Heroes of the Storm Balance Patch Notes - July 20, 2021

General Discussion
64

Yes, and each takedown is 1 point. where getting the highest of the game in the categories (siege, hero damage, xp) is 2, and highest on team is 1. Death timer reduces your score based on time spent dead, where this is applied percentagewise.
As a game can easily have 30 takedowns on 1 side. This dominates all the scoring together with time spent dead (which in the late game does affect quite a bit as 1 minute dead in a 20 minute game is already 5% - or 1.5 takedown in the 30 kills example).

They got hit the hardest. But werent the only one. All low waveclear heroes currently suffer as they become very incapable of proper soaking when it turns into a 1v2. And yes, this is less than 10 heroes. But that doesnt mean it isnt negative. Soaking should be rewarding towards all heroes.

Going QM as nova and facing horrible teammates is a very common thing.
then again, you went nova… which might be considered equaly horrible

But still, QM should be decent for all heroes, and having some flexibility in tasks is therefor nice. Even if suboptimal. Soaking is however one of those things that just should be rewarding in order to get players to do so.

This is a complete nonsense comment. Because it is irrelevant to the issue. Soaking should especialy be rewarding on lower ranks, as thats where you want to teach the importance of soaking.
And although to a certain degree it still is, popular bronze heroes should generaly not suffer as much (these are the typical heroes that are bad at waveclear and only work for PvP).

I could even say that master/GM knowledge is counter productive towards understanding bronze/silver. Because those players play a completely diffirent game, just because a lot of skill aspects simply do not exist there.

Rank doesnt say anything for everything. And i had personal experience at balancing mvm missions in team fortress to get an idea of how diffirent skill levels are. In my map it was extremely difficult to make missions for the easiest mode, just because you need to balance towards the clueless. And to a certain degree that comes down to guiding them, and not overload them with stuff that they just cant follow. Again, at the lowest skill levels they play a diffirent game.

And on a side note, the last change in which XP stays longer is to me the positive change it needed in order to push those players to soak. It could still be better, but at least it provides the teaching aspect. So its not too bad entirely anymore. Its now more of a factor of which benefits do you consider more important.

So before you misunderstand me here. I do like that they tried changing it, and the current approach is an improvement. Its however currently not as optimal as it could be. And thats because of those situational cases.

65

I couldn’t care less what you think is counterproductive.
Been smurfing those ranks more than enough times to know exactly how to play and get out of them.

And yes rank has ALOT to say, because your giving out tips and tricks on matters you don’t get, and when your faced with someone who knows they don’t work and that knows what works, you go up against it.
If your gonna go against something that works, then you gotta put your claims in a place.
Once you start handing out ways to play, your litteraly giving players insentive to play like you suggest.
Hence why my teamfight post was for education, not for arguments sake on how you “feel” about the subject, because i couldn’t care less how you feel on the matter.
What works, works.

Laning shouldn’t be rewarding for all heroes if your faced vs someone whos good at it.
A nova shouldn’t be dominating a lane vs a lane bully of equal skill.
You might aswell turn every hero in the same hero for the sake of balancing the game then.

Plz stop, your being counterproductive and encouraging players to play like baboons for 20mins.
I wouldn’t be able to get MvPs straight if what your claiming here is true at all, there are so many criterias that if you fight 24/7, your losing out on all the other 30 or 40 points on the list, just stop.

The only part we agree on, because XP was confusing before the changes, nobody had a clue, i saw several posts about camps giving XP and camps not giving XP, range of soaks and all kinds of posts that was just missleading to a point wher enobody knew what was true.
Watching players picks “junglers” was even a thing in the first seasons, til they realized how silly that was.

This isn’t team fortress, stop.

66

A GM is in general bad at giving tips towards bronze, because they simply dont understand the bronze struggles. A gold player is generaly better at doing that, because they often still face similar issues regarding some of the higher macroplay, but at least are often better capable of giving lower difficulty improvements, because they faced those themselve.

Dominating is not what i ask. I only think that its not worth it for a nova to get less than a minion worth of XP per wave while defending at the wall against a hero she cant face. She might aswel not be there at all. Getting some sort of compensation for at least being there is quite essential at making it rewarding to still stay there. Thats what the XP can do.

At Diamond+ takedowns become a lesser factor, because there are less takedowns in the first place. People are much better capable of staying alive. And thats when the other factors do matter.

But in lower level games, a lot of takedowns happen because people do not retreat early.

Anyway, as long as the MVP status is considered useless by many, thats at least something. But i do see plenty of people that purely care about MVP, and instead of trying to improve, they simply refuse because ‘i get MVP, i am better’-mentality.

This is about getting an idea of how far skill levels can be apart, and the mindset that goes along with it. And what sort of struggles you can face at balancing that. And because i have been doing level design for that, i used that as example.

Balance is not a simple thing. Even if you are a GM in this game, it doesnt say anything about knowledge about balancing either. Balancing games is a skill on its own.

2 Likes
67

Overall, yes, but mostly because you left out the second change to his E, which is that you no longer self-root while channeling it. This means that while the channel is a bit longer, he can be moving while channeling, giving him more mobility (which he sorely needed) and somewhat unintuitively, he has a longer range on his Q+E combos. I notice this the most on reverse swaps, but the godswap is buffed, as well as the standard non-combo’d swap, as you can be moving towards your target as it channels.

He feels a lot more fluid to play in general, between the E changes and the extra range baseline on W.

68

Yes this is what I want pleeth

Appreciate the other changes too

1 Like
69

Still not included Valeera, Zarya, and Abathur as recent Balance patch without any of Melee Assassin and Support heroes, as I waiting for weeks to taken as Yrel and Nova also big rework, in this patch Jaina have good one.

70

Still wont balance the match making and deal with trolls. Another patch wasted.

71

Finally uninstalling this game. The new Zagara changes make her so unbelievably broken. Almost as unfun to play against as Abathur.

72

Exaggeration. Zagara is indeed a powerful assassine, but I wouldn’t say she is “unbelievable broken”. Her only escape is still her movement speed that comes from her trait and her wide range, but if you can catch her, she’s dead. There are more than enough mobile heroes to achieve that. It seems it’s an l2p issue.

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73

Considering she’s over 60% win rate currently with a 66% popularity, I think it’s safe to say she’s busted and it’s not an exaggeration. Who woulda thought looking at the patch notes?

74

Isn’t it too early to tell, if that’s actually the case? But even, if you’re right, then she will get the nerf bat sooner or later like Valla or Falstad. At least I like to face more Zagara in the meta.

EDIT:
Don’t get me wrong, Volun. I don’t want to defend Zagara, if she is really op, but I just dislike the way how RobotRob critizise heroes he don’t like to face, it’s just whining and not a fair way to discuss his point of view.

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75

I don’t necessarily like the way he’s so dramatic either, and I love the slug, but let’s also be real, no one likes facing blatantly OP heroes.

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76

I already knew Zagara was going to be broken when I saw her patch notes and it was all buffs… They didn’t even fix the fundamental design flaw that actually hinders her from getting any buffs in the first place

3 Likes
77

Ironically I played a finished game some minutes ago, where I played Genji vs Zagara. I killed her multiple times, but we lost it, because enemys had more ranges and we’re more melees, including Murky vs the Butcher. My team end up feeding too hard. But I wouldn’t say Zag was the problem. :stuck_out_tongue:

78

She is still weak againts her counters. Dont forget about that. Its just her dmg that has sky rocket a bit.

1 Like
79

I hope someone at Blizzard’s reading this topic.

Can you, please, fix this or at least address it not being fixed since the firs report? Is macOS support frozen? Based on the patch notes, some work is being done for HoTS. Can the development team take a look at it again?

Thank you.

1 Like
80

back in 2017, Overwatch announced it wasn’t going to get a mac version. While there hasn’t been an explicit statement detailing the particulars, the ‘technical reasons’ stated seems to have been more prophetic than not as other games since then had to announce dropping support for mac versions of their games (paladins, some games through steam, etc)

It probably should have been fairly telling that the blue responses in that topic shifted to asking if any updates from Apple were helping resolve the issue. I’d venture that you, and others in that topic, haven’t been reading tech articles about some of the x32 support dropping, OpenGL depreciations, and other things that have happened since 2017 since it’s a whole lot easier to just keep repeating the same blame game in that topic for months to years on end.

Since Apple announced they’re going to transition away from Intel components (in 2020) that can frustrate attempts to reconcile issues with 2012 and on machines for ones that will be using Apples own chips instead, esp since the change could/should make it easier to bridge the development gap between iOS and Mac OS. While support for intel-based machines can continue for a few years, for stuff that’s already having problematic support as is…

2 Likes
81

You must defeat Shenlong to stand a chance!

82

Well, it makes a lot more sense to me now. Thank you. However, they should’ve definitely posted a blue text to make it clear for the people that joined the community fairly recently or simply never cared about such things as Apple supporting their products. This is something I see to be the right move, especially when it’s not Blizzard who is able to affect it. Simply address it for everyone asking, so that they stop being concerned. If I were the person responsible, I’d definitely just make a post that’d state the reasons.

In my opinion, silence just makes it worse and motivates people to post on forums, create tickets etc. In the end, it’s a waste of time for the Blizzard employees, that have to chat with people about it and respond to the tickets. The way I see it, addressing it would simply save them money due to staff having to process fairly less data. This is quite complicated, but I don’t get why they wouldn’t make such an obvious decision that would prevent all of the stated above.

In my defence, I really don’t think a customer is obliged to be up to date with whatever is going on in the industry.

Although, it seems like a good time to actually Boot Camp it and never play on macOS again :slight_smile: If Apple is this focused on M1 and its iOS apps support, I don’t see why I should invest in this company anymore. There have been already quite a lot of things that made me regret buying their PC.

83

To my notice, Diablo 4 and D2R don’t list mac as porting options, so that seems to be consistent with Overwatch.

Blizz could make an outright statement and admit they’re playing the waiting game, but by having an official stance, it means they’ll be held accountable to it too. That is, if they say they’re going to wait and see, then people may expect them to actually dev into it after the transition happens on newer macs and not just take it as a ‘we have to wait and see’.

However, Diablo immortal is coming to iOS, so blizz isn’t cutting all ties with Apple, it just seems that the issue has been with the desktops.