Heroes Of The Storm Stealth Changes
Hi there, ChaosOS again. This week's article, in anticipation of a balance patch, will be a little more exploratory and less of a number crunch. Assuming we get our usual Wednesday balance patch two weeks after a hero release, expect another article Thursday going over those changes. Instead, today I want to talk about Hero Roles.
Specifically, the issues with the current Assassin/Support/Warrior/Specialist and what we can do about it. Furthermore, this analysis will be useful in future articles when I go through each hero role and do intra-role comparisons.As a side note, this article was written before the current reddit post talking about this exact issue , but I felt it would be best to post this blog as a long-form response to the issues cited in the thread.As a basis of this article I created the following spreadsheet to compare base stats, a helpful tool when trying to decide how to categorize certain heroes:Edits: TyposThe System as it StandsHeroes of the Storm currently has 68 heroes. Of those heroes, 27 are assassins, 11 are supports, 17 are warriors, 12 are specialists, and 1 is Varian (Multiclass). (A hero is defined as an option to select in the hero selection screen, so The Lost Vikings are 1 hero and Cho'Gall is 2) This system has clear flaws, as evidenced by the odd nuances of the Quick Match matchmaking system (For those not in the know, there are many rules to QM matchmaking, such as no 1 vs 0 healer matchups, 1 vs 0 tank matchups, or 1 vs 0 'sustain' matchups.
This is not a comprehensive listing of the QM rules. Each of these rules can be broken if necessary to minimize wait times, and any 5-stack is automatically treated as having all roles filled).Assassins are an overly broad category, as noted by the Blizzard response to our string of 'Warcraft Assassins' at the start of the year. All assassins do damage, but the variability with which they do it is astonishing. While Malthael sustains in the frontlines and does his damage over time, Chromie is a long range beam sniper. The original launch of technical alpha only included 7 assassins, none of them mages, so it can be understood that originally it made sense to group all damage dealing heroes. Now, due to the huge diversity in the role, it makes more sense to break it up.
Heroes Of The Storm Stealth Changes Youtube
Heroes of the Storm Devs on Hanzo, Alexstrasza, Stealth, and more from BlizzCon 2017. There are two new characters coming to Heroes of the Storm, but there are also some key changes coming to the.
So our first goal is to break up the assassin role into its sub-categories.Supports have a similar issue, with the distinction between solo supports and not-solo supports. Tassadar and Tyrande are not 'real healers', which is represented by the QM 'Sustain' category that also contains Abathur, Zarya, and Medivh. Thus, the second goal is to separate primary supports from off supports.Warriors have a similar issue as Supports with some heroes being 'Main Tanks' and others 'Bruisers'. Heroes like Sonya simply lack the survivability necessary to be the primary initiator until they pick up late game talents.
This is again reinforced by QM rules, which only attempts to match tanks to other tanks, but makes no such attempts regarding bruisers. The third goal is to separate main tanks from off tanksSpecialists suffer misconceptions about their function. The original Tech Alpha had Abathur, Gazlowe, Sgt Hammer, and Nazeebo in the category. Gazlowe and Nazeebo were defined as specialists in part by a level 1 talent they had called 'Demolitionist', which increased their basic attack damage against buildings by 10% and made their attacks drain ammo. (A modified version of this talent still exists on The Lost Vikings with Erik's 'It's a Sabotage!' ). As the game has evolved the specialist category has become a catch-all for heroes that don't quite fit the game's usual categorizations.
Since beta we've had a total of 3 specialists: Xul, Medivh, and Probius. Xul and Probius fit the model of Summon-heavy heroes a la Zagara or Azmodan, while Medivh was Blizzard admitting that heroes that cannot solo heal should not be in the support category. Star wars battlefront download completo pc.
The current specialist pool consists of a few categories of heroes: Summoners (Azmodan, Gazlowe, Nazeebo, Probius, Xul, Zagara), Siege heroes (Sgt. Hammer, Sylvanas), Oddities (Abathur, Murky, The Lost Vikings), and Medivh. A better role system would break up these heroes into categories that better described how the hero functioned rather than simply mashing together all these heroes. Our fourth goal is to split specialists into the role they actually provide, rather than grouping all the summoners together.Finally, Varian is his own problem child as the sole existing Multiclass hero, and all the Quickmatch trouble that has brought along with it.
Varian as the only tank in a game is a frustrating experience, while having a Varian that needs to go tank instead go Fury or Arms is frustrating in its own unique way. Oh, and randomly having an entire category in the statistics to himself is rather odd. There isn't as concrete a goal here except to try and handle multiclass better than exists.TL;DR The current system sucks and needs to change.Blizzard's attempt at a fixFor those that didn't know, if you mouse over a hero during hero select it will provide a short description that labels the hero and explains what they do in a short sentence. These descriptions are a few months fresh and most players are completely unaware of them, but they are some attempt at new and better descriptors of heroes and their roles. The capitalized roles provided in the descriptors are as follows:Assassin (Includes heroes from Alarak to Valla)Bruiser (Thrall, Ragnaros, plus non-tank warriors)MageHealerSupport (Tyrande, Medivh, Tassadar)Tank (Anub'arak, Arthas, Diablo, ETC, Johanna, Muradin, Stitches, Tyrael, Varian)Summoner'Physical Damage dealer' - Odd category that is the only role descriptor for Sgt. Hammer, while prepended to Raynor and Zul'jin who are 'Physical Damage Assassins'. I will not officially count this as a role due to the dissimilarity in usage, but it is odd that it is capitalized like all of the other roles.As a side note, it would be really nice if these were searchable terms in the hero search bar.
But more searchability later. Oh, and the hover text should also include a hero's title, as otherwise the only place to see a hero's title is in the collection.As it stands, I still see some issues with this categorization. Assassin is still too broad and includes both burst mages, for example Alarak, and sustained physical damage dealers, for example Raynor. Multiple heroes are oddly categorized, such as Sylvanas who has the Assassin descriptor, while Sgt. Hammer has no descriptor.
Malthael has higher base HP, more self-healing, and more damage mitigation (through armor talents) than Thrall. However, Malthael is listed as an Assassin, while Thrall is a Bruiser. Nazeebo has walls and Gargantuan but is not a summoner. Nova is a Mage rather than an Assassin like Alarak and Kerrigan.
These roles are not only inconsistently applied, as demonstrated, but also do not address the above goals. Summoners are still clustered together even though they use their summons very differently, while Assassins are too broad of a category.
Your system is better than what we got:P I mean no system will ever be perfect, but people like to put things in boxes, even if you have to find a box for Varian, Murky, Cho'gall, Abathur, D.va, and TLV despite how incredibly different they are from anything else in the game.Personally I think Multiclass was a huge mistake and Varian just needs to be a Warrior / Tank unless they remove his burst-negation on a tiny timer. He shuts down burst heroes entirely regardless of his 'class' choice, it is just a choice of burst dmg vs. CC really at 10.
As a GM spec main this patch is just horrible to me. There aren't just one type of specialist, there's tons of different spec styles and this patch just completely fucked it over.Xul isnt a particularly good siege hero, he excels at pushing lanes (two very important distinctions), some other specialists focus on high building damage, etc.Either they have changes for specs ready or haven't thought this through.(Or they hate splitpushing and just want the game to remain a fun casual 5v5 teamfight game).