Personally those two sound awesome. I would lean towards Mannaroth though he comes with some challenges. Characters with multiple limbs (e.g. 4 legs, 2 arms 2 wings) take a ton of time to animate. For me when I am on something creative that is taking a long time to get done it can be mentally draining. There's a point where I have a hard time calling it done and things get blurry which can be hard on an artist.

None at this time. While we enjoyed what Haunted Mines brought to the game, we couldn't find a way to get it to the same level of fun that our other Battlegrounds could provide. As our number of Battleground swelled, we couldn't justify keeping the map in Ranked or Quick Match rotations over others, so we've removed the map indefinitely.

That isn't to say that it couldn't ever come back in some new fashion if someone comes up with a fantastic amazing solution, but that's not on the books right now.

Yes.

Ideas are usually not a problem. We have a ton of ideas but are always open to more. This is why we like chiming in on community skins and whatnot. We're there to let you know we're watching. Still would love to see the next community inspired skin like Azmodunk or Janitor Leoric.

My vote goes to Hogarth. Our producer, Taylor's dog.

We don't have plans for massive Battleground reworks similar to Garden of Terror's recent update, but we do want to continue to make smaller changes ranging from tuning to minor gameplay changes like Volskaya and Infernal Shrines recently received.

We realize that Blackheart's Bay is a divisive Battleground, and have plans to increase the interactivity with enemy teams without taking away what makes the Battleground special. I can't offer a time frame for that at the moment, but it's something that we're actively talking about and I wouldn't be surprised if you see changes before the end of the year.

We think that we have a diverse and interesting Battleground pool at the moment, and while we think it would be fun to introduce new ones, we think there are a lot of gains to be made by making smaller tweaks to the existing ones to keep them interesting and make sure they're fun. So for the foreseeable future, we think that smaller adjustments to Battlegrounds is the way to go.

There were many changes to Xul as we were creating him. To your question we tried it and the biggest problem was clutter. At the time we developed Xul we had Zagara, Nazeebo, Azmodan along with 35-45 other heroes (can't remember the hero number). We were getting into a trend of putting a lot of summons on the screen at the same time. We tried to keep the fantasy of the Necromancer as much as we could while keeping clarity for the player base. One ability that hit the cutting room floor was that we wanted to get a more active corpse explosion which consisted of using the skeletons as leaping at a target then detonating.

We pay attention to what the community wants when considering a new hero. When what the community wants aligns to what we're really passionate about that's when those heroes come to the nexus. If you look at some of the past community driven hero polls you'll find that we're doing our best to hit the top end of most of those polls. If the past couple years has been our track record of that I think we've done a pretty good job.

Hey Smugjpeg,

We actually changed it so that Garrosh's Into the Fray doesn't affect Immune to Friendly flagged units. It ignoring that flag was actually a bug. When we fixed that though, it exposed another issue that D.Va was flagged as Immune to Friendly.

We've weighed what changes would happen if we removed that flag from D.Va's Self-Destructing Mech, and we've decided to remove it in an upcoming patch (the next major one with a PTR). So you'll be able to throw D.Va's Mech again (as well as a few other things like make give it Sanctification's Invulnerability).

Happy Birthday Billy!!!!

Magic 8 ball says outlook looks good.

Happy Birthday!

I just checked the stats for the Lord of Sin. Since the Anduin patch, he's at 53.2% at Gold MMR or lower games, and 50.4% at Platinum and above games. So he's in a pretty healthy position overall.

For Talents, while Talents like Gluttony, Art of Chaos, Tide of Sin, and Total Annihilation are picked more than their counterparts, they actually have lower or comparable win rates. Some of this is the expertise effect (if you don't know how to play Azmodan, you play the cookie cutter spec, and you probably have a lower win rate). But these statistics are pulled from only people that have leveled Azmodan to at least 10, which displays at least a decent familiarity with the Hero.

TLDR: Try to break the mold and pick some of the other builds when it makes sense, they are actually pretty strong. Overall, Azmodan is right in the middle of the pack in terms of overall balance.

She never left!

Our intent is to eventually have those races represented in the Nexus. It will take time.

Hi lifeeraser. We answered this here https://old.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/bm90b5/heroes_of_the_storm_design_ama_may_9_2019/emv3end/

I'll take a stab too. The style of Heroes borrows mostly from Samwise Didier's style. What this means is when we pull in characters from Diablo or StarCraft we have to adjust them since those styles are generally leaning more towards the more realistic side of the scale. Overwatch, StarCraft and Diablo games, particularly the cinematics have a ton of tiny details made to be seen up close. Those teams put in a lot of awesome details which at our viewing distance would get lost. We need to carefully edit the details that would get lost out while enlarging some of the more important details. This is all an attempt to make everything look like it is from the same world.

No. It's a good start but nothing is a direct import from other games. There's a lot of recreation when we pull a character in from another game. Different art style and tech art and animation needs. If you look for the 2017 Hero Deep Dive the team and I go into this a bit more.

I think a lot of reworks in the past have been pretty aggressive in terms of change. Diablo saw an entirely new Talent tree and change to his Firestomp. Sylvanas saw large changes to Withering Fire, Shadow Dagger, and Black Arrows. Artanis gained the ability to use his Phase Prism during Blade Dash. Lots more.

Over time, we've seen the success of reworks and dedicated more time and resources to them. I think you've seen an uptick in both the frequency and amount of change in the last 18 months as we've noticed that they can be powerful new ways to make older Heroes feel like new.

We are focused on Heroes, Reworks, Skins, Skin packs and more.

I answered a similar question here https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/bm90b5/heroes_of_the_storm_design_ama_may_9_2019/emvam4j/

We're never afraid of making a hero.

It's usually a group effort. Usually the designer of the talents would take a first shot at creating names while we began to test them. Sometimes these are definitely temp, sometimes they are closer to their final name. We'll then send them off to the team at large where people more familiar with lore or clarity can chime in and offer better alternatives as needed.

You can expect to see more adjustments to Battlegrounds like you saw recently to Volskaya Foundry and Infernal Shrines going forward. There likely won't be any new ones, but we think that even smaller adjustments to older maps can make them feel pretty new (Braxis Holdout, Warhead Junction and Blackheart's Bay, I'm looking at you).

I would remove Azmodan, so we could release him as Azmodunk. That's the true Azmodan in my book!

No but seriously, I think any time we've thought this, we've essentially gone back and reworked the character to be in a state that we're happy with. So from a practical standpoint, I guess you could look at the Heroes that have required the most changes since coming out, and it would be nice to have super-fortune-telling powers and release them in their current state now rather than their initial release?

It's a cool idea, something we'll consider. I think the biggest challenge facing Warhead is probably the size of the Battleground, and that's why there's less interactivity with opponents more than anything. It's interesting because the map was an answer to the request from players that they wanted a way to have more smaller 1v1 and 2v2 skirmishes so they could show off their individual skill, but the result was that globals were mandatory and split pushing and Mercing is king.

Great question. No. One of the first skins we made was Medic Uther and we were able to make Lt. Morales. We also made a Novazon skin for Nova and later came out with Cassia. Anything can happen in the Nexus.

Keep posting on reddit and the forums. We are watching. I post in those threads often. We do see them. We talk about them. Rally behind a concept the community wants and we'll try to make another Azmodunk or Janitor Leoric.

Well it was at the time. But it also wasn't.

We previously flagged it as Immune to Friendly to avoid things from being wasted (like Chain Heals or Heroics), but wanted certain things to work on it like Into the Fray. By removing the flag, we realized most of our fears were unfounded because the abilities solve themselves.

D.Va's exploding Mech is never missing Health, so Heals can't target it and won't jump to it unless there's no other target. D.Va Mech is treated as something similar to Nova's Holo Clones or Chen's Storm Earth Fire, which are filtered out as viable targets for most allied Heroic Abilities.

Basically we solved the issue in other ways rather than calling something Immune to Friendly that wasn't really Immune to Friendly.

I answered this last AMA. :) Here you go. https://old.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/b930id/heroes_developer_ama_art_design_april_4/ek4b8ze/

We loved the work that was done on Dragon Shire. A lot of that update was done to coincide with the comics and the big push for Orphea release. I'm not sure that we'll do things to that extent again, it was a special moment in the story of the Nexus, but it would be cool to do smaller things.

We do! We're adding new tints to Heroes all the time. Artanis with Zeratul's Blade is a little bit deeper than just doing a new tint but we do lore skins like that as well. We do our best to get mount color matches. Keep an eye out!

It's gonna be awesome.

We love doing it! Thanks for playing!

https://imgur.com/gallery/SohrXi6

Will fix! A lot of Heroics don't though.