Diablo, the new Battlegrounds hero, is not performing as expected. Blizzard is hot fixing it after only three days. What went wrong?
The yearly Hallow’s End event brought some spice to battlegrounds with the temporary visit of Diablo. Despite the initial hype for its unique hero power, Diablo’s presence in Battlegrounds didn’t fulfill the expectations. Not even three days have passed, and a hotfix came to rescue Diablo from doom.
Diablo’s hero power is something unique to Battlegrounds. It was difficult to understand how it worked the initial announcement. Every four rounds, the whole lobby fights against Diablo’s Warband plus The Lord of Terror, as if it were a raid. The Lord of Terror is a minion that increases stats starting at 3-3 in turn four. If players manage to kill this special minion, players get a Treasure, but for every time The Lord of Terror survives, the Diablo player gets two treasures.
Diablo's problem
In theory, it’s an interesting game experience. The Battlegrounds streamer RDU talk about his thoughts on Diablo on his Youtube channel.
“I expected it to be mad crazy. The whole lobby is played around diablo. If you're Diablo, you're having a lot of fun just killing people and destroying the lobby. If you're playing against diablo, you're afraid. You're like, “oh my god, I hope I don't fight diablo”. Every single four turns shaking in your boots if you're gonna beat diablo or not before you have your epic encounter. What happened? Diablo was unplayable, and that was kind of a turn-off.”
As we mentioned, the Diablo concept is revolutionary for Battlegrounds, but it doesn’t seem to work in practice. The Lord of Terror ended up being a week minion that players can easily kill in close encounters, or that they can snipe with some luck. Then, if you can’t beat most players on turns 4 and 8, you are giving away your hero power to the rest of the lobby.
HsReplay stats show that Diablo is, in fact, one of the worst Battlegrounds heroes, sitting comfortably in Tier 4, the standard for unplayable characters.
Other Battlegrounds popular content creators also spoke their voices with similar thoughts. The common topic was that Diablo seemed to have little impact on Battlegrounds due to its low power level.
“One player in every lobby right now is offered diablo, but you might not think so because there's not a lot of players playing diablo anymore. The reason is Diablo is spectacularly terrible.”
How to fix Diablo in Battlegrounds
As we mentioned, there is an agreement between expert opinions and stats that Diablo´s problem in Battlegrounds is its power level. Even though there will always be concerns about overpowered heroes, RDU shares an interesting take about buffing Diablo: “I think, if they would make diablo just automatically win every single lobby it's played for the next week, it would be a better event than it is now with diablo being borderline unplayable and bottom 10 winrate heroes in the game.”
Due to the nature of his temporary presence, being a dominant character would be less of a problem than its current state. Fortunately, the Battlegrounds’ dev team has already announced that Diablo’s power level will be buffed.
The hotfix announced in a blog post states that the base stats of The Lord of Terror will increase from 3-3 to 5-5. This apparent slight change will make Diablo win more consistently its first epic battle in round 4. Consequently, with more treasures available, the hero will be able to snowball to stand ground in the turn 8 battle and the late game.
When something new and special enters the Battlegrounds, it should have a meaningful impact on the game. Darkmoon Fair prize event from 2020 did make every game different, creating unique experiences. With Diablo entering Battlegrounds this year, casuals who play one game a day and tryhards that hit the tavern multiple times a day saw little change in the game. The fall in pick rate due to its power level started to kill the exciting and innovative experience Diablo should have brought to Battlegrounds.
The hotfix is already live, and I hope Diablo makes a comeback. While we find out, stay tuned to Esports.gg for more Hearthstone news and updates. See you next time, in the tavern.