Dear Bigg,

What's your thoughts on the powercreep in Heroes of the Storm? Orphea, like Mal'ganis, has launched in a broken state, packing mobility, burst, sustain and everything inbetween. She pretty much makes 90% of the Assassin roster redundant. Is it a concern for you?

-Geggis

While I agree with how strong Mal'Ganis is, I cannot agree with Orphea being considered broken. Boasting a 46% win rate isn't quite what I would consider strong, although it is early in her release. She does a lot in terms of sustain, mobility and burst, but she has a few flaws. While she does a lot of different things, she doesn't particularly excel at anything. Most team compositions would much rather have one Hero who excels at killing heroes such as Genji, Hanzo, or Raynor, and another hero for waveclear or merc camps such as Fenix, Hanzo, or Jaina. Orphea doesn't fit well into every team composition. Another major issue with Orphea is her fairly long cast times. Her mobility is unreliable due to requiring to land a line attack with a 0.5 second cast time, making it challenging to land against skilled players. Even on a target suffering crowd control, she has to put herself in harms way, having to Shadow Waltz into melee to Chomp, requiring 1.165 seconds to deal her burst. She then requires another 0.5 seconds to Shadow Waltz back out assuming you were not CC'd during this entire combo.

So to answer your question, power creep is certainly occurring as new heroes are added and old heroes are reworked. However, it just seems to be very, very slow, as not all new Heroes or reworks are stronger than the average Hero. As far as Orphea is concerned, I don't think she is much of a problem. Her weaknesses far outshine her strengths.

Max "Bigg" Hoskin is ranked #5 Grandmaster in Heroes of the Storm. He spends all his free time playing the game, and produces our Mind of a Master series. Have a Heroes of the Storm question you'd like Bigg to answer? Drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or the comments section of our Tier List and Bigg will make every effort to answer it!