Devs response on Whitemane rework

General Discussion
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https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/d5gosf/the_whitemane_rework_is_a_mistake/f0mcpn4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

I made this thread because I didn’t want to link this on every single Whitemane rework thread here. This is better for everyone to read.

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Inb4
“Pfft actiblizz don’t listen dis is bull”

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Well, it is nice to get some feedback even though again on reddit. I just hope they will make the right decision and change up the rework in the right direction.

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If they’re so afraid of mana restoration talents dominating then they could’ve just baked some mana restoration into her base kit rather than yanking it all out.

And/or reduce the base mana costs so people don’t feel as compelled to take such talents to begin with. If you intentionally make a hero burn through mana quickly, don’t act surprised when everybody takes mana restore talents to combat the problem that you introduced.

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That is what they tried and it is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just give her the mana return talents at one and adjust them to not restore too much. Having to manage your mana bar with spending and restoring is a good part of what makes Whitemane interesting.

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Exactly. It was one thing that made Whitemane unique. You could run out of mana fairly quickly if you don’t hit your abilities right/or were hard pressed spamming Q, but at the same time you could regain your mana during the fight after a little downtime where your healing is reduced.
When your mana is out, you didnt necessarily have to return to base, you could regain it with good skill usage.
Thats btw why i liked the Searing Lash mana talent way more than Inquisitor, it rewarded me with skillfull placement and punished me when i missed.

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I do not understand how her numbers stay the same when her damage was nerfed across the board.
I realy dont know where these numbers are coming from, because going for full Q (when possible) will give you a similar but worse version of the live Q ( less dmg, removed talents, less reach, nerfed Aegis and more mana problems) so it isnt there. W build isnt doing it either because it dosent exist anymore.
So is that all in the A.A. build? Because these are the only ones who could bring those numbers back

Also, link to the article on the official website about both reworks

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/23114954/coming-soon-to-ptr-junkrat-and-whitemane-hero-reworks

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Removing the level 4 talents and making her less about the mana balance was a good thing imo. However, they did this in conjunction with increasing her mana cost on Q, which is a bad thing since that’s her sole method of healing. Now because of the mana gain talents removal, it also closes out several team heal builds, and now that her heal ult is 90 seconds, it’s going to be a make or break effect, similar to moshpit in terms of gameplay.

But otherwise the talent diversity is nice and cool.

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Well, her classic features are nerfed across the board. I personally wouldn’t mind if her mana recovery gimmick is removed but they did this while her abilities burn mana just as fast as before if not faster. It’s really counter intuitive.

Her damage is also nerfed overall and I figure the only reason why internal testing reports similar numbers is because her AA talent is an overperforming beast and that baseline Clemency could help raising those average healing done per match values.

My personal suggestion would be:

1.) Replace her mana recovery with duration recovery. The point of the mana recovery talents were to allow Whitemane to actually use her Q for her whole team instead of pocketing someone. If you add talent choices to refresh her abilities then it’s already better. Still, I’d prefer to have an extension on the duration of Zeal, perhaps to 10 seconds. So you can have AA, W and E based zeal duration refreshment. Even with this I feel some easing on her mana consumption could help but the key element is. Duration refreshment/extension can achieve the same effect without giving the infinite mana engine Whitemane which Blizzard appears to fear.

2.) Revert the nerfs on the Scarlet Aegis. This is simple. Her other Heroic will be already competitive given the reduced cooldown it’s the only truly reliably mana recovery of hers. Scarlet Aegis itself wasn’t really overtuned in my opinion compared to defensive Heroics for other heroes. If it’s still a concern then perhaps Scarlet Aegis should be rather buffed in order to become more than a niche pick, increasing its AoE to Divine Reconing levels, while keeping the 90s cooldown.

3.) Whitemane’s burst damage really suffers in this rework. E talents are weaker and the base damage of E is also nerfed as the most egregious example. Yet the most troublesome of all is the loss of Whitemane’s Fanatical Power. I’d say rather than removing this it should be made a baseline feature, activated by her trait (D) button. This new Fanatical Power could have a 60s cooldown but it could be reduced by Whitemane’s actions. Let’s say this is baked into her talent choices for Zeal duration refreshment. If you pick the E based version then landing your Searing Lashes should lower the cooldown of your Trait activation. This way you have a very dynamic and engaging playstyle.

With these changes you could have three distinct paths for Whitemane:
1.) AA and Desperate Plea buff based style
2.) W based style
3.) E based style
Yet likely as per the original Whitemane you could combine these talent paths to get more variety.

So yeah, if you don’t want Whitemane to be this unending mana monster that’s fine by me. There are myriads of other ways to preserve her style.

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They won’t. Sunk Cost Fallacy has too tight a control on companies this big. They’d have to justify to their superiors why they spent resources making a change, only to then spend more to undo the change, and the superiors won’t care about the practicality of any of the changes. All that matters is minimizing expense to maximize profit.

I expect balance tweaks, but they have never once rolled back the central parts of a rework, even if those central parts are what ruin the hero.

I personally don’t have a strong opinion on the WM rework, as I almost never play her, but I can definitely empathize with having your favorite Healer’s core identity and playstyle distorted and degraded. RIP Lucio.

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Agreed, maybe they could just bake some of them into her W & E, like if she uses her W to deal damage to a hero she gains some mana back or gets some mana back per hero hit from searing lash.

That way players can be rewarded for playing offensively & hitting their skillshots.

Because it’s internal testing. Internal testing while valuable doesn’t necessarily reflect how the hero will do once live. From a game design stand point, the people play testing her have an idea of what and how they envisioned her playstyle to be.

This creates a sort of bias on their part:

“Well this is how we envisioned her playstyle with her design and so this is how we play her and this is how we think players in general will also play her”

But once this goes live and into the hands of the entire player base, all bets are off. We don’t have that bias and we’re not privy to any internal discussions about how a hero should be played from their design.

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It’s good to hear that the feedback regarding fanatical power got back to them. To me that was an interesting talent. More damage at the expense of survivability.

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She didn’t “burn through mana quickly” except when you decided to. Which was largely when several allies were in trouble.
And it wasn’t a “problem” it was an intentional design approach.

  • Mana cost from 30 to 45
  • Compounding Mana cost from 60 to 45​

0 Desperation: 30->45
1 Desperation: 90->90
2 Desperation: 150->135
3 Desperation: 210->180

So in other words…

The changes reduced the mana cost of spreading Zeal around to the whole team.

  • Righteous Flame Increase the damage of Searing Lash by 25%. Increase this to 50% if the target is Stunned, Rooted, Silenced, or Slowed
    (Lower bonus, but applies far more frequently.)

  • Pity the Frail
    Enemy Heroes hit by Searing Lash reduce the Cooldown of Inquisition by 1 second. All of your Healing is increased by 25% on targets below 25% Health
    (Lower Inquisition damage, but more casts. Also buffs the healing from Q and Clemency, instead of just Zeal)

But probably indirectly.
Inquisitors Prayer grants max health.
Martyrdom and Pity the Frail increases self healing.
Indulgence gives move speed.
Survivability and mobility lead to increased damage opportunity.

Though she no longer has Unwavering Faith’s shielding but who else was using that besides me anyway

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The changes reduced the mana cost of spreading Zeal around to the whole team.

Maybe I am just ungrateful but when even at absolute best this only means a mana cost decrease of 30 so I think my point very much stands. Oh wow, instead of burning away 85% of her entire mana pool in 4 seconds she only does 80%. What a glorious change!
And that’s theorizing the best possible scenario. At average you’d hardly use Desperate Plea more than 3 times at once. In which case your mana expediture is the exact same as before. Worse, you actually spend more mana when you heal only one or two targets.

So yeah, how exactly they toned down her mana consumption, again?

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Did I say they toned it down across the board?
She only really has mana issues when she gets to high stacks of desperation. They toned down THAT in exchange for making her pay a bit more when she doesn’t GOD HEAL the entire team.
She still has radiance.

I could see them maybe reducing the mana cost of Clemency, since a long cooldown ability that only heals an ally SHOULD be more mana efficient than than doing the same thing while doing damage and healing more, but Clemency also avoids the risk associated with it.

You spend more mana to apply Zeal, but 2 of her level 1 increase her potential damage output which means the marks average higher healing. (Flame was nerfed in the aoe CC combo scenario, but buffed across the board elsewhere) and the third allows her to increase her max mana.
Two of her level 4 talents offer her potential to increase her damage.

She has a 0.5 second cooldown heal, there’s a draw back. Learn to deal with it or don’t play her, it’s that easy.

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All this said - please know that we are here listening and thinking about all of the feedback you are giving us. Thank you for sharing your passion and feelings about Whitemane - please keep doing so!

Jopefully we will see actually changes on this on monday/tuesday which are actually regarding the mechanic feedback and not only some number tweaks.

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unlikely.

I suspect we might see some number tweaks and a “we will have an update in the next patch changing mechanics/talents heavily”.

I don’t see how a week would be enough time to get anything meaningful done.

Unless they push back her rework launching until the next big patch (3 weeks), perhaps?

That would be interesting and sounds possible.

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Getting out a rework in that state and say “we´ll fix the hero in three weeks” is not exactly a good thing to do.

I sure hope for that.

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No one ever got that privilege even heroes changes as controvertial as the whole stealth heroes cast.
No way WM gets a pass.

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her balance and ability might actually be fine.

I understand that their is community dislike towards how they’ve changed her.

But if she is balanced, well, she may well be balanced?

In which case, the “state” of the rework is balanced and viable and NOT LIKE THE OLD WHITEMANE.

The “state” of the rework is also hated my vocal Whitemane mains on forums and reddit.

Which still isn’t necessarily a reason to not release it.
Especially if they dislike how the current whitemane functions, and there is no way to easily fix the things that the vocal part of the community hates.

And honestly, there was a hero that had one big broken part of his hero that was greatly nerfed (after already being the worst build) and they didn’t even try to fix it until multiple patches after release. Abathur.

Given the issue is with the lack of a talent tier or rather about how her mana-management has really fallen off, I don’t see why a talent tier or even slapping on mana regeneration talents ended up attached to talents on an early tier being a fix that could be done soon.