We combed through it all so you dont have to. Read about incoming buffs and nerfs and gain insight to their approach to game design
First things first
Q: Are you guys wearing pajamas in this picture?
A (BlizzClaudio): It is hard to imagine a day these guys don't wear pajamas to work. #SoCalLiving #BlizzardDressCodeIsLax
How do I get on the balance team?
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computer/console industry experience good (even non-dev jobs).
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Making creative stuff on your own, like mobile or board games.
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Become involved in the gaming scene, either competitively (eSports/casting/websites/streaming) or providing support (tool creators, web site developers, *content creators).
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Any work experience that involves collaborating with lots of people, making deadlines, and being organized.
Heroes on their radar
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There needs to be better diversity on Dehaka, Diablo, E.T.C., Johanna, and Muradin.
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Rexxar needs improved talent diversity, improved control scheme, and further sharpening his role.
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Nova may get a hero-specific version of bribe to compensate for her poor wave clear
The buff list
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Right now, no one needs more love and affection than Nazeebo. We are looking at ways to increase his skill cap (cough spiders cough, and you better believe we'll be taking a whack at that talent tree. We also agree in rolling in some form of Death Ritual baseline.
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On hero-defining talents: We've gotten a lot better about this and are going to be much more cognizant about it. Changes planned for both Johanna and Nazeebo in this regard
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We are fiddling with increasing [Medivh’s] Portal hitbox size internally right now, we agree it is currently too small.
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We're working on changes for your favorite meat cleaving machine (Butcher) now. Make his trait a bit more interesting and give him a more unique role as a Melee Assassin.
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Valla’s mage-build might get some love. Team is aware of mana tension with hero.
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Minor buffs for Artanis planned as well
The nerf list
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Greymane and Kerrigan will be nerfed
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Falstad is too strong right now in both eSports and Hero League. Damage, utility, and map presence make him virtually always a good pick. Plans are to reduce the damage of Hammer Gains (Gathering Storm), and hopefully make a few more viable builds.
Balance philosophy
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Core value: We don't want our design to ever be restricted to the point that we don't take risks that could potentially improve the game. Because of this, it's hard to say that we will ever be at a spot where we wash our hands and say "yep, game looks good now!"
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How do you use metrics in determining if a hero is winning too much? “This is, by far, the most complicated part of our job, and not something easily or quickly answered. Our data analysts have set up over 20 different 'dashboards' that allow us to correlate statistics together, giving us both broad and detailed looks into each Hero.
Our goal is to try and keep most Heroes win-rates between 45-55%. As for some of the stats we use when making balance decisions: Hero Win Rate, Hero Pick Rate, Hero Talent Picks, Hero Popularity, Player Perception, and Player Skill (just to name a few).”
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Hero performance that surprises you? “There's an interesting loop effect of Hero win rates where small buffs can make players that are hardcore and "playing to win" more likely to pick a Hero, therefore further increasing the win rate.”
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Approach to balance and game design has evolved, the game is coalescing into a more defined form, still have a lot to learn and improve on.
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Hero Release Goals: every hero around 50% on release. Very challenging to do, especially when referencing win rate data on a brand new hero that everyone is playing. We typically wait 2 weeks before patching a new hero as we want to wait to gather enough data, but also give the community some time to learn the new character and strategies. We feel this is also quick enough to address any glaring balance issues.
Over time a new hero will typically trend upwards 4-5%. While every hero varies, we've never seen a new hero trend down over several weeks. In that regard, even if a hero is at 50%, we expect early data to indicate they're much lower.
- Chromie and Medivh release: pre-release, people were crying, “OP! They’re gonna break the game!”, and yet once they came out both their win percentages were pretty low.
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Li Ming and KT first-bans in HL: Addressing it by sharpening their role/weakness and bringing more heroes into meta.
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On RNG: Overall, we have been, and will continue to be, very careful about how and where we use RNG in our abilities and talents. We mostly try to avoid % chance/RNG mechanics.
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Role Diversity: “Couple options; create more categories that help us better define our Heroes (Bruiser, Mage, Pusher, etc...) or embrace their current designations and make kit changes to allow them to better fulfill their given role. I think a combination of both would be nice but the implications of adding more roles comes with a lot of additional fallout.”
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More on Role Diversity: Uther as a tank? Unlikely. “Imagine, if you will, that we create a Hero that can be used as either a Warrior or a Support. How do we make talent tree work for both specs? If you plan on going Warrior spec do half the talents no longer even matter to you?
It also has massive draft implications (which could be good or bad, depending on your outlook).”
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On Powercreep: If we adjusted weak heroes up every patch and not down, our game would just get more and more lethal. Also, take a hero like Cho'gall, who is underplayed and has a really low winrate; if you gradually tune them up, you run into a problem where they continuously don't see play until they're pushed potentially into the realm of being OP.
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AA heroes vs Mages: We've noted that the game has more Basic Attack counters than Ability Damage counters; can improve.
The typical work day
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Get to work and play a game of Hero League.
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Have a small meeting to go over recent changes, then have our morning playtest.
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Talk about the results of the playtest, then go to lunch.
This part of the day can vary:
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Have meetings to go over the state of the game and discuss any potential changes we want to consider making.
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Research various changes to current hero reworks, potential system changes, or other parts of the current state of the game that we want to change.
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Look at new hero balance and make sure they're in line for our playtests/release.
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Implement changes that we're making for the next day's patch/playtest.
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Answer questions about specific hero interactions or bugs and how we want to resolve them.
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Play the game!
Specific balance issues
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On the Minion damage buff: For all the hubbub they caused when we announced this on PTR (mostly from our poorly written patch note) we haven't heard much about them since we shipped them (which is good). We've seen game times reduce slightly, which is a positive outcome.
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On Supports: A lot of supporting and healing Abilities are "low skill cap", in that they are point and click instant cast.
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A lot of healing Abilities are a huge part of the "power pie" of a support.
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Some Supports need to stay easy , because we want a variety of options among Supports.
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A lot of people really enjoy playing Supports right now, even though some don't.
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Creating Supports without the Ability to heal is problematic, because Supports that can heal exist. In fact Medivh was a considered a Support for a long while internally, but every playtest it felt like the lack of true healing make him feel inferior.
Rather than adjust his kit to include healing, we decided to embrace the fact that he was a Support-style specialist.
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Any changes to healing number values (up, down, sideways or otherwise) will likely require a lot of other changes to the game, and might really change the way things feel.
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Some players are playing Supports that otherwise wouldn't want to, due to the Daily Quest system.
- On Carries: This is being addressed with higher skill-cap heroes and talents
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On Maps: We're testing the rework of Haunted Mines weekly and making refinements to it. No release date yet
Talent Design
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Things to consider: Does this Talent now define the Hero? Is it why they were brought to a team? Is it healthy for the game? Can we create viable alternatives at the same tier that are just as compelling, without trying to do the same thing 4 different ways or offering a giant range of tools that the Hero shouldn't have in the large scheme of things?
- “We have a nifty excel file that does a lot of numerical calculations to show us which Heroes have the 'worst' talent health in the game.”
- Q: Which balance change and/or idea for a mechanic did you blatantly steal from reddit?
A: Stitches: Helping Hand baseline. There is no way I can take credit for that one.
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Fury of the Storm may receive same treatment as Bolt of the Storm
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More heroes coming with mechanics similar to Xul’s lvl 20 Mortal Wound
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We've seen mixed success on the viability of non-healing Heroics on Support, no doubt.
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Ess of Johan brought back as a level 20 talent: Balanced, but we cut it because “it made hitting with all of your spells so easy.”
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On Cleanse: “There has never been a talent I wish we could 'kill with fire' more than Cleanse. We have constant debates about it every week and I have not got a decent night’s sleep in months due to it haunting me.”
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What about making Cleanse a baseline ability for every Supports: “We want to move in a direction where Cleanse is not considered a 'must-pick'.
Cleanse is not an ability we want most players to be using (especially newer users), so giving it to everyone baseline goes against that. Internally, we have been discussing if there is a good replacement for Cleanse, as we definitely like that it can mitigate CC chaining.
I think we could also explore doing hero specific Cleanse talents that would give us more individual tuning knobs such as what level it's at, what talents it’s against, the CD, etc.”
Future Heroes
One can dream...
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We are working on some stealth heroes, but you wont see them coming any time soon. I can't reveal any more information about them at this time.
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Core replacment Heroes: They sound cool don't they? And we've balanced crazier things in the game, like Cho'gall or Abathur. There are definitely a ton of challenges there, but I'd say there's potential there.
Do ya'll love these AMA's as much as we do!? Huge shoutout to Blizzard and the Dev Team for being so open and interatcive with the community. Not only do these AMA's provide a more meanigful context for players but they truly reflect how much they're paying attention their player base.
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