You haven’t paid much attention have you? Mists of Pandaria’s second last patch, War Crimes, and especially Battle for Azeroth. He’s done a lot. Also has a specially tailored model (armour set mostly), which Cairne never got.
We just had a Warcraft hero though, and prior to him it was Diablo, so I’m banking on Starcraft or Overwatch. Possibly Starcraft, actually, based on the current bundle. Could mean the team’s in a Starcraft mood.
My top wishlist of new heroes to be added, in no particular order, is.
Arcturus Mengsk
Dr. Narud
General Warfield
Selendis
Lady Vashj
Vol’jin
Gelbin Mekkatorque
Fandral Staghelm
Archbishop Lazarus
Baal
Andariel
Zoltun Kulle
We could easily have Stetmann + Gary, just like Rexxar + Misha
What I want:
From WOW:
From Diablo:
From SC:
From OW:
Andariel might be difficult. Diablo 2 was rated M, Heroes is rated T. Andariel would require design modifications I think as a result. But I do still want to see the various groups be completed (Angiris Council, Seven Evils, Elemental Lords, etc.).
What would Stetman even do?
He could be a very unique terran healer than combines zerg and protoss tech to amplify his supportive capabilities, all through the glorious effort of research.
Hmm… He could go a lot of ways, likely Support to contrast Lucio and either Zagara or the Vikings as part buff-based Support and part ultra-laner support, though he could instead mono-focus on one side or the other.
Gary’s the first big question. The two likely methods are as a D.Va-like “shell” or a secondary Hero like the Vikings, while the differences would obviously have Gary be more durable than Stetmann, but either one could focus on either end of the range/strength dichotomy quite easily. Access could be either baseline or a Heroic, and the Heroic could be a passive change rather than a summon.
The second question is the Mecha Swarm. If Gary is baseline, then Stetmann could instead use Mecha Zerg for similar effects to Gary’s abilities, such as summoning a few Mecha Banelings instead of launching E-Gorbs. The Mecha-Swarm could instead be confined to Talents, with maybe Mecha-Zerglings baseline for The Best Oil to trigger. Stetmann summons, Gary respawns?
There’s also the matter of what kind of abilities could be made up specifically for HotS for Stetmann that aren’t related to the Mecha-Swarm co-op commander. And what Talents could do.
We could use more paladins than just two. Liadrin, Tirion, and Turalyon fit this bill exceptionally well, even if their paladin moves are different. But we’ll have to wait and see.
Two out of three of your suggestions are just discount Uther.
We already have Uther. We don’t need more Uthers.
There is no ‘just’ here. Tirion and Turalyon are going to be their own seperate heroes if you ask me.
Their own separate heroes, who bring the same themes and body shape as one we already have.
They’re just discount Uther, and if they ever make it in game it should be as skins for him so the new hero can be saved for people who actually bring something new to the table.
I’m not going to let you correct me on this.
Except that Uther is intended to be primarily representative of the WC3 Paladin, while the Holy Paladin kit in WoW has had more than enough tools throughout its history to make another two Healers out of it.
Additionally, Tirion Fordring is a shoe-in for a Bruiser or Melee Assassin based on the Retribution spec, as his significance is about carving up loads of Undead with Ashbringer, and Turalyon could very much be used for the Protection spec.
They could, but we could also just make every single named elf a character with their own kit. That doesn’t mean we should.
Both Tirion and Turalyon are standard issue human male paladins. We already have one of those, Neither of them bring anything new to the table thematically.
I’d argue that theme is a lot more than a character’s general class, race, and gender. Weapons(Book & Hammer versus the Ashbringer or Turalyon’s sword), armor(The Argent Crusade tabard would certainly go a long way to making Tirion easily identifiable.), any differences between characters within a similar class(Holy versus Retribution versus… Protection? I’m not too familiar with Turalyon), ability visuals(Small waves of light versus waves of holy fire, while similar, would still be different)… I’d say, thematically? They’re pretty distinct from Uther despite surface similarities.
Neither would anything else. A paladin is a paladin. Yrel’s abilities could have easily fit Uther or anyone. Talent names aside, she didn’t bring anything unique from the Hand of Argus or any other draenei paladin orders.
There’s a huge difference between “hard to kill healer” (Uther), “vengeful pain-train” (Retribution spec) and “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” (Protection spec). And there’s a whole lot of ways to shuffle mechanics to get unique kits for more characters to get going.
And there are, in fact, some noticeable character differences between Uther, Turalyon and Tirion, they aren’t equally archetypal representations of the open-source fantasy concept of “Paladin.” Granted, Retribution could just as easily be handled by a Blood Knight (the bluntly-named Blood Elf Paladins), with a somewhat better thematic fit than Tirion, but there’s enough abilities to implement to have both.
First off, Uther’s the iconic for the Warcraft 3 Paladin courtesy of being the only one who’s worth mentioning for more than one mission that isn’t Arthas. Who is kinda busy being the Lich King. So no, Yrel’s abilities couldn’t have fit Uther, because he was pretty much stuck being an implementation of WC3’s Paladin hero unit, and they’ve spent a lot of time linking the Holy Paladin spec in WoW to him, so he’d have to double down on the healing.
Also, Yrel’s kit actually has virtually nothing to do with what Paladins do in WoW outside some general number outcomes, as Protection Paladins actually do have the secondary healing thing going on and have been the AoE tanks (laning being the best MOBA conterpart) from the day they were functioning as tanks (Vanilla class balance was trash).
We’re talking about races though. As far as race goes, a non-human wouldn’t bring anything a human couldn’t (and hasn’t so far). Or at least anything significant. Individual story/lore is another matter.
I didn’t say they did. Like I said before, I’m talking about race.
…In case you’re completely ignorant of Warcraft lore, the races actually do have goddamn massive group identity situations. Which weigh heavily on many of their major lore characters. Liadrin’s character arc is entirely rooted in what happened to Quel’thalas at large, on every level. A non-Blood Elf by definition does not have many of those themes.
And that’s setting aside the blatant counterexample of the Greater and Lesser Evils of Diablo, where who and what are definitionally inseparable, same with the Angeris Council. As well as Cho’Gall’s kit being fundamentally reliant on Cho and Gall being two minds of skilled spellcasters stuck in one body, something otherwise seen solely in Protoss Archons, who have utterly different abilities. There’s tons of stuff Blizzard’s done that makes non-human able to be extremely bloody important, and they’ve actually used that pretty often.