Heroes of the Storm Forums

Hey there folks, HeroesFire was repping hard at BlizzCon 2014, and we even got a few minutes alone with one of the big Heroes of the Storm developers, Alan Dabiri. Since I asked for your questions, we asked as many as we could, and we hope you enjoy some of the answers peering into the future of this upcoming brawler!

People really want to know if Abathur will get a second ultimate, and how that will change his gameplay?

• He is absolutely getting a second ultimate in the future. Nothing specific that I can share yet, but they're working on it. I haven't played it yet either!

Right now, the current Heroic helps make Abathur a top pick in the NA meta, and he was played in almost every match in the exhibition/semi-finals games on November 7th 2014. A lot of his strength comes from the double soak and pushing power, coupled with his Ultimate Evolution, and the clone can give rise to some ridiculous combinations. In terms of fine tuning the current heroic, are there any plans?

• We're always open to any kind of balance changes; I think we want to watch what people are playing and see how they use it, just like in the exhibition games. I think there is always the opportunity to tune it, and I'm not sure about any specific plans to change the Heroic, but we're going to keep an eye on it. We're listening and we're watching.

You created Hot Shots for Nova, and here at BlizzCon, we've noticed Hot Shots got nerfed. What was the design goal for Nova and how she chooses to use Hot Shots?

• Nova specifically we wanted her to feel different. The idea was to help create the effect of an explosive burst sniper. Maybe that might of been a tad overdone, but the feedback we've gotten is that she now feels very cool to play. Now its just the matter of dialing it to find the sweet spot. It also has a trade-off; if she doesn't take down her target, then she's vulnerable to counter attacks.
  
  Part of it is also that the game is constantly changing. People that aren't familiar with it may see the cloaking shimmer, and get destroyed by the burst. But in Ranked games, if someone takes a Nova, you can actually start countering that with Clairvoyance or Tassadar's Oracle. We want there to be options in order to counter Heroes for sure.

In the upcoming draft, players will know the map ahead of time. Will there be a map pick and ban system?

• Not initially. Just like in StarCraft, you will be assigned a map to play against your opponents on. StarCraft has a map preference system, however, that will allow you to state what maps you like and which ones you don't. Right now, we just don't have enough maps to make that effective, so initially we're not planning to add that. If we see a need in the future, we'll address it.

We saw some resistance in the Heroes Q&A about the lack of hero bans in draft, and as we saw in the show matches, Tassadar was first pick in every match. Blizzard is OK with this?

• We'll see how it goes. If it turns out we need them, we can definitely add them.

Is there any thoughts to bringing map choices before picks into the normal Versus play?

• I think that will probably stay the same way. That one is a little more difficult because we haven't actually matched players up yet on Hero selection, so probably that will stay the same. The idea of those modes is that its less competitive, and supposed to be more casual and fun. Get into a game quickly and just enjoy. If you want to know your teammates, enemies and maps, then queue into Ranked.

Our understanding is that Hero League will continue this "fill in the blank" system, where teams can queue with a group of one to five players. Can you still queue as five man outside of Team League?

• In Hero League you can go anywhere from one to five, and its meant to be more flexible, more open. A 5-man should queue into a 5-man, while still taking into account MMR, in order to find opponents of similar level. It will always prioritize similarly sized parties.

You talked about a skill that persists from season to season, and a ranking that resets season to season. Will ranks be reset back to the lowest level every reset? Are there any plans for win-streak bonuses?

• Depending on how you did in the season, we will give you some amount of boost on reset so that your climb isn't necessarily as far. In terms of what you go back to, we're still fine tuning that and looking at the math. This means that you'll retain a portion of your built up skill level in order to continue playing with players that also kept theirs. It's very influenced by Hearthstone, but we're not planning on win streak bonuses.

For Ranked and Talent Gating, are you going to allow Heroes that are Talent Gated to be played in ranked?

• Right now, and this may not make it into the first iteration of Ranked, we want you to have ten heroes owned. We are discussing that they MUST be at least Hero level 4. You MUST own them, and the Free to Play rotation does not count towards that number. There has to be some expectation that you've played these Heroes before. We want the Ranked experience to be more competitive, and not just jumping in with just any Hero. Ultimately we're still discussing all this.
  
  Part of this is the tutorial options in the beginning of account creation. Right now, no matter what button you hit, it will bring up the tutorials. But we're working on implementing these choices. If you say you're a Master at the game, we're going to cut out some of the tutorials. As well, your skill rating will be adjusted slightly depending on what you select. If you tell us you're new at this game, we'll match you up with newer players, and if you tell us you're really experienced, we'll match you up with some more veteran players.
  
  Here's the thing though: no matter what you choose the system will catch on really quickly. It's really just to help out newer players and help ease them into the game.

In future custom games, will there be implementations of fun modes, like duplicate heroes on a same team, or All Random All Mid?

• Internally, we have the ability to do some of that already. We'd love to expose those kind of options in Custom Games in order to allow you to tweak the rules for a different type of game. This game is built on the StarCraft 2 engine, and it has a very powerful map editor. We want to release this later on and see what kind of maps the community starts making.

Content creators have been asking for additional options to assist in movie making for a while now, like the ability to remove the User Interface or shrink it. Would these kind of options come with the map editor?

• Already the StarCraft 2 engine has a good amount of support for these requests - we have this entire cut-scene editor already built in. You can create very real movies using the map editor for future Machinima, and we're excited to see some of the creations later on.

The community is frustrated with the reconnect system as it currently stands. Does Blizzard have any plans to address this?

• The way reconnect works today was a first pass, a quick system. It's not ideal whatsoever, especially as the game goes longer and longer. We are working on a new version right now, and the idea of the change is that we don't have to sync up from the start on reconnect. We're implementing save states that will periodically update as the game progresses, so that players that need to reconnect should be able to latch onto the latest save state and rebuild from there.

Right now, how does Blizzard feel about the current gold gain?

• Technical Alpha has been great for the analysis of the data, and we feel good about where we are. We feel there are a lot of opportunities for you to earn gold and purchase your Heroes. There is player leveling, the daily quests, the 500 gold built into every hero. Since we're still in Alpha, we can definitely make adjustments, but so far, we feel that you can unlock a decent amount of stuff already. You should be able to earn enough gold to unlock ten Heroes by level 40 for Team League.

What are Blizzard's thoughts on Resurgence of the Storm in its current state?

• I've overheard the designers talk about some cases where that talent is not performing as intended. I, unfortunately, don't have any specifics about any changes coming up, but when entire teams take Resurgence, it has some unintended consequence. Anything can change in this game, and Resurgence is no different.

Some of the thoughts was to increase the cooldown or something similar, and since game lengths can easily be under 20 minutes, an extra 60 seconds on a timer could make or break that talent choice.

• Right, and if there's a solid trade-off between taking Resurgence or not, you could be losing out on something else that could turn the team fights in your favor. Again, no specifics, but we're evaluating options.

Is Blizzard concerned about having a couple of distinct talent builds like Multishot Valla, or are you more concerned about having viable options every talent tier?

• The intention is a bit of both. The whole point of talents is options. You're supposed to read the game, read the enemies, and choose accordingly. Maybe you need a bit more damage, maybe a bit more healing. The point of talents is to help fundamentally change how you play your hero, and give you a lot of options for a lot of different builds. I think we've done that really well on some Heroes, while others maybe not so much. We do have some upcoming plans to improve talents for some Heroes, and we do have a desire to have several viable builds per Hero.

So the idea behind some of these changes is to combat static builds?

• We want to try to, but we've seen this before. In StarCraft 2, in a high level game, if someone does something new, and it works out well, then you'll start seeing it more and more on ladder. In these games it's a very big "Follow the Leader" mentality. Sometimes it takes someone to show that there's others viable builds, and once you learn them, you can start being more competitive with it. If we don't see that for some heroes, then we'll keep improving them.

Right now for maps , we have objectives and interaction mechanics of just collection. In the future, could we see more specialized interaction mechanics? For example, in Diablo 3, you may find a lever that deploys a bridge, or raises a gate. Could we see a map in the future with additional mechanics past that of the objective?

• Absolutely. We wanted to start out a bit different, as we're aiming to be different from other games in this genre, but we didn't want to go crazy yet. That's what so great about this battleground concept, and we can literally do anything we want. As long as its fun, we're cool with it. I think you're going to see us continue to explore the boundaries of what we can do in future maps.

Big thanks again to Alan Dabiri for his time, you guys for your questions, and we hope to see some exciting developments in Heroes of the Storm! We'll see you guys online and in the Nexus!

"You should be able to earn enough gold to unlock ten Heroes by level 40 for Team League."

Sorry, but...where are they getting their numbers?

Maybe they expect you to only play when you have Daily Quests to and doing the math off that...but I mean, you could grind to 40 and only have some 10-15K gold, and there aren't 10 2,000 Gold heroes.

Good interview though!

Probably using soem kind of average numbers of games played per day, wins and losses, there is also the 500 gold bonus on reaching level 5 of each hero, dailies and player level unlocks.

Huh, I'll have to wait and see. I honestly don't play as much as I'd like due to stuff like really bad internet connection, so I haven't even hit 40 yet.

I play on average like...5 games per day, which gives me a pretty large Games:Gold ratio since I'm completing daily quests and pretty much not playing outside of that.

So far I'm level 34 with ~20K gold earned. I mean, sure, you could buy like 6 Heroes with that...or you could buy 2. I don't know, maybe I just haven't done the grind for new Champions/Runes in League of Legends for too long and I forget how excruciating the grind is.

Gotta make money though, welcome to the real world. =P

Guy said "you should be able", not "you will have enough gold for sure". I did some math: right now there's 31 heroes available, there probably will be more available at game launch when ranked games really start, so that's 15K gold for leveling them to 5. Then there's the rewards for leveling yourself, that's another 5K gold, so that alone is 20K gold probably before you reach level 15 (I'm assuming quite a bit of luck here, since you could reach lvl 40 and not see all heroes available in the free rotation slot, but you'll see at least about 75%).
Dailies average about 400 gold per day (there are some that net you 800 gold but those are not frequent) if you take into account the 60 to 100 gold you win just by playing those games. I'm level 37 right now, and I've raked up 32K gold already, of which 12K are from leveling heroes and myself, the rest is dailies and completed games rewards.
Now, regarding heroes prices: there are currently four at 2K (ETC, Muradin, Valla and Raynor), and seven at 4K each (Tychus, Gazlowe, Li Li, etc), that's a total of 30K worth to buy ten heroes. I'd say it's perfectly doable, though you should commit to do the dailies and level many of the free to play to 5, it's definitely not something you go about and say "gonna play the weekends and just these couple of heroes I like and be done with it".

Yup is about right, for those ten heroes you need to buy cheaper heroes a bit though but as it stands many 2k and 4k heroes are quite good so that isn't a big deal. You can definately get all for one class with a few others that are close to that close (like tassadar being more of an assassin then support for example).
Daily quests seem to average closer to 300 gold though, i think i had about 50/50 on 200 gold 'play 2 of this universe' quests and 300 gold 'play 3 x heroes' quests. About 1 in 10 I think i got some more lucrative one like win 3 matches that was worth 600-700.

Suppose you level to 40 in 5 weeks. Probably takes about 400 games assuming you ally with friends like a third of them. That will give you about 10k. You get about 10k from daily quests as well in that time. Plus you'll be having 5k from leveling yourself and about 13k from heroes to lvl 5 since you'll probably have done like 80% from free rotation. Totals about 38k and with heroes averaging about 6k that's 6 heroes but you'll probabably pick up a few more cheap ones.

A bit of a lengthier grind that i'd like especially if 4 more new heroes come soon which undoubtedly will be 10k. With about 30 euros in the bundles on discount it isn't too hard to have 75% of the heroes and all the ones you like from the current roster by lvl 40 though which is fine I think.
The bundles could be a little better though, like being cheaper if you already have certain heroes etc.

Now I recommend just getting the 2 cheap bundles and using that plus weekly rotations to play. Then only buy a cheap hero here and there you like early and save the rest to get heroes that didn't show in the rotation/you want or those to finish off a certain style you wish to play in your team.

Thanks for the post. My only problem with this is that means I'll be playing like...15 games in a week. Because there's absolutely 0 incentive to play beyond that.

I suppose when Ranked comes out there will be incentive so maybe I'm arguing nothing. Just a bit irked right now that after playing 2 games I'm like "Welp...guess I better do something else now".

Also, getting Heroes to lv 5 as a primary means of gaining gold is a problem for me as well. I mean, once you get them there and get 10 Heroes, then a new Hero comes out that you want, it'll take you a month of daily quests (Probably exaggeration, but you get my point) to get it. So you plateau really hard as the only stable source of income is from Dailies.

It's not a huge issue for me though, I kinda feel sorry for all those players who will have to start their grind at Jan 13th instead of having all the time like I did.