Brett Crawford is the Lead Balance Designer for Heroes of the Storm and, believe it or not, has been thinking about these reworks for almost a year. I had the chance to talk with him about all manner of Raynor and Azmodan topics and, in doing so,  I learned a lot about game design and what the word "splat" means.

If I had to pick the three most important philosophies that seem to guide Crawford's design decisions they would be as follows:

1. Try not to take things away from players.
2. Changes should make things more fun.
3. Design should encourage players to make decisions.

Actual game balance is important too but, in my experience, modern online games rarely stay brokenly imbalanced for long. They are more at risk of staying unfun or unchanged until everyone just accepts the status quo.

In the age of lethal Shimada brothers, one man dares to call himself an Assassin. I started my conversation with Crawford with the most pressing question first:

Raynors Revival

The Heroes team must be aware of how long people have been asking for a Raynor rework.  How long has it been on your "to-do" list?

I personally have been working on him now for around 6 to 8 months. We knew that there were changes coming a long time ago - up to a year ago. But he wasn’t slated for our production pipeline at that time. So, I have been coming up with ideas and trying to figure out what direction would be healthy for Raynor to bring him into a more meta-focused place in our game.

I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.

"The moment I knew we were on the right track was when we were able to make him feel like a late-game carry"

The community has commonly used Raynor to criticize a pattern of leaving old heroes in the dust while newer heroes are flashy and powerful: I’m guilty of doing this myself. How much do you think that sentiment is justified, that the old heroes are all in need of a rework?

We do hear it a lot and we read about it constantly on the forums. It is something we take to heart.

With Raynor particularly, he was an entry-level hero for us. When we had all of our tutorials and he was a hero that we wanted for players who had never played a MOBA. A Hero that they could pick up and run with without needing a lot of thought process as to how his abilities combo into each other. We needed an easy to use hero that could show new players what the game was all about.

So we kind of left Raynor alone for a while as we brought in a whole bunch of new users. He did gather a little bit of dust over time and we kept seeing that sentiment. So we wanted way to keep him easy-to-use (he is still a basic attack focused hero), but still give him some nuance that other players, your middle to high-level players, could pick up on. Something they could use to do some crazy and fun things.

There are Raynor mains out there that want to see pro players and experienced players use him while also being able to pick-up some tricks. I think we have accomplished that with the changes here and I am pretty excited about it.


With the opportunity to appeal to more skilled players this time, how much of Raynor’s rework was about revisiting the ultimate Marine hero fantasy? Was it primarily about making Raynor a viable competitive pick?

This brain-vision I’d say came from wanting to make sure we could give a basic attacker some mechanics that were easy to use but the pros could still make use of.

It wasn’t as much about what a space marine can bring -- Raynor will always have the flavor of his Banshee and his Hyperion. He is a commander of the battlefield, making his minions and mercs push for him; he already has the flavor. For me, it was more about bringing something to the table that Raynor could do that other basic attackers could not.

Both new users and competitive players will be able to  bring Raynor to different lineups and do things that other basic attackers like Zul’jin can’t do right now.

"What Raynor brings to an actual team composition will change drastically in the face of this rework."

It seems like a bold design choice to introduce a basic attack reset (new inspire functionality) to a hero that is meant to be beginner friendly. What went into making this decision?

That is actually the first change we made in the entire rework. Bringing that to inspire was something that, as a new player coming in or even a non-moba player they dont have to make use of. Inspire isn’t about the basic attack reset, it is about inspiring the minions and making him move and attack faster --  it’s a steroid for him first of all.

But this basic attack reset allows your higher level players to do more. If they time it well, players can get an instant piece of burst from Raynor. Then, utilizing his new trait, it allows him to do some tricky stuff to speed that process up and make Acquire Weak Spot trigger faster.

Fenix was another auto-attacker that introduced talents that reward players with MOBA mechanics like orb-walking (stutter-stepping). Do you think we will see more heroes that encourage these traditional MOBA skill-sets?

I think you will and not just from the reworks. As we are evolving Heroes, we are taking those steps. We started off with fairly basic and fun to use abilities and, as our character roster has grown so much, we now have a little more design room to make more nuanced ability changes.

We have learned a lot from the basic attack resets heroes like The Butcher and Maive -- it’s one way we can reward these heroes because right-clicking someone is not very difficult in our game. Anything we can use to add more skill-based gameplay for a basic attackers helps an issue we will be facing until the end of time.


Can you give me some insight about the added mana cost to Adrenaline Rush? Was it needed to offset the new power of his reduced cooldown and departure from a passive ability?

Well, we started with not having Adrenaline Rush cost mana -- the first change was making it activatable. We wanted to give players another button to hit. It was kind of a scary thing because Raynor is one of the few heroes with a passive that doesn’t really do much and players don’t have control over it.

"I wanted to do something different and give Raynor a pseudo-permanent pet."

Then we started playing with it and realized people would use it four to five times more than the old trait. We realized how much more powerful it was as a trading tool in lane and I needed to have another hook on it to balance that.

If you are using Adrenaline Rush all the time, you might have mana issues, but if you are using it like it was used before, you won’t even feel it.


The new Raynor’s Raiders looks like it resembles Rexxar’s pet  in that it accompanies Raynor indefinitely until it is killed. Can you give me some insight on what that Heroic's function is and how you went about designing it?

The old Raynor’s Raiders, as much as we loved the fantasy of it, was a cast, point and click ability, You hit R, threw it on a target, and forgot about the ability. You could control the Banshees and some higher level players would, but for the most part, it wasn’t used in that fashion.

So I wanted to do something different and give Raynor a pseudo-permanent pet. I guess you can say Gargantuan at Level 20 from Nazeebo is kind of that way. I wanted an easy to use ability that could differentiate itself from Hyperion while giving players that wanted to do more in lane another button to play with.

Now you have a pet! It doesn’t have quite the AI that Misha has or things like that -- it is very similar to the live version where you can R click and it will follow your orders or chase your basic attack commands -- but for the most part it is a permanent pet. The cooldown is just the inverse of a regular cooldown so it instantly cast the moment it is up.

As long as you keep the banshee alive it is just adding to your DPS.

Dare I say it, does this legitimize a  “Raynor the Laner” style of play?

I wouldn’t say that he is a great siege hero now to just sit in a lane but, to be honest, with the new trait he has a very, very powerful jump in his wave clear. You will see Raynor being able to lane, especially because he can trade so effectively with Adrenaline Rush as well.

He was internally a very strong solo laner and we don’t have a lot of ranged solo-laners right now. Not a lot of them can heal themselves or clear as fast as the bruisers or warriors. But seeing him clear so fast with his trait, you will definitely see that what Raynor brings to an actual team composition will change drastically in the face of this rework.

Personally, what are some of the most exciting things you designed with regards to Raynor’s new talent tree?

From the designing standpoint, I liked being able to change the generic talents. With Raynor, he has one of the oldest talent trees: he had seven generics still on his tree, four of which were part of his primary build that everyone always used. I really enjoyed keeping the flavor of how all of these basic attack talents worked, but giving them more interactions with each other.

Players now have more reasons to pick separate talents instead of just the one that completely amplifies the next. Building the talent tree was the most fun for me.

On top of that, being able to find a way with his trait that makes basic attacker interesting and with interesting decisions while just right clicking things. That was a huge focus of this rework and it took a little while before we landed where we landed.  There are points in team fights where you are going to want to target swap and not just sit on one target. Those decision points are going to make your better Raynor players start standing out from your average ones.


The level 20 talent Indomitable Resolve stands out for me in particular. It is an upgrade to Hyperion, but comes with a really strong passive upgrade to Inspire that grants a 2-second self-Unstoppable on cast. That seems is powerful enough to be its own storm talent.

Can you talk a bit about the decision to attach such a powerful upgrade a specific heroic choice?

It is a spider-web of design decisions that were made through that. To break them down into something that is manageable, first, we wanted to get rid of Scorched Earth. It creates a massive amount of AoE clutter on the battleground and Hyperion is already a very noisy ability. Its splat is very loud and it kind of destroys the game space when it is out.

So I wanted to get rid of that clutter first. Originally, I had the upgrade grant Raynor unstoppable while Hyperion was active, so 12 seconds of unstoppable in our internal playtest.

*laughs*

It was fun, but there were a lot of times where you wanted to cast Hyperion to siege with or during a team fight and the unstoppable feature wasn’t adding a lot to your gameplay decision making. By tacking on the current Inspire change,  great players looking for Storm Bolts or things trying to stun them have that on-demand ability to negate the CC used against you.

I think you will see pro players and high level players absolutely love this talent and change their gameplay a lot at 20.


It seems very powerful, but you really have to make a choice at 10 in order to get that powerful ability at 20.

Yep -- we will see how the community takes that. I think it is an exciting decision for a player and as a designer, it was fun to get to where it currently is and see how it will play out. We will see if they like it or if Dusk Wing becomes the meta pick and they are forced to choose. We are super excited for it.


What was the moment during playtesting when you knew this rework was going well. Can you share with us an amusing moment or story from that testing?

Hyperion level 20 granting unstoppable for the entire duration was pretty funny. However, the moment I knew we were on the right track was when we were able to make him feel like a late-game carry. When Raynor hits Inspire towards the level 16-20 he will hurt -- he chunks people. He already does that on live because of all of the synergies, but we achieved that without having to rely on a bunch of talent synergies.

Being able to see him solo in a lane, clear waves (something a lot of our basic attackers struggle with) and then, on top of that, come into the late game and put out the damage a lot of the mages are currently doing -- that was when we knew we found gold. We had a basic attacker who was easy to use, still put out a lot of damage and is a lot of fun to play as you ramp into the late game.

Sin Marches Forward

One of the biggest features of Azmodan’s rework is the inclusion of a baseline quest that has players farm Annihilation stacks in a variety of ways. The payoff for doing so is big Globe of Annihilation damage like the original Taste for Blood and newer Sieging Wrath talents made possible. Prior to the rework, this was just one of many ways to play Azmodan but now, it seems like this is the defacto Azmodan style the design team has embraced.

Can you give a little bit of insight about the history of Azmodan’s design?

Yeah, Azmodan has honestly become Globe of Annihilation which was not ever the design for him. He was first made a long, long time ago by John Zee -- he was a siege, split push hero and the Globe of Annihilation was just a fun way to clear minion waves. But, as players got their hand on the quest talents and Taste for Blood, he really become about that one ability.

"Black Pool was never designed to be a 'dunk enhancer' so to speak."

When doing any of these reworks, it is really important for us to not take the identity from the hero unless we have a really good reason to do so. Since the player base has built Azmodan as an artillery mage for the most part, we decided to just embrace it. We figured we can’t take it away from the player base so let’s make the Globes exciting and powerful, give players what they want baseline, and then build Azmodan around that.

A lot of the rework focuses on taking two of his abilities, his Demon Warriors and All Shall Burn, and making them more interesting to cast and a little bit better in team fights. Really though, we are riding off the back of Globe of Annihilation and what that has done to his hero kit.


Can you tell me a little bit more about the new Demonic Invasion heroic and why you made changes to the heroic?

Before the change, you could have infinite life little minions running around and it was mostly used to just cast in the lane and then run away. You would see this all the time on Towers of Doom and it wasn’t getting a lot of interaction. It felt frustrating to play against for enemies because they had to clean up all of these little warriors.

So, we decided that what was most fun about the ability came at level 20 when they could explode and do surprising amounts of damage when on top of somebody.

So we owned that and brought it to the level 10 version. Then we gave the minions a timed life so enemies don’t have to react to it but they still do a lot of damage and can be used to siege - we didn’t want to pull that identity away from the heroic.

Then,  at the end of the 8 seconds, there is going to be another massive amount of damage. This way, Azmodan doesn’t have to worry it and enemies cleaning it up don’t have to either.


Tide of Sin, on the other hand, is an entirely new Heroic that replaces Black Pool. However, I have a feeling many Azmodan fans will view this as a nerf. Can you explain the reasoning behind this change?

To get to there, you have to realize where we were headed with Black Pool to begin with. Black Pool was never designed to be a “dunk enhancer”, so to speak. It was supposed to be for him to really ramp up his minions and increase his siege potential. But, as the community often does, they took the design and built it to what they wanted it to be.

"Azmodan was just destroying people -- it was like a massive Chromie hit and we really didn’t want those coming out from the middle of nowhere"

It ended up to where you just ALT + Cast Black Pool then throw a Globe. You were getting extra benefits from Black Pool, but you really didn’t see them or notice them: you only cared about the massive damage coming up from Globe of Annihilation. We really tried to get away from Black Pool itself early in the rework but realized quickly we couldn’t take it away from players. We couldn’t take away empowered Globes.

So we just kind of doubled down on it. We said: “let’s empower the Globe, use the power we took out from Black Pool and inject it into his talents and baseline abilities.”


Azmodan frequently encounters mana problems, and Tide of Sin might help with that. Is the mana support  Tide of Sin grants significant enough to make the ability work as a Heroic?

The costing no mana part was an added bonus we wanted to put on there to offset the fact that Tide of Sin will probably do less damage than the live version of putting Black Pool underneath you.
Picking this talent pretty much says a player is entirely Globe focused. It gives you a powerful Glove every X amount of time and you don’t have to worry about mana tension so much. You can really focus on other things.

We originally made it so Tide of Sin increased Globe damage by 90% and that is all it did. The problem with that was that Azmodan was just destroying people -- it was like a massive Chromie hit and we really didn’t want those coming out from the middle of nowhere, especially when players are stacked early on when they hit level 10. So we really wanted to pull some of the damage bonus out and we needed something to offset that.

The major Azmodan mains are always letting us know their mana tension is so high, so we figured it would be a win-win to help them out there.

I'm seeing a lot of auto-attack talents for Azmodan and it looks like there is a real basic attack build that is supported. Can you give us some insight on the decision to make Azmodan attacks mean more than they ever did before?

We have started exploring that with a few of our mages. We are trying to be a bit careful -- you see it with Chromie's Bronze Talons and Li-Ming has one auto-attack talent. We have been looking at these for a while trying to see if our mages can do something a little different if they are built around that. Some players don’t want to have to think about Globes, some players want to focus more on their Laser, so we tried to bring on an actual basic attack build that can compete with a Globe build.

In our internal playtesting, it has worked. You can get some surprising numbers from just basic attacks. It also brings him more into a team-fight focused build he currently has on live servers with Globe talents

On live, you are farming Globes all game long just to get to the late game and then trying to blow up teams in a team fight. With his attack damage build, you can still get a fair amount of Globe damage coming out, but you can also be more of a threat in short ranged skirmishes or team fights.

We wanted to kind of push him away from the sieging style of just sitting in lane all game and farming and allow him to come and contribute to team fights.

"We are seeing a lot of our specialist heroes and we are going to start pushing into other roles"

His new level 20 talent Pride, is very similar to Nazeebo’s level 20 talent and is another example of heroes with clear late game identities and power spikes if they achieve certain conditions. Are these types of heroes something we will see more of in the future?

I think we are excited to try it.

Nazeebo is the main contender for this. For example, it’s not very easy to get 175 stacks of Voodoo Ritual for Vile Infection. Sometimes you have games where it just doesn’t work out or the enemy is doing a really good job at keeping you away from lanes. From that aspect, it creates an interesting decision point because if a player is only at 150 stacks of Voodoo Ritual, do they pick a level 20 talent that does nothing at all while they pray to finish the quest or not?

From a designer’s standpoint, that is really interesting because it pushes players to achieve these quest as quickly as possible. We have to be very careful of how we balance them though. If we balance these talents so the average player can unlock them at 20 most of the time, then we have to really scale down their power. With Vile Infection, it doesn't come online all the time as it is really difficult to obtain. But when Nazeebo does, the power spike is massive.

David Kim did a lot of the work on this stuff and I think he would really want to create a talent for Azmodan that is right in the middle. This is a large power spike but, in our playtesting, it wasn’t super difficult to get 400 stacks of Annihilation so the reward has to be somewhere in the middle. Sometimes you get 400 stacks, sometimes you don’t.


Azmodan seems like a hero you either love or hate. Was this rework about trying to make all Azmodan players happy, or removing stray builds and unpopular strategies from an already niche hero?

I think we did a lot of the last part of your question there.

Coming into the reworks, we are seeing a lot of our specialist heroes and we are going to start pushing into other roles -- mostly towards team fighting or pushing quickly. Doing other things than just sitting in lane. It is not always fun to respond to an Azmodan that is just crushing one lane over and over and that is one of the reasons we gave him the basic attack build and tightened up is W and E abilities to be more team fight focused.

We’d like to see a lot of our specialist heroes also be able to contribute to team fights so it doesn’t become a chore to run around and chase them down to try and stop their pushing potential. We want it to become more about brawly team fights and this rework was about finding ways to bring Azmodan to fights, other than just for a moment to throw a Globe and then run back to a lane.

That was the main focus. It is not always fun to play against Azmodan and we wanted to make that more fun for both players.

Can you give us any hints on what heroes might be getting reworked in the future? Or perhaps, some heroes or qualities of heroes that you aren’t satisfied with and plan on changing.

I can’t go into specifics as I’m sure you know, but I will say we have a few heroes that have older, out-dated trees that we are looking at. That is always very important to us because as our design philosophies always continue to change and grow. We look at the way to do quests and the way that synergies between talent trees or how the newer heroes are exploring new ideas -- our design philosophies are always changing.

You are likely to see reworks from the older heroes with older trees looked at first. We are also looking closely at roles because the roll re-classification will be coming up soon. We will be swapping out of the four roles and try to point heroes into more of a “you know what you are getting into when you pick this hero” system. Right now, it is not always so crystal clear.

Older heroes will be updated, some fan favorites will be updated. Some of them are just passion projects to the designer that has time, so it will be a little bit all over the board. However, I can say that there will be a lot more coming up.


Is there anything you’d personally like to leave all the die-hard Raynor and Azmodan fans with before we finish?

I would just say to leave feedback! These are so fun to do and they are so fun to make. It is fun to see the communities reaction and we are always reading the forums -- we are reading Reddit we are reading Battle.net so leave us any good or bad.

We have thick skin and we are trying to make the best heroes we can. We will continue to put out quality stuff so it’s really important for us to hear any and all feedback from fans.

See the new talents and abilities for your self