Thanks for the report, I let QA know.

Hello fellow Heroes!

The Heroes Design team has been hard at work on our next seasonal content, including deciding what to do with the Call for Help Nexus Anomaly. We’re looking for feedback, and we wanted to take the time to give you some heavy insight into our thoughts, so strap yourselves in, this is going to be a doozy!

Firstly, we have already decided that we like what the changes to the Kings Core have brought to our game, and we want to keep those. We believe they give our maps a unique flavor and they add some cool moments to games. This article will be focused solely on the more controversial changes that were made to Towers, Forts, and Keeps in regards to how they interact with enemy Heroes. We think a good place to start is with what our goals were when we changed the Tower Aggro system.

We had two major goals with the system:

1. We wanted players to feel like their Towers were “smart” about how they tried to protect members of their team. We have heard lots of feedback over ...

I’m not an engineer, but I can take a crack at this. The forced 50% win rate discussion is weird and complicated because it’s both true and not true at the same time, and people often inject their own biases very heavily on games to support what they think is happening to them, usually to assign blame for a loss to an external source (in this case the matchmaker) because it’s an easy thing to do (the matchmaker can’t defend itself after all!). First, let’s discuss what forced 50% isn’t.

Forced 50% isn’t the matchmaker putting potatoes on your team because you had a win streak. Frankly it’s hard enough just to find good games that there’s no way we would program such a thing, and there is no incentive for us to. We are incentivized to find matches of equally skilled players in our games because they are the most fun overall, which is what the matchmaker always tries to do.

The way it does this is by assigning a skill level to every player as they play our game called MMR. This skil...

I read the thread title and rolled my eyes.

Once I opened the thread I laughed and then rolled them a second time.

Well played my friend.

Just took a look at Ragnaros’s talent stats to see what’s going on. To be honest, his Level 1 talents are as close to perfectly balanced as you can get when looking at the whole game, and they get a bit worse, but still great for Q build, when you get to high level (this is extremely common, so I wouldn’t read too much into it since high level players tend to be much pickier about what they will take when it comes to talents).

Across the whole game, the pick rates look like this:

1. Engulfing Flame: - 34.6%
2. Sulfuras Hungers - 33.9%
3. Shifting Meteor - 31.4%

High Level Storm League:

1. Engulfing Flame - 46.6%
2. Sulfuras Hungers - 40.8%
3. Shifting Meteor - 12.5%

Also the win rates of the talents aren’t anything to write home about, they’re all pretty similar.

I have a few simple examples of things that deter me from taking it. I don’t like taking Elune’s Chosen when:

1. The enemy team has a lot of Blinds (usually not enough of a deterrent by itself)
2. The enemy team has a threatening enough front line that I’m not confident I’m going to get Basic Attacks in when I need to heal my allies
3. I’m not on a map where the objective is near things that I can Basic Attack to get value from non-Heroes

There are a few heroes that walk the line between Tank and Bruiser and can act as one or the other in a pinch, and I think Imperius can walk this line when necessary.

However, I don’t think he’s classified incorrectly. Tanks have to check a number of boxes in order to be effective in their role, and Imperius doesn’t check some that are fairly important. Some of those are:

1. Reliability and consistency of CC
2. Ability to survive being focused by the enemy team

Back in the day we also originally intended for Dehaka to be a main tank, and he had a similar issue in that he could reliably take a lot of damage, but his ability to CC was primarily tied to his Drag ability which wasn’t consistent enough to have him be a main tank due to its range, wind-up, and ability to only CC 1 target. I think Imperius falls into a similar category due to the nature of how Celestial Charge works. It’s not quite reliable enough to deter enemies from diving his team in most situations since it has a bit of ...

Thanks for the feedback!

What I like about the design of Protector of Aiur vs. Seasoned Marksman is that Protector of Aiur motivates Artanis to do more of what his kit tells him to do, which is to brawl with enemy Heroes. His main source of mitigation is from fighting things, which is what this talent is telling him to do as much as possible. Seasoned Marksman was a bit more blurred in this motivation because it told Artnias to go push lanes in order to gain power, which conflicted a bit with the rest of his kit. Also, we felt that the Attack Speed portion of the Seasoned Marksman talent was a bit redundant since he has a couple other ways to get that bonus in other talents. Removing it allows us to focus his Level 1 talent better and to let the other talents shine more that allow him to gain that buff.

Also as a side note, it’s fairly unlikely we’ll add Healing to Artanis. In general, consistently generated shields or Armor mitigation + healing is an incredibly strong combination...

Are you disrespecting the changes to Anduin?

Growing up The Legend of Zelda 2 was one of my favorite games. My brothers and I got to the final palace multiple times on different save files (because that game for whatever reason randomly lost its save data pretty often), but we could never beat the game because we would get lost and just couldn’t find our way to the final boss.

It wasn’t until many years later that we finally found the right route and beat the game.

Generally what people already said in the thread is the most useful advice - pick heroes that have multiple forms of CC that interrupt his Dark Conversion. The idea is that you can use one of your CC’s to still engage and do your job, and save the secondary one specifically for Dark Conversion. Also you’ll have a good tell of when he wants to use it since he will always want to when he’s at low Health, so you usually have a generous window to look for it if you constantly keep it in mind.

Some heroes that are great to interrupt it:

ETC - his Q and W are fast and easily able to knock him out of his channel

Johanna - Her W and Blessed Shield can be used for an interrupt. Her trait can also be used to try to survive if he gets the ult off on her. This is a little more risky/takes more skill as her W is the main form of an interrupt so you have to pre-emptively cast it as he’s getting low.

Diablo - He has his Q and E to interrupt it quickly. He also has various talents that can reduce...

Sonya is a strong response to Xul.

A lot of her damage comes from her Abilities, so she is resistant to his W attack speed Slow compared to other Heroes.

She has an early game talent that negates his Root.

Whirlwind’s healing greatly benefits from having more targets, so his skeletons help her in teamfights.

My worst was a 16 game loss streak in Hero League at the beginning of a new season. I think I was at a 32% win rate over ~50 games. Was rough, but over more games things evened out.

I’m not going to give away everything, but I can answer this question.

We get raw data on basically everything that’s happening in the game across all modes based on win/pick rate, as well as things like damage dealt/taken etc.

We are able to parse through this data to look at it through many lenses. This is where raw statistics become less useful and the skill and experience of a designer come into play more so that we can draw meaningful conclusions from the data, and decide what changes we want to make based on the results.

To get a full picture of what’s going on in the game, for example, I can and do look at things like win/loss data that’s filtered by different leagues and game modes. I can also see hero pick and ban popularity with this kind of granularity, which lets me see, for example, what the meta is looking like in the Bronze - Silver range as well as the Diamond - GM range.

While incredibly useful, I want to emphasize that it’s not just the raw data that’s important, bu...

Thanks for taking the time to type this.

I think your premise makes sense. As for your solution, adding a seperate cooldown reduction mechanic on top of the increasing duration mechanic feels like a bit much in regards to the talent having too much stuff going on, I think we can just get away with just lowering the cooldown to get the same effect. We could also just add cooldown reduction to the existing mechanic, so you want to hit people to get both benefits.

I made a note to think on it. Thanks for the post!

There are a lot of good ones. When you’re picking Diablo as a tank your initial best strategy is to kill one enemy very quickly when they’re out of position. Therefore, heroes who bring follow-up CC to his initial burst of offensive power are generally the best.

Healers that i’m happy to see when i’m Diablo are:

1. Tyrande - There’s a reason this is a tried and true combo. Tyrande provides both follow-up CC and vulnerability on the target he charges. The combo does take coordination to pull off though, so unless you’re on the same page this won’t work well.
2. Uther
3. Malfurion
4. Deckard (his CC is a little slow though so it’s best to have someone else who can more reliably follow up Diablo’s Stun)
5. Anduin

Really anyone who has reliable CC is optimal. You can get away with soft CC like Stukov, or other useful debuffs like Ana’s Grenade as well, but it’s not as easy to pull off as simply CC-chaining Diablo’s target and killing them (these heroes are perfectly fine if someone else on your tea...

Johanna is a generally powerful tank and is more meta right now, so you’re good picking her pretty much any time. She does shine more on maps where waveclear is more powerful. She’s particularly valuable on maps with two close lanes that consistently need to be cleared, like Tomb of the Spider Queen and Dragon Shire.

Diablo has traditionally been more powerful on certain maps. He can absolutely dominate games on maps where teams fight in small corridors such as Cursed Hollow, Infernal Shrines, and Towers of Doom.

Everything being equal, Johanna is the safer pick more often, but Diablo can completely win the game for you, particularly if you are more skilled than your opponents and are reliably taking advantage of their mistakes in positioning.

Very cool!

I do think it would be neat for some more analysis on your end of what this data means. You did a little with Ragnaros and Xul, but I’m sure there are more cool, interesting gems you can find in there.

In any case, I think it’s awesome that you took the time to get this data.

Thanks for the find. Will fix!

Hey Calcaz!

We get enough data, even with a massive ban rate. Of course, as more data comes in we’re more confident with where things sit, but we have always had enough data to make educated changes before the first balance patch after a new hero release. After the first balance patch, we always have an even more clear picture of where things stand since we have that much more time for data to come in.

Balance patch is looking good!

For Deathwing, more general nerfs across the board, particularly to Destroyer form. Also some Worldbreaker buffs and talent tuning.

Can’t confirm dates. Confirming dates is the path to the dark side.