BlizzCon 2013 – Heroes of the Storm Overview Panel Transcript

Browder: Alright. This is the crazy one we did pretty recently. This is The Haunted Mines. This is our latest map.

Browder: Two weeks before Blizzcon.

Didier: “Yeah, let’s get this in.”

Browder: It may have been a month, but it was also pretty quick.

Sigaty: Four weeks, come on Sammy. Geez.

Browder: We had this idea during a map to have an above-ground and below-ground, you know, cause why not?

So we have this mine entrance and the mine entrance will open up at a certain point in the game, and then you can go down into the mine and now you are underground; and now you are in a competitive PvP/PvE dungeon and there’s all these skeletons down there.

You are gonna kill these skeletons and collect their skulls. So also a boss down there. Man, there’s a lot of team fights around this boss.

I gotta tell ya, that we have a hit map, we will just see thousands and thousands of dead players around this boss, because so many of the skulls that you want to collect are inside this boss; and he’s pretty hard to fight.

So a lot of players will gather on this boss. There’s often a big team fight that results in all kinds of sneaky shenanigans with players who are on a losing team, trying to sneak in a hero to steal the skulls before they get murdered. Absolutely intense moment around this guy.

Now, once all of the skulls are collected, a “Grave Golem” appears for each team.

Now if I collected 70 skullls, some of you guys have collected 30 skulls, I have got a bigger Grave Golem; and these Grave Golems are then going to move across the battlefield, focusing on enemy towns and any fortifications.

They are gonna smash everything that gets in front of them. Now it’s a choice. You are gonna attack and defend, you know, if I wanted to defend my Grave Golem and then maybe try to attack yours– Am I gonna switch?, or Are we gonna split the team up? — and there is always how the team work is absolutely vital, communicating with your allies is totally essential in figuring out who’s gonna go where. What is going to happen? Who has the best composition to engage a Grave Golem? Who can deal with certain enemy heroes and trying to find in just a couple of seconds the right move. And, of course, these Grave Golems can lead to absolute victory.

One of the things, I sort of missed there as we were going through it was, wherever the Grave Golem dies… that’s where it respawns the next time it comes back up. So you need to get on this thing, when it appears. You want to kill it as fast as possible.

I think most of our games last about 3 Grave Golems. There are some two, some four, but you really want to make sure that thing dies as far away from you as humanly possible.

Sigaty: I think that the other part of this strategy, that is there before you even get to them, ah, raising in the bases because you have to make a decision on when you are gonna go down. Or am I gonna stay and push up top? Or, am I gonna send guys down below? You know, how your team gonna work together; and that’s a strategic depth I think that, ultimately, we guys are creating on the designs of these battlegrounds.