Loot Drop Rates and Prices

Loot Type Overwatch Drop Rate OW Drop Rate (%) Heroes of the Storm Drop Rate HotS Drop Rate (%) Rare 1 per box (guaranteed) N/A 1 per box on average (NOT guaranteed) N/A Epic 1 per 5.5 boxes 18.18% 1 per 4.5 boxes 22.22% Legendary 1 per 13.5 boxes 7.41% 1 per 17.5 boxes 5.71%

Loot Type Overwatch Purchase Price Overwatch Duplicate Value Heroes of the Storm Purchase Price Heroes of the Storm Duplicate Value Common 25 5 40 5 Rare 75 15 100 20 Epic 250 50 400 100 Legendary 1000 200 1600 400

Loot Type Overwatch Purchase Price Overwatch Duplicate Value Heroes of the Storm Purchase Price Heroes of the Storm Duplicate Value Common 75 5 60 5 Rare 225 15 150 20 Epic 750 50 600 100 Legendary 3000 200 2400 400

Loot Type # of Dupes to Buy a Common Item # of Dupes to Buy a Rare Item # of Dupes to Buy a Epic Item # of Dupes to Buy a Legendary Item Using Common Dupe Rewards 5 15 50 200 Using Rare Dupe Rewards 2 5 17 67 Using Epic Dupe Rewards 1 2 5 20 Using Legendary Dupe Rewards 1 1 2 5

Loot Type # of Dupes to Buy a Common Item # of Dupes to Buy a Rare Item # of Dupes to Buy a Epic Item # of Dupes to Buy a Legendary Item Using Common Dupe Rewards 8 20 80 320 Using Rare Dupe Rewards 2 5 20 80 Using Epic Dupe Rewards 1 1 4 16 Using Legendary Dupe Rewards 1 1 1 4

Loot Box Item Counts

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Player Icons 124 124 Sprays 555 555 Voice Lines 228 228 Victory Poses 72 72 Highlight Intros 73 73 Emotes 120 1 121 Skins 96 49 100 245 Total 783 292 242 101 1418

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Player Icons 8.74% 8.74% Sprays 39.14% 39.14% Voice Lines 16.08% 16.08% Victory Poses 5.08% 5.08% Highlight Intros 5.15% 5.15% Emotes 8.46% 0.07% 8.53% Skins 6.77% 3.46% 7.05% 17.28% Total 55.22% 20.59% 17.07% 7.12% 100.00%

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Portraits 91 91 Sprays 62 19 81 Banners 37 37 74 Emoji Packs 147 147 Voice Lines 340 340 Announcers 22 3 25 Skins 385 214 79 678 Mounts 32 43 33 108 Total 677 473 279 115 1544

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Portraits 5.89% 5.89% Sprays 4.02% 1.23% 5.25% Banners 2.40% 2.40% 4.79% Emoji Packs 9.52% 9.52% Voice Lines 22.02% 22.02% Announcers 1.42% 0.19% 1.62% Skins 24.94% 13.86% 5.12% 43.91% Mounts 2.07% 2.78% 2.14% 6.99% Total 43.85% 30.63% 18.07% 7.45% 100.00%

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Sprays 25 25 Voice Lines 48 48 Emotes 24 24 Skins 11 11 Total 73 0 24 11 108

Item Type Common Rare Epic Legendary Total Portraits 5 5 Sprays 14 14 Skins 18 5 23 Mounts 10 10 Total 0 19 18 15 52

My Growing Concerns

Loot Type Approximate Odds of Specific Drops Rare 0.203% Epic 0.075% Legendary 0.044%

Suggestions for Improvement

Hello everyone! I thought I'd take a break from blogging about balance patches to discuss a growing concern of mine: loot.A large part of 2.0 was the introduction of a new progression system that lets us get loot every time we level up. The change has brought forth some complaints which I feel have growing merit, especially now that we've seen how event-limited loot is going to work. So, because of this, I'd like to evaluate how well the loot system works right now, and see where we need to improve. Since Overwatch's loot system is perhaps the closest to our own, and because they've recently announced changes to their loot system, I'm going to draw the most comparisons to them.Fair warning, as with most of my non-patch blogs, this will be a long read.As always, I've crafted a spreadsheet for this purpose, covering the basics of Overwatch's loot system vs our own. It is located here. Don't worry about going through it, as I'll be going through several aspects of this sheet in my analysis below.Let's start with a comparison of drop rates. Drop rate data is based on the reported rates from China, which can be found here for OW and here for HotS As you can see, we have a lower rate of Legendary drops, but we get a higher rate of Epic drops. We also have no guaranteed chance of a Rare drop in each chest, whereas Overwatch guarantees at least that much. In addition, we are allowed to re-roll our own chests, meaning that we effectively get several opportunities to improve our drops. Altogether, this suggests that our chests are currently better than OW's.Let's now take a look at cost data. OW provides 20% of a duplicate's value, and HotS provides close to 25%, except in the case of the lower tiers. This leads to figures as shown below.And here's those figures adjusted for event-limited items. OW prices their event items at 3x, HotS at 1.5x. Neither game increases the duplicate value of their items.So overall, we pay higher rates on individual items, but significantly less on event-limited items.However, what really matters is this: do we get reasonable value for our shards? Yes, in fact, we got better value than Overwatch. Let's compare the two. First up is a table showing the number of duplicates needed at each level in order to earn the credits to buy certain item tiers.Now here's the same table showing the number of duplicates needed at each level in order to earn the credits to buy certain item tiers in Heroes of the Storm.As you can see, low-end items aren't worth very much to us and really don't help in pursuing higher-end loot. However, that changes after you reach Epic tier, as you end up with more value from dupes at the high-end than the low-end. Overall, our system ends up being less efficient than Overwatch in terms of saving smaller and weaker items, but this is mitigated to some degree by the ability to re-roll our boxes.EDIT: Correction to shard duplicate values, thank you seavictory Up next, let's look at how many items there are in both games, starting with Overwatch. These counts may not be perfectly accurate as some of them were pulled from wikis, but I'm reasonably confident in their accuracy. Overwatch has the following non-event, non-achievement items available in standard loot boxes:And here's the distribution of those items (i.e. how much they contribute to the overall total). Note that some of the totals may not add up correctly due to rounding.Let's now compare these figures with HotS's. Several of these I counted myself, so again, I'm reasonably certain of the accuracy here. Keep in mind that this is a count of non-event, non-achievement items only, so the new Sun's Out event items are not being included in these counts.And here's the distribution of those items (i.e. how much they contribute to the overall total). Note that some of the totals may not add up correctly due to rounding.So, we currently have more in-game items than Overwatch. This is where that lack of a guaranteed Rare can actually hurt our bottom line a little bit. However, notice the differences in item distribution. Overwatch flooded their game with sprays primarily (making up nearly 40% of all items) whereas our game's largest distributed item is skins. This is why we feel like we're getting a decent number of skins from these boxes....because, well, we kinda are! They make up most of the overall loot table, so even with the reduced odds of getting Rare items, we're still seeing them a lot. It's also why Overwatch's boxes always feel so disappointing: the Common loot table is largely full of sprays, and since Common items drop the most, we're seeing sprays moreso than anything else.A bit of quick math can give us an estimate at the total cost value of these collections. For Overwatch, the total value of the Hero Gallery comes out to 202975 Credits. For HotS, the value of the Collection tab is about 369980 Shards. It's worth noting that this larger amount is almost entirely due to the pricing differences between our game and theirs. That price tag would drop to 237150 Shards if we used the same pricing model as OW, showing that there's really not that radical of a difference in the two models.Now let's look at how things look with our first post-2.0 event, the Sun's Out event. We're going to compare it to Overwatch's most recent event, the First Anniversary event. It should be noted that this event is actually abnormal compared to other events because its cost is fairly high (56475 Credits, whereas most events ranged from 30-35k), but it's the most recent, so it's entirely likely OW will continue down this road for future events.So, here's the data from the First Anniversary Event in Overwatch. As noted above, this event's total cost was 56475 Credits.Let's now compare that to the Sun's Out Event in HotS. The total cost of this event is 49650 Credits.So, despite having half as much total content, the costs between these two events are actually very similar. This leads into one of my primary concerns with the way loot has been going, which I'll discuss further in the next section.It's fair to say that we've had a lot of time now to see how the new 2.0 loot system would work out for us since it premiered in April. And while I still feel that 2.0 was a significant improvement to the game's loot and progression systems, I am seeing some very concerning issues that it seems like Blizzard has not yet addressed. And now, I'd like to discuss what it is that has me so concerned about where this game is going. This is perhaps going to be the least "mathy" section in this blog, but rather a section which draws upon the math above to discuss what aspects of the system might need to be changed.1)Despite the fact that we have different loot boxes with different art and sound effects, they function....mostly the same as our old ones. It has been determined that these loot boxes do not contain a guaranteed Sun's Out item in them. This is obviously meant to encourage more loot box sales (to get more chances at the items) and I don't blame HotS for trying to do this. But I think the HotS team missed the memo here as far as why loot boxes are so appealing. Overwatch has a "hook" in place: a guaranteed event drop in every single box, which is part of the appeal to buy boxes in the first place. You're always getting something from the event, even if it's something as simple as a spray. These boxes don't do that, which means there's no actual appeal to buying more boxes at all, because there's no guarantee that I'll get any of the new content from it. Given how little new content was added that is exclusive to these boxes, and how much of a vast library of content we had before this (approximately 1544 items, as my data above shows), it is theoretically possible for someone to play through this entire event and never get a single event-related item. And that should never happen.EDIT: Someone made mention of the fact that you can re-roll boxes to get event-specific items. That's fine and dandy, but neglects the fact that the mathematics behind re-rolls encourages you not to re-roll in the first place. It was previously determined that you should generally not re-roll a box more than twice, as you're essentially losing re-roll value at that point. Not to mention, you should generally not re-roll a chest with an Epic or Legendary already in it, due to the very low odds that you'll get a same-quality item in the next roll. So, let's say you roll a chest with a normal Epic item, but no event item. How likely are you to re-roll that box just for a chance at one of the very rare Epic or Legendary items in this event? I wager most people are not very likely to even consider it. And that's the problem inherent in these boxes: there is no guarantee of event items, and to re-roll specifically to try for event items is often a poor move given2)As the table above shows, 33 of the 52 items in this event are Epic or Legendary. This means 63.5% of the content in this event falls into categories with a drop rate below 25%. That's pretty bad. And when you factor in the 1544 items already in the game, your odds of getting any one specific item are slim-at-best, as the table below shows.And keep in mind, these are merely estimations of the odds of getting a specific item from the Collection tab. Without knowing the exact drop rates for things like currency, stimpacks, etc, it's very likely that the exact odds are far lower than this. So you have, quite literally, a fraction of a percent chance of getting an event item from these loot boxes.3)This particular change is one that much of the community has complained about before, with no response. Because of the way the new system is designed, only "featured" content can be purchased with gems directly. And as of the time of this blog post and the start of this event,of the new items in this event are "featured". So for those of us who would absolutely be willing to drop money on the items we want....we simply can't. Again, the intent here is to funnel our money into loot boxes, but with no guarantees of getting what we want, why would we buy them? This goes beyond just individual purchases, too....the bundles are similarly poor value for the asking price, and don't allow you to buy all of the available skin tones for new event items, which basically makes them worthless to anyone who doesn't want those specific tints. To put it simply: we're trying to offer you our money, Blizzard, and it feels like you don't want it.With Overwatch already taking steps to adjust its own loot system, shouldn't we be doing the same? Here's the changes I think would make a significantly positive impact on this game's loot system, especially when we're talking about events.1)We understand that you're trying to get people to buy loot boxes, Blizzard. But with no guarantees of event drops, nor any indication that the event boxes have increased drop rates of event items, there is very little inspiration to do so. If they have increased drop rates already, advertise as much. If they don't, add them in. Remember, Overwatch boxes always drop at least one event item. If we're not getting somewhat similar results in HotS, we're not as likely to bother with buying boxes.2)This also helps reduce the problem of front-loading your content into Epic and Legendary tiers. If people are getting event-fitting loot, even if it's not the top-tier stuff that everybody wants, it'll at least feel better than trying to open event-themed boxes and not getting any event stuff at all.3)This has been requested for a long time by many folks on Reddit, and as someone who likes spending on this game, I happen to agree. Event items should be available for direct purchase via gems during the event. To be fair and to continue to encourage box sales, they could be sold at an increased gem price (much like how they're currently sold at increased shard prices). Similarly, offer bundles that allow us to buy all of the tints of each new item that you add, so that somebody can (for example) spend money directly to buy all of the Tracer variations up. This means that those of us who want to pay for specific content can do so again, at least for event-specific items.Do you feel these changes are fair? Do you feel that this goes too far? Not far enough? Let me know in the comments. After all, we're all here because we love HotS and we want it to grow as a game. So I think that if we as a community have concerns about the way loot is being handled, we need to make those concerns as clear as we can, as often as we can, until Blizzard has given us an indication that they've heard our feedback.