Heroes of the Storm Q&A discusses upcoming changes and more

There’s been a ton of controversy surrounding recent changes to Heroes of the Storm. Between stealth changes, healing nerfs, and upcoming lane and structure changes, there’s a lot to digest. Between all the changes, there are a lot of questions swirling around the community. The developer team took to Reddit for a Q&A to discuss these changes in depth.

A running theme through the questions was a request for information regarding heroes whose power will likely be affected by the changes to laning. To refresh your memory, in an upcoming patch towers will now have unlimited ammo. In addition, after a few seconds, regeneration globes will swap to neutral before despawning. Both changes will affect certain heroes more disproportionately than others. Laning changes may affect Heroes with abilities used primarily for soaking ammo like Zagara. Heroes with a talent revolving around picking up globes will be affected by the despawning.

Blizzard responded to many of these queries with similar feedback. They didn’t want to make sweeping hero balance changes at the same time as the laning changes. This is because although they have some theories about how things will play out, sometimes the complete opposite happens in practice. They’ll tune later as needed.

Reddit asked the team the difference between designing the bizarre niche heroes that are sort of the signature of Heroes of the Storm like Murky or The Lost Vikings, as opposed to heroes which are able to be used to fill gaps in more general situations, like Valla or Raynor. They discussed the intricacies of designing each, and promised they aren’t ignoring the off-the-wall action. The interesting thing they noted is, if one generalist is the slightest, tiniest bit more strong than the others, suddenly that hero is all over the meta while all the other generalists fall off. Why pick the slightly less strong hero when they’re all interchangeable?

The team also noted that they’re also designing behind the scenes stuff, like a new method of reworking heroes which will hopefully lead to getting to each hero more quickly. We’re pretty excited to see what they come up with next!