Blizzard's brilliant attempt to solve the Support heal debate and why it will create a new problem

Offical Post regarding the new changes

What is the Support debate

Many players don't like playing Support because they think supports are boring and don't have enough playmaking potential. Of course, it is not possible to add playmaking abilities to supports for free without making them overpowered and having them take over the meta. That means that if playmaking abilities are added, something has to be taken away from supports.

That something would be raw healing power. Compared to most other MOBAs, supports in Heroes of the Storm have considerably larger raw healing output. This has led to many players calling supports boring backline healbots. These players then called for Blizzard to considerably nerf healing, increase the value of poke damage and then add playmaking abilities to supports.

Balance and Game Design are a tricky thing. Even small changes here and there can have a huge effect on the game. A massive shift in the power budget for supports would have created a tidal wave of consequences that would have required Blizzard to pretty much rebuild the game from scratch.

So what would happen if Blizzard significantly nerfed healing numbers across the board?

Stalled Game Length

Blizzard has designed Heroes of the Storm to be a fast paced MOBA built around team fighting and objectives, with the average game length around 20 minutes. So what happens if Healing is nerfed?

If Healing is nerfed without changing any other variable, deaths go way up. This pretty much forces another change - across the board damage nerfs. But across the board damage nerfs increase game length because all structures take longer to kill. So then all structure health has to be nerfed, and then all minions/mercenaries/objectives...the list goes on.

Even with all that, Heal nerfs still make it fundamentally harder to end. To see why, imagine that it is late game and your team has a 5 vs. 3 with 2 dead for 60+ seconds, but your team is somewhat low on hitpoints.

Ordinarily, this is absolutely a game winning scenario, as your team's support will start to heal your team up and then you will push for the win. But under lower heal numbers, this won't be as simple to do. It will take longer for your team to heal up, and will be easier for the enemy team to kill a player with lower healing numbers, especially if your team also has to tank the Core. The fact that their support may be dead or is putting out less healing will not matter as much, because they can always retreat to the Nexus and heal up if necessary.

Ranged would beat Melee

This should be overwhelmingly obvious, but ranged heroes take significantly less damage than melee heroes. Healing is a resource, and when it is scarce and in short supply, ranged heroes will be preferable to melee heroes simply because they require less of that resource.

On top of that, Ranged Heroes offer ranged poke, which is extremely valuable in an environment where Healing is much harder to come by. The only exception to this rule will be melee heroes who can literally sustain themselves with little or no help from supports.

Busted heroes

Obviously, there are many heroes who might benefit from this change. For starters, Chromie might become actually viable. Lunara might see a rise to prominence as well. But these heroes are not the ones I am referring to - I am thinking of heroes who are already considered elite, becoming overpowered.

Muradin

Muradin is already a major talking point of the community, being the number 1 warrior in competitive almost 100% of the time. His ability to take damage almost effortlessly, and heal it back up through his heroic Avatar, his basic ability Dwarf toss, his level 13 talent Healing Static which heals him per hero hit by his basic ability Thunderclap and his trait is already a major concern, but under a low healing environment would be significantly worse. With damage forced to be lower, Muradin becomes a literal god who is pretty much incapable of actually dying.

Valla & Li Ming

Valla and Li Ming are by far the best ranged assassins in the game, as far as the competitive meta goes. They both have mobility and large amounts of ranked poke, and both are capable of putting out enough burst damage (particularly Li Ming) that they can fit into just about any composition. While Valla will put out even better raw damage numbers, Li Ming's higher burst damage and resets of all abilities whenever an enemy hero dies makes her no less formidable.

Dealing effectively with either requires the ability to dive them. But with healing nerfed, this becomes significantly harder, allowing these two to safely deal damage for considerably longer (even if it was scaled back somewhat due to general damage nerfs). Li Ming's reset trait also becomes considerably more obnoxious, as supports will have a harder time saving someone who is low on hitpoints.

So how did Blizzard address all of these valid concerns?

As noted by the official post, regarding damage amplifiers/dampeners, Blizzard used to take the largest resistant granting buff on a hero, subtract the largest vulnerability debuff on that hero and then use the result as the damage modifier on the hero.

For example:



If a player had Hardened Shield and Hunter's Mark on them, they took 50% less damage.



Any other resistant effects or vulnerability effects on that hero had no effect - a Cold Embrace Sylvanas Shadow Dagger or a Safeguard from Lieutenant Morales would not factor into the damage calculations.



Now, all of them count and are all added together.



But the major development is Blizzard's plans to introduce Baseline damage mitigation for frontline heroes. This solution manages to avoid the problems that nerfed heal numbers would bring in the game.

With Damage mitigation implemented...



Ranged heroes aren't going to get much if any baseline damage mitigation. This means ranged poke will be considerably more impactful versus backline heroes.



Game length won't be affected - Damage Mitigation allows Blizzard to tune damage versus heroes, without affecting damage versus structures or other objectives.



Ranged heroes won't overpower melee ones. Blizzard can tune the baseline damage mitigation numbers until Melee Assassins/Specialists aren't at such a massive disadvantage to their ranged counterparts.



An individual problem hero like Muradin could be tuned by giving him less baseline damage mitigation than other Warriors, and the nerf to Healing will do the rest.



Heroes like Li Ming and Valla won't skyrocket in power level in the same way that nerfed healing would allow them too. Most of their free damage is against frontline warriors and other melee heroes that should have higher baseline damage mitigation.

So what's the problem with damage mitigation?

About a year ago, Heroes of the Storm had a huge meta-problem: Tyrande had gotten buffed, and then the scaling patch hit. Suddenly Tyrande was the best hero in the game, bar none. Blizzard also wasn't doing frequent balance patches, and the resulting meta was universally loathed yet brutally effective: the stun lock meta had been born.

Heroes were frequently deleted from the game for even the smallest mistake, and games were decided by which team had more hard crowd control. To remove this meta from the game, Blizzard was forced to nerf the durations of several crowd control abilities, like Tyrande's Lunar Flare, and make Cleanse provide unstoppable, even though Blizzard has frequently shown their distaste for the mechanic and the fact that it has to be available near universally to supports as a level 7 talent.

A Revival

The new stacking of Vulnerability and Resistant effects is the key to understanding why the stunlock meta is likely to see a massive revival, once healing is nerfed. Yes, it is not possible for a hero to take more than 25% damage above baseline. However, since frontline heroes will have baseline damage mitigation once healing is nerfed, multiple vulnerability effects on the same frontliner will get full value, making it very easy to burst down the target since healing output is lower.

Even worse, stuns and vulnerability effects have natural synergies together: when a target is vulnerable, you don't want them moving - you want them stationary, where you can get full value out of the vulnerability. Stuns do this beautifully. But that's not the only thing stuns do: stuns also prevent the disabled target from using any of its abilities. That includes resistant granting abilities like Hardened Shield. Since the vast majority of resistant-granting abilities, talents and effects are self-cast, stuns prevent the target from using them.

This creates a scenario where stuns prevent the counter play to vulnerability stacking, making the strategy of stun/vulnerability stacking the next incoming meta.

The future

Imagine a Tyrande/Varian/Jaina combination:

Varian charges a target with his level 4 talent Warbringer, and can pick Colossus Smash as his heroic. Tyrande immediately follows up with Lunar Flare and Hunter's Mark. Jaina not only has tons of burst, but has the level 16 talent Northern Exposure, which also applies vulnerability.

Medivh is the only realistic counter to this combination, with his Force of Will ability. But what if he is banned? Couldn't you pick Tassadar or Zarya instead? Unfortunately, Varian has an answer for that too once he gets to level 16: Shattering Throw. It hard counters shield abilities with both its passive effect and active use.

What is stopping the dreaded stun-meta from returning? Tyrande loves her husband Malfurion, but he's had his time in the sun. She's ready to get back to marking her poor victims for deletion, alongside her erstwile Alliance friends.

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