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BlizzAZJackson

04-06-2020 18:53:14

omnisarch
Agree. The role is a little stale and boring. At this point I don't play tanks anymore just off laners. More variety.

Firstly thanks for the feedback. I appreciate that you took the time to write this up, and wanted to give you my perspective.

I went back and checked, and since the beginning of this year (the last 5 months) i've implemented 48 changes to Warriors, and some of those changes have been adding/removing/moving talents around. I've also been reading over the last few days that the tank meta has been the same all year which I know is factually false. At the beginning of the year Mal'ganis was extremely powerful to the point that he needed to be toned down, and then we also had a period of time where Uther tank was also a top priority pick. Garrosh was also much more popular at the beginning of the year.

As far as actual performance, almost all of the Warriors are between 49 and 52% when looking at high level data over the last ~3 months, with the only outliers being Cho at 55.3% and Blaze and Stitches being at ~47%. Compared to other points in the game's history, and even compared to other roles and balance in general, this is very good on paper as far as individual hero performance.

I don't say this to discount your post, but to frame where we are and where we have been this year. I've seen so much disinformation floating around that it makes it hard to parse actionable feedback from it. Your post largely makes a different point, which is that the changes haven't been wild enough to the role to give enough new, interesting toys to play with. I think there's some truth to this, though there have been changes to some tanks during this year that would normally qualify by your definition of being significant if the heroes ended up being more mainstream (the various buffs/switching of talent tiers on Stitches for example). This is a tricky subject, since player perception of power levels and significance of changes is so largely influenced by pick rate instead of actual performance. There is also a phenomenon that happens all the time where players pick things only because everyone else is and they feel that they are expected to follow suit, regardless of how things are actually performing. This often significantly raises the pick rate of heroes when their performance is not out of line enough to justify those pick rates, which is currently what is happening with ETC and Johanna. We've been trying to buff up other tanks in the last few months to freshen up the meta instead of nerfing those two Heroes.

All and all I get where you're coming from, and in the future it would be helpful for us to focus the feedback on which tanks you would like to see changes to and how you would make them more interesting or picked more often in addition to signaling when you believe a role is too stale.

Thanks again for taking the time to write this up. :)

Fuente

BlizzAZJackson

04-06-2020 19:47:17

erik14251
I think the main problem is that pretty much every tank that isn't Johanna or etc is too hard to draft/ can easily be countered. Even malganis and garrosh are risky picks on the front end of a draft. Correct me if I'm wrong but when it comes to hero design, more recently the team has been shifting towards normalizing heroes to pull them out of their niche and make them more pickable in more situations (see cassia, tassadar, and tracer). This frankly does not seem to be the case with tanks and I think that is where the problem lies. Not only is the hero pool smaller than every other role, but 75% of the choices are niche picks. Granted niche picks that perform well when drafted in their proper place, but ultimately don't have a place in many drafts/situations. I recognize that this is just the nature of the role because tanks are defined a lot more by how they interact with the opposing team. I'm honestly a big fan of getting that one game where abubarak or stitches or tyrael gets to shine; that FEELS good. But when you have 2 tanks (Jo etc) that don't have a niche and the rest of them do, it's no wonder that everyone is picking those 2 heroes every game.

Here's a circular thought exercise for you:

Muradin, Garrosh, Diablo, and Mal'ganis have also had periods in their history where they were immediately first pick first ban material and were absolutely considered generalist tanks (if you go even further back Arthas and Stitches were the OG first pick/ban heroes in all games, and were also considered generally good in every possible team composition). Did something change to make them more niche? Would making them even more generalist solve the problem, or would it just create a new issue where all tanks are doing the same thing so people will just pick the hero who does that thing the best (this is why we changed Tychus to be more unique with his tank buster role back in the day because all of our ranged attackers were considered generalists so people only picked the one they thought was best at the time)? Is the issue actually that we need more niche heroes who are better in their roles so that when they're the right pick players automatically flock to them to keep hero variety higher, or is it that most of our tanks are too generalist and ETC/Johanna are just considered too good right now?

Also I want to dispel the theory that we want to make all heroes more generalist. This is not true, and having niche, unique heroes is a part of what makes this game more special. Our reference in Cassia's dev comment awhile back was that she was too niche in her role to the point that it was a detriment to her place in the game, not that we want to make every hero a generalist.

Fuente

BlizzAZJackson

04-06-2020 21:39:48

BlizzAZJackson
Firstly thanks for the feedback. I appreciate that you took the time to write this up, and wanted to give you my perspective.

I went back and checked, and since the beginning of this year (the last 5 months) i've implemented 48 changes to Warriors, and some of those changes have been adding/removing/moving talents around. I've also been reading over the last few days that the tank meta has been the same all year which I know is factually false. At the beginning of the year Mal'ganis was extremely powerful to the point that he needed to be toned down, and then we also had a period of time where Uther tank was also a top priority pick. Garrosh was also much more popular at the beginning of the year.

As far as actual performance, almost all of the Warriors are between 49 and 52% when looking at high level data over the last ~3 months, with the only outliers being Cho at 55.3% and Blaze and Stitches being at ~47%. Compared to other points in the game's history, and even compared to other roles and balance in general, this is very good on paper as far as individual hero performance.

I don't say this to discount your post, but to frame where we are and where we have been this year. I've seen so much disinformation floating around that it makes it hard to parse actionable feedback from it. Your post largely makes a different point, which is that the changes haven't been wild enough to the role to give enough new, interesting toys to play with. I think there's some truth to this, though there have been changes to some tanks during this year that would normally qualify by your definition of being significant if the heroes ended up being more mainstream (the various buffs/switching of talent tiers on Stitches for example). This is a tricky subject, since player perception of power levels and significance of changes is so largely influenced by pick rate instead of actual performance. There is also a phenomenon that happens all the time where players pick things only because everyone else is and they feel that they are expected to follow suit, regardless of how things are actually performing. This often significantly raises the pick rate of heroes when their performance is not out of line enough to justify those pick rates, which is currently what is happening with ETC and Johanna. We've been trying to buff up other tanks in the last few months to freshen up the meta instead of nerfing those two Heroes.

All and all I get where you're coming from, and in the future it would be helpful for us to focus the feedback on which tanks you would like to see changes to and how you would make them more interesting or picked more often in addition to signaling when you believe a role is too stale.

Thanks again for taking the time to write this up. :)

Also by referencing data so much I wasn't trying to dismiss your concerns that the tank meta is stale, only to give more insight to the complexity of data vs. perception. Balance is very heavily about both, and I agree that the simple fact that Johanna and ETC are currently at such a high pick priority is an issue.

Fuente

BlizzAZJackson

04-06-2020 23:06:19

MrProbius
Could you perhaps PM me some names of talents that are rarely picked but have high winrates? I'll take it upon myself to promote their use by winning a large number of games :)

Hoo boy I don't even need to PM you, there are too many examples! I'll mostly list Heroics because otherwise i'd be here all day~

Anub'arak - Locust Swarm

Arthas - Summon Sindragosa

Azmodan - Demonic Invasion

Deckard - Lorenado

Dehaka - Adaptation

Lunara - Thornwood Vine

Fenix - Plant Cracker

All of these Heroics have a moderately lower pick rate but higher win rate compared to their counterparts. In the interest of time, I only went from A to F on the hero list. Also there are tons and tons of examples of just random talents that have low pick rates but win just as often if not more than the popular picks.

Fuente

BlizzAZJackson

05-06-2020 01:41:09

leonblacktwitch
A bit disingenuous to say the tank meta hasn't been basically the same all of 2020. It's been 4 tanks + 1 support with one of the tanks being powerful due to a really bad bug.

Johanna has been dominating the meta for far longer than 2020(and still getting buffed somehow? blessed 20??) and in E.U. ETC was already there.

NA has caught up to ETC being a very safe to play tank with high reward.

Mal'ganis only existed in the meta because (at least in NA) because the ETC craze wasn't popular yet and more importantly, a game breaking bug that when fixed, dropped his (public) win-rate by 5%.

Garrosh will always be around because his kit is fun and oppressive whilst not necessarily the best, he can take over games and snowball games to easy wins. I'm sure his win-rate is not good right now as his 2 worst matchups jo/etc are the most popular atm.

Uther being picked as a tank just further proves how stale the tank role is that we have to go find supports with kits that are easier to execute than a hero suchas muradin. (Stun cdr quest anyone?)

Some tank changes I'd like to see off the top of my head -

Garrosh

I'd like to see him get some late game power specifically in his storm talents

Muradin

Remove the cast time on Q(or reduce?), change baseline quest to 15 stacks instead of 25 (+2 bonus for kill instead of 3)

Make his w talent an ability actually worth using besides enabling talents.

Stitches

Give him waveclear to compete with johanna

Make his w either uninterruptible or make it so it at least doesn't full cooldown when it does (Such-as it was before they reworked him in late 2018).

Fleabag was a cool talent but I guess that got replaced with his W at 4

Please just give him his old hook range back, its really frustrating to not actually be able to do any fog of war hooks until you get fishing hook.

Diablo -

the 13 quest should just be reverted or altered to be more powerful. if not reverted, buff the current one to actually give value to stacking your quest whilst you're stacking it and not get (lol -15 armor) on the 6th wallbang. something like, -3 armor per stack and bonus -5 when you complete the quest totaling -20 armor.

Tyrael

some mana love and some wave clear (although ill admit tyrael is probably better than I give him credit for as I watch him be very successful in E.U.)

Anub

Lower CD of Locust swarm

At the end of the day the current meta in the game = easy to play+high reward heroes are dominating which is what ETC/johanna/uther encompass.