ITN - 112

#112 - Into the Nexus: “The One with DunkTrain”

• Garrett • Kyle

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Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!

Big fat thanks to Gorath for the awesome intro music.

News

Reminder, you can go to ITNcast.reddit.com to submit stories or upvote submissions for the next episode.

Season One is Live!

Season 1 Start Wednesday, June 15

Season 2 Start/Season 1 End Week of August 23*

SEASON 1 RANKED REWARDS

Whats up with:

Skeleton King
Greymane

Links

Medivh is out!

Talkin’ non-support support with Dunktrain

Medivh at 22%

Links

Health Sustain

Via Matt Cooper:

This includes all sources of healing available including passive Health Regeneration, collection of Regeneration Globes, using a Healing Fountain, and a wide range of sustain talents such as Regeneration Master or Laws of Hope. Of course let’s not forget those pesky Support characters who can quickly top you off, or even returning to your Hall of Storms for a full heal.

Why are we looking at sustain, and what are we trying to accomplish?

Well, here are a few things:

Poke heroes such as Chromie or Lunara can have much of their damage output invalidated by the constant uptick of health. This is partially why Chromie’s damage is tuned so insanely high, she essentially sits in burst territory.
High sustain limits the reward of outplaying an opponent in a small skirmish fight. Your skillshots and those ‘small wins’ you get don’t ultimately matter that much unless you can get a kill.
With the exception of a major lane bully like Zagara, it can be very difficult to decisively win a lane and force an opponent out. The reward for denying Regeneration Globes in lane also doesn’t end up meaning much.
In team fights, high sustain can create somewhat passive skirmishes. Unless you have the burst damage to immediately destroy an enemy, most of your damage isn’t meaningful. This is partially why Burst Damage & CC are so prominent.

Ultimately, we’ve experimented and discussed this internally a lot. There often isn’t a ‘Silver Bullet’ in design, and this area is no exception. There isn’t even necessarily a consensus amongst the design group of if this is even a problem or what the right solve may be.

With that all in mind, here is where we are currently leaning:

Regeneration Globes: We’re actually looking to tune these up.

The math in the live game is awkward, but it works out to be roughly 6.2% of your max health and 32 mana.
They’re playtesting increases to 12% of your max health and 8% of your max mana.
“The hope is that denying opponents access to Regeneration Globes while securing your own ends up being a more meaningful event.”

Healing Fountains: We wanted to make using your Healing Fountain a bigger moment.

Crazy first idea we had was to increase the CD on these from 100s -> 300s (and buffed accordingly).
After much testing we are leaning towards a smaller change though. We’ve been playing with increasing CD from 100 -> 120s which feels meaningful but familiar. There are additional moments where that added 20s is enough to force you back to the Hall of Storms. We’ve also increased the mana provided from 20% -> 30% but kept the health the same. This ends up being an overall reduction in the HPS that these can provide.

Passive Health Regeneration: While we’ve tested quite a few variations here, one interesting test we did was simply turning off Passive Health Regeneration and not allowing players to pick any sustain talents like Regeneration Master or First Aid. This change meant that taking damage from an Abathur Mine or a Tyrande Owl was now ‘permanent’. You had to take some sort of action to remove this lost health instead of getting it back for ‘free’ over time. This change was pretty heavily contested internally so it’s not something we’re currently planning on shipping but it’s potentially something we will explore more in the future.
Support Characters: While I think we can all agree that Support heroes are a huge part of sustain, I wanted to exclude them from this initial conversation as I feel that this will overpower the discussion. Know that we are looking at Supports though...

Links

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/forum/topic/20745285499

Mini News

Beyond the Nexus - Beyond the Nexus is a brand new show aimed at getting you caught up on all the action in the Heroes of the Storm esports world. Join Gillyweed and Dreadnaught as they prepare you for the Summer Championship.

Feats of Strength - Throughout the Ranked Pre-season, Hero League and Team League players have ridden into battle countless times within the Nexus, accumulating tons of takedowns, and destroying many cores in the process.

Twitch Streaming Schedule - The Heroes community continues to amaze us with the effort they put into their awesome content. We’ve seen hero guides, laughed over fun show matches, gotten all the latest news via podcasts and patch previews and heard some great commentaries of pro-matches.

Dustin Browder Tweets!

Team might make /dancing and /taunting easier to dissuade B-Walking

Lifetime stat page coming soon

Medivh’s portals do not remove Symmetra as a possible hero

Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN

Patron Thanks

Bob T. Skull
Jared Leggett
Jerry
James MacIntosh
DaveH
Tobias Bengelsdorf
William Ramirez
Mike Seghers

Questions for Dunk

Alex

I would like to know where the name "Dunktrain" came from. Is it the name he uses for any game or did he specifically choose it for Heroes?

Windmagegarr

I was hoping you might address how to handle high damage comps, e.g. 4 assassins and a healer? One game we tried to double tank as last two picks when it was obvious they were going to run no tank or no healer and got completely destroyed as the other team gained a 2 level lead before 10 (think Kerrigan li-ming tracer, rehgar, zagara). Another game we played a Johanna KT Illidan Xul Monk into nova li-ming tracer rehgar greymane and won after a prolonged bloodbath. Any advice on drafting and in game strategy other than maybe play safe early?

Love the show, you guys are awesome.

Best,

Matthew aka Windmagegarr

Tralamin

It would be nice with a discussion on the differences between the tournament meta and the solo q meta.

We answered thiss.

geoffryb : How long has that beard taken Dunk?

KissyBears

Hello Garrett, Kyle and Dunk!

I wanted to ask Dunk about scrims. From what I understand, teams in the same region tend to scrim against the same number of teams in preparation for upcoming tourneys. What I've always wondered though is where this leaves room to develop "pocket strategies." If you were to practice them and be successful in scrims, wouldn't the other team be aware to look out for that in an upcoming live draft? I feel as it might take away from the element of surprise and strategy.

For example should DK have known to expect murky at Blizzcon or no since maybe you didn't scrim much against them.

Interested to hear what you have to say and thank you!

Outro

Patreon Shout Out

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iTunes Thanks

Name

Into the Nexus is produced by Amove.tv and our Patreon producers Declan H and CheezyBob! ITN coffee mugs and glasses are over at bit.ly/amovestore.

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, Facebook.com/Amovetv, And ITNpodcast.reddit.com.

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

The Angry Nerd

Kyle

A-move Radio

Kylefergusson.com

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