Reworks - What's going wrong

General Discussion
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Hi there,

so, after the lattest, most hated rework, I’ve been thinking a lot on what’s going wrong with reworks. Here are my impressions.

What a rework should be

In general, when I think of a rework, I imagine something like taking an obsolete or underwhelming hero and making it up to date, while preserving most of his/her concept and main builds. An example of a good rework would be the recent changes applied to Xul: the concept of the hero remains the same (waveclear + summons, with AOE damage, melee range and certain levels of utility), but the added values make him more attractive. What I loved about Xul’s rework is that his main build (W) remained untouched and useful in the cases where it was, whereas other builds that where less interesting have now more use, like the Q and E builds. And YES, he is overtuned as hell, and needs some nerfs. But the concept is great.

What a rework shouldn’t be

In my opinion, a rework should never take over the concept of the hero down. Before reworking a hero, the first thing you should do is watch what is going on with the hero when it’s being played. I don’t care if it gets picked 1/1000 games. Those who pick the hero, they deserve some consideration for keep playing that underwhelming guy who is not OP anymore. You may think the game comes first, but what’s a game without his/her players? Basically nothing. People invests time into learning how to play certain heroes, and somethimes, while they do, the environment changes: new heroes come up, their heroes get nerfed, the nexus changes (affecting the effectivity of the heroes). And then, after all that effort, after playing so much a hero, you get to be good at it, even when it is no longer Tier S, or A, or even B. And all your effort goes down the sink, because the devs have some thoughts and decide they don’t like the hero as it is, and they completely change it.

And all this doesn’t even refer only to the new Tassadar, which is the most awful rework has ever happened. There are plenty of examples before this one, like the old Azmodan rework, which completely denied his playstyle, or the old Tyrande rework. And I understand some times these changes have to happen, because some heroes cause a very bad game dynamic, like it happened with the old Sylvanas. In such cases, changes are perfectly justified (what I will never understand is the change to her Q… it was so much fan before, and nothing broken at all).

You should take into account that many players don’t have like 100 hours a week to play this game, and yet we are part of the community. If I can play reliably 10 heroes, and you completely change one of them, then it’s 9 heroes I can play. This type of things pushes players out, and there’s no more a competitive scene that justifies such a radical adjustment.

TLDR

So, this is how I see it. Reworks should keep main builds and preserve a hero’s essence, while embedding those things that are a “must take” into the basic kit possibly in form of a quest, and should open new avenues in how to play a hero, without closing the old ones. Heroes should never be fully changed, just adjusted to be more competitive in the current environment.

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You mean Whitemane? Because the new Tassadar rocks.

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I don’t even have anything against this particular form of Tassadar. But I don’t understand, if such a deep rework was to be applied, why didn’t they add a new hero instead. Aren’t other high templars available in the SC universe? (I don’t care if they aren’t, they can just make it up).

Is the removal of a hero that is being played and does not particularly destroy the balance of the game what I don’t like.

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  1. Theme didn’t fit Tassadar (he’s a High Templar, not a Sentry).
  2. Making another HT could cause silhouette overlap which would make it difficult to tell them apart, which would be a bit of a problem.
  3. They’d have to have Psi-Storm, which means Tass would need to lose it, which means he would need a rework anyway.
  4. New heroes take a lot more effort than a rework to make. They’d have to make a new character model, get a voice actor, animate all of their new abilities, playtest, check for bugs, etc, etc. That takes a lot of time and a lot of resources, neither of which the HotS dev team are exactly swimming in right now.

I do agree, in general, with your OP. The Xul rework was great because it preserved his identity and role while shoring up his shortfalls.

However, I do believe Tass is an exception to this rule, along with a few other heroes who are problematic because of their current identity and role (looking at you Hammer). He needed a rework, and while this incarnation is not the rework I would have given him (I’d have scrapped Force Wall completely so we could save it for an actual Sentry hero), it is definitely a couple steps in the right direction.

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Doesn’t matter, Tassadar’s kit was in the game for over 5 years, and NOW is the great time to gut him !? Now !? I really hope they gut some more heroes then and end themselves. Alarak doesn’t have the kit he used in Stacraft 2 either, so shall we gut him and make a completely different kind of Alarak as well ? There plenty of heroes that can get the same treatment.

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New heroes take a lot more effort than a rework to make. They’d have to make a new character model, get a voice actor, animate all of their new abilities, playtest, check for bugs, etc, etc. That takes a lot of time and a lot of resources, neither of which the HotS dev team are exactly swimming in right now.

Yeah, that’s of course true. But I don’t like that they try to create the impression of the game getting new things by destroying things that were already there and people enjoyed.

  • Theme didn’t fit Tassadar (he’s a High Templar, not a Sentry).

I get that too. In fact, that was more or less the first thing I said about him when I saw him for the 1st time. Like “why is this a templar and only gives shields to everyone”. But then, years have gone, and he remained in that form for so long, I don’t think is very nice to change it now, when so many people has being playing him as a support.

I’d have scrapped Force Wall completely so we could save it for an actual Sentry hero

That’d be so cool actually.

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I agree in principle with what you said.

Tassadar, however, was broken in some key ways that Blizzard has been trying to fix for a long time. We’ve seen the feedback over the years they felt he didn’t fully represent a high templar. We’ve seen the feedback about his shield being highly abusable by certain heroes. This rework was an opportunity for the devs to fix both of these problems at the same time.

And the new Tass is hardly “hated.” He’s exceedingly popular. He’s in every game. People seem to enjoy playing him. Xul’s similar. He’s much more commonly picked than he used to be and strong enough to do well. I’d agree that Whitemane’s and Tyrande’s reworks were unpopular. I rarely see either of them, so these things are hit and miss. Regardless, it is their game and they have the right to shuffle things if they want, even if that means completely reclassing a hero.

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Hi. I’m a Tassadar main, level 102. I was obviously afraid of change. I love the new Tassadar.

gg

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Hi. I am Tassadar main 108 level. I dislike rework, because Tassadar isn’t support anymore, even when rework is good by itself.

The main problem about old Tassadar was his lifesteal, what was able to make AA heroes stronger. Best thing, what devs could do, is deleting Lifesteal from Tassadar amd buff his other things (dmg, add more shield talents, etc).
After such change he would stop to be AA shield bot and be played in other comps easily. As Tassadar main half of my games were played without Hypercarry comps and I didn’t use lifesteal. Mostly I played around Khala Light (+20 armor after shield for 3 seconds) and tried to absord as much damage as possible.

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This. I’m sorry but even if you like the new pew pew pew tassadar, there’s zero reason why they couldn’t have just made him as a new hero.

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Tassadar is a high templar. They cast high damaging abilities from afar. He’s now more accurate to what he should be from StarCraft. And they did a good job. He plays well.

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All re-works are hated by someone.

No one will ever agree on what a re-work should be. Lots of people hate the Xul re-work that you gave as exemple of a good one. It’s all personal preference.

People fear change. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 300% better. They will still complain simply because something changed.

Now, you can make decent Q talents. The way it works now gives different ways of talenting into it. Whereas before, anything but barbed shot was mostly ignored.

This cannot be a guideline, as it isn’t always possible. Very often, the hero’s main build is what needs to be changed because it’s oppressive and creates issues. So it would defeat the purpose.

That is incorrect. The competitive scene is still there. It just isn’t called HGC. People say that without even looking it up.

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In SC Tassadar was mage-support. If you played it, you must remember he had Hallucination to make illusions, what made him support.

What stops High Templars to be supports? What stopd them to use their minds to scout area around them (Oracle), create Walls ®, protect allies (Plasma Shield) and make someone useless for 4 seconds (Nullification)?

Nothing. High Templars don’t need to win their enemies by damage only. They can use other tools to gain victory because they are strategists too.

And I was good at using old High Templar.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/694166825826517003/697170304056688681/unknown.png?width=839&height=472

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Maybe not the most hated be deffinitely one of the most divisive yet.

There is deffinitly a good amount of protoss “magic users” to go around. But for a new protoss i feel a new tal’darim would be great and if we would be looking for a more dps oriented protoss that could go for this.

  • Ji’Nara ( she is Alarak’s dirrect subordinate )
  • Ma’Lash ( he and Alarak fought in Rak’Shir )

Both of these could easily be highly aggresive character and fit their lore without any issues. ( specially Ma’Lash but id still prefer ji’nara out of the two . would be interesting having her and alarak on the same team )

And using hallucination is awesome lol.
How many time did i asked for hallucination as an ult . that would had been great ! :+1:

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Look we can go back and forth all day it seems with you’re a higher level, and I’ve played more hours of StarCraft and StarCraft 2. We can agree to disagree.

What I can agree on is how I was really good at old Tassadar too, and I’ll miss him as well. High Templar certainly could be supportive. But I and many other protoss players usually warped them in to deal lot’s of damage from afar, even though they were squishy.

I’m really enjoying the new Tassadar and I was afraid of change. I love how he feels more like a high templar from StarCraft, AND I love how well he plays. I’d love hallucination, but I’ll take force wall instead, which is just as supportive. I don’t think he’s OP because I can still deal way more damage early and mid game as Li-Ming (with the high templar skin of course).

I’m sorry you’re unhappy, but I would invite you to play more. As a fellow protoss fan, I’m sure you’ll find the good in this new damage dealing high templar Tassadar.

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Agree. I had an idea to make this ult like that.

Tassadar makes an illusion of ally hero. It can’t deal damage, but other effects (CC, healing, etc) works as usual. Illusion is alive for X time, CD of ult is Y.
Illusion can’t use ult, but it’s talented. Tassadar can move between controling himself or illusion by pressing R or choosing by left-clicking/Tab-ing .

Thank you.
DrLogan#21202
If you want, you can join my discord as Tassadar player.
https://discord.gg/xVt4GF

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Something just hit me there while reading this , in sc2 the main reason for using them were storm ( and i love to storm some freshly stimed marines just like the next guy lol ) but what you described there is a more offensive role , even feedback. Usually insta kill the proper targets.

But in SC1 , they were more support/damage because they had both hallucination AND storm.

I think is may be another variable why some people view HT as only damage dealers while others not.

I maybe wrong but do you think it made sense :thinking: ?

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They don’t mention Tassadar was kinda supportive, because it will mean that HTs can be supports too. They don’t want to ruin their main argument by their selfs, lmao.

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You’re right.
Afterall , we are all in this together.
No use to constantly mourn tassadar.
Lets at least look at the positive.

Heck , your words may get me back to pick up tass again !

Edit : see thing is for me , i had high hopes when they mentioned they wanted to make tass closer to its HT counter part and i was honneslty scared a bit but also thrilled.

What do HT means for me ?

  • psionic storm
  • hallucination ( sc1 )
  • feed back ( sc2 )
  • archon ( both )

What did we got ? No hallucination , no feedback.
thermal lance on a freakin HT out of all terminology to use :man_facepalming: !!
“Protoss magic”
A bunch of electrical term
A HUMAN on the icon for the Khala’s gift !

So yeah the real reason i was mad is tassadar feela like someone had NO idea what protoss are and how they worked and just slaped random protoss words here and there to try and sound to be remotely accurate.

( damn it , im getting frustrated by all this again xD )

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agreed. reducing high templars to just pew pew PSI STORM ARCHON YEAH BAM BAM BAM it’s just childish and a bastardization of their character. but I guess it is to be expected these days. people are too stupid to appreciate nuance.

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