"Eternal Conflict" Diablo Content Campaign Announced

Heroes of the Storm is doing a stream right now, they've announced what they're doing next and what they plan to do. The plan is to do bursts of themed content the first theme being Diablo. Over the next few months they'll be focusing on Diablo Heroes and Diablo Maps. The first new Diablo hero (excluding this week's addition. Johanna) is the Butcher who, turns out, is an Assassin who farms up his attack and can hold enemies down. The first Diablo map will be the Battlefield of Eternity map they showed concept art of that seems to have become a 2 lane map since last seen. They're about to show gameplay of it so we'll know more soon.

Exciting! The content is also going to be coming at a faster rate with a character every 3 weeks with 2 dropped into each patch (one released on a 3 week delay after the patch). Hoping we'll see the other new hero before stream is up. Probably Leoric!

They also mentioned they'd be showing stuff that's months away. No idea what that'll be, exciting.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/19529834/the-mayhem-begins-youtube-livestream-event-6-5-2015

Edit: Map and Butcher drops June 30th. Neat. The Battlefield has unique Diablo mercenaries with cool properties and in the center there's a big Demon and Angel fighting. You gotta help your one win the fight so they can push the strongest lane hard. Cool.

This is so cool, thanks for sharing. I played a bit of the Heroes beta and it's the first MOBA I ever lasted more than an hour with, although it still didn't fully hook me in. Hearing about stuff like this makes me at least interested in the future of the game, though, if not making me want to jump back in at least a little!

Heroes Nexus has the downlow. All the new heroes stats plus some videos and such of everything. Very good stuff.

So then multiple Diablo heroes aye? Each about 3 weeks apart. Well after Butcher there'll be Leoric probably but who after that? There's still more heroes that'll follow that right? One needs to be a Support. One needs to be Deckard Cain. What else is needed? Who else is even up for it?

@themasterds: Just thinking of Diablo characters off the top of my head...Deckard Cain would be the obvious choice, but Queen Araneae, perhaps?

Well, I mean assuming Deckard is a wizard if they bring him in and not just an old dude with books who gets merc'd the first 10 seconds of each round (or an Archivist, that fake class they did for april fools), then the only class not shown would be the monk, which i could see being an interesting bard support type dude or just a warrior with no mana.

OH SHIT, you know who should be a hero? This asshole:

Damn you treasure goblin! Let's see...he could bribe for free with a talent. And...hitting him knocks out gold that damages you or slows you or something. And his ult is a portal. Nightcrawler style wherever he wants with a big explosion when he pops out.

Also interesting to note is how this sets up a very clear gameplan. In 3 or 4 months after the event starts they'll announce they're doing Starcraft next, presumably timed with whenever the game's coming out. Whenever that is. After 3 or 4 months of that they'll say "Hey, Overwatch is next" and do 3 or 4 months of Overwatch Heroes and maps.

I'm curious if we'll be seeing any purely PvE modes like some sort of Horde Mode. Once the Map Maker comes out I imagine that sort of thing will just show up but in the meantime I'm real interested to see if that's something they do themselves.

Wait, I thought that Pudge guy with the hook was always supposed to be the Butcher. Stitches. Guess that's Warcraft then.

As for other Diablo characters, I'd like to see Malthael show up. Aidan/Dark Wanderer would be cool too.

It's kind of neat that they plan to roll things out thematically but I can see a pretty big downside to it in that if you don't like a certain franchise you're stuck with content from it for a while. Or, as in my case, Warcraft is easily my favorite Blizzard franchise so it'll be a real bummer to me have such a long wait between content from it.

I'll see how it goes but overall I think I'd prefer they kept things mixed.

Another detail I forgot to mention that's pretty important: When you kill the core loot and gold comes out.

@bane122: Dude Starcraft hasn't had a character in a year. Diablo's not been much better off. Warcraft has had it's themed release time, it was called "the alpha" and also, alternatively, "the beta".

I think there's something to be said for brief non theme patches between theme patches. I imagine you could drop Kel'Thuzad and someone else (I'd like Ragnaros, have a small "Hearthstone Campaign Boss" theme briefly) before it's time for Starcraft or Overwatch.

I read somewhere that Overwatch stuff for HotS will be vetted by how well it's received by the playerbase -- something about the team getting asked at Blizzcon and replied with "we'd love to be in Heroes of the Storm, but we have to earn it first." Here's hoping though!

I'd take a Valla skin of Reaper, for sure.

@themasterds: Right, and that sucks for the fans of those franchises, of which I'm a part of. Hence saying I don't like the themes, keep an faster rotation of everything so no one is left waiting a while.

Of course a problem they will run into, and also possibly why it's been so Warcraft focused so far, is that that series simply has more characters to pick from. So at some point it may need to be skewed to Warcraft a bit so they don't run out of things from other series.

I really like that they've finally announced some kind of plan for release. The past couple months have just been well we could get a diablo or starcraft hero but it will probably just be warcraft again. It's nice to know okay its going to be diablo for a few months, no need to get my hopes up for Artanis, Stukov, Fenix, or Dehaka yet. Hopefully after this we'll be close enough to Legacy's release that we can have some kind of starcraft release period to celebrate the upcoming release. As far as diablo goes, I can't wait for the butcher. He looks exactly like the kind of hero that I like to play. It will be interesting to see what the Skeleton King's kit is (specialist maybe?) and hopefully we'll get the other diablo classes that aren't represented yet. (I'm looking at you Wizard and Monk)

@bane122: They've said in the past that it'll be about a 2:1:1 ratio of heroes in the game, warcraft being the 2 of course. However, there are still tons of heroes to grab from all 3 series. They could keep this up for a good few years before they would even get close to the bottom of the barrel of Starcraft and Diablo. Eventually they will have to slow down on those two because they will hit their caps much faster than warcraft will, but that day isn't anytime soon at all. They haven't even put most of the popular Starcraft and Diablo characters into the game yet, let alone secondary characters or popular base units/enemies.

Since the theme of the thing is basically Heaven vs Hell I'd expect another Archangel before it's over. Not first or second though obviously since Leoric is clearly second.

@themasterds: Imperius would make sense by sheer popularity and role I think. Diablo needs a support more than anything though so maybe Auriel?

I don't know the Archangels very well but maybe they do both. And Decard Cain. I think those 5 heroes make a pretty solid event.