EPT
With its rise to prominence during the stun meta in early Heroes of the Storm, Cleanse has been one of the most iconic Support talents in the game. By providing your allies a brief immunity to crowd control effects, the talent rewards high level players for quick thinking, teamwork, and preemptive play.
Despite its high skill cap, the talent’s huge playmaking potential has often made it the default choice on any support who can access it. The problem with this lies amongst the lower skilled players whose win rate with the talent has consistently struggled. An example of this can be demonstrated using HotsLogs data for one of the most popular support heroes, Malfurion. While he no longers uses the original iteration of Cleanse, his level 7 talent Nature’s Cure has a similar mechanic. When looking at the success of Nature’s Cure across different leagues, you can see a substantial jump in the talent’s win rate when you move from Bronze (29%) to Master (53.5%). This trend is consistent among other heroes with a Cleanse or similar talent.
As such, less skilled support players have often found themselves frustrated by the lack of alternative options. The response to this was to remove Cleanse from many support heroes or rework its functionality on a hero-by-hero basis.
With this and new focus on releasing non-Cleanse supports, professional play has seen the talent decline in popularity. The graph below displays this downward trend on Cleanse support pick-rates over the last year of HGC.
Data retrieved from Masterleague
To further analyse the current state of the talent, we spoke with three of the best support players in the world: Nurok from Team Liquid, Cursen from Method, and KilluZiioN from Team Freedom.
Do you think Cleanse has dropped in priority over the last year?
Nurok: Overall I think the priority of Cleanse might have gone down a bit, BUT it depends on a) the meta and b) team comps. Back then Cleanse was more important than it is now, but that was mostly because of the very fast and one-shot heavy metas we had. Now we have more tools to answer these kinds of drafts - more bans, more bruisers, and more viable supports.
Cursen: I think that Cleanse has not really dropped in priority on the heroes that have it over time, but rather teams have learned how to draft around the supports of which does not have any Cleanse at all. These heroes are given other tools like CC (Stukov and Deckard) or high numbers (like Alexstrasza). However this makes supports without Cleanse very meta dependent, and currently having “high” sustain is high on the list when picking the right support.
KilluZiioN: I don't think it did. I think most teams/players just got used to playing without it since a lot of supports were losing the ability.
Does Cleanse have a healthy impact on the game?
Nurok: It's a healthy ability but I’m happy it's not baseline for every support. It gives every hero a unique way of dealing with lockdown instead of just Cleanse at level 7. For example, Kharazim accesses his “Cleanse” at level 16 while Ana gets hers at level 13. I believe Blizzard will keep this direction of design which is healthy for the game, otherwise it would become too static and boring.
KilluZiioN: Cleanse is a great support ability and I think the game definitely needs it.
Do you think changes should be made to the talent to improve its win-rate at lower levels of play?
Nurok: The “active“ abilities usually always have lower win-rates at lower levels of play, that's just natural. It's an additional button you have to be aware of and if you use it poorly or not at all, you're missing out on an entire talent tier basically. Thus, for a bad or average player, I suggest picking a different talent if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to utilize Cleanse in a perfect way.
Cursen: Cleanse is the “big play” of the support role, rewarding skill/quick decision making and differentiating players within the role. I think most supports should have another viable option at 7 other than Cleanse and should be balanced accordingly. While I don’t think much about Cleanse itself should be changed, I think adding parts to it for different heroes to have a different feel is a good way to go, like with Malfurion or Li Li, so it reacts in different ways but is still essentially a “remove CC” button, that will always have lower impact in lower skill brackets.
KilluZiioN: I don't think so. If Cleanse is too easy to use, it would be broken. I like where it is at right now. I even wish to see more changes to have more hero specific Cleanses. I really like the idea and I think it should be a thing for every support in the game.
What kind of changes should be made to the talent to improve the experience, especially at a competitive level?
Nurok: I could see Cleanse being given an additional effect, like either removing CC or having another benefit if that’s not the case. These could be mini-heals or hero specific interactions, e.g. Rehgar’s target gets a lightning shield, Malfurion gets a Moonfire proc, or Uther’s passive is applied to the target.
These ideas are spontaneous and could be thought out more properly but I think a change like this could give really skilled players more options, and less skilled players always something else.
These ideas are spontaneous and could be thought out more properly but I think a change like this could give really skilled players more options, and less skilled players always something else.
Cursen: I think overall Cleanse is in a good spot of rewarding good decision making in competitive. The main issue I can see being worked on is the “wait on my cd” situation. Because most basic cc abilities are on a shorter cooldown than Cleanse, you will sometimes have to use it before the enemy has committed anything beyond short cooldowns, forcing you to wait until your CD is back up.
Rehgar is the most common hero where this situation occurs, due to his low impact basic abilities for saving people. The main way in my opinion of changing this is to introduce ways to reduce the CD, even if it increases the baseline CD.
A good example of this is the current version of Uther’s Cleanse that requires auto attacks yet has a 90 sec CD.
An example of a change for Rehgar would be to reduce the cooldown of Cleanse when dealing damage with W to enemy heroes or biting anything.
Rehgar is the most common hero where this situation occurs, due to his low impact basic abilities for saving people. The main way in my opinion of changing this is to introduce ways to reduce the CD, even if it increases the baseline CD.
A good example of this is the current version of Uther’s Cleanse that requires auto attacks yet has a 90 sec CD.
An example of a change for Rehgar would be to reduce the cooldown of Cleanse when dealing damage with W to enemy heroes or biting anything.
KilluZiioN: Somehow make it easier to see for the audience. A lot of insane Cleanses are being missed in the cast of HGC and it’s kinda sad in my opinion. I also think changes could be made to reduce the CD for some heroes, for example, Rehgar could have the CD reduced every time he bites an enemy hero, or Morales could have the same effect with her grenade.
That's what the professionals had to say about Cleanse, but what do you think? Should it be available to more heroes? What changes would you propose to the talent? Share it in the comments below!
Emily ‘ethyr’ Thurgar is an Australian esports journalist and minor region fanatic. She is a guru on all things happening in ANZ, LATAM, SEA, and Taiwan, and is fluent in Google translate. Make sure to follow her on Twitter for updates on minor region HotS, and more!
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