Hi there! So I'm not on the balance team, but I will try to answer this as best as I can!

So Focused Attack on Zeratul was simply too strong, in terms of how much immediate, un-interact-able burst it gave Zeratul. He'd roll up, blink in, and with a single Basic Attack from Cloak, do too much damage, that you as the opponent had no response too.

So instead we wanted to create a replacement talent that required a little more work for Zeratul to get that bonus, but allowed the other player to react, and thus the Master Warp Blade talent.

Might I also suggest Bakery's earlier post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/3scadx/a_short_piece_on_nerfs_and_game_design/

as he did a pretty good job at explaining similar concepts!

So I shared this at Blizzcon, but it's one of my favorite stories.

One day I was assigned to play three Cho'gall games in a row, and the fourth on some other "one-headed Hero".

And that fourth game loaded up, we spawned in, and I ran to my gate. I pressed my Push-to-Talk button on my voice program, getting ready to talk with my other head, when I realized I didn't have another head!!!!

Drift Compatible - Thanks /u/hobocannibal

that would be our Lead Character Artist, Phill Gonzales!!

i love all those multi-achievement portraits!!

i'll forward this on to our art team and see what they think!

hey thanks for the callout! That would be a bug!

would you mind posting this to here: http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/forum/13268292/

that way our guys can take a look at it!!

sounds cool!!

I would personally be shocked if NO heroes changed as a result of this massive shift to the entire system.

But, we are very confident with these changes (we've been playtesting them internally now for over 3 months), but, as we always do, we will definitely be monitoring and making future adjustments down the road as we continue!! :-D

Hi there!

So this one is nuanced...

In designing Cho'gall, we wanted to make sure we weren't making "two-heads that can do everything!" So for starters, we wanted to limit what Cho and Gall could do, so they weren't a utility box of mechanics that had everything you could want in two heroes.

Further, we didn't want to have a lot of repeat mechanics on the two heads, and we didn't want to use any "Generic" talents on them (so that our balance designers could later on easily adjust a specific talent on each of them if they needed to buff/nerf anything in the future).

And in looking at all of this, we realized that if we tried to jam in a 4th talent on each tier for the heads, it would not be as stellar as having 3 solid talents.

We believe 3 choices at each tier still offers a lot of choice, and different gameplay feelings based on what kind of build you do.

We are, of course, very open to talent feedback on our two-headed friend :-)

I cry.

But really...a part of my soul dies.

Okay, but seriously, the AI takes over. Taking over Gall is easy-peasy, nice-and-breezy, that bot ain't gonna miss no skillshots.

Taking over Cho on the other hand, is a bit less pure happy fun time. Thankfully, your other head can reconnect, and we are hoping you know this person (we do require a party for Quick Match, and in Hero League...well, be careful out there!!). But if he is gone forever, and you do have a bot for your Cho, he does listen to your pings more than other players. You can also have another player Ping your Cho's body to 'leash' him to them, so you're at least being brought to the team fights.

This isn't the best of implementations, however, and we are working on further ways to improve this!

"No, that way!"

Hey guys!

So we didn't really say hello at the beginning, but my name's Kent-Erik "Centaurik" Hagman, one of the Hero designers on the team who worked on Cho'gall's design!

I'm joined here today with John "Johnzee" Hodgson, our lead technical designer! You can also find us elsewhere on the web! John can be found on Twitter @BlizzJohnzee, and I am there as well @Centaurik.

We'll be trying to answer all that we can in the time frame and want to say thank you for coming out to ask us questions!

One of the things we'll be doing with Cho'gall in the future is continuing to polish up Quality of Life (QoL) fixes for our favorite two-headed friend!

We've already had some great suggestions in this thread (such as letting Gall see Cho's Healing Fountain Cooldown), but if you guys have anymore, I'd love to hear them and compile them all for us here internally!

Again, thank you guys so much!!!

i think this is awesome. will fix!

LOL that art!!

Forwarded on to our art team!

I like the way you think!!

that sounds wicked sick! I will forward it on to our UI and Art team :-)

"The queen mustn't know!"

I have no idea ;-)

But really, the high-level players continually surprise us with what they are able to pull off (Murkathur C9 DK G2!), and who knows what will happen with Cho'gall! That being said, we have balanced the character that we believe he is certainly viable.

He requires a radical shift in thought, however, in how you approach the game, and that is what will take a while for everyone to fully wrap their single-head around.

I will say this: Like other counter-pickable Heroes (looking at you Nova, ETC, Chen!) if you want to play Cho'gall competitively, I advise you try to pick him near the end of the draft sequence, to limit your opponent's ability to counterpick against you with an Anub'arak, Leoric, etc.

But not ETC. you know, the other etc...

bah

it could be a possibility! It could also be they're okay!! It's a completely different direction for the game!

The scaling changes have only been live for just over 24 hours for us now, and we will definitely be monitoring all the data as it comes in :-)

and please keep providing the feedback! we're very interested how you all like it as you play with it more!

Oh, there's a ton of ideas there! But it's never a question of "is this TOO crazy?" and all a question of, "but will it actually be fun to play?"

There were a few reasons for this!

One, because it's technically a single unit, they'd either be sharing this mana, or only one head would be using it. (At first, it was "well obviously Gall would use the mana, Cho the health!). But then we realized it would lead to some icky situations where Gall would really want Cho to go get him some mana so he could...well play the game! But Cho would be dead set on getting them to the team fight or something, and we wanted to remove any gameplay-friction points between the two people! We love the fantasy of the two-headed ogre fighting itself, but we wanted to hit that aesthetically and not with gameplay ;-)

Also, it made it a lot easier presentation wise to other players. If both heads had their own mana bar, that's a second extra blue bar under that nameplate, which starts to get hard to parse in the heat of combat, and questionable in its usefulness.

Instead we found we were able to hit all the things we wanted to with just making him cooldown based!

There were a TON!

I went through so many different abilities, as we realized only certain things worked well with the driver/gunner relationship that we have!

The biggest continual re-working was actually the Rune Bomb! We loved the idea of the combo ability, and for a while blowing up Cho's Rune Bomb was done via Gall's Shadowflame.

However, because Gall wants to use Shadowflame on-cooldown, it became really hard to coordinate with your second head "hey i'm throwing the bomb out" "wait! Q is on cooldown" and then they miss the window to blow it up! Or, because the Bomb (for a while) was actually a circular orbiting path, requiring Gall to hit it as it passed by, he'd miss hitting it (sometimes because Cho took him away from it!!)

So eventually we settled on simply making Gall's [E] button be the detonation for the bomb, as that proved to be enough as-is to add to the Gall's player mental-bandwidth (due to the 3/6s cooldowns on Q/W for Gall)!

Also the Heroics!! Gall himself had two completely functional heroics that weren't these two at first! There was a ball he could "leave his body" to control, that would zap people between it and Cho's body, and...shoot there was something else, but I've forgotten! But we put them in, we playtested them both for about a week or and realized they were falling short! :-(. But thankfully, Shadow Bolt Volley and Twisting Nether were already papered up as backup ideas that I was already excited about, and after slotting them in, they both felt super natural (ha!) for Gall!

So this was internally debated for a while! We were asking ourselves if we wanted to "swap the legs" or not between the players.

We were talking about it, and realized there would be some hiccups in doing that. If we let you swap, we would want it to be something that you do for a great gameplay reason, and that the other players will want to know who they are fighting with as you move. But the way the character looks, this one "humanoid" body that has two heads, doesn't do justice to expressing which head would be moving the body. We'd rather do that for a hero whose look would better express which player is "driving"!

But, after trying the fixed-Driver/Gunner loadout, we realized there was a lot of fun in that! One of the pleasant surprises in that is that it still has a long-tail mastery growth for both players, particularly in the Communication department. I feel the best Cho'gall players will be those that are "Drift Compatible" ;-)

I'm actually SUPER interested to see if those really competitive Cho'gall players start to specialize amongst themselves: of the pair, is one always the Cho, the other always the Gall? Probably?! Who knows!!

Uh oh!!! Don't let Johnzee see that Mengsk concept!! John has an unusual fascination with this ruthless dictator, and will stop at nothing to continually suggest to us we add him asap!!

That being said, we definitely are always challenging ourselves, asking what other "whackadoo" Heroes we could add to the game. And while we've done Heroes that don't really die (Murky, Leoric), and Heroes that don't leave the base (Abathur), and now a multi-player controlled Hero (Cho'gall), we don't want to limit ourselves to those methods of doing something crazy!!

We absolutely love reading these fan concepts from you guys, and are glad to see you guys have the same passion for the game we do!

well you can thank our UI/Online Engineers and Designers! They wanted to do as much as possible to hit that two-headed fantasy!