Pillars of Hero Design

By Teslobo

What is This?

When given criticism for concepts, some people appear to assume that hero quality is a 1-axis deal. If they fix issues, the hero quality will go up, right? This isn’t always the case - people end up creating even more problems in the process, and get frustrated by their efforts being rewarded with more holes to patch.

I believe this problem comes about by people not realising that the quality of heroes, for the most part, are governed by 3 different pillars, each one as important as the other. People focus on fixing the issues on one pillar, completely blind to the fact that the changes are causing the other 2 to slip.

I want to explain what each of these are and how they are handled well.

Balance

The first quality measure of a hero is its balance, the one people know the best. A hero that is balanced is simply one that does not overshadow other existing heroes whilst not being overshadowed itself.

Achieving balance is usually a case of just tweaking numbers until it's a fair match, and thus I’d rate it the easiest of the lot. Blame The Controller made a decent video explaining balancing which can be found here, although I would avoid taking his teachings as gospel, as he fails to acknowledge or encorporate the other two pillars into his explanations, which sometimes result in dodgy messages.

Engagement

Overwatch is a game at the end of the day, which means it needs to be fun as well as simply balanced. Overwatch is all about using your unique abilities to make interesting decisions and change the tide of a fight. So naturally, the more engaging kits are the ones that present players with the most interesting decisions.

It is best to decide beforehand what things you are wanting players to think about in combat (positioning, health, etc) and make sure every part of the kit reinforces that. Likewise, make sure the kit helps the player ignore unimportant things - give them lots of health if you don’t want them to think about being cautious, and give them lots of range if you don’t want them to worry about positioning. �It can be a helpful exercise to look at existing heroes and think about how certain abilities help establish what a player needs to think about when playing a them.

Quality of Life

Quality of Life is the hardest thing to grasp in my opinion because, by its very nature, it is meant to be invisible. It is the small touches made to a kit that stops it being frustrating to play with or against - if you do a poor job on this section, a kit can feel frustrating or potentially unfair to players, even if you balanced it perfectly (Symmetra lock-on beam anyone?)

Some common quality of life pitfalls include creating overly complex or obsolete mechanics, “forgone conclusion” abilities where there is no way to prevent incoming damage, abilities that have ridiculously powerful effects but only against stupidly specific things/heroes, etc.

Just consider when designing an ability: �“is there a scenario where someone will get really pissed off by this?”

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Conflicting Pillars

You might notice working with these 3 pillars that they tend to conflict with each other. A lot. Sometimes balanced things aren’t engaging, sometimes engaging things are frustrating to fight, and sometimes things that are fun for everyone are way too powerful.

This is unfortunately your burden as designers: to find the rare points where all 3 of these pillars intersect. But it is rare indeed that anything fits perfectly. Mei, for example, has some quality of life issues, with being frozen frustrating enemies, and ice wall frustrating allies. However, her engagement and balance are so well done that these things are necessary evils we can allow.

You’ll never get all these rules to line up perfectly - use your own judgement to decide what is acceptable and what is not.