Ok lets be honest for a second, I'm insanely happy Hogger has been added to the game, he's a great hero with an amazing history and his kit is awesome, BUT I think it's a little too awesome. It remains to be seen just how powerful he really will be in skilled hands, but it seems the power creep in terms of mechanics and design is greatly exceeding other characters.
For starters, he basically has 3 traits: Rage, Loot Hoard, and meat. Remember, some heroes basically don't have traits at all. For example, Auriel's trait is basically just an extension of her W ability substitute for mana, and Arthas just gets mana return and a minor slow from his auto attack. Don't get me started about Morales' trait, if it even exists... The shear amount of options that Hogger get's not only from his abilities, but from his triumvirate of traits options, is actually crazy, there's no way in hell this hero could be bad with this many options. Including the fact that his E has a self cleanse AND is his greatest mobility option, on a short cooldown (like Johanna's trait PLUS the mobility), it just sounds like this hero is going to be insanely toxic in the right hands.
I think Hogger should be strong, but I really don't see why he needed this much power creep in terms of his design. You could completely remove Rage or the Meat and he would still be really good imo. I get that some heroes have different amounts of options as part of their design when it makes sense, like Valeera, but here I think the inclusion of Rage is kind of mind boggling. I see that rage is his substitute for Mana, but here there is no resource management really. Even if you're not taking damage, you're still getting more and more powerful as you deal more damage? I mean maybe the trade off would be that you start to take more damage and/or have less armour or something, there needs to be a trade-off, especially when he ALSO has meat and MANY self healing options via talents.
Anyway just my initial thoughts about the design of the character and messing around on the PTR. I know it's too early to tell and all that, but I was pretty shocked to see this level of power creep from the design. I won't be surprised to see this hero perma-banned in the upcoming weeks of CCL.
EDIT: It's possible that Hogger is just fine in terms of balance with all of these options, but I do think it really points out just how dated some of the other heroes are. I actually love the amount of options Hogger has, He's already one of my favorites to play, and I hope we see more changes like this for some of the existing cast of heroes.
