When I was 22, I was an aspiring HotS pro. I got a gaming PC to start a YouTube channel devoted solely to HotS (which I abandoned after 2 videos) and even tried to build my own team. What frustrated me the most during that time was the inability to escape the possibility that I would be matched with someone who was below everyone else's skill levels and my team would pay the ultimate price of LOSING THE GAME, OH NO.

I ended up migrating to LoL, which is a thousand times more toxic and honestly a thousand times more miserable. Sure, you can hard carry and get hard carried in ways that are impossible in HotS, but that also means players are much more ego-driven, and 5v5 teamfights are relatively uncommon.

Not that League is a bad game, but it did rob some years of my life that I would like back. Now I'm back to playing Heroes with a completely different attitude and fully embrace its more laid-back approach to competitiveness.

Even if one person can drag the entire team down, you're still winning and losing as a team. It's not I WON THE GAME but WE WON THE GAME. And that also means that you'll get some matches where you will randomly lose because someone had a bad day or whatever, but that doesn't really matter. It's not like your rank will affect your salary, and most people playing HotS are probably well aware of that, so the community is a lot more chill.

I like this environment and if I wanna be a super tryhard and try my best to climb to Gold (my definition of "making it" in ranked these days), I can play League for a few days. But I think for now I prefer playing one or two games of hots that last 20 minutes and relax.

I will never not suicide for them

One of the most fun matches I've played lmao

(But we're on the same team .D)

/Edit Also starring Sherlock Vala.

I was playing Fenix and my friend was playing Zarya, so we had a nice combo of grav and planet cracker which killed the Anubarak. But by pure coincidence, Aba happened to be exactly in line with the planet cracker!

"There ain't nothin' I can't fix!" — Rory Swann

Rory Swann is a Terran Engineer, a Veteran of the Kel-Morian Revolution and Raynor's Rocketeer, wearing his Modified Marauder Combat Suit.

Swann is a ranged tank capable of dealing much damage and efficiently pinning his enemies in place. He applies constant CC, which grows stronger as the fight progresses.
You can think of Swann as an alternative to Blaze — a mix of ranged DPS and a bulky tank; but Rory is a bit more on the "ranged DPS" side.
Note, that the raw numbers of damage/shields etc. in the teaser above may be a bit off. Its supposed to present the raw concept and ideas for Rory, not create production-ready, perfectly balanced hero.

Auto-attacks — Swann has standard auto-attack range with solid damage and fairly low attack speed (without stim). He can also hit in melee with his mechanical claw. In the teaser it deals less damage, but It could as well deal much more, to compensate for not applying Concussive Shell stacks or Punisher Shrapnel effect.

Concussive Shells (Passive) — Each ranged basic attack slows the target by 8% up to a maximum of 40%, for 3 seconds. With Swann's low baseline attack speed it takes time to apply maximum stacks, but overall its much harder to disengage the fight if there is enemy Swann in it.

Breach Missile (Q) — After a long wind-up shoots out a projectile that damages and stuns the first enemy hit. Teaser does not ephasize this, but the wind-up makes it very telegraphed (similarly to Blazes Jet Propulsion); it is also a moderately slow moving projectile, so slow down your target with Concussive Shells for easier snipe with your Breach Missile.

Reflective Shell (W) — Shields Swann for moderate amount of shield points. If it expires after 5 seconds – nothing else happens – but if it's broken via enemy damage — it damages and knocks back all nearby enemy heroes. Its a strong defensive ability, that can be used both to mitigate ranged burst damage, or to keep enemy melee heroes at bay.

Punisher Shrapnel (E) — Upon activation, each ranged auto-attack deals additional damage behind the main target for 50% of basic attack damage. The search area is a shape of a cone, which makes it easy to use it for waveclear, but challenging to use efficiently in teamfights (similarly to Greymane's Hunter's Blunderbuss). Use it to quickly clear a wave, force your enemies to spread out, or damage enemy backline through shooting at their tank.

Stimpack (R1) — Upon activation, grants Swann 20% movement speed and 50% attack speed. It costs no mana and has no cooldown, but in return it costs 20% of Swanns Max HP, taken over the duration. Make note, that this is pure HP damage, so it cant be mitigated with Reflective Shell or shield from his allies, so you will need a healer if you like your stims. Use it to quickly apply a lot of Concussive Shells stacks, instantly clear minion wave with Punisher Shrapnel or just simply dish out a lot of damage.
And yes, I know there are already many stim abilities in HotS: Morales Stim-Drone, Raynor's Adrenaline Rush (sort of), Blaze even got three different stims. But in my opinion none of them actually are "stims". StarCraft stimpack is supposed to be "become a devastating war machine, while your hearts tries to escape your chest" button, and thats what Swanns Stimpack is. The only other ability that actually resembles StarCraft stim in HotS is... Zul'Jins Amani Rage...

Empty?? (R2) — What would be your ideas for the second ult? I thought of Flaming Bettsy — a turret that Swann throws down, which engulfs nearby enemy hearoes in flames. Similar to Drakken Laser Drill, but deals AoE damage and is not so easy to destroy, but in return has much lower attack range, so its more of a zoning tool. Maybe you could come up with something better?

Some talent ideas:

• Punisher Shrapnel applies applies Concussive Shell stacks to enemy heroes.
• Increased cone size of Punisher Shrapnel.
• Basic attacks against heroes with max Concussive Shell stacks deal %dmg.
• Reflective Shell can be manually detonated.

Please Share with me what would you change or add! I love both Rory from SC2 and Marauders are my favourite unit in terran army (right after Siege Tanks of course), so I felt I had to make this.

PS. sorry for instant delete & reupload... the post got uploaded when I clicked on the video for some reason...

EDIT. to all dear ignorants who accuse me of making "AI concept": literally the only little place that AI ever touched in this entire post is blending in the text in the Swann's spotlight splashart, because I had trouble doing it myself. No other word, art or a second in the teaser was touched by AI. If thats enough for you to discredit the rest of enormous amount of work mainly in the game editor but also in video editor as "AI made", then I have no words for you...

I really like the Warcraft and Diablo heroes. I mostly play offlaners, bruisers and/or assasins which can proactively influence the game.

Is samuro worth it regarding those Points? I Always never see him but I love how close his design is to the WC3 version

Will there be a Hallow's End event this year? There are some Hallow's End cosmetics I want, but don't want to spend gems on them yet if they become handouts during the event or at least discounted (not sure if that's how it even works)

At one point, our Core was at 9%, we had no keeps or forts, and they had everything.

So I just tried my first Ranked match ever, figured I should try and so I can work on the higher skills of the game.

Never again.

constant abuse 4 minutes in until the very end for not understanding comps, not doing enough damage, not diving into a 2v4 (I guess they would prefer I feed), and having low team fight damage even though I was running around capturing camps (as Sonya).

Where am I supposed to learn about comps from playing this game? QM? Not a chance.

Told to just stay out of ranked which sounds INSANE to me since that's pretty much the core pillar of the game, and the ONLY place to learn and experience comps, drafting, etc. If these people want their game to stick around why are you telling people never to try? I am literally unranked; that means I'm new and if you're there with me you're probably just as bad or you would be higher up.

I can understand having 5 mans facing 5 mans in ranked atm, but why are 3-4 mans even allowed? Makes solo queuing completely miserable by how many smurfs there are in the queue where you often have them teaming up with multiple. Duo smurf accounts are bad enough, but by how unrestricted the rules are now there is no legitimacy to any of the rankings anymore.

Added to that the amount of people who just troll games with no repercusions and really poor balancing with the meta Heroes being bonkers broken make this season feel absolutely awful. Heck, last weekend I had one guy who I got 3 games in a row with who apparently used a scripted hack to play the game in ranked and he even straight up said that he wanted to lose just to spite some people on the ladder, even when we had a solid chance of winning if he just played. Of course no reports in the world will ever have any effect either despite how deliberate it is. I remember ranked being historically a bad experience, but man. This season takes the cake. Makes me even regret coming back to the game by how poor it has been.

So with D5 getting announced I got thinking about the old bundle releases they used to do, where you'd get a map and a couple heroes all from the same universe at once. Eternal Conflict was probably my favorite patch the game ever had. Figured I'd throw out what I'd want if they ever did one for D5.

Map: Fallen Westmarch

D5 is set after Diablo already won so the map is just Westmarch wrecked with Hell leaking into it. 3 lanes, normal forts/keeps/camps.

The mechanic is Helltides. Every 3 min or so (first one around 3:00) the sky goes red and for about a minute and the map starts spawning cinders. Cinders come from 3 places

• demon packs wandering around. small amount each
• Tortured Gifts, which are chests. they spawn in pairs on opposite sides of the map and both teams see them. you channel to open them and getting hit cancels it
• a Herald mini boss in the middle partway through. biggest payout so theres always a reason to group for it

You drop your cinders when you die like doubloons on Bay. I really wanted it so you can win by fighting but you dont have to. If the other team is way better at teamfights you can just split and farm the chests on the far side since they cant be on both at once.

When the Helltide ends you bring cinders back to your altar (short channel, can get interrupted) and it summons a Blood Maiden to push a lane. Bigger stack = stronger Maiden.

Also during the Helltide there's meteors and fire coming up out of the ground.

Hero 1: Plague Knight (bruiser)

Blizz said he spreads disease and then consumes it for power so I just went with that.

Trait puts Plague stacks on people (max 5), it ticks damage and jumps to anyone standing next to a plagued enemy every couple seconds. His D button rips all the stacks off everyone nearby, damages them and heals him per stack. That's basically the whole hero, everything else is about getting stacks on people.

Q is a cleave that gives 2 stacks. W is a slowing cloud that keeps stacking while they stand in it. E is a charge.

Heroics: - Blight Lord, 8 sec aura that maxes stacks on everyone around you - Epidemic, mark someone and after 3 sec their stacks explode and copy to everyone around them

Hero 2: Lilith (ranged assassin)

Biggest Diablo character not in the game and Helltides are literally from her expansion so she had to be the second hero.

Trait is a blood meter that fills when you hit heroes, and when it's full your next ability gets a bonus. Q is a long skillshot (pierces when empowered), W is a delayed blood petal burst (roots when empowered), E is a quick flight with her wings where she can't be targeted (2 charges when empowered).

Heroics are a blood rain zone where she gets lifesteal, or Temptation which charms people in a cone and walks them toward her for like 1.5 sec.

I'm of the crowd who stopped playing for several years (right before Hogger was released, hence not having played him at all), and come having come back now. I used to do Storm League back in the day (high gold/low plat), but these days it's just QM and ARAM for me, solo or with friends.

I don't like "proper" "meta" builds and will do weird stuff just to be obstinate. If I was on your team and played a Q-build Xal'atath, I'm sorry that I'm not sorry.

Anyway, tell me all about how I suck at this game and my hero selection and preferences are literally the cancer killing HotS. GLHF!

Now it is slow as fuck; not only do I need to open each loot chest individually, but I also have to unveil each four of the items inside individually---and when you accumulate hundreds of them...you just never wanna do it...

I used to play HOTS a lot back in the day. And I'm very happy to see that HOTS is getting a new hero and new content. That bodes well for a prospective revival. I guess I should be happy that they're making new content to begin with

But I find it very disappointing that they always make heroes from Warcraft and Overwatch these days. It's getting tiresome.

It's been ages since we've gotten a hero from Diablo or SC. I admit I'm not much of a Starcraft fan so I can't speak much about SC, but give us Baal and Lilith for crying out loud. There are so many cool and interesting characters from Diablo but they rather make some B-tier obscure WC hero instead. Especially on Diablo's 30th anniversary it's disappointing we didn't get a Diablo hero

All I want is 5-10 seconds to change my talent when I accidentally mis-click or change my mind on the fly... Just... something?

The whole point of Abathur splitpushing is that he should take risks proxing in order to get maximum value out of his splitpushing. The closer the proxy the more value he extracts.

Now, with this new abomination that has been around for quite some time now is ridiculous.

He can still get similar value although delayed by staying really far from the splitpushing line. The locusts give no indication of where roughly abathur's location is other than which lane he is spawning those locusts from. Sure if he plays far, his mines' placement is also restricted, but the difference in the old Abathur was night and day. Now, it is just like Night and maybe dusk. Even bad abathurs can derive enough value to justify the pick.

The clearing of the locusts isnt the problem. The skill floor on this character now is. If there is one thing I would like to see brought back, it is the duration of the locusts. Obviously with dmg and health re-adjusted to account for the maximum duration.

(art by Volodymyr Rezvin)

In response to another thread about bringing Rokhan into a HotS - where OP made him a straight up healer - I now have to offer up a counter-concept to do him justice.

I did keep some of the ideas from the OP in the kit.

Rokhan : The Shadow Hunter

I'd lean away from healing entirely and make him an anti-healer, pro-mage support, focused on weakening enemies healing taken, and empowering allied mages.

Here's how I'd imagine his kit:

Trait (D) - Veil of Shadow

Starting out, the trait needs to be core to his identity, so we're bringing back Veil of Shadow from the original Shadow Hunters.

In HotS, we'd make it an aura that reduces healing received by nearby enemies, scaling with proximity. Something like 0–20% reduced healing received, depending on how close Rokhan is to them.

And then we add:

"Your basic attacks deal additional magic damage based on the target's healing reduction."

Now we're setting up some good Shadow Hunter support gameplay. You want to get close to enemies, weaken their sustain, and then punish them for it. And, we're allowing other heroes to enable this even further with their own healing reduction talents and abilities.

Q - "Blessing" of da Loa

A targeted ability - short 0.5 cast-time - that works differently depending on whether you cast it on an ally or an enemy.

• Allies: Gain a 1.5-second burst of movement speed and a 5-second ramping spell damage buff, starting at 0% and reaching 20%.
• Enemies: Suffer a 1.5-second slow and a 5-second ramping Spell Armor reduction, starting at 0 and reaching -20.

I enjoy ramping buffs and debuffs. It gives allies time to react and plan their abilities accordingly.

And offensive use there's some nice interplay with his trait. You want to get close to enemies to maximize Veil of Shadow, so having a burst slow to help you catch up makes sense, and increased spell damage taken will ofc make his trait even stronger with a Q on enemies.

W - Hex Bomb

Hex will always be a polymorph in my mind, which Brightwing already has. So let's take inspiration from another of his WoW abilities: Hex Bomb.

Make it a skill shot with a fairly small AoE that polymorphs all enemies hit, including minions and mercenaries.

Simple as that. Should break on damage ofc, with a level 20 talent that makes it no longer break on damage.

E - Serpent Ward

Well, Serpent Ward is a flame-spitting snake, not a healing totem!

So I'd just make it that.

Place a ward that attacks nearby enemies with magic damage, prioritizing whoever Rokhan last hit with a basic attack, if possible.

You could cook some baseline utility into it, like having Veil of Shadow also apply around wards, but maybe that's better left for talents.

R1 - Spirit Link Totem

"Place a Spirit Link Totem in a target area. All damage dealt to allied Heroes within the area is shared between all allied units in the area."

I love the idea of Spirit Link as an ultimate, especially if it works with ALL allied units, rather than just Heroes.

Damage dealt to Heroes gets distributed to everyone within the area.

It gives really good synergy with summoner Heroes, your own wards, and a strong incentive to fight inside minion waves.

R2 - Big Bad Voodoo

I'd make this a global channel, similar to Mephisto's ultimate, and keep the ramping theme from Blessing of da Loa.

"Channel Big Bad Voodoo for 3 seconds. Each second, all enemy Heroes are slowed by 10% and have their Spell Armor reduced by 10% for 3 seconds, stacking up to 3 times."

So effectively 1 sec 10% slow and Spell Armor reduction, then 1 sec 20%, and then 3 sec: 30%.

A global, escalating debuff that your entire team can play around. I think that could be a really cool alternative to Spirit Link, especially for bigger maps and more spread-out team comps.

Talents: I think the talents could let you build Rokhan in two pretty distinct directions:

• "I want to be in the middle of the fight" More Hunter, less shadow. Maximize basic attacks, Serpent Wards, and close-range disruption. Stay close to enemies, weaken their healing, and make life miserable for their healers.
• "I want to weave in and out of the shadows." More shadow, less hunter. Harder path of the two: Focus on mobility, well-timed Hex Bombs, and throwing out debuffs/buffs left and right.

Both would lean into the Shadow Hunter fantasy, just in different ways.

I think there's room for a really unique support Hero here, and I'd love to see my precious Rokhan get that treatment.

Illari dont have mana but sunpower that regenerates passively its is only used for her Q, her other abilities cost no mana.

Passive - Sun Favorite
Active(d) - your next auto attack give your enemy the sunstruck effect, you can reduce this ability CD by auto-attacking enemy heroes

Sunstruck - enemy get revealed and marked, if that enemy is damage by x amount by any source the mark explode dealing area damage around it.

Q - Solar Rifle - lock in a target making a line between you two (similar to azmodan E) you heal all allies in this line, damage enemies and lose sunpower based on the healing/dmg. you also get slighty slower while holding it and cant auto attack and use other abilities. this ability dont have CD but need sunpower.

If you use your D while charging your Q you give sunstruck to enemies in the line instead of your next auto.

W- Healing Pylon - deploy a small turret that shot allies in medium range healing them, it shoots one ally at time and you can only have 1 turret active, it does not vanish except when destroyed or when you put a new one.

E - Outburst - knockback enemies around you and slow them
(i know its not how it works in OW but i dont think someone with 2 healing abilities should get mobility)

R1- Captive Sun - enter in a suncharged state that increase you move speed, attack speed and make you ignore unit colision, you can recast this ability to lauch a skillshot that explode when it hit an enemy hero dealing area damage where it landed to all enemies, appling sunstruck to all of them and slowing them.

R2- Eye of the sun - iluminate and reveal all the map and all enemies, them you can deal damage to 1 small point in the map with roughly jaina w radius and global range after a fair delay and stun the enemies in the area who also get sunstruck.

Pros - Specially good against invisible heroes and can give healing to 2 diferent places using the turret.

Cons - the healings are not good against bursts of damage and are often not enough to peel against an assasin burst. you also dont have a very good CC for engages

Gotta put these boys to work.

The more I play her the more I feel like her trait should work like Gall's shadow bolt ult. Pick a direction and shoot there. That way you can strafe better, and you never run into the dumb situation where someone is running away and your bolts hit just behind them bc that's where they were standing before.

Edit: for those crying about it buffing her, I'm not saying she needs buffs, I'm saying her ability feels wrong. Her numbers can and should be adjusted further