heroes Heroes of the Storm AMA Recap: April 30th

[Stan 5,244]

Heroes developers answered your questions on Reddit yesterday, and here is a recap of the AMA.

AMA Highlights

• They have no plans for publicly facing roadmaps because they tie their hands in ways the team is not always comfortable with.
• A new Hero will be revealed soon, they have a huge lineup of Hero reworks planned, and new awesome skins.
• None of the Heroes that are currently in development classifies as Support, but things could change.
• The team is still not sure what to do to improve Haunted Mines gameplay and there are no plans to bring the map back for now.
• Towers of Doom started as Arathi Basin, but the devs could not find out how to get it to work quite right. If you observe the towers, they are themed very similar to main areas in Arathi Basin.
• They tried a visual for Kaelthas' Living Bomb radius, but every solution that was noticeable was also very noisy and added clutter to the battlefield.
• Brightwing's Soothing Mist passively healing inside vehicles is a bug similar to Garrosh's Into the Fray that can be cast on allied turrets, as well as Tyrande's Elune's Chosen healing Leoric while he is Undying.
• The team may experiment with new buffs to make AI games more interesting, like increasing AI health and power by a percentage.
• There will be some changes to tower aggro in the coming future to fix stuff like Azmodan's global summon hitting someone in top lane causing a bottom lane fort to attack him.
• The Invisible Horse mount will return in the future.
• The D.Va rework is still in the works.
• They are very well aware that Ragnaros is in need of a new skin, but that won't happen this year, unfortunately, as they are in the process of evaluating what they're going to do for 2021.
• The new Nexus Anomaly increases game length by approximately 1 minute across the board and there are no huge changes in win rates.
• A new balance patch is planned for the near future with fixes for the new Anomaly and some Heroes.
• Battle Passes are a cool idea, but the feature requires too much engineering and UI work to be implemented, and they rather focus on game content for now.
• The Heroes team believes that the number of crowd-control effects in the game is appropriate.
• Season rewards could be back next season.
• The team is overall happy with Tassadar and the rework, but he is currently trending a little lower than they'd like, so expect buffs soon.
• We haven't seen new banners in the game for a long time, and they are discussing getting some more in.
• In 2021, it's possible that we're get our hands on the Death Knight Arthas skin that was removed before Beta.

We also extracted all questions from the thread that got answered by the devs and you can find them below.

(Source)

I'd like to know, what's the roadmap looking like for our favourite game?
We know there's nowhere near the resources as in the beginning, but that absolutely doesn't mean development is dead (as was proven by you all!). Is there any room for new hero/new map, or is it straight-up tweaking & reworking from here on out?

Greetings, /u/Klaagzang! We've received feedback on the desire for a roadmap previously and have discussed it a few times since our last AMA. We’re aligned that it sounds awesome to give players commitments on things to look forward to, but we still wrestle with how deep we should be going on that. So while we obviously have an internal roadmap for Heroes that usually looks over a year out, we like to give ourselves flexibility to add to, change, remove, or move things around as needed and a publicly facing roadmap ties our hands in ways we're not always comfortable with.

What are we comfortable saying? We have new heroes in development and will be sharing info on the next one soon. We have a huge lineup of hero reworks that we’re excited about and want to continue breathing new life into old favorites regularly. We have features coming that will make the game better while also improving our ability to support it. We have some of the coolest skins in the history of the game yet to come. And we want to be building toward a world where we can add more content to the game year-over-year. Stay tuned!

More cross-game promotions with WoW, Overwatch, Hearthstone etc came up at the last AMA, and were actioned as something to look into. Do you have any cool stuff to report in this area?

Good morning jjp3!

We are indeed discussing how we can cross-promote with our other games, as the past events were extremely awesome! That said, there is a lot of differing opinions on how to set them up and when they should occur. While I don't have anything concrete to share right now, we are definitely discussing it and are always looking for new opportunities to make it happen ?

Can we expect a new support hero to be added in the future?

Good afternoon Darak_,

Unfortunately, I can't really answer your main question as the kinds of heroes we want to bring in changes all the time. We are in a spot where the team can truly work on the features/Heroes they are most passionate about, and bringing the next Support to the Nexus requires the championing and drive towards it. The Heroes we are currently working on do not fit into the Support mold as of right now, but that can always change (and has many times in the past)!

Around 6 months ago I released something you can use to modify the map that is loaded when you are watching a replay that allows tracking of a bunch more stats

The way it works is really quite simple: the game looks at the replay.details file to find out what map to load, and I change it from the automatically generated file path to a custom one, and then custom triggers can be used that generally don't cause the replay to desync(Unless you are Tomb, Warhead, or Haunted Mines, strangely enough, and those work when it's only AI, also strangely enough). There's quite a lot of stuff there, like the amount of healing from each ability, damage from each ability, damage modified by armor, healing to each ally, damage to each enemy, and more niche things, like the amount of damage DVA prevented with Defense Matrix.

Is this something that players could have their accounts actioned for using? Although I released the first version 6 months ago, I've been actively using it for the past 8 months or so.

Hey Spazzo,

It's one of my dreams of being able to give you guys more numbers from the games. It's still on our wishlist.

I've spoken with our engineers about exposing damage mitigation in the past. My understanding is that it would require code support.

Thanks for the question!

If Blizzard wanted to implement something like this, they totally could, and not being limited to triggers would make it so much easier to do compared to how I had to do it, although some things would still need triggers or an engineer to add new stuff, like an example of something I implemented is tracking Sonya's Wrath of the Berserker bonus damage - this currently would require triggers for Blizzard to implement it, or add new features to data to track the bonus damage from DamageDealtFraction as part of a behavior.

Triggers are kind of unreliable to 100% implement tracking with accuracy - like handling overkill is kind of a pain, and multiple damage effects happening at once can cause things to go pretty wrong, as triggers really only know what the state of the game is at the end of a game loop, not in between. Means that if you've got something applying armor after damage in the same loop, that armor did nothing in relation to that damage, but the triggers don't know that(but even that has it's own little exception in which you can discern info from where there isn't any).

Hi u/Spazzo965,

You are right, trigger timing is something we always have to keep in mind while working on this project. It does make this kind of stuff more complicated to implement telemetry for if the specific data is not already exposed to triggers in an easy to use way.

In most cases exposing data like this would require changes to the code, which means it depends on us having a compelling reason to do so -- a feature or piece of content that requires it. Like everything it is a matter of resource allocation and prioritization.

I'm asking for a friend of course: Are there any new main tanks in development or at least conceptually planned? I feel like my this role could use some love in particular. Cheers!

Yes ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

Can you guys please bring Haunted Mines back into rotation?

While I would love to have it back at all, I think even small changes could improve its status with players, like replacing the sappers with a vision camp, increasing xp from skeletons, etc.

Hey secret3332,

Actually, the design group just met about this the other day. We have some initial blue-sky ideas on things we could do to improve the gameplay of the battleground, but that is about as far as we have currently gotten. Just bringing it back in its current form is really tricky as there are a lot of bugs (many of them super edge-case) with the way the mines work that are very difficult to tackle and would require a major amount of resources to resolve.

Overall, we love the map and all of its unique assets, and hope to return it to the map pool some time in the future!

Tassadar's was the most in-depth rework so far, with an entirely new talent tree, a new basic ability and a new heroic. In terms of his development, as well as where he fits in the release cycle, does the team consider him a "new hero"? Or was his workflow still closer to that of past reworks?

I would say he’s firmly into new hero territory.

We had talked about shifting him from a support role to an assassin for years, but we didn’t have a solid plan as to what this transition would look like. I knew from the beginning that Plasma Shield would have to be cut in favor of another damage ability, so I started experimenting with various abilities and what became Shock Ray fell into placepretty quickly. We experimented with just that addition for a while, but we realized very early on that that there was no reasonable way we could keep Dimensional Shift *and* inject more numeric power into his kit without it becoming overpowered or making extreme concessions elsewhere. Removing that safety option really broadened the possibilities for what we could do with Tass and we spent a good amount of time (~4-5 months I want to say) trying different things until the base kit resembled what it is now. Figuring out talents took another few months, but came together fairly easily. Moving Force Wall from an ultimate to a Basic Ability was a little contentious at first, but as we got used to playing with it we realized it worked well. Black Hole came very late in the design cycle and went through multiple iterations before it became what it is today. We stopped making big design changes to him probably 2-3 months ago, so his total iteration time was probably a year’s worth of time, which is fairly close to how long we iterate on brand new heroes.

Patch 50.0 included a great quality of life feature: we can now favorite our talents and, more importantly, copy and share builds with other players. Can we expect more features like this in the near future?

A lack of these kinds of features, many of which are highly requested, is one of the things that has dampened HotS' popularity for years. Are we finally going to be getting frequent feature updates?

Hey Pscythic,

We absolutely love bringing new features like this to the game and are always working on and prioritizing the next ones. As passionate developers, any individual features release is normally just the beginning, as we often have improvements or quality of life changes already planned (and adding more from player feedback). These, of course, get put into the chute against all the other features we are wanting to work on. It's a never-ending cycle that is honestly one of the more difficult parts of actively developing a live game.

Hi HotS team! Wanted to share a Un'Goro Battleground concept and how humbling an experience it is to realize the absurd amount of work that's put into this game.

1. Do you guys have any art/design bible for consistent direction? If so, could you share some popular rules to follow? (i.e. color schemes, "never allow X type of abilities", "ORB BRUSH EVERYTHING!")
2. Are there any stories of scrapped battleground/hero ideas you could share?
3. Hope everyone's doing well during lockdown but assuming you're working at home, particularly /u/blizz_kinabrew and anyone else on the art team, I'm curious how it's affected your workflow. Do you guys all join some giant voice chat server all day? Meetings? Do you typically communicate by walking up to other computers or send assets over a network?

First off… holy cow you did a lot of work here. Everyone should look at this and understand that this isn’t trivial. u/jiggywatt64 spent a lot of time on this.

1. Yes we have art bibles and design guidelines for direction. The purpose of the seniors and art director of the team is to make sure that everything is directed towards those goals. There are things that we do in the craft of these things that we teach new artists who join the team what we want them to utilize. Art does dictate some direction abilities will go because of noisiness, performance, or it might look too much like another ability. Ultimately our job is to get creative with it and get it done. Also, Michael Vicente is a friend and I cannot express what a service he’s done for the art community with his Orb Brushes.
2. Towers of doom started out as Arathi Basin but we couldn’t figure out how to get it to work quite right. If you look at the towers they’re themed very similar to main areas in Arathi Basin.
3. Communication over video conference and PMs have been a challenge but it’s been a great learning experience and we’ve been very productive given the circumstances. It’s a tribute to our awesome team. I do miss hanging out with everyone and having those interactions because we feed off each other’s energy.

In 2019 we’ve seen 4 new heroes: Deathwing, Qhira, Anduin Imperius. Can we expect more new heroes for 2020?

Yes

Why doesn't Kaelthas Living Bomb (W) show a red circle where the damage radius will be?

Almost every other ability that does delayed aoe damage will show a red outline first, including ones attached to a hero (like Ragnaros E).

Hey Senshado,

We tried several iterations of this. Every solution that was noticeable was also super noisy and added a lot of clutter to the battlefield. We haven't been able to find a good compromise so far, but we will keep trying.

Thanks!

Is there anywhere we can send ideas for skins?

My family keeps making it a game to come up with ideas. So far we have Goldshire farmer murky. Lord of the high tide Ragnaros. His weapon is a surfboard. His Q would be a water effect similar to a splash. W would be a beach ball. His lava wave could use a tidal wave effect similar to the surfboard mounts

You can post it in the Heroes Reddit and Heroes Forum. We are actively checking fan art/ skin ideas from these places. ❤⃛ヾ(๑❛ ▿ ◠๑ )

How many new heroes are you guys working on at the moment? ?

More than 1. Less than 42.

Will there be any more improvements to the newly implemented saved builds for talents?

I can think of a few examples that may improve quality of life to this new feature:

• A toggle option to have builds auto select your favourite talents upon level up, excluding blank tiers and Lv1 talents so you can still select you build choice 1-3.

• A new hotkey keybind to select your chosen build's favourite talent. Simmilar to Ctrl + 1-4 for regular talents. Example Ctrl + F for favourite talent.

• Have the AI select your chosen build's favourite talents if you disconnect during a match.

Also on an unrelated note, any plans to implement damage prevented from armour to Healing/Shielding on the score board? I feel this will help more accurately show the value of healers such and Uther and Morales.

Hey RedFive,

Those are all really good suggestions we are exploring. Stay tuned!

Thanks!

Hello again! When will Deathwing's emoticons :deathwingembarrassed: and :deathwingsad: finally be swapped?! Literally unplayable

Oh dang, we weren't aware of that one! We've got a bug in now, thanks for the heads up!

Any updates on a potential gifting system?

Hey! We do currently have some hero bundles available for gifting in the battle.net shop, and we also have seasonal chests available during the winter. We’re looking into adding more content to the shop in the future!

Howdy!
There are a series of interactions that we are unsure of in regards to them being bugs or intended features. It would be real slick if we could get a definitive answer. The interactions are:
Brightwing - banned from entering vehicles on Dragon Shire and Volskaya Foundry;
(is she supposed to heal while in vehicles? )

Garrosh is prohibited from using his level 7 "Into the Fray" to throw turrets;
(Turrets are generally immobile through any other means so Garrosh throwing them seems a little weird)
Tyrande level 1 "Elune's Chosen" - globally banned while playing with Leoric on the same team.
(It continues to heal even after he is dead, reducing his death timer even further than normal. That seems a little odd.)

Not only that, is there someone that organizations can contact within Blizzard? After all, we are all working for the same things.

Thanks for clearing it up!

Heya, thanks for all y'all do!

Brightwing's Soothing Mist passively healing while inside vehicles - this is a bug.

Garrosh's Into the Fray able to be cast on allied Turrets - this is a bug.

Tyrande's Elune's Chosen healing Leoric while he is Undying - this is a bug.

I've entered reports for each issue now.

Our official bug report forums is the best place to report bugs or potential bugs: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/c/bug-report

Any chance you could create a vs. AI game 'Nightmare' level that increases enemy AI hero health, physical damage and spell power by 20%? For most people playing vs. AI mode, 'Elite' level is probably too easy and they're probably looking for a harder challenge. I think the resources required to do this is low, relative to the big pay-off for vs. AI players.

I like this idea a lot. I think there is a lot that can be done to make vs. AI more interesting and unique in a way that PvP doesn't really allow.

I will pass this idea along to the team!

How do you feel about enemy forts attacking you for dealing damage to enemies that are nowhere near that fort? For example, Lunara's poison draws building aggro even when the enemy player leaves the lane, and Azmodan's global summon can hit someone in top lane and cause a bot lane fort to attack him.

Hey Beg_For_Mercy!

We anticipated that this kind of feedback could happen, and we had many debates internally about exactly how tower aggro should work. For the release, we landed on a design that emphasized clarity as the most important aspect to guide tower targeting decisions. It’s an extremely clear rule to say “if you hit an enemy Hero, towers don’t like you”, and we initially didn’t want to muddy up that with a ton of exceptions unless we felt it was completely necessary to. Now that we’ve gotten a ton of feedback from you guys since the anomaly has been released, we have some changes coming that should address a lot of these concerns.

Have you planned heroes with a more atypical gameplay, for example a hero based on the speed of movement like a rider, or a hero a little artist who while he is channeling a spell we can draw with the mouse the AoE, heroes with surprising gameplay ?

Yes! We like to try technically crazy things early in a heroes iteration cycle and sometimes we get cool stuff out of it. Qhira's Revolving Sweep is a good example of that.

Long long ago we thought about giving Brightwing an ultimate where you would "draw" a path of healing with your mouse for a few seconds. I think that idea was pared down and refined until it became Blink Heal.

Unfortunately, complex systems that sound really cool on paper often either end up with not-so-cool gameplay or a bottomless pit of technical problems to overcome.

What are your thoughts on melee assassins? It has been talked about by players a lot but I think that devs have only admitted they're in a weird spot. I know that many of them like Kerrigan and Illidan can be oppressive when they can fully sustain themselves because they function as bruisers with more damage. Do you accept that that's their fantasy and their weakness? (They either outlive everyone and kill them or they die in seconds) Or is there room for improvement? Maybe they should be less reliant on autos so that they don't get countered by blinds and auto-attack speed reduction as much? And maybe they have less active sustain in exchange for that? Have you figured out the equation?

Hey -Duality!

I think that Melee Assassins are in a weird spot due to where they fit into a team composition. Most teams compositions that players are comfortable running consist of a Tank, an offlane Bruiser, a Healer, and two Ranged Assassins. Generally to make a team composition “feel” right, the Melee Assassin has to fit into one of the Ranged Assassin slots or replace the offlane Bruiser slot. This means that other team members have to flex their roles or risk running 3-4 Melee heroes in their composition, which often feels uncomfortable (though statistically is still completely viable). As a whole, Melee Assassins are performing very well in regards to how often they win games, so I don’t think there’s a problem with how effective they are.

In regards to their design, there are specific Melee Assassins who have the high octane style of gameplay where they can dominate an entire enemy team if things go right (ex. Illidan), but they don’t all function that way. I think this is acceptable, as it fits a specific fantasy that many players like to chase. There are definitely some heroes in this category that can use work to be less spikey less often, but this is no different to me than other Assassins, Tanks, or Healers who could also use help in various ways.

Lots of Mounts are currently unavailable for purchase, and hasn't been for years.

Any chance that these will be brought back, either permanently or as Limited-Time Items?

The answer for this is going to vary entirely based on what mount you’re looking for. Some mounts were promised for meeting specific goals (like season rewards) or for participating during a certain time or event (like the BlizzCon mounts) and we wouldn’t want to make those less special by making them more widely available now. However, some older mounts we might be able to bring back, and there are others that we may be able to do new variations of. If anyone has a specific mount they want us to look into, leave me a reply and I can discuss it with the team!

There have been hints at a D.Va rework dating as far back as July 2019 (as far as I know). Has there been any progress on this front? I'm curious if/when D.Va will ever see a rework in HotS as she's currently a very fun hero to play, but often not an ideal pick.

Hey Exvaris,

There has been progress on D.VA. We are still working on her. ?

Are you ever going to fix the Hanamura Samurai's Slash?

It's still broken...

Thanks for the detailed report Pscythic. I appreciate the effort of including a video, it makes my job much easier. I've entered an issue to help move this closer to being resolved.

Any updates on kerning?

Alternatively, can you do something about this one-pixel-off-from-perfect-balance capture bar?

It’s still on our ra dar. We have other things that are ahead of it. It’s not sc heduled at the mom ent but when we evaluate pr iorities it’s something that comes up. Keep figh ting the good fight and keeping us honest u/Kamikaze28!

Does the elemental lord of fire have any skins in the works?

Every time new items are added to the collection I look to see what you tease us with. Ragna Robot and Dark Nexus Ragnaros are the ones that come to mind immediately.

We’re in the process of evaluating what we’re going to do for 2021 and we are well aware that Rag needs another skin. There’s a non-trivial amount of work to get new skins done for him. We have a bunch of cool ideas. It is still a goal.

Could you take a look at Sylvanas during Haunting Wave and Lunara Leaping Strike both still being interrupted by the Dragon Knight kick knockback, despite both being unstoppable?

Absolutely! I'll make sure we investigate that shortly.

KT has a bug where his L7 and L1 D talents do not work properly together. The SP increase from the L7 talent doesn't increase the L1 heal. Can we get this fixed?

Thanks for the report - I've entered an issue for tracking.

What kind of unique challenges have come up from using an old engine? How did you get around them? And most naively, any hope for rebuilding something new like a HotS 3.0?

Every engine and game project has challenges, unrelated to age. Heroes is no different in this regard!

Most of the hard problems we face revolve around systems that were built for other purposes that we have to refactor or systems that simply don't exist that we have to build up from scratch without destabilizing other parts of the game. Things like pathfinding, networking, and ability usage are examples of things that are vastly different between games like Starcraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm.

Our origins in Starcraft give us a ton of benefits as well though. The engine is extremely data-driven, which makes implementation time for designers blazing fast. This is why we can easily test and iterate on things like the Nexus Anomalies. Many general systems like movement, unit selection, and projectiles already existed in the game, so we started with a huge leg up for that stuff.

Can you share (or promise to share soon) statistics that are especially relevant to the current anomaly with the community? In particular, how have game times been affected and are any heroes seeing significant changes in winrates?

Hey Pscythic!

Since the anomaly has been released we’ve seen an average game time increase of about ~1 minute across the board, which while not what we want in a perfect world, is not too significant. There hasn’t been any huge change in win rates outside of what we would normally expect between patches. We also have our normal balance patch coming up that will include changes that should address various concerns over the anomaly as well as to multiple heroes.

Have you ever considered Battle Passes in HotS?

Hey, /u/Dsingis! We’ve explored designs for a Battle Pass-like feature for Heroes in the past and still think that’s a cool idea for the game with its combination of a clear roadmap of unlockable content and what's required of players to get it. Ultimately the feature requires a lot of engineering and UI work that we’d rather focus on game content and other features currently, but I wouldn’t rule it out in time. Thanks!

What is your opinion on the current amount of slows, pushes, stuns, roots, stops and displacements in the game? Do you think it’s too much? Do you think that damage across the board needs to be nerfed also?

Greetings FloatingWatcher!

I think the current amount of CC effects in the game is appropriate. Many heroes need at least one of these kinds of effects in their kit to be effective, and so that means that you will likely have at least 5 of these kinds of effects in every team composition. This has been the case since the game was released, and I think it's worked out just fine.

To help answer CC, we've also over time added a slew of effects that prevent or negate CC as well, which gives teams ways to answer these things.

In regards to damage, I don't believe it needs to be nerfed across the board. Time to kill hasn't gotten out of control in a general sense, though burst management on an individual hero basis is something that we keep an eye on.

Are there any changes planned regarding the recent Nexus Anomaly with all the feedback you had? Will it be cancelled, modified, improved, not touched at all?

Hello!

Yes, we already have changes coming in the pipe for the Nexus Anomaly. You can expect for any Anomaly that we will iterate on and improve them after they've been released if there are things that can be made better.

Could Murky's Egg health scale at a percentage per level please? BTW, Tychus' health regen scales at 4.5% per level, while his health scales at 4%.

Speaking of, is it known that the scaling values aren't exact percentages? like 4% is 4.0038%, 4.75% is 4.7607%, 2.5% is 2.4902%

Hey Spazzo965!

I'll check out Murky's Egg scaling and Tychus's Health regen. Not sure why the egg scaling is not a percentage.

In regards to weird scaling values, there are sometimes limitations in the editor when it comes to very specific percentages that results in this. I remember being frustrated when trying to tune some Lucio healing talents back in the day because they tick every second and some of them were fractions of those ticks, which I wasn't able to get exactly where I wanted them to be ?

Those scaling values not being exact are most likely because Heroes uses a fixed-point float, rather than a real floating point value. This is primarily to support parity when transferring information over the network and is common in games that use lockstep networking like we do and have to have perfect synchronization between clients.

Essentially, in our implementation the number %2.5 doesn't exist, so %2.4902 is as close as we can get.

Pretty please can we get end of season mount rewards again for ranked?

We have been exploring season reward options and if things go well should have something to show the next season.

I have a question to /u/Daybringer and /u/Blizz_KinaBREW. Heroes community has a lot of talented artists, and there are a lot of amazing skins concepts. Could you tell us more about the implementation of Janitor Leoric into the game? What is the process of interaction with the author of the original concept? And is there any chance we will see some more fan ideas in the game?

Hunman360 did the art for a competition. There was talks to creating that skin as far back as the moment we were aware of it. Our schedules are written out for us at least a year in advance and there wasn’t good place to put it. By time we decided to do it the concept had been around for quite some time. Community sentiment was the biggest for any community skin we had ever seen. It was a really strong concept as well. We reached out to the artist and asked them if they would like to see it in Heroes. Thankfully the answer was yes and we did it.

Our community has some really great artists and we definitely want to put more community skins in the game. We like to put skins out with pair well with other skins. Theme the packs. This is mostly why Janitor Leoric took as long as it did. We decided it would be cool to pair it with the RCHS Orphea’s Slacker skin and RCHS cheer leader Kerrigan. Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out where we can schedule something like that in.

About the AI: previously, a big overhaul to their internal workings was mentioned, with changes to the structure of their goal and tactical systems and whatnot. Since that seems to be out with the latest patch already, does that enable you to update the AI faster than before, or is it about the same?

In particular, I'm thinking about some of the remaining glaring issues, like their behavior when confronted with Lurking Arm or Concussion Mine, especially near gates but also on other chokepoints. There has definitely been an improvement in their overall behavior, but I look forward to seeing it ironed out a bit further. I'd also say the follower AI doesn't benefit as much from these improvements, as its logic keeps being seemingly overridden by its new leashing priority.

Hi maguszeal,

Yes, the overhaul make sit easier to navigate the AI trees in our editor. I don't have to spend as much time figuring out how things work.

The issue you describe is more complex as it touches our path finding tech, something that /u/Blizz_JeffB can provide better explanations for you.

hi u/maguszeal,

Our current pathfinding solution doesn't weight terrain based on the existence of dangerous AoE abilities. This means that before an agent enters an AoE, they don't know it is there, so they cannot path around it. There are a number of factors that make refactoring the pathfinding in this way non-trivial, including the nested nature of our ability data and specifics related to the pathfinding system itself.

The overhaul you mentioned does, however, give us a greater and faster ability to iterate on the behavior trees, which is ultimately how an agent decides to handle moving out of AoEs. This power can potentially be leveraged to get us a shorter-term solution to this problem without having to wait for resources and time to become available for a more involved engineering change.

Will the Invisible Horse return?

Yes!

What do you think about the rework Tassadar now that you got some data? Do you regret / wish some additional changes?

He's currently trending a little lower than we'd like, but nothing some balance changes can't fix. ?

The removal of Dimensional Shift had a huge impact on how you need to think about positioning and I think some players are struggling in that regard. It's going to take a bit of time for players to relearn both playing as or with a Tassadar. I've seen dozens of different opinions about which build is best or when Tass is a viable pick, but no real dominant consensus has emerged yet. I feel there's still a lot of community mind-share going on, which is a good thing! We've had great success with Tass internally over the past few months, so I have no doubt about his viability long-term.

While he is considered a mage along the lines of Kael'thas or Gul'dan, a lot of his power comes from the utility or "intangibles" he brings. I think JHow's analysis (check out his Youtube!) that Tassadar should be thought of as a complementary pick instead of a carry pick is pretty accurate.

All that being said, I do think there's room for improvement with his AA build. It's a bit too pointed towards utility at the expense of damage. I have some ideas I want to try once we see how our balance changes settle.

Hey guys!

Second question. Right after all the spooky announcements, there were a bunch of wild patches. Sweeping balance changed for like 1/3rd of the roster. I personally thought it was fun to see these huge changes as it reinvigorated players to play heroes who are buffed. But they seem to have decreased in size and frequency.

Was this just not viable because of the work? Did you find it was actually scaring players off? Or will they continue?

My idiot brain thinks "oh these are just number changes, it can't be that hard" but then I remember what an Arena Net employee said "Change the color of an item icon and 30 walls around WvW fall through the floor." So I won't assume to know how easy/difficult it is. And of course all of these require testing to make sure you are not just breaking the balance either.

Hey NotParadox!!!

I pushed to have the large balance patches at the beginning of last year, and I think it’s been fairly successful since then. As far as the size of the patches, from my point of view they’ve still been very large. There hasn’t been a specific reason that they got smaller then those first couple outside of the fact that it takes a lot of work to consistently find changes that have a high probability to be good for the game. The changes themselves do take a lot of time and work to implement and for QA to verify, but outside of that it also takes a significant amount of time to plan changes that have a higher likelihood of being good for the game.

In the last few patches I’ve tried to focus on having a decent amount of functionality changes that are a little more exciting and make heroes feel fresh to play. Naturally, if more time and effort are being put into those kinds of more complex changes, it takes away from time that could be spent doing a higher volume of simple number changes. At the end of the day it’s a balancing act between these two ideals, and right now we’ve been leaning more towards changes that have more meat to them over volume. Oh, there’s also these Nexus Anomaly things that, ya know, take up a little of our time as well.

Hey Unbiased_Bob,

I don't think that the size of a patch correlates with the impact it will have on the game, I think our focus is solely on the quality of the changes and how exciting they are for the players vs. sheer amount of changes. However, as the amount of changes increase so does the amount of testing that is required. We try to be as "balanced" as possible ?

Thanks!

Edit: What Adam said!

Have there been any discussions about adding new banners to the game? Outside of events and anniversaries, it doesn't seem like many have been added since HotS 2.0.

We have actually just recently started discussing getting some more banners in, but don’t currently have a time frame for them. This is a very helpful list, thank you! Please feel free to leave me a reply with any other banners you’d be interested in having.

Could you please bring the Death Knight Arthas skin back? By that I mean the one that looks like his default skin, but without the helmet or glowing eyes (and with the same alternate voice-over used by his Crown Prince skin).

It was available during the Alpha, but removed before Beta because some people felt taking his helmet off wasn't a big enough visual change to warrant being a separate skin. HotS 2.0 introduced skins that made even smaller changes (like Chen wearing his hat on his head rather than his back), so that shouldn't be an issue now.

For many fans of Warcraft III, Death Knight Arthas is the most iconic version of the character, as that's how he appeared in the majority of missions where he was playable. It would be really nice if we could play as that version of him in Heroes of the Storm.

I agree that would be cool. There has been some movement towards getting the Arthas remodel going. We are currently in the planning stage for 2021 and there is a strong desire to get the remodel in your hands. When we release the remodel I think it would be good to have a variation without his helmet on to fulfill this wish.

Hey guys! As usual I'm going to harass about lore.

My question/comment is largely toward the theming of ability and talent names. Recently Tassadar's rework brought a bit of it into the spotlight. Some talent names were great (props for Shadow Walk), but the Q ability Shock Ray seemed oddly off theme for a protoss ability, when there's stuff like his auto attack, Psi Assault. What was the reasoning behind the name? Was the more established abilities too close to psionic storm in terms of being easy to say, or did is it striking a balance between what the ability does and fitting with the lore?

Similarly, I was curious about the name of Raynor's reworked talents, the famous "Acquire Weak Spot vs Give 'em Some Pepper" was the big one, but the rework also stripped most of the references to his character from his kit. I wasn't sure the reasoning when other reworks like Nova and Hammer (and Tassadar) have been hyper flavorful in their talent names.

Great question!

I'd say it's complicated, because our Heroes generally represent not only a specific character, but a larger mish-mash of relevant gameplay mechanics and lore from their respective universes.

Personally, there's three things I would say I draw upon when designing/naming things:

Obvious established fantasy hits that directly represent the character or archetype that character falls in to. Things like Archon, Khaydarin Amulet, Psionic Storm are all things you would expect Tassadar to have if you've played either of the Starcrafts.

Expanded universe fantasy hits like Thermal Lance, Shadow Walk, or Khala's Gift which speak to a broader category of Protoss technology/magic or specific lore moments from that character's history, but had no established mechanical implications.

Literal mechanical translations like Shock Ray or Black Hole. These can definitely be the weakest, but I think there's a certain value in being straightforward sometimes, especially when it comes to helping players develop heuristics. In Shock Ray's case, I didn't want to double up on the "psionic" nomenclature for abilities and talents. Pushing it to be more "electrically oriented" means I don't have to figure out 10 different ways to describe "psi damage" between two different abilities. It also helps makes it more obvious to players which ability a given talent is going to affect by name alone.

[Halock 156]

When they say 'Arthas remodel', they're talking about a new model, right? That's not just a weird way of saying 'rework' to confuse stupid people?

Because that's awesome enough to keep me high right through 2021. That old model really doesn't do him justice.

[Arcling 898]

14 hours ago, Halock said:

When they say 'Arthas remodel', they're talking about a new model, right? That's not just a weird way of saying 'rework' to confuse stupid people?

Because that's awesome enough to keep me high right through 2021. That old model really doesn't do him justice.

Yeah, that would have been nice! One year wait though... Hopefully it's worth it. ?

I wonder how that D.va rework is coming along, still they didn't give it any release date. Perhaps it's something big, like giving her missile ability from Overwatch. Speaking of Overwatch, no one seems to have asked about any new hero from it. It's been over two years since last one.

[Valhalen 1,484]

22 hours ago, Halock said:

When they say 'Arthas remodel', they're talking about a new model, right? That's not just a weird way of saying 'rework' to confuse stupid people?

Because that's awesome enough to keep me high right through 2021. That old model really doesn't do him justice.

Lots of Heroes could get some improvements in their base models, mostly the old ones. People keep saying Arthas needs a new model, but Malfurion and Chen could get some love too.

[Halock 156]

34 minutes ago, Valhalen said:

Lots of Heroes could get some improvements in their base models, mostly the old ones. People keep saying Arthas needs a new model, but Malfurion and Chen could get some love too.

I feel like the old, chunky, style works with most of the other old characters better. Like Uther'd probably look something closer to WC3R if he was released today, but I quite like his old model. Arthas, though, just feels too small.

Tyrande's probably the first other one I'd pick though. I hate Diablo's model too, but the Prime Evil skin is brilliant. 

Wonder if by 'remodel' they mean updating the current skin -- it's pretty awful even for sharpness -- or adding a seperate, cooler one like Diablo's? 

 

 

[Valhalen 1,484]

2 hours ago, Halock said:

I feel like the old, chunky, style works with most of the other old characters better. Like Uther'd probably look something closer to WC3R if he was released today, but I quite like his old model. Arthas, though, just feels too small.

Tyrande's probably the first other one I'd pick though. I hate Diablo's model too, but the Prime Evil skin is brilliant. 

Wonder if by 'remodel' they mean updating the current skin -- it's pretty awful even for sharpness -- or adding a seperate, cooler one like Diablo's?

Yeah, Uther's model is pretty on point. He has a lot of details on his model and textures. I'm actually ok with Tyrande's model, to be honest.

What I'd like to see are more refined animations for some characters. If you compare the older Heroes with the new ones, the quality of the animation is very noticeable. Adding more keyframes and smoother transitions would add so much more fluidity to some of these characters. Could be even minor things. For instance, Brightwing got a brand new Hearthstone animation after her work a few years ago.

[BoiderBois 4]

Please no Season Pass. Its not cool. 

[Enryu 12]

Battle passess are horrible for the UX

[Vespero 0]

that doesn't look positive at all, basically they are lucky to be kept alive by blizard for the time beign

If i had to picture them, I'd see them working from a container, in 3 devs, surrounded by opened chips bags and beer cans with bliard passing them cold food from under the door once a week

Edited May 4, 2020 by Vespero
typo