BlueTracker

Lorhand

Tassadar's was the most in-depth rework so far, with an entirely new talent tree, a new basic ability and a new heroic. In terms of his development, as well as where he fits in the release cycle, does the team consider him a "new hero"? Or was his workflow still closer to that of past reworks?

I would say he’s firmly into new hero territory.

We had talked about shifting him from a support role to an assassin for years, but we didn’t have a solid plan as to what this transition would look like. I knew from the beginning that Plasma Shield would have to be cut in favor of another damage ability, so I started experimenting with various abilities and what became Shock Ray fell into placepretty quickly. We experimented with just that addition for a while, but we realized very early on that that there was no reasonable way we could keep Dimensional Shift and inject more numeric power into his kit without it becoming overpowered or making extreme concessions elsewhere. Removing that safety option really broadened the possibilities for what we could do with Tass and we spent a good amount of time (~4-5 months I want to say) trying different things until the base kit resembled what it is now.

Figuring out talents took another few months, but came together fairly easily. Moving Force Wall from an ultimate to a Basic Ability was a little contentious at first, but as we got used to playing with it we realized it worked well. Black Hole came very late in the design cycle and went through multiple iterations before it became what it is today.

We stopped making big design changes to him probably 2-3 months ago, so his total iteration time was probably a year’s worth of time, which is fairly close to how long we iterate on brand new heroes.

Since Tass took as long as a new hero, I understand why OP could assume Tass took the place of a new hero.

Archlichofthestorm

So the next hero will come earlier than 3 months after Tassadar?