AZJackson

Hello friends,

I’ve always believed that strong communication and building trust is paramount to making the world a better place, so I wanted to have the chance to talk with all of you about a change to the team.

I’ve reached a point in my career where I’ve come to the difficult decision to move on to another project. I’ve been a part of the Heroes team for a very long time now, and in order to grow as a person and a designer I believe it’s important to constantly challenge myself in new ways. I’m still going to be at Blizzard, and I’m very excited about the new challenges that I get to overcome and the awesome experiences that I’ll be able to help bring to you.

I know these kinds of things are never great to hear, however I wanted to reassure you that we did hire a replacement for my position, and that it was someone who I was able to personally vet because it was very important to both me and the team that the game had someone who we felt could do the job an...

I just wanted to pop in here and say there isn’t a coding limitation and that yes, we could make % based damage mitigated by Armor, but we don’t want to.

I feel baited lol.

Also to clarify, I was not the designer in charge of Deathwing (though we all had a hand in helping out with him), that was Kyle, who also did heroes such as Zul’jin, Kel’Thuzad, and Orphea.

For what it’s worth, I read these forums pretty much every day, so there’s very little that happens here that I don’t see.

Arthas’s Icy Talons talent makes me think he’s a bird.

I’d say we haven’t…

The primary intent for Brawl is to be a fun, casual mode where crazy things can happen. While I get how the idea of making Brawl as fair and competitive as possible can be attractive, a lot of methods of doing so would result in changing Brawl from being a fun, casual mode to being something very different, which we have multiple other game modes for.

That doesn’t mean we don’t think it could, of course, use some improvements, but I think approaching it from this lens is a good way for good, productive discussion to be had on how to improve the mode. Keep the ideas coming!

Thanks for the report, I let QA know.

I just wanted to say thanks for all of the feedback and keep it coming.

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.

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...

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...

Are you disrespecting the changes to Anduin?

Growing up The Legend of Zelda 2 was one of my favorite games. My brothers and I got to the final palace multiple times on different save files (because that game for whatever reason randomly lost its save data pretty often), but we could never beat the game because we would get lost and just couldn’t find our way to the final boss.

It wasn’t until many years later that we finally found the right route and beat the game.

Generally what people already said in the thread is the most useful advice - pick heroes that have multiple forms of CC that interrupt his Dark Conversion. The idea is that you can use one of your CC’s to still engage and do your job, and save the secondary one specifically for Dark Conversion. Also you’ll have a good tell of when he wants to use it since he will always want to when he’s at low Health, so you usually have a generous window to look for it if you constantly keep it in mind.

Some heroes that are great to interrupt it:

ETC - his Q and W are fast and easily able to knock him out of his channel

Johanna - Her W and Blessed Shield can be used for an interrupt. Her trait can also be used to try to survive if he gets the ult off on her. This is a little more risky/takes more skill as her W is the main form of an interrupt so you have to pre-emptively cast it as he’s getting low.

Diablo - He has his Q and E to interrupt it quickly. He also has ...

Sonya is a strong response to Xul.

A lot of her damage comes from her Abilities, so she is resistant to his W attack speed Slow compared to other Heroes.

She has an early game talent that negates his Root.

Whirlwind’s healing greatly benefits from having more targets, so his skeletons help her in teamfights.

My worst was a 16 game loss streak in Hero League at the beginning of a new season. I think I was at a 32% win rate over ~50 games. Was rough, but over more games things evened out.