I hate to say it, but I have to agree, these patches that would have been demonically bad once in a blue moon seem to be a regular occurrence. The fact it took them 6 months to get DW into a balanced state, and the Gazlowe, a barely undertuned hero, giving massive buffs both baseline and talent wise is just so depressing to see.
There’s shaping the meta, and then there’s normalizing near incompetence.
But the forum prefers a scapegoat and chisel method to changes rather than sledgehammer changes. You get what the collective community asks for
Not the best example because Cassia at least did come out super bad. So, being somewhat bold in changes made sense. Why it was so bad to begin with, I don’t know what’s going on in their QA, few heroes have ever been released in that terrible of a state.
If you want to ignore that as an occasional slip up, fine, but giving a hero a 20% hp buff that was also affected by a baseline trait armor was INSANE. And any casual person looking at those notes would know that. Gazlowe who was not released nearly in as bad a shape as Cassia was, what is the excuse for the scope of these changes?
You can also just as easily build up as you can whittle down.
These are no longer occasional slip ups, they’re a staple now. Back in the day people would always have to refer back to Li-Ming for how bad a screw up was. Now you just have to look back to the latest patch. Having heroes be overturned to change up the meta is fine, having broken ones where you feel like you’re forced to ban the latest screw up is not.
This is why I came up with the autobalancing idea.
Tassadar got a mild nerf and getting back to a healthy place.
I’m not entirely sure about Gazlowe, he was always oppressive. His turrets are particularly problematic to clear. I think it’s more about people playing him more due to hype and at a slightly higher level, resulting in more wins and more hype.
Some heroes might have an unhealthy spread of winrates, thus making the devs scratch their heads. There are examples of strong, okay and terrible heroes, so the response is a bit random.
Cassia is clearly overproducing numbers but she requires so much effort, she deserves to be OP according to the same line of thinking that claims Li Li shall not exceed 48% winrate for she is supposedly easy. Also it’s possible that she is hard to master.
The hero I’d actually nerf super hard is Kel’I-delete-you-now’thuzad. Then again, he requires skill and coordination, too. And I’m seeing him at 36% winrate (4:9 as teammate, 9:14 as enemy). Still, one good stun and the whole team is gone. Also prevents all channeled objectives. Ain’t easy work balancing…
That’s what I mean when I say they overcompensated. HotS has a bad history of buffing underperforming heroes. Some of the most broken things come from overbuffed weaklings.
Cassia was the exception, not the standard. You cannot straight-faced tell me that Gazlowe, D.Va, and Tassadar were as broken as launch Li-Ming or launch Maiev. Cassia wasn’t even that broken.
QA is not responsible for balance.
Game designers are.
Everyone on the HotS team can voice their thoughts on balance, I imagine.
Part of the issue as I understand it is that in internal games they play multiple builds at the same time, and have their own inhouse meta.
The volume of games they can play to get a feel for balance is very small. In an hour after the update goes live, they’ve probably got more games than they could have possibly playtested while releasing regular patches.
I can, because Li-Ming had trouble reaching 60%, all those heroes already have. Cassia wasn’t even that broken? Lol, okay…
it doesn’t work that way. But, don’t take my word for that, here is AZJackson:
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/hr6kng/heroes_of_the_storm_ama_july_16_2020/fy9pgac/?context=3
which sadly isn’t going to work widespread, but would be cool to see on heroes that aren’t going to generate a bunch of salt if their winrate is around 50% on average.
And what do you mean by that. You want to bury every hero in the ground with extreme nerfs so they end up being weaker then a lane minion.
There is a reason why op heroes only get small nerfs untill they are fine again.
Sledgehammer nerf a hero sound so dumb. Maybe because you dont know how balance patches are made from the data they make them from.
If all op heroes got nerfed by your logic then they should have hp reduced by half and dmg reduced by half too to make sure they become a empty husk of their former self.
Its good the devs never listen to people on this forum and stick to actual data.
They’ve done some pretty big ones.
AZJackson hasn’t always been the balance lead (pretty sure he is the lead on balance/design, yeah?). Sometimes OP heroes got knocked pretty hard.
to comment on released heroes with major nerfs:
Xul, Leoric, Tracer, Fenix.
I Think Leoric is arguable either way, and there were a handful of other heroes that I was on the fence about so i left off. But they haven’t always done things the current way as far as I can tell.
Community feedback about how it feels something should work is stuff they look carefully at.
It’s what got Imperius’s Q into it’s current state.
It’s why Aba’s hat heals Monstrosity in rework (and heals for 6 ticks instead of 5).
There are almost certainly plenty more cases.
Smile is just my meal. He is God of fear, just wanna find him and make his day.
You’re referring to actual position of QA, I’m referring to the process of QA which the game designers are obviously the ones ultimately responsible for in balance.
I remember when Kael first came out and a little after mid game, in my FIRST game with no experience, I had already gotten like 100k damage, while the next highest was at like 30k. Like those are the releases that seem unforgivable. But even then, I understand if these are occasionally occurrence of slip ups.
But when they have data on live, and they still make the massive/tiny changes they do, there’s just something fundamentally wrong with their balance process.
and your examples are …?
As I said, I think they could push heroes down a bit harder, but you’ve got an example of years ago. 
Cassia had 65% Winrate, and wasn’t she broken? WTF.
MurlocAggroB has the habit of defending OP heroes like Deathwing on his release and his first nerfs. Deathwing had like 65% Winrate before at MASTERS, and he only relied on saying that the Masters themselves Did not know how to play against DW…
He doesn’t really care about the numbers of the heroes, but about his anecdotal evidence.
He just does make out of context comparisons like this:
Then:
Oh, I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in this thread, in particular Gazlowe in the recent patch. But you could say the same of any of these 60% heroes.
Well, the people with the actual stats did say:
You can beleive that they’re lying about his actual results if you want, but to what end?
I have loled when I saw someone telling me Gazlowe cannot be killed. Yes, he was under performing, he got overbuffed because the impact of the buffs was obviously underestimated.
Honestly, my issue with the whole thing is that they seem to be fine slowly nerfing strong/near overperforming heroes, but don’t mind throwing buffs at the wall of underperforming ones.
But we have no idea how underperforming he was.
A part of the issue is community perception, i remember when they quoted that Malthael’s AOE ult was statistically stronger, and the next day people here were still complaining it was the weaker of the ults. Diablo was getting banned tons when he was statistically the weakest warrior is another. Gazlowe probably was not strong. But yeah, they went Freaking HAM on him.
But generally speaking their balancing is fine. I think it could be faster, but that would require a ton of extra work to squeeze that in, even if it was just to balance the new hero/reworked hero, based on what I’ve been told.
But even in their language a “bit” underpowered, was actioned with a reversal of a “lot” of nerfs. It just makes no sense.
I never said they were lying, I also think he came out low. After all, I was one of the old Gazlowe players who were telling the hordes of people that thought he needed to be reworked, that he probably wasn’t as good as he was before (even though I thought he could get to the point with changes). I just think the response to something that is a bit low is not massive buffs.
I think the reason why balance in this game is so difficult to do is because there are so many freaking metrics to analyze.
This isn’t like sc2 where the number of interactions are somewhat limited, you have how many potential heroes with potential combinations and even then, when your dataset is corrupted by smurfs, your only choice is to balance around the statistical anomalies since at the highest level of play, at least your datasets are 100% indicative of the play happening at that level.
I like the concept of this game quite a bit and in terms of mobas, imo it’s the best one for general fairness but the match making is a trickle down issue which permeates every aspect of the game., including balance. Their datasets have been corrupted by smurfing.
Gie harbinger some credit he’s not being abusive to anyone yet.
its not that hard to understand that giving 100 health is less OP then 200 health (looking at you xul)
Yet 
But I give him some credit, he is one of the best tanks at this forumù (if he isnt depenand on f2p) im sure everyone who is disagreeing that those heroes are OP are at an elo where meta doesnt matter.
Gazlowe was already good at masters so I dont get the ban neither