Heroes of the Storm Giving Out Free Characters to Celebrate Next Update

With Heroes of the Storm's big StarCraft-themed event almost upon us, Blizzard will be handing out free characters starting in September to mark the occasion.

The freebies will be offered once the next big patch goes live, which is scheduled for September 13. Starting then, you can claim your freebie by simply logging into the game. A pop-up notification will ask you to make your choice from a select group of characters.

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To start with, Blizzard will offer Tyrande, Anub'arak, and Thrall for free. If you own one or more of those, there are three others that will take their place in this order: Nazeebo, Sonya, and Uther. In other words, if you own one character, Nazeebo will be available in their place; if you own two, Nazeebo and Sonya will be available; etc.

Blizzard said that all of these characters cost the same amount, so you're free to choose whom you're most interested in playing as, not the one that would cost you the most to purchase otherwise. That's actually not currently true--Tyrande costs 7,000 gold right now, but the image accompanying this announcement shows her price as 4,000 gold, so a price drop is apparently on the way soon.

In the event that you own all six characters, Blizzard will simply give you the amount of gold--4,000--any of them would cost to purchase. That alone is enough to pick up two characters from the 2,000 gold pool (which includes the likes of Raynor and Valla) or one of the other 4,000 gold characters (like Kerrigan or Tychus). Other characters cost as much as 10,000 gold (or 15,000 during the period immediately after a new one is released).

Also new for Heroes of the Storm are patch notes for the current test version of the game. By logging into the Public Test Realm, you can check out the next character, Alarak, and the two maps coming as part of the upcoming StarCraft event. It also introduces the new Overwatch-style awards system and a wide variety of balance changes, all of which you can read about here.

We recently spoke with Blizzard about the new StarCraft-themed content on the way to HotS, as well as Overwatch's Zarya. The developer also last week shared the rationale behind a potentially significant change to mount speed.