When the Nexus brings in so many characters from across Blizzard Entertainment's repertoire, not everyone's gonna be a winner.
Melee Assassins
- The Butcher is an aggressive all-in burster, with the ability to 100-0 lots of heroes, especially late game. However, he's also the best example of a Skill Gate Character. He's a pubstomper who thrives on bad play, which you don't see a lot of in the higher leagues. And if he doesn't snowball, he becomes The Load, with not enough damage to be relevant in the lategame and no way to catch up. Dying is easy with his kit, and is extremely punishing as he loses his precious meat. Not to mention, he's the most easily outdrafted hero in the game, being butchered by Blinds, Shields, and strong escape. He's gone through four reworks to attempt to balance his kit, more than any other character, all met with general failure. Out of all the reworks, only one made him competitively viable (the one that came with the Garrosh patch), with the small downside of making him an all-around completely broken character. He was promptly nerfed and is still basically a Quick Match hero only.
- Pre-rework Gazlowe was another infamously garbage hero. He was an overly defensive character that wasn't able to do much except defending an area... and even that doesn't do much compared to bringing your team there. He was also very squishy and didn't push as hard as other choices. 'Hoping Gazlowe gets a buff' was pretty much a Running Gag to the community. This eventually led to Blizzard doing a massive rework of his talents in the Dehaka patch, but it still wasn't enough to fix him. In late 2020, he was given a huge update that reworked him into a Bruiser, making him much more useful as he was now actually worth a damn in a fight.
- Not even Memetic Mutation can save Illidan from being the bottom of the tier lists. He's not capable of big burst damage; he's a rather rickety Hero who gets stopped dead by any form of Crowd Control whatsoever; and while he definitely can chip away the enemy HP slowly, he's also very squishy for someone who demands to be in the middle of combat at all times. He's taken a dive to the lower tier and picking him can elicit groans from your team. His talent rework has helped a bit, but in the meanwhile, other characters have been released who do what he does, but better: Falstad can lane just as effectively after Lv.4 and shares the global mobility; Malthael lacks the global mobility but handles himself better in fights; and even other weak melee assassins like Butcher, Valeera, and Qhira come with crowd control on their base kits.
- Qhira had an extremely strong showing when she launched, but after a few balance patches and players getting to know her better it became clear that her kit was really limited. She suffers from the same problem as a lot of assassins: hyper-specialization on killing heroes at the cost of everything else. Her single-target damage is fantastic, and if she catches a squishy (or even a beefy that's way out of position), there's pretty much no escape. However, she struggles in lane or mercing since her self-sustain only works on heroes. She's also extremely reliant on her E to actual make plays, which is tied to a skillshot that can be reliably predicted, so if she misses it she's as good as nonexistent until it's off cooldown again. Top that off with an extreme Weaksauce Weakness that makes counter-picking her very easy — namely, if her E target becomes Unstoppable, the skill is cancelled and Qhira will be stuck out of position — and you have a pubstomper without much competitive relevance.
Ranged Assassins
- Despite the fanfare he's gotten, Kel'Thuzad (Archlich of Naxxramas, Lich Lord of the Plaguelands, etc.) has had a rough time making a splash in the Nexus due to his playstyle. In addition to being an extreme Squishy Wizard with a glaring weakness to mobile divers, he's entirely reliant on skillshots to have an impact, with his main setup ability in particular requiring him to land two tricky spells in a row on two separate targets. Unlike most skillshot based artillery mages, he has to land 30 hits to even start doing actual damage. Even setting aside the question of player skill, Kel'Thuzad's lack of a reliable setup aside from Frost Blast means that he takes way too long to come online because the opposing team will never just stand there and let him land easy hits - and a Kel'Thuzad that can't land easy hits early on becomes dead weight come late-game, making him extremely weak if forced onto the back foot.
- Nova got hit hard with the Skill Gate Character stick. At low tiers she's the quintessential pubstomping hero that can kill someone before they can react. At the high end she's considered almost useless because she isn't very good at doing anything besides killing heroes — IE, all the things that actually win the match — and people are savvy to her tricks. (While she can provide an acceptable laning presence or work on objectives, she can only do this if someone babysits her, which is a big ask at that level.) After her changes in the Li-Ming patch, she more or less became entirely useless in both low and high levels of play. She did get a few minutes in the spotlight with the Hanzo patch giving her Ghost Protocol, which gave her an actual escape and patched up her main weakness to make her a high-performing burst mage, but of course that wasn't allowed to last, and Nova was nerfed into obscurity once again.
- Probius had a fairly poor launch, with low-range skills, too much setup needed, and not enough health to justify it. After some cooldown and range buffs however, Probius earned his niche as a Difficult, but Awesome area-denial mage/pusher hybrid that could pump out Chromie levels of burst. That was until two things; Pylon Overcharge receive a barrage of nerfs to help make Null Gate attractive, and Genji was released, ushering in a dive meta era that his squishy body couldn't take. Throw in his extreme reliance on Pylons and their setup time, and Probius could simply no longer keep up, reverting basically back to his launch status except without even the high impact Pylon Overcharge gave him. Nowadays, his combination of extreme squishiness, short range, and requiring a lot of setup and team support to get kills means that Probius is consigned to the bottom of most tier lists. His main saving grace is having decent waveclear, which is sadly rendered moot by how easy it is to bully him out of lane.
- Pre-rework Sylvanas, another Skill Gate Character candidate. Her ability to push down lanes was unrivaled... but she could easily be stopped by simply going to fight her, since she barely tickled most heroes. Despite how easy she was to counter, her "power pie" was almost entirely eaten by her trait, which passively caused her to stun any enemy non-heroes she damaged, just because it has such snowball potential. She wasn't a strong solo-laner due to a lack of sustain, she wasn't good at mercs or objectives thanks to low damage, and she wasn't good in teamfights because of her low-impact abilities aside from Wailing Arrow. All she could do is lock down structures for her team to rip apart. Her later rework fixed her to be more of an actual Assassin capable of putting out damage at the expense of not being as oppressive when split-pushing, fixing that issue of her playstyle.
Tanks and Bruisers
- Anub'arak for the longest times was considered one of the worst tanks in the game. While he did have some decent utility with his ult and stuns, it didn’t make up for the fact that he was squishy and didn’t really put out that much damage. He was especially hurt when his Burrow Charge ability lost its invincibility which made him even worse. And then Blizzard added the armor mechanic, giving him 25 spell armor, which promptly sent him to the other end of the power scale until he had to be nerfed back down.
- More than any other hero, Chen was a victim of the changing meta. He relies on his Brew to use abilities, which he has to recover by standing still and drinking. Doing this grants a large regenerating shield, but he's unable to take any actions while he does this, and any stuns or knockbacks will break the channel early. Originally he was a strong anti-backline tank that was hard to kill, with a major weakness to stuns. However, as the game evolved, stuns (and especially knockbacks) became more common, and Chen fell behind. He simply no longer filled a niche and was too easily countered. On top of that lot of underwhelming builds and generally weak Heroics have made Chen kinda boring, and he sits one of the most unpopular heroes in the game, with less play than Cho'Gall, an underpowered hero that requires two people in a party to even play. Thankfully Blizzard finally reworked him in the June 18, 2019 patch to turn him from an awful Tank into a serviceable Bruiser.
- Speaking of Cho'Gall, in professional play he's seen as the one of the weakest heroes (at one point having a 20% win rate, and only hovering around the bottom 40s at the highest). This is because Percent Health damage abilities absolutely wreck him, on top of only having 4 total bodies (because he requires 2 players to control) being a huge downside in competitive; if a coordinated team picks him off or locks him out of the fight somehow, you're now playing 3v5, which is very difficult to win barring a small miracle or a massive slip-up from the enemy. Not to mention, Cho is a really crappy hero, with extremely low damage, minimal crowd control, and predictable mobility. Gall has a decent skillset, but tying it to such a low-impact hero makes that a moot point.
- Prior to her rework, D.Va was by far the worst hero in the game. There is a good reason for this: her base mechanic of jumping in and out of her mech makes her nigh-unkillable (and unlike Leoric or Murky, she barely awards any XP for your struggles), so Blizzard played her Mech Mode safe. It turned out this was too safe, because her Mech was horrendously useless with a permanent 15% speed penalty, no real CC, and basically no damage output. This left her at an awkward place where it was actually preferred to ditch the mech as fast as you could and run around on foot as a really bad version of Valla, because her Pilot Mode at least had damage, which was something. She was eventually reworked into a proper Bruiser that actually wants to be in Mech Mode, allowing D.Va players to proactively do things aside from being a minor nuisance.
- While Mal'Ganis started out being hated for seemingly being the ideal tank, with lots of health, crowd control, and self-sustain, he ended up in the bottom tiers once his glaring weaknesses became apparent. While he's great at harassing during the laning phase, when a teamfight breaks out Mal'Ganis doesn't really do anything. The most disruptive things he can do are mini-stunning things with his third Fel Claws or putting people to sleep with Night Rush, but he has to be in melee range to actually make those things happen and unlike most Tanks he doesn't have a good way to get there, making him a magnet for crowd controls, interrupts, and knockback. Considering that Tanks are called on to disrupt enemies and set up favorable fights and Mal'Ganis isn't good at that, it's not hard to see why he isn't very popular at higher levels of play. In fact, his play-making potential is so abysmal that tier lists often rank him as the worst Tank in the game.
Healers and Supports
- While each Hero gets a difficulty rating (from "Easy" on Raynor and Li Li to "Very Hard" on Medivh), there are two real difficulty tiers in the game: simple Heroes shine if their player understands how said Hero works, and complex Heroes require the player's entire team to understand those things. Abathur is definitely one of the latter. While good Abathurs can be game-changing, he's incredibly unorthodox — everything he does, he does in weird, indirect ways, and he can only be played to maximum effect if all five players are leaning into his strengths and playing around his weaknesses. If that isn't happening, you'll have 4v5 teamfights all day long, which is a major disadvantage when Heroes is tilted so heavily towards teamfights. Besides, Sturgeon's Law applies to Abathur players because of how tricky he is to play, requiring massive knowledge of both the game's maps to be effective and knowing how to play every hero in the game in order to use his Ultimate Evolution Heroic, giving the haters more reason to be vocal about his state. If a gameplay hate topic isn't about Murky or Nova, it'll definitely be about Abathur.
- Ana players, especially ones in Quick Match, tend to get a lot of flak. That's because all of her skills (including her healing) require precise skillshots, something not every player can consistently do. Despite high theoretical numbers, many factors can render Ana useless: not just missing her heals, but allies deciding to dodge them (which happens all the time). She also had almost no ability to heal herself. That was fine in Overwatch, where two healers on a six-person team was and is a pretty normal team-comp... but in Heroes and their teams of five, the second healer is typically the first to go, which led to Ana being extraordinarily easy to bully off. Blizzard eventually gave her some self-sustain via auto-attack lifesteal, but even so, people who enjoy playing Ana because of her skill ceiling admit that she needs more buffing.
- Auriel was released as a true Combat Medic, having an AoE heal which could be fired every four seconds but only being able to charge her heal's Energy Meter by doing combat damage. To aid this, and for flavor reasons, she can also use her trait Bestow Hope to channel an ally's damage into her meter as well. The only problem was that the Energy she gained was incredibly low; she needed a strong hyper-carry, pumping out absurd amounts of DPS, to function at maximum capacity — or a Cho'gall, allowing her to cheat by charging herself with two players' worth of damage at once. Not helping was the fact that she becomes useless exponentially faster compared to other heroes when the enemy team gain an advantage, due to the fact her heals depend totally on other people's abilities to stand and fight. As such, she languished in obscurity and niche team comps (read: Cho'gall) for several years. Finally, Blizzard buffed the amount of Energy she gained, almost doubling her charge rates and allowing her to take a place in the Nexus that amounted to more than "Joke Character."
- Speaking of unconventional gameplay, The Lost Vikings are almost a throwback to the MOBA genre's Real-Time Strategy roots. Their strength is the ability to have three bodies, all of them soaking each lane and gaining constant XP without the need to rotate; you're essentially one player playing three characters at once, giving their team a huge advantage in a game where outnumbering the opponent guarantees victory in 99% of cases. So why are they on this list? Simple: They require constant awareness of your team (so that you can be where they're not), your enemies, and all three of you; naturally, most beginner players will skip this entirely, instead grouping them as three and controlling them like a hit squad and taking away their main advantage. (This can be effective, mostly in late-game teamfights, but not often enough to be worth doing.) Additionally, they're three characters with the HP of one character, so intense micromanaging and map awareness is necessary if you're splitting them up; looking aside for just two seconds can result in a dead Viking, which sets your team back a lot. Long story short, Difficult, but Awesome, but with great emphasis on the "Difficult" part... and Vikings players in Quick Match are something of The Dreaded due to the high chance they aren't ready to function at that level.
- Lt. Morales may be one of the most unique samples of this trope. She is pretty much the best Healer when it comes to single-target healing and can efficiently keep a key Assassin or Tank at full health in the middle of a fight. Her tradeoff is not being able to do anything else; she can’t put out damage, has very little health, has no crowd control, and has only one self-peeling ability that is quite difficult to use. The end result is that she can easily be scared off or killed if her defenders don't position right. The problem is the tactics of positioning and outmaneuvering opponents isn't really a skill that newer players have a great grasp of. As such, Morales is practically invincible to them; they'd either duel the enemy she's healing, to no effect, or chase after Morales like it's Benny Hill time, to no effect. She is, despite being a dedicated healer, a quintessential pubstomper — someone who is only effective against an uncoordinated opposition. But then you get to higher levels of play and her effectiveness drops off dramatically, because people have figured out how to efficiently Shoot the Medic First by divorcing her from her team and leaving her vulnerable.
- Another one of those memetically worthless characters, Tassadar was left in the dust for ages. An uneasy compromise between a High Templar Squishy Wizard and a Sentry Barrier Warrior, he did some damage on his own but was best used to babysit heroes like Valla and Tracer, whose weaknesses he could easily compensate for. He was, in that sense, not really a hero in his own right but rather a hero-enabler, which made him basically impossible to balance. Make him independently useful, and he breaks carries. Balance him around his best pairings, and he's worthless without them. Blizzard opted for the latter, making him terrible for years while they figured out what to do with him. The end result was a total rework; he was shifted to the Assassin pool and reconfigured as a genuine offensive threat instead of the weird half-and-half he was before. While this did generate a Broken Base of those who liked his playstyle and lament that it can no longer be accessed, the reworked version is a huge step up competitively.
