This is a crazy place to be. I’ve written a fair few news posts about the surprisingly frequent patches Heroes of the Storm has been getting lately, despite its ostensible maintenance mode status, but I never thought we’d be getting changes big enough to justify an entire column.

Of course, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. We rarely devote 1,000+ words to a game when everything’s hunky dory. While I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, my initial impression is that the sweeping changes to core game mechanics in Heroes‘ September PTR patch might be moving the game in the wrong direction.

I recommend reading the full patch notes to get all the details, but I’ll highlight a few of the more important points that stand out to me:

  • Small XP globes from minions now vanish if there is no hero nearby to collect them immediately. This means teams will lose out on more XP if they don’t have characters in every lane at all times.
  • Attacking a structure will now significantly buff the movement and attack speed of nearby minions.
  • Forts, keeps, and cores have had their targeting adjusted to be less smart, but when a nearby allied hero is damaged, they will now grant that hero damage reduction and apply a slow to enemy heroes who attack that hero. This lasts a few seconds, has a cooldown, and can only affect one target at a time.
  • Several maps have received major redesigns.

My general impression of the first two changes is that this is going to encourage a lot more time spent pushing lanes and severely punish teams that don’t stay on top of that. Some might say that’s encouraging proper play, but I think one of the chief appeals of Heroes of the Storm is that you don’t spend so much time camping in lane like you do in other MOBAs. The emphasis on team fighting is what makes Heroes fun, and I don’t understand why you’d want to pivot away from that.

Additionally, it’s already a big source of frustration that push-focused characters like Nazeebo and Azmodan are in nearly every match. The bad ones never leave lane and sabotage their own teams by not showing up to team fights, and the good ones who manage to juggle both feel absolutely oppressive to the other team. These changes look to be a pretty substantial buff to those characters that will exacerbate the frustration they already cause.

What’s strange is that the map changes seem to be pushing in the exact opposite direction: They seem targeted towards encouraging team fighting rather than just focusing on PvE. I see this as a more positive change, but coupled with the XP and minion changes, it seems as if the patch is working at cross purposes to itself.

I’m a little nervous about the changes to Blackheart’s Bay. This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but it’s my favourite map, and I worry these changes may reduce some of its special flavour.

I’ve heard some players say that the change to make heroes drop only half their coins on death will help prevent snowballing, but I fear it may have the opposite effect. Getting a lucky gank on someone with a huge stack of coins is one of the chief comeback mechanics of the map, and this is a nerf to that.

So far most of the controversy I’ve seen in the wider community seems to be around the fort changes. I’m ambivalent on the targeting change, but I have to say I do not like the new armour buff at all. “If you hit an enemy, they’ll get a damage reduction buff that also slows you when you hit them, but only in some places, and only on some targets, and only some of the time” is such a convoluted and unintuitive mechanic. One of the great strengths of Heroes of the Storm is that its mechanics are usually pretty easy to grasp at a glance, and this is not that at all.

Beyond all that, I also think it’s worth asking if it’s even a good idea to implement changes of this scale on a game in this part of its lifecycle. The really hardcore players who still play every day may welcome the shakeup — and to be fair, in the game’s current state those kind of players may no longer be the minority — but this is a lot to deal with for more occasional players like me.

For me, the great silver lining of maintenance mode has been a stable meta. The constant tinkering with things that didn’t need fixing is one of the biggest things that made me stop playing Heroes of the Storm for several years, and in my opinion it’s a leading reason why the game wound up in maintenance mode in the first place. It’s supposed to be the casual friendly MOBA; you shouldn’t have to be relearning things all the time.

This feels like Blizzard repeating the mistakes of the past. Things like the minion and XP changes will reward well-coordinated teams in ranked play, but I firmly believe that the heart and soul of this game is quick match and ARAM, and I think the changes will be a net negative for those modes. This is the fatal mistake Blizzard made from the start: designing Heroes as an esport and not the silly brawler that it is.

But I don’t want to catastrophize too much. It is possible that these changes will work out fine, or even be an improvement. It’s too early to know anything for sure. I did consider hopping on the PTR to check things out, but it’s apparently pretty badly bugged at the time of this writing, and honestly, a few PTR matches won’t be enough to give a good feel for what the long term ramifications of these changes are. This is the sort of thing that will take weeks or even months for the meta to adjust to.

At the end of the day, the fact is they wouldn’t push changes this big to the PTR if they didn’t plan on implementing them. There might be some tweaks, but I expect this patch to arrive on the live servers mostly as is, so there’s nothing to do but hope for the best.

I’m nervous about what the impact of this patch is going to be, but I’ll try to keep an open mind and at least acknowledge that this is far more effort put into Heroes of the Storm than I think anyone thought possible at this time in its life span. I still think actual new content is unlikely to ever come, but I never thought we’d see a patch like this, so who knows?

The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.