In what came as a shock to fans of the beloved
Diablo series, they received quite the news today as
Blizzard Entertainment revealed their next character in their popular MOBA game,
Heroes of the Storm, to be the "Lord of Hatred" himself,
Mephisto. There's speculations running amuck that this may tie-in to a new
Diablo series game, or just a remastered version of
Diablo II, as Blizzard
released one for their popular RTS,
Starcraft, last year, but either way there's certainly a specific reason Blizzard decided to resurrect and give a facelift to a character that hasn't seen new light in almost twenty years, since 2000 when
Diablo II was first released.
This is only the second character, out of a total of 17, from a
Diablo-series game without being from
Diablo III, the other being
Cassia, based off the Amazon playable character class from
Diablo II. It does look like there's a possibility that this wasn't "for fun," or that it wasn't just the
HotS dev team paying homage to a classic game, as the Community Manager for
Diablo III had something interesting to say just earlier this month in a video:
With
BlizzCon 2018 coming in early November, there will certainly be more news to follow on the
Diablo front. Anyway, on to his
HotS spotlight:
Mephisto is an
Assassin class (AKA, the damage dealers) with a moderate amount of complexity to his playstyle.
His Basic abilities are as followed:
-
Skull Missile: Mephisto fires a burning skull that slows and deals damage in a linear casted direction.
-
Lightning Nova: He surrounds himself with a wide AOE (Area of Effect) dealing lightning damage, the longer a hero stays in the AOE, the more damage they take from it.
-
Shade of Mephisto: Mephisto teleports and deals damage at a specific location, leaving behind an illusion of himself at the original spot. After a few seconds, he is returned back to the location of his illusion.
And here are his two Heroic Ability choices:
-
Consume Souls: While channeling this skill, he reveals all enemy Heroes, and after the channeling finishes, Mephisto deals damage to all Heroes and slows them.
-
Durance of Hate: Mephisto deals damage and roots an enemy Hero for 2 seconds, which can also jump and spread to nearby enemy Heroes, dealing damage and rooting them as well.
His Passive Hero Trait is
Lord of Hatred, which allows Mephisto to lower his Basic Ability cooldowns whenever he hits enemy Heroes with his Basic Abilities.
To see his full Spotlight video check it out below:
Heroes of the Storm is currently in the midst of their 2018 Ranked Season 3 and was initially released back in June 2015 and is available via Battle.net on both Windows PC and MacOS.