Hey Paladia, thanks for your question.

Short answer: One of the core tenets of design is that by creating limitations, you gain greater freedom in all the areas where you don't limit yourself, and can focus on making these areas awesome. We think the "apples to apples" actually allows us to make more interesting Talents and push the limits of what Talents provide as a whole.

Now the long answer:

Let's start with the major goals of the Talent system, just so we have a common language.

• To give a sense of growth to your Hero over the course of the game
• To add replayability to a Hero by giving you multiple interesting choices that changes the way you play them from game to game
• To add customization and ownership to your Hero that fits your preferred playstyle

Now, over time, we've played with a lot different styles of Talent trees all trying to fulfill these goals, and we've learned a few things.

• 95% of the time, if a large majority of the Talent tiers offer vastly different choices (aka apples to oranges), one of them becomes dominant. Healers want healing. Damage dealers want damage. While in a perfect world these would all be really compelling and awesome choices, it rarely works out that way even after considerable efforts at tuning post ship. In order for tanky Talents on Valla to be attractive one-off choices, we need to make them really powerful. And if those choices are on almost every tier, then there's the option of Valla building almost exclusively tanky options, which would deviate from how we think the Hero should play.
• Offering this much variance typically means we need to dilute the effective power of the Talents or remove synergies within them, because if Jaina could choose 6 Talent tiers that all augmented her damage in a synergistic way, there is a huge jump in the power that a Jaina can deal by the end game. So instead we try to concentrate the coolness of the Talents into less choices that can be really synergistic and awesome and BIG COOL WOW MOMENTS.
• There are a few cases where "apples to oranges" does work, though we usually only do it on a few tiers. Continuing the Jaina example, at level 13 she can choose to take Ice Barrier (survivability), Icy Veins (damage), or Storm Front (something in-between). Now, we can make Ice Barrier a really powerful defensive Talent for Jaina that you can splash into your regular build, and have it feel like a meaningful change to the way you play your character. The most common place you'll see these hybrid tiers are on our Bruisers, as they are hybrid characters to begin with, and often survivabilty = damage for melee characters (staying in the fight means more damage). But we try to only do these 1 or 2 times on a Hero, for the reasons stated prior.

Now, if you haven't noticed, we're always working on Talent trees. We can basically tinker with them forever to try and get them right, and we've learned so much over time from iterating on them. Some of the examples you bring up of Zagara and Rexxar have traditionally been difficult trees to get right, and I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see some more work done on them as we continue (you could say that about any Talent tree to be honest).

We are trying to add interesting ways to play that are different. We just don't want to take the easy way out and say that simply because Valla can get tanky, it's a fun way to be different. We instead try to focus on more nuanced gameplay, like Hungering Arrow or Hatred Builds, and making sure that there are reasons to take each of these.

We don't have any plans to drastically rework Transcendence or Insight. While we think there's some small changes we can make to his Talents to allow him to be a little more consistent with his ability to Basic Attack in general, statistically Insight and Transcendence have comparable winrates, and while Iron Fists is the most picked at high level, the other two are still close.

We try to walk the line with Kharazim between making Transcendence and Insight a meaningful portion of his power pie, without making the healer feel like he can't heal unless he can manage to punch people an entire fight.

Hey rogue_LOVE, thanks for your question!

One of the cool things about Talent trees is that they can have their own unique flavor on each Hero. In Thrall's case, he has quite a few quests, but we think that's something that makes his Talents different and for the most part work on the character. I wouldn't expect us to do this type of thing very often however.

And let's be honest, Thunderstorm isn't exactly a quest Talent, we just use the quest pings for it. In fact (keep this between you and me), we're planning on removing the quest classification of the Talent, which will reduce Thrall from 3 to 2 Tiers of Talents that are quests.

Hey ridleyfire, thanks for your question!

I think we've mentioned this in past AMAs, which unfortunately reminds me that we haven't been able to get changes for Valeera out to you all in a timely manor. I'll try to give you what our current opinion of Valeera is (at least right now):

• Having a bunch of Talents that focus on only 1 opener isn't ideal, since it discourages you from ever using the other openers
• She's always towed the line between viable and frustrating, mainly due to having burst and CC on the same kit.
• One of our original goals for the Hero was to be the "anti-carry", being able to really shut down the throughput of 1 particular character. Obviously there are challenges to make this dream come true without being frustrating if you're the chosen prey of Valeera, so we'll have to see how that goes as we refine her place in the Nexus.

Thanks for your question YeojSeyah.

We've traditionally made Block and similar Talents use charge based effects so that they were especially useful when trading. The idea behind them originally was that you could feel free to go in when your Block charges were available, and then back away when they were gone. There's also something visceral about getting a high block value on a few attacks, as opposed to spreading it out over a duration.

It's true that it's less powerful against fast Basic Attacks like Tracer or Tychus, but in general we think there are already plenty of counters to Basic Attacks so having Block only be effective sometimes is a positive.

We've talked about it in the past, but it's an area we tread lightly. We like the cleanliness of having Physical Armor or Blind be the counter to Basic Attackers. Then saying you could take Talents that say "oh but wait it's not", creates a sort of arms race that isn't something we're excited to pursue.

Question from one of our Chinese players:

The most recent balance patch has buffed lots of weak talents, rather than nerfing the strong ones like before. Is this related to the cancellation of professional matches? Or just to try a new approach? In addition, almost every hero’s modification has a developer's comment now. Why? Will it continue in the future?

Question from one of our Chinese players:

The current version has too many ranged mage heroes. A large proportion of the total damage output is of ability damage. Now the DPS contest is more like an exchange of abilities. Valla, Tracer, Greymane and other heroes become less playable, and they require much resources from the supports. Is there any plan to adjust this in the future?

Question from one of our Chinese players:

The new roles system is actually a more detailed classification of heroes. But it is also a limitation on the heroes. Is it possible to provide the existing hero (or future new hero) with multiple classification labels? And give them multiple roles through different talents, so they can be compatible with different lineups.

Question from one of our Chinese players:

There is a lot of controversy after the new experience mechanism was launched. Is the development team satisfied with the changes caused by the new mechanism so far? Will there be any improvement?

Question from one of our Chinese players:

Has the suspension of HGC influenced the development team on the hero/map balancing?

Question from one of our Chinese players:

Although the official tournament is suspended, there are still some organizations holding competitions. Will the official provide them with some support, such as providing a special server for the matches under a certain version? Will the development team consider the data from third-party matches into future balance changes?

Question from one of our Chinese players:

The PVE maps of brawl mode have been quite popular, such as “Escape From Braxis”, is there any plan to make more PVE maps, or PVE challenge maps in the future?

Question from Belzofinni in Germany:

How does the change of the team (developers) affect the team? To explain: Some time ago a change was reverted. Are there any plans to revert other changes, for example tower munition or 1/3 catapults for each fort. With the recent team changes it feels like the team has more freedom again in design changes. Also how frequent are you guys planning to release patches/updates?

Question from Nachspion in Germany:

Do you guys consider to restrict the amount of gained or lost points (maybe even MMR changes) in ranked mode, if a team plays with bots or against a team with bots?

Question from Player in Germany:

Will there be range restrictions for groups with only one league (example: only groups within platinum or platinum to high gold instead of every rank in a group like now).

Question from Player in Germany:

What will happen with rankings from TL and HL when you merge the leagues? Do you guys plan a total reset?

Question from Truphoss in Germany:

Are the any plans to remove promotion and relegation games between divisions?

Question from Listar in Germany:

Do you guys have any plans to convert Brawl Mode into a fix Aram mode?

Question from Balbero in Germany:

Will it be possible to have fixed teams per seasons (with a Team MMR instead of a personal MMR and special rewards) in the future?