Hey Vantharion! There are a ton of really great questions here, I'll try to get to them all.

1. There are a lot of things that can help getting a job on a dev team: Working in the computer/console industry (even non-dev jobs). Making creative stuff on your own, like mobile or board games. Becoming involved in the gaming scene, either competitively (eSports/casting/websites/streaming) or providing support (tool creators, web site developers, written content creators. Any work experience that involves collaborating with lots of people, making deadlines, and being organized.

2. We ask ourselves when the right time to add Talents to a baseline Ability is all the time. Typically, we only do it when we view it as absolutely necessary to balance out pick and win rates on a Talent tier. Our Hero Designers create base kits a certain way on purpose, and continuing to introduce more and more mechanics can start to overly complicate what the core design of an Ability is. We usually ask ourselves: Does this Talent now define the Hero? Is it why they brought to a team? Is it healthy for the game? Can we create viable alternatives at the same tier that are just as compelling, without trying to do the same thing 4 different ways or offering a giant range of tools that the Hero shouldn't have in the large scheme of things? Is cutting the Talent a viable option? Every situation is different, but I'll just reiterate for u/Centaurik's sake that we don't do it lightly!

3. Yes, we absolutely consider wave clear when both designing and making tuning changes to a Hero. We didn't want Heroes like Medivh and Chromie to have lots of wave clear, so when we buffed them we made sure that they didn't gain any. It would be an easy way to make a lot of Heroes more viable, but after a while every Hero in the game would have tons of wave clear. Which would mean that any Hero that didn't (either live or future) would be non-viable. We also think that any Hero with wave clear should feel special, and to do that we can't give it to everyone. I think that our Hero designers could answer the question of a Hero that doesn't do any damage to Minions better than I could, but I think it could be done! You'd just have to compensate them in other ways, and be sure that they have active things to do.

4. I don't know that adding "piano Li Li" options really fits what we want from that Hero. We're okay with 1 or 2 options so that someone who loves Li Li and has played a ton of games on her has the ability to begin to opt-in to more complexity, but we view her as one of the easier Heroes to play that doesn't need to have the same skill-cap as others.

5. We like to use the "X attacks" mechanics occasionally, because it puts some Heroes that have similar attack speed but very different damage amounts on the same footing. For instance, now Brightwing and Raynor can kill a chest in about the same time. We're okay with things like Treasure Chests dying more quickly to people like Tychus, as long as it doesn't break the game (and killing a Treasure Chest a few seconds faster than other Heroes doesn't break the game).

6. Every mage in our game should have downsides, especially when compared to our Basic Attackers. We think we have room to improve here, both in terms of improving Basic Attackers and providing more obvious weaknesses to our mages. We've also noted that the game has more Basic Attack counters than Ability Damage counters, and this is making things worse.

7. We think the occasional takedown mechanic is okay for the health of the game. We like it when the players that really want to chase individual skill have a few Heroes that they can gravitate towards.

8. Thanks, we like them too!

9. Maybe we could make Core replacment Heroes? They sound cool don't they? And we've balanced crazier things in the game, like Cho'gall or Abathur. There are definitely a ton of challenges there, but I'd there's potential there.

10. Some of the 20s are really fun, but those break the rules :) I've always really enjoy Chromie's Past and Future Me talent, but I'm not sure that you can really expand that onto a lot of other Heroes.

11. Glad you're enjoying it! The whole team loves those Heroes too, and we hope that we can continue to provide a wide range of choices in terms of top tier Supports!

Thanks! I tried my best to answer it all, but there was a lot here!

Hey TKBB,

I can only speak to your question about Talent reworks as a member of the Balance team.

The larger Talent reworks like Rehgar, Illidan, or Tychus can take anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks, occasionally slipping beyond that.

• Usually a week is dedicated to determining what we want to accomplish with the Talent rework, and papering out rough ideas and getting feedback.
• After that, it takes 1-4 days to get all the changes implemented, depending on complexity.
• After a game or two of testing the changes in an AI game and ensuring our initial numbers weren't way off, we playtest the Hero with all the other Designers.
• We continue doing tuning and making changes to Talents for a few weeks after that.

Hey Sulicius!

1. I think collectively as a team, we've been surprised a few times by Hero performance. We've learned a lot over the last few years, and sometimes it doesn't seem like 5-10% Health will do a lot for a Hero that doesn't need it, but it can be dramatic. There's an interesting loop effect of Hero win rates where small buffs can make players that are hardcore and "playing to win" more likely to pick a Hero, therefore further increasing the win rate.

2. Internally, everyone felt like Rehgar after his Talent rework was fun and strong, but not nearly as overpowered as he turned out to be. We were also pretty surprised by Tychus' rework and how low his win rate was, as he felt pretty scary in all of our playtesting.

3. Lt. Morales initially came out pretty low, and we were thinking that we were going to have to make some meaningful adjustments to the way her healing worked. We decided to make a few Health adjustments and see where she landed, and she trended up nicely to where she is today!

We're still actively having conversations about supports internally. I don't have any conclusions, but I can say that we're considering all the following when talking about any future changes:

• A lot of supporting and healing Abilities are "low skill cap", in that they are point and click instant cast.
• A lot healing Abilities are a huge part of the "power pie" of a support.
• Some Supports need to stay easy , because we want a variety of options among Supports.
• A lot of people really enjoy playing Supports right now, even though some don't.
• Creating Supports without the Ability to heal is problematic, because Supports that can heal exist. In fact Medivh was a considered a Support for a long while internally, but every playtest it felt like the lack of true healing make him feel inferior. Rather than adjust his kit to include healing, we decided to embrace the fact that he was a Support-style specialist.
• Any changes to healing number values (up, down, sideways or otherwise) will likely require a lot of other changes to the game, and might really change the way things feel.
• Some players are playing Supports that otherwise wouldn't want to, due to the Daily Quest system.

That's not everything, but a lot of it. We don't have any immediate changes coming, but our goal is to make playing a support an enjoyable long-term experience.

We think that Falstad is overall too strong right now, in both eSports and Hero League. He's offering a lot of damage, utility, and map presence that makes him virtually always a good pick. We have some plans coming really soon to reduce the damage of Hammer Gains, and hopefully make a few more viable builds.

That's a great question.

We're always trying to improve the pick rates of the lesser Heroics. Specifically for Warriors, right now we want better diversity on Dehaka, Diablo, E.T.C., Johanna, and Muradin. We haven't detailed any specific plans to fix these issues, so I can't really offer any news right now, but we're well aware.

We've seen mixed success on the viability of non-healing Heroics on Support, no doubt. We have a few successes on Heroes like Kharazim and Tyrande, but the others see a low pick rate (even though the win rates are very competitive on a few). We think that offering a non-healing Heroic can work, as long as there are very clear situations in which you should take it (like Seven-Sided Strike). We still have room to improve here!

hahahaha yea he meant Gathering Storm, which internally was called "hammer gains" for a while (before we reused the name for the lifesteal talent)