Since the latest release I’ve had several in game issues occur:
- Not loading any Heroes whatsoever, meaning I can’t play. Only way I’ve found to fix that was a full clean install.
- No sound (game doesn’t even recognize my output devices no matter what I do). I have yet to find a solution for this. I’ve tried scan and repair, updating drivers, full clean install, restarting, changing in game options. Absolutely nothing helps, the game just straight up doesn’t connect to audio devices.
- Occasionally the game freezes just as a match starts and doesn’t reconnect unless I force close the game and restart. When I reconnect I then always get the chat bug, where chat doesn’t work.
HotS has always had a few minor hiccups here and there, but since this latest patch most of the time I can’t even play the game because there’s always something wrong
I also have the sound issue. No output device recognized for game sounds, in sound settings only “default” is listed and nothing else.
Voice chat works fine and recognize output and input devices.
I managed to fix it by running the game as administrator.
It is highly likely that your operating system might have some corrupted files or registry errors, especially since the game uses a very classic installation method. To verify this, try installing a few other newly released games—if you experience similar issues there as well, the problem is definitely within your OS.
The most efficient solution here would be switching to a more stable system. I ran into almost identical problems myself after upgrading to Windows 11, and I eventually had to roll back to Windows 10. It is currently much more stable for many legacy and classic applications, saving you dozens of hours that you would otherwise spend digging for complex fixes and troubleshooting.
I am currently trying to raise my forum Trust Level to help users with technical issues and push for positive updates. Since good feedback often gets buried due to low forum ranks, we really need to support each other’s topics.
Crucial note for everyone: If you want to find and support my other posts, please do not do it through my profile history page. Blizzard’s forum system has a major limitation: likes and engagement given directly from a user’s profile activity stream do not count toward Trust Level progress. To support me properly, please find my topics manually in the main feed or look them up using the forum search bar. Let’s help each other out!