Are you still mad about getting only so few Heroes a Year?
League of Legends gets by far more Heroes per Year than HotS but there are releases, that doesn’t fit at all and don’t get percieved well.
Particularly the last two releases got negative feedback:
Samira for possible gamebreaking design and power creep and
Seraphine for being a mockup of other Heroes (mainly Sona) and don’t fitting in the lore at all.
I don’t know how you see this, I’m glad we don’t get Heroes on a monthly base that are bad designed, overtuned or over-hasty released.
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I’m glad we don’t get a lot of balancing messes often, but I do miss new Heroes and think it’s pretty much time for a new one.
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Nope… we get heroes whenever they feel like it that are bad designed, overtuned and incomplete when released.
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They should be shooting for around 3-4 new heroes a year imo. No more no less.
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If we had the huge number of heroes LoL had you’d have a point
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I’m totally up for a new Hero, but I prefer it when Blizzard take the time to design a good and useful Hero, that isn’t a mash up of other already implemented Ideas.
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Riot Games got a full team of artists and programmers (With some of them being former HoTS developers). That’s why they release champions this fast.
Seraphine is too similar to Sona as many people mentioned.
But the heroes dev team, despite their lack of members, still releases more balanced heroes than LoL.
(Also Am I the only one who feels like Samira’s ult is similar to Valla’s Strafe?)
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quality over quantity, imo. LoL has a redundancy issue which HotS has thus far managed to largely avoid.
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Considering Blizz has mostly abandoned this game to its fate, I’m surprised we got any new heroes since they jumped ship and left us with a skeleton crew.
Kudos to the few devs still working on this though!
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Since Morales is in the game, I don’t think we’ll ever get Mercy…
this is for me the proof, they haven’t abandoned the game
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Well I mean not abandoned in the sense that it’s over, but Blizzard did say that HotS was no longer a major focus and that they pulled most devs from the game, in addition to shutting down the professional scene.
There have been some messy patches and controversial design decisions but on a long term the balancing work of Blizzard is way better than everything Riot has ever achieved.
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yea, part of the issue for games with large rosters tends to be how they continue to make something ‘unique’
Dota 2 is also often compared to HotS but most of the initial roster was based around the game mirroring heroes on either side and then spending some time a decade later to try to then make a given hero seem more unique compared to its peers. (and having years between ‘new’ hero releases between dota 1 and dota 2)
Part of the downside of HotS design is that heroes are narrowed to a specific role and don’t ‘fill’ in the same way Lol/Dota can with items, so the capacity to shift particular heroes based on their item choices causes a bigger concern for redundancy for HotS heroes. Tychus, for example, wasn’t initially a tank-buster hero and zul’jin didn’t have his baseline quest.
Item variety isn’t quite the same as talent variety as getting items is a form of resource management so the distinction becomes more evident in HotS based on stuff like Gazlowe switching away from mana, and only needing to really manage his scrap count.
I do think if hots stressed a few more unique resource styles and had talents be a trade of power (boost one thing, reduce another, but net gain overall) that would help with some of the ‘unique’ build aspect for hero design.
edit note: there’s a similar complication for Fighting Games; players love getting new additions, but once the hype of the initial release happens, it’s not uncommon for select characters to fall into the massively unused section, which then questions some of the emphasis placed on developing something ‘new’, if then doesn’t see any play. But part of that is also due to Fighting Games constantly making new sequels and then reworking existing staples.
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Which should be pretty easy as they have two other major mobas to get unique kits that hots heroes don’t have yet
Other mobas can see hots heroes and there are still unique abilities hots has that other mobas can use if they’re running out of ideas
Unless they change her kit to make her unique from Morales (Like how they did with Mei). But she won’t be the next hero for sure.
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I’d even settle for 2 heroes a year if this particular quality standard is met.
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I’m one of the people that want “MOAR heroes” at all costs even if I won’t even use the heroes
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?
What brought this on?
I don’t think you can really compare the two, given the specifics of each dev team. The release schedule right now is a glacier, while a monthly one is the opposite. There is a balance between the two.
And since we’re talking about the specifics, I think 2018 had a pretty good cadence (9 in the year). If memory serves, most of those releases were met with positive reception. Personally, any less than 4 is too little.
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