Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
The latest Diablo hero; Auriel, was released 6 aug - 2016.
Title hints at it.
Now I get it. Warcraft (whom I am a great fan of and have spent countless hours on, warcraft 1-2-3, wow and its expansion, properly more than 400 hours if not more.)
But even I can get sick of the lack distribution of Blizzard universe. Balance and changing the Meta are certainly the most important for the game. But it's been 7 months now since the last Diablo hero, now we don't know who is next. But Plz let us have a Diablo hero soon.
EDIT: Please stop telling me what to post and not to post, I get it. Some of you see this as whining, fine. But I'm merely making an observation and a plea that we will get it soon. If you Hate thread like this? Then downvote them and move on. Don't tell me to not my express opinion on a video game forum.
KinaBREW
We agree that there are many cool Characters in the Diablo Trilogy and we love them dearly!
BlizzClaudio
I just wanted to shed some light on a few things here as there is a lot of speculation and even misinformation in this thread. We've discussed a lot of this at BlizzCons, AMAs and in interviews, but I'll just clear some things up. :)
When we develop new heroes, we start with the name. Be it Thrall, Tracer or "D3 Angel" we start with an immediate vision of what that character represents for Blizzard and our history, what they could/can represent in Heroes of the Storm, and what we want them to become. This allows us to plan about a year of speculative heroes in advance. I say speculative because we realistically can change direction on anything we haven't actually started on. This allows us to plan out roles, IP, etc, with a general estimate of how many of each type we'll end up with for that year.
When looking at all these things, we don't aim for parity. If we plan 14 or 16 heroes in a year, we don't set out to make 4 supports, 4 warriors, 4 assassins and 4 specialists. This goes the same for IP. In general, you are going to see less Diablo and StarCraft heroes as we've already pulled a lot of the strongest fantasy ones in. Warcraft has the most characters to offer, you are probably going to see more from that IP than any other. Overwatch is a solid source as well since their heroes are similar in design (few core abilities with a heroic) and also have a very strong fantasy (they don't simply copy/paste though, that really undersells the amount of work that goes into translating an Overwatch hero into our game, and the talent/finesse it takes to get it feeling just right).
In terms of kit development, we don't design a kit and try to find a name to fit it. Starting with the fantasy first provides a lot more direction for the hero as we develop it. Sometimes we do start with a mechanic idea and attach it to a hero, but even that isn't something we do often.
Developing heroes for the meta is challenging since we work on heroes 6-8 months in advance. The meta shifts frequently, so we tend to create new heroes to fill gaps we see that exist. We look at their draft implications and what the new hero will have to offer the game, and we try to make that a unique role. Early in development when we were still finding ourselves we tended to make generalized heroes that could do a bit of everything, but we find the game much more interesting and engaging having to choose what you want to draft. We tend to lean on our live designers to help with meta specific issues, and they will update talents and kits of live heroes to help out in that regard. The hero design group and the live design (balance) group are two separate entities that are focused on very different things.
This ended up being longer than I expected...hopefully it has helped. :)