#81 - Into the Nexus: “Title”
• Garrett • Kyle
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Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!
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News
Reminder, you can go to ITNcast.reddit.com to submit stories or upvote submissions for the next episode.
Lunara
Mount
- Lunara cannot use Mounts. Instead, you move 20% faster by leaping short distances.
Trait
- Your Basic Attacks and damaging Abilities poison the target, dealing damage each second for 3 seconds. Can stack up to 3 times.
Basic Abilities
- After 0.5 seconds, cause an area to explode with pollen, dealing damage.
- Enemies currently afflicted by Nature’s Toxin have its duration increased by 3 seconds and are slowed by 40%, decaying over 3 seconds.
- Spawn a Wisp to scout an area. Can be redirected once active. Lasts 45 seconds.
Heroic Abilities
- Send forth vines that deal damage to all enemies in a line. Can hold 3 charges.
- Leap over an enemy, attacking and slowing the target by 80% for 0.35 seconds. Can hold 2 charges.
Links
Patch Changes
TASSADAR
- Can now be cast on allies located in the Hall of Storms
ARTANIS
- Basic Attack range increased by 25%
- Phase Prism (E)
- Range and speed have each been increased by 15%
Developer Comments: Artanis was having a harder time sticking to opponents than we’d like. This was hurting his ability to disrupt the enemy team and his ability to survive... The increased range on Phase Prism and his Basic Attacks should help him feel better to play, and help him more successfully fulfill his aggressive Warrior role. These changes are intentionally slight, as we feel Artanis is very close to being extremely powerful in today’s game.
CHO
- Basic Attack damage increased from 110 to 120
- Base Health increased from 3360 to 3528
- Base Health Regeneration increased from 7 to 7.35 per second
Developer Comments: Cho’gall’s win rate has been trending up since his release, but it is still a bit lower than we’d like. We have plans to improve Cho’gall with Talent changes in the future, but we wanted to give him a small buff before then..
Bug Fixes
- Azmodan’s Globe of Annihilation will now deal the correct amount of damage while under the effects of Black Pool and the Taste for Blood
- Fixed an issue that could cause Leoric’s Drain Hope to end prematurely.
- Artanis’ Purifier Beam will no longer track Murky back to his Egg if Murky was killed just as the Ability was cast.
Links
Phase One Matchmaking Improvements
The first phase of the promised matchmaking improvements went live with this week’s patch. Spyrian put up a new blog on the official Heroes site detailing these changes mentioning that “When Heroes of the Storm matchmaking was originally implemented, it was based on the system we used for StarCraft II. This works great for a game that’s primarily centered on 1v1 play” and continued “However, Heroes is team-based, and we had to create several rules, such as team composition and party size restrictions, to help tailor this system to a 5v5 game.” When more rules were added, the harder it was for the matchmaker to do it’s job.
During the last couple months, with extensive internal testing, Team 1 completely reworked matchmaking to build a brand new system tailor-made for Heroes of the Storm.
CREATING HIGH QUALITY MATCHES
- The Heroes matchmaker will now much more effectively group you with allies and opponents that have very similar matchmaking ratings (MMR) to your own, creating games that are fair for both sides. This will also affect Ranked play, and you may notice that all players in your Hero and Team League games are much closer in terms of Ranking.
QUEUES AND WAIT TIMES
- Rather than trying to get you into a match as soon as possible after a certain time has elapsed (the old 10-minute rule), the new matchmaking system’s primary focus is to give you the most evenly matched games that it can.
- The matchmaker will now give higher priority to those who have been waiting the longest in queue. This means that you may end up waiting a little longer for a game from time to time, but you’ll have a better match as a result.
MATCHMAKING CHANGES FOR PARTIES
- While the new matchmaker will continue to match parties of equal size against one another, we’ve placed additional emphasis on matching teams of similar skill. This means that you may occasionally encounter party size differences between your team and your opponents, but the match you receive will be much higher quality.
- To add to this, matchmaking will now also take a party’s ability to more effectively coordinate as a team into account when creating games. This means that if you queue alone and get matched against a party, that party will likely be of lower average skill than your team of solo players, which should help to balance out your opponents’ communication advantage.
LOADING SCREEN CHANGES
- In Hero League games, you will only see players’ Hero League borders and ranks on loading screens.
- In Quick Match games, you will only see basic portrait borders and player levels.
- Also added were new party icons to loading screens that will indicate which players are partied together, and how many parties are in a game. (hooray! transparency!)
KNOWN CHALLENGES AND FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
- We’ve reduced the likelihood that new players will be matched with or against veteran players, but we’d still like to make further changes in this area with future updates.
- We’ve reduced the likelihood that high and low rated players will be matched in the same games, though our first round of improvements isn’t perfect, we believe we’re on the right track. As mentioned above, it’s also still possible for this to occur when high and low MMR players queue together in parties.
- Additionally, we’re planning to work on improving the accuracy of matchmaking ratings as a whole so that the matchmaker’s estimations of players’ skill levels are even more precise.
- We’ve just added a new rule for Warriors in the Quick Match queue. This functions much like the Support rule that came before it, in that teams without a Warrior hero will no longer be matched against teams that do have a Warrior. Keep in mind, however, that this rule can still be broken by players in full parties.
- We still have more work we’d like to do to limit unfavorable team compositions in Quick Match. For example, we’d like to limit the likelihood that one team will receive multiple “special” heroes, such as Cho’gall, Abathur, and Nova, in a future update.
- While queue times have increased as a result of our latest matchmaking changes, the number of quality matches we’re seeing has also increased. We’re going to work toward bringing queue times down, but our primary focus is going to stay centered on providing high-quality matches, and we don’t want to sacrifice good games for shorter wait times. We’ll keep you updated as we make progress toward this goal.
- We have heard your feedback that it’s not fun to be matched with players that you’ve added to your Blocked Communication list, and while we agree, we haven’t yet addressed this. However, it is on our radar, and we hope to work toward a solution in the future.
Links
Winter Veil
- Play 15 Games – Earn a 4 day Stimpack
- Play 50 Games – Earn a 10 day Stimpack
New Skins
- Greatfather Winter Stitches
- Sugarplum Sylvanas
Price Changes
- Zagara’s prices will be reduced to 4,000 Gold and $6.49 USD.
Links
Datamined Space Lord Leoric
Meat of the story goes here.
Links
Blue Posts
Are towers too weak now?
Towers are a bit weaker now due to the scaling changes. This was an intended change.
Because of this, we are seeing more "Gank related" types of team compositions (Diablo/Tyrande). I can assure you, the balance team is keeping an eye on the change and will make alterations as necessary. Feedback is certainly appreciated on this topic if anyone wants to chime in.
Heroes will not get its own engine
While there are some very hardworking members of the Heroes dev team that do work on bug fixes and improvements for the engine, performance, optimization, systems, and much more, we are not working on a new engine for Heroes right now.
Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN
Patron Thanks
- Craig E
- MTG Cardsmith
- William K
- Ryan P
- Big Kids at Play
Emails
Spitbawl
Greetings heroes!
I have recently started trying new heroes and I have discovered that by trying the heroes that I always overlooked, I have gotten a whole new wave of love for the game. One of my favorite heroes that I have started getting used to is Sgt. Hammer who I never thought I would have fun with. My question is this, what heroes surprised you the most when you started using them with how effective or just how fun they were?
Chad
If you had to choose only one Blizzard universe's hero pool to play permanently which one would it be?
Outro
Patreon Shout Out
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iTunes Thanks
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Into the Nexus is produced by Amove.tv and our Patreon producers Declan H and CheezyBob! 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.
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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
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Kyle
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