Heroes of the Storm Reddit Q&A reveals Warrior balancing and map plans
Heroes of the Storm developers sat down yesterday for a two-hour Reddit Q&A. There were lots of great responses from them and we’ve pulled out the highlights for you below. You can read the full session on Reddit.
Warrior balancing
Awhile back the meta in North America was tank heavy builds with Diablo and ETC dominating. So much so that both tanks got nerfed and then powerhouse mage Kael’thas was introduced. Paired with Jaina or another mage, the meta has shifted even more away from warriors despite the introduction of solid new heroes like Johanna and Leoric. Blizzard recognizes this and spoke about future Warrior balancing:
Warriors in general are heavily on our radar, especially the first four you mentioned. We have been discussing at length about how we want to tackle them as a whole. Right now we are looking at trying to focus them more towards different roles so teams will have more options to counter-pick heavy mage or heavy auto-attack compositions.
We are also evaluating intended strengths and weaknesses to them and making sure that we aren’t throwing the whole kitchen sink into their core abilities and talents. This is a large work in process and I can assure you that we are keeping a very close eye on the present events while remembering (and trying not to copy) some of our mistakes from the past.
Map talk
When new maps are introduced, like next week’s Infernal Shrines battleground, Blizzard will limit the number of available maps to 6 for a short while. They also consciously choose to delay the introduction of the new map to give it some breathing room from the introduction of a new hero (Kharazim.) They have no intention of permanently retiring any maps, such as the much-loathed Haunted Mines.
They also mentioned they still plan to offer a map editor to the community, but didn’t give a timeline on when that would happen. There was a one-lane Diablo-themed map that was explored, but ultimately shelved.
Kharazim
The devs briefly discussed some other talents for the Diablo support monk that were explored, but didn’t make the final cut:
The biggest one that comes to mind was the idea of bringing in Mystic Ally from D3. We tried doing various allies to replace generic talents, such as a Scouting Ally (instead of Scouting Drone) and a Healing Ally (instead of Healing Ward). And then letting your Dash work on these allies!
This turned out to be a bit too powerful, and also a bit out of fantasy for the Monk, so they ended up not making it!
Positive Feedback
There are plans for players to give each other recognition for positive play instead of just negative ones. No timeline yet on when that will be introduced.
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