Heroes of the Storm has a new balance patch out now, and it makes the game’s defensive structures more dangerous. Towers, forts, and keeps will now do 10% more damage to enemy heroes, which Blizzard says will give tower diving heroes less time to hang around and cause a ruckus.
“We’ve given our tower changes some time to settle, and while we like how their current targeting mechanism works, we believe we went a little too far in lowering their damage,” Blizzard writes in the latest round of patch notes for its MOBA. “We’re giving them some of their teeth back so that enemies who tower dive have a little less time to hang around in their opponent’s base before they have to disengage.”
The patch also swaps the health and shield values for healing fountains, which is a move meant to make sniping those structures a bit riskier – now, players will have to destroy the structure entirely to make sniping these in the early game worthwhile, according to Blizzard’s reasoning. We’ll have to see how that pans out.
The patch also includes the usual round of buffs and nerfs to HOTS heroes roster, as the developers try to find the sweet spot for some recently altered characters. A few notable changes include Gazlowe getting a few recent nerfs nerfed – in other words, Blizzard says, it’s giving him damage boosts to Rocket Boots, One Man Wrecking Crew, Robo-Goblin, and Grav-O-Bomb. Some of his other skills have gotten needed boosts as well, including his level 20 Bomb Toss, which gains an additional Xplodium Charge with a three-second cooldown between uses.
Diablo, the developers decided, needed to have his Diabolical Momentum dialed down a bit, since it was “simply too good at doing everything since it has synergy with all of his other potential ways of playing.” To address this, Blizzard has changed that ability so that it no longer reduces Fire Stomp’s cooldown.
Blizzard is still trying to get the balance on Deathwing sorted such that players switch between his Destroyer and Worldbreaker forms fairly frequently. What’s been happening at high levels lately has been players favouring Destroyer. In a move that’s guaranteed to be controversial, the team has reduced some of the Destroyer form’s power and given it to the Worldbreaker form, as well as giving that form an energy buff.
As some players on the subreddit have pointed out, a major problem in switching Deathwing’s forms is that it’s on the slow side – he has to channel for two seconds to do it, and as a slower character, it’s just too risky in many situations.
You can read the full patch notes over on the Blizzard blog.