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.