Heroes of the Storm Dev Tracker

Hello fellow Heroes!

The Heroes Design team has been hard at work on our next seasonal content, including deciding what to do with the Call for Help Nexus Anomaly. We’re looking for feedback, and we wanted to take the time to give you some heavy insight into our thoughts, so strap yourselves in, this is going to be a doozy!

Firstly, we have already decided that we like what the changes to the Kings Core have brought to our game, and we want to keep those. We believe they give our maps a unique flavor and they add some cool moments to games. This article will be focused solely on the more controversial changes that were made to Towers, Forts, and Keeps in regards to how they interact with enemy Heroes. We think a good place to start is with what our goals were when we changed the Tower Aggro system.

We had two major goals with the system:

1. We wanted players to feel like their Towers were “smart” about how they tried to protect members of their tea...

I’m not an engineer, but I can take a crack at this. The forced 50% win rate discussion is weird and complicated because it’s both true and not true at the same time, and people often inject their own biases very heavily on games to support what they think is happening to them, usually to assign blame for a loss to an external source (in this case the matchmaker) because it’s an easy thing to do (the matchmaker can’t defend itself after all!). First, let’s discuss what forced 50% isn’t.

Forced 50% isn’t the matchmaker putting potatoes on your team because you had a win streak. Frankly it’s hard enough just to find good games that there’s no way we would program such a thing, and there is no incentive for us to. We are incentivized to find matches of equally skilled players in our games because they are the most fun overall, which is what the matchmaker always tries to do.

The way it does this is by assigning a skill level to every player as they play our game calle...

I read the thread title and rolled my eyes.

Once I opened the thread I laughed and then rolled them a second time.

Well played my friend.

Hey there,

This issue is addressed here New Cassia Skin Bugged

Just took a look at Ragnaros’s talent stats to see what’s going on. To be honest, his Level 1 talents are as close to perfectly balanced as you can get when looking at the whole game, and they get a bit worse, but still great for Q build, when you get to high level (this is extremely common, so I wouldn’t read too much into it since high level players tend to be much pickier about what they will take when it comes to talents).

Across the whole game, the pick rates look like this:

1. Engulfing Flame: - 34.6%
2. Sulfuras Hungers - 33.9%
3. Shifting Meteor - 31.4%

High Level Storm League:

1. Engulfing Flame - 46.6%
2. Sulfuras Hungers - 40.8%
3. Shifting Meteor - 12.5%

Also the win rates of the talents aren’t anything to write home about, they’re all pretty similar.

I have a few simple examples of things that deter me from taking it. I don’t like taking Elune’s Chosen when:

1. The enemy team has a lot of Blinds (usually not enough of a deterrent by itself)
2. The enemy team has a threatening enough front line that I’m not confident I’m going to get Basic Attacks in when I need to heal my allies
3. I’m not on a map where the objective is near things that I can Basic Attack to get value from non-Heroes

There are a few heroes that walk the line between Tank and Bruiser and can act as one or the other in a pinch, and I think Imperius can walk this line when necessary.

However, I don’t think he’s classified incorrectly. Tanks have to check a number of boxes in order to be effective in their role, and Imperius doesn’t check some that are fairly important. Some of those are:

1. Reliability and consistency of CC
2. Ability to survive being focused by the enemy team

Back in the day we also originally intended for Dehaka to be a main tank, and he had a similar issue in that he could reliably take a lot of damage, but his ability to CC was primarily tied to his Drag ability which wasn’t consistent enough to have him be a main tank due to its range, wind-up, and ability to only CC 1 target. I think Imperius falls into a similar category due to the nature of how Celestial Charge works. It’s not quite reliable enough to deter enemies from diving his te...

Hey everyone!

Thanks so much for clarifying the specific Skin you are seeing problems with. We are tracking an issue that only affects the “Thunder Goddess Cassia” variant of this new skin.

Thank you all for your patience while we work this out!

Hey, thanks for the comment.

Good question, I can provide some insight into how an agent would approach each situation.

The way AI travels to a Goal (like a map objective) is the same as a move command. It’s the same as if you right clicked a tribute and just let the game take you there. This is our pathfinding at work and it’s what our agents use for traveling to Goals. While it will get you where you clicked by taking the shortest route, it does not consider other possibilities like flanks or shortcuts. Those types of dec...

Thanks for the feedback!

What I like about the design of Protector of Aiur vs. Seasoned Marksman is that Protector of Aiur motivates Artanis to do more of what his kit tells him to do, which is to brawl with enemy Heroes. His main source of mitigation is from fighting things, which is what this talent is telling him to do as much as possible. Seasoned Marksman was a bit more blurred in this motivation because it told Artnias to go push lanes in order to gain power, which conflicted a bit with the rest of his kit. Also, we felt that the Attack Speed portion of the Seasoned Marksman talent was a bit redundant since he has a couple other ways to get that bonus in other talents. Removing it allows us to focus his Level 1 talent better and to let the other talents shine more that allow him to gain that buff.

Also as a side note, it’s fairly unlikely we’ll add Healing to Artanis. In general, consistently generated shields or Armor mitigation + healing is an incredibly s...

Hey there CardiffGiant,

Can you confirm if that skin you purchased and unable to use in Ranked is the Thunder Goddess Cassia skin variant?

If it is a different one, can you please let me know the full name of the Skin that you are seeing locked in Ranked so I can investigate.

Thanks!

Are you disrespecting the changes to Anduin?

Nope! It was an unintended byproduct of fixing another bug. It should be resolved in the balance patch coming today.

Hi Teo!

Thanks for your notes! I can give you some insight into some of your points.

The reason why AI ignore Deathwing fire breath is because we made a conscious decision for them to ignore it. Otherwise, AI agents would be constantly running away from Deathwing. This is due to our pathing system. It isn’t sophisticated enough to navigate around dangerous areas like how a human player would. Unfortunately, “fixing” pathfinding is not a t...

Hey there gekko513,

You might want to try our Mac Support forums instead of Bug Report. Support over there would be better equipped to look into an OS level crash and work with you to identify what is happening.

Thanks!