Today was an exciting day for you if you’re a Heroes of the Storm fan – we got a new patch, new hero, new holiday event, and new matchmaking changes.

If you’re too overwhelmed to read everything or just don’t have the time, here are the highlights from today’s patch notes, some first impressions on the changes, and the implications for the future of the game.

 
Score Screens: Kills, Deaths, and Assists have been reordered on in-game and end-of-game Score Screens to read as Kills, Assists, and Deaths.

This change boggles my mind.

I don’t recall there ever being a time when KAD was more standard than KDA. Maybe they’re trying to support Kids Against Drugs.

I have a hunch that the reason they changed this was due to community feedback. A few weeks ago, while I was browsing the harsh lands of a place called the reddits, I saw a few people suggesting that, in order to easen the math, kills and assists should be placed side-by-side so we can quickly add them together and relive the old memories of when we used to have takedowns.

If this really was the reason why they changed it, I’m sad that Blizzard listened to them, because, as we’ve seen in the past, people are astronomically bad at knowing what they want.

Let’s put on our Storm Psychology hats (if you haven’t read the series, I highly recommend it – it’s my favorite series that we’ve published on Tempo Storm) and dive into a psychological phenomenon called introspection illusion.

Introspection illusion is a bias where people think they know exactly what they want and why they want it, when they actually don’t have a clue. Using this unjustified confidence, they predict what they will like and dislike in the future, without ever actually experiencing it first-hand.

What disasters has this caused? In 1985, Coca-Cola developed the New Coke flavor, which scored high in consumer feedback during testing periods; upon its public release, Coca-Cola received over 400,000 complaints about the new flavor. In 2009, Walmart’s customers said they wanted the aisles to be less cluttered; Walmart listened, and as a result, lost $1.85 billion in sales.

The new ordering of kills, deaths, and assists is strange, and doesn’t really click in my mind. I’d really like some insight as to why this change was made.

 
Festive Treasure Goblin Mount: All players can ride the brand new Festive Treasure Goblin Mount for free during Winter Veil! This limited-time Mount cannot be purchased, and will only be available during Winter Veil, so be sure to pick it during Hero Select before readying up!

Winter Veil Items in the Shop: Several new Winter Veil skins and bundles, including Sugar Plum Sylvanas and Greatfather Stitches, have arrived to the Shop for a limited time!

It’s great that Blizzard is celebrating an event with yet again another new mount, and it’s even better that this one is going to be available for free. But, it’s just the same new cosmetics over and over again – new skins and new mounts. I would like to see Blizzard really take it up a notch with their shop items.

I personally don’t feel as if there is any reason to ever buy more than one skin for each hero (unless I have so much gold piled up that I might as well unlock some master skins on heroes for which I already have real-world-money skins). It’s not like you can put on two skins at the same time. Yet, all Blizzard does is give me a wider selection of skins every patch.

Back on April 1, 2015, Blizzard introduced the Big Head Mode as an April Fool’s joke. Every hero in game had their character model modified so their head would be about four times larger than normal. Of course, this was a joke, but I would still like to see this premise implemented as a cosmetic.

Let me pay 20,000 gold to put a Santa hat on all my heroes.

If Blizzard was able to inflate every hero’s head for an April Fool’s joke, then surely, the character models are designed well enough that they can easily modify the “head” of a hero? Just plop a hat on top of it, and you’re ready to spread holiday cheer. If it’s not that easy, then the earlier they act on innovative ideas like this, the better – the longer they wait, the more retroactive work they would need to do.

This same thing goes for mounts. The Cloud9 Champion’s Nexagon mount was released today as well, and, even though I already bought it for 5,000 gold, I most likely won’t ever use it, as I already have a mount-and-skin combo for every hero.

Instead, for 20,000 gold, let me activate an option to put the Cloud9 logo as an emblem on all my mounts. The theme here is similar to the Santa hat – give me something that I can buy and use in conjunction with the stuff I already have. Give me some revolutionary, outside-the-box cosmetics so I can use everything I’ve bought at the same time.

 
Dryad’s Swiftness: Lunara cannot use Mounts. Instead, you move 20% faster by leaping short distances.

When Lunara was first announced, I noticed a striking similarity between her and Kalista from League of Legends.

I personally hated Kalista because I felt as if she took the most important aspect of mechanics for a squishy damage dealer – positioning and kiting – and made it too easy. Kalista’s passive allows her to throw out an attack, then immediately dash towards her next click. This completely eliminates the importance of threading movement between ability usage and basic attacks.

I initially thought Lunara would work the same way, and was a bit disappointed. But, after trying her out myself, I realized that it wasn’t the case at all.

The tricky thing about Lunara is that you can cancel her movement mid-bounce. This introduces a whole new world of mind games with your opponents.

Eventually, your enemies are going to pick up on Lunara’s bouncy movement patterns, and predict where you’ll end up at the end of your bounce. If that ever happens, switch it up on them, and press S while you’re in midair to stop and immediately fall to the ground. Or, click at a different angle and switch directions, to experience the same effect.

This also prevents kiting on Lunara from going on autopilot. In order to actually take advantage of the extra distance on her bounce, you’ll need to time your basic attacks and abilities so they happen after the bounce completes. This adds a completely new facet of movement optimization, and turned what could’ve been a “noob-friendly” mechanic into something with an extraordinarily high skill cap.

 
Portrait Border Display: Loading Screens will now only display portrait borders that are relevant to each play mode.

And finally, on a closing note, when I saw this update, I originally thought to myself, “I can finally learn heroes in Quick Match without everyone having the expectation of me carrying because I’m Rank 1, or getting upset if I underperform.”

Then I realized that I already manually turn off my Rank 1 border when I’m learning heroes in Quick Match, because that option is already available.

So I guess this update means that Blizzard is now forcefully preventing people from showing off their ranks in Quick Match.

 
That’s everything that popped out at me in these patch notes. To read them and decide for yourself if there was anything else important that I left out, check out the post on Battle.net: Heroes of the Storm Patch Notes — December 15, 2015