Hero Design Workshop (Let's see how this goes)

The premise: That this thread act as a place inwhich map makers can discuss the process of designing and balancing a custom hero, a topic i believe is strangely neglected.

Basically feel free to post the information about any hero you have created (with a few details about the map) and hopefully the community will be able to give you feedback on how well developed the hero is. In effect i hope to capatalise on the large amount of experience many map makers have in the fields of hero implementation and balance, particularly those who have completed maps.

Note: This thread is not intended for questions regarding the creation or implementation of features, simply discussion of the designs themselves - think of it as a map making version of "Theory-craft".

Of course since it is i starting this thread i feel i should get the ball rolling with an example.

Hidden information: Jadis - The White Witch A melee hero based around the White Witch of Narnia fame. Uses Jaina's model with a longsword attachment in the off hand. Map:An generic Aeon of Strife that i have been building for fun Hero Concept: Jadis is designed to be a light melee/support hero - designed to have a radical effect on the outcome of large scale combat but minimal raw "power". Designed to be particularly weak against other heroes. Attributes: Inteligence based but with agility as her fasted developing stat designed to gimp her maximum damage output due to low raw damage. Ensures however that she is relativly hardy. Effectively well rounded in the stat department. Skills (all completed): Fury of the White Witch: Turns a target enemy unit to stone (melee range). The effect is permanent at all levels but CAN be dispelled. Development Manacost/level 125/105/85/65/45 Cooldown/level 16/12/8/4/0 Thoughts: Keeping in mind the traditional AOS focus on Heroes i feel that this skill will be reasonably balanced. Early on the skill is prohibitivly expensive, while later on the development of Heroes as the main focus and likley increase in the numbers of units spawned should reduce its impact enough to warrant the low cost. The fact it is dispellable should in my opion also keep it in check. Frost of Winter (passive): Permanently increases the witches armour value while providing n effect similar to "Frost Armour". The frist armour component however (and the armour it provides) can be temporarily dispelled (~5 seconds to regenerate) Development Armour (perm)/level 1/1.5/2/2.5/3 Armour(frost)/level 0/0.5/1/1.5/2 Thoughts: I felt this spell would ensure Jadis' could move freely on the battlefield, thus synergising well with Fury. Traitor's Pact (Aura): Offensive Aura. Any (non hero) unit attacked while under this aura effect has a % chance to instantly swap owners (to Jadis' Owner). Only effects units with less than 25% health. Development %/level 2/4/6/8/10 Thoughts: A difficult abilty in my mind to balance. The high % chance at later levels is to reflect the greater lethality of combat for units at those stages of the game, at 25% health a unit is liable to simply die almost instantly. Has questionable synergy with Fury (Read: none) Hundred Year Winter (Ult): It's Blizzard. Big AOE, long channeling time but still more or less blizzard. Creates icy ground tiles slowly within its AOE. Later if Jadis' stands on those tiles she recives stat boosts. Development All levels - 800 AOE, 30 waves, +10 str +10 Agi +5 int. when standing on snowy tiles. Dmg per wave/level 20/30/40 Thoughts: A simple ultimate designed tio give her limited sieging capabilty. Reasonable synergy with Aura.

So there you have it, a hero.

Feel free to post any thoughts you have regarding it's design, or better yet post your own heroes and give me soemthing to do!

I don't have a hero to discuss, but tips on creating a balanced one, I just took this out of my tutorial (here: http://www.wc3campaigns.com/showthread.php?t=53944 )

Anyway, this is a part about heros.

Try to have atleast 1 passive spell, 1 or 2 assualt spells, and one other spell(summoning, troop enhance, shields). For the hero's Ultimate, if the hero has 2 assualt spells make its ultimate not an assualt spell, instead make it a defensive or passive spell, such as an Avatar type ability or Reincarnation.


This basically doesn't make one hero absoluetly rediculous, while others are boreing as hell, definantly don't make a hero with all passive spells...

Yay, theorycraft, my favourite! Such threads really should surface more often.

First to respond to your example, BBDino, the first thing that poked me in the eye is the aura. My interpretation: you have to work to bring units to near death so the enemy can then get experience for killing them. That sounds really lame. But let's give it a more thoughtful review:

The thing that would make this aura actually work would be some healing capability. This hero has none, though, which means you need another healer constantly at her side. Normaly, I am very fond of such teamplay requirements in maps, but they should be used for synergy effects of otherwise useful skills, not for fixing a weak skill that otherwise potentially works against the player. The mechanic is interesting otherwise, and I see one way to justify it: if it's used in an army-based AoS, and I don't mean slightly more army-based than the average AoS, I mean really seriously army-based, the exact opposite of DotA and most other AoS maps where high level heroes eat troops for breakfast.

The fury is an interesting skill, again in the context of a more troop-focused AoS where you can't just kill a unit with 2 attacks and immobilizing units this way actually means something. The defensive passive sounds like a must-have for a front-line intelligence hero, which by itself adds a bit more variety to the otherwise typical 4 hero types, the strength and agility melee and the agility and intelligence ranged. A really good match of the hero type and the ability. The use of dispell mechanics on more abilities is a refreshing and welcome addition to the monotomy of damage&stun spells of the average AoS.

The ultimate seems simple at first (not that there's anything wrong with simple, you can achieve great gameplay effects with simple base components), but the terrain changing mechanic is another interesting addition. Especially if the bonus is considerable (I wouldn't know, because I don't know the basic hero stats and the power of items) and more heroes have terrain-changing capabilities, this could lead to some great rivalries and positional warfare. The finest achievement would be, if players actually occasionaly considered it a better choice to use the spell somewhere, where it would deal less damage, because of the tactical value of having a snowed area there. The bonus seems somewhat odd, though, the main thing that gets boosted seem to be the heroes fighting capabilities, although the hero isn't intended for direct combat and probably can't match the heroes that are even with that bonus. It would perhaps seem more appropriate if the intelligence received a more substantial boost instead, or perhaps the (frost themed) abilities, or maybe some spell damage protection, as that is the bane of the low-hp high-armor heroes.

All in all, an interesting concept, I would like to see more like that. The only thing that seems off to me is the aura, gameplay-mechanics-wise and design-wise, although I'm not familiar with the world of Narnia, so design-wise, it could be actually right for her specificaly, but not for a generic ice caster. However, I'm not too fond of AoS maps that gather heroes from all sorts of popular fiction, rather than making up their own, the whole mixing of worlds seems to me like a terrible failure of design (and so many maps do it, DotA, ToB, AoM, to name just a few I happen to remeber!). Perhaps this is a discussion for some other time...

But I just realised, 2 passives on a part-caster hero? That seems wrong, unless, of course, you have a hero skill system with a lot more passives than the regular warcraft one. But to have that in an AoS, where all a player gets to control is a hero? You already use only 4 hero skills out of possible 5, and no default unit ability for the hero to start with, either (unless if you consider the standing-on-snow bonus as an additional passive). I'm not saying you should take advantage of all these opportunities, there's a limit to how much a casual player can work with, even with only a single hero, and it's easy to cross that limit if you go overboard with spellbook abilities... but two active abilities (one of them needs to be channeled, so in that time you really have to do nothing) really seem like too few.

Right now, the hour is so late where I live that it's actually starting to be early, so I'll stop here. I'll post some of mine hero design thoughts later.

Thanks for the comments.

At this stage the map is looking to be more epic in scope than the standard AOS map, larger terrain, more spread out bases etc thus reducing in many ways the impact of the heroes and hopefully giving "leader" type heroes a niche.

The Traitor aura is a reflection of the Witches forces generally consiting of the "evil race" and a plot device employed in the books that gives her the "right" to the lives of all traitors. One idea i had for improving its usefulness was granting each converted unit a small heal, maybe 20% of life? So when you convert a unit it doesnt instantly die.

As i may have missed it, units turned to stone have reduced armour, ensuring the witch doesnt miss out on the bounty as she can easily still kill them.

Yea, the the 2 passives was something i considered, it's actually a throwback from when i intended for her to have 5 skills. I'm considering employing a hero class system that would see her recieve a food bonus as a "leader" hero (more mercs to micro).

As far as the stat bonuses go i think i need to reinforce the idea that even though intelligence based she is not really caster. She has high (ish) Strength and Agility to give her high durability but low int. to ensure her raw damage output is reduced. Again i like to think of her as a "leader" - a tank geared towards unit "killing".

If you can also get heal casters as mercs, the aura starts to make sense, but as mentioned earlier, it still depends greatly on unit/hero ratio. The high levels are what you need to watch out for, on low levels, even DotA heroes can't match the creeps. The percentages seem rather low to me, though, although that depends on how many attacks does it take on average to get a unit from 25% life to 0. In any event, most creeps won't switch sides at 25%, but lower. Possible fixes would be greater chance to switch side, 50% hp instead of 25%, units granting kill-experience when switching sides and/or healing when switching.

But even if you make the ability work, there's still the question of how it fits this hero. It lacks synergy with other abilities, and I don't think I would pick it much, it depends on the gameplay a bit, but I suppose the hero really needs her passive defense, so I would definitely pick that, and then I'm left with a choice between a passive and an active ability, if I picked the aura, I would have no way to use my mana, which is a waste (unless, maybe, if there's a merc that has an ability similar to Destroyer's Absorb Mana). The ability also seems out-of-character for the hero, the skill combination only makes sense in the context of Narnia, but not in the context of your AoS (unless you make it entirely Narnia-themed). Although it is nice to see heroes that't don't focus only on a single spell-element/spell-type.


I'm having difficulties deciding which individual hero to present. How a hero works is so much dependant on the context, the map, other heroes... it's difficult to present one without writing an essay about the whole map. Ideally, no hero should be designed individually, you should always consider how it fits into the map, how it works with other heroes... For starters, you can have custom triggered spell systems within which all heroes need to operate, for example having element-based spells and implementing elemental resistances, or something similar. But even if you're working with the usual war3-style independant spells, context matters.

When developing abilities for the heroes in my map Theramore Arena (version 1.5 soon to come), I had a table listing all the heroes, where I documented special-game-mechanics skills, like invisibility and detection, channeling and stun, summons and buffs and dispell... When trying to think of new skills, I used this table as a reference for what gameplay mechanics the map still lacks, and what kind of skills I shouldn't make in order to not decrease the value of some other hero with that sort of skill. Each hero has to play some part in some of these mechanics, but not too many of them, to achieve balance, and heroes who work with the same mechanic should work with it differently (like one hero having AoE dispell and the other unit-target) and not share other mechanics to achieve diversity.

What I can do individually is visual design, how the abilities of the hero are named and what graphics they use, but in terms of gameplay mechanics, a lot of elements are influenced by other heroes and the map itself.

At this stage i believe i will re-jig the developments of the skills to encourage a wider skill point distribution. In this situation i feel it is not unacceptable to have a skill that is picked early on, but only taken to higher levels later on in the game, once other skills have been maximized.

An example of this is the Defensive passive. As the frost armour slowing effect is universal across all levels i believe many experienced players would probably feel comfortable with only 1 level in it at first. As long as you are careful with your micro ,the bonus yielded by 1-4 armour points is unlikly to be as great as that provided by another skill.

The aura is a bit of a problem in that it's power level based entirly on the availabilty of units in the map, at this stage however i believe that it would be able to find a niche.

One further note regarding the fact that the hero has 2 "passives", it is important to remember that the aura, when successful grants control of additonal units, effectivly putting it in the same league as a summon skill.

Of course the one piece of information i want is this:

Do you believe, assuming that the map was set up in a way to make usage of all skills viable, you would enjoy playing this hero? Because that's the key piece of information any map maker wants.


Insofar as you providing a hero, remember that this thread can act as a yard stick for how well recieved a hero would be. The minute details of balance can of course not be tackled here, i was more aiming at people presenting heroes with clear imbalances (multiple slow effects for instance) or obvious design flaws (that hero just makes NO SENSE on any level) or simply a place where comments can be made (isnt that Sashi from ToB, again?).

And of course it is nice to hear other peoples ideas.

This really won't work in such a vague way.

Such as, passive skills are a NO NO for any kind of hero-based micro-managing maps. If you only have 1 guy to play with, giving a hero a passive skill is cutting a good chunk of operation out of the game for that character.

On the opposite, for custom melee or large-scale games, the whole sense of what's balanced or a good template is completely different.

The only thing that's really universal is theme and variation of arsenal =)

Conversely passive skills also free the player from monotnous micromanagement. Most AOS maps have at least 1 per hero.

And once you throw active use items and mercenaries into the mix, most players will probably be glad of the hiatus.

And i am aware that this thread will almost certainly not work, but hey, at least Anitarf's enjoying it!

EDIT: btw I may post one of my less ecletic heroes when i next get a chance.

Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to contribute, but I feel you should differentiate the heroes by environment. Maybe just point out 'Hero x is destined for melee', 'Hero y is destined for 10 skill RPG' or whatever.

Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood something, I thought that the units affected by the aura would just switch sides with the other team's computer, not come under the direct control of the player, that's something different, the ability to micro and retreat those troops gives you more chances for healing them up. But the skill still trades experience gain for strength in numbers, which can be a bad bargain sometimes (superiority in numbers is often easily overcome by the enemy with the use of high damage towers on defense and AoE damage spells), and when it is you can't avoid it because it's a random passive effect.
Regarding the first part, I don't agree fully. In the Batleships maps, few players liked to play as traders, and yet, the most interesting and dynamic games were those with trader players. Of course, that's a bad example, because there are also playrs who not only don't like to play as traders, they don't like to play in games with traders either, and who am I to say that they're wrong. So is this really the key piece of information you want? What others think? Since the result is always subjective in some way, you might as well ignore everybody and do something that you want. Unless what you want is primarily to please others. It's not my primary focus, that's why I disagree, but others might agree. (*cough*DotA*cough*)

On the topic of the second part, I agree. Developing ideas, sharing design insights, gaining inspiration, discussing the (slightly more) objective aspects of game design... those are good reasons for a thread like this for me as well.

I think most people aren't interested in what heroes do or have anyway...

Anyways, I thought I see more in this many posts, but I guess not.

Hidden information: Name: Sienare, Prayer's Child (Uses Priest Model) Map: Made in a map based on survival, like Warchasers. Hero Concept: Solely based for ranged assault. He has the lowest amount of life compared to the other heroes in my map. His regular damage is very high, but he attacks very slow. Attributes: Inteligence, of course. He has a lot of mana to spare, which is why his spells are very effective and the cost of mana it high. His Strength is very poor, as well as his Agility. He's pretty much useless without a meat shield. Skills: Chain of Light: Strikes a number of enemies. If the bolt is able to complete it's entire trip, it will explode, dealing damage in a 300 AOE. Damage per strike 60/80/100/120/140 Number of strikes 5/6/7/8/9 Explosion damage 90/120/150/180/210 Mana cost 120/140/160/180/200 Cooldown 12 seconds all levels My Thoughts/Comments: I would never recomment this as a one person spell, since it must complete it's total strikes to deal it's full damage. Since it's harder to do so on higher levels, it kind of is a double edged sword. Healing Touch: Basically Heal with a new name. Heals a low amount of health for a decent amount of mana. Health recovery 30/40/50/60/70 Mana Cost 6/8/10/12/14 Cooldown 1 second all levels My Thoughts/Comments: He is one out of the few heroes that have a healing spell. Although his healing spell is weak, he has the most mana to make up for it, thus high mana regeneration. This can't really hurt his mana pool. Slow Force Aura - Creates a 600 AOE aura that reduces attack damage of nearby enemies. Attack Reduction(%) 10/15/20/25/30 My Thoughts/Comments: In a survival map, auras becomes essential to survival, no matter what kind of aura it may be. So, in Sienare's survival, instead of giving him devotion aura, I gave him a passive howl of terror (reverse command aura). Ultimate - Summon Illuminus - Summons Sienare's most faithful companion that he recieved during his ordeal to become a Prayer's Child. Can cast (These don't refer to their real names, just to tell you what it can do)Area Armor, Tranquility, Stampede, and Spell Immunity. Lasts for 150 seconds. Health: 1000/1500 Mana: 600/800 Damage: 59-84 chaos/72-107 chaos Armor: 5 hero/ 8 hero Mana Cost: 400/700 Cooldown: 180 all levels My Thoughts/Comments: The summon is pretty strong, but I made this summon to ensure that Sienare can live without a human shield.

There ya go. I'll post more later, since I find this topic interesting.

Firstly i think we need to address a design descision you have made, increasing spell costs as level increases. I have always disliked that form of progression as i feel it is anti-intuative to have spells become harder to cast as levels are put into them. I can see however the fact that it gives you greater control on how spells are used, particularly at higher levels (prevents random spamming). Any one else have any thoughts on this issue?

Looking at the hero i am having difficulty understanding the theme you hope to achieve, you describe him as ranged assault yet his skills appear - at least to me - to be geared towards ranged support. His offensive spell for instance is cumbersome to use, i'd imagine in most games that the team would benefit more from a straight aura/heal build.

You should remember that the aura is very, very powerful in that it effects everything (melee AND ranged) and is geared towards the map in question - i can't imagine anyone NOT maximizing it as their primary skill.

Does the ultimate last the full 180 seconds? Remember that spell immunes can still be healed, the synergy with the heal skill may be overpowering.

Okay, I guess I forgot some details to his summon. First of all, if you read a little closer on the summon description, it lasts for 150 seconds. Tranquility, since it's an AOE healing and not an ultimate, I made it weaker then the Keeper's Tranquility. All of the summons' skills were designed so that it could only use them at least once, sometimes twice during its lifetime.

I believe that his is more of a ranged support, but he has his limitations. His aura only expands to his firing range(600), making sure that he can't go too far from battles. Since he initially has low life, this makes it more effective on melee units then ranged. Plus, there are a hefty amount of groups of enemies, so people would consider more using his attack spell.

My mistake, i was refering to the heroes healing spell, at 70hp/s that summon ain't going down fast.

If I had more time to spend and less Christmas shopping to finish, I'd deal with this topic in a more thoughtful manner. In the meantime, however, let me shamelessly plug PFW and point out that all these heroes are functional and balanced.

I disobeyed two commandments of hero development in making this map, which is okay because I only invented them after finishing it.
The first is that melee heroes need a ranged damage skill in some variety. If it has a stunning or disabling effect on the target, all the better. This is to make it more feasible for a melee hero to compete with a ranged hero on its own turf.
Secondly (and this is both easy and profound), match the colors of the icons on your hero. Come up with a thematic base for the heroes abilities and implement them, but when choosing their art, try to find a good set of icons that all match one or two primary colors. It looks so good.

Maybe that's not a gameplay suggestion, but it's very important.