After listening that the devs will probably be using duels feature for Dev-astation 4, I thought that it would be so easy to counter their hero picks, and it made me think about the duel feature, and how it could be upgraded a bit.
I believe the duels, besides of the option of pre-set hero strengths, could use different “pick” settings.
1 - The current mode, where you can see what the other player is picking and change your team as you wish.
2 - Enemy team picks are hidden, so you can’t adapt your team according to what they choose.
They could add a draft option too, where heroes are picked by turns, to reward having a varied roster and allow a certain grade of counterplay, but I’m not sure if people would actually use this one.
Great idea! To expand on your ‘Draft idea’ I used to play League of Legends quite often and I don’t know if you’re familiar with the game, but in Draft mode each player chose a hero to ban for the duration of the game, and then chose their heroes by turn. Maybe there could something like this, where each player bans 3 heroes that can’t be used (up to a total of 6 depending on if they ban the same hero or not), and then choose their heroes accordingly.
Maybe there could even be a PvP mode revolved around this idea.
I thought about bans too, but they are a thing in games like League of Legends, Paladins, etc because two instances of a hero are almost identical (sure, you can make them different with runes, masteries, or however its called, but the differences between two heroes are minimal). While in this game the differences can be massive (Lv1 Green vs Lv 70 Plat II).
It can be frustrating to spend months developing a hero just to be perma-banned in a tourney. But that’s also the case with Faction Wars, or Elemental Wars, so it may be good.
Also taking turns and bans would make matchmaking longer, which is cool for duels, but maybe it get too tedious for some people for a PvP mode (I would personally love it, though)