Heyheyhey it’s Joy K! Good to see you back for more Heroes of the Storm content. I wanted to talk about the Nexus Anomalies. We have seen various ones, some stayed and some were deleted from the game again. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion one on the next anomaly: The Gladiator's Medallion.

But what are the anomalies really for? Are they an event that should be fun or should they be a new way to express your skill in the game? The anomalies were introduced in December of 2019. In 10 months, we have seen 4 variations of the anomalies and I'm going to take you over them in historical order.

December 2019: Experience Globes.

• When a minion dies it spawns a small globe that will stay for 6 seconds for an allied hero to be picked up. If you walk into the globe's range it will float towards you and you will get experience upon contact with it.

The idea of the experience globes is something we’ve probably gotten used to. It was introduced by the developers to discourage passive soaking by sitting in stealth or a bush in a lane. This was a well received anomaly and the developers decided to keep it in the game. It has influenced the ways of soaking and solo laning a lot ever since. A solo laner now has to keep check of the range he is in to pick up the globes that come from minions, otherwise there is no experience to be gathered.

For the more skilled players it became easier to make your enemy miss experience by freezing the lane and actively zoning them so that they couldn't get in range of the globes. In another way the laning phase has also become more forgiving, because you can show up late to a wave and still pick up most of the experience globes even though the minions will have died by the time you arrive. The globes last for 6 seconds, so keep in mind you don't have all the time in the world.

Sidenote - This was tested for about 6 months before putting in it in the actual game.

April 2020: A Call for Help

With this anomaly a major change came to towers and core mechanics were added to the game. Towers and forts now will aid in defending allied heroes by targeting heroes that attack their allies, which is a bit like League of Legends. The ammunition was changed to deal reduce armor for each attack instead of a slow. According to some this is less powerful than before, and I have to agree that it felt safer under my own tower when the divers were slowed indeed. A slight change was made after the initial patch of this anomaly to make only the forts target heroes that attack their allies instead of towers as well. This was because pushing with AOE heroes became rather hard as they got shut down so easily by the slightly overpowered towers.

The developers wanted the ending of the game to be a bit more spectacular which is why they added core mechanics. All of them came in their own theme of the map. It has been less discussed by the community than the changes that were made to the towers. The overall opinion might be that the core abilities are not impactful and got swept under the rug by the tower changes. Overall the abilities aren't very strong, and need a certain scenario or accidental overlap with CC to be impactful. The only one I would consider strong is the root ability on the Battlefield of Eternity map and on Infernal Shrines.

On maps like that and in a meta where Melee heroes and Tanks are very powerful, these come in handy when you are defending your core. The other core abilities are not great and in my opinion the Tomb of the Spider Queen Dread Wave can be marked as the weakest.

Sidenote: all of these mechanics are fairly easy to sidestep, but add some extra fun to a teamfight at the end of each game! This anomaly also stayed in the game as we know it today.

June 2020: Climate Phenomenon

With the release of Mei in the Nexus another anomaly called Climate Phenomenon was added. This was a series of different climates that would happen on a certain set of maps.
In short this wasn’t well received by the community. On the first day of the release the server crashed entirely. Inexcusable: Community rage!

The overall feedback from the community was that their game had a hard time functioning and it was hard to use the phenomenon optimally. The stealth that was provided on certain maps was easier to make use of then the other climates like movement speed or a small shield that would more occur like an accident where someone gets away with 1 hp. With the stealth you could set up whole plays of a CC chain as you went into a bush to acquire the stealth and then just stand still. With the changes made to stealth last year, this means that when you remain completely stealth you go completely invisible. For heroes with impactful CC, like ETC, this way a great way to set the team up for some juicy kills.

September 2020: Gladiator's Medallion.

Even though on a 5 minute cooldown, it seems very strong to give some characters a self-cleanse. Imagine Illidan, which you practically have to CC until he dies, but oh hey, CAN'T CUZ SELF-CLEANSE BTW.

It will be fun to see if the meta will shift at all with this anomaly but I count on it to shift so that characters like this will be picked more often. Definitely in the late game, I feel like the Medallion can be very powerful to deny certain CC for a pick off or deny a complete ultimate like Jaina’s Ring of Frost. The cooldown being 5 minutes is sensible in my opinion and I think that the developers are really trying to listen to the community to release new content in the game that isn’t instantly marked as overpowered or busted. They are making great progress with this in my opinion.

The opinions I have heard so far are that people use it often right before they die. This can result into two things: you either get lucky and live, or still die because it doesn't make you immune to taking damage. What I'm trying to say with that is that the ability has a long cooldown and if you think you're going to die... just die. Optimal use of this ability is denying the initial engage of the enemy tank. Press it in time to not get stunned and you will always walk away as the winner. It doesn't feel like a gamebreaking anomaly to me, read: it didn't crash the server on the day of release.

It allows players to make up for small mistakes with this ability, but it doesn't save you from feeding a bunch if you're playing bad. That's what I call balance.

The overall look is that the first two anomalies affected the game and were accepted quite quickly because they are easy to deal with. In higher ranks, the community called this uneventful because they didn't impact the game so much for them as it was just tricks they were already using that came even more effective now. Some would argue that the anomalies mess with the balance of the game. I think the current anomaly should change that opinion as it's not messing with the balance of the game and definitely can't be called unimpactful. Again, I think the devs are doing a great job listening to their community and came up with a great anomaly to answer it. Keep up the great work!

The developers have a list of about 20 different anomalies they would want to implement in the game at some point. Some of these have to do with the tower ammunition and possibly reversing the changes made to that. Another one is turning the wizard minion into a sapper which was a community request. I would like to see what impact both would have.

What kind of anomaly would you like to see coming to the nexus?

Until next time!