With all the recent updates Blizz has been doing to their other games, breaking them and whatnot, the fact that HotS doesn’t receive regular updates anymore has, in my opinion, made HotS blizzards best game!
Edit:
I was mostly making a joke about how blizzard games suck now, and the best blizzard has to offer is old content with no new updates.
But it’s definitely interesting to see how many people still love this game.
Honest opinion: I hope they bring back a crew to HotS. It really is my favorite blizzard game, even though i really dont play any blizz games anymore except on very rare occasion.
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I really like starcraft. But yes I can confidently say I’ve played more hots than any other blizzard game with the exception of WoW because it was quite the phenomenon of its time.
Cant say hots is the best but I can surely say its at least second best blizz game to me. Which is still pretty damn good.
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HotS was the most balanced (so in a category best) Blizz game even when it was regularly updated and changed.
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Note: the bar for this is somewhere in Hell.
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My playing Blizzard games is now like 90% HotS, 9% WoW, 1% rest. What is preaty bad. When was for me like 35% HotS, 30% WoW, 20% Diablo, 10% HS, 4% OW and 1% rest.
In this moment i can only wait if Johanna Faries and MS start do somethink or if they dont wake up soon they will lose me like a lot other players.
Johanna Faries is almost 2 weeks President and there is still not any info what will be. In this part was Mike Ybarra more active.
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I love the idea of a MOBA.
PVE & PVP in a pretty good balance. I think HOTS does it better than the rest.
- Sound design - Amazing
- Graphics - Pretty good
- Game length - About right
- Various maps - Yes please
- Talents - While not overly complicated does have some depth
I don’t like that they have all but abandoned HOTS but it’s in a pretty good spot EXCEPT for obviously low players numbers AND Smurfing.
A few of us that like playing SL together have swapped from ANZ to NA. And we started running into other former ANZ players we thought had quit.
Talking to a few it was down to the toxicity (which sucks but seen this in all MOBAs), Smurfing and coming against the same toxic smurfs.
People are leaving blizz games IMO and this is probably in one of the best spot in terms of actual gameplay and people wanting to play.
I’m a wow player as well but there seems to be more people only hanging on for the sunk cost fallacy or nostalgia.
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You’ve said this a few times now, and I don’t know where it comes from. HOTS was terribly balanced during many of its time periods. It’s decent now, at least in comparison to how atrocious it had been for a long time, but could definitely be better.
SC1: BW was probably its best balanced game.
The cool thing about Blizzard that made it different from other companies back then was that it continued supporting and balancing their games with free updates. B.net really changed how people could continue obsessing over a game with other people.
For me personally, WC3: FT is still my favorite. But HOTS is still great and something I still play for a variety of reasons. It’s low time commitment, team oriented combat with supports, and battles that don’t end too fast, with generally good diversity in how games play out (from comp choices, talents, maps).
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It had some bad times, but it wasn’t the norm.
And as if other games were always sunshine.
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IMO most of the unbalanced times I noticed were normally on hero release.
< Puts on tin foil hat >
I think it has to do with making new heroes more appealing during the 2 weeks where they are both OP and only available for gems
< Takes off tin foil hat >
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That’s quite the rose colored goggles to say it wasn’t the “norm”. I guess it depends on what period you’re talking about. It was probably at its best when they were doing like bi weekly patches. People were complaining about how OP Tyrande/Diablo was when they had like 54% win rate. Oh how I wish for those days. It was pretty bad a lot of the time post Li-Ming, but it got even worse as they dropped HGC.
And yeah, some games like SC are actually really well balanced to the point that communities still play them over the sequel. So if you’re just looking for examples, it’s actually not farfetched, some games are actually quite the sunshine. But those are more the outliers as most games usually have some degree of imbalance. But to say the balance in HOTS balance is the best is downright baffling. What was particularly egregious about HOTS balance is the magnitude of how bad the balance was (60-70% win rate heroes) and for how long it took them to fix it and how consistently each new patch created new balance problems because they just wanted the new heroes/reworks to be OP even if it made no sense.
Like even Rehgar, our last real rework that made him the new king. He was at like barely sub 50% when they reworked him. So what do you do with a hero that is almost balanced? Let’s buff the $#! out of him to where he’s 65+%.
Well, they would deliberately make them even if they weren’t sometimes. Some heroes/reworks came out under. Like I remember all the people thinking the Gazlowe rework was gonna be so good. I knew it wasn’t going to be and his initial win rate data was actually lower than prerework (I think his old win rate was like 51% and rework it was 47%). So, what did Blizzard do? Let’s undo ALL the safeguards we put in place in the design process even tough we were pretty close. Same with Cassia, yes, she’s weak, but oh let’s give Cassia a BUNCH of HP, because on a hero that has armor, that doesn’t have any compounding effects.
I agree, with some qualifications. Some heroes were released too strong, such as Li-Ming, some were underpowered, Zarya (?). The other factor, was players working out how other heroes played with/against these new heroes, there was always a learning curve.
lol, you’re not wrong there. I had friends who were whales and would buy the entire hero/skin/mount bundles and pay real money, in particular if the hero was considered strong/broken. This stopped after 2.0., where you could just forge everything for free, they always had enough gold on hand to buy the hero.
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I was a beta tester during Diablo 3. I cannot remember it, I am pretty sure my brain blocked out how horrible it was. Unfortunately, I still remember Diablo 3’s vanilla Inferno difficulty. I still get flashbacks from time to time of…everything. Of everything. So many horrid experiences. It was like Dark Souls and one of those awful Korean grindfest games had a one night stand with the baby dropped off at an orphanage, which burned down in a mysterious fire. The only thing remotely close to balance was how well you balanced your health bar between full and dead.
I haven’t played it in years, but the game is not too dissimilar in WoW in how one or two classes will blow the others out of the water. What is worse with Diablo 3 is that there is zdps classes and what are called rat races (if my memory is right) that focus on zooming through greater rifts as much as possible. Classes get rotated around like hot dogs and chicken wings in a gas station in balance.
So many broken moments in that game with the last one I can recall being the interaction between Demon Hunter’s one talent and the Necromancer’s. I cannot recall-nor care too look it up–what it was that was done, but used together were putting up damage numbers that made the United States national debt look like pocket change.
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Well, it was a beta test. All beta tests are kind of like that. That’s part of the reason why you have one, to get more data to a broader swath of players that can help you fix what needs to be fixed. In the design phase, you generally want to throw fun stuff onto the wall even if it breaks the game. The problem is once a game hits live and you fail to change anything, then you’ve just habituated players to imbalance and then people whine when things get nerfed.
I only played Diablo 3 when it was released, but yeah, it was probably my worst Blizzard experience. I heard it got much better in the expansion, but I didn’t need to indulge in that. It’s not a game for me. It’s a PVE game that focuses on grinding for items. I enjoy group based PvP games. The director at the time also openly mocked how PvP balance wouldn’t affect the PvE, even though Diablo 2 had quite the pvp community. If this was coming straight from the director’s mouth who had no problem insulting part of its fans, I didn’t need to take any further part in it.
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That and the reworks that came to specific heroes. Looking at you Falstad/Zag.
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It’s really not that well balanced now though
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It did eventually get better, but it took it a while, if I recall correctly at least a year. They did away with Inferno for Monster Power which scaled from 1 to 10 which is debatable but I feel that was the game’s hayday in terms of theorycrafting builds, especially near the end after the Skorn was nerfed (that axe was OP during those days) and afterward the developers shafted home brew builds with sets.
Thereafter it went downhill in terms of brainstorming. They did have highlights for certain builds (I used the Return Fire Crusader build for a while) but that eventually went away as the Greater Rift levels climbed further and further with class sets being released.
There was a lot of theorycrafting, especially during Inferno. The barbarian whirlwhind build back when Battle Rage: Into the Fray worked differently along with Wrath of the Berserker allowed infinite uptime was needed to counter Izual.
For those that never experienced that nightmare, Izual was an absolute terror to deal with that made you control+alt+delete your character if you screwed up for even a heartbeat. He nearly had 100% uptime on freezing people if he caught them and did tremendous amounts of damage to frozen enemies no matter how well equipped they were. If he didn’t one shot you, he just needed to tap you with his mace to finish you off. His AoE was ridiculous, and if you did not kill him in a certain time limit he would carpet bomb the area until either he or you died…take a guess which happened more often. Back then every boss and certain enemies had rage timers, but his was one that always insta-killed with no room to fudge your way through. It you did not use your character’s unstoppable, he would freeze you (his arena wide AoE was instant so good luck countering it) to then run you over like an eighteen wheel plowing over some poor critter on a highway. He made Diablo and just about every other boss look like chumps in comparison.
Then there were the Elite and Champion mobs…that had rage timers, and they didn’t have restrictions on what prefixes they could have. You don’t like the combination of Wallers, Fire Chains, Ice Orbs, and Arcane Orbs? Sucks to be you because you just ran into a group of Elite wasps with those prefixs in Act II with no way to corner them. Don’t kill them? Hope you like bleeding to death, becaue that rage timer just kicked in. Oh look at that champion over there with Waller, Arcane Orb, Invincible Minions, and Inferno. Be sure to wave at them before they pull a Grand Master Probius in zoning you all the way back to the starting area.
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I could try to break down every patch and see how good/bad was the overall balance, but I think none of us could do that reliably and precisely.
But HotS always had every Hero as playable (at least by their rare niche main masters) and every Hero could be handled (even the most broken monster).
Most the times every Hero was between 45-55% wr except a few outliners like Medivh.
And if they broke a Hero, they fixed them with 1-2 patches.
HotS never had gem-only periods. The Heroes just cost 15k gold instead of 10k.
And there were breakdowns of releases, a fair amount was underpowered or just fine (not up or op).
But it’s true, that the devs aimed higher than lower powerwise, because they couldn’t get enough reliable data if no one was willing to play the new Hero because “meh”.
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Amen. Objectively looking back at all the games, how old i was at the time, how much i played each game, I have to say that HoTS is also my favourite. To me, it’s the game that cherry picked all the things i loved about the other games.
It sure was and im glad to have been a part of it. Now I look back and see the game for its flaws.
- so much of my eye ball time was spent looking at the UI as i looked at the healing grid, or spell cooldowns. Meanwhile, my flashy looking character is obviously standing in the fire. HoTS fixed that. The UI is simple and my eyeballs are making decisions based on what i see on the battlefield.
- i also loved dungeons / raiding. The concept of playing a character that has strengths and weaknesses and together, with teamwork you complement each other to overcome a common goal. HoTS keeps this aspect that i love.
- Loot is a big component of WoW, but it’s also a road block to playing the content i actually enjoy: dungeons and raiding. HoTS fixes this with no stat gains from loot. Pick Kaelthas, his power is limited only by your capabilities.
Indeed it was. My only problem was that it was crazy slow on my computer at the time. Not the game’s fault, but it did diminish my personal experience with the game. Plus I was at uni when WC3 came out so my commitments to video games were…limited (no regrets there)
Speaking of “everything”, this may sound controversial, but i actually liked the concept of having an Auction House. D2 was a brilliant game and holds a special place in my heart, but my one gripe was that gold was near useless in that game. NPCs sold weapons that were crazy expensive but still incredibly weak. Why even have that as a feature? To this day D4 has NPCs that sell crap for really expensive. Why? The only good place for gold in D2 was gambling…urg. Gold was so crap that players came up with a new currency of rune trading.
I liked the AH in D3 because it acted as a way to compensate for bad luck. If good loot didn’t drop from monsters then you could grind gold to eventually fill those item slots.
The big downside to AH (real life money aside), was that as time passed more players killed more monsters and produced more items. However, there was no sort of Bind on Equip type mechanic to remove items from the system.
It’s like printing money, but no money leaving the system which devalues your currency. Eventually, items on the AH got better and better for cheaper and cheaper. This meant that the loot dropped from monsters was unrewarding as you kitted out your character just by buying stuff from the AH.
TL;DR: Good idea implemented poorly.
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I play a lot as Morales, and he is often hated for his medevac, although he often saves lives, dear developers, please strengthen the medevac a little, please add the health of the ship, and armor after its destruction. This won’t change the balance much, but it will add interest to this skill.