Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard’s direct competitor to League of Legends and DotA2, is getting completely overhauled for Heroes of the Storm 2.0.
Most of the changes will be from the back end and the cosmetic side of things, keeping the gameplay intact. The biggest changes come to the progression system, but Heroes will also be getting its own form of Loot Chests, a giant crafting system, and hero specific load outs.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZCVxc-zkY]
Currently, in Heroes of the Storm there are two things players contribute XP to: a player level, and hero levels for each individual character. Your player level caps at 40 though, and most people reached that cap long ago. Hero levels went to 20, with a master skin unlocking at level 10, and other rewards like skin colors unlocked along the way. In 2.0 there will no longer be a cap for player level, and it will just be an added total of all of your hero levels. Every time you gain a now universal player level, you gain a loot chest, which can contain a ton of new items. As you hit certain hero levels, you will get loot boxes that contain items specific to that hero too! While it might sound daunting that experience will determine how many loot boxes you can get, the experience required to level up will cap out at player level 12, meaning there won’t be such a huge grind between levels.
Loot boxes mean that there will be a giant influx of loot as 2.0 drops. Of course, there is loot quality attached to this loot, featuring common, rare, epics and legendaries. What makes this exciting though, is that you can unlock Heroes this way, meaning you don’t have to save up gold or pay real world cash to unlock every character, you can just simply play the game. Other unlockables include voice lines for each character, announcer voices, emojis, mounts, banners, portraits, skins, and sprays. If you end up getting duplicates through this system, they get destroyed and turned into new currency shards. Shards can be used to forge specific cosmetic items, meaning you won’t always be at the mercy of the random loot boxes if there is something you absolutely need. Heroes can still be purchased with gold, but just having the option of possibility getting a hero in a loot box feels great, as a player’s collection will keep growing in unexpected ways.
In addition to all of this, the next hero added to the game will be the Amazon from Diablo 2.
This update is pretty robust, and is available on the PTR now. Heroes of the Storm is free to play, and with this update, it looks to be getting a nice shot in the arm with Heroes of the Storm 2.0.
