Hero releases will likely never happen, though maybe hero reworks will still happen–it’s possible that some of those might change roles a bit
But I think the “Support” role is dead to be frank (even though it’s by far my favorite role to play). People just don’t value what a support brings to the table, whether that’s consistent soak from Vikings, powerful Burst and Recon from Medivh, amazing enable from Zarya, or global pressure and aid from Abathur. Even my favorite tank, Tyrael, is very reminecent of the support category and people often dislike Tyrael for that reason (e.g, He doesn’t DO enough hard CC)
Tassadar used to be a support hero–now they are a ranged assassin. Old Brightwing was arguably a support hero, but she too was reworked into more of a traditional healer. I’d even consider old Sylvanas a support who’s pretty clearly been reworked into a dive assassin (nothing wrong with this particular rework btw, old Sylvanas was VERY annoying)
But no character has EVER been reworked into a more supportive role. Thoughts on this?
From a money perspective, it’s more frequent for a Support to be reworked into other roles because those other roles are way more lucrative and popular with the player base.
From a balancing perspective, Supports can be arguably more difficult to balance than say, Healers, because they exist to aid their teammates in ways other than Healing. The only obvious form of this is of course Shielding, but they can’t all be Shielders, so some give other buffs to their team and these other buffs can be a nightmare to balance because it has the potential to swing from one extreme to the other depending on what teammate you supported. For example, a move speed buff to a Li-Ming probably will seem very weak. But give that to a Garrosh and you basically have a guaranteed throw.
I don’t think other roles will be reworked into Supports even though they are bordering Support categories (Tyrael, Tyrande. etc.) because Supports just have that stigma to them of being hard to play, making them unpopular by comparison to other roles. Not to mention they are difficult to balance and make.
That being said, I do hope we’ll get more Support heroes in the future. I personally would like to see Overmind, Karax, and Mengsk becoming Supports.
The functional concern is that “Supports” aren’t really a ‘class’ for designing a hero. The general gist is that they are heroes that do not easily conform to standard draft expectations and create problems for QM. They’re just weird, hard-to-play leftovers that don’t have direct offsets to what they can do for a team; if anything, Cho-gall could fit into that same group, but being a hero that takes two slots, he has to be considered a ‘tank’ to attemp to be fairly matched against pug compositions.
Tyrael has shields and is an unconventional tank, but he’s not really a ‘support’;
Chen can talent to granting allies shields, yrel has ally-supportive abilities, and so on. Even as a ranged assassin, Tassadar has supportive talents he can take, as does chromie, and other heroes.
As some heroes get reworked, some of their talent options (to provide build variety) have them get “support”-like qualities. Tyrande is an example of the ‘pinnacle’ of previous heroes – she had unique buffs and debuffs – but those unique aspects have since been distributed to the rest of the hero pool. Tanks can get anti-heal, -armor, and shrinkray effects that weren’t previously options for that role. For any new hero added to the game to be a ‘support’ would likely have to come from the game getting an overhaul on the buff/debuff system that tries to use ‘support’ as a way to push a more niche appeal to particular heroes if they aren’t already predominately chosen for something as is.
Considering that we don’t get Heroes and even when we did the devs said that Supports are the least likely to happen, no, we won’t get Supports imo ever again.
Support role is dead because hots devs didn’t want supports to be like LoL supports. Instead they wanted supports to be weird and out of the box heroes
Usually I ignore your ill-informed biased nonsense, but this is an important topic to me.
Devs didn’t try to make Supports, so no, they didn’t refuse to make LoL-type Supports due to “forcing out of the box Heroes”.
Supports were accidents tbh.
For example when they said how they made Medivh, they said he almost became a Healer. It’s just they didn’t want him to be one, they thought the Role is not fitting, but his supportive tools and lack of beef made him not fit for Assassin/Warrior thus he became his own thing.
Cho’Gall is an out of the box Hero but they’re a Tank and a R.Assa.
Murky is “OotB” as well but a M.Assa.
Leo? Hogger? Bruisers.
And I might be wrong but I think Tyrael is pretty “LoL Support”-esque.
Tyrael just sucks whether as a support or tank. His kit is really bad and he needs to wait until ten to have any peel for the team.
Supports would have been easy to implement in hots. Where are the shields or heals that have secondary effects like attack speed boosts or attack damage boosts? Anduin has a pull but it’s on such a long cooldown. Where’s the tank support who can peel while tanking like alistar in LoL? Where are the hook heroes other than stitches (who wouldn’t be a good support as his w is really weak as a peel. Blitzcrank would get a hard cc knock up on base kit to follow up a solo hook). In fact, hooks can have different properties whether it’s like blitzcrank/stitches, a tether while slowly pulling in a hero (thresh), or halfway pull hook that allows the tank support to halfway engage while bringing their targets halfway as well?
There were so many easy potential kits to broaden the support role with even subroles within the support role. Other mobas already did the groundwork for hots heroes to copy.
There is no actual ‘supportive role’ or thing supports bring to the table though. It’s just a general catch-all for Heroes that can’t or don’t fill any of the main roles. (Kill things / Protect Things / Heal things, broadly speaking). It’s already quite tricky to think up concepts that are unique enough yet still are suitable for normal gameplay.
It also tends to lead to problems with fitting them in comps, as you’re suddenly down a Hero for filling the main team roles. Supports often require fairly specific drafts to compensate this (basically ‘draft a 4-man comp that can do everything already’ so the 5th pick doesn’t matter as much).
Because of this, it’s pretty rare to design a Support. Even if a good Support ability or concept does come up, its usually better/easier to think of an actual role for that Hero, and then simply make them that role instead. For example, don’t make ‘ally-boosting-Support’, but also give them some healing and make them ‘Ally-boosting-healer’ instead. Or make them bulky and turn them into ‘ally-boosting-Tank’. That way the Hero becomes more viable from not needing a dedicated comp to be playable, you can just pick them in their role slot and use their supportive capabilities from there.
“support” in Hots = healer. Most of the other dota-like games don’t have comparable healers and instead have damaging heroes that also heal. For them, ‘secondary effects’ are a way of sprucing up another minor ability whereas stuff like that is on the ‘support’-class healers – which is why that role was initially called ‘supports’ and casters and streamers will often still call them as such.
However, since those games keep using that term, a lot of players fixate on the word, and less so the function/application of it.
Idk I’ve seen support more as debuffs/buffs and other misc. utility (such as unparelleled soak, or something more wacky like terrain manipulation) rather than healing throughput. Every character SHOULD have some sort of supportive aspect, but supports lean into the “makes the game harder for enemy makes the game easier for allies” mentality.
Arcturus Mengsk is one of the possible heroes in the game, perhaps this is wasn’t truly added yet, as of today.
Support heroes didn’t have more of them, since I did prefer to Assassin heroes, Zarya (Overwatch) is most recent; and Abathur (StarCraft) remains popularity, despite of this; three others have avenge to only 20% of players.
I’m haven’t play Heroes of the Storm since last December; largely because not have any updates for Abathur since last 2 years, apparently I had to returned in the game, once we finally found Abathur rework patch.
I had left this forum for reasons that I moving to World of Warcraft; perhaps that need more Warcraft heroes.