Twinfinite recently attended PAX East and we had the opportunity to speak with Heroes of the Storm team members, Matt Villers and Kaeo Milker. We got some great insight behind the latest hero to join HotS, Deckard Cain, and they were kind enough to answer some burning community questions as well. The first page will be all about Deckard Cain. Learn more about how he will fit into the meta, how he will impact the support class as a whole, and more. If you’re interested in community questions, you can check that out on the second page. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Heroes of the Storm at PAX East 2018: Deckard Cain
Ed McGlone of Twinfinite: Can you start by giving us a brief overview of Deckard Cain?
Matt Villers, Lead hero designer of Heroes of the Storm: Deckard is of course, our latest hero, latest support. He’s kind of a new type of support, this set up support. He’s got a lot of abilities that really reward him for thinking ahead and planning. Knowing where a fight is going to be, where his allies need help.
He has of course his healing potions, he can put that down; he can leave that out there indefinitely, they don’t expire, he can have up to five of them. So he can spread them out to different lanes and support multiple allies at once. He can put them in one big clump in a bush and bait enemies into and get a huge heal. There’s just a lot of really smart ways to use that ability.
He’s got this kind of great CC set up combo with his Horadric Cube, with his Scroll of Sealing, he can lock down enemies and potentially set up other abilities. Likewise with his Stay Awhile and Listen, that enables some really good combos when your team is working together. It really rewards coordination.
Of course Lorenado, you can use that to push people away from your team, you can also use it pull people into your team. It’s vector targeted, so you got control over that. He’s got a trait that really rewards him for staying close to his team, so you really get that feel of he’s your support, he’s kind of guiding you and really helping you shine when he’s with you.
Twinfinite: Are there any heroes in particular that you think he will synergize really well with?
Villers: So yeah there’s actually a few combos that I super like. With Stay Awhile, you get rewarded for that big delay that it locks people down in. It buys time for other major abilities to go off. Jaina’s Ring of Frost is one example I bring up. You can lock down the whole team and Jaina has all the time in the world to perfectly aim that, freeze people, and that in turn can combo into other things. Or alternatively, you do that and E.T.C. follows up and Moshpits everyone. Oh and D.VA! With her talent that increases the explosion timer and damage, that lines up really well with Stay Awhile. So you can pretty reliably get that off if you can get a good Stay Awhile and trap everyone in it.
And in terms of some of his other talents, he has bottomless flask at level 20 which makes the potions regenerate themselves. So if you got a hero who’s kind of good at staying in one spot and doing a ton of damage if they don’t move, like Sgt. Hammer, put five potions underneath her and every few seconds the heals keep coming and it’s wild.
Twinfinite: That seems really strong. Is it by design that you wanted to create a really powerful support hero to emphasize that style of play more?
Villers: To an extent. It was kind of something that we discovered along the way because Deckard, he’s very different than our other heroes in general in that he’s not someone who’s out on the battlefield. He’s a narrator, he’s a storyteller. We had this big meeting when we started hero design that’s talking about their background and what powers they are known for and what people might expect to see from them. And for Deckard, it’s he knows a whole bunch of stuff and he identifies your items, and neither of those are really combat skills. So we had to approach the problem of how his skills would work in a different way really from a lot of other heroes. But what we ended up finding was that things that were forceful or destructive didn’t fit his nature. He’s Uncle Deckard! He’s a nice a guy, he’s smart and clever but he’s not someone you would expect to go out there and start smashing people.
What we ended up finding, first with healing potion, which is an early ability in his kit, is that more kind of tactical and clever feel really suited him and when we started doing other abilities that played into that kind of strategic nature is that he was beating enemies not by brute forcing them but being wiser, more clever. and outplaying them, and that’s what really felt like Deckard.
Twinfinite: Was Deckard someone that you have had in mind for a while or was he a new idea that you ran with?
Villers: Deckard of course is super iconic for Diablo and is one of the first things you think of. Diablo III cinematic, he’s right there at the start of it. So we’ve wanted to do him for a long time. It was just a question of: “Man how are we going to make this work? This is a battlefield game, it’s about conflict and he needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with Thrall and Arthas and characters like that. How’s that going to work?”
So once we were ready to take on that challenge we just dove right in. We were super excited to do him.
Twinfinite: What’s Deckard’s level of complexity? Is he someone that new players could pick up? Or is he more for veterans?
Villers: I want to say he’s kind of moderate. He’s not Abathur level where he’s super advanced, that you have to have a really good understanding of the game, like full on map awareness and all that. But he’s also got a little bit more going on, that you do have to think ahead a little bit to get power out of him.
Now we did make it so that his potions can be thrown directly at allies. So even if you’re not quite ready to jump into that whole “oh I’m thinking ahead to the objectives and jumping being lanes and rotating” you can still be a pretty effective healer with him, but to really start to show that [you] are a really effective Deckard, it’s probably more in the medium space.
Twinfinte: Can you give some more detail about how he’s different than other support heroes and why someone would want to choose Deckard over some of the other support heroes?
Villers: That’s something that we think about every time we set out on a new hero. One of the very first questions is: “What makes this hero different? Why would you pick them over some of the other heroes that are they are sharing a space with?” For Deckard, the big things are the fact that he can be in multiple places at once which is something our other supports don’t have. He can ride up to the top lane, drop a couple of potions there and come back to the middle and bottom lane and heal there, and really be helping on multiple fronts at once, which is awesome that he has this ability to look into what will happen in the future and where people might need help. He can go to an objective early and drop five healing potions there and when the fight starts there’s already a huge burst of healing waiting for his team.
Also that he has so much of that setting up his allies gameplay built into the rest of his kit, with the Scroll of Sealing, Stay Awhile and Listen, he’s really good at enabling combos in kind of an amazing way that you don’t necessarily see from the other supports.
Twinfinte: What is Deckard’s major weaknesses? Why would teams elect not to pick him?
Villers: Deckard doesn’t have a great deal of mobility. It would obviously be kind of weird if he was zipping all over the battlefield. So he’s someone if you catch him out, he has a bit of a hard time getting away. He can throw out the Scroll of Sealing, but once that’s gone, he’s just trying to drink his potions as fast as he can and hope he can get out.
Another one is that he likes to throw those potions out in advance. If you’re someone that has a skill shot, or a powerful delayed damage ability, you can watch people walk over to the potions, and enemies can see them, so they know “oh this guy is going to try and drink a potion” and punish that by lining up a skill shot with that. Heroes like Kael’thas with Flame Strike, can potentially punish people who are trying to drink potions. So those delay damage abilities kind of work against him.
Twinfinte: Has the addition of Deckard Cain forced you to re-examine the support class as a whole at all? Or how specific characters are balanced?
Villers: So honestly there is a trend that we have been following with supports for a while, where we have been trying to add decision making into their gameplay. There is kind of this classic stereotype of supports where they are just playing whack-a-mole with health bars right? And we want more decisions, more mastery, more opportunities to really shine and show off how awesome you are. So we have been pursuing that really with Alexstrasza. She’s got her abundance heal, and that’s kind of delayed and how you use that really affects things; choosing your right moment to use Dragon Queen. Ana has this really great engaging skill shot based gameplay. Stukov with the way that you spread his Pathogen around, and when you activate his trait. So these extra decisions you can make and when you make them really add a lot of fun and depth to support heroes. So that’s something that we’ve been following for a while and Deckard is kind of the next step.
We are also taking that back into re-works, like with Malfurion for example, we added that extra layer of where he has the Moonfire mini game. Who he has Regrowth on, he can try and then do some offense to boost his healing which is a really cool thing and we’ll probably do that in the future with other supports.
Heroes of the Storm at PAX East 2018: Community Questions
Twinfinte: Are there any updates on how the team is looking to improve reconnects and combating afk players or to lessen the impact that is afflicted by these players?
Kaeo Milker production director of Heroes of the Storm: Yeah we’re looking that in a couple of fronts. First detection and actioning on AFK players is something that we have put a lot of work into and we continuing to invest in. Having players continue to report people who see doing things, whether it’s being AFK, toxicity, whatever it is… use the report system because we action on it.
We’re also looking at things on our side, that lets us determine who is doing these behaviors so we can action on them as well.
The reconnect system is something that’s deeply rooted in the technology of Heroes which was built originally on the technology of StarCraft 2. We’ve made some improvements over time, so some players have probably seen some of that come already. I understand that it’s never perfect, it needs more, and they want to get [back] in as fast as they can. And the longer you’ve been disconnected, the longer it takes to reconnect which is really the problem that people start getting into. Our hands are somewhat tied. We can’t just snap our fingers and suddenly make that instantaneous, but we will continue to look at opportunities to make improvements to it though.
The other side of that though, which is what I think people are concerned about, is how we can have something like loss forgiveness if you’re in that situation and you’re negatively impacted by that. Whether you’re the person that got disconnected or someone that was playing on a team with someone that got disconnected and it impacted your game. How can we make it so that doesn’t start knocking you down for a situation that was out of your control and not something you can influence? We’ll keep looking at those sort of things to try and mitigate those effects.
Twinfinte: Is it possible for players to have shared heroes across regions or is that something that is also inhibited by those technical issues?
Milker: Yeah so there was decisions made early on about the way the licenses carry over on your account and it’s specific to regions right now. I think we keep getting feedback on that. I’m interested in continuing to hear it. I don’t know that there are any plans or immediate action that I can talk about, but I hear that people are saying that.
Twinfinte: Can you give us any updates on Hanamura?
Milker: Hanamura came out, and it did a lot of different things… but the challenge was that it did… a lot of different things [laughs]. There’s a lot going on on that battleground. Very quickly we started seeing that players were struggling with knowing what to do in any given moment and that there was a lot of debate on what the right thing to do was. And while we make battlegrounds specifically to give you those types of strategic choices, and that’s important to us. Generally you have like one or two choices that you are weighing, and you pick a clear one. Hanamura has more options than that at any given moment. So I think it became something that caused a lot of confusion and strife with players.
So we’ve been doing a lot of work on it, it’s undergoing a lot of changes and play-testing on our side. I don’t have an ETA for it, but it will come back and it will be a much more streamlined battleground that’s focused on a few very strategic choices. We will bring back the aesthetic and the beautiful art that we love from it, but it will be re-imagined into something more akin to the rest of our battlegrounds in terms of clarity and purpose in what you’re trying to accomplish.
Twinfinte: Are there any plans to re-balance Raynor?
Villars: So we’re definitely hearing that feedback. It’s something that we have an eye on. I think we have mentioned previously that we are shifting more energy in those reworks and getting them out there. So I think he could definitely be a candidate. We don’t have anything to talk about right now but we’ve totally heard it.
The big concern that people bring up is that “he’s the intro hero, so we couldn’t change him” but honestly we could. That’s one of our big values: easy to learn, difficult to master. So there’s plenty of space to have a hero who is pretty straightforward and approachable, but still has a lot of room to grow as you play him more.
Milker: What I’ll say on the Raynor front too is that as time goes on we learn a lot about making heroes, and we’ve come a long way. Raynor is one of early ones, and players value the simplicity of his gameplay, in terms of his kit is very straightforward and approachable, and he’s a great starter hero. I think some of the things people bring up is that we bring out a new hero that’s the better version of Raynor and that Raynor can’t stand toe-to-toe now. I think it’s important for everyone to know that we’re going to take [everything we’ve learned] in these reworks and go back to our early heroes and level them up and do everything we can to make them still have their own space in the game, and their niche, and make them a choice for players to choose so that they can say: “I love this hero, I love playing them, I love their kit, and I love the way they feel” while also maintaining their uniqueness.
Twinfinte: Heroes of the Storm has changed so much since launch. What are you most proud of in terms of where the game is now, versus at launch?
Villers: That’s a good question, we’ve changed so much. Sometimes we look back and look at the breadth of things that we have changed and we’re blown away. Like recently, someone was looking at in 2017 we patched the game 57 times.
There is this mentality on our team that of like “what’s the most impactful thing we can do to the game, what’s the best opportunity to make it better?” That’s something that we really strive for, and we’re not afraid to touch anything. Any system is up for revision, any hero, any battleground. It’s something that we’re going to keep pushing on. And that means that the game is going to be, at any given moment, the best version of the game that has ever been, and that’s something really cool about working on this game.
Milker: Something on the hero side that we have come a long way on is the design for talents. Initially we had a lot of generic talents that were just “hey this does more damage or the cooldown is a little bit lower.” And I feel like, we’ve really learned a lot of the years about how to make really exciting talents and talent trees. Both in terms of individual talents, the balance between talents within a tier, and the overall structure for heroes so you feel like you have good ways to both express yourself, and make in the moment make interesting decisions. It’s been a really cool process, and through reworks we also get to take that knowledge and apply it to some of the other heroes.
Twinfinte: Going forward, are you aiming for smaller, more calculated patches and updates, or larger scale ones that dramatically shift the meta, and then you see where it lands?
Villers: There’s a balance that we want to be careful of. One of the challenges with how frequently we’re updating the game is that it does create instability that it’s hard to grab onto any given change and wrap your ahead around the current state of the game because it’s in such flux. So one of the changes we’ve made recently is we used to deliver just a ton of stuff in one patch. Where it would be like: “three hero reworks, a brand new hero, we might have a new battleground, tons of balance changes, bug fixes” there would just be a bunch of stuff, and you don’t even know the state of the game anymore after something like that. Maybe players could focus on one or two of those things and wrap their heads around it, but there was just this huge breadth of changes. And [now] we’re really trying to space those things out to give more breathing room and digestion time for each individual change so people can wrap their heads around the current state of the game in that snapshot of a moment. I think it’s going to benefit [players] in a couple of ways. They really get some time for those things to shine from apperciation standpoint and a understanding standpoint.
Twinfinte: Are there any plans for a third ban in drafted modes?
Milker: That’s something we’ve talked about a lot. I think as our hero roster grows, we’re hearing more and more of a demand both from an esports perspective and just from players in general. It’s something that we’re open to and talking about to see what kind of timeline we can get it on.
Twinfinte: Are there any plans to rework Team League in any way?
Milker: We love Team League. We look at Team League as the way we would ultimately like to have people play the game. That’s where it’s experienced best when you’re in a full team, communicating, using voice chat to talk to each other. I think we’ve done a lot of things already to try and encourage Team League play. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit for rewards and bonuses for playing that mode. I would like to keep doing that. Because again, it’s really the best way to play.
It’s challenging for players I think because they need to find the people to play with to make it work. But we’ve made some changes in terms of the number of players you need over the years, and I think we’ll keep looking at it trying to make sure we get the best balance of how to make sure [players] can get players and get in there and have fun, while kind of preserving the sanctity of that mode.
Published: Apr 16, 2018 03:27 pm