Let's Talk About Lt. Morales - Rework Proposal by DIG Bakery

Let's talk about Lt. Morales
by DIG Bakery (August 2016)

Lt. Morales (henceforth referred to as 'Medic’) is a very divisive hero, not only in terms of her power level, but also her design choices. Let’s look at the core values of Medic’s kit, open a conversation about interactivity in video games and lastly provide a proposal for a kit rework.

Medic's Design Fantasy and Core Values

First, let's start off with defining Medic's fantasy. This fantasy, and the core values below, are my interpretation of what Blizzard set out to do with her character and kit when they were designing the hero. Having studied Riot’s champion design process in the past, I took a similar model and retrofitted it onto Medic.

When you're playing Medic, you want to be stood at the back of the team, making sure your whole team is full HP, and providing them with the heals that they need. The enemy team will try to kill you, but through aiding your allies, them peeling for you, and your skill, you hope to survive the enemies’ dive.

This is easily the most difficult part to define, as it is often subjective, but this fantasy is very close to that of the medic unit within StarCraft, and applies well (but not perfectly) to the current implementation.

Now we'll take a look at what I’m going to call her core values. These are entirely game design related, but should fit well with the character, and stick closely to the fantasy defined above. 

• She must have the highest single target sustain healing in the game.
• To be viable, she needs a way to 'burst heal’ or otherwise mitigate short periods of high damage.
• She needs limited options to self peel, but should mainly rely on allies.
• Her skill floor should be very low, but there should be a respectable skill ceiling.
• She likes to amplify her teammates.
• She should be a situational pick, and should have clear counterplay.
• She must die if she is successfully dived, meaning...
• She cannot have a movement ability.

The current implementation of Medic ticks every box above, although some not entirely satisfactory. So what are the issues?

Medic's Issues 

While she is very hard to play at a high level (due to the skill required to position her properly) there is very little mechanical nuance to her kit, which often makes her boring for competitively minded players. There are also a severe lack of impactful choices to be made - you Heal the target taking damage, you Safeguard the enemies’ burst damage, and while there are choices to be made with her Grenade is some cases, most involve waiting for an enemy's’ movement ability to be cast, or saving it for a form of interrupt.

This ties in very closely to one of the major talking points I wanted to explore - interactivity in video games. Interactivity is the crux of video games, it what makes them the medium that they are, different from books or films. It's also where all of the challenge comes from, how well can I control my character, what is the best way to build my character? I don't think there's any argument that this is where a huge portion of the fun comes from as well, including fantasies, personalisation and the game mechanics themselves. This kind of interactivity is what the talent system in Heroes is designed to give to the player, and this is where Medic's talents fail.

Well designed talent trees have a wealth of possibilities, and should not only be designed to vary based on the game, personal preference and power level, but they should change the way that the Hero is played. All but two of Medic's talents do not change the way the Hero is played at all, and even those talents (GRENADE IMPACT and Second Opinion) are not taken every game, and represent a minor change in gameplay. To understand why Medic's talents are lacklustre, we need to look at her kit.

Healing Beam is a very dangerous ability to create talents for, as it already is very hard to damage through, and if a team has no way to dive the Medic, a fully buffed up Q would make it nigh impossible for the enemy team to do anything. While Safeguard has a similar issue, the fact that it is a cooldown based ability does make it much safer to design talents for. Despite this, there are still not many. Her final ability is incredibly easy to create talents for, as there is very little danger in a Medic dealing higher damage, and while CC must be considered it is still safe.

Fun mechanical fact: Bioshield will only start applying the shield at exactly 100% HP, even if they have 1 HP missing, the shield will not start to apply, and the beam will instead heal that 1 damage, and not start applying the shield until the next tick. Any form of DoT in the game, along with any attack from a minion or mercenary, will delay the shield from applying, resulting in a catastrophic mana and time waste to get the shield setup - which is probably the main reason it is not viable. My solution to this would be for the shield to start applying at ~98% HP, which would in the vast majority of cases make no difference, but fix the issues above.

This creates a puzzling situation where the current optimal Medic build involves taking 2 or 3 out of 4 or 5 (This is due to Cleanse, but that's a topic for a different article) talents for her damaging ability, while having the other choices being a self-defense passive or mana cost reduction, and a buff to her Healing Beam or Spell shield). To change this it really does seem like a kit rework is necessary.

Taking Stock

First, let's set out what we hope to accomplish with this kit rework: 

• Add more gameplay choices to the player in skirmishes and fights
• Give the player talent options that change the play style
• Maintain the skill floor, while raising the skill ceiling
• Continue to obey the core values
• Continue to fit the character 

Now let's go over her current kit and see what we need to keep and what we can work with.

Q: Healing Beam
This is her primary heal, and fits the fantasy, the character, and the core values. We cannot change this.

W: Safeguard
This skill is required to fill the burst healing checkbox, and does it in a much more interesting and interactive skill than an active that increases her Healing Beam by 30% or something similar. This is a good skill, and should have a place in her kit.

E: Displacement Grenade
Displacement Grenade is Medic's self peel and only damaging ability. We can very easily swap this ability out, but would require work for a new ability and new talents.

R1: Stim Drone
Stim Drone is an ability that fits with the character, and our core value of buffing allies, but we definitely have some room to work with this one.

R2: Medivac
Medivac is again, an ability that fits the character and does work with her core values, but we also do have the opportunity to change this.

D: Caduceus Reactor
Due to Medic having no tool to heal herself, this trait really is required. It is quite boring though, and isn't very interactive.

Kit Rework Proposal

My proposal for a kit rework is as follows: 

1: Safeguard
D: Caduceus Reactor
Q: Healing Beam
W: Stim Drone (obviously vastly reduced cooldown and effectiveness)
E: Displacement Grenade
R1: ?
R2: Medivac

The R1 ability is not important to the core issues we are tackling, and as such I think Blizzard would be the best ones to design a new Heroic. If I was to design the ability then I would go for something like 'Particle Beam’ which would act like a reverse Healing Beam, causing considerable damage but it cannot be cast at the same time as Healing Beam.

Let's look to see if this rework accomplishes the goals we set out above. 

• Add more gameplay choices to the player in skirmishes and fights

We have more skills in this proposal, but also there is more thought that can be put into when to use Stim Drone. The aim is for one per fight, with the cooldown coming back up towards the end to allow for a second to cleanup or turn. 

• Give the player talent options that change the play style

This is the main reason why I think Stim Drone needs to be on her base kit. In a game with strong auto attack damage Medic will be able to talent into Stim Drone. Games where the enemy team has low damage, Medic will be able to talent into Stim Drone or Displacement Grenade. Other games, when she is paired with mages or the enemy team is really quite scary, she can talent into Displacement Grenade or Safeguard. This leaves space for personal preference and still on a per game basis. 

• Maintain the skill floor, while raising the skill ceiling

Medic is just as easy to pick up and play as before, and her trait being the reverse of Tyrande’s Mark should feel intuitive. The extra ability should increase the skill ceiling in and of itself, but the fact that it's Stim Drone gives not only choices of who to use it on and when to use it, but the option to talent into it. 

The proposal successfully fulfilled our goals, and looks like it would be an exciting kit rework to test.

 

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the discussion, and the rework proposal. I'm always hungry to learn more about game design, and of course improve my understanding of it, and would greatly appreciate any feedback that you guys could give on my perspective of game design. 

Credits:
Antihero and Linked - In the hotel lobby at Gamescom, Linked and Antihero and I had a conversation that lead us to this rework proposal. Thanks to them!
Heyoka - He made sure all the things that didn’t make sense were caught, and helped me improve my writing! And is also the best, in general.