After the last two patches brought both reworks and an overall rebalance to the game, Tassadar/Tyrande have been omnipresent in competitive play, with near 100% pick-ban rates, and Tyrande has started to dominate HL/QM play as well, with a near-58% winrate on HOTSLOGS.
Normally, in these situations, the correct thing to do is just to hold tight and wait for Blizzards team to fix things. They know theres an issue and typically adjust the numbers to compensate until things look good.
In the case of these two, however, the numbers are never going to work right because Blizzard has made a series of very bad choices in response to matchmaking issues that have left Tassadar and Tyrande being asked to fulfill multiple party roles equally well, in a way that will leave them either overpowered or turn both of them into boring healbots.
Tassadar and Tyrande have been designated as support characters since the beginning, but neither was designed (or redesigned, in Tassadars case) as a main healer. Instead, both are hybrid DPS/Heal characters with large amounts of Vision utility. Throughout most of this games lifespan, theyve been good characters who have seen lots of competitive play, and who have been great when slotted into one of the 4 non-healer spots in a competitive team. Teams would occasionally run both of them in order to forego a healer, since their combined healing output would roughly approximate one (minus the missing Ultimate) while allowing for larger DPS output.
The issue with these characters started not because of any issue with these two characters, but with the QM matchmaker. Blizzard noted that games where one team had a healer while the other did not were relatively lopsided, and decided to introduce a rule where if one team had at least one support, the other would need to have one as well. This was great, except for one big issue: While Tassadar and Tyrande were supports, they were not healers. Their lack of healing through-put would recreate the same healer vs no healer dynamic inside QM games despite the support rule being in place. Tassadar and Tyrandes QM winrate plummeted, and Blizzard realized that something needed to change.
Blizzard decided that the best course of action would be to make Tassadar and Tyrande capable of pulling their weight as solo healers, instead of excluding them from the QM support matchmaking rules. This decision is the single root cause of their current issues, and until these decisions are reversed and corrected, these two characters will be thorns in Blizzards side, breaking the game in their path.
What Blizzard is asking of these characters is an impossibility. Both Tassadar and Tyrande were conceptualized as offensive characters who were also capable of helping out on defense. Both characters were about ¾ DPS and ¼ Healer. They were not designed to solo-heal. But in one of the most recent patches, both characters received retunes which essentially put Tyrande at ¾ DPS and ¾ Healer, while Tassadar received a substantial nerf to his offensive Ultimate in the process, leaving him at ⅗ DPS and ¾ Healer. Note that both characters add up to over 100%. This is not a mistake, it is the natural conclusion of asking two characters to fulfill two entirely different role archetypes equally well. Given that theyre over 100%, this would mean both are in need of a nerf. But if you dont want to hit their healing capabilities (due to the effect on QM), this means that the only thing left to be nerfed is their DPS. Theyll become ¼ DPS and ¾ Healer, and become just like the other supports.
This is the natural outcome of this design decision: If you require them to be healers because of artificial QM requirements, they will turn into healers, and lose their unique hybrid design attributes in the process. This was pointed out by players like Dunktrain, who feared that direction for the characters, and sadly seems like it is an inevitability unless Blizzard reverses course and corrects the actual issue here- the character classification systems interaction with the QM matchmaker.
Neither Tassadar nor Tyrande was changed because there was an actual issue with either characters. Instead of correcting the global matchmaking constraints causing the play issues, they instead chose to try and warp the characters to fit into a broken system. This has had negative effects on both the characters and on the overall gameplay of Heroes of the Storm, and the characters will continue to suffer if a fix to the real issue is not implemented, taking the Full Healer in QM burden off of the characters shoulders when balance decisions are to be made.
There are two possible fixes. The first is to manually exempt these two characters from the QM matchmaking rules. Blizzard likely didnt want to go through this route because it would complicate a complicated system even further and make it even more difficult to explain to players suffering matchmaking problems why their problems were occurring.
The alternative and best fix is to simply remove the Support classification from Tassadar and Tyrande. .At the time the original decision was made, Lt. Morales had not yet been released. If Tassadar had been moved to another classification, it would have left Starcraft with no Warriors and no supports. For Daily Quest purposes, I can totally understand why Blizzard didnt want to have this happen. Now that Starcraft has an alternative Support, however, we are left with a very simple and clean fix to the solution. Tyrande should become an Assassin. Tassadar should become a Specialist. Suddenly, they will fit into QM group comps in ways far more appropriate to their original design intent, and allow the balance team to tweak their numbers in ways that allow the characters to still feel like the Tassadar and Tyrande weve come to know and love.
Over time, subclassifications could and should be added to the game to highlight characters who fall in the grey area. Tyrael, Tassadar, Abathur, Tyrande, and perhaps ETC could all get the Support subclassification, while characters like Artanis and Sonya could get an Assassin subclass, and Arthas/Rexxar a Specialist subclass. This would help indicate to newer characters that the character isnt quite the full-on Tank/Assassin character they might be expecting at first glance.
I hope that this reaches and influences those at Blizzard making these decisions, because the current situation is not good, and will never work out in a positive fashion for the game or players. Youve made many good decisions, but have also been willing to take the L when your decisions havent worked out. Sadly, this is another time that you need to do so, but it would truly be for the betterment of the game.
