Deathwing Reveal Recap

Deathwing Reveal Recap
This is just a short overview of his abilities as revealed on the stream. Be sure to watch the VOD for all the delicious information and two Deathwing showmatches as played by the developers of the hero.

Release: Playable at BlizzCon and will be available in the live game with the first major update after BlizzCon, which is scheduled for early December.



  • Bruiser. Deathwing has the health of a main tank but lacks the immediate control you want from a tank
  • All abilities have a cast time
  • Deathwing spends 100% of his time in dragon form. He's slightly bigger than Alexstrasza's dragon form.
  • Trait: The Aspect of Death
    • 100% bonus damage to heroes, as Alarak
    • Permanent Unstoppable
    • Completely unaffected by allied abilities. Cannot be healed, cannot be buffed, cannot be copied by Abathur, and so on.
    • Starts off the game with 40 Armor. He loses 10 Armor for every 25% health he loses.
  • "Mount": Dragon Flight
    • Deathwing takes off and disappears from the map.
    • Can land anywhere on the map that has vision.
    • Regenerates health and Armor while in the air. While he can heal lost health via fountains and health globes too, Armor can only be regenerated in the air.
    • All abilities go on a 3-second cooldown after landing
  • Two forms: Destroyer and World-Breaker
    • Destroyer focuses on melee, being in the thick of things
    • World-Breaker focuses on ranged abilities
  • Q: Molten Flame
    • Giant flame breath, ala Diablo's
    • Cannot turn while channeling
    • Constantly drains energy
    • This ability possibly has the highest damage-per-second of any ability in the game
  • W (Destroyer): Incinerate
    • Pulse of flames that does damage around Deathwing
  • E (Destroyer): Onslaught
    • Lunges forward a small distance, slows enemies caught. Does extra damage at the end
  • W (World-Breaker): Lava Burst
    • Spawns a lava pool in the targeted area, doing damage and slowing enemies
  • E (World-Breaker): Earthshatter
    • Slams the ground, sending out two lines of broken ground that stuns enemies on contact
  • Only one Heroic: Cataclysm
    • Available from the start of the game, with a bit of a cooldown on it
    • Flies into the air, and breathes fire in a large area ahead of him
    • At level 10 you can choose a talent that resets the cooldown of Cataclysm when you destroy a fort or keep
  • Another level 10 talent is Bellowing Roar
    • An area-of-effect Fear similar to the dragon fear abilities in early World of Warcraft
This article was originally published in forum thread: Deathwing Reveal Recap started by chaud View original post
Published on 2019-10-22 08:09 PM
25 Comments
Comments 25 Comments
  1. MatadorMedia's Avatar
    Nice to know they're still giving HOTS something, even if it is just a fanboy dream character. These stats and abilities are just straight up ridiculous.
  1. iosdeveloper's Avatar
    illidan will counter the f out of him
    i feel like reinstalling! good one, Blizz
  1. Jotaux's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by MatadorMedia View Post
    Nice to know they're still giving HOTS something, even if it is just a fanboy dream character. These stats and abilities are just straight up ridiculous.
    Hots should always be giving us fanboy dream characters.
  1. msdos's Avatar
    Bruiser that pushes forts hard and has global presence, so perfect. That's basically how I fantasized him being in game, I think I posted about it once.
  1. shade3891's Avatar
    Awesome!!!!
  1. DesoPL's Avatar
    DW health pool is similar to number of Stiches.
  1. Nerraw's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by DesoPL View Post
    DW health pool is similar to number of Stiches.
    That's before the armor too. Stitches has around 8000 health at level 20, I think? So with each "section" of his health having varying amounts of armor, he'll have about 10k effective health at level 20.
  1. DesoPL's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Nerraw View Post
    That's before the armor too. Stitches has around 8000 health at level 20, I think? So with each "section" of his health having varying amounts of armor, he'll have about 10k effective health at level 20.
    Sounds like an true raid boss. :P
  1. RadasNoir's Avatar
    Cataclysm kind of ruined Deathwing for me as a character, but I gotta admit he looks like a blast to play. I dig the fact that they really made an effort to make him feel like playing a raid boss; part of the appeal of playing some of the beefier tank characters (Stiches, Diablo) is the fact that they come the closest to feeling like you're playing a video game boss.

    Again, now that they no longer have to worry about balancing things for e-sports, or timing hero releases with events in their other games, maybe that means we'll continue to see characters with wackier mechanics, or older fan favorites people have been asking for.

    Speaking of which, now that we finally have Kel'thuzad, Imperius, and Deathwing, are there any other heroes people have been asking about for as long as those three?
  1. DesoPL's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by RadasNoir View Post
    Cataclysm kind of ruined Deathwing for me as a character, but I gotta admit he looks like a blast to play. I dig the fact that they really made an effort to make him feel like playing a raid boss; part of the appeal of playing some of the beefier tank characters (Stiches, Diablo) is the fact that they come the closest to feeling like you're playing a video game boss.

    Again, now that they no longer have to worry about balancing things for e-sports, or timing hero releases with events in their other games, maybe that means we'll continue to see characters with wackier mechanics, or older fan favorites people have been asking for.

    Speaking of which, now that we finally have Kel'thuzad, Imperius, and Deathwing, are there any other heroes people have been asking about for as long as those three?
    People mostly ask for Reinhardt second after Deathwing, then Mengsk, Tosh, Lady Vashj, Azshara and Overmind if i recall good.
  1. Mirishka's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by MatadorMedia View Post
    even if it is just a fanboy dream character.
    Is that not the point of the game?
  1. RadasNoir's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by DesoPL View Post
    People mostly ask for Reinhardt second after Deathwing, then Mengsk, Tosh, Lady Vashj, Azshara and Overmind if i recall good.
    I do recall quite a few people have been asking for Mengsk and the Overmind for awhile now. I think Blizzard even made an April Fool's joke about Mengsk coming to the Nexus, at one point?

    Now that I think about it, I've also seen a lot of people asking for an Old God, any of the Old Gods, as well.
  1. matrix123mko's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by RadasNoir View Post
    I do recall quite a few people have been asking for Mengsk and the Overmind for awhile now. I think Blizzard even made an April Fool's joke about Mengsk coming to the Nexus, at one point?

    Now that I think about it, I've also seen a lot of people asking for an Old God, any of the Old Gods, as well.
    Mengsk is in works. Blizzard literally asked players to make more concepts for Kel'thuzad, Deckard and Mengsk.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Myobi View Post
    I'm glad they are back into making characters like this.
    With no HGC we can get something nice again.
  1. therealstegblob's Avatar
    He looks stupid as hell, but whatever. Not expecting much from HotS anymore so I guess they're just going in more with rule of cool stuff.
  1. Caperfin's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by therealstegblob View Post
    He looks stupid as hell, but whatever. Not expecting much from HotS anymore so I guess they're just going in more with rule of cool stuff.
    Really? I actually like the design. I believe this is the first hero to be in a kind of 24/7 dragon form.
  1. melzas's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by therealstegblob View Post
    He looks stupid as hell, but whatever. Not expecting much from HotS anymore so I guess they're just going in more with rule of cool stuff.
    What's stupid about him? If anything it's a first unique hero we've got in a very long while, this is exciting and the opposite of stupid.
  1. therealstegblob's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Caperfin View Post
    Really? I actually like the design. I believe this is the first hero to be in a kind of 24/7 dragon form.
    Quote Originally Posted by melzas View Post
    What's stupid about him? If anything it's a first unique hero we've got in a very long while, this is exciting and the opposite of stupid.
    Note that I said "I guess they're going with rule of cool stuff", as by "he looks stupid" I mean he looks 'badly' designed (in the context of designing a 'good' character for HotS, one that fits the criteria of practical and relevantly useful, i.e. not experimental heroes like Cho'gall or Murky or ones that are very niche situational like Lost Vikings). HotS had a rocky back-and-forth philosophy on whether their game should be developed more seriously and made for competitive e-sports or if they should just do all sorts of wacky shit and let the game balance itself. They're apparently taking a step back towards the latter with Deathwing.

    As for specifically why he looks stupid, his whole kit is just ridiculous. He's permanently unstoppable but also can't be healed by teammates, which is like a literal fucking bad fan concept-tier of design. He's (reportedly) pretty underpowered and is awful 1v1 and also very mediocre at split pushing (which is what he's designed to do). He'll probably be a Dead on Arrival hero who won't be played very often, which is only exacerbated by the game's dwindling player base/general support.

    If they don't eventually rework him later on (if the game even gets enough money to do something like that) he'll easily be one of the least played heroes and probably one that people will get angry at you for picking, unless it turns out there's a couple of ways to really play him lowkey well which in that case you'll get flamed by your team even when you carried them.

    All in all he seems like Cho'gall or Murky. Annoying to play against but even fucking worse to have to play with. A failed experiment that doesn't fit into the game's shitty meta and is just kind of "there". I wouldn't mind if the game was designed this way with every hero in mind or something, but it isn't.

    HotS had a lot of things wrong with it but I think one of the roots of all evil was Blizzard not leading the project well and never going fully down one path or the other (the path between making a serious MOBA-like or making a wacky non-srs game that was balanced less around teamfights or laning and more around completing different map objectives).
  1. Mormolyce's Avatar
    Man I just watched the HOTS panel. Everyone who came up to ask a question prefaced it with "hey guys we all love this game thanks for making it", it got to be like the HoTS team was a kid with cancer or something.

    Deathwing looks great, I hope they focus more on these big weird impactful heroes, it's the game's biggest strength.
  1. raz98's Avatar
    Anyone else hoping that one of his skins is Galakrond?
  1. skorpio's Avatar
    Galakrond was proto drake
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