Reworking Lt. Morales

Morales has always been one of those heroes who wasn’t in desperate need of a rework but was a niche hero that not everyone enjoyed.
My main goals here were recuse some of her down time and give her some more utility. As well as reworking medivac to make it more widely applicable. I also wanted to overall buff her just a bit as she does fall behind every other healer at the moment.


Morales rework

Trait
Caduceus Reactor
While channeling Healing Beam, Lt. Morales regenerates 2% of her maximum Health per second. After not being active for 2 seconds, regenerate 5 Energy per second.
Added functionality: toggle to increase the healing of healing beam to 172 at the cost of 8 energy per second.

(Energy regeneration reduced from 6 to 5)

Q
Healing Beam
Heal target ally for 73 Health per second as long as they are in range.

(Energy cost moved to trait, Healing per second reduced from 172 to 73.)

W
Safeguard
Cooldown: 11 seconds
Grant target ally Hero 35 Armor for 3 seconds.
Added functionality: also heals the target for 140.

E
Displacement Grenade
Cooldown: 12 seconds
Fire a grenade that can be manually detonated, dealing 208 damage to nearby enemies and knocking them away.
(Unchanged)

R1 stim
Stim Drone
Cooldown: 90 seconds
Grant an allied Hero 75% Attack Speed and 25% Movement Speed for 10 seconds.
(Unchanged)

R2 medivac
Medivac Dropship
Cooldown: 100 seconds
Completely changed: Morales summons a medivac over 1.25 seconds that she then pilots for 12 seconds.
While piloting the medivac, Morales gains 30% movement speed and can move over terrain. Morales retains her basic abilities but cant basic attack.
Allies can right click the medivac to get in and can get out at any time. While in the medivac, Morales and allies heal for 150 a second.

But Y tho?

The biggest complaints I see with Morales are with Healing Beam and Safeguard not being exciting enough and overall feeling like a heal bot.
The change to heal beam should help you feel less worthless when you run out of energy. Energy management is still important here as toggling your trait on and off is where the big healing comes from. As a tradeoff for infinite healing, energy generation has been reduced overall.
The change to Safeguard is pretty small all things considered but I’m fairly confident that seeing green numbers pop up is all it really needs to feel better. Many of the safeguard talents have also been changed.
Finally, I’m not totally confident in this new medivac but this should make it more useful when you get a team that can’t use stim drone as well as you’d like while still being able to ferry people across the map to some extent.

Talents

Level 1

Scanner sweep
Cooldown: 60 seconds.
Active: reveal a small area on the map for 3 seconds.
Passive: Increase Attack Range by 1.1, and Basic Attacks against Heroes generate 4 Energy.

Life Support
Generate 2 Energy each time Safeguard reduces damage, up to a maximum of 15 Energy per use and Caduceus Reactor also empowers safeguards heal by 50%.
(Max energy gained reduced from 20 to 15)

Clear!
Displacement Grenade generates 3 energy per hit.
❢ Quest: Hit Heroes with Displacement Grenade.
❢ Reward: After hitting 15 Heroes, reduce the cooldown of Displacement Grenade from 12 seconds to 9 seconds.
❢ Reward: After hitting 30 Heroes, increase the detonation area of Displacement Grenade by 25%.

But Y tho?

I don’t know about you but I miss some of those old vision talents :stuck_out_tongue:

Level 4

Cellular Reactor
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Active: Consume 25 Energy to heal Lt. Morales for 40% of her maximum Health over 4 seconds. Caduceus Reactor is disabled while this is active.
(Energy cost reduced from 30 to 25)

Reinforcements
Active: Activate to call a Medivac Dropship at your Altar for your allies. After 10 seconds, or when the Ability is activated again, the Medivac will travel to the original cast location to unload its passengers.
Cooldown: 35 seconds.
❢Loan: Reinforcement’s cooldown is increased by 8 seconds each time its used. Up to 75 seconds.

Blast Shield
Hitting heroes Displacement Grenade or casting safeguard grant Lt. Morales a Shield equal to 4% of her maximum Health, stacking up to 6 times.

But Y tho?

Yep, that’s a Lone. Its totally just there to bait people in to commenting. I’m mostly kidding. I didn’t want to remove the old reinforcements talent but I did want to make it available much earlier and I thought this would be a good way to do it. Besides, Trauma trigger was kinda just an alternate Cellular Reactor but on the same tier.

Level 7

Restore
Cooldown: 90 seconds.
Active: Grant target ally unstoppable for 1 second. Each time safeguard reduces damage the cooldown of restore is lowered by 1 second.

Optical Flare: enemies hit by Displacement Grenade are blinded for 1.5 seconds and slowed by 35% for 2 seconds.

Medi-Drone
Allies with Safeguard receive 50% of the healing done by Healing Beam on another ally.

But Y tho?

Giving Morales a real cleanse may be a bit op but eh, her win rate wasn’t great anyway.

Level 13

Safe Space
Safeguard knocks nearby enemies back a short distance. Each enemy hero knocked back in this way reduces Safeguards cooldown by 1.

System Shock
Heroes hit by Displacement Grenade deal 30% less damage for 4 seconds.

Second Opinion
Hitting 2 or more Heroes with Displacement Grenade reduces its cooldown to 2 seconds.

Level 16

Critical Care
Safeguard heals an for an additional 350 when used on an ally below 50% health.

Shield Sequencer
Safeguard gains a second charge.

Intensive Care
Active: toggle Caduceus Reactor on and increase its bonus healing to 200% and remove its energy cost for 5 seconds. Caduceus Reactor is disabled for 3 seconds afterward.
Cooldown: 25 seconds.

Level 20

Hyperactivity
Reduce the cooldown of Stim Drone from 90 seconds to 45 seconds, and increase the Movement Speed bonus from 25% to 50%.

Elite Dropship
Medivac can be reactivated once to gain 50% move speed decaying over 5 seconds.
Passive: while piloting the medivac, Morales is unstoppable.

Caduceus Reactor 2.0
Increase the healing provided by Caduceus Reactor from 2% to 6% of Lt. Morales’s maximum Health per second.

Life Saver
Each time Healing Beam heals an ally who is below 50% health its healing is increased by 5% for 4 seconds up to 50%.

6 Likes

As someone who is easily amused by the raw power MOrales grants and thus can enjoy her
I approve of this rework

2 Likes

But that’s the thing though, she is meant to be a Healbot that’s her job. her main problems are not able to heal enough, little to no survivability, and energy regeneration/consumption is highly unoptimized. I do agree a buff or positive change to medivac would be nice.

1 Like

I’m not going to comment on each suggested change, but just give my overall impressions. I really love the direction of this proposed rework. I’ve always tried to enjoy playing Lt. Morales, but as many have said, she’s as close to being a healbot as you can get in HOTS. Of course she’s not, but compared to other healers like Tyrande, Malf or Whitemane there feels like a lot of downtime between skills that aren’t all that fun to use.

I still miss the irradiation damage her beam could do and many other skills lost when they reworked her from Mana to an energy based hero. Any ideas that make her more dynamic to use, but don’t make her too strong would be a huge improvement.

4 Likes

Intensive care sounds so good! Also I love your iteration of Medivac.

Maybe have a cap to it? Like a maximum of 40 additional seconds? Just to avoid it being too unfun to play.

I can see this as being able to target enemies with healing beam and being a level 20 talent similar to mixing fire. That would be so broken :joy:

2 Likes

I think adding a cap to Reinforcements would be fair.

lol thanks :smiley:
I like the idea of the heal beam have a 3rd level of hardcore healing.

I remember the rad beam. It was pretty cool. What if she got that back as a 1 talent and it generated energy when it hit heroes?

Now that idea I love Waterlong. It wouldn’t have to do as much damage if it was set at a lower talent tier, but I especially like your idea of it also producing energy. Different methods of producing energy outside of taking a talent for it on her Safeguard, or using Grenade or AA’s would be welcome, she feels very linear atm which is why I don’t play her very often.

2 Likes

Now where would I slot that in…
Whats the lamest talent?

Cadeuceous 2.0 at 20 doesn’t look very flashy…

1 Like

the talents that gives you a few minutes of protection after leaving medivac

2 Likes

Cadeuceous 2.0 is a bit boring by comparison now isnt it. I think that may be a bit late to add in an energy talent at 20 tho

that medivac crashed in to a mountain somewhere. We got the new medivac that does something else now.

2 Likes

Really I’m tempted to just make it a baseline activate able ability that gets unlocked at a certain talent like 7 or something. You know, testing out Stitches’s new unlocking mechanic and all :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

No. This bypasses proper energy management which is a core element of Morales.

For both the aforementioned reason and this being a boosts to a turbo-button, no. This remonds me quite a bit of Trashmane´s trait, which alone taints this hard.

Morales has this one plus where she has proper Management tools, and this is downplayed in this rework.

She also is the only healer that provides strong, continous single-target heals. With this she is just another burst-focused healer with a bit of out-of-combat heals. This is really not what the game needs.

#SayNoToTurboButtons

er, care to explain?

172 is a second is how much she heals on live to tho. All shes gaining in her base kit is a crappy small heal to fall back on and W gets a small tickle of a heal thats less then LiLi’s heal.

2 Likes

You propose healing without energy (bad as it undermines the resource management), boosting via trait to more than double of that (does not matter that it is the current value), and even more so via talent choices.

Morals playstyle is bound around her resource management, that is her one good thing. If you can heal without, then it is undermined.

Healers should not be the ever same with everyone having out of energy/combat heals or a button to amp up healing.

Even if that heal kinda sucks? 73 a second isnt gonna save you from much.

I also don’t understand why a button to boost healing is bad. I personally find it enjoyable. Stuff like Brightwing’s Safety Dust and Uther’s benediction are a lot of fun for me. Those aren’t even the only ones.
Actually, now that I’m looking at the list, most healers have at least something like this.
Same with free/ very cheap healing.

3 Likes

Your Q beam might actually promote bad habits and make people even worse healers? If you’re out of energy, you should probably just stop healing.

Instead of heal on W. I was thinking to bring back some synergy back to armor effects and making it less awkward to use. That if target already has armor or at any point gains armor during its duration, a shield pops up that is dependent on the strength of the other armor effect. So, this way the armor stacking has a linear synergy rather than exponential synergy.

I miss a lot of the old Morales too. Scanner Sweep is cool and very much in the vein of a Terran ability.

Bringing back Restoration is cool and I love tying it to smart safeguard use. I always hated her themed shield tiers of pick what you’re good at CC and shoving it down our throats by binding it awkwardly to a basic abilities. She was the OG cleanse in SC1. Having that stripped from her felt weird. Kind of against unstoppable though.

Medivac is already my favorite ult in the game. So your version, as much as I would enjoy it in some ways, would be super OP. Having a mobile bunker that heals is crazy. Reinforcements is already super powerful at 20, to have it at 4 is kind of yikes. I also hate loan talents lol.

The thing I don’t like about the current medidrone is that it forces you to switch targets to a non medidrone target even though that’s probably the target you want to heal at full power. I’d prefer it if your heals are reduced by 75% while safeguard is up, but your safeguard targets are healed for 100% during the duration.

Some other things I’d like to see, bring back the ability to heal normal mercs. Maybe some implementation of a true blind like Dehaka. Maybe having temporary medidrones like Lucio has boom box. Healing Beam effects.

3 Likes

oh, I ment the energy regen starts if your traits bonus healing is toggled off regardless of weather or not Q is still going. My bad :stuck_out_tongue:

Its a cool idea but shields + armor worry me with how well those 2 synergize together. Combined with her very strong single target heal, It might be a bit much to have 3 different types of “not die” on the same target.

Me too.

Yeah, attaching it to W wasn’t great. Kinda killed the abilites flexibility rather then help it in a way. Think it would be to weak if it just removed CC with out the unstoppable?

Yeah, probably lol. I struggled to come up with anything that was both less niche and kept the same medivac theme. Wouldn’t be against completely throwing it out or just not changing medivac at all but it was a complaint and I attempted to address it.
Personally, I always had a hard time picking Reinforcements over the better self heal at 20 so I thought lowering its tier would help. 4 probably is to low but I’m also not sure I like the idea of having it compete with another talent that boosted your ability to stop deaths in the first place. Maybe stick it in 13? idk.

Could be cool. Personally I’m a fan of current medidrone.
Although, what if It was like a summon that you sic on an ally and it healed them until it died or timed out?

2 Likes

Becasue Stim Drone Qhira is OP ?

just gonna point out, that still more then BW hps. it jsut not a group heal. BW saves ppl. think LT is based on mana tension. i do like your rework, seems fun and does take away alot of the problems with LT.

1 Like