I noticed my current build doesn't get the special post game star on either computer but on the PTR i now get the special end game star. Is this feature being rolled out in segments or was there a bug?

Any updates you can give us on the attack queuing and the bugs that have been causing abilities not to go off while right clicking? (ex, Kerrigan combo not going off)

Hope I'm not too late to the party, but has the team every considered adding a shield and armour system similar to overwatch, where shields and armour absorb Yx amount of damage compared to normal health.

Are you keeping an eye for power creep? The newer heroes can do more and more things; hard cc on Varian assassin, split pushing power of Samuro, very strong DD andally save on warrior zarya.

Hello nice blizzard people!

I come from the foreign lands of Scotland, to ask if balance testing in blizz HQ is done with batches for new heroes, or introducing them and testing one by one in the current environment (Current being the state of the game for the rest of us).

I ask because once upon a time I saw a comment that said "It makes sense that Li-ming was so powerful to begin with if the devs were also testing tracer at the same time."

Hope this question gets answered!

I love me some big Excel spreadsheets! have frozen my computer several times with +200Gb ones! (Offshore oil platforms simulation results and post processing)

I know my edits have made the post into something far longer than I first wrote; he's definitely interesting in terms of balance. So, sorry about the wall to read over.

I'm still interested in how you feel about Cocktail build. I like the idea of armor with Worgen form (Resistance?) and the goal you have for MFTK, but there's still a lot of Greymains that are unhappy about Cocktail build in its current form and feel like they had the old Greymane "stolen" from them in favor of making Cocktail viable after numerous patches. They feel the ability is unreliable, or it doesn't do enough, or it takes too many talents devoted to it. Do you have any further plans for this build?

Ooo, Armor. I'm curious what that means. % damage reduction, a shield, something else?

Is your goal to make every talent tier an "apples to apples" choice, or will there still be tiers that have different options?

Hello Neyman. Thanks for answering my question.

Rexxar lvl 7 talent tier is in my opinion one of the best talent tiers in the game. It has 3 completely different talents and all are viable with similar wins rates. One is great in team fights, one is great for tanking or holding a point and one is great for pushing or taking camps. It's always an interesting choice for me as a player as it caters to different playstyles and I can adept to the situation at hand. However, the pick rate of them are not even.

I think it would be a shame if you turned such a great talent variety into something else with the "apples to apples" philosophy. Where it instead of being interesting choices with great variety, turns into "In this talent tier you can only improve your damage in slightly different ways".

We feel like we can more consistently create choices that are interesting if we start to limit the spectrum of choices you have to choose from.

It makes the hero play out the same way every time however with only slight variation. If you make them similar, there will generally be one that is better and if it isn't, that's often because the choice doesn't matter. Like Tracer lvl 7 and Tracer lvl 16. It just tends becomes bland, the hero is played exactly the same way regardless of what you take.

I think Zagara is the prime example of the different approaches you can take. Before, she had two ways of playing. Either you go vision build for utility or you go pushing. Right now, she only has one way of playing, apart from the ultimate. The change to her ultimates was definitely needed and I think good design in several ways, so was a remake of many of her talents. However, I think you missed the second key part of her kit by not allowing her to be built for vision anymore, as that is what her trait and entire race has always been about and it is also a key point in competitive play.

A question I'm really anxious about is how you will approach your redesign or alteration of Rexxar. Will it be with the new "apples to apples" approach or will we continue to see great talent and playstyle variety within the same talent tier?

From DeMo in LatAm:

• What are the challenges of balancing a multiclass hero such as Varian?
• How happy do you guys get when the design team comes up with a new, crazy, super hard to balance ability?
• For an ability with 120 seconds cooldown, Hinterlands Blast has an extremely low damage. Any plans to change it in the future (either damage or cooldown)?

I'd like to address your "apples to apples" philosophy which for the most part the hero remakes and the balance of the game is based on now. It makes for talent tiers like tracer tier 16 or Nova tier 4. Which perhaps in your statistical analysis is great for it has a reasonable diversity. But to a player it just becomes a bland choice as every talent is basically the same.

Which means every time you play the hero, it is the same. If I was watching a replay, I wouldn't even be able to tell which talent the hero took for it plays out exactly the same. You call it good talent diversity but I think you should aim for a good play diversity instead. Where every talent plays out as differently as possible. Instead of making every talent as similar as possible.

I'll take Rexxar as an example. He has mediocre talent diversity but his talents are very different. I'd much, much rather see that type of diversity where one talent makes your great at solo bosses, another great at CC and a third gives you great survivability. Those are choices that actually matter even if one talent gets 50% or above pick rate. Instead of "apples to apples" talents like the wisp talents or a talent that is basically "Talent 1 gives you 50% extra damage on every attack, talent 2 gives you 100% extra damage on every second attack!". Sure, it may look great on a spreadsheet where you see they have equal pick rate but that is because the talents choices do not matter.

Do you agree that the "apples to apples" balance philosophy tends to makes for uninteresting choices and end up playing the same for the most part? What is the priority, good play diversity or good talent pick rate diversity?

A few quick questions:

1) With the Calarmity nerf don't you think that lvl1 teleport talent on Li-Ming is completely useless now?

2) Malf seems to dominate both HL and competitive play as a number 1 support for quite a while. Will you try to buff all other supports to his lvl or can we expect a nerf cooming soon?

3) Haunted Mines is the first map without the bushes right next to objective (i.e. there are none of them in the mines itselfs). This takes away Dehaka's crucial ability to stay on the lane until the very moment when he is needed in the teamfight for the objective. Are you ok with this?

4) Why can't Rehgar use his Lightning Shield (W) on the enemies? It would be quite fun and in the same time not very strong.

I also have a side question which is not about the balance but about the bug: I have made a topic on the gamebreaking Kharazim/Graden Of Terror interraction (https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/5ejdea/just_witnessed_a_huge_bug_on_got_heroes_recieve/) but neither it nor the bug report on the forums (http://us.battle.net/forums/en/heroes/topic/20752186416) got a responce from blizzard and there is no mention of it in the recent patch notes so I thought that maybe you can send it to the right hands in case it was unnoticed?

In your minds, what's the optimal balance patch schedule for a hero's release? I was a big fan of how Zarya's release was done, though I would've liked the final iteration to be a bit sooner. Samuro felt busted for far too long.

Whats the toughest balance decision you've made for the game through the years?

[deleted]

Another question of mine about a hero that I'll admit I was slightly disappointed in not seeing anything for in the recent patch notes: Greymane. What's your stance on him? He seems to be a little lackluster as of late when compared to assassins like Alarak and Valla who have better poke, sustain, and utility. Yet he has still seen some effective competitive use. Are there any changes being considered that might buff him in public play without affecting him too much in pro play?

Edit: Since this one seems to be rising a fair bit quicker than another comment, I'm going to borrow one of his questions: What happened with Scented Tincture, and will it ever return in some form? The best suggestion for it I've heard is to make it basically a thrown Clairvoyance that simply reveals a small area and the heroes within it for no damage if it doesn't splash off of anything. Though I'd admit I'd have a hard time ever picking it over Perfect Aim in the case of Cocktail build because the baseline range is rather unimpressive.

Edit: More talk about Cocktail. Do you feel that Cocktail should require 3 talents to be a central part of Greymane's kit and not just a situational piece of extra poke/waveclear/finishing tool? Would you consider altering/combining or making parts of the talents for it baseline (like Draught Overflow?) I mentioned the usefulness of Perfect Aim over Scented Tincture earlier as well. The baseline range is often times just a little too short; 30% is often more than enough however. Perhaps we could see a 15%-20% baseline range increase in favor of altering the Perfect Aim talent?

Edit: I also heard a lovely suggestion about making Wolfheart baseline, perhaps for half a second per autoattack for up to 10 seconds of reduction. Thoughts? Viciousness is, to me, almost simply inferior in that refreshing it off of Abilities means little when Greymane only actually has two abilities, one being his Heroic, that could refresh it(yes, technically Darkflight can too, but when are you going to dive in just to keep your IB going?). But here's the kicker: Baseline Cocktail range is not much more than autoattack range. I could see it working with Perfect Aim to allow for a long range refresh, but they're both on the same tier! So the only real benefit is the extra second, which doesn't really mean much when you can just have the cooldown reduction to reactivate it with Wolfheart and you're also free to use it more liberally (like on merc camps) with Wolfheart, whereas with Viciousness, IB might not refresh in time.

Edit: How could I forget the elephant in the room? Marked For The Kill, and how it compares to Go For The Throat. I really don't know where to go with this one, so I'll just add some thoughts. I like Go For The Throat not just because it's a burst tool, but because it's also a mobility tool. It's an instant gap closer to reengage a hero that may have just used their own in an attempt to escape. It's a long cooldown trade for a short one (and boy did that 20 second cooldown increase + range reduction hurt), but the ideal outcome is that it results in a kill for me. The original iteration of Marked For The Kill also had a gap closer on it, and it was easily 3x the range of GFTT, but it moved slowly and with a thin projectile. This made it far more situational than GFTT, so it was changed to be a refreshing vulnerability with the goal of being a "tank killer" tool for Greymane. But that's not his job. It's nice to have in some scenarios (I used it to obliterate a Cho'gall the other day in QM), but there are better heroes for that than him. I'm picking Greymane because I want to get at a squishy backline, not to poke down the tank. Of course, I might just be missing the intended purpose of this ult, so I'm curious what you hoped to achieve with the change? There are people that have also voiced their want for it to have the old gap closer functionality back on it, and I think that could make for some interesting play if it were to be added. Of course, it'd still be risky, because many of the squishier backline heroes have small hitboxes (Li Ming and Chromie come to mind). This is another benefit of GFTT: it's point and click, instant, guaranteed value. Very strong. As I said, I don't really know what you could do with MFTK to make it a meaningful alternative as I haven't given it a lot of thought, so I would be interested to hear if you have any potential further changes in the pipeline. We saw Nydus become worthwhile once it had passives loaded onto it; could MFTK be the same?

I love Greymane (and could probably go on and on about how I feel about his talents), so I would love to see more of him again and have a reason to keep playing him myself. I still play him in QMs, but I can't ever seem to justify picking him in drafts.

TL;DR per request: Greymane feels outclassed by numerous heroes in most scenarios, being limited to maps like Battlefield of Eternity for his raw Worgen damage but becoming unfavorable for anything else. Cocktail build is still not considered useful by many or feel it requires too much devoted to it to become useful. Greymane's level 1 tier is unbalanced, and Scented Tincture's removal is still unexplained. MFTK is still plain worse than GFTT in the vast majority of situations and needs further changes.

What are your opinions on 'Hero cycling', and do you think that Heroes of the Storm's Hero cycling is in the right place.

Thanks for your hard work,

Bakery

(Hero Cycling is the concept of rotating in and out Heroes by deliberately overnerfing or overbuffing them. To give some Heroes specific examples; Muradin has been in the meta for so long, it could be argued that he should be deliberately nerfed out of Tier 1-3. Diablo has been out of the meta for a long time, so you could also argue that he should be deliberately overbuffed to bring him up to Tier 1 so that he can see regular play. The main argument in favour of this concept is that it brings more diversity to the game and keeps metas distinct and interesting.)

Is Thrall considered for a rework? While I think he has a fun playstyle, I wish his talent choices would be a bit better, I feel like he has at best 1.5 viable build.

What basic or heroic ability do you feel is underrated by the community?

https://imgur.com/a/6ep9f - he thought stitches wanted to play. Luckily saved the plushie before complete destruction.

Hey if you are still answering questions I have one. Is it by design that newer heroes typically enter the game on the stronger side of things to promote sales? It seems like every time a new hero is added they come in really strong and then are gently nerfed down to be more in tune to what already exists in the game.

Is there any plan to make it more clear to players what role a hero provides by expanding on the role system in place? A bruiser tank doesn't fill the same role as a real tank (Sonya v Muradin), and a hybrid healer can't compete with a true healer (Tassadar v Malf).. with the addition of Varian this seems to get more cloudy.

When you have heroes such Tyrael with decent/not overpowered winrates, why is the choice of design to nerf the overly favored heroics ie, Sanctification and not bring the lagging heroic ie, Judgement, up to par in enticement?

When you have heroes such Tyrael with decent/not overpowered winrates, why is the choice of design to nerf the overly favored heroics ie, Sanctification and not bring the lagging heroic ie, Judgement, up to par in enticement?

In a previous AMA, one of the devs said each hero had an internal tag line used to align the vision of how that hero should feel.

What is Uther's?

It seems like Uther is supposed to be the "tanky" support. I'm not the best player but I've heard pro players say he's best played as a "backline" healer. What's your vision for Uther and do you think he's where he needs to be balance-wise?

How long does it generally take to get from "we notice there is something wrong with that hero" to "here are some changes on the PTR". Does it depend on the popularity of the hero as well as its winrate?

I love the Murk, I love his annoying as hell playstyle. My favourite game within the game is making the opponent waste important cooldowns on my Murky. However, with the addition of recent heroes (Tracer of course, but not only her), Murky has become practically irrelevant. Have you got any changes planned for him? And what exactly is your goal with him? The fantasy, I mean.

Thanks a lot, you guys do an amazing job.

How long does it generally take to get from "we notice there is something wrong with that hero" to "here are some changes on the PTR". Does it depend on the popularity of the hero as well as its winrate?

I love the Murk, I love his annoying as hell playstyle. My favourite game within the game is making the opponent waste important cooldowns on my Murky. However, with the addition of recent heroes (Tracer of course, but not only her), Murky has become practically irrelevant. Have you got any changes planned for him? And what exactly is your goal with him? The fantasy, I mean.

Thanks a lot, you guys do an amazing job.

Thanks for the answer Alex <3

Thanks for the answer Alex <3

With the recent nerf on Thrall's Sundering followed by the buff to Earthquake, are there any plans to make Worldbreaker more enticing compared to the other L20 talents? It feels rather underwhelming for a high CD even though there's the super rare clutch snipe/interrupt moment.

Also , what is the purpose of the change Dehaka 's L1 Enhanced Agility talent as it's effect wears off in 1 second and it forces the choice of taking the talent that increases the trait duration to 3 seconds.

OK, spill the beans. Do you take the meta into account when rolling out balance changes? I'm thinking in particular recent buffs to underused talents like Iron Fists and Earthquake, where it certainly feels like the balance team is improving an already-strong talent because it is undervalued in the common meta. Or another example, the buff-wait-nerf cycle that Zarya experienced, in which the sum result was Zarya at similar strength as her release condition but much more popular because the meta shifted while she was temporarily OP.

If you put Chromie and Cho'Gall on either end of a see-saw, how would the balance look? Chromie being a dragon is probably a bit hefty on the aul scales.

I would love to hear if you think 4 lane maps can be balanced.

Also about maps in general. Are maps made with intent to make certain heroes or talents stronger in it, or just made to fit an idea and balance follows suit?

We've never seen any viable aggression added from Uther's Hammer talents, Auto attack and hammer of justice. Is there any desire within the design team to change that? or is the utility/healing approach the only design goal?

The changes on Diablo are nice; he really feels the lord of terror now. Thanks for that.

One question, what made you leave the optional trait activation out? Would be too op? It feels bad when you die and there is no value in spending one hundred souls for a quick rez. Maybe a countdown in the D icon showing how many skulls is the cost to rez now. With this, the player can synchronize the rez with the team and spend fewer souls at the same time.

The changes on Diablo are nice; he really feels the lord of terror now. Thanks for that.

One question, what made you leave the optional trait activation out? Would be too op? It feels bad when you die and there is no value in spending one hundred souls for a quick rez. Maybe a countdown in the D icon showing how many skulls is the cost to rez now. With this, the player can synchronize the rez with the team and spend fewer souls at the same time.

Are you able to share anything concrete right now over any possible Tassadar or Murky reworks or talent changes? I love both these characters to death and was wondering if you guys had anything you're able to talk about yet.

P.S. Love the game ^{I play it too much}

Are you able to share anything concrete right now over any possible Tassadar or Murky reworks or talent changes? I love both these characters to death and was wondering if you guys had anything you're able to talk about yet.

P.S. Love the game ^{I play it too much}

From Balrog, in our Russian Community:

It looks like players prefer one build for Tassadar: shields and wall. But he is a high Templar and many players associate him with psionic storms and attacks. So my question is: do you plan to make Archon more attractive? If yes, then how?

From Balrog, in our Russian Community:

It looks like players prefer one build for Tassadar: shields and wall. But he is a high Templar and many players associate him with psionic storms and attacks. So my question is: do you plan to make Archon more attractive? If yes, then how?