Experience Globe

Experience Globes next to a Regeneration Globe

In order to make collecting experience more satisfying and intuitive, the developers are changing how experience is collected from Minions in the Heroes of the Storm. Players will no longer get experience from simply being nearby, but instead need to gather an Experience Globe dropped by dying Minions.

Basic Mechanic

Experience Globes work similarly to the Regeneration Globes already found in-game: Instead of automatically granting experience, defeated minions will now leave behind globes that you can collect — with a generous pickup radius — to contribute to your team’s collective total experience. Experience Globes slowly move toward the closest allied Hero within 6 range, and are collected when an allied Hero comes within 1.75 range. Heroes who kill Minions with Abilities or Basic Attacks will automatically collect the experience from the Minions.

Experience Globes will not move toward Heroes that are hidden in bushes or Stealthed, but they can be still collected by these Heroes if they move within 1.75 range. Once a Hero has revealed himself, Globes will magnet to them again. So, for example, an Abathur will need to be in a visible spot in the lane or reveal himfself from the bush by using an ability in order to range-soak them.

A few Heroes have special interactions with Experience Globes:

• Ragnaros Lava Wave will now instantly collect Experience Globes as it passes by.
• Abathur's Symbiote is treated as a Hero for the purposes of collecting Experience Globes.
• Hallucinations like Samuro's Mirror Images or Nova's Holo Clones are treated as a Hero for the purposes of collecting Experience Globes.
• Heroic Pets like Misha will count as a Hero for terms of soaking.

Gameplay

Spawning a Globe

• Heroes who kill Minions with Abilities or Basic Attacks will automatically collect the experience from the Minions.
  • Footman and Archer Minions (and their equivalent on different Battlegrounds) drop an Experience Globe that lasts for 6 seconds and awards 80 experience (plus 2 every minute).
    • Experience Globe value is checked when the Experience Globe is collected, instead of when it spawns. This means you can kill a minion at 0:58, and then collect the Experience Globe at 1:01, and you'll get more experience than if you collected it as soon as it spawned.
  • Wizard Minions no longer give Experience, but Experience Globe values have been increased to compensate.
• If the minion belonged to the team on the left side of the map, the Experience Globe will be spawned belonging to the team on the right side of the map, and vice versa.

Behaviors

• When an Experience Globe is created, it spawns with two behaviors - the first is how long that it lasts, and that is 6 seconds, and the second is to look for allied heroes.
• Once the initial delay has expired, the Experience Globe will instantly perform 3 actions, and then reperform those 3 actions every 0.1875 seconds:
• Action 1: Search for targets to be picked up by within 1.75 radius with the following requirements: Is a Hero, isn't in Stasis, isn't currently E.T.C. Stage Diving, is Abathur Symbiote, or Hallucination (like Samuro's Mirror Images or Nova's Holo Clones), and is not Dead or in a Special Death State (like Leoric's Undying).
  • If that action is performed, then the Experience Globe will be collected, and the experience will be granted to the collecting player, and the later actions will not occur, as the Experience Globe is collected.
• Action 2: Search for targets to magnetise towards within 6 radius with the following requirements: Is a Hero, isn't in Stasis, isn't cloaked, or is cloaked but revealed, isn't in a Bush or is in a Bush but revealed, is Abathur Symbiote or Hallucination, and isn't dead or in a special death state.
  • If this action is performed, the Experience Globe will issue a move order towards that target, and have a behavior applied that lasts for 0.25 seconds. Upon expiration of this behavior, the Experience Globe will be issued the stop command.
  • An Experience Globe moves at a maximum speed of 20, but has an acceleration of 8. Compare this to most Heroes, which have a maximum speed of 4.8398, but an acceleration rate of 1000.
• Action 3: Search for a Lava Wave to be collected by within 6 radius
  • If this action is performed, it fires the same effect seen for when a hero collects the Experience Globe, and thus it can overwrite the second action, as it does not disable later actions.

Development

The idea behind it is to better communicate the XP system so you now have a better idea on how to deny the enemy XP by pressuring them away from the minions. Additionaly, the developers don't want to encourage passive soaking of experience via sitting in a bush or Stealth, as one of our goals with the change is to encourage active gameplay around fighting over experience. That makes Experience Globes a two-for-one opportunity. Not only do they make a core part of the game—gathering experience—more satisfying and visceral; they also help players align on the importance of doing so, leading to better coordination and—hopefully—more games that feel like a good session of pickup basketball.

Another nice effect of Experience Globes is that leveling up finally makes sense from a narrative perspective. “Why is it that I kill this random soldier and I suddenly get stronger?” Alex Neyman says. “The idea now is that there’s this Nexus energy that you go and pick up, and that makes you more powerful.” That’s right: by defeating enemy Heroes and clearing minion waves, you’re tapping into the boundless energies that roil and thunder within the Nexus, multidimensional currents that wrest realms in and out of existence like a deranged swarm of cosmic fireflies. As you extract the very life essence from the corpses of your foes, your powers grow, until they become so vast that none can stand against you...

Trivia

• Experience Globes are visually reminiscent of picking up globes in Diablo III (ex. Nephalem Globes, Health Globes).
• The developers tested Experience Globe for about 6 months before bringing them to the game.
• Experience Globes were introduced as the first Nexus Anomaly.

External links

• Introducing Experience Globes, the first seasonal Nexus Anomaly