Health Globes Just Got Way More Important in Heroes of the Storm

A new Heroes of the Storm patch is now available that increases the importance of regeneration globes, adds a character, and provides players with a bigger pool of characters to choose from in some modes, among many other things.

Gul'dan is the newest hero addition. The Warcraft character is an Assassin who focuses on sustained damage and can Fear enemies, causing them to scatter. Following his release, the next character on the way is Diablo's Auriel.

Also in this patch, Blizzard makes some substantial adjustments to regen globes. They now restore 12 percent of your maximum health over five seconds (versus 6.24 percent over four seconds) and eight percent of your mana over five seconds (versus 32 mana over four seconds). This makes globes significantly more valuable; you'll want to ensure you're grabbing them even if you don't choose a talent that requires collecting them. Just as importantly, you'll need to prevent the enemy team from grabbing theirs.

"Thank you for all your discussion and feedback on our recent Health sustain post!" Blizzard said in the patch notes. "We are still heavily evaluating a lot of it but wanted to get the first round of changes in. Internally, we enjoyed the increased importance on regeneration globes and have cleaned up the system a bit. With a larger importance, denying enemies their globes in lane has a much larger impact."

Healing wells are also being adjusted, with the goal being to "add a larger impact to the moment" you use one. Health regeneration is roughly the same (40 percent of your max health over 20 seconds, down from 41 percent) while the mana recovery is bumped up to 30 percent over 20 seconds from 20 percent. The cooldown has been increased from 100 seconds to 120.

Another change comes with the damage dealt by minions. Ranged, melee, and wizard minions all deal 50 percent more damage to structures; catapult minions' attack and sight range has been increased, and they'll now focus on dealing damage to structures (rather than attacking minions). Blizzard explained that it wants "escorting minions to towns to be more impactful, such that they can really start to do some damage if left unattended." The idea is that they'll now do more than just soak up ammo from towers.

The new update also makes some major changes to characters. Zagara has been completely reworked, and a number of characters' talent trees have been updated to ensure they have multiple viable builds. These include Kerrigan, Kael'thas, Lunara, Azmodan, Brightwing and Abathur.

Other changes of note include making Bribe work differently (capturing a full camp with bribes makes it respawn faster) and increasing Garden Terrors' Overgrowth damage to structures to help speed up matches. Additionally, when getting ready for Quick Play, you'll be notified when queue times are longer than usual with some characters. When you get this message, you can choose to have your character auto-selected, which will reward you with double experience.

Finally, Blizzard has kicked off an event of sorts providing players with more characters to play as. From now until August 23, the first 30 characters added to the game are free to play for everyone in Training and Versus AI modes. You can see everyone included here, and inspect the full patch notes here.