Nexomania Preview, Blue Posts, Weekly Hero Rotation & Sales

Nexomania Preview
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
ARE YOU READY FOR NEXOMANIA?
JOIN THE FRAY | MAY 22 – JUNE 11



NEW SKINS, MOUNTS, & MORE
A FIERCE LOOK FOR THE GREATEST FIGHTERS TO ENTER THE RING
This Nexomania, the biggest brawlers in the Nexus will don colorful costumes and square off in no-holds-barred battle. Check out new Skins for Lunara, Sonya, Diablo, Garrosh, E.T.C., and Kharazim—plus adorable Mounts!

Legendary Skins
  • La Parca Lunara, La Catrina Lunara, and Los Muertos Lunara
  • La Pantera Sonya, La Pantera Dorada Sonya, and Underworld Pantera Sonya
  • El Jefe Garrosh, El Fuego Garrosh, and Underworld Jefe Garrosh

Epic Skins
  • El Chamuco Diablo, Hell’s Screamer Diablo, and Underworld Chamuco Diablo
  • El Mariachi E.T.C., Festival Mariachi E.T.C., and Underworld Mariachi E.T.C.
  • Dropkick Kharazim, Champion Dropkick Kharazim, and Dropdead Kharazim

Mounts
  • Luchihuahua
  • Pigñata
  • Great Razorgrin

During Nexomania, all Loot Chests you earn through progression, Heroes Brawl, or by spending Gems will be Nexomania Loot Chests. (The one exception is Hero-specific Chests, which will remain unchanged.) The limited-time items shown above have a chance to drop from Nexomania Loot Chests only. Items from last year’s summer event will also be available in Nexomania Loot Chests!





NEW QUEST
LA PARCA LUNARA VS. LA PANTERA SONYA
Lunara and Sonya are scheduled for an epic grudge match, and the whole Nexus is getting in on the action.

Players choose a side in this Quest and earn a different set of seasonal rewards depending on their decision. Choose carefully—once you choose a side, the other questline will become inaccessible. (Don’t worry—rewards from both questlines will be available in Loot Chests during next year’s summer event.) Quests become available on May 22.


LUNARA'S QUEST
Help La Parca Lunara defeat the fearsome La Pantera Sonya by completing challenges in Quick Match, Versus A.I., Unranked, or Ranked games. In return, you’ll earn seasonal rewards!

Quests
  • Play 3 Games - Máscara de la Parca Portrait
  • Achieve 70 Takedowns in Winning Game - The Underworld Grip Spray
  • Win 6 games - Ojos de la Parca Animated Spray
  • Achieve 100 Takedowns in Winning Games - Lunara Portrait and El Guapo Announcer



SONYA'S QUEST
Help La Pantera Sonya defeat the mysterious La Parca Lunara by completing challenges in Quick Match, Versus A.I., Unranked, or Ranked games. In return, you’ll earn seasonal rewards!

Quests
  • Play 3 Games - Máscara de la Pantera Portrait
  • Achieve 70 Takedowns in Winning Game - The Panther Forearm Spray
  • Win 6 games - Furia de la Pantera Animated Spray
  • Achieve 100 Takedowns in Winning Games - Sonya Portait and El Guapo Announcer


The smackdown won’t last forever: get out there and throw some hands before Nexomania ends on June 11!

Blue Posts
Following last week's reddit AMA, there was some concern about how the developer team uses winrates for balancing purposes. Game Designer Adam Jackson set out to dispel some misconceptions.
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
I'd like to dispel this over-simplification of how we view win rates, as a complete reliance on win rate vs. pick rate vs. community perception is consistently the most difficult part of balancing a game like this.

First, I'd like to point out a few examples of how we tried to convey the difficulty of balancing purely on win rates from the AMA:
  • In the AMA Daybringer brought up the example of Hanzo, and how he has been a huge Meta hero despite having a low win rate. In his example he said: "What is the correct course of action - technically he needs buffs right? This is where balancing on win-rate alone becomes impossible."
  • When talking about Chen, Daybringer said: "His design is very binary in that you can either deal with him and his trait, or you can't. This is something we can't really fix through tuning and need to go into much deeper design changes to fix. " This is describing a different problem, where Chen has a reasonable win rate right now but he isn't Meta, and the community is asking for buffs. If we were to purely go on win rate, we could afford to just buff him up so that he has a higher play rate, however this doesn't fix inherent problems with his design, which is that his trait can result in a very binary experience for players depending on team composition. If we buff him to the point that he's a super Meta hero who we're seeing all the time, the concern in this case is that it would create an unfun experience for our players to the point where we would just have to nerf him back down again, which gains us very little in the long run. In this case, creating a more healthy design in the long term is more desirable than just buffing numbers in the short team so that a hero is seen more often. I'd also like to clarify that that this doesn't mean we'll never do it, and that we often do choose to simply buff heroes so that they can have a chance to be seen more often. These kinds of decisions are not black and white, and often come down to judgment calls.
  • In my example for Rexxar, I stated that while he has a high win-rate, he also has two other factors that play against him: First that he is a multi-control hero which inherently brings down a hero's play rate, and secondly that he doesn't feel as impactful as other heroes to play, which has been a common complaint, since a lot of his power pie is in Misha.

We had a desire to pull back the curtain a bit with the AMA and give a few win-rates of heroes to help justify some of our positions, and that may have resulted in some misinterpretation of just how much we rely on that data. I want to assure you though, that it's not all that we look at. Why a hero has a particular win rate and play rate matters a lot, and is the crux of the more complex work that we do. We all play the game a lot, and use data, our own experiences, and feedback from the community, pros, and other members of Blizzard when it comes to making balance decisions.

One of my all-time favorite quotes when it comes to statistics is: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." All of us on the team have a very healthy respect for how often statistics are either misrepresented or have false conclusions drawn from them, and whenever we look at win rates or propose changes to heroes, we always have discussions that go beyond "well XYZ hero is winning a lot so we have to nerf/buff them". It it were that easy, then our job could pretty easily be automated.

Lastly, I'd like to give some clear examples where we've made balance changes that were not due to a hero's win-rate:
  • In our latest balance patch on 5/9, we nerfed Hanzo's Basic Attack Range, his Natural Agility range, and his Explosive Arrows talent at level 4, despite him being in the bottom third of assassins in our game in regards to his win rate. This was primarily done due to his play rate at all levels of the game, his tendency to push other ranged Assassins out of the meta, and frustrations with playing against his long auto-attack range.
  • On 4/24 we reduced the range on Genji's Swift Strike, took away Swift Strike resets from Dragonblade at Level 10, and increased the cooldown on Cyber Agility. At the time, he was numerically one of the lowest win-rate heroes in our game, and these were fairly hefty nerfs to him. To compensate, we slightly increased his Health and Basic Attack damage in an attempt to keep him from being a sub-45% win-rate hero. Our motivations for doing these changes were not based on his win-rate.
  • On 12/20, we redesigned Garrosh's Groundbreaker ability to no longer pull enemies towards him, despite his win-rate being consistently mediocre since his release. If we looked purely at win-rate, he did not need any changes. We did this because its original functionality did not feel good to play against, and he had an incredibly high Ban rate.

I hope this clarifies that, while we use win-rates to get a picture of the story of a hero, it is not the only vector we use when deciding what changes to make to the game. I love talking about this kind of stuff, and hope that this helps you all to have a more clear picture of how we make decisions when it comes to balancing Heroes =)

A couple of other issues were graced with the presence of developers as well!
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
The incoming patch apparently makes E.T.C's Tour bus unplayable. When you use E.T.C's Nexusmania skin and you pick Tour Bus, glorious mariachi music doesn't play, instead it's the clearly inferior generic rock music.
In the all mighty words of Dustin Browder. Will fix.
How is D-Bro doing by the way?
Great! (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

are those glow in the dark skins happening?
The Dia Los Muertos versions at the end are color variations
If they are color variations, how have they been to play test on dark maps such as Towers of Doom?
We have been playing with them and QA has gone through them as well and they play fine.. If you run into any problems with them let us know. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

Do they actually glow differently depending on the map?
I'm unsure how to answer this. There are different lighting situations on each map but the texture map and glow map doesn't change on a per map basis. Does that answer your question? (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

Kinda, what im asking is if they "glow in the dark" or if they glow the same amount on every map. For example, are they glowier when the Garden of Terror's objective begins, since the map actually gets darker? English isnt my main language so you'll have to forgive me.
A glow map will be more apparent scenario where the lighting is darker. I think I can say yes because it will seem that way. From a technical standpoint it's closer to a "yes and" because the settings that make it glow remain the same in all scenarios. It's just that the intensity of the environment will change its appearance. Stupid art stuff. /geekout (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

Yes, Dia Los Muertos Color variations are coming to the Nexomania pack.
These are pack-only skins..? -_-
No. You can craft these for shards if you would like. They're visible on the PTR if you want to take them for a spin in try mode. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

This is awesome! But why wasn't this made for October?
We thought about holding the Dia Los Muertos Color variations to October but we thought that maybe it could come early this year? We loved them so much that we wanted to get them to you as soon as we could. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

But the important question, does the Mariachi ETC skin change the song? Also is the Punisher getting a seasonal skin?
Yes to ETC. We wanted to do something for the Punisher but ran out of time for this event.
Interesting! Does that mean that the team has considered alterations to battlegrounds as loadout items (kind of like DOTA2 custom lane minions and terrain?)
The idea has come up but it is currently just an idea. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)

FYI, El Guapo only speaks in Spanish!
Hi there! Could you confirm if el Guapo is Arturo Rivera? He is a legend in Mexico and el Guapo sounds almost identical to him.
The one and the same. Legendario! (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)


Just noticed on PTR that it says "Available in Sun's Out Gun's Out Loot Chests", with the wave-icon, when you check an item out...I'm guessing it should be Nexomania Loot Chests
Thanks! I'll bring it up. It is our summer event so it should be similar. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)


On replay files not registering player hero levels above 20
I will dig into this a bit today. Thank you for surfacing it!
There has been an open github issue about this for over a year now.
This is being tracked and I am in discussions about the scope of work involved with getting it changed. I can't promise anything about a timeline but we are looking into it.

Thanks again, have a wonderful day! (u/Blizz_Daybringer)


I am disappointed by how infrequently you hear unique kill quotes
They haven't forgotten and this is fixed in a future build. You'll know it when you hear it!
future build? like 2 years from now?
Sooner than 2 years. Good question.

In all seriousness though. Next major build.

After Nexomania. (u/Blizz_KinaBREW)


Also saying Chromie isn't a gnome to hint that the Raven Lord isn't "just a guy", might be true lore-wise but we all know she's still a gnome, and that doesn't give much hope for the Raven Lord!
She's not a gnome.
Keep telling yourself that :D But every time she uses Bye Bye, what do you say? A) "That Damn Gnome" B) "That Damn Dragon"
Calling Chromie a gnome is akin to calling Kanye West an actual dragon. (u/cloaken)

Weekly Hero Rotation
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
Free-to-Play Hero Rotation: May 22, 2018
  • Malfurion
  • Valla
  • Gazlowe
  • Johanna
  • Thrall
  • Dehaka
  • Blaze
  • Lt. Morales
  • Li-Ming
  • Gul'dan
  • Tyrande (Slot unlocked at Player Level 5)
  • Sylvanas (Slot unlocked at Player Level 10)
  • Junkrat (Slot unlocked at Player Level 15)
  • Chen (Slot unlocked at Player Level 20)

Weekly Sales
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
Our next set of Heroic Deals will begin on Tuesday, May 22! Check out the list of upcoming featured items and Hero discounts below.

Upcoming Hero Sales
  • Zeratul — Sale Price: 375 gems
  • Lt. Morales— Sale Price: 375 Gems

The following skins and mounts will be added to the featured item rotation and will become purchasable with gems until this round of Heroic Deals comes to an end:

Upcoming Featured Skins
  • Night Ronin Zeratul
  • Prototype Love Doctor Morales
  • Abyssal Deathbringer Sonya*
  • Dreambreaker Thrall
  • Cruel Queen of Ghosts Kerrigan
  • Kandy King Muradin
  • Overqueen Zagara
  • Elite Agent Nova

* First time featured item!

Upcoming Featured Mounts
  • Hunter Felsaber Demon
  • Hellboar

This article was originally published in forum thread: Nexomania Preview, Blue Posts, Weekly Hero Rotation & Sales started by Nerraw View original post
Published on 2018-05-21 08:40 PM
19 Comments
Comments 19 Comments
  1. Tziva's Avatar
    HYPE HYPE HYPE

    ahem
  1. ophion1990's Avatar
    That Kanye West line at the end, haha.

    Can't wait for the event, have some heroes close to leveling already to get that sweet, sweet kickboxer Kharazim (or the shards to craft it).
  1. Tietoso's Avatar
    These skins are so goddamn expensive. WTF. its getting worse than league of legends.
  1. Nikkaszal's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tietoso View Post
    These skins are so goddamn expensive. WTF. its getting worse than league of legends.
    It's a free to play game. It's gotta be profitable somewhere, otherwise it's a business failure. The good part is that the ONLY part of the game which isn't f2p is the optional cosmetics.
  1. ThatsOurEric's Avatar
    The *ONLY* thing I don't like is that why aren't the Luchador skins making them speak Spanish.

    It would've been absolute gold and an instant buy if they were. Or at least spanish accents.
  1. Stormcall's Avatar
    I've managed to get TWO chihuahua mounts in boxes so far, and I have no interest in them whatsoever. Not one new skin though.
  1. devven9's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Stormcall View Post
    I've managed to get TWO chihuahua mounts in boxes so far, and I have no interest in them whatsoever. Not one new skin though.
    No interest in the chihuahua mounts?!? I don't know you, but you're dead to me.
  1. Tziva's Avatar
    FWIW, it took me like 15 games to get all the quest rewards. I just did them on quick coop.
  1. mmocd82a39b843's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tziva View Post
    FWIW, it took me like 15 games to get all the quest rewards. I just did them on quick coop.
    And you didn't cover your asshole-cats. Feelsbadman.
  1. Stormcall's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by devven9 View Post
    No interest in the chihuahua mounts?!? I don't know you, but you're dead to me.
    Chihuahuas are ugly dogs, they're unpleasant dogs, and in game, riding one as a mount looks flat out stupid as hell. I'd rather ride a pleb horse. Only things I like less are the coin/flying banner type mounts.
  1. skorpio's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Stormcall View Post
    Chihuahuas are ugly dogs, they're unpleasant dogs, and in game, riding one as a mount looks flat out stupid as hell. I'd rather ride a pleb horse. Only things I like less are the coin/flying banner type mounts.
    But it isnt Chihuahua! It's Luchihuahua!
  1. ophion1990's Avatar
    Looks like the anniverary rolled around aswell and gave a portrait/spray/banner, kinda like last year, but I haven't gotten the HotD stuff yet, did those rewards not go out yet?

    Also, I feel like I got pretty lucky with the chests I opened, almost all had Nexomania stuff, rather than 'Suns out Guns out'. Didn't get the skins I wanted yet, though (the dark Kharazim and any Sonya one). Only need 500 more shards to craft them either way.
  1. mmoc00f573e3be's Avatar
    May the lootbox god with us... Sooo expensive.
  1. devven9's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Stormcall View Post
    Chihuahuas are ugly dogs, they're unpleasant dogs, and in game, riding one as a mount looks flat out stupid as hell. I'd rather ride a pleb horse. Only things I like less are the coin/flying banner type mounts.
    I agree that they are a bottom tier dog in the real world. Riding a masked one in to battle is great though.
  1. Acidbaron's Avatar
    Might get the shark mount that's about it will work great with some summer skins
  1. Tenjen's Avatar
    is the razorgrin ingame yet? i dont see it anywhere
  1. Tziva's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tenjen View Post
    is the razorgrin ingame yet? i dont see it anywhere
    No, they marketed it as part of this holiday but it isn't available currently.
  1. ophion1990's Avatar
    Razorgrin is available in the shop now! It looks a little derpy but it's nice overall. It costs 10k gold.
  1. Tenjen's Avatar
    I spent so much gold on chests rerolls for nexomania! going to need to earn like mad

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