So with the huge patch that was applied to Heroes of the Storm this morning, everybody rushed to take a look at all the new features. For the record, and should anybody be wondering, here are my thoughts on the new implementations and some existing features I happened to discover recently also:
Battlefield of Eternity: this is a fun map. I can only imagine it’s a giant shitstorm when playing in Quick Match or Hero League, since I tend to usually play vs. AI because of firstly shyness and secondly the nature of a great deal of players. I like the secret middle gate into the bases and trying to level Gazlowe I derived probably an inappropriate amount of satisfaction from sneaking into their base to disable their forts while everyone else was busy elsewhere.
The visuals are also, obviously, amazing, and it’s probably the most visually-striking map so far. I would like to hope that Blizzard could apply this same amount of dedication and art design to future maps and ensure that they’re all this phenomenally enticing. A Starcraft map crafted with this amount of care would be a wonderful thing to see. The new music, which appears when playing this map as well as in the menu screens, is also wonderful and atmospheric, and was a really pleasant surprise for me when I booted up the game, being something of a musician myself.
The Butcher: yeah, no? No. Nope.
What, that’s not enough for you? Allow me to elaborate: visually unappealing, overhyped, completely lacking in any kind of charisma or appeal from a characterisation perspective, and ridiculously overpowered in certain key areas.
The character trailers Heroes of the Storm put out used to include footage of actual gameplay, for an example, see those for Kerrigan and Zagara, just off the top of my head… gradually, as they went along, they drifted away from that. Jaina’s trailer features her freeze-bombing more than 5 people at once, and Johanna’s trailer is about her flinging people away over treetops. While these are obviously exaggerated, and probably do a great job of hyping the character for people, they’re unrealistic – but they’re nothing compared to the trailers for Thrall and The Butcher.
Thrall, the darling of World of Warcraft who can only accurately be described with extreme contempt as “green Jesus,” has a trailer which features him saving various peoples just by appearing and looking stoic, and declares that the HotS characters can be “a family,” which is delightfully ironic seeing as he follows that comment up with a warcry of “for the Horde!” despite some of the people he is calling his family being Alliance. The Butcher, on the other hand, has a trailer that goes even further than to declare he unites all of the characters together despite race and universe of origin, boldly stating that The Butcher has killed literally every character from the rest of the game. And attempting to portray him as a horror movie villain. Not just freezing or flinging away the other characters as in the case of the exaggerated Jaina and Johanna trailers, but killing them and chopping them up for meat.
I can’t tell whether this is overcompensating, that the developers noticed the complete lack of excitement for The Butcher and decided to use the “spinosaurus from Jurassic Park 3” tactic of assuming that if they have the new character kill all the characters people actually like, people will somehow like the completely uninteresting character more; or if the developers just really like The Butcher a lot more than anyone else.
However, and this is the main thing that annoys me, it’s entirely possible that he probably could slaughter all the other characters. I haven’t tested him against any actual players, partly because of my aforementioned avoidance of playing with people and partly because there’s no way in hell I’m shelling out the Australian-dollar-equivalent of US$15 for this bastard, but in trying him out in the shop, I discovered something that troubles me greatly. If you take the talent that allows a larger maximum amount of meat, and Nexus Blades at level 20, The Butcher ends up sporting a 650+ damage on his basic attack.
Six hundred and fucking fifty. Uh, yeah, that’s a big fat fucking nope. That would be overpowered if he had literally nothing else to offer, and that’s really not the case. I can only hope people murder him quickly to avoid him building up that meat count or else everybody had better kiss their healthbars goodbye.
I’m a sucker for basic attack builds, and taking the ultimate basic attack builds for other assassins like Kerrigan and Thrall leaves you capped at about 400-500 maximum (within reason, since you could get more if you ground minion kills forever, and hey maybe I just finish games too quickly to advance further, I’m not sure), and The Butcher doesn’t even have Seasoned Marksman. Level 20 Butcher vs. someone really squishy like Kael’thas is going to be… not pretty.
Which, I guess, suits The Butcher well, because he’s ugly as sin. I will probably never cease to be annoyed about him.
750 gold gain at level 9 for characters: hooray!
Role display of damage taken by tanks in the stats screen: I am very much behind this. I’m super-glad it’s been implemented. It does make me wonder what it’ll do for warrior characters like ETC and Tyrael who can do heals, though. Ignore the healing, I suppose.
Block list limit: now this is an old thing, since it first hit me a couple of days before this patch and I’ve just been waiting for an excuse to rant about it. Because seriously, Blizzard? Seriously?
How is it that the culpability for the bad behaviour of people in chat has somehow been placed on the people who don’t wish to put up with it? It might have been helpful if Blizzard had informed me that I had a limited number of reports of inappropriate behaviour I could make, so that I could have carefully considered whether to report for completely inappropriate comments either the guy talking about his genitalia at length or the guy who says “I rape newbs” and proceeds to describe said events.
But yeah, no. Totally my fault for reporting too many of those arseholes. Obviously there needs to be a limit to the number of blocks I can make, because if online interactivity has taught us anything, it’s that there is totally a very small, finite number of people who behave stupidly. OBVIOUSLY.
When it’s reached the stage where me reporting somebody for calling people derogatory names and blasting them with hate messages in general chat doesn’t block them, there’s a problem with your goddamn blocking system, Blizzard.
And… I’ll leave it there for now. I’m very happy with the list of free characters this week and I have a hankering to get back to levelling Gazlowe. God I hope Blizzard fixes its shit, though.
Emiliana's Thoughts 