WHY WE HAVE TALENTS

When players draft their champions or heroes in a MOBA, they are making a decision on which set of unique abilities (their toolkit) and attributes (their health and auto-attack damage and stuff) they would like to play with. When you are in the match, you are attempting to gain power, so that your unique set of abilities will become strong enough to outpace the enemy and lead you to dominate the map.



In both Dota 2 and League of Legends, you gain power by XP level and purchasing items. Those items are available for purchase by all champions, and the stat bonuses and effects that the items provide become, over the course of the match, responsible for the majority of the champion's combat power. This is in contrast to Heroes of the Storm, where the majority of combat power of any hero comes from XP level and talents.



In DotA/LoL, when the player purchases items, he or she can choose items that empower different aspects of their kit. For example, you might purchase items which reduce mana costs and cooldowns in order to play a poke-heavy lane bully, or on the same character you might purchase items which increase damage resistance and spell damage to play a 1v1 gank mage.



In HotS, you can only empower different playstyles when you pick talents. This means that if the talents of a hero don't sufficiently change how their kit can be used, then that hero has a fixed purpose. You'll know at draft time everything that a hero will do in the match rather than just what they can do.

ROLES AREN'T PERFECT

I've recently been seeing tons of suggestions about reworking the role system to have more specific categories. The two main reasons that I see stated are:



1. Quick Match uses the roles in their matchmaking, and it leads to poorly-matched compositions too often.

2. New players are misled by roles, choosing fragile warriors as tanks and shield-based supports as healers.



Because of these reasons, most of the suggestions tend towards creating a larger amount of more precise roles, like "mage", "marksman", "ganker". There are also plenty of suggestions that HotS adopts a system of descriptive tags, similar to DotA, stating things like "melee", "initiator", "stealth", "burst", etc.



While the tag system is great, there are benefits to the current role system: it's simple for both the matchmaker and new players to make decisions, and it can keep people open-minded about what purposes the hero can serve... which should now tie into my previous point.

HEROES SHOULD BE MORE VERSATILE THROUGH TALENTS

Let's forget about Thrall's exact power level right now and his place in the meta. I want to talk about a hypothetical, idealized Thrall from his design:



Thrall has fantastic staying power due to his trait. In addition, he has a ranged poke, a reliable root, and a short speed boost. He is currently an assassin in role, yet he is described to be a bruiser. I don't think this is a problem at all. Thrall's kit makes him an effective lane bully, and you should hypothetically be able to talent him into:



1. A good initiator, when the Chain Lightning poke damage becomes substantial enough to force the enemy's hand into fight or flight, and Feral Spirt can isolate a focus-fire target for everyone to kill (not to mention, Sundering)

2. A good ganker, when the Feral Spirit can prevent escapes and the Windfury allows him to chase hard and deal heavy melee damage

3. A good sustained DPS, where alternating between Chain Lightning and Windfury allows for him to deal his highest DPS to non-mobile targets and his trait keeps him alive from all the ability usage



Bruisers tend to be okay initiators and deal plenty of sustained damage. The assassin role encompasses gankers and sustained damage dealers. By calling him an assassin, we lay some foundation that gives people something to expect, i.e. that Thrall is not intended to be a tank or healer or sieger, and then people should have the options (through talents) to make him a bruiser or a ganker or a sustained DPS.



If you can think of current heroes with this sort of talent-based flexibility, great! If you're hard-pressed to find any such heroes, though, I would assert that the design team should get more heroes to work this way, because ideally, the match shouldn't be decided at the draft.



The fact that Blizzard called the meatshield role the "warrior" is great because it supports both tanks and bruisers. Working off my idealized design, there should be naturally-kitted tanks that can talent towards being a heavy disruptor or a sustained DPS, and there should be obvious bruisers that can talent towards being a solo tank or a great initiator. The support role should continue to include healers and non-healing utility, with the default solo healers being able to talent into utility or group heal, and the group healers able to talent into solo healing or heavy CC. And these aren't the only spectrums—I'd love to see more frontline disruptor healers like Uther or fragile dive healers like Kharazim or what have you. Talents should broaden the spectrum of what a hero of a certain role might bring to your team composition.



Thanks for reading.



A NOTE ABOUT THE SPECIALIST ROLE

This part is actually just a rant.



Specialists used to be sieging or lane control. They accelerated the XP your team gained, by trivially soaking multiple lanes, or using mercenaries and summons to destroy enemy structures quickly. Their old role icon was a symbol of a building, clearly showing their emphasis on being ideal for the more PvE side of the game. Around the time of Medivh, this designation became "heroes that don't work the way others do" and the icon was replaced with a generic star-like shape.



This is a useless role name now. "Playing in a special way", like Abathur, Murky, or TLV, doesn't say anything about what a hero can bring to a match. It describes how they play rather than what their play accomplishes. I'd argue that it shouldn't be kept at all in any of the proposed systems, not just mine. Make Nazeebo an assassin, Medivh a support, Murky a bruiser, whatever other role best describes it. If you're going to have a fourth role, call it Siege or Control or Pusher or something, or else don't have a fourth role at all.



A FURTHER NOTE ABOUT THE MULTICLASS ROLE