A few notes about Hero Creation

Just a few notes about heroes in perSonas, with regard to Hero Ideas...

General Notes:

1. You do not need to include icons for your abilities, or even numbers if you do not wish. The concept is always the most important thing.
2. Always imagine playing against the hero. Would you like to be mind controlled and forced to run into the enemy towers? This is the reason we don't use effects like this. But in terms of general balance, just be sure you're okay with someone else picking your hero to use against you.
3. Heroes should be able to stand alone. From experience, if you have a perSona that serves a specific function - benefiting your other perSona, for example, or countering one specific aspect of an enemy player's heroes - you will not be successful. You will do better if you have two heroes that you actively use.

Specific Notes:

1. If you really care about numbers, here are the relevant ones:

Attack range - typically 600 for an energy hero, less than 600 for an agility hero, and melee for a strength hero. This is not set in stone, however.
Movement speed - ranges from 350 to 360 typically.
Base armor - 0 on an energy hero, 1 on a ranged agility, 2 on a melee agility and 3 on a strength is fairly typical.
Base stats - Always add to 60.
Stat gain - Always adds to 6.5 per level.
Base damage - Factoring in primary attribute, this should be around 40-45.
Hit points - 15 * strength + 100
Shield points - 10 * energy + 50
Armor gain - 6 * agility

2. If you include numbers on your abilities, please make them SCALE NICELY. I am borderline-OCD when it comes to this.

Example of what not to do:

Deals 100 / 150 / 250 / 325 damage.

(Umm...100, then 150, then all of a sudden we jump to 250? And then we finish at 325? WHY?)

Cooldown: 30/30/20/20.

(Umm, what's wrong with 35/30/25/20? Or 32/28/24/20? Or 25/25/25/25 for that matter?)

See where I'm going with this?

3. Be careful of exponential scaling. Like, figure out what should scale and what shouldn't. If putting another point into your Thunderclap ability increases the damage dealt, lowers the cooldown, increases the slowing duration, increases the amount it slows, increases the AoE, and has an increasing chance to cause your enemies to gain an increasing miss chance for an increasing number of seconds...you get the point I think.

4. Keep the duration on disables fairly low. If they can swap out of it (e.g. Entangling Roots) then it's ok to have it last a bit longer, but something like a stun should be kept minimal.

5. Synergy. This is a tricky issue. You want the abilities to work well together. This doesn't mean they necessarily have to relate to each other (for example, Thrall's stun benefits his Wolves by giving them time to attack), however they can relate to each other (for example, Thrall's ultimate increases the damage of his Wolves). But you don't want forced synergy. This means you need ability A for ability B to be any good. Look at Thrall's ultimate. Is it still good even if you don't have Wolves? Yes, it is. So that's fine. However, if all of the effects were related to the Wolves, that wouldn't be good because if you didn't want to take the Summon Wolves ability you'd have a crappy ultimate. The one exception to forced synergy is if the ultimate is the ability you need to have for the other skills to have maximum effect. This is okay, because every hero should want to take his ultimate as often as possible.

Again, concepts are the most important thing. If you have a really good and unique idea for a spell, excellent. If you have a really good idea for an overall hero, great. You don't need to have all the details down. The most important things are synergy between skills (not forced synergy though), general role (is this hero a nuker? a late gamer? why would I want to pick this hero?), and theme. I think most hero suggestions are pretty solid on the theme, but for example, if you have a Water Elemental hero with a silence, I want to know why it has a silence. If you have an ability that silences and you think it should also give a chance to critical strike on attack, I want to know why those go together. Yeah, I'm picky. Rawr.

Excellent points Bengal.

There are some things I would like to add to keep in mind:

Hero design has some concepts and themes. Here's how to minimize heroes that are OP:

- Stuns are very strong. Any stun in this game is capable of turning the tides in a fight. Stuns are the only thing that prvent your enemy from swapping or attacking or moving or casting spells. This is why stuns are usually 1. Aimed, and can miss, 2. Low duration, 3. Minimal damage. Some good examples of this are: Cerauno's Telekinesis, WarChief's stun, both do low dmg and have a good chance to miss. This is also why hex is an ultimate.

- Instantaneous damage. 4v4s can get ridiculous when you have multiple heroes with instantaneous damage potential. A bad example was the previously imbalanced disruptor, who could unleash close to 1k+ damage instantly if he played his cards right. Other heroes that used to be very powerful had AoE versions that were very powerful 4v4 fights, including earth panda and shadow sorc. It's a good idea to keep heroes from doing too much too quickly; a hero like DotA's Lina would never fly in perSonas. We try to make sure our heroes keep it minimal on the instant damage, and, if they can do a lot of damage instantly, it's because they needed to be skillful in pulling it off. For example, Ceraunomancer has a lightning charged bolt that CAN do 450 dmg, a stun that does 160, and an ult that can do up to what, 700? But, notice, charged bolt is difficult to hit, telekinesis can be juked, AND he takes a lot of damage for casting his ulti.

- Escapes: make sure people who have escapes have a good reason to have one. We put them on heroes that typically are weaker and fragile. Exceptions to this would be like Earth Panda or Minotaur, but their escapes are not nearly as versatile or fluid. Please dont pick an escape on a hero just because it's cool and fun.

- Heals: Heals are very powerful in perSonas, especially instantaneous ones that can heal mid battle. Make sure if you let your hero get heals, that he is not superbly powerful at escaping and dealing damage in symmetry. For example, the shadow hunter can heal, but his heal is aoe over time. His leap is a decent escape maneuver, and he has no immense damage potential.

- Farm potential: Heroes that have mass farming potential should be weaker in other ways. For example, our BGH and our Shadow Sorcerer are very good at farming, but neither have a heal, a true disable, or an escape. But they're excellent in farming lots of creeps quickly. This lets them buy items to help them recover their weaknesses.

- Late game scalability: DO NOT GIVE HEROES THAT SCALE EXPONENTIALLY ALL OF THE ABOVE. For example, the ninja has a great escape maneuver. That's about it. His instantaneous damage is limited to his escape move, and he has no heal or excellent way to farm. Soul Troll is another great late gamer, but his only real asset is the ability to heal through regeneration and attacks; otherwise he has no real disables himself (except wisely placed traps) and has absolutely no escape (rampage really wont cut it).


Keep these principles in mind when designing your hero and see whether they have too much of something that make them just simply TOO good. Shadow Hunter is probably my favorite simply because he can do everything, but doesn't do anything particularly well. He's being nerfed in B3 simply for that reason alone.