only mage in the super traditional sense, as in actual wizards, aoe range heroes that use only magic for their abilities
mages: azmodan, chromie, guldan, jaina, kaelthas, kelthuzad, liming, Mephisto, orphea, gall
you could argue nazeeb could be there depending on if he’s just throwing poisoned animals or if they are ethereal spirit magic. Tass May change into a mage if he uses all psionic abilities only.
What about melee mages, such as Alarak?
yeah alarak is a psionic mage, probably Tass after his rework
Edit: actually not sure if alaraks abilities are his suit or his pure psionic abilities. Is discord strike just the psi blades doing a special function?
Which is the problem with your request to break up the ranged assassin category. Too many heroes won’t fall nicely into one or the other, and some heroes in the melee classification could technically be reclassified as a non-ranged mage. It made sense to break up things the way they did, although some heroes will never pigeon hole very well, but to add more categories at this point will simply add the list of heroes that do not categorize well.
Why would your change be necessary?
No I think all the ones listed are the mages. The rest use abilities that are mix of magic and weapons or their strength/agility
Nazeebo depends is he summoning spirit animals or is he actually throwing regular animals and poison? If all of his “kit” is a magically based ability he’s a mage
Falstad has magelike builds but his mobility and barrel roll are part of the bird and he also has decent AA not mage
Zuljin has a mage build and ult but he also relies a lot on his AA and trait which aren’t magic. Also regen might just be normal troll stuff not mage
Raynor, tychus, nova, use guns and tech though nova has some psionic abilities not mages
Kerrigan QWE are Zerg related though they may be psionically empowered, ultra is Zerg not mage
Zera has magelike builds but he uses Protoss tech to cloak, the Q ability is his psi blade, not sure if W is created by zera or thrown like a grenade not mage
Cassia used Spears not mage
Second thought it’s not clear if discord strike is a psionic ability or function of Alaraks blades, all or some of his stuff could just be his suit
That is a weird definition of a mage. I always go by the distinction between abilities and basic attacks as main damage source. Alarak definitely is bound way more to abilities/cooldowns than basic attacks.
Should Nova be counted as “mage”? Because her DPS depends more on her abilities than her AA.
Why should this make sense / is a necessary improvement of the game?
These hero-categorizations are for beginners and every real HOTS player knows that every hero is quite unique.
Just get yourself a box of smarties/skittles and sort them according to their color xD
New system is fine, we don’t need that.
We need a tag system. I wonder why it is not ready yet, it was announced a year ago.
You realize the new categories are just to align with how the matchmaker works, right?
There is no reason to split ranged damage type in the matchmaker, so there is no reason to split it in the categories.