Pretty much this. Every spec can be viable if Blizzard would find any role for it. For example Shadow Priests were providing great mana regen to others in Wrath, Shamans were enabling Arms Warriors in PvE with Windfury Totem etc. There was synergy and role for everyone while now top comps are based on damage you can deal and how tanky you are.
And about MOBA to compare how well is IceFrog balancing Dota compared to Blizzard - only 1 hero wasn’t picked during last year’s TI - Techies out of 115. Why? Because every hero has it’s role.
You misunderstood part of what i said. The gem in their hands was wc3 and dota before it became a proper game. They could have acted at that moment and create THE moba.
Now as to why HoTS ‘failed’, clearly because it showed up too late. For example to any of my friends I talked about it, they said that they had invested too much on LoL/Dota. Add the fact that those 2 games have huge e-sports scenes, it’s hard to get in between.
This argument is flawed and people who wave it around dont realise what it actually means. For every game where someone carried the team, there were 4 people whose performance was irrelevant.
I understand it’s flashier for tournaments to have skilful plays from one player, over a well coordinated engagement, but personally i find it more fulfilling.
Really HoTS community and developers was GREAT. Literally the best devs.
Still, for HoTS to succeed it had to surpass a level of popularity taking players from LoL and Dota. Blizz had to invest a lot of money to do it, but they were not willing
ive asked around and ppl get reply from GM that arena weekly for 1800 can contain 445 azerite and 435 non azerite. Theres a screenshot of that reply somewhere on internet.
It’s not that their performance was irrelevant. The fact was that Immortal (our rank 1 player) can carry games up till ancient (Elite) but he won’t be able to do it in Immortal or Divine (our glad bracket). And by carrying game I don’t mean picking late game hero getting 6 sloted and 1v5 enemy team but providing good vision so your lower elo teammates can farm safely or just saving them in teamfights with Glimmer Cape of Force Staff. The only thing I can say about HotS is that it has the best design healing heroes. Neither Dota nor LoL can be compared in this and also HotS introduced talents that Dota 2 took from them. However as MOBA game HotS isn’t attractive because it lacks economy - all that Dota 2 and LoL are about.