Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
Hello /r/HeroesoftheStorm. We've brought in our live design team to answer your questions regarding Heroes of the Storm Balance.
Patch Notes – March 14th, 2017
We’ve brought in a few of our live design experts to answer your questions on the latest changes introduced to Heroes of the Storm. Feel free to ask questions about the recent changes to the game, your favorite heroes, talents, or anything else you’d like to know regarding balance and the current state of the Nexus!
For today’s Q&A, we’ll have the following developers in attendance:
- /u/Blizz_Daybringer – Brett Crawford (Balance Designer)
- /u/BlizzCooper – Matt Cooper (Lead Balance Designer)
- /u/BlizzNeyman – Alex Neyman (Balance Designer)
- /u/BlizzAZJackson – Adam Jackson (Balance Designer)
- /u/Blizz_AKlontzas - Alexander Klontzas (Producer)
Please feel free to start posting your questions below! We’ll be starting at 12:00 PM PST.
As a reminder: There will be questions posted by CMs from non-English speaking regions. If you'd like to see these questions answered, feel free to upvote them for more visibility.
azgaz
Have faith! His changes have made it into our daily internal play testing so it won't be much longer.
azgaz
Hey Hoazalf,
This is actually on the list to get on the TAB screen. I can't remember off the top of my head when this is going to go out to you guys but it's definitely something we want there.
azgaz
We also noticed that Bronze Tiger Kharazim forgot what gloves are and how to punch with them. We will schedule some training to remind him how to correctly use them.
azgaz
Hey Rosikko,
Changes to Tyrande are currently being play tested internally so we hope to have her in your hands once we're confident with her shiny new toys. Li Li probably won't see changes until a bit later down the line.
azgaz
Hey BuckSleezy,
It's all a matter of prioritizing what work needs to come in first. These abilities are functionally working so it's hard to put them before more critical balance needs but there are other implications sometimes as well that we would need to figure out. Let's say we swap Malfurion's Scouting Drone with a Wisp, how do we differentiate it from Lunara's Wisp or if we gave Nazeebo Spirit Walk, how do we make it different from Tassadar's Dimensional Shift? We would need the Art to stand out in some cases to avoid overlap but also keep things as unique as possible to each hero wherever possible.
Regardless, we tend to look at these generic talents when we do a broader rework of a Hero to decide if they should keep or change them so we will get through them eventually, just a matter of finding the time.
azgaz
Hey rockerfrozzo,
It's a bit hard for me to give you the best advice since I don't know what your full skillset is but it looks like you've already been working with the SC2 Editor which is a huge plus.
I can tell you what worked for me when trying to join Blizzard itself which is keep an eye on the job openings page (https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/) and if you see something you feel confident you can do, go for it and keep trying until you succeed! Don't underestimate the value of a good resume and cover letter and do your best to have a portfolio of your work, tailored for the position you are trying to get. Be tenacious and don't give up if things don't go as planned the first time around. You're going up against tons of other applicants so if you don't succeed the first time, take the lessons learned and use them to make your next attempt even stronger, be it better interviewing skills, expanding on your existing portfolio of work or learning an entirely new skill.
Good luck and maybe I'll see you walking around the office one day! :)
azgaz
Hey ColonelCrunk,
Good news, Uther is actually being worked on as we speak so be on the lookout for an update coming sooner rather than later.
azgaz
Hey Flow,
We very recently made a few number changes to Abathur that we hope will bring him to a better place. For Medivh and The Lost Vikings, I think we're ok with them not showing up very often as they are meant to be hard to play and somewhat situational. Medivh has actually risen in popularity in the last couple of months in both competitive and Hero League and Vikings can still cause havoc on certain maps like Garden of Terror or Warhead Junction. I will say thought that we do have some quality of life changes for both in mind that may see the light of day somewhere down the line.
azgaz
Hey 엘라닉스!
Don't forget that this is the Nexus where anything can happen so it's not crazy to think that Malfurion has been hanging around Raynor and borrowed a few Scouting Drones. In all seriousness though, it is a pretty cool idea to theme some of these abilities more closely with their respective lore or origin. No promises, but I'll shop the idea around and see if it's something we want to explore since we would have to change the functionality of these in the process to make them truly fit their intended theme.
Neyman
Hey! A day late, but I figured I'd get one more response in.
Cleanse is an extremely powerful tool, that can create some really awesome reactive playmaking and does a good job keeping certain disable heavy compositions from running rampant.
From a balance perspective, we like what it's doing for the game, but we don't want Cleanse to be mandatory to make a Support viable. We're tackling this from a few angles.
Different ways to counter-act CC via a Talent, potentially at a different power level and tier. Kharazim's Cleansing Dash is an example of this. We're beginning to experiment with other ways of augmenting Basic Abilities when they interact with disabled targets.
Compensating supports that don't have Cleanse in other ways. Uther is our anti-burst Support, so he'll probably always have that. But he doesn't have the raw healing over time that Lucio does, and from a balance perspective we think there's a tuning amount that will make him worthwhile when he doesn't have Cleanse.
In regards to incoming Support changes, I can share a little info about Uther. He's going to have more frequent self-healing without sacrificing his ability to save others, have the ability to provide short bursts of Armor to allies, and will have an entire tier at level 7 that is built around countering disables in different ways. He'll be a nice pick if your team is a little fragile or the opposing team is burst heavy. He won't have the raw healing output that other Supports can have, unless he's taking a lot of damage himself.