Heroes of the Storm Update Thoughts!

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.

The Multiplayer Jungle

When playing online multiplayer games one, inherently, by the nature of the game, exposes oneself to other people playing the same game. In some cases this can be a good thing, particularly for people the opposite of myself who are extroverted and good at making friends, but in some particular scenarios it opens everyone up to coming across the sort of people we’d all rather avoid, in the unpleasant context of being forced to work together with them.

I first encountered this when I began healing in the multiplayer dungeons in World of Warcraft, across various characters and in yes, both factions, because I’m not a fan of either the Alliance or the Horde, before anybody claims that Horde/Alliance players are better than what I’m about to describe. However many dozens of dungeon runs I made without incident, it’s always the ones that go badly that stick in my memory, even now more than a year after I have ceased to play WoW.

I still remember with clarity that one Scarlet Monastery run I did where a Dwarf Retribution-specialisation Paladin rolled for every piece of INT Leather gear that I (as a Restoration Shaman) needed, just to be a dick, and frustratingly won all of them. I still remember the Scholomance run I did as a Balance Druid where I ended up healing because our actual healer refused to, and then was left there on my own while everyone else exited the instance. I still remember the unbelievable Stockades dungeon instance I did on my Feral Druid character where I realised to my disbelief that all four of the other characters in the dungeon were controlled by one person, all with the same name ending in various numbers and set to auto-follow each other.

But sometimes, through some stroke of what is either incredibly bad or incredibly good luck, you come across players that are so goddamn awful that it becomes a bonding experience for everybody else forced to put up with them.

In honour of experiencing one of these yesterday while playing Heroes of the Storm (which I will probably talk about soon as well), I hereby present the story of my most remarkable dungeon in WoW ever, which occurred in Blackfathom Deeps as I tried to level my Dwarf Restoration Shaman.

The rest of the party was comprised of mainly Human characters, a Hunter who had a boar as a pet, a Destruction Warlock who started off with an imp summoned, and a Rogue. Our fifth, who was ostensibly supposed to be the tank, was a giant arse of a Night Elf Feral Druid who had queued as a tank presumably to cheat their way into the dungeon quicker (tanks and healers are always in higher demanded than DPS because there are 3 of the latter and only one each of the first two required).

Things started off all right, although we were all already somewhat bitter about our “tank” maintaining cat form, and it wasn’t until the first boss that our Rogue and Warlock started putting out messages saying “can you take bear form and tank please” because between the two pet classes there were enough extra bodies that we hadn’t suffered particularly much from the lack of tanking, and, to be frank, I was quite a good healer in those days. In response to their pleas, our Druid began switching to Bear form (which is designed to draw enemy fire from squishier characters like the Warlock and the Rogue) while running between enemies, and then switching straight back into Cat form to attack them – which could only have been a deliberate move to annoy them because it enhanced nothing.

Needless to say, this dickery did not sit well with the rest of us. We did our best as we continued through the dungeon, gritting our teeth and determining just to finish the thing, but our Rogue died a few times despite our efforts and my attempts to heal and the messages directed at the Druid began to become angrier as the dead Rogue started swearing at them, pointing out that if they had been in Bear form he wouldn’t have died. After the second boss, our Warlock summoned her Voidwalker (which has very mild tanking abilities) because we were desperate for anything to draw aggro, and our Druid indignantly demanded to know what the hell she thought she was doing switching to something that did less DPS.

All three of the DPS players were quick to point out that we needed a tank because the Druid refused to do their job, and it was at this point that the dungeon descended full-on into batshit insanity.

I was private-messaged by the Druid, who said “don’t listen to the Warlock, she’s trying to turn you against me, you should just heal me and ignore the others,” which I obviously ignored, because that’s not how dungeons work. Shortly afterwards it became clear they had been messaging the Hunter as well, because he stated in party chat that the Druid had told him that we should all run away from the fight and let the Warlock die, though quite why they felt that she was more at fault for anything than the other two DPS characters was beyond me. The Hunter furthermore insisted that the Druid should shut the hell up and do their job.

The Druid countered by saying that we had all been brainwashed by the Warlock’s lies about them (she not having said a single thing about him other than “can you actually tank please”).

By this point we were blitzing through enemies as fast as we could because we were desperate to get away from this person (unlike with the other three, I never knew their gender) and at a point where you can optionally choose to go underwater and fight a relatively secret boss called Old Serra’kis, we naturally were making no effort to prolong anything and breezed past the diversion, much to the annoyance of the Druid.

They began spamming the chat with [Old Serra’kis] [Old Serra’kis] [Old Serra’kis] over and over, probably at least a hundred times, standing by the entrance as we determinedly ignored them, mostly too busy fighting to actually type any messages in response since we were now fully down a man. I began receiving more private messages from the Druid, cycling through attitudes along the lines of “you’re going to leave me after we finish this dungeon aren’t you? You’re so heartless, how can you be so mean” to “you suck, I’m a better healer than you, you should just drop dead” to “what has the Warlock been saying about me? Don’t listen to her, she’s evil you know,” none of which I responded to and all of which were equally maddening. The first of these was especially confusing because I can’t believe that this player might ever have encountered a party who chose to stay together after a dungeon with them, and yes we were all obviously going to go our separate ways afterwards.

Our very irritated Rogue died once more and demanded in chat that the Druid stop messaging him with their “creepy-ass shit” (sic.) and the Druid, in between spamming [Old Serra’kis] a few more times, insisted that they would only stop if we would help them kill Old Serra’kis instead of going onwards. They then said, in what was a blatant and unbelievable lie, that they had been trying this dungeon for weeks and could find nobody kind enough to help them with Old Serra’kis, and couldn’t we please find it in our hearts to be good people for just a second and not ruin their whole day. This, despite being at level 15 still, the bare minimum for entering the dungeon, which they would have levelled past if they had done the dungeon even once before.

We took a short break, waiting for my healing to fully restore our Hunter, and I managed to type “maybe we would help with Old Serra’kis if you would actually TANK” and my comment received the universal online message of approval in the form of three sets of “^” and our Warlock saying “Preach!”

It was at that point that the Druid finally gave up on trying to convince us to kill Old Serra’kis and instead returned to outright insults, telling us all that we sucked in various imaginative ways and saying that we were evil and we were deliberately trying to ruin the game for them. None of us could be bothered responding to them anymore, and we quite miraculously managed to four-man the penultimate boss, with the Hunter’s boar doing a decent job of drawing the aggro for us this time. The Druid had caught up with us by now, but refused to fight, so the Rogue pointed out that the boar was more useful than the Druid had ever been, and we all in a fit of somewhat impish delight began crying “all hail the pig-tank!” and someone put a star symbol over the boar’s head, and there was much bowing, mostly because it was cathartic.

The Druid then flipped out, saying that we would see just how much they had been helping us if they went off and got themselves killed, and we would then be doomed without them, and beg them to help us with the final boss, and ran off to presumably throw themselves at some enemies and watch in triumph as we failed without them.

However, unfortunately for the Druid, our Hunter had just pulled the last boss, and what with the Druid pulling absolutely no aggro, the boss ignored them, thwarting their efforts to martyr themselves and show us the error of our ways. They then cried “you’ll never win without me!” and threw themselves at a bunch of minion enemies, not realising that the pile of tiny crabs they were standing in the middle of were all neutral enemies that wouldn’t attack unless provoked (unlike most of the other enemies in dungeons).

Undeterred by this latest failure, they finally took Bear form and attacked the last boss, drawing enough aggro to pull it away from us, and we let them take it, because by this point we were all quite happy for them to get themselves killed. And yet, even now, I had put out a healing totem that kept gradually keeping the Druid alive, and their constant cries of “what will you do now, huh?” were followed by them continually living and having to make a theatrical gesture again.

At length, the Hunter told me to let the Druid die, and I informed him that I wasn’t trying to help them at all, but that the spell I had used before (in order to help us) was inadvertently thwarting their schemes. The Warlock summed up all of our thoughts on the entire dungeon by saying “figures he can’t even kill himself properly.”

And then, at last, the Druid died, and over the top of their cries of how doomed we were, we defeated the final boss, congratulated each other, the Warlock and the Hunter sent me friend requests, and we went on our separate ways.

And I will probably never forget it while my memories hold, because it was so absolutely, ludicrously terrible that it reached a stage where it was actually kind of wonderful.

The Butcher(ing) of Heroes of the Storm

So I discovered today via my Battle.net launched news that it had been announced a while ago that Heroes of the Storm will be receiving a new map (which people seem legitimately excited about) and a new character (who has been met with kind of the opposite reaction), a demonic villain from the first Diablo game who was re-vamped for the third called The Butcher.

And in browsing through the comments on the release notice, it seems like a lot of other players have the same basic reaction as I did, which was “ugh.”

Obviously as someone who never played Diablo I’m sitting at a disadvantage to those who have, in that I don’t even know this character that I don’t find particularly enticing, but from what I’ve been able to gather from people who do, there’s a lot of muttering about leaving characters from the second Diablo game (which many of said people consider to be the best of the trilogy) out of Heroes of the Storm, seemingly as a marketing move, to directly promote Diablo 3 and the current versions of the Blizzard games that can be downloaded right now, if you would like, they’re right there in your launcher!

The forum comments have thrown around names like Baal and Mephisto (who, I will add, are references to actual demons I’ve actually heard of outside of Diablo and are much less nebulous than simply ‘The Butcher,’ which would probably be more appealing to other people who haven’t played the Diablo games), and even jokingly Deckard Cain, who even I know is a frail old man who talks a lot, as Diablo characters they’d prefer to see over The Butcher.

Which brings me to the major problem I have with The Butcher, which is that it’s frankly undeniable that he looks a lot like Stitches, a WoW character who is basically an abomination made of stitched together parts of corpses. Hell – The Butcher even has stitches on his chest like Stitches. Despite being red-skinned, The Butcher bears a very close resemblance to another character in a game that’s specifically designed to allow you through levelling to unlock different skin colours, and which – up until this point – has done a brilliant job of keeping all of its characters visually distinct.

There’s a clear visual divide even between skins designed to alternate-universe-switch characters into each other’s plotlines, like Malfurion and Illidan, one of whom betrayed his race and took up with demons, and the other of whom stayed behind and became a leader and a genuine tree-hugger. Both of these characters are visually distinct because a lot of focus was put on their GIGANTIC weapons, a staff on one hand and two giant daggers as tall as the character on the other, and this allows players even in the thick of a clump of players to be able to tell who they’re facing so they can react accordingly.

In what pictures I’ve seen of The Butcher, he has literally the same style of weapon – a giant cleaver in one hand and a hook-type implement in the other – as Stitches uses. Oh, but, the hook and cleaver have marginally different designs! You know, kind of like they probably would have if Blizzard had just made a cosmetic “Butcher” skin of Stitches!

Which is another complaint I’ve seen often on the forums. Not only does their similar visual style make them confusing to tell apart on the battlefield, a lot of people are convinced they could have released a product re-skinning Stitches to look like The Butcher for roughly the same amount of effectiveness.

The logic goes: players who liked The Butcher will buy the “Butcher” skin of Stitches. What’s that you say? Nobody liked The Butcher? Then why the fuck are we being asked to play him?

The amount of “awwww yis get hyped for The Butcher!!!!!” PR I’ve been seeing from Blizzard is an amazingly clear proof to me that they actually don’t listen to a thing their audiences say. There could almost not be less hype for The Butcher. The kindest thing I’ve seen said is that The Butcher character model has been tied to Heroes of the Storm since alpha development and that they badly-timed their release of him. Yeah, that’s the kindest one.

The overwhelming cry of “for the love of god release a Starcraft Warrior” has apparently gone largely ignored, which I find sad, because I seriously want to see Dehaka, the primal Zerg from Starcraft 2, make an appearance, and he would fit that character build perfectly.

I would also love to see Blizzard try and come up with a ranged Warrior character. I believe it would work most effectively with probably one of the dragon aspects from WoW, in dragon form, with a ranged basic attack of fire breath or similar depending on dragon breed, and some kind of trait that pulls aggro (or absorbs damage done to other characters) in order to be an effective tank from a distance. And I would probably give them my money/gold for that.

For The Butcher? No.

Even though his play-style is distinctly different to Stitches, there is nothing about The Butcher that entices me.

Where’s Vol’jin? Where’s Crowley? Where’s Dehaka? Where’s Stukov? Where’s Baine? Where’s… that one evil Forsaken guy with the cool voice who shouted “death to the living!” at the Wrath Gate? Where are the dragons? Where’s Aggra? Where are the Draenei? Where’s Tosh? Where’s any character anyone has asked for? Hell, I would be at least vaguely interested in Mephisto and Baal or one of the other angels from Diablo!

Really? The Butcher? Really?

Well at least our expectations are suitably lowered for the next new character reveal.

The Torment of the Nexus

“Damn it, Sarah, it didn’t have to be like this!”

For those of you who don’t know, Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA (massive online battle arena) game published by Blizzard, purveyors of several other games, most notably World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Heroes of the Storm itself creates some kind of canon-bending-Nexus-thingy that brings together characters from all three of these game series, to fight alongside one another and (more frequently) murder each other brutally.

It’s a game that’s quite willing to admit that it’s messing with the games’ various canons, with the tutorial telling one of the characters (James Raynor, from Starcraft) “don’t think about it too much” as he wonders how exactly he came to be there. The majority of the characters, however, are borrowed from World of Warcraft, with a fair number of the villains being present as well as the heroes.

On the one hand, this can lead to some great interactions between the characters when a game opens (of which each player will hear a different one), especially between characters who actually hate each other in their own individual games. The WoW Night Elf Stormrage-Whisperwind love triangle gets a lot of attention, as does the enmity between Sylvanas and Arthas, and the various Diablo characters and their unmitigated hatred of, well, the character of Diablo.

We get a giant undead scarab-bug-person king (Anub’arak, from WoW) hitting on a Zerg broodmother (Zagara, from SC), Illidan Stormrage full-on professing his former love for Tyrande Whisperwind in front of the three other yobs who make up their team without batting an eye, and a fairy dragon from WoW (Brightwing) saying she’s looking forward to murdering people in a cutesy little girl voice that comes off as excessively creepy.

I will not deny that I giggle evilly in satisfaction every time I hear Illidan tell his brother Malfurion “oh, get over yourself,” something I’ve wanted literally anybody to say to Malfurion for a very long time.

But it’s the characters’ interactions with characters on the opposing team that interest me the most. You might think, given that Tyrande and Malfuron are… sort of married? De facto? Officially a couple at least? That when one of them kills the other as they appear on an enemy team, there might be some kind of emotion displayed. However, the most I’ve heard Tyrande say is a fairly bland “Forgive me, my love,” in her usual deadpan voice, before she moves on to shooting his friends.

Raynor, whose romance with Sarah Kerrigan in SC is basically confirmed not to be a thing, and almost certainly won’t be resolved in the upcoming Legacy of the Void campaign unless the Protoss get really nosy, on the other hand, sounds genuinely distressed when Kerrigan dies at his hand, lacking only the animation ability to kneel beside her body and shake his fists at the sky, since the emotion is clearly there.

But the words “damn it, Sarah, it didn’t have to be like this!” make me wonder. To what is he referring? Their failed romance in the games that contain their own canon? Or the entire business of Heroes of the Storm? It’s a brilliant money-making scheme for Blizzard, encouraging people who play some of their games to investigate the others, but from the point of view of characters who we’re supposed to follow through story arcs and sympathise with, being thrown into a MOBA is a pretty traumatic character development – dying constantly, over and over, and continually being forced back to the Nexus to wait for the next match, where you’ll be pitted against some of your friends and teamed with some of your enemies with complete randomness, chaos and confusion for all eternity.

Maybe Uther tells Raynor not to think too hard about what they’re doing because thinking about their actual situation would be really fucking depressing.

It seems to me, that out of all of the characters from all of the games Blizzard has pulled together, Raynor would be the most likely to try and convince everyone to work together and escape from the Nexus. The WoW Alliance and Horde (neither of which can really be classified as the “good” side) characters are too busy having grudge-matches with each other and their villains to be the voice of leadership, and Raynor has a long history of working together with his occasional enemies the Protoss and the Zerg to make things right in the SC campaigns.

Every time I hear his grief for Kerrigan yet again, it makes me think that he’s not only lamenting that someone he cares about deeply has been killed (even though she will be back shortly), but that he’s rueing the fact that all of the characters that have been brought together were so contentious and fractious that they could have escaped the hell of the constant cycle of unending death that is Heroes of the Storm if only they could have been convinced to work together with him. Fanciful to imagine, perhaps, but when you take a character from a game with an elaborate story campaign like SC and throw them into something utterly story-less, one can’t help but wonder how they would feel and react.

It makes me miss the cutscenes from SC, particularly the second game; I would love to see, perhaps as a counter to the opening cinematic (depicting Raynor and Kerrigan on opposite teams fighting each other), some kind of cutscene of Raynor’s team murdering Kerrigan, and him stopping while the others take their whirlwind of destruction onwards, to close her eyes and make the whole thing seem less grotesque. Raynor’s (albeit scripted) ability to care about one death of Kerrigan’s in what is undoubtedly millions by now is probably one of the most endearing things about this game, emotionally speaking.

It would also please me greatly, if, one day, if Blizzard ever gets around to closing Heroes of the Storm down, they could end the game with one big cutscene of the heroes escaping from the everlasting torment of the Nexus – one last big adventure.

I doubt it will happen, of course, but one can only ever hold out hope.