#38 - Into the Nexus: “Title”
• Garrett • Kyle
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Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!
News
Reminder, you can go to ITNcast.reddit.com to submit stories or upvote submissions for the next episode.
New Hero: The Lost Vikings (Olaf, Baleog, and Erik)
General
Links
Patch Changes
Player Profile
General (Comments by Johnzee)
J: The power level of Rewind turned out to be pretty nuts. A sign that perhaps something is too powerful is when its presence makes or breaks the Hero. Still, Rewind is really fun and has the potential to create some unique gameplay.
J: We’re also introducing a lot of new Level 20 Talents to refill some of the gaps left by the removals of Resurgence of the Storm (last patch) and Swift Storm (this patch).
Reworks
J: Raynor is the big Talent revamp release for this patch. We had a couple of goals for Raynor’s changes:
Lead from the Front required players to master a mechanic (last-hitting) that Heroes of the Storm really isn’t about, and furthermore we were asking many of the newest players to the game to understand it. Raynor is the tutorial Hero...
The new Trait, however, does fit that bill: increased weapon range requires no prior knowledge to make use of (good for newer players), slightly keeps Raynor safe (good for newer AND experienced players), and allows Raynor to pull off kiting maneuvers by default (good for experienced players who know how to exploit it).
The old Trait is still around in the new Talents
Previously controlling the Banshees was somewhat confusing. We programmed them initially to target the enemy you were attacking, but this was pretty hidden functionality. We also got a lot of player feedback (as we did with Kerrigan’s Ultralisk) that the Banshees should be manually controlled.
The new functionality helps solve the “hidden knowledge” issue by requiring an initial target that the Banshees will attack when they fly in. And we’ve added the manual control onto the R key. Again, we think this change will be both good for newer players (initial targeting) and good for advanced players (target switching) – the design benefits both groups.
Buffs
Sonya’s got problems – some balance problems, true, but also design problems. The original intent for Sonya’s Trait, Fury, was to evoke the same kind of resource mechanics that the Barbarian does in Diablo III, but that hasn’t been the case. In Heroes of the Storm, Sonya is either at full Fury, or has no Fury – she can use her abilities with impunity, or she can’t do anything at all. Clearly, something went wrong.
Readers may notice that most of the changes are based on significantly increasing Fury generation while slightly increasing Fury cost. We’ve found that this helps a lot to create the gameplay that we originally intended with Sonya, because players interact with their generators and spenders a lot more. Combined with some general buffs, Sonya started feeling much better during internal playtesing…
… but we’re still not done yet. We’re experimenting with design solutions for Sonya that may lead to more involved changes. In the meantime, we’ll be carefully watching how these changes pan out.
Nerfs
Chen got a lot of Talent-shuffling, and the power level of the shuffled Talents have been appropriately adjusted. These changes were catalyzed by the seemingly essential talents Pressure Point and Chug.
Pressure Point felt like a must-pick, and turned Chen into a “root bot”. We don’t really like giving such strong CC on such a low cooldown (Flying Kick’s cooldown is 5 seconds, which was not difficult to keep up consistently). We moved the talent to 16 and turned it into a super-slow.
Chug similarly felt like a requirement for Chen players. Chug breaks the tuning we have around how fast Chen can recover spent Brew – which is fine, but not at such an early level. We moved it to a later choice, and to help address the insatiable thirst for Brew we increased his baseline regeneration rate.
The biggest change we made here were the changes to Murky’s Trait, Spawn Egg. We’d like to encourage more aggressive Egg use with Murky – a 45-second cooldown didn’t really give Murky players many opportunities to continue moving their Egg around to adapt to fights and map mechanics.
Rejuvenation made it a little too easy to completely negate any progress made against a marauding Murky. The difference between 50% of Murky's health and 100% isn't actually that much, considering his small health pool, making this change look like a harder hit than it actually is.
Battle Momentum pushed the power of Windfury and Frostwolf Resilience a little over the edge, and had an high impact on Thrall's relatively low-cooldown Heroics.
Last patch I talked a little about the “second health bar” problems with regards to Resurgence of the Storm (which was cut) and Chen’s Storm, Earth, Fire (which tweaked to allow for counterplay). Tychus also has that problem with his Odin Heroic ability, but we weren’t able to get to it in the previous patch.
The new Odin works differently. We’ve refocused it to what Tychus loves best: doing damage! The Odin gains increased damage, utility, and a new movement ability, but in exchange gave up the “second health bar” bonuses.
Another “must-pick” Talent, except this one had to get the axe.
Sometimes we design a Talent that is extremely binary in function, making it very difficult to balance. Cast Aside is one of those Talents – either you have it or you don’t, and when you do, it transforms a damaging ability to an extremely powerful stun/interrupt and displacement effect on a low cooldown. There are no numbers that we can tune the power of the ability around, besides the cooldown or mana cost of the Smite ability itself (regardless of whether you have that Talent or not).
We think that Tyrael could use more improvements. We’re not entirely happy with Smite’s design in general, and it can be argued that his Trait doesn’t make much sense. Expect to see more changes in the future.
We got a lot of feedback about Zeratul stealing mercenary camps feeling extremely unfair. Some players even thought that behavior was a bug... why are Heroes that are clearly standing on a capture point not counting towards a capture? Honestly, we didn’t like how it felt either.
Links
State of Ranked Play
Recent community discussions about the Heroes of the Storm ranking system have produced some interesting theories about how it works, and we’d like to shed a little more light on this topic. Heroes is a highly competitive game, and we wanted to create a ranking system that clearly reflects the skill of its players. With this in mind, we decided to split the system into 50 different ranks, and made each represent roughly 2% of the Hero League population at any given time, so that players can more easily identify how they stack up against the rest of the Hero League playerbase. If you achieve Rank 10, for example, you can generally assume your current skill level is among the top 20% of all Hero League players.
Links
Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN
Patron Thanks
Emails
Paul
I like to wait until I have 2-3 dailies so I might knock multiple ones out at the same time. Today I have the warrior one and the Starcraft one, and I am finding out there are unfortunately no Starcraft warriors. Tychus would have been an obvious choice in my mind but since they already used him an assassin, who (or what) in the Starcraft universe would make a good warrior? Along the same lines, who would make a good support from Diablo? Anyone else you can think of from anywhere that you'd like to see added? I'd like to see the Diablo followers sometime because I found the Templar and the Scoundrel entertaining.
Outro
Patreon Shout Out
ITN is supported by our badass Patrons. You can become a ITN Patron by going to Patreon.com/itn.
iTunes Thanks
Into the Nexus is a produced by Amove.tv and Declan H. You can see more about this and all the other A-move shows at Amove.tv. You can also email the show at ITNcast@gmail.com or continue the conversation over at forum.Amove.tv.
Catch the live show Thursday nights at 8pm Eastern on Twitch.tv/Amovetv. Mobile live stream provided by Alpha Geek Radio. Go to mobile.alphageekradio.com.
Follow the show on Twitter @ITNcast
Thanks to Brian Griffith, the musician responsible for our intro music. He can be found at briangriffithmusic.com or @briangriffith on twitter..
Personal Stuff
Garrett
Follow Garrett @GarrettArt
NOMOONart.com for Garrett’s stream designs.
The Angry Chicken: A Hearthstone Podcast
Kyle
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