Did anything change recently that would make my PC unable to play HotS?

i found out the reason. turns out my ISP was giving me super slow internet when i am paying for high speed…its fixed and the game runs normal now

Well, I can still play the game, but it freezes and stutters unless I lower graphics settings to the lowest setting. Up until recently I played hots on extreme/ultra and it was quite smooth. Is it possible my PC could suddenly get too old? Seems more likely the game has added some increased textures or something, I really don’t know. On my end I have made sure my drives are clean, my software and drivers are all up to date as well as O/S.

Without posting your DXdiag it is hard to say.

What I can say is that it works perfectly for me on an absolutely ancient I7 920 with NVidia 760 GTX. Pretty much maxed out at 1080p except some CPU dependent settings.

If using an NVidia GPU it might be driver related. People are reporting stuttering with some recent driver versions, specifically those intended for the RTX 2000 series of cards.

Otherwise it is likely network connectivity related. Running the support recommended network connectivity tests with the HotS servers is recommended. One wants reliable sub 100ms ping with 0% packet loss at all times for the best play experience.

This is a recent change: