Version 13.3 of Heroes of the Storm is here, and Blizzard posted all the changes in the latest patch notes:

Heroes of the Storm Patch Notes – September 8, 2015 (via Battle.net)

There are nowhere near as many changes in this patch as there were in the last one.

• No more Treasure Goblins

  I honestly didn’t really like the Treasure Goblins. I hate things that act cowardly, can’t really do any­thing, and just run around being a nuisance. I’m sure you can agree that Treasure Goblins are ex­act­ly that.

  But, the actual concept of earning an extra 100 gold one time each day is something that I did like. If you’re looking to unlock all the heroes and a good number of master skins, the gold cost is astronomically high if you don’t spend real money on the game.

  Not only did this 100 gold help quicken that process, it also encouraged people to sign in and play, even if it was just for one Versus A.I. game to get the daily gold bonus.

  Heroes of the Storm is more-or-less my favorite game right now, so I almost always find time to play every­day. But, on days when I’m too busy to play even a single game, during the Treasure Gob­lin event, I would literally delay my sleeping time by 15 minutes so I can sign in to play a bot game and get my 100 gold.

  Now that this promotion is over, I have no external motivation to play every single day, because daily quests can stack up to three at a time. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who feels this way, so I’m guess­ing that the end of this event will mark a slight drop in play.

  Although the Treasure Goblins themselves were annoying, integrating this win-of-the-day concept into a treasure hunt was innovative and well done. I’m just hoping that it will come back soon for the next event in a similar fashion, because a win-of-the-day mechanic is present in a lot of dif­fer­ent games, and their presence is well-justified.

• Rexxar

  Unfortunately, the new hero wasn’t available for play on the PTR before he was released this time, so I wasn’t able to get a chance to preview the hero and see how he is played.

  Based on the descriptions, he seems like an innovative character, as “tank” and “ranged” generally don’t go together.

  After watching the videos, I wonder if Rexxar himself will act like a tank, or if Misha will fill that role and Rexxar himself will act more like a support/utility character.

  When we think about warriors and tanks, we normally think about bulky melee characters who either stand in the way of their damage dealers to protect them, or dive into the opponent’s back­line and disrupt the enemy damage dealers.

  I wonder if Rexxar will fill the second role of tanks and use his kit to disrupt assassins and spe­cial­ists. He would particularly excel at this because of his range, as the enemy’s tanks would have a slightly harder time peeling off Rexxar because he can abuse his spacing advantage.

• Ranked mode restricted to parties of one and two

  I initially found it very strange when people were able to play ranked in groups of three and four.

  A critical element of MOBAs is a player’s ability to work together as a team. Your rank is the av­er­age of all of your skills, and teamwork is one of them. Thus, if you have Rank 1 mechanics but you’re absolute trash at working with your allies, you’ll obviously be ranked a lot lower.

  I was upset that someone would be able to completely bypass this requirement of teamwork by grouping together as a party of four and ranking up the ladder. This person, who deserves to be lower than Rank 1 due to their poor teamwork, is able to nearly eliminate that element of gameplay simply because they’re playing with a large group of people with whom they’re already familiar.

  Now that ranked play can only be solo or duo queued, it puts the appropriate importance back on adapting to allies, being flexible in playstyle and strategies, and working together as a team.

  Although I love playing MMOs and RPGs, and I’ve been playing them for longer than I’ve even known about the existence of MOBAs, I find games like Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends particularly interesting due to the facet of ally interaction.

  Being a human psychology enthusiast, I find enjoyment in learning about different kinds of people I meet in-game, manipulating their emotions, and making them go on reverse tilt – basically, figuring out how to make them feel great and more motivated to perform. I’m glad that the effort I put in this will pay off even more now in Heroes of the Storm ranked games.

• Player reports and silence penalty

  I’m pretty much indifferent about the silence penalty. I actually prefer people getting suspensions and bans instead of chat restrictions. If anything, a chat restriction will make people start to think that verbal harassment isn’t that huge of a deal, because all you’ll get is a silence penalty instead of a ban.

  But, regardless of the punishment used, the one thing I’m still waiting for is report feedback.

  League of Legends sort of had something like this through their tribunal system, where people would vote on cases as to whether or not the culprit should be punished. After a final decision was processed by a Riot staff member, the voter would be notified as to whether or not (s)he voted with the majority. Unfortunately, the tribunal rework became a complete, disastrous pile of trash of a failure, and there is now no longer community involvement in the decision-making process of be­hav­ior­al punishments. (If you’re not familiar, the tribunal went down for a “rework” and never came back.)

  Finding out that you contributed to making the community a better place is extraordinarily re­ward­ing, and in one case, I decided to give myself my own satisfaction.

  If you’ve been following my gaming for a long time, you might know that I have issues with League of Legends where it feels extremely unfun and counterintuitive to the purposes of gaming. Re­gardless, I still occasionally go back to play a game here and there to make sure I’m caught up with the changing meta (which is helpful for casting).

  On one of my first games back after a long break, there was one person whose name was some­thing along the lines of “I Never Roam” and they pretty much single-handedly made the gaming experience terrible for the other nine players on the battlefield (because he had a particular liking to using all-chat).

  At the end of the game, I reported him, and put a pretty detailed description in the report box as to what he did to make me never want to play League of Legends ever again.

  I then proceeded to forget about this person for several weeks, until I was looking through my ranked game history and recognized his username. I decided to click on his profile to see if my report made a difference.

  At first, it seemed like he was still playing like normal – he must be an addicted League of Legends player, because he plays just as much as a professional player would (but is still somehow stuck in low gold). But then, as I scrolled down his match history, I noticed something.

  For a duration of exactly seven days, he did not play any games. At the end of this seven-day period, he started playing several games every day again.

  I’d like to think that the reason for this was because he received a seven-day suspension as a consequence for his behavior. I wasn’t able to figure out for sure (maybe he was out of the country for seven days because karma decided it was time for his grandmother to die in his native country). But it’s still satisfying that such a thing could’ve happened as a result of me clicking the Report button.

  It would be pretty amazing if Blizzard could implement some kind of system like this where they can notify their players for sure whether or not their report made a difference.

  Sure, it might be difficult to add this feature to the report system, but I think the time spent on it would be worth it, as it would be an overall boost to playerbase morale, and a deterring effect for people who think it’s okay to cause problems in game.

That’s all I have to say for these patch notes. One last notable change is with Kael’thas’ Chain Bomb, but I’m not good enough with that hero to immediately know what kind of gameplay changes it will introduce. Even though my Kael’thas has been leveled up to 9, I actually only play him during free week … and I still don’t know what I’m doing with him.

Back when I first played Heroes of the Storm, I played quite a bit with Ed, who you may know as Grainy­rice.

This was during a Nova free week, and Ed appeared to have fallen in love with Nova. He played her every game.

Not long after, Ed stopped playing Heroes of the Storm. Because of this, I will most likely remember him as the Nova player.

Unfortunately … he was awful.

He would come to my lane, sit inside a bush, and wait for the perfect moment. The perfect moment obviously didn’t come, because he needs to take the initiative to set up a situation and reposition himself to deal damage. So, because the perfect moment didn’t happen, he would just walk away.

A minute or so later, he would come back, and do the same thing. Sit in the bush, do absolutely nothing, then go to a different lane.

I eventually got so infuriated at his stupidity that I told him to always do something when he comes to my lane, and never to just sit there in stealth doing nothing.

So he did. He came to my lane, sat there for an extremely long time, watched me fight and still did nothing … then sniped a minion, mounted up, and left my lane.

I was a little upset when Ed stopped playing Heroes of the Storm because I had one less friend with whom I can play the game and gain 50% bonus experience for my matches.

But then I think back to these matches, remember how awful Ed was at Nova, and then my sadness all goes away.

Fast forward a good amount of time and I start playing Heroes of the Storm a lot more seriously, grinding my way up to Level 40 and Rank 1.

During my journey, I encountered a lot of Novas, but most of them were also terrible. They would walk out of the bush to gank me, but I would see the shimmer of their stealth, hit them with a skillshot to reveal them, then pummel them with ten times more damage than she dealt to me. Nova was basically ganking her own self by coming to my lane.

So, as you can imagine, I’ve always had a pretty bad impression of Nova. I assumed she just wasn’t really that great of a hero.

… Until I started playing her myself.

If you can spot stealth heroes, Nova doesn’t really become much of a problem when you’re just regularly laning. But, when you’re already engaged in a fight, it becomes a lot harder to keep track of her because you’re so focused on trading damage and using abilities. That’s when Nova can go in and get the kill.

If you can’t spot stealth heroes, then you’re basically screwed in the hands of a skilled Nova. There isn’t really much more to say about that.

During early- and mid-game, when I play Nova, I stomp on most people. I keep track of who can see stealth and who can’t, and target those who can’t. Once I’ve devastated them enough that they hide behind their wall of turrets, I go to those who can see stealth and be a little bit more patient, waiting for them to be distracted by something before going in.

But I always encountered a problem. My late-game performance always went downhill. I could barely as­sas­sinate anyone for some reason, and I couldn’t figure out why.

But then, I discovered the importance of clones and the clone-related talents.

I’ve always thought that using her clone was a waste of mana. Why not just go in, use your damage, then walk out? What’s the point of the clone?

Well apparently, a lot of people don’t realize that Nova’s clones don’t have markings on the mini-map, and a lot of people focus down and try to kill the clones. On top of that, once you get the damage talents, the clones do enough damage to make up for the small bit of health with which your victim would have otherwise survived.

I started using my clones more intelligently, placing them down first and/or revealing my stealth at the same time as my clones so three Novas pop up at the same time, and the confusion factor has really been helping me out. The clone damage is just a bonus on top of that.

Since taking clone talents and managing my clone ability usage, my Nova performance has increased drastically.

I took a pretty funny screenshot of Quick Match grouping me with three supports.

(Click to enlarge)

Although I haven’t been streaming or uploading videos of any Nova games because I consider them practice games and I’m still learning Nova, I think I’m going to get there soon.

The hero revealed at Gamescom 2015 is now on the HotS PTR – Kharazim, the Veradani Monk, a melee support.

His abilities are:

• [Trait] Pick Your Trait
  Choose between Transcendence, Iron Fists, and Insight from the Talent panel.
• [Q] Radiant Dash
  Mana: 30, Charge Cooldown: 12 sec.
  Jump to an ally or enemy. Enemies are immediately hit with a basic attack.
• [W] Breath of Heaven
  Mana: 60, Cooldown: 8 sec.
  Heal nearby Heroes for 108 and give them 10% MoveSpeed for 3 seconds.
• [E] Deadly Reach
  Mana: 50, Cooldown: 10 sec.
  Your next Basic Attack increases your Attack Speed and Attack Range by 100% for 2 seconds.
• [R] Seven-Sided Strike
  Mana: 77, Cooldown: 50 sec.
  Become Invulnerable and strike 7 times over 2 sec. Each strike hits the highest Health nearby Hero for 7% of their max Health.
• [R] Divine Palm
  Mana: 50, Cooldown: 60 sec.
  Protect an allied Hero from death, causing them to be healed for 500 if they take fatal damage in the next 3 sec.

To put his second heroic option into perspective, Rehgar’s “OP Full-HP Heal” ability is:

• [R] Ancestral Healing
  Mana: 80, Cooldown: 70 sec.
  After a short delay, heal an allied Hero for 600 Health.

Kharazim’s traits are:

• Level 1
  • Transcendence: Every 3rd Basic Attack heals the lowest nearby allied Hero for 40.
  • Iron Fists: Every 3rd Basic Attack deals 100% bonus damage.
  • Insight: Every 3rd Basic Attack restores 12 mana.
• Level 4
  • Foresight: Radiant Dash reveals the area around the target for 3 sec. Only one area can be revealed at a time.
  • Overtake: Basic Attacks while Deadly Reach is active increase your MoveSpeed by 30% for 2 sec.
  • Healing Ward: Place a ward on the ground that heals allies in an area for 2% of their max Health every sec. for 10 sec.
  • Protective Shield: Shield an allied Hero for 15% of their max Health for 5 sec.
• Level 7
  • Echo of Heaven: Breath of Heaven heals a 2nd time 2 sec. later for 50%.
  • Way of the Hundred Fists: Radiant Dashing to an enemy causes you to launch a volley of blows dealing 180 total damage instead of a Basic Attack.
  • Clairvoyance: Reveal an area for 10 sec. Enemies in the area are revealed for 4 sec.
  • Cleanse: Remove all stuns, roots, silences, and slows from the target and reduce the duration of their reapplication by 50% for 2 sec.
• Level 10: Seven-Sided Strike or Divine Palm
• Level 13
  • Quicksilver: Radiant Dashing to an ally gives you and the target 30% bonus MoveSpeed for 3 sec.
  • Spell Shield: Upon taking Ability Damage, reduce that damage and further Ability Damage by 50% for 3 sec. Can only trigger once every 30 sec.
  • Relentless: Reduces the duration of silences, stuns, slows, and roots against your Hero by 50%.
  • Fists of Fury: Increases Deadly Reach’s duration by 50%.
• Level 16
  • Soothing Breeze: Breath of Heaven removes silences, blinds, slows, and roots.
  • Circle of Life: Increase Breath of Heaven’s healing by 10% for each other Hero in the cast range.
  • Blinding Speed: Decreases Radiant Dash’s cooldown by 2 sec. and increases the maximum number of charges by 1.
  • Blazing Fists: Every 3rd Basic Attack reduces the cooldown of Deadly Reach by 1 sec.
• Level 20
  • Transgression: Seven-Sided Strike hits 4 additional times.
  • Peaceful Repose: Divine Palm’s cooldown is set to 5 sec. if the Hero does not die.
  • Storm Shield: Shield all nearby allied Heroes for 20% of their max Health for 3 sec.
  • Epiphany: Activate to restore 33% of your max Mana and refill 2 charges of Radiant Dash.

He currently has one skin available, Jade Dragon Kharazim. This skin, as well as a standard skin color var­i­a­tion, are shown in the screenshots below:

My initial impression of this hero is that he’s another support similar to Tyrande and Tassadar, where they’re more damage-oriented rather than support-oriented, but they’re classified as support simply due to the utility they bring to the team. However, there is one distinct difference.

Tyrande and Tassadar are generally used as damage-dealer substitutes, and most teams that carry Tyrande or Tassadar have a separate dedicated healer. The only options Tyrande and Tassadar have to heal are ei­ther very weak heal/shield abilities, or cheesy talents like Healing Ward.

On the other hand, Kharazim is much more dynamic, and can be used as a flex pick. If the player wants to use him as a utility support like Tyrande and Tassadar, that’s fine; if the player wants to turn him into a dedicated healer, the Transcendence trait actually works pretty well.

In comparison, Brightwing’s trait is Soothing Mist, which heals nearby allied Heroes for 30 every 4 seconds. Kharazim can actually heal more than Brightwing as long as he is continuously engaged in combat.

And of course, the two heroic abilities contrast very much – a damage Kharazim would take Seven-Sided Strike, which is great at ripping apart tanks (49% of your opponent’s health gone in 2 seconds during a 1v1 can be shocking and devastating), while a healing Kharazim can take Divine Palm and almost have an Ancestral Healing for an ally under certain circumstances.

Now, if Kharazim is selected as a dedicated healer, all this trait and heroic healing would be on top of the healing that Tyrande and Tassadar do. That is, Kharazim’s Breath of Heaven is like Tyrande’s Light of Elune (heal herself for 60 and an ally for 120 health) and Tassadar’s Plasma Shield (shield an ally for 200 health).

Unfortunately, because I am not a support player (I play specialists and assassins exclusively), I can’t really say with much confidence how strong Kharazim will be. However, just from theorizing with the information given, he will definitely bring a lot of different options to a team, and force the opponents to regularly check his talent selections if they want a chance at forming some counterplay.

Blizzard released a set of patch notes yesterday for the Heroes of the Storm Public Test Realm as a pre­view of what’s to come in the next patch:

Heroes of the Storm PTR Patch Notes – August 10, 2015 (via Battle.net)

There’s a lot of content in those patch notes, but I decided to go over the items that I liked or particularly caught my attention.

Items may now be purchased from the PTR Shop using real money.

I’m glad that Blizzard is including store purchases in their test realm, and compensating testers for their purchases by providing the same items for free on the live servers. This hints at the fact that this test realm is actually there for testing as many things about the game as possible.

This, of course, contradicts what I discussed yesterday about the League of Legends Public Beta En­vi­ron­ment – how bugs are often reported but rarely fixed, and make it to the live servers anyway, which sug­gests that the PBE exists as a showcase environment rather than a bug testing environment.

Add Diablo to Your Hero Collection

Something I heard about in a previous patch notes release is that bundles will become dynamic bundles, and you will be refunded for any heroes that you purchased twice as a result of purchasing a bundle.

Small things like this that are essentially insignificant to Blizzard (it’s probably irrelevant to them if they reward you with 10,000 gold so you can purchase another hero) can mean a lot to players.

I qualify for a few heroes in the dynamic bundle refund system, and I’m hoping that they do something similar to this Diablo update, where if you own Diablo III and Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, you earn Diablo for free. I’m looking forward to getting several thousand gold back so I can get closer to completing my entire collection.

Malthael’s Phantom

If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts regarding Blizzard games, you probably know that one thing I absolutely love about Blizzard games is how they’re all intertwined. For example, I played World of War­craft recently because I was able to get a free mount in Heroes of the Storm once I reached Level 100 on a character in WoW (again, not really a mount I would use, but as I said, it’s all about completing the col­lec­tion).

Malthael’s Phantom is another mount you can get by reaching Level 70 with a character on Diablo III dur­ing Season 4. This is probably the one update I’m most excited about, because this mount actually looks pretty amazing and I will most likely use it on a lot of heroes.

This also brings exposure to their other games and encourages players to try them out. Although I have a level-capped character on Diablo III with over 250ish Paragon levels, I still have no clue how the Season system works. Because of this in-game promotion, Blizzard has successfully given me enough motivation to try out that aspect of Diablo III when the next season rolls around.

New Portrait Rewards

These new portrait rewards are all about the goals. Sure, just playing the game is fun, but having these rewards as external motivators makes it even better.

These portraits take quite a bit of time to achieve. For example, playing 50 games will take quite some time and dedication, especially when it has to be done within the Eternal Conflict period. Getting Level 10 on two or three heroes will also take a substantial amount of time, and aren’t easy rewards.

I like that this increases the range of difficulty of rewards. Those who like short-term and easy rewards can just level heroes and get small gold rewards and skin color unlocks, while veterans and advanced players have these big goals to which they can look forward.

Versus A.I.

Finally, the last thing I’m somewhat excited about is the improvements to the Versus A.I. mode.

When I first started playing League of Legends, I played almost exclusively with Ed (who you might know better as Grainyrice), and he was particularly fond of playing bot games. Unfortunately, back then, bots were very basic in League of Legends, and it got pretty boring, pretty quickly.

I like that Blizzard is implementing A.I. improvements to HotS because it shows they recognize that some people just don’t really like PvP, and would rather work together as a team to take down a computerized opponent.

There is also a Versus A.I. section on the profile that is supposedly coming soon, so I like that they’re adding more diversity into the game with different game modes, and no matter what you choose to do in Heroes of the Storm, you can show off your achievements in your profile.

A few days ago, I was playing some Hero League on Heroes of the Storm when my Internet became unstable and I lost connection to the Battle.net servers. This happened while my team was in hero select.

Leaving during character selection is generally called “dodging” because you dodge the game that’s about to come up. It’s a strategy in League of Legends to avoid games you are sure you’re going to lose (such as having an illegitimate team composition or a player who claims they are going to intentionally feed in-game).

In League of Legends, dodging gives you a small penalty of losing a few league points (which is nothing compared to how much you would actually lose if you were to go on to play that game and be defeated). Regardless, I’m not really much of a dodger, as I like experiencing the game in different ways, and love to take on challenges.

I have a similar mindset in Heroes of the Storm, and never dodge during character selection. I was sure there was some sort of penalty for dodging, but I didn’t really care too much about it and didn’t look into it much because I never really planned on ever dodging.

Unfortunately, getting disconnected from Heroes of the Storm means you have a guaranteed forced dodge.

I signed back in after my Internet connection was restored … and saw that I was down to Rank 2.

Apparently, the penalty for dodging a game during hero select is around 300-400 points. Of course, I hadn’t played enough games in Rank 1 to collect up a lot of points, so that penalty was enough to send me right back to Rank 2.

The worst part is that, in Rank 1, your point gains get severely stunted. Up until Rank 2, you gain a base of 100 points per game, plus an additional skill bonus if your matchmaking rating is high, so the dodge penalty is about one or two games’ worth of losses.

But it’s a completely different story in Rank 1.

In Rank 1, each game means you gain or earn around 12 points, based on my experiences. So, by losing a couple hundred points, it was basically the same as getting defeated for about 30 games straight.

Now of course, I’m sure that your true hidden matchmaking rating is unaffected by the dodge penalty (and I know it wasn’t, because after I started playing games again at Rank 2, they weren’t any easier than my regular games).

But this brings me to my main point of not really liking these rating systems (Ranks in Heroes of the Storm and leagues/divisions in League of Legends).

League of Legends used to go off a pure elo system, where you had a four-digit number (or three digits if you were really bad) that represented your position on the ladder, with higher elo values indicating higher levels of skill.

I don’t fully agree with the fact that this was changed into a system where the ranking system listed on your profile rarely accurately reflects your true skill.

It’s almost like receiving “Excellent,” “Good,” “Satisfactory,” and “Poor” in school, rather than your exact percentage as a grade.

Imagine if a kid got a 98% on his exam and was told he received an “Excellent, Tier II.”

On the other hand, another student received an 82% on his exam, but because his past exam scores were 20%, 59%, and 70%, he was told he received an “Excellent, Tier III” because the fast improvement put little confidence in the rating system and it needed to adjust.

I don’t see that as being much different than people getting +300 point skill bonuses in Heroes of the Storm (which I got), or people skipping tons of divisions in League of Legends (which I did).

Now, with that conversation done and put aside, something like that obviously didn’t discourage me from playing more Heroes of the Storm. I quickly and easily made it right back to Rank 1, and I’ve been continuing to play since then.

And finally, a preview of my next gaming project – Blizzard has offered me seven more free days of game time in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor to try out the changes introduced with Patch 6.2. I didn’t manage to finish leveling the last time they gave me this gift, so I’ll definitely make sure to finish it this time. Those stream VODs will be coming up in the next few days.