Last year, what remains of the HotS development team announced that they would be stopping Nexus Anomalies indefinitely. If you don’t remember–or you’ve scrubbed your memory–Nexus Anomalies were small, temporary changes to the game that aimed to make normal play feel little different. The goal from a development perspective was to keep the game feeling somewhat fresh in a cost-effective way that required few new assets to be produced – a boon for a game that’s not getting any panels at BlizzCon(line) this year. The most notable Anomaly was Gladiator’s Medallion, an extremely high-cooldown ability for all heroes that made them Unstoppable for 1 second. Though Medallion ended up being somewhat successful, other effects, like the weather changes to maps, were, um, not successful. (I liked watching it snow on Volskaya. Sue me.)
In any case, Nexus Anomalies are no longer part of the game, and it doesn’t seem like the dev team plans to continue them in the future. Many players complained that while the changes were ostensibly small, the gameplay impacts were frequently larger than expected. In the spirit of good (and bad) humor, here are some ideas for Anomalies that absolutely shouldn’t exist–which means they absolutely should.
Thanks to BishopMist, flex extraordinaire and almighty meme lord, for significant contributions to this article!
- Physical and spell armor’s effects are swapped. Anub’arak now becomes the premiere anti-auto-attacker tank. Gul’dan can flip the bird at Raynor as he runs away from him with no issues.
- Healing globes are always neutral. As if the bruiser meta wasn’t already powerful enough… This would make offlanes an absolute battleground. I haven’t decided whether globes should only stay on the field for the duration of their normal neutral time or whether the time should be extended to the current full duration of the globe. I know which one would be more chaotic.
- Silence stops auto-attacks rather than abilities. Talk about a way to make the game move more slowly. If Malfurion lands a huge Twilight Dream, everyone just stands around looking at each other while Li-Ming plays pinball with her orb.
- Respawn timers are based on death count, not the game’s length. The idea here is that if you die in the late game but it’s your first death, you respawn in 10 seconds. If you’re inting and you die for the 5th time in 5 minutes, your respawn takes 60 seconds, even if it’s only the start of the game. I, for one, am looking forward to the Ana-Nova “snipe from the back and never die” meta.
- Haunted Mines returns as a map. Right, Blizzard? RIGHT?!
- All mercenary camps are replaced with bosses. Win a big team fight? Just run around the map and take as many bosses as you can. Sit back in your base and rub your hands in glee as you watch your army of grave golems run over the other team’s forts. (This would probably also require a change to Bribe talents to avoid making them totally worthless.)
- Healing fountains grant Nano Boost or Stim, but their cooldown is increased to 250 seconds. This one is tricky. Usually, when you use a healing fountain, you’ve disengaged from the fight and are a decent ways away from anyone to attack. Maybe you’d have 2-3 seconds to run back to the fight before the boost activated?
- Ammo returns to towers and forts. Each shot hits 3 targets for 33% damage each. Like Zagara’s Medusa Blades talent, this enables towers to hit more enemies, but for less damage. In theory, it would take some pressure off of a pushing team by spreading the damage around on multiple folks around the tower, but it would also help offlaners by clearing minions more effectively. Maybe. I haven’t done the math.
- Every time you die, you permanently lose 5% of your starting max health. A la Dark Souls 2, this would make for the absolute safest games possible. Dying, particularly in the late game, already comes with the hefty penalty of increased respawn times, but making it so that you lose a chunk of your health for every death would discourage everyone from inting. Yes, it would stack, and yes, it would absolutely destroy the tank role as we know it,
so I say go for it.
- Healing fountains are neutral and spawn temporarily in random locations around the map, replacing the standard fountains near towers. Want a heal? You gotta go find it. This wouldn’t be a big deal for high-sustain offlaners like Sonya, but if you’re Genji and you need healing, oof. Find your tank and have them escort you or risk getting splattered.
- Spawn doesn’t heal, just like in brawl. We die like real men.
- Standing in a bush with more than 2 teammates for more than 5 seconds decreases your armor by 5 every second thereafter. Let’s be real: everyone hates being the victim of a bush party. This would cut down on that by making it so that teams have to choose their bush carefully and react quickly unless they want to face a disadvantage in the resulting fight. To avoid this, teams would either have to not bush party or everyone would need to stand in different bushes, making positioning infinitely more important.
- Bushes apply damage over time to heroes standing in them. This is an alternative to the armor decrease detailed above. The longer any of your teammates stands in a bush waiting for a gank, the less advantageous the gank will end up being. This might be overly destructive to the Dehakas, Valeeras, and Novas of the Nexus, but like, would anyone really complain?
- Abilities and passives that heal allies can now be used to damage enemies. Think healers are boring? Think again. I’ve always thought that Auriel’s Searing Light talent is really interesting, but most other healers don’t have a similar ability or mechanic. Imagine being able to passively roast people for 150 HP every 4 seconds as Brightwing. Yeah, I dig it.
- Camps attack on sight instead of waiting for you to attack them. This would force teams to watch their rotations even more. If you don’t go straight down the middle of Infernal Shrines, every camp on God’s green earth now has their sights set on you. Garden of Terror? Don’t even get me started.
- Every hero respawns in 5 seconds but has a very small amount of health, like Murky. As opposed to making the game slower, as the Silence auto removal would, this would make the game much faster. If you’re like me,
and I hope you’re not, you’re tired of scrolling through Instagram during your 60-second death timer. This would fix that problem…and make things just a tad more chaotic.
- Bruisers are removed from the game. I’m getting a little tired of them. Aren’t you?
What’s a weird and wacky effect that you’d like to see as a Nexus Anomaly? Ping me with all your terrible suggestions and I’ll give my own terrible responses!