- Acting for Two: Overlapping with some Role Reprise:
- Laura Bailey does both Valla and Jaina.
- Michael McConnohie does Lich King Arthas, Uther, Xul, and Kel'Thuzad. With the addition of Deathwing, it is now possible to have an entire team voiced by Michael McConnohie, and if that wasn't enough, KT and Arthas also have announcer packs.
- Patrick Seitz does Crown Prince Arthas, Artanis, Garrosh, and Cho.
- Steve Blum does Abathur, The Butcher, Rexxar, and Dehaka.
- Grey DeLisle does Nova and Li-Ming.
- Chris Metzen does both Thrall and Varian.
- Matthew Mercer does both Rehgar and Ragnaros.
- Paul Nakauchi does both Malthael and Hanzo.
- Michael J. Gough does Tassadar, Mal'Ganis and Deckard Cain.
- The French version somehow manages to top this by having Guillaume Orsat dub Illiran, Ka-Beleth and Medivh, meaning that you can have Guillaume Orsat fighting Guillaulme Orsat while ordering Guillaume Orat to help him.
- Ascended Fanon: Three examples.
- After much clamoring from the fans, Blizzard announced the Azmodunk Legendary Skin
on 10 March 2016. - People have been making jokes about "worker unit" heroes in the game since release. Cue the appearance of Probius, Protoss probe on 3 March 2017.
- At BlizzCon 2018, a Janitor Leoric skin was announced. Keep in mind that there have been about a bazillion fanart renditions of him as a janitor...for the past two years! Including the version that won an official Blizzard art contenst. "We did it reddit!" indeed.
- After much clamoring from the fans, Blizzard announced the Azmodunk Legendary Skin
- Author's Saving Throw: Blizzard, following the release of Maiev, announced they were slowing down the release rate of heroes and would be focusing more on gameplay improvements and reworks for existing heroes, with the first of the latter being Medivh and Sonya. This was met with mixed sentiments, with some being fine in the shift in focus for varying reasons, while those who are largely attracted to the game by the influx of new heroes were understandably irritated. Original responses to the announcement tended to skew towards the positive, but as the weeks passed without any teasing of a new hero to follow on from Maiev, opinions definitely began to sour. Eventually however, the Medivh/Sonya reworks arrived along with the well-received STORM skin set, and it was announced that a new StarCraft hero would be unveiled to coincide with the franchise's 20th anniversary. Said hero being the long-demanded Fenix DEFINITELY helped. In addition to this, it was also announced that an 'unusual' hero would be revealed for April, restoring the fanbase to its usual state of arguing over WHO the hero should be, as opposed to the considerably more negative 'when.' Reactions to this mystery hero being the popular/meme suggestion Deckard Cain were mostly positive, especially since he proved to be a dedicated healer.
- Celebrity Voice Actor: El Guapo, the announcer of Nexomania, is voiced by Arturo "El Rudo" Rivera, a famous lucha libre commentator.
- Development Hell: The first concept for Heroes of the Storm was Blizzard Dota, shown in 2010, as a Mod for Starcraft II. It was shown again as Blizzard All-Stars in 2011, then there was little to no news about it (save for the reassuring news that it'd been scrapped and reworked twice) until November 2013. COMING SOONISH™ indeed.
- Dueling Works: The game was made to be Blizzard's answer to Dota 2 and League of Legends. Unfortunately, despite the weight of all Blizzard's franchises, established fandom and development/marketing budget behind it, it never really had a chance at standing up to either game, falling to a very distant 4th place in the MOBA genre behind Smite. As of 2022 it's effectively dead.
- Dummied Out:
- The Mega Enforcer didn't fit into how the new Hanamura Temple worked, so it got the axe instead.
- A few UI elements for Selendis exist in the game files, which were datamined from one of the last patches the game ever got. In a Reddit post, a former dev confirmed that Selendis was going to be the hero following Hogger before development was abruptly cancelled.
- Executive Meddling: Blizzard's decision to scale back support for the game is commonly seen as a result of Activision's efforts to cut costs throughout the company, something supported by Blizzard's layoffs around that time. Since it was the least popular of Blizzard's core active games, and the one with the least amount of revenue that could be made, it was easier to scale it back.
- Lying Creator: After Blizzcon 2015, Blizzard seemed to emphasize that there wouldn't be a specialist for awhile... only to announce that Xul (Necromancer) would be a melee specialist. However, by the time Xul actually reached the Nexus (1 March 2016), nearly a year passed since the last specialist's arrival (Sylvanas, released on 24 March 2015).
- The Other Darrin:
- Darin De Paul takes over for Steve Blum as the voice of Anub'arak. This was most likely done because Blum's voice for Anub'arak is very similar to his voice for Abathur, who was already in the game.
- Li Li is voiced by Kim Mai Guest instead of her World of Warcraft actress Lauren Tom.
- In the Latin American version, all the characters from other Blizzard's games dubbed in Latin American Spanish had different voice actors, as the dub was made in Argentina, while previous games were dubbed in other Latin American countries like Colombia (World of Warcraft and StarCraft) or Mexico (Diablo III). Oddly enough, this was averted with both Tracer and Cain, whose voice actors are Mexicans.
- When Fenix joined the roster in his first appearance since Brood War, he retained his Other Darrin voice actor, Marc Graue, that his robotic copy, Talandar, received in Legacy of the Void, making it a weird, semi-retroactive example of this.
- Kerrigan gets her third voice actress; Glynnis Talken-Campbell, who voiced her in the original game, was replaced by Tricia Helfer for the second, and here is played by Vanessa Marshall.
- Whitemane was originally voiced by Kath Soucie in vanilla WoW before being replaced by Grey DeLisle in Mists of Pandaria, and in this game is voiced by Erica Lindbeck.
- Even original characters aren't exempt from this. When Battlefield of Eternity was added to the game, Ilarian was clearly voiced by Jonathan Adams, sounding uncannily like his voice for Tyrael. Perhaps to stave off confusion between the two characters, Ilarian was given a new voice by the time Infernal Shrines was added.
- Role Reprise: Damn near everyone is brought back by Blizzard to voice their characters, especially even despite being mostly an artist, Samwise Didier returns to voice Samuro, one of the Blademasters that he voiced in Warcraft III. Blizzard, however, tries to avoid Acting for Two whenever possible, so, for instance, Steve Blum just does Abathur and Rexxar only, not Anub'arak (which created a Broken Base). However...
- This is especially relevant in the Latin American version with Tracer, since they used her Mexican voice actress, rather than using an Argentinian one for her.
- Both played straight and subverted with Fenix. For details, see The Other Darrin and What Could Have Been.
- Notably, Michael J. Gough returns to the role of Tassadar, whom he voiced in StarCraft I before being replaced by Michael Dorn for the sequel.
- Screwed by the Network: In December 2018, Blizzard announced that they would officially be scaling back development on the game as well as canceling all related e-sports events. While Blizzard did promise that new content will still be made for the game, it will be significantly reduced. Many fans have taken this to mean that Blizzard has all but given up on the game and is simply leaving it on life support. This is evident when the amount of heroes released in 2019 amounted to around only five, in comparison to the nearly ten the previous year.
- Throw It In!: Blizzard's goal is for each Hero to have multiple viable playstyles, and when they see a Talent being picked overwhelmingly, they will typically Nerf it and/or buff the alternative choices... but not always. In February 2018 they solved an overwhelming-Talent problem for Greymane by 1) removing itnote entirely and 2) ...incorporating it into the ability, so that Greymane has its effects 100% of the time. They've also done this with a few other talents, such as Double Crossnote for Alarak, Chain Bomb for Kael'thasnote , Zealot Charge for Artanis (as well as an autoattack range increase) note Snipe Masternote for Nova, The Master's Touchnote on Medivh, and You Want Axe?note on Zul'jin.
- Trolling Creator:
- Somehow. So yeah, Nova is pretty hot, so fans do clamor for a summer skin for her, maybe her in a swimsuit or bikini. Blizzard's response? "Here, have Bikini Stitches!" Cue fans desperately looking for Brain Bleach.
- The identity of the last two yet-to-be-named members of the original Overwatch Strike team was a long dormant mystery among its fanbase. Naturallly, when Ana reminiscing about them in her Stop Poking Me! quote, their name were given as redacted and redacted.Ana: I just love this photo of Fareeha and me with the original Overwatch team. It brings back memories of times with Jack, and Gabriel, and *beep* [Redacted]. Oh, and I could never forget *beep* [Redacted].
- The Hanamura Showdown cinematic, which introduced D.Va to the game despite the buildup suggesting several other options with Deathwing being the top contender, quickly became infamous among the fanbase for the twist. So naturally, Blizzard used a screenshot of the infamous claw mark on the door to tease Deathwing's reveal on the official Twitter. Judging by the comments, it actually threw people for a loop, leading to a lot of players expecting a D.Va rework.
- What Could Have Been:
- For a while, the profile screen included a "Coming Soon" notice underneath "Versus AI" alongside the level and league rank information, indicating some kind of statistic tracking for Versus AI matches was in the works. However, nothing came of it; the space was eventually filled with the win stats for Heroes Brawl. The profile screen was later redesigned to include more detailed statistics, including for AI matches, but in a method that wouldn't have fit in the original space anyway.
- As noted in this blogpost, Thrall's old kit consisted of Chain Heal, Earthbind Totem, Lightning Shield and Bloodlust, which are all shaman-themed abilities, but fit a Support hero more, which is not what they envisioned Thrall to be. So instead of discarding the kit, they looked up the lore to find another shaman and found Rehgar.
- Bill Roper, Fenix's original voice actor, expressed interest with his reveal in reprising the character. Blizzard re-using Marc Graue, the voice of Talandar from Legacy of the Void, seems to indicate their decision to use Graue's voice as the canon depiction of the original voice of Fenix. It should be noted however, that there may be other reasons they didn't contact Roper (such as his being involved in Blizzard North's messy split with the parent company).
- Each of the three prongs on the game's logo were meant to represent Blizzard's three major franchises, but the release of Overwatch made this The Artifact. Blizzard actually briefly experimented◊ with a new four-pronged logo, but it never made it past a few early marketing images for Heroes 2.0 and there are no high-rez images of what the Overwatch prong would've looked like.
- For a long time, Reinhardt was intended to be the next Overwatch hero to follow Hanzo. There is a more-or-less working version of his kit without anything else finished, but his development was put on pause as the team had a hard time making his shield function in a satisfactory way. Ultimately, Mei was designed specifically to fill the missing role of an Overwatch tank.
- In a Destructoid interview shortly before Hogger's release, the game director mentioned that Arcturus Mengsk, Blackthorne, and "another familiar face" were all in development. Sadly, with the game's budget being slashed even harder in March of 2021, it's unlikely that any of those heroes will see the light of day, itself confirmed the following year when it was basically made a dead game in terms of support. Years later, another dev confirmed that the "familiar face" was to be Selendis.
- In January of 2024, a former dev revealed in a Reddit thread that the team was working on a rework for Arthas (generally considered an underwhelming hero with an outdated kit) before development was cancelled. The rework was meant to solidify him as more of an offlane bruiser instead of his awkward spot as a main tank, with the main changes being Frostmourne stealing the souls of enemies to power up Arthas' trait via a baseline quest, and Army of the Dead now letting Arthas gather the corpses of minions and heroes to raise as ghouls rather than just being a normal cooldown.
Hero Release Order
- Initial Roster
- Abathur
- Arthas
- Diablo
- ETC
- Falstad
- Gazlowe
- Illidan
- Kerrigan
- Malfurion
- Muradin
- Nazeebo (Diablo III Male Witch Doctor)
- Nova
- Raynor
- Sgt. Hammer (Starcraft Siege Tank)
- Sonya (Diablo III Female Barbarian)
- Stitches
- Tassadar
- Tyrael
- Tyrande
- Uther
- Valla (Diablo III Female Demon Hunter)
- Zeratul
- Released in 2014
- Tychus
- Li Li & Brightwing (Warcraft III Faerie Dragon)
- Murky
- Zagara
- Rehgar
- Chen
- Anub'arak & Azmodan
- Jaina
- Released in 2015
- Thrall
- The Lost Vikings
- Sylvanas
- Kael'thas
- Johanna (Diablo III Female Crusader)
- The Butcher
- Leoric
- Kharazim (Diablo III Male Monk)
- Rexxar
- Lt. Morales (Starcraft Medic)
- Artanis
- Cho'gallnote
- Lunara (Warcraft III Dryad)
- Released in 2016
- Greymane
- Li-Ming (Diablo III Female Wizard)
- Xul (Diablo II Necromancer)
- Dehaka
- Tracer
- Chromie
- Medivh
- Gul'dan
- Auriel
- Alarak
- Zarya
- Samuro (Warcraft III Blademaster)
- Varian
- Ragnaros
- Released in 2017
- Released in 2018
- Blaze (Starcraft Firebat)
- Maiev
- Fenix
- Deckard
- Yrel
- Whitemane
- Mephisto
- Mal'Ganis
- Orphea
- Released in 2019
- Imperius
- Anduin
- Qhira
- Deathwing
- Released in 2020
- Tassadar rework
- Mei
- Hogger
