#248 - Into the Nexus: “Dawn of a new day”
• Garrett • Kyle • Jeff or Guest
#Heroes #of #the #Storm #HotS #Blizzard #Entertainment #Warcraft #Diablo #StarCraft #Overwatch #Hearthstone #WoW #Garrett #Kyle #Weinzierl #Fergusson #Video #Games
http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/
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Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!
News
Kaéo Milker
The Bad
“I’m disappointed that some of the exciting plans we had for 2019 will have to change.”
The Good
The team that remains dedicated to Heroes of the Storm is a veritable Who’s Who of developers who have been driving every facet of the game from the very beginning—from people you know and have seen speak publicly about the game for years, to those who have poured their hearts into it from behind the scenes. In short, we’re continuing to develop the game with an incredible team that has the experience and passion required to support Heroes of the Storm well into the future.
The Heroes of the Storm team and I also have a unique opportunity to rethink things and reprioritize. Because now more than ever, our charge is to focus on taking care of you, our players, and to channel all our energy into keeping the game dynamic and fun. This means we’re still committed to regular hero reworks, themed events, and even new heroes. We’re setting our sights on the new goals and timelines for what we want to do with the game from here on out and we’re eager to share those plans as soon as they’re finalized.
Community esports
Heroes Lounge is putting together a crowd-funded tournament.
“Heroes Lounge has grown to be the largest Heroes of the Storm amateur league worldwide with more than 350 teams and thousands of players competing in both Europe and North America.”
Listener Coup brought Heroes Lounge to our attention a couple months back. If you don’t remember he wrote in to inform us that they were expanding from Europe to North America with their latest season. Coup had a lot of good things to say about the league and that he’s gone from Gold 3 to Diamond 2 since joining.
Heroes Lounge is now introducing a new league: Division S. It’s where the top teams from Europe and NA will compete within their region.
Quick Facts
The prize pool will be crowdfunded through Matcherino. Their goal is $10k for this first season.
esports Talent Sticking Around
We already mentioned that Khaldor’s going straight to casting Division S for Heroes Lounge.
Dec. 19th Patch: They came for Cho’gall!
Nerfs
Cho
Sizeable nerf to Health and Regen as well as Gall’s most popular talents at 1, 4, and 7.
Stats
Gall
Abilities
Talents
Orphea
Health and regen down. Significant damage nerf to Crushing Jaws as well as bringing its Stun down to only half a second. Major nerf to the bonus damage of Ancestral Strength at Lv. 1.
Stats
Abilities
Talents
Samuro
We’ve seen him rising up hotslogs. Beware if you’re an Illusion Master.
Developer Comment: Samuro has become a bit of a nuisance for many players to deal with, particularly when playing against people who are competent in using Illusion Master. We’re reducing the power of Way of Illusion and Illusion Master, which should generally reduce the overall damage that Samuro can deal throughout the game.
Zagara
Abilities
Talents
Uther
Developer Comment: There was a large disparity of the value that Uther could receive when taking Armor of Faith against various heroes who have small stuns that proc often against enemies (such as Johanna.) While we still like the idea of this talent turning crowd control against Uther into a boon for him, we want to be able to control its frequency so that his output isn’t drastically different when facing off against certain heroes. To compensate for the loss of uptime in these situations, we are giving him a fairly significant Mana return, which should offset the cooldown reduction that he receives on Holy Light when this talent activates.
Mal'Ganis
Buffs
Sylvanas
Her winrate isn’t just low on hotslogs.
Stats
Abilities
Developer Comment: We are still gathering and evaluating data on Sylvanas, but her win rate is looking a little low, so we are giving her some small preliminary buffs while people figure out how to play with her updated kit and talents.
Stitches
Devs are keeping an eye on Stitches and believe he could still use some tuning. But they want to give him more time to settle.
Talents
Developer Comment: Overall, Stitches is faring well with his new toys. There are a few places we think could stand some numerical changes, but we’d like to give him a bit more time to settle in with all the other changes that went out with this patch. We will continue to monitor the large lad, but felt there were some easy wins on talents that were obviously underperforming.
D.Va
Deckard
Mostly buffs to underpicked talents with the exception of Super Healing Potion at 13.
Talents
Developer Comment: After the last round of changes, Deckard’s win rate has fallen more than we would like. Rather than put more power back into his base kit, we are buffing some of his talents on various tiers to make his talent choices more impactful and to increase his power growth throughout the game.
Auriel
Debatable
Lt. Morales
Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN
Thanks to our Patreon producers Declan H, CheezyBob, and Pythagos.
Patron Thanks Doc for keeping track
Strategy
2019 Update So Far...
It’s been live for a couple weeks now. How are we liking it?
Talking Points
Emails
Helli
Hey you two!
I'm writing this after the news broke, after seeing the impromptu show you set up, after reading thoughts on Reddit, after seeing other content creators react to this and after going over it in my head. It's an odd time, to be sure.
First of all I'd like to say that you two were a big part of my own HotS-experience, since you two made me think in new ways, of new things and pushed me to keep challenging myself.
A tad of history:
I played original Dota in WC3 back in the day and thought it was fun enough, later dipped my toes in Heroes of Newerth (blast from a past, that one) but that was short lived.
Tried some LoL, then the new Dota, bloody hell, I even gave Smite a go but none of those really worked for me enough to keep playing. Especially Smite. That game just, ugh..
Until one fateful day my mate showed me HotS back in 2015 around the time, if my memory serves me right, when Johanna was released. I have a clear memory of playing against her and thinking "why. won't. you. just. DIE!". Good times.
And some (I'm guessing here) 500€ or so, some 4k+ games, owning all the heroes, nearly all of them at lvl 15 later, I'm still here.
Next thing was to look for podcasts about the game and after trying a few of them, I ran into you two. I even became a supporter but then had to stop it as I went back to uni and money got tighter, even if it was only a handful of dollars a month, which admittedly feels silly.
The whole time I've enjoyed the show, so much that I've even made my wife listen to you two when we're doing longer drives (I'm sorry Garrett but she prefers Kyle's sultry voice more).
Speaking of her, the show even got kind of personal to me, since we had our wedding on the 2nd of September 2015. And the time I started listening to the show was right around the time Garrett was stressing over his wedding. It often gave me a chuckle listening to him go through the same or similar situations as I had just had to deal with.
I still remember being on the honeymoon (went on an island for a long weekend) and me driving around this tiny town, trying to find medicine and something to eat for the wife who ran a fever of 39c/103f all the while listening to you two.
I sincerely hope your honeymoon went in a manner far smoother than ours.
Anyhow, despite all of this, I still really, really enjoy the game. Apart from some great LAN-games I haven't found a better game to play with a bunch of mates than HotS and I think I'll be playing until the game shuts down or they just stop keeping it up to date. I mean, I even made great friends in the game, some me and the wife have met for a pint or two when backpacking around Europe.
In fact, I'm optimistic that now that they're not trying so hard to be a "proper hardcore moba" they can go back to what made me stick with HotS, which is creativity. If I wanted to play a "traditional" moba I could go with LoL or Dota but I don't want that. I want the heroes and villains I've grown with, I want different maps, odd and creative heroes to play. Maybe they can get back some of that magic, passion and imagination from the early days since they're not so restricted by the pro scene anymore.
Anyhow, I don't know what your plans are but I will stay with you two fellas until you stop.
So if you want to surf into the sunset, I'm game. Hell, I'll bring my own silver-gold board and get blinded by your way cooler plat-diamond boards and have a laugh, as I've often done listening to you two.
And if you want to go to other (possibly greener) pastures, well, I can't blame you and I will wish you all the best. The two of you deserve that and so much more.
All the best, and in the words of Kevin, "I'll (hopefully) see you in the Nexus",
- Helli
Outro
Patreon Shout Out
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Thanks to Gorath for our intro music and briangriffithmusic.com (@briangriffith) for our outro..
Personal Stuff
NotParadox
Garrett
Kyle
For future episodes
Lanthal (Noob of the Storm)
Who would you like to see come in as a slightly left-field hero? I'd love to see Hogger make a showing or perhaps Hemet Nesingwary.
Lupus64
I've found that, with some heroes I have struggled feeling impactful with in the past, taking off meta builds has helped improve my performance.
For example: building anub with regeneration master and then all W talents, building dehaka with regenerative tissue and then all dark swarm talents.
What off meta builds can you give examples of that might help players see hero functionality in a different light? I know Garret loves him some chrysalis kerrigan