Serenity's Custom Patch Notes (edit)

General Discussion
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Edit: It looks like a lot of people are unimpressed with many of my suggestions, which makes me a bit sad considering this took a long time to write. I don’t mind if people disagree with me, I just hope people aren’t missing the forest for the trees here. Exact numbers aren’t important because I can only estimate what would be balanced. What matters are the things that I’m identifying as problematic and my solutions to those problems. For example, I don’t like the feedback that I’ve over-buffed Anub’arak because that misses the point of the change. The point is, as stated in my comments, I’m identifying Cocoon as a problematic ability and proposing a fix for it. The stat buffs are just compensation for that fix and would be adjusted accordingly if I could test things out. Maybe this is a problem of the format I’ve written this post in. Obviously I’ve structured it like the in-game patch notes, but maybe this makes my intentions too unclear to the reader. Either way, I ask you to focus on the problems that I’ve laid out in the “Serenity’s Comments” sections, if you agree with the problem, and if you agree with the fix. </edit

I love this game. I’ve been playing it for years, and I get so excited every time a new patch drops. Every time, I read through the changes with the eagerness of a child ripping open christmas presents. And 95% of the time, I like every single change they make. Recently, the game has received balance changes at an unprecedented rate which I’m so so happy about! But there is always more to do! This is sort of a personal wishlist of what would probably my first round of changes if I had all the power :smiley:

Of course I can’t address everything and I have more than a few biases, so Li-Ming gets a good deal of love while Hanzo gets a good deal of hate (I tried to keep everything balanced, I promise), and many heroes I haven’t touched because I don’t really know enough about them. Also, as a masters level player, I did aim several nerf hammers at things that are only a problem at high levels of play. I tried to estimate number changes as best as I could, but obviously some of them would have to be tested and tweaked. Anyways, I hope you enjoy my list. I would love to hear feedback and if I see any good suggestions in the comments I can add them afterwards. I hope you can get a similar enjoyment out of my list as I do out of the actual patch notes, Enjoy!

The Heroes I’ve changed are:

  • Tanks: Anub’arak, Diablo, E.T.C, Garrosh, Johanna, Muradin, Tyrael
  • Bruiser: Malthael, Varian
  • Ranged Assassin: Cassia, Gul’dan, Hanzo, Li-Ming, Valla
  • Melee Assassin: Alarak, Maiev, Zeratul
  • Healer: Alexstrasza, Ana, Deckard Cain, Tyrande

If you just want the highlights and don’t want to read everything, I suggest looking at Hanzo, Li-Ming, and Zeratul.

Tank

Anub’arak

Stats

  • Basic attack damage increased from 81 to 91

Abilities

  • Impale (Q):

    • Damage increased from 90 to 100

  • Burrow Charge (E):

    • Damage increased from 91 to 96

  • Locust Swarm (R1)

    • New Functionality:
      • While active, basic attacks have 25% life leech

  • Cocoon (R2):

    • Now has a 0.5s channeled cast time (Interrupting this channel will put it on a 10 second cooldown)
    • Cocoon now has slightly more health (but the duration is the same)
    • Cooldown reduced from 70s to 60s

Serenity’s comments: While Anub’arak’s winrate is within acceptable ranges after his recent nerfs, the fact that cocoon casts instantly combined with Anub’arak’s other CC abilities provides too fast and strong of an engage with not enough counterplay, particularly at high levels. This change will make Anub’arak have to think a little harder about his cocoon use, as well as give the enemy team more time to react and counter it. This is a very big hit to his kit, so to compensate for this, I’m reverting several of the recent nerfs to the beetle and making cocoon slightly harder to break. I anticipate that Cocoon will still be the desired ultimate at high levels, so I also took a pass at Locust Swarm to make it more competitive. Simply buffing it’;s passive damage or healing though could make the talent too powerful and uninteractive, so instead I added an extra sustain component that Anub’arak has to actively focus on and put himself at risk to get value from.

Diablo

Stats

  • Health increased from 2777 to 2810 (+1% roughly)

  • Health Regeneration increased from about 5.555 to about 5.620

Abilities

  • Black Soulstone (Trait):

    • Health bonus per soul reduced from 0.4% to 0.35%

Serenity’s Comments: Diablo’s health pool with Black Soulstone complete dwarfs every other health pool in the roster, and I think it’s just a bit too much. This nerfs Diablo’s health with Black Soulstone completed by 2.5%, but buffs his base health to make him slightly less weak without it.

E.T.C

Abilities

  • Rockstar (Trait):

    • Armor Bonus increased from 25 to 30

Serenity’s Comments: E.T.C is in a pretty good spot, but I felt his survivability could use a slight buff to keep him competitive with other tanks. Rather than just giving him base health, I decided to increase the armor of his trait to reward skillful play.

Garrosh

Stats

  • Health increased from 2142 to 2228 (+4%)

  • Health Regeneration increased from about 4.4975 to about 4.6675

Talents

  • Level 4

    • In For the Kill:
      • Adjusted Functionality: Basic attacks cleave in a wide arc for 35% damage
    • Indomitable:
      • Moved to level 7

  • Level 7

    • Oppressor
      • Moved to level 4

Level 16

  • Mortal Combo

    • New Functionality: If Groundbreaker is used on a hero that was thrown by Wrecking Ball in the last 2 seconds, it deals 200% increased damage.

Serenity’s Comments: Garrosh’s level 4 and 7 talents have been dominated by Indomitable (ha) and Into the Fray, especially at higher levels. While I like the playmaking potential of these talents individually, together they added too much utility to Garrosh’s kit and enabled certain plays that no other hero could equal. For example, if Garrosh and an ally were caught by a Ring of Frost, Garrosh could Cleanse himself with Indomitable and then Cleanse and save his ally with Into the Fray. By placing these talents on the same tier, players will have to choose if they want to cleanse themselves or their allies. To compensate for this, I’ve given him a health buff to help with his survivability even if he doesn’t take Indomitable (and keep in mind that extra health compounds with Garrosh’s trait). While doing this, I also decided to rework In For the Kill to be less awkward to use and have some benefit in team fights, and rework Mortal Combo as it’s design is a bit of a relic from Garrosh’s original kit and doesn’t reflect how he’s currently played very well.

Johanna

Abilities

  • Falling Sword (R1):

    • Stun duration upon landing increased from 0.2 to 0.5 seconds
    • Cooldown increased from 50 to 60 seconds

Serenity’s Comments: Falling Sword is rarely picked over Blessed Shield because it often doesn’t accomplish as much as Johanna players would like given how long it takes to land. Taking yourself out of the fight for 2 seconds is a bit of a tough sell when the alternative is a near-instant hard CC. By increasing the stun duration of Falling Sword, it will be more impactful when it lands and make it a more attractive pick over its counterpart.

Muradin

Stats

  • Health reduced from 2876 to 2739 (-5%)

  • Health regeneration reduced from about 5.752 to about 5.478

Abilities

  • Thunder Clap (W):

    • New Functionality: For each hero hit by Thunder Clap Muradin heals for 2.5% of his maximum health over 2.5 seconds (same duration as its other effects)

Talents

  • Level 4

    • Sledgehammer:
      • Damage bonus reduced from 350% to 250%
      • New Functionality: If Storm Bolt only hits non-heroes, its cooldown is reduced by 3.5 seconds and it refunds 15 mana
    • Thunder Burn:
      • New Functionality: Hitting an enemy hero with Thunder Clap triggers a second explosion in the same location 2 seconds later. This explosion does not heal, but applies Thunder Clap’s damage and other effects.

  • Level 13

    • Healing Static
      • New Functionality: Triples the healing received from Thunder Clap

Serenity’s Comments: Muradin is sitting in a great spot balance-wise, but his talents needed some work. The synergy between Healing Static and Thunder Burn granted so much survivability that they often felt like “must pick” talents. To alleviate this, I’ve pulled the extra healing from Thunder Burn (but increased its damage to keep it as a competitive pick), and moved some of the power of Healing Static to Muradin’s baseline to lower the opportunity cost of not taking it. The goal here is to keep Healing Static’s power level about the same, but make it feel like less of a must have in Muradin’s kit. I made Thunder Clap’s healing apply overtime because with this new Healing Static, he could instantly recover a third of his health bar if enough enemies were nearby, which could be quite demoralizing for the enemy team.
While looking around I also noticed that Sledgehammer could use some love. At the moment, while it does staggering amounts of damage to non-heroes, using it this way often made players feel they were missing out on opportunities to hit heroes with Storm Bolt and get quest stacks. By building in PvE cooldown reduction and reducing the damage, it should be just as effective at PvE, but not incur so much opportunity cost.

Tyrael

Abilities

  • Archangel’s Wrath (Trait):

    • Damage reduced from 550 to 325
    • New Functionality: Tyrael can use El’Druin’s Might before exploding and it’s cooldown is reset, but it does not damage, slow, or benefit from talents

Serenity’s Comments: Tyrael’s trait is currently extremely inconsistent. 95% of the time it won’t accomplish anything significant, but once in a blue moon it could score a triple kill or more. To normalize it’s performance, I’ve significantly reduced the damage of Archangel’s Wrath, but given it the mobility of an old talent at baseline so it can’t simply be walked away from.

Bruiser

Malthael

  • Talents

    • Level 13:
      • Inevitable End: If there are no active reaper’s marks upon activation, the cooldown is doubled.

Level 16:

  • Memento Mori: Damage amplification increased from 80% to 100%

Level 20:

  • Reaper of Souls:

    • No longer increases the duration of Tormented Souls
    • New Functionality: While Tormented Souls is active, basic attacks against heroes deal an additional 1.5% of their maximum health as damage, and hero takedowns refresh the duration and reset the cooldown of Wraith Strike.

Serenity’s Comments: Malthael’s trait build coupled with Tormented Souls once wreaked havoc upon the nexus back when Malthael was first released. However, many nerfs to the damage of Black Harvest later and both have fallen out of favor. With this and the recent change to Tormented Souls that has given Memento Mori stiffer competition at it’s tier, I think it’s safe to push it’s power back up a bit. Meanwhile, Reaper of Souls was changed to fix a couple problems with it. Firstly, to not make players feel like they were missing out on Wraith Strike resets if the duration got increased. Secondly, after being active for a few seconds, Tormented souls mostly just looks scary and isn’t very useful once the enemy team already has Reaper’s Mark on them. The attack damage buff while active gives Malthael something to do even if he’s already spread his mark to the entire enemy team, and pushes its power level to make the talent competitive with others on it’s tier.

The change to Inevitable End is to punish players for using it to escape a gank or similar situations as opposed to survivability in a team fight which is what his level 13 talents are really meant for.

Varian

Talents

  • Level 13

    • Shattering Throw
      • Base damage increased from 50 to 100
      • Bonus damage to shields reduced from 1400 to 300

Serenity’s Comments: Shattering Throw is only useful in a very very small number of situations, but in those situations it is way, way too powerful. The most notable of these are that it can instantly delete Fenix’s shield, and instantly delete a Sound Barrier shield. Having such drastically polarizing results is generally poor design, so I’ve massively reduced the shield damage and given it some base power instead. To be honest, the talent should probably be reworked entirely to be more generally viable and provide only a small boost to shield damage, but that’s a little beyond the scope of what I’m willing to theorycraft here.

Ranged Assassin

Cassia

Talents

Level 7:

  • Surge of Light: Now has a 1.5s cooldown between casts

Serenity’s Comments: Surge of Light could occasionally create weird scenarios where a Cassia player has to spam her trait key while being focused to get as many procs as possible, and by doing so could deal incredible area damage that unfairly punished a team for trying to focus her down quickly. Adding a short cooldown will lessen this unhealthy dynamic and removes the need for spamming her trait key, but will not affect the talent in most cases.

Gul’dan

Abilities

  • Rain of Destruction (R2):

    • Meteor damage Reduced from 165 to 110
    • In addition to the random AoE meteors, a smaller, single target meteor is guaranteed to drop on each hero within Rain of Destruction’s Radius about once every second (7 total). These also deal 110 damage.

Serenity’s Comments: Raining Destruction upon people and places is one of Gul’dan’s favorite hobbies, but he’s been out of practice for a long time. After working the rust of in the Nexus’ training grounds, he realized that raining purely random destruction upon this realm’s mortal insects would sometimes leave them mostly (or entirely) unscathed, which is far from ideal. So he figured out a way to make his rain a little smarter, and can much more consistently crush the life of his enemies with it. (Also it does more damage this way.)

Hanzo

Abilities

  • Storm Bow (Q):

    • Damage Increased from 291 to 320

  • Scatter Arrow (W):

    • Damage reduced from 88 to 66
    • Arrows created upon hitting terrain have significantly increased width

  • Natural Agility (Trait):

    • Cooldown reduced from 30s to 20s
    • Range reduced from 9 to 7

Dragon’s Arrow (R2)

  • No longer scales based on distance traveled

  • New Functionality: After 1.5s, fire an arrow that travels across the battlefield. Explodes upon hitting an enemy hero, dealing 260 damage to all nearby enemies and stunning them for 1.25 seconds

Talents

Level 4

  • Explosive Arrows

    • Explosion now deals 100% of Storm Bow’s damage to Minions and Monsters, but only 25% to heroes

  • Serrated Arrows

    • Damage bonus increased from 100% to 250%

  • Ignore All Distractions

    • Added Functionality: Killing a minion with a basic attack also makes Hanzo’s next basic attack fire 50% faster. Basic attacks also deal 50% increased damage to structures.

Level 13:

  • Ninja Assassin

    • Cooldown reduction reduced from 10 to 6 seconds

Level 16

  • Piercing Arrows

    • Now also increases the cooldowns of Storm Bow and Scatter Arrow by 25%

  • Giant Slayer

    • Damage bonus reduced from 2% to 1.5% of a hero’s maximum health

Level 20:

  • Perfect Agility:

    • Cooldown reduction reduced from 10s to 5s
    • New functionality: Now also increases the range of Natural Agility by 4

Serenity’s Comments: There is a huge disparity in performance between the average Hanzo players, and the most skilled Hanzo players, and this is because skilled Hanzo players abuse very specific parts of his kit, all of which are being addressed here.

To start with, Scatter Arrow is a problematic ability. If used perfectly, it can provide huge amounts of near-instant burst damage, but if your aim or timing is only slightly off, it will often miss completely. Significantly increasing the projectile width will make the ability more forgiving and easier to use, but it won’t do as much damage anymore. Dragon’s Arrow is also a very problematic ability. When used at very long ranges, it is either completely useless (if it misses), or one of the strongest engages in the entire game. Even ignoring the extreme feast or famine nature of the ability, this is very unhealthy because it upends the relationship between tanks and assassins on a team, namely that tanks are designed to engage a fight and assassins to follow up on that engage. But Dragon’s Arrow completely reverses those roles. Tanks will often wait around near the enemy team and wait for Dragon’s Arrow to land, then follow up on the massive AoE stun that the ranged assassin of the team just provided. This is a very effective strategy because using Dragon’s Arrow to engage carries no risk for the Hanzo player, even if he misses. By comparison, melee assassins like Kerrigan and Maiev (as well as most tanks) also have strong engage potential, but they must put themselves in danger in order to do it. To combat this unhealthy dynamic and get everything back in order, I’ve set Dragon’s Arrow to always deal it’s second tier stun and damage no matter the distance, then added the same cast time as Dragonstrike to make sure it isn’t overpowered in close up fights. This significantly reduces the maximum engage potential of Dragon’s Arrow, and instead encourages Hanzo to follow up on Diablo’s Apocalypse with it, and not the other way around.

And finally, there are Hanzo’s talents, 2 of which in particular are probably the most abused parts of his kit at very high levels: Explosive Arrows and Piercing Arrows. Explosive Arrows was designed to be mostly used for PvE and not PvP, but in order for it’s explosion area to be large enough to effectively clear waves, it also has to be large enough to be a far more reliable poke than intended. More troublesome though is it’s synergy with Piercing Arrows. Piercing Arrows was intended to provide large sustained damage to multiple targets, and it does, but when combined with Explosive Arrows, Hanzo was able to also drastically increase his single-target burst damage if there were any minions or monsters nearby (which is especially problematic on Infernal Shrines). These interactions have proven to be too consistent at high levels, and abusing these two talents in particular pushes Hanzo’s damage far above acceptable levels given how safely he can dish it out. To fix this, I’m removing most of the PvP damage of Explosive Arrows but increasing it’s PvE to try to keep it competitive with the other talents around it, as well as reducing the incredible potential damage that Piercing Arrows provides by increasing his ability cooldowns. The overall goal with these changes is to nerf the parts of Hanzo’s kit that are heavily abused at high levels without harming the playstyle of the average Hanzo player.

The rest of the changes are minor in comparison. Natural Agility has seen some cooldown increases overtime in an attempt to bring Hanzo into line, but with all of the above out of the way, it’s cooldown can be brought back down again. The goal of the range reduction is to discourage Hanzo from jumping over walls at weird angles that cause it to function more like a powerful dashing ability (such as Valla’s Vault) than one that is designed to specifically jump over walls. It’s corresponding talents were changed to reflect the new cooldown. Meanwhile Giant Slayer was nerfed to compensate for the fact that landing a full Scatter Arrow is now significantly easier, Serrated Arrows was buffed way up because it no longer synergizes with Never Outmatched, and finally, adding extra structural damage to Ignore All Distractions gives it a PvE niche among the other talents on it’s tier to make it more appealing, especially in a redemption build. Overall, with Storm Bow’s damage being buffed and Scatter Arrow providing easier, more consistent damage, hopefully the average Hanzo player will see these overall changes as a buff rather than a nerf, while high level players will be glad to see the abusable parts of his kit gone.

Ok, real talk, I was very tempted to just put this for Hanzo’s entry

Hanzo

  • Entirely removed from the game

and leave it at that because, as you may be able to tell, I really hate this character and I think a lot of his kit is extremely poorly designed (cough dragon’s arrow cough) but I decided that’s not constructive and kind of ruins this post’s credibility and tone. So instead I gave it my honest best shot at reigning in his absurd power at the Grandmaster level without eviscerating the lower leagues of Hanzo play. Let me know what you think!

Li-Ming

Talents

Level 4

  • Triumvirate

    • Cooldown reduction reduced from 5 to 4 seconds

Level 7

  • Seeker

    • Adjusted Functionality: If 3 Magic Missiles hit a single target, the third one deals 125 bonus damage. If that target was a hero, Li-Ming’s next basic attack within 3 seconds has 1.5 increased range.

  • Zei’s Vengeance:

    • Damage bonus reduced from 25% to 20%

Level 16

  • Arcane Orbit

    • Range increase reduced from 25% to 20%
    • Maximum distance damage bonus reduced from 371 to 340
    • New Functionality: Now also increases the range of Magic Missiles by 20%

Serenity’s Comments Li-Ming’s Arcane Orb build has been underperforming for a very long time, even though on paper its poke damage looks overpowered. As someone whose most played hero is Li-Ming, I believe this is because Arcane Orbit, the talent that is supposed to complete the build, has severe anti-synergy with Li-Ming’s kit since it causes Arcane Orb to completely out-range Magic Missiles. Because of this and the increase in damage, this talent incentivises Li-Ming players to oftentimes stop casting Magic Missiles in a meaningful way, and instead focus entirely on getting maximum value out of Arcane Orb. In practice this playstyle does not increase the amount of meaningful poke damage Li-Ming outputs by nearly as much as it does on paper, and it significantly hinders her burst damage potential if she cannot effectively cast Magic Missiles (and doesn’t have access to calamity) which is a critical part of Li-Ming’s role on a team. By making Arcane Orbit also increase the range of Magic Missiles, this will allow players to still get value out of both her damaging spells, and allow Orb-Build Li-Ming to more effectively snipe down targets at long range and secure kills (as opposed to just dealing meaningless poke damage) if she can land her skillshots. Obviously this is a massive buff to the Arcane Orb build, so it’s talents have been accordingly nerfed. As an unintentional upshot, this also reduces the frustration of playing against Li-Ming in ARAM brawls.

I also took a look at Seeker, another lackluster talent in her tree. Seeker is in a weird spot where the burst damage it provides is far worse than Calamity, the poke damage it provides is far worse than the Arcane Orb talents, however in order to deal enough damage to compete with either of those it would have to be buffed to unhealthy levels. Instead, I’ve made it so landing 3 Magic Missiles gives your next basic attack a long range so that the talent has very good synergy with Charged Blast and Cannoneer, and thus enables a very mechanically intensive playstyle.

Valla

Stats

  • Basic Attack range increased by 0.5

  • Basic Attack damage reduced from 78 to 72

Abilities

  • Vault (E)

    • Range reduced by 0.5
    • Damage bonus per hatred stack increased from 6% to 8%

Talents

  • Level 7

    • Death Dealer
      • Damage bonus per hatred stack increased from 14% to 16%

  • Level 20

    • Farflight Quiver
      • Range increase reduced from 2.2 to 2.0

Serenity’s Comments: I want Valla to be buffed, but she is in a very precarious spot. Currently she is generally considered to be too fragile and easy to punish when compared to other auto-attackers like Raynor and Fenix to be worth picking. However, anyone who was around for the “Holy Trinity” meta of Valla, Auriel, and Tassadar knows that she can and will completely break the game in the hands of skilled players/teams if she is buffed even a little too much. This is my very cautious attempt at making her a more generally viable pick. The 0.5 auto attack range buff is small, but I think just enough to give her the safety she needs to pressure frontline and out of position heroes without being in constant fear of instant deletion. The fail-safes in place to ensure she doesn’t break anything are a significant hit to her basic attack damage, and reducing Vault’s range by the same amount her basic attack range was increased by. The rest are just changes to normalize her kit with her altered basic attacks.

I recognize that the exact numbers on this set of changes would have to be extensively tested, so take them with a grain of salt.

Melee Assassin

Alarak

Abilities

  • Lightning Surge (E)

    • The area that constitutes the “center” of Lightning surge has been significantly shortened at the far end.
    • Damage increased from 62 to 68
    • Healing increased from 70 to 77

Counter Strike (R2):

  • Counter Strike’s base is now angled forward 15° on both Alarak’s left and right (so it’s shaped like an upside-down kite instead of a triangle. The tip remains in the same spot)

Talents:

  • Level 4:

    • Negatively Charged:
      • Damage bonus per stack increased from 5% to 7%

Serenity’s Comments The area that constitutes the “center” of Lightning Surge is ambiguously large around where it impacts the targeted enemy. What this meant in practice was Lighting surge could hit an enemy with it’s “center” if they were standing directly to the side of the target, and sometimes even if they were standing behind the target. This makes Lightning Surge’s talents far more consistent than intended, and a skilled player could easily abuse the ambiguous center range by having the ability on Quick Cast once they got access to Lightning Barrage. By shortening the length of Lightning Surge’s center, Alarak will actually have to hit enemies with it’s center in order to get maximum value out of the ability. Because this is a significant nerf to the ability and build, i’s base damage and healing have been increased as well as Negatively Charged’s stacking damage to compensate.

The nerf to Counter Strike’s area is similar as it also had an ambiguous hitbox around Alarak’s sides that made it extremely hard to circumvent at close range and could hit melee attackers that were standing almost behind him for full damage. By angling the base forward, enemies in close range have a little more of chance to get out of the way if they react quickly enough.

Maiev

Abilities

  • Spirit of Vengeance (E):

    • Travel speed reduced by 15%
    • Range increased by 0.5

Serenity’s Comments: If you read my comments on Hanzo, you know that I believe powerful engage tools should be tied to tanks and not assassins. I did mention that Maiev does have to put herself at risk by being in melee range to get her engage off, but I still feel that her engage is too powerful and too consistent. Much like Dragon’s Arrow, Maiev also creates the dynamic where tanks will often wait for her to engage and then follow up rather than Maiev following up on the tanks engage (which is how it should be most of the time). By reducing the travel speed of Spirit of Vengeance, enemies will have more time to react to her approach and spread out or run away before she can lock them down. This is intended to make Maiev’s engage potential weaker without harming the anti-mobility she provides against heroes like Genji. The increase in Spirit of Vengeance’s range is mostly a compensation buff that doesn’t directly touch her CC or damage. I recognize that the exact numbers of these changes would have to be extensively tested, so take them with a grain of salt.

Zeratul

Abilities

  • Void Prison (R1):

    • Now has a 0.5 second interruptible cast time (getting interrupted sets it on a 10 second cooldown)

Serenity’s Comments: Void Prison has been making plays since Heroes of the Storm first existed to the public, and it has remained untouched for many years. In the distant past, lower level Zeratul play mostly consisted of trying to assassinate heroes by using the old stealth mechanics, whereas at high levels, his kit wasn’t very impactful, but Void Prison was the reason that Zeratul was picked. Now after his rework, Zeratul’s base kit is a powerful asset at high levels in addition to having Void Prison, and it’s finally time to take a look at what is arguably the most powerful heroic in the entire game. I would argue, in fact, that it is the most powerful heroic in the game (at high levels of play), and I intend to fix that. While there are other Heroics that have comparable impact to Void Prison such as Sanctification and Mosh Pit, the key difference between Void Prison and every other similarly powerful heroic is that Void Prison is instant, and thus has almost no counterplay. If Sanctification could be cast instantly like Void Prison, Tyrael would skyrocket in popularity and possibly become the most desired hero in competitive play. Adding a 0.5 second cast time brings Void Prison in line with other heroics that have similarly large impact in a team fight and adds some well needed counterplay to the ability. It is also worth mentioning that, just like Maiev and Hanzo, this lessens the extreme engage potential that yet another assassin hero has.

Support

Alexstrasza

Abilities

  • Life Binder (R1)

    • Final healing is now capped by Alexstrasza’s maximum health (1766 +4% per level base, or 2266 +4% per level in Dragonqueen form)

Serenity’s Comments: Life Binder is just a little too good at healing exceptionally large health pools such as those of Stitches, Cho’gall, and Diablo. This change will ensure that it can still full heal most heroes in the roster, but can’t output triple the burst healing of Rehgar’s Ancestral Healing.

Ana

Abilities

  • Healing Dart (Q):

    • Range reduced by 1
    • Healing increased from 195 to 210

  • Biotic Grenade (W):

    • Range reduced by 1

  • Sleep Dart (E):

    • Range reduced by 1

  • Aim Down Sights (Trait):

    • Range bonus increased from 25% to 30% (this is to ensure that the range of healing Dart and Sleep Dart aren’t implicitly nerfed by more than 1 with Aim Down Sights active)

Serenity’s Comments: Ana has the potential to output incredible sustained healing from just a little too far away, and without the need for a healing ultimate unlike Lili or Rehgar. Because she doesn’t have a proper escape and slows herself by using Aim Down Sights, the natural way to counter her by diving and focusing her early on in a fight, but in practice this proves very difficult for many team comps due to her huge range. By reducing the range, this introduces more counterplay to her enormous healing output, and I’ve given her slightly more healing as a bit of compensation. Overall this is intended as a nerf, but I admit this may be slightly overdoing it and would certainly have to be tested.

Deckard Cain

Talents

Level 7

  • Emerald

    • Duration reduced from 4 to 3 seconds

Serenity’s Comments: Emerald sticks out when compared to other healing reduction abilities such as Malthael’s Touch of Death and Ana’s Biotic Grenade. This change brings its power much closer in line with those counterparts.

Tyrande

Abilities

  • Light of Elune (Q):

    • Healing Increased from 255 to 275

Talents

  • Level 1

    • Elune’s Chosen:
      • Healing reduced from 200% to 125% of basic attack damage

Serenity’s Comments: Elune’s Chosen can provide an incredible amount of sustain healing that far outstrips the other talents at its tier if she isn’t pressured, and is just way too powerful for a level one talent in general. So I’m significantly nerfing its healing output and giving her a buff to her baseline healing to compensate.

3 Likes
P.notes, Mi mundo
2

Oh dammit, I was hoping this would be the random patchnotes generator I’ve seen on planetside.

“-NC reavers now armor rockets, 300 to 1500 indirect healing

3

I love your openning statement about unwrapping xmas presents. As an Australian, any blizzard patches come through in the middle of the night (about 3am to 4am). Being able to wake up first thing in the morning to have the presents already arrive gives that extra christmas feel.

Ill have to read the rest of your post when i get more time.

4

I read the whole thing and i would up vote it but the Alarak changes were painful to read, still, good job at making this.

5

Thanks for reading! Would you care to elaborate on what you thought was so bad about them? I intend to edit the list if I see good suggestions.

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6

The thing about Negatively charged is that isn’t an OP talent, instead is like Living bomb, a problem of the opponents who doesn’t know how to deal with it (suddenly some black glasses appear in Alarak face!).

Mostly of the time i go for Q talents since is really hard to do real damage to the enemy heroes with Negatively charged and the scenarios when i pick it are when i facing teams based around tanks like Garrosh, why? Because the rest of the team is always behind the tank, waiting for him to engage, allowing to Alarak to do monstrous damage.

This is what happen every time i saw Alarak at pro levels, usually the enemy team is caught out guard by the Alarak pick, and then they are to focus in keep doing what they practice for hours instead of just changing their strategy around Alarak. Ones you see Alarak in the enemy team, you need to think that you are facing a real deal like Kael’thas and start to look around you, so his E’s will never start stacking. Now this is hard to do since most people don’t know about the hit boxes in the game, but ones you play Alarak for a while you notice that your E’s stacks when your primary objective’s hit box is touching other targets hit box, so mostly of the time that i finish my level 1 quest is because i hit an enemy wall when my foes are retreating.

Maybe by making a cosmetic change you can teach other people about hit boxes. Imagine if the hit box of the primary target glows when you hit people with your E, and if someone’s is touching that hit box with his hit box then he will notice how his hit box is also glowing when he receive the damage.

If people adopt the duck’s strategy of approaching in V formation, then Alarak’s Negatively charged will do absolute nothing. The few times that i faced opponents who adopt this strategy i ended doing miserable damage with only 12 stacks, so i believe that we only need a cosmetic change for Alarak’s E

And now, for his Counter strike, i only need to say that his hit box is just a bigger Q, so just walk a little and you’ll be fine, so cosmetic change too in order to make more clear the AOE.

However, i’m just a gold player, so i can’t address a problem like the cheese Alarak in pro play, but my ideals are always buff and try to avoid nerffs, like in this case when i think only cosmetic changes will be enough and believe me, nerfing in your way Lighting surge will be a hard hit to our highlord.

7

Interesting points for sure. If players knew more about how Lightning Surge worked, then it would probably be significantly less effective, perhaps to an extent that this wouldn’t be an issue anymore.

Personally, I’m not sold though. Kael’thas has been in the game for, what, 3 years now? People STILL can’t dodge Living Bomb properly. In my mind that’s proof that such abilities are unhealthy and should be minimized, not encouraged. Balancing around how smart the enemies are has proven to make heroes/abilities weak at high levels and busted at low levels, rather than making them balanced overall (see Kael’thas and Azmodan, and to an extent Lt. Morales). Because of that I still maintain that education is not the solution, and this interaction of Lightning surge should still be removed.

8

250% serrated arrow dmg is too much i think 200% would be normal
imagine killing imortal when enemies are deffing and ur also getting cdr from lvl 7

i would bring back pve synergy with lvl 4 and lvl 7 W talents but W lvl 7 talent would give only or 0.75 cdr when hitting pve and 2.5 when hitting heroes
lvl 4 would be still 100%
and why are u buffing his Q damage? :thinking:

and also chill when buffing garrosh health
he has also armor so its way more than u think
his W spell also heals % from missing health

9

you really don’t like hanzo huh, where are the medivh nerfs? :thinking:

I don’t really agree with the patch notes, but good effort nonetheless.

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10

No, I do not like Hanzo. I would be very happy if he was just removed from the game, but like I said that’s not constructive and will never happen, so I gave him a fair chance.

Sorry to hear you didn’t my patch notes, do you think you could be more specific on things you didn’t agree with?

Medivh is a hero I certainly considered looking at, but it was really hard to figure out what specifically to do with him. I do think he needs changes, but in what direction? I think his problems are more fundamental than just numbers, but I can’t picture what the “perfect” design is, so I just left him out.

11

Medivh suggestions:

Remove Q quest and give Q baseline cd reduction (to compensate)
added trait functionality: “curse of the weak willed” or “arcane burden”
allied heroes benefiting from force of will or portal have -5 armor for 2s

Medivh’s portals and shields are incredibly strong and already provide a huge advantage. This would reward well placed shields (and punish badly placed shields) and also nerfs coordinated offensive portals (while not eliminating them entirely). But rather than allowing a full team reposition/flank for free, you have to weigh whether -5 armor is worth it or not. Disengages are mostly unaffected, because the armor is irrelevant in that case.

Furthermore it only affects allied heroes, so it does not alter medivh play style in uncoordinated/solo style gameplay.

It’s not perfect, but I think its a decently elegant way to balance how problematic his portals and shields are at high level play.

Numbers can be tweaked if 2s is too long.

12

I’ll be honest, I stopped reading after the tanks.
You put a ton of effort into this thread just by typing it, and you probably did think a lot about these changes as well (I hope). And I appreciate that.

But why on Earth you’d want to buff almost all the strongest tanks?

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13

So I’ve read all of it, and I think you may need to rank up and experience playing these Heroes and playing against them.

Firstly buffing Tanks that doesn’t require buffs nor nerfs right now such as Muradin, Garrosh (although the idea for Indomitable to be in Tier 3 isn’t a bad idea.), ETC (There’s not that much skills required to using Rockstar as it procs every time he casts an ability.) and Anub’arak.

I disagree about your ideas to buff Valla, she does not require a small attack range buff, nor does Cassia needs a nerf on Surge of Light (after all, it’s your team’s fault for attacking Cassia rapidly and at close range, at most Cassia deserves to spam the damage to punish your own team’s stupidity.)

Overall, your ideas are more or less just a blatant buff to the Heroes you listed e.e

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14

Maybe a more… experienced forumeer could perhaps make a parody of this? :eyes:

15

16

You forgot to nerf whitemanes leg length :rage:

17

Don’t you dare to even bring that to discussion, our Whitemane is already perfect!

18

The changes tho.

What.

I’m okay with this.

Hell no. That thing already hurts like hell.

Her base range is fine as is.

Ey, now. It’s fine as is.

A significant buff to her is deffo slightly less mana costs.

Ouch.

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19

I think you’re severely missing the point with most of these changes, none of them are intended to be a buff or nerf (except E.T.C). If you read my comments on each change, you’d see that I never mentioned wanting to make any of those heroes stronger. Instead, I’ve identified something that I consider problematic and I’ve proposed a fix for that problem. The rest is just compensation that would be tuned if I could actually test anything. Complaining that I’ve overbuffed anyone is missing the forest for the trees.