BlueTracker

Happy birthday!

Hi pacemaker95, thanks for the question!

Usually we start both at the same time. The concept artists get to work on how to interpret the visual design of the character into Heroes of the Storm and the designer goes to work on creating a kit that would fit the hero and feel unique in our game. Sometimes the concept art will inspire new ideas for the kit. Having worked on Zul'Jin personally, I had a really fun time trying to imagine all the different ways he could throw an axe or what kind of other axes he had in his back... pockets? He even has a voice line where he asks where the axes are even coming from. :D

As for the bonus question, I'd probably say Alexstrasza. She could just fly us wherever we wanted to go instead of being stuck in a car. Plus it'd be super fun to fly around on a dragon, right?

I would personally consider Medivh to be more of the Arcane mage. He doesn't have a mana management game (that's more of Whitemane's thing) but he does have mechanics that restore mana such as hitting heroes with Arcane Rift, the Arcane Brilliance talent, and Raven's Intellect. He also has a few other classic mage spells like Polymorph and Invisibility!

There have been a few heroes in the past who have created map balance issues. Varian with Twin Blades early on could very easily solo any boss on any map, Hanzo with Scatter Arrow build was able to deal incredible amounts of damage to stationary bosses very easily and with a very low cooldown when he combined the Serrated Arrows (level 4) talent with the Never Outmatched (level 7) talent. One of the changes we made to address this issue was changing Never Outmatched to require you to attack a hero in order to gain the cooldown reduction benefits. Previously it was any basic attack.

It's a fun challenge and it's one of my favorite parts about designing new heroes! There are many ways we start, sometimes we have a strong idea for a kit and we try to find a hero that it would work best on, other times we have a strong desire to bring a specific character or silhouette into the Nexus and have to build a kit to fit the role of whatever that hero may be. Kel'Thuzad is a great example of a hero who we knew we wanted in the game, but trying to tie down what his kit was took some time. Do we go with the traditional Lich kit from War3? Should he bring more of his necromantic side and support skills like Raise Dead and Frost Armor? His role as a burst combo assassin helped narrow down what his base kit should be, and we brought in some newer ideas like the concept of him using his Chains to pull people around.

Samuro is a good example of a hero who almost perfectly matches his source material in terms of base kits. He has all of the War3 Blade Master abilities as well as the heroic Bladestorm. However, talents really enable us to experiment more and give cool choices and new gameplay styles to make the character feel fresh despite sticking to the source material for his base kit.

Not usually, but sometimes it is a thought in the back of our minds. Since heroes take 9+ months to develop it can be very difficult to predict what the meta may be by the time the hero comes out. Instead of trying to "counter" the current common strategies, we try to focus on making sure we have a diverse range of character options and strategies for players to use.

1.) Creating talent trees usually starts once a hero's base kit is in a more finalized state. The kit is working together nicely, the abilities all have cool uses and shine in different situations, and the hero is feeling fun to play as and against. At this point we can start looking at adding talents to accentuate their abilities. Usually while we're in the process of working on the base kit, we'll have ideas of what a cool talent would be. Sometimes we have a base kit ability that might be a bit too complicated, so we cut out something and reserve it for a talent idea. Other times, we just have a ton of ideas for a hero and since they all can't fit on the base kit, they ultimately become talents. Eventually we start testing the hero with their talents. We focus on each talent individually and on talent builds. We try to make sure the talents are fun to play with and effective on their own as well as when combined with other talents. Players love discovering new synergies and builds and sometimes even we're surprised by what kind of playstyles become the dominant way to play the hero.

2.) We run into a lot of problems when we put different types of themed talents on the same tier. A good example of this was early on in the Heroes alpha and beta days when Illidan and Tychus both had a suite of survivability talents scattered throughout their tree. The primary way to play these damage dealing heroes was to pick all of the survivability talents rather than the talents that increase their damage. No matter how much we buffed their damage talents, players still felt safer and more effective when using the survivability builds. So instead of just nerfing the survivability talents into the ground, we thought it would make more sense if we put them together, changed their use cases, and let players pick between them. It isn't a perfect solution, but as we've developed more heroes we've become better at finding situations to combine talent themes. Orphea has a lot of tiers that offer both survivability and damage on the same tier, such as at level 7 where she can pick Ravenous Hunger (damage and sustain), Insatiable (pure damage) or Mind Devourer (more CC and damage). Li-Ming also has a lot of tiers that offer different choices -- at level 1 she has mana options alongside damage and survivability options (Power Hungry vs Force Armor). At level 13, Illusionist vs Glass Cannon offers another interesting choice and at 16 she has 3 damage options alongside a pure survivability option (Diamond Skin). In many cases, the type of "build" that you're using may define which talent you end up picking. At the end of the day, what matters most is that players have a wide range of choices and feel effective no matter what build they end up using and that they also feel smart for picking the talents that best suit the game they're in, the team composition they are playing alongside, and the enemy composition they are playing against. When those three concepts don't align, that's typically when you'll see a hero get looked at for a talent update or rework.

3.) We feel the same way about D.Va. We're looking at making some changes to her in the future but don't have anything concrete to announce at the moment.

Thanks for the questions, /u/mikes3ds!

We're still in the process of planning BlizzCon, but at this point there are no plans for organized Heroes esports. I would love to see some games played - exhibition or otherwise - but no promises there.

And I obviously can't go into any details, but the team and game will be there with new stuff to talk about and play!

I definitely had the most fun designing Kel'Thuzad. He is such an iconic Warcraft character and had so many potential options for what he could be. Early on, one of his level 1 talents was actually Mr. Bigglesworth which was a pet he could summon and move around with his 1 Key, similarly to Lunara's wisp. While it was out, it had an aura that increased Kel'Thuzad's spell power as long as he was near it, but had a long cooldown if an enemy hero was able to attack it. Another idea we tried was that Mr. Bigglesworth was a scout like the Wisp, but if it was attacked it would run away and Kel'Thuzad would yell at the enemy team for attacking it and gain a huge damage buff for a short amount of time. We moved away from these ideas for a few reasons, but the main thing was that as a combo mage, it felt tedious and fatiguing to be constantly maneuvering a pet around while trying to land difficult combos.

Go Sharks!!

I don't plan on hearing it anytime soon ;)

Hey Zefer! Thanks for the question and glad you like Orphea! Time manipulating heroes are pretty tricky to pull off and it can be hard to understand as an enemy exactly what they are doing. Early on in Chromie's development process she had a Heroic ability that allowed her to slow down time for all units on the map except for her, which made it much easier for her to land her skillshots. While it was thematically cool and fun for Chromie, it was pretty unfun for everyone else. Despite that, I think it would be fun to explore more time-based heroes and what that could mean for the game... afterall, anything is possible in the Nexus!