Heroes of the Storm Dev Tracker

I’ve Level 31 with The Lost Vikings, and they are my second most played hero in Hero/Storm League over the history of the game (this is my external data, dunno about my internal stats with them).

Multi-unit control heroes have always kinda been my thing since I come from a background of playing many RTS games like Starcraft.

In regards to my take on them, I believe that over time the Vikings have become fairly problematic in how much they warp games that they’re in to generally be much less fun for everyone else involved. It’s a complicated problem to solve that would likely require big changes to how they work if we wanted to live in a world where it’s ok for them to be seen as much as more standard heroes like Valla or Li-Ming.

Hey Zeal!

Correct, it is now usable in both forms!

We have made several changes since Blizzcon, and the Deathwing you all got to play on the show floor is no longer the same as what we have on the PTR right now.

Thanks!
Huginncord

I predict:

Whitemane buffs
Lunara doesn’t dodge the patch
Junkrat RIP-Tire nerf
Nazeebo lvl 1 talent changes

I’ll bite.

One of the things that sometimes makes me sad as a developer, and I think any person who works in a public, creative space can attest to this, is when people assume that we’re completely incompetent or have the worst intentions with a change that we try to make to improve the game.

It can be saddening to work on a project for a long time to only see discussion devolve into assuming we have the worst intentions or haven’t put any real care into what we put out. The people here are incredibly passionate and our internal discussions almost always come back to what we think will make the most fun, best game possible, and seeing those efforts be translated into statements like “they just don’t care about the game” can be disheartening.

Anyone who knows me can attest that I have pretty thick skin, but even i’ll admit that the job at times is harder than expected due to how easy it can be to be sucked into negativity, particularly if you spend too much time...

Thank you. I appreciate that you noticed.

Thanks Kemordia, this is a great suggestion. I played her the other day and didn’t realize that this changed and it felt like poopy. We brought up an old build and you’re totally right, it used to work this way. It won’t make this balance patch, but i’ve made a note to fix this.

Thanks!

Counters are generally what you would expect. Percent based damage is great against him, so things like Malthael and Tychus give him a hard time.

A more surprising one in my experience are fast-moving, auto-attack based heroes like Valla and Lunara. Because Deathwing has long wind-ups, when he’s fighting out in the open against these kinds of heroes they run circles around him and have an easy time dodging his stuff while killing him. His best bet in those scenarios is to run away a bit then suddenly turn around and catch them with an Onslaught > Auto Attack combination.

He’s also a little weak to poke, things like Hanzo and Chromie can whittle him down.

He’s great against teams with lots of Melee, since his abilities all pierce and generally do damage in wide areas. He’s also uniquely good against heroes like Garrosh and ETC since he doesn’t have to respect their normal areas of threat that they control.

More than excelling against certain heroes I f...

While it’s true that Deathwing doesn’t benefit from allied abilities, I think you’ll find that he still relies on his team to be effective. We made a lot of design decisions to ensure that he doesn’t go too far in the direction of being completely self-reliant.

As one example, while he can’t be healed by allies, he very much designed around excelling during big teamfight engagements.

Because his abilities have such long wind-ups, he combos very well with his allies when it comes to receiving help in setting up a good Molten Flame, which can simply win engagements when done correctly. He also helps allied CC chains happen due to having fairly good follow-up CC, particularly when in Worldbreaker form.

When played optimally, I think Deathwing is absolutely at his best when fighting alongside his team. In 1v1 settings he isn’t nearly as potent due to his abilities being easily dodged due to their long wind-ups.

However, like many have said in this thread, ...

Hi all,

There’s a lot going on in this thread and I simply can’t touch on every train of thought, but I wanted to pop in and say a few quick words. I’ve been a technical designer for Blizzard for almost eight years now, six of those on the Heroes team. I’ve had a hand in implementing probably half of the Heroes in the game and have been the primary designer for about 10 reworks now.

The biggest time “expenditure” or “bottleneck” in the design process is not the implementation, but the iteration. Assuming I had an entire design ready on paper (four basic abilities, two heroics, 21+ talents, etc) and was only focused on making the hero playable ASAP, I could probably bang out a hero using existing assets in a week or two. That’s just to have a controllable character with placeholder visuals that can interact with their world and be mostly bug free. The problem is, we don’t just cobble together our initial thoughts and call it a day! We try an idea out, tweak it a bunch o...

Great thread. I’ve been pretty passionate about making more Level 20’s feel epic and game-breaking, so I got a lot of notes from the replies here.

I can confirm, Mastery Rings are purely cosmetic and don’t change the size of a hero’s hitbox in any way.