We agree, Azmodan's Globe of Annihilation vastly overshadows the rest of his kit. We actually have him slated for a Talent Rework in the coming months to address this, as well as give him more Talents that can actually change the way that he plays. We don't like that the proper way to play the Lord of Sin is to rarely use All Shall Burn or Summon Demon Warrior, and we feel that the base power of the character isn't all that strong (Azmodan is one of the weakest characters in the game without Talents).

A few tidbits from the upcoming update:

• Taste for Blood is becoming Azmodan's baseline quest.
• All Azmodan's level 1 Talents are going to alter the baseline quest, allowing you to add an additional bonus or way to get stacks.
• Summon Demon Warriors are getting a baseline damage aura, similar to Burning Rage.
• All Shall Burn won't last indefinitely, but instead does more DPS over a shorter period.

Obviously, lots of new Talents to go alongside these changes, and hopefully spice up the way Azmodans play from game to game.

We talk about mobility creep (and power creep in general) a lot as a design team. Here's our take on it:

• We always want to push the envelope of what our new characters can do. We think we can do that and still make these characters feel balanced and fair.
• Some Heroes probably pushed this envelope too far. We recently made balance changes to Genji, Hanzo and Tracer to reduce their mobility and force them to be a little more exposed when they try to do their thing. We're still tuning them, but overall we think they're in a much healthier state now than immediately after their respective releases.
• You can look forward to more Chromie changes in the future. I can't give a date, but we've started to experiment with various ideas, like pulling in her range further but reducing her cast time, and making her W visible to enemies. All of this is still early in development, but the idea is to make her feel more interactive with enemies, and not create such a binary experience for Chromie herself (if enemies reach her, she dies and can't do damage, otherwise she's untouched).
• We've discussed coming up with creative abilities that can combat mobility, but haven't really found one we liked that met all of our criteria so far. It would have to punish mobile characters without also hurting non-mobile ones, have clear implications of what it would stop and wouldn't stop, and make sense from a fantasy and clarity standpoint.

We love The Lost Vikings, and think they're important to the game as a whole as they exemplify how Heroes of the Storm is unique among MOBAs. I can't give you any specifics on a date or scope of a rework since we haven't decided on anything yet, but here's what I can share:

• We don't like that the Vikings' primary function is to be in all lanes to soak experience.
• We love when the Vikings work together, and think that the coolest part of the Hero is having 3 units that combined are stronger than their individual pieces.
• We would like to see the Vikings be more accessible. There's a small section of the player base that loves the Vikings, but by and large they are not a very popular Hero due to their power feeling hidden and their high micro demands.
• We would love to see more interactivity and plays made with their kit. We have to balance that out with making them approachable.

Again, keep in mind that these are just our thoughts, and it might be that we may drastically change their kit... or just make small tweaks over time. We honestly don't have any concrete plans yet, but I wanted to be very transparent and share what we think about the Hero at the moment. We would love to get them into a more prominent role in the Nexus at some point, though.

Varian's a tricky one! First, some stats for context.

In Hero League, Hero Level 10+, Diamond League+, Deckard Release:

• Taunt - 75% pickrate, 50.3% winrate
• Colossus Smash - 17% pick rate, 48% winrate
• Twin Blades - 8% pick rate, 47.8% winrate

Ideally, we'd probably want to get Taunt to about 50% pickrate, and maybe 30/20 amongst the two DPS specs. The damage Heroics could use a small buff, though the winrate isn't quite as bad as the memes would lead you believe.

We have some plans to give both Colossus Smash and Twin Blades some more Health in a coming patch (just went into internal playtesting yesterday, so I can't give a date yet).

We think that Valeera is in a better state now than when she was released, but there's definite room for improvement. You've correctly identified one of our issues: players like to focus fully on a few openers and therefore as the game progresses and you pick Talents, you have fewer gameplay choices. That runs contrary to one of the design goals for Talents in our game, we want them to increase the options and abilities available to your character over the course of the game.

Anecdotally: When we designed Valeera, we decided to make her different from Heroes like Zeratul by really capturing one of the World of Warcraft Rogue fantasies of locking down an enemy Hero. When Valeera was in development, the Valla/Greymane hyper carry meta was in full force, so we thought that this would also be a welcome addition to the game that would shake up the meta. If Valeera is good at locking down only one enemy, and a team's composition relied on having one major damage dealer, she'd be great at it.

That's why the balance changes we've made to Valeera over time have tried to reduce her damage, and kept her focus on disabling one enemy. We're still trying to adjust the Talent tree to fit into that philosophy, and trying to balance making her good at reducing a carry without also making her too strong in setting up kills.

Yes, we're always looking at making these tiers healthier. Sometimes that means we can make tuning changes, sometimes it means we need to make design changes so that two Talents aren't competing with each other to accomplish the same goal. We periodically do sweeps of Talent trees and try to make a series of small incremental adjustments. Typically you'll see a lot of these changes in our balance patches two weeks after the release of a Hero or Rework.

"Is there a reason you got rid of Diablo's Health percentage damage without any compensation?"

We feel like we've actually properly compensated the rest of his kit, though Devastating Charge does have more counterplay now. We removed the percentage Health on Devastating Charge because we thought his unrestricted ability to kill enemies regardless of their high Health pools or defensive buffs wasn't healthy for a tank character. There weren’t many ways to counter it besides positioning or immunities. We tried to keep the spirit of what Devastating Charge is, and actually if used on a lower Health Hero will do basically the same damage it did previously (more if you can get external Spell Power or reduce enemies Armor).

One of the challenges facing reworks—especially ones affecting characters who are already powerful—is that we have to take away from somewhere in order to add additional power in order to keep them balanced. Sometimes this means we trim out some of the less important or noticeable effects (like the armor on Shadow Charge), and sometimes we have to add additional counterplay to already powerful existing effects (like Devastating Charge).

"Any changes planned for Cho's level 16 talent Surging Dash?"

Yes. It's a bit too transforming when Cho gets the Talent, and shuts down too much of the counterplay for opponents after level 16. We'll likely keep the overall balance of Cho in mind (he's still really powerful in Team League and Quick Match, so it might be okay to just flat nerf).

"Why did you feel Hanzo needed the longest AA range in the game when he was released?"

First, a bit of history on Hanzo development (this was partially explained in Kent-Erik's BlizzCon talk last year on Hanzo). When we were working on Hanzo, we started to become hyper-aware of the frustration that long range Heroes can pose at times. We were pursuing a sniper fantasy for Hanzo: his Storm Bow (Q) had a much longer longer and did much more damage than it does now. What we decided to do was pull in his Q range, increase his Basic Range, and shift some of the power of his Q over to his Basic Attacks. I think the version of Hanzo that shipped is a more fun Hero to play against than the one we were iterating on at the time (which was essentially Chromie with mobility).

Then his release happened, the winrate wasn't especially high, so we made a bunch of buffs to the Hero. That pushed his Basic Attack damage into an area that started to make the range feel frustrating again. In hindsight, we should have reduced the Basic Attack range when we increased his damage to a point where being "poked" by it was really becoming meaningful.

Hopefully that makes sense!

Late response, but I do what I want!

We don't think that all tank Heroes need self-sustain, but it doesn't hurt. We specifically added it to Diablo because we wanted Fire Stomp to feel more meaningful, but we didn't want to add a ton of damage to Diablo. It also fit well with any Talents that increased the damage of Fire Stomp, since that could mean more healing for Diablo too (which as a tank should be one of his primary focuses).

We added it to Varian because it gave him more solo lane presence that he would need as an occasional bruiser, and it was a method of survival that wasn't tied to Parry (since too much of it was tied into Parry already, causing Talent issues).