Heroes of the Storm had a very big day.

Between four newly announced heroes, a new game mode and another map, the young eSport definitely got some quality time on the big screen at BlizzCon's opening ceremony.

Moments after those announcements, theScore eSports met up with Matthew Cooper, a senior game designer on Heroes of the Storm, to talk about how the competitive scene has shaped design, what they're working on to improve it now and how the new additions will affect the scene.

How has feedback from the competitive Heroes community affected decisions you've made about the game?

I think on every level, really. We kind of had a ban system we put into our eSports scene, and from that we've seen a lot of really good...we're seeing more hero diversity, we're seeing more heroes picked because of that, the strategies in drafting is deeper, so we're actually excited to bring that into Hero League and Team league. We think it's a nice add, and obviously like balance. We get the highest level of play in eSports, so Uther or any of those other characters, we get to see exactly how strong they can be.

Talking about bans in Heroes team league, do you have a timeline on that?

We don't have a timeline on it, that I'm aware of, but it's something that we're working on. We know it's something players want, and it's something we're working on. Hopefully 2016.

Is there anything in the pipeline right now that can ensure competitive players get that meaningful practice outside of scrims?

I mean, I guess better matchmaking is important. A lot of the time I think right now if you have a pro team queuing up in say team league, they're probably going to wait the max time, the six minutes, or I guess now it's ten minutes and they're probably going to get dumped into match with another team that's probably not as good at them. Better matchmaking will definitely help there.

But beyond there, I think a lot of pros, even in Heroes, Starcraft, Hearthstone, they scrim a lot outside of ladder, so I mean ladder is great, but at some level, Cloud9 is probably going to be scrimming against Tempo Storm and stuff like that .

I want to talk about the stuff I just saw [at the opening ceremony]. Cho'Gall. That, I squealed because of how exciting it was for eSports specifically. So, what sort of design challenges and maybe specifically, balance challenges, did you have when designing this hero?

Cho'Gall is two players are playing him, and he acts as two characters essentially. So your team has four heroes on the battleground, since Cho'Gall is occupying two spots. He's basically a Warrior, since that's who he is, he's our tankiest Hero in the game, he runs into combat.

And Gall, the sidekick, is kind of like ranged assassin, like a mage almost. That character is doing a lot of damage and they have a lot of synergy with their abilities. There are a lot of challenges whenever we do a new characters. We have kind of a template, like we're doing Lunara who is a ranged auto attack character, so we can compare her to Valla or Raynor and like, okay she's got more mobility, so let's give her a little less damage, those kind of things.

Cho'gall is a pretty big unknown. He's kind of the opposite of Lost Vikings in a lot of ways, because we still don't know quite how much power having an extra body on the field means. Normally if you have to go clear a lane and you send your Kael'Thas to do that, you have four characters doing other stuff, but if Cho'Gall has to go clear that, you only have three. And if Cho'Gall gets ganked, now your team really can't fight. So I think we playtested him a lot, and I think he's in a pretty good spot right now, but I think we'll learn a lot as soon as he gets out there, and the pros get their hands on him.

In competitive, a body in a lane, especially in the early game is very important. So I'm not even sure how pros will use it.

Yeah, it's hard to say. We had a playtest a few days ago where a Cho'Gall, a Morales, Nova and a Janna, where Morales can't solo a lane, and Cho'Gall is one hero. So we had Cho'Gall and Morales together in a lane, the Nova was in a solo lane, and she can't roam, she's not a good lane clear, so it's kind of like this thing where you have to build a certain team comp.

Yeah, I sort of wondered if he might end up being his own roaming squad.

Yeah he definitely can be, he's the kind of character that no one can fight him one versus one obviously, because he's essentially two characters, and a lot of the time he'll beat up two characters. So we've kind of tuned him in a way that we think is pretty good, because in the same way Lost Vikings are kind of undertuned because they have so much potential to soak three lanes and always be contesting multiple objectives, Cho'Gall has the opposite challenge where he doesn't bring any of that, so maybe he has to be more powerful.

But then there's all these fine things where Blood for Blood is really good against Cho'Gall, so is percentage-based damage, Anubarak's web wrap heroic ability against Cho'Gall takes two players out.

This is something that pros want from what I've heard: obviously this is a game that's been designed to be friendly for new players, is it that you don't feel that visible MMR is something new players want to see?

So we've talked quote a bit about showing MMR, and I don't know if we've come to a conclusion about it yet, there are some challenges with that. Say we show your MMR and we rank you based off that MMR and stuff like that, this is kind of minor I guess, but it's not often a very clean number in the MMR system we use. You're negative 1.4879, you know? What does that mean? Our rank system was trying to accomplish that in a lot of ways, ranked are basically MMR now, so if you are rank one, you're essentially in the top 2.5 per cent of MMR.

I want to talk a little bit about Arena mode. I'm hoping that there's a competitive future for this, but I want to know, have you designed it that way, or is this designed as more of a diversion for players to quickly jump in ― get a quick match in with random heroes, no one really feels bad because it's all random anyways ― or have you designed that mode with potential competitive play in mind?

I'll say we did not design it with competitive play in mind. Obviously, at some level, there will be some competitive play, we don't know about that yet. It was designed to be a fun mode, We talked about, if you're in a lobby, or say I've logged in and I see that one of my friends is in a game and he's been there for 12 minutes, it's probably not a good idea for me to queue up in a game, because by the time he finishes I'm in my game for 12 minutes, but Arena takes about 8-12 minutes to play, so it's a shorter game length, it's more of a wacky experience, because you can get five Illidans, that kind of thing.

I'm sure there will be some competitive play around it, but that wasn't our intention.

It's a really fun mode, we definitely get really vocal around the office when we're playing it.

So let's talk about balance. I've been talking a lot with pros over the last few days, and they have had some strong opinions on balance, I want to know, firstly, where do you think the balance is in the game right now?

Obviously there are challenges. Certain heroes are too good at the pro level, but they're kind of pretty good across matchmaking, there are some heroes in matchmaking that are too good, but not that good at the pro level. There are challenges, but the balance in a good place overall.

The last major patch that had all the warrior changes, Stitches, Diablo, Chen, that brought in a lot more warriors, we were basically just seeing Leoric and Johanna which was not exciting, but I think now there's a pretty good variety of warriors.

Most pros have said it's actually really good, but I wanted to talk about heroes that don't see pro play at all. Is that a balance issue for you? For example, Gazlowe has basically zero pro games except against very specific comps.

We're doing a state of the game panel tomorrow, and I'm actually talking about some stuff we're doing for Gazlowe. We are looking at Gazlowe because we don't see him in pro play. He's actually okay win rate wise, he's at 50% I think, so if we were going just based off ladder, he's okay.

I asked a couple pros when Gazlowe would be good, and they said against maybe four melee, since that's the only sort of situation where you'd see that.

For us ideally, Gazlowe would be viable on like, Sky Temple, a battleground where you want to hold a location for a long period of time. He has a zone control kit. I don't know if we want to bring Gazlowe up to be the main character on all battlegrounds, but if he was a good pick on Sky Temple, Dragonshire, those more zone control maps, that'd be awesome.

Let's talk about recent hero releases and the way they've affected competitive play [...] is it a conscious decision to bring heroes out in a more subdued state than in the past?

Our goal is to get them out at 50 percent. So I think Jaina actually came out a little underpowered, and we had to tune her up a little bit. But yeah, I mean our goal is to get them out at 50 percent. Rexxar had some bugs with Misha controls and stuff like that, so we fixed those, and I think he's in a pretty good spot right now.

The interesting thing with Morales and Artanis is that they have kind of really sharp defined roles, and they have sharp defined weaknesses built in to those roles. If you look at Jaina or Kael'Thas, they kind of do everything well, and a lot of our original 30 characters fit into that bracket.

I guess more generally then, looking at these new heroes, besides Cho'Gall who has his own specific design niche, and Lunara and Greymane appear to both be very high mobility heroes. For the most part, the most recent heroes have been mostly lacking mobility. Is this a conscious effort to add more mobility to the game as well?

I think that it just happened. Lunara definitely has a lot of mobility. SHe doesn't have a mount, but she moves faster than other heroes by default. Greymane has a little bit less mobility than that, he has a little bit in the sense of diving into a fight, and a little bit to get out, but not a lot. So he'd have less mobility than say, and Illidan for example.

I don't think we said 'we're lacking mobility so we're adding more characters with mobility' and more trying to find unique design spaces for these characters. Both Lunara and Greymane are autoattack characters, so they'll fit into the Raynor or Valla territory.

One final question, I was having an interesting discussion about iconic characters or characters that aren't as iconic in terms of their ability sets. Is it easier for you to build an iconic character or harder?

I would say in general, it's harder to build an iconic character because there's such strong fantasies and game play expectations I guess. When we worked on Arthus or Diablo. Diablo is the boss of Diablo 1, 2 ,3 they all had some similarities in terms of fire and bones, but they all have different kits. The D2 Diablo is different from the D3 Diablo. And Arthus, some people were picturing him from WoW, other people were picturing the Death Knight from WC3. So what skill set do we do? We had a pretty good Arthas kit at one point, years back, but we got feedback at one point asking "where's Sindragosa?"

And this was after we released the cinematic where Arthas summons Sindragosa and it flies over his army. So now Arthas has to have Sindragosa, so we went back and changed his abilities. So a character like Abathur, it's more mechanics focused. Working on this character, we need a third ability that does AoE damage, so it's more just making a kit play well, So we're trying to do that with Arthas, Diablo, Thrall, while also tying in what people expect.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Josh Bury is a dryad at heart. Ah, the great outdoors ... You can find him on Twitter.