Tremble and Nomad, as I like to think, were the bastard children of our design team. They came at a crucial period of transition–we were moving from a sporadic, “when it’s done” schedule for hero production to a regimented, “one hero per two weeks” schedule. Even though Tremble was in development for a month, a significant portion of this time was wasted due to haphazard patching, and design leadership being away from the office during the first vital week of live testing. This led to Tremble taking an exceptional amount of time to complete, both in concept and for art, as we were rushed and pressed for time in the face of a new hero-building process. As such, Nomad was a very short period of time to mature in live testing; roughly five days, the shortest of any hero we’ve released.

I’ve always felt like Nomad was one of my best designs, save for the passive, which was something I’d never felt satisfied with. It exemplified the playstyle I most hated; one-shotting. I highlighted most of my disappointment in a previous blog post, but the skill continues to haunt me due to its absurdity; it’s not imbalanced by any means, being on a melee hero that largely can’t harass with his autoattack, but it made a hero that was intended to exemplify mind games and trickery to instead be reliant on building pure damage and trying to snipe kills. Players who dislike Nomad tend to point out his ability to dish out massive damage in an instant, damage that’s entirely the result of the passive adding too much damage to the ability. It’s a problem we’ve wrestled with on Deadwood as well. The hero isn’t necessarily imbalanced–a common comparison is Pebbles, who can output as much or more damage at a faster rate, yet Deadwood draws much more criticism. Rather, the problem lies in the distribution of damage on the hero–that is, even though the overall damage output may be similar, or even less, than a hero that uses two or more abilities to deal damage, the perception that the majority of damage results from a single ability is highly frustrating to players, as it induces feelings of being cheated, or being beaten by a hero that requires less skill than their own.

What would I do now?

I don’t know. I don’t know what changes I would make to Nomad to fix this, as his spike damage output, like Deadwood’s, has been so ingrained into identity that any changes to the ability would effectively create a completely new hero. I still firmly believe that one-shotting isn’t conducive to a well-designed, well-planned game. Regardless, there are still many concepts from Nomad that I enjoy.