Nomerology : Nomad Hero Dev Story

 

Nomad by prolificpen

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Tonight my friends, I shall tell the tale of the Nomad. I should add that this particular blog entry is a lot more personal than the others, as I am trying the convey the stream of consciousness-like design buildup that proceeded from the hero’s inception to its release. As such, there will be a lot of random crap that a lot of you probably don’t care about.

As many of you may recall, Nomad was a hero previously included within the closed beta client, accessible only by enabling developer heroes or spawning through practice mode. His skill set was composed of an eclectic mix of stealthiness coupled with boisterous debuffs and damage abilties. In DotA terms, it was a bit of Nightstalker, a bit of Ursa, and a whole lot of imba. It was also artist S2Ari’s lone effort to my knowledge; he did the model, the texture, the animations, and the skills. For whatever reason, the concept was banished to the depths, forever lost to the world of Newerth.

Everyone works in different ways. Some prefer to build from the ground up, building a basic concept and fleshing out abilities afterwards to fulfill the original design direction. Some prefer to take the opposite path, smashing individual creative ideas together and using that as a determinant for the bigger picture. I am a very visual, tactile worker, and I often have no clue what I am doing. What I prefer to have is a muse; a piece of art, usually. Something to see, hear, and feel. So while the other designers script their heroes without effects and sounds, I prefer to first have what is usually the completed product, so to say. So there Nomad was, sitting in the “test” folder of the internal build. I see, and I think. Abilities then come to me, often functionally; Nomad has a big sword–therefore, he must have a big sword attack. He has a sandy shell texture; therefore, he should turn into sand. Voilà!
The first iteration of Nomad was completed two or three months ago. It featured:

• Sandstorm: Envelops the Nomad within a Sandstorm, making him and nearby allies invisible. Conceptually identical to retail Nomad.
• Desert Strike: The Nomad charges at an opponent, dealing massive damage on impact. However, half the damage dealt is healed over time.
• Invocation: Lanaya’s Refraction.
• Oasis: A debuff that would convert a portion of all incoming damage on an enemy to Nomad as a source. In other words, a part of all damage dealt to an enemy with the Oasis debuff is credited to the Nomad. This was essentially Anomaly’s Hollow Curse from Dream: http://dream.heroesofnewerth.com/hero/GeneralGrind/Anomaly

Now here’s the problem. With Lanaya’s Reflection–and this is something I’m sure the Valve guys will also run into and have to deal with–you have a serious design issue in that the skill is very reliant on poor graphical representation. In DotA, there was a small blue flash that played as each charge deflected an instance of damage. Problem is, you couldn’t really see that flash in a big teamfight, and it introduced a heavy burden of knowledge on opposing players to figure out why they weren’t doing damage to her. The ability could either sacrifice proper visual representation for gameplay balance, or it would be blatantly obvious but visually make sense. Good designers understand that a gameplay element should never revolve around the interface fooling the user. Yet even aside from that, Lanaya’s laning play was heavily dependent on her range status and also her incredibly powerful invisibility skill (which IceFrog took from my Gambler remake, mind you!). On this iteration, it simply wasn’t that good. In fact, this iteration kind of sucked, period.

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