Hey, Blizz
Guess what time it is. It’s time for this old warhorse to lay it on you again. Been here back when Warcraft was the hype and the two opposing sides were almost identical. Was one of the first to step into the world of Sanctuary when Diablo was a brand new game and it was truly an amazing experience from the first mage to the last monk. I did have ten or so iterations of each because whynot.
Warcraft 2 and its map editor gave me endless hours of fun and I sunk my teeth into Starcraft and made fairly high up even on one of those korean servers. World of Warcraft gave me over ten years of fond memories and let’s be honest, I’ve played almost all of your games except for Heartstone which is just not my thing you probably understand.
I love Blizz games. And games in general. I’m one to advocate Blizz as The Game Company, bringing your production quality and levels of design up as main aspects to which I measure every other creator. I know, it’s unfair, but what can we do. I grew up on your games.
I wrote one of these assessments on many games in many forums.
Bear with me, I tend to go off on tangents at times, often with good reason and other times just for anecdote.
Last Blizz game I critiqued was Diablo3 back before the D3 team released the last big patch, touching on that game’s major issues - most of which hit home as they were all addressed in the patch to come. I have no illusion that my single post influenced any of that: I just like to think that I have Farsight (yes, a reference to Warcraft there) enough to point out all that’s wrong about a game currently. As one whose three main loves include gaming, (the other two being art and nature) I’ve been digging deep into the theory (and for a decade, the practice) of game design so I have at least a semblance of a clue what’s up.
Anyway, let’s get to it. Here’s a quick summary of what I’m going to talk about.
- Considerations, Disclaimer, Where I’m coming from
- A riddle
- We have enough heroes now … Time to balance them!
- Top five things that need to go
- Everything wrong with roles
- Summary
Important Considerations
This stands here for the average reader, not the Devs though they may also find this a useful read to just get a basic idea of my train of thought at first. Some of my critique below will be harsh because I firmly believe that Heroes could, and more importantly, should do better at being a Good Design, something it has been gradually abandoning in favour of…
Well, let’s see.
As said above: I understand game design. I understand design itself and I understand that principles of good design are often a lower priority than some other things when it comes to developing, testing, or maintaining the design and principles of a game.
EMPLOYEES GET PAID. So if you play for free, you need to start wondering where they get the money. And it’s up to you but I like to support them. With money.
Game companies need to make money. This is the top priority and Blizzard is known to excel in quality in spite of this requirement where many other companies bleed and in many cases [those other games] will feel, as players say, “money-grabbing” or “pay-to-win”. Compliments due where compliments deserved, let’s be honest: Blizzard Games are usually good.
Heroes, unfortunately, has been heading over towards the gray area where it’s still not as bad as a P2W game, but it’s recent development has been … a bit less of Above and a bit more of Below. Average, that is.
NOBODY PLAYS IF NOBODY PLAYS. Seen a “dead game” before? Nobody plays it so you won’t pay it. But you’d play it if others played it, but they don’t so you don’t. And they don’t because you don’t. Feel how tedious this is? This is exactly how a game designer feels when they need to address an issue of popularity.
Games need to appeal to a certain demographic, multiple if possible, but cannot appeal to everyone and this influences the choices made when designing them. Popularity is another problem we encounter in the game biz, where we need to make sure that the single glance you give to a game will make you stay forever. Or at least long enough to get money out of you.
Heroes is pretty good at being popular, being engaging. However, as soon as a player starts to understand the game and sees one of the less … thoughtful (?) mechanics of the game, they might just head right back over there -> to play something where they don’t have to deal with it. A lot of these things have appeared lately. Allow me to shoot a wild guess at what I thought these were.
What’s better to start a guessing game with than…
A Riddle
Genji has two, Nova needs it badly, Valeera’s sucks, Li-Ming has a half and it breaks the game as is. What is it? The answer is moves that cover great amount of ground and make you able to engage or disengage nearly unstoppably.
Ever rap your fingers on your keyboard annoyedly after getting nailed by a runaway fireball, wishing those numbers counted down faster? Time is a crucial part of combat games, in many ways. Proof is how slowly your character trudges along without Mounting Up. Or being dead, that’s a good indicator of what I’m trying to say here: The concept of respawn timers itself was introduced so that when a player is defeated, they will not be able to defeat anyone right back for so long. A whole minute feels like an eternity and losing your healer for a minute can mean the end of the game for your team.
This is where Mobility Moves / Gap Closers (I gave them a name, I could call them Steve but I think that would be confusing) make all the difference. A character that can just jump right back into the fight or out of the fight and out of death’s way has a great, impeccable advantage over one that cannot.
Whether it’s Tracer’s hoppity hop or Chen’s dropkick, many heroes have the ability to cover some ground and these heroes will always be that much superior to those who cannot. These moves vary by range (Illidan’s ultimate can go full screen, Genji’s almost, Li-Ming’s is barely useful etc.), effect (some of these moves do better than others), damage and general usefulness but they are becoming commonplace.
In recent rememberance heroes without have been deemed less useful, and with good reason. Mobility / Gap Closing has been reigning supreme with minute cooldowns (that take considerably less than a minute. Let me just confuse you some more. Mwehehe) and great effect.
I’m not sure whether their prevalence on one hand (every other new hero) and omittance on another (not fixing old heroes to be competitive against its prevalence) was a conscious decision or an oversight because it’s seriously confusing the heck out of me. But more on that in a second, need to say two more things first.
Two more riddles.
What do most warriors do better than healers these days?
and
What do most warriors do better than assassins these days?
The answer to the first is a bit less surprising than the answer to the second. While Varian and Mal’Ganis are a rightful candidate for heavy scrutiny in any semblance of common sense’s point of view, it has been a tendency to turn Assassins into single purpose “Supplementary Damage” and healers into “otherwise useless but at least it restores hp” concepts and that right there is something we will need to look into further in a bit.
The answers are not so simple as to put them down into single words but I’ll try.
Answers to the first could include “Survive”, which is okay in a sense, but the second; “Heal themselves”, is a slight bit of outrageous.
One last riddle and I promise I’m done with rhetoricals.
What’s a countermeasure to everything except for Varian and Medivh in this game?
The answer is CrowdControl. Those two, however, have a mechanic called “invincibility” that was removed from Anub’Arak’s slide move - a move that nowhere near allowed the freedom to act as the abilities of those two guys above - and removed rightfully so. Three begotten seconds of MC Hammer’s good old hit song You Can’t Touch This is tantamount to typing Power Overwhelming and winning a Starcraft game with a single probe. Probius would probably still be useless even if he DID have access to that cheat code, just by the by.
Anyway, Crowd Control, yes. Ever had an enemy Mal’Ganis sleep your entire team 5v1 and then claw his way out of harm while all of you were saying “Yes, that’s perfectly fine, that mechanic is balanced” ? Yeah, me neither.
Let’s backtrack and look at the prevalence and omission bit. New heroes are silly, old heroes can’t keep up. That’s all it means. New heroes have all the mobility, self heals, CC, what have you, while old heroes are “reworked” only to be made worse than they were (Looking at you, Azmodan) and are pretty much excluded from the power creep of the game.
Hmm. Power creep. Hold that thought a sec, be right back.
We have enough heroes now. Time to balance them!
The competitive scene is quite clearly showing some strengths and weaknesses within the roster as far as five-man complex teamwork and finding combinations of successful engagement goes.
It’s very clear that Heroes is intending to go in the direction of “teamplay” but it will be for naught if the concept thereof comes across as a halfhearted attempt rather than a wholesome retreat from “casual battlebrawler”. Outliers like Lost Vikings, Nova, Valeera, Zeratul, Azmodan, Abathur, Tyrande or Hammer will never fit the general concept because of their design and the game will go more askew than it already has in the past year and a half.
I at least in part comprehend the complexity and rigours of running such an elaborate system, and I commend the Blizz Heroes team on all their effort at keeping this game remotely playable on both a casual and a professional level, but there are certain tendencies the game needs to break away from: those above and a few more below. Otherwise we’ll just be copying Dota and frankly, Dota does better at being Dota.
Please to back to being Heroes.
Honestly, Blizz, my brothers and sisters in arms, my family, my beloved, I get it, you sell new heroes for cash but just STOP. Please.
Stop for just three months. Re-sell some long-not-seen skins and mounts, run an event where we can dump cash in for benefits, do something else but
PLEASE STOP RELEASING HEROES AND FIX ALL THE WEAK HEROES.
No amount of backtracking will stop the current Power Creep if you keep releasing variables into an already uneven system.
Top 5 things that need to go.
- Invincibility / Parry that’s no risk and all reward.
- Self-healing on Warriors.
- The Healer Nerf.
- Invisibility
- Renerfs and Rebuffs
Let’s see them one by one.
Invincibility such as Medivh’s or Varian’s bubbles is, as said above, a broken mechanic. Giving someone a 5k absorption shield is far less destructive to game balance than outright making them impossible to harm for entire seconds in a game where nanoseconds make a difference.
Warriors can heal themselves but Healers are literally just hp batteries. This design choice, while I understand the reasoning behind, I feel turns the game into a lot less interesting or fun to play than back when a good LiLi could kite and kill a decent Diablo simply because she was able to restore her own HP and he was not.
Invisibility was destroyed on a kneejerk reaction: good players were already able to spot you so it was literally just a “baddie-killer”, yet it gave you guys over at the Dev Team incentive to destroy three of the most interesting characters, two of them, the girls, beyond help and Zeratul just badly enough to make his oppressive playstyle recede into something that only appeals to a select crowd.
If it’s such a big problem, just drop the concept of Stealth from the game. What it does right now - big fat nothing - is literally just an insult to Blizzard production quality as a whole.
- Characters still have dedicated “reveal” mechanics despite there being absolutely no need to remove even the single benefit of the trait.
- Everyone has an aoe, it’s not like being “invisible” helps at all. The whole game just renders the ability inert.
Drop it, I say. Or alternatively, make only skillshots work on it. Make it a shield of sorts that only breaks by targeted skills that you need to aim properly. Allow all stealthers to restealth a bit like Samuro does and you’re golden.
Renerfs are what happened to Nova and Tyrande. Characters get considerable viability increases and then in the upcoming two or three patches they gradually get made as weak, or weaker, than they were pre-rework. Nova’s damage is literally inferior to most warriors and every assassin, notably to Varian’s, Mal’s, Diablo’s, to name a few, and she can’t even live to try again with being one of the five least survivable heroes in the game.
And while we’re on about Nova: Her snipe quest is insipid, no offense. It’s the only quest in the game that can “wear off” on you. Make it so many shots but make it last. She needs damage. At least damage, if she has nothing else whatsoever. No self-heal, no cc, can’t even survive 1v1 against most of the cast. Might as well make her 1shot tanks, right?
Rebuffs are the opposite: A character gets Honesty-Checked and then sneakily buffed right back up to the previous margin. This is a very dishonest way of developing a game, guys.
Please set your margins correctly and don’t allow Varians and Mal’Ganises to slip through. Not fun.
Everything wrong with roles
I think it’s safe to say that the single-purpose no-variety low-skill-cap gameplay that Heroes has been shooting for will probably apply to whichever demographic the target audience has been changed to, but old veterans such as myself will gradually wander off to play something else that offers for what we liked about Heroes from day one.
Whether you’re doing it intentionally or the design choices started an avalanche due to the competitive viability attempts, I cannot say. But the way roles are right now…
Multiclass - Either start to aim for it with most characters, or drop it. Varian is a broken piece of piece that only munchkins and trolls like.
Warrior - If we’re going single-purpose with healers, stop making warriors that perform better than Assassins and Healers at killing and surviving on their own.
Healer - Just unnerf them please. It’s the least interesting role to play with Warriors not needing you, assassins leading you into getting jumped and you can’t even capture a begotten camp on your own anymore.
Assassin - HP nerf. Damage buff. Glass cannon, the lot of them. Please ditch their self heals, it’s ridiculous sometimes.
Let healers heal, let tanks tank, let assassins lay the smackdown and if any of them go out of position, let warriors suck at getting away, let assassins and healers die in one shot and make the game feel a lot less like the winning team has been winning for 20 minutes and the only reason we’re still insulting one another is just so that we don’t get leaver penalties.
Summary
Heroes is a good game. Its production quality is through the roof: the visual, the audio, the controls, everything runs smoothly on an old machine so much as a state of the art powerplant-tier rendering machine. The game is full of variety - seemingly at first, that is - which is severely undermined by recent design choices which are aimed to favour certain playstyles over others.
While so-called Meta Shifts are inevitable and often invaluable, the former direction of the game, ie being a Battle Brawler was far more appealing than the recent intentions which seem to be aiming to copy the competition rather than offering a flavour of new and interesting.
The constant release of new, more overperforming heroes and certain mechanics in the game being inert, (invisibility being a joke, most prominently) considerably skew the former exuberance of this beloved masterpiece.
Munchkin Favourite heroes such as Varian and Mal’Ganis need severe normalisation and if we’re aiming for teamplay viability, the pacing and general layout of maps will also need to change - but I’m leaving this part up to the development team without any further comment, simply because I’m already overstaying my welcome and because I have no numerical data on the inner workings of match dynamics which would be crucial to properly critiqueing various maps.
Some of them do feel like they need to change heavily if we’re to shift the meta from what it was towards what it feels to be going for lately.
With respect and adoration
The Narrative Monster
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
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