If heroes are ready why are you shelving them for 4 months or more?

[Hulkie-11860]

That’s assuming the characters they’re working on will cause a meta shift. Or a character that people want. People want more tanks like Reinhardt. But they have to make a new character act similar to him. But not rip him off. There be no point of Rein or the new character. Or they don’t want some sort of double main tank shield meta. In conjunction with snipers/Bastion to happen.

They could have set release dates, to influences the balance patches of the current heroes. If they don’t have a rule set. A balance patch for X will make them OP. Because a new hero came out and caused some sort of abuse problem. I’m on everyone’s side. They need to make more heroes for the other roles. But there’s no point. If they just rip off Reinhardt. Or make a character that no one wants to play. Because they made a character who tanks so much. They are that boring to play, more so than Reinhardt.

This is why junk takes so long to make. And has like 2000 planning steps.

[TwoCoins-1776]

I really think that “Magnet” hero they discussed will be the “Rein” hero that plays similar but very different. A Tank that can push forward through a choke.

He can absorb projectiles and shoot them back out. Like the Titans vortex from Titanfall.

[Bui-1491]

As Jeff said, Job security.

[Cerburus437-1424]

@TwoCoins-1776

Ashe was made as a reaction to her CGI animated short from Blizzard themselves. She’s basically has no unique mechanics that required a ton of testing and she’s essentially a modded Widow. Which probably saved a ton of development time

Actually what they meant by this could be that its the same case as Brigitte

Source:

@GeoffGoodman

Both Moira and Brigitte had very early prototypes near each other actually. There was a time where we just really felt like we need to add more healer options to the game asap, so we got to playing around with different prototypes and mechanics. In fact, Brigitte (who we just called ‘pally’ internally) was the one that first started with Moira’s Biotic Orb ability (though she only had the heal part of it). Initially Brigitte’s prototype was sort of… ‘lets see if we can do a healer who only healed via powerful cooldowns’, so thats where the bouncing heal ball started.

Eventually we wanted to push the tank hybrid angle much more which lead to her Inspire passive and armor ultimate. We weren’t even sure, originally, that it was going to be Brigitte or just some new character that has yet to be seen, but once her kit started coming together it really felt like a perfect fit.

@GeoffGoodman

Ever hero is different, but in Brigitte’s case she certainly was born from a gameplay desire first. Initially we weren’t even sure it was going to be Brigitte or someone new, but once we started playing her and her kit started coming together it really felt like a great fit.