Blizzard is keeping a watchful eye on the strength of warriors, UI improvements, and making certain heroes viable counters to mage type heroes.
The much anticipated Reddit AMA happened today, and while nothing truly surprising was revealed, those of us insterested in the behind the scenes discussion had loads to talk about. Topics of discussion included warrior balance, the new battle ground, and balance considerations when creating new heroes.
On balancing the Infernal Shrines map objective:
"The AoE stun used to have a large damage component built into it. This created a lot of snowballs in our internal play testing and was quickly removed. With this change we added a little more of the damage into the Punisher's themselves.
We both reduced and increased the Punishers stun many many times as we iterated upon his power level. Our biggest take away was the stun at lower numbers didn't feel very impactful and consequently the reward felt unimportant.
While we wanted to maintain the Punisher's damage levels we decided to add counter-play instead of removing damage. He switches to the nearest enemy hero. So after the initial stun and I believe 1 to 2 hits of guaranteed damage on the primary target your allies can jump in and soak the damage.
While testing we also saw lots of baiting tactics get developed as players learned the maps to pull Punisher's into areas where it was harder for the attacking team to follow up on the Punisher."
On warrior balance:
"Warriors in general are heavily on our radar, especially the first four you mentioned. We have been discussing at length about how we want to tackle them as a whole. Right now we are looking at trying to focus them more towards different roles so teams will have more options to counter-pick heavy mage or heavy auto-attack compositions.
We are also evaluating intended strengths and weaknesses to them and making sure that we aren't throwing the whole kitchen sink into their core abilities and talents. This is a large work in process and I can assure you that we are keeping a very close eye on the present events while remembering (and trying not to copy) some of our mistakes from the past."
On how a hero is created seperate fromt he meta:
"So believe it or not, we do not take the current meta into account fully into making a new hero. Generally speaking, work begins on a new hero between 6-8 months before a Hero, and as you guys have probably noticed, the meta swings a lot in that time frame! So if we designed for one meta, before we know it, it'd be out of date!
We do however look at the whole game as a sense and are trying more in the future to strike a better balance of Assassins, Warriors, Supports, Specialists, Melee v. Ranged, et cetera, to make sure the Hero roster as a whole has good coverage.
When it comes to making a new hero, we are often looking at the core fantasy of what that Hero represents, and trying to make a "kit" (DQWER1R2 abilities) that reflect that fantasy through Gameplay. For Johanna, the Fantasy was "Big Shield! Unstoppable Force!" so that literally became her trait ;-). For the Butcher, that meant "horror movie villain, preying on the weak", so that meant abilities like Ruthless Onslaught and Lamb to the Slaughter, to make your opponents feel like you were relentless in your chase (as every Diablo 1 player knows!)"
The entire thread is a great read and offers a honest picture of what priorities are taken when developing the game. Check out the entire thread your self here.
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