Blizzards MOBA Heroes of the Storm is an awesome game. I still play it at least onece a week. I have several max level Hero’s and I have even dabbled in the ladder mode though I still have yet to get a placement since they upped the number of games you need to finish to be placed. Now HoTs is getting on the few things it has been missing to put it on the level of other major competitive MOBA’s like Riots League of Legends. Its getting draft bans! Draft ban’s arent all the next patch is bringing either, in a strong show of dedication to a game thats over a year old Blizzard is also bringing out an  “epic visual overhaul” to the games lobbys including new background art, animated hero models and portraits, and updated selection animations, and hero bans in ranked play. Perhaps most exciting of all is that custom ranked games are also on the way

The redesign will more clearly indicate which heroes are being banned out, show you what map is going to be played, add favorite heroes, and loud, clear audio cues will be added to indicate maps, hero names, and bans. Perhaps the most anticipated and asked for change, hero bans, will be implements this patch as well. This will allow players in a ranked game to exclude some champions from choice in their games. Draft mode is a necessary piece of strategy for higher level games and should add a new level of depth to the games somewhat shallow meta.

This is what the new UI will look like, nothing is radically changing but there are a lot of small tweaks. Notice the large text at the top, denoting what map the game is to be played on, and the two top ban slots, as well as the bottom row of favorite heroes.

In the video (which we linked above) Dustin Browder says, “We’ve been doing this ban system in our esports for the last many months, going all the way back into last year, so you can watch our esports now and you can see how these bans affect your strategy in the game. So absolutely go check out our esports and see how the pros have been playtesting and using this ban system to create some really interesting strategies in our game.”

Are you looking forward to these changed? Tell us on Facebook or Twitter what you think of bans in HOTS