Mount speed changes explained by Blizzard developer

Heroes of the Storm designer, Matt Cooper, offers an explanation for mount movement speed changes in the latest patch.

Read the official post here

If you aren't aware, the Gamescom patch that was on display last weekend featured a subtle change to mount speed. In fact, mount movement speed was reduced from 40% to 30%.

This seems like a small change but, considering that mount speed is such a core element of the game (that has been unchanged since it's release), the ripple effect this change will make is hard to fully grasp.

Slower heroes? 

Public opinion of this mount speed change seems largely negative, which might be the reason for Mr. Cooper's decision to explain in depth the reasoning for the changes. These are the goals the team hopes to achieve through the mount speed changes:
 

• Slowing down the 2-4 man early game gank squads on bigger maps
• Making map-wide team positioning matter more
• Making recognition of the enemy team’s location on the map more significant
   

Most people can understand these points, but Blizzard devs have an insight we lack. One of the most interesting parts of the post was when Mr. Cooper explained how the team sometimes goes about deciding how to change certain elements of the game. In this instance, Mr. Cooper explained how dramatic and extreme changes can get their team to rethink how the game should be played

 One such example was increasing the mounting cooldown from 4 seconds to 80 seconds, but the Movement Speed was increased from 40% to 80%. Ultimately we didn’t like the extreme change this made to Heroes of the Storm, but it make us think about where we were on the map more often. We really enjoyed that, so we wanted to bring a slightly tamer version of it to live. ”

This example is an extreme of course, but one can imagine how an 80-second mount cooldown would force players to take their position on the map much more seriously.