Blizzard's free-to-play MOBA Heroes of the Storm sets itself apart from competitors like League of Legends and DOTA 2 in a number of ways, one of them being mounts. Every character in the game (well, almost every character) has access to one, and when riding a mount, player movement speed is greatly increased.
That will still be the case moving forward, but that movement speed boost is about to receive a significant downgrade. As detailed in a lengthy forum post, game designer Alex Neyman explains that the movement speed bonus from mounts is being decreased from 40 percent to 30 percent. It doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a pretty big deal for serious competitors.
The goals for doing so, Neyman writes, are three-fold: slowing down two to four man early game gank (see: ambush) squads on bigger maps, making map wide positioning matter more and making recognition of the enemy team's location on the map more significant.
When it comes to slowing down early ganks, Neyman writes that with the changes "you can still gank, it just won't always be as effective, and therefore you'll need to make harder decisions on whether it's worth it or not."
On the subject of map wide positioning, slower mount speed will "encourage more interesting strategic choices, forcing you to choose which of the minor objectives (like Mercenaries or Minion waves) are important, or potentially split up your team to get multiple done at once and still reach a map event on time."
When it comes to the location of the enemy team, having a slower movement speed allows for players to more easily predict enemy locations in the fog of war, "which, ultimately, rewards better play and mastery of the game."
Neyman says Heroes of the Storm will still be a game that is focused on big 5v5 team fights.
"We think that we'll all still be enjoying those epic 5v5 brawls we've all come to love," he writes. "We just might split up one or two more times between the big fights so that we can get all the minor objectives we'd like before the next big team event will start."
The changes will arrive on the game's public test realm next week. Blizzard also recently announced a number of new heroes, mounts and skins coming to Heroes of the Storm in the near future, all based on the developer's Starcraft game series. You can read more about that here.
