After more than two months, there’s a new patch in Heroes of the Storm. Game version 55.0 has arrived at the Nexus. Despite not including any new characters, this patch brings us some new cosmetics and many changes to our beloved heroes. Patch 55.0 includes skins for Diablo, Li-Ming, Rehgar, Raynor and Kerrigan, as well as a new mount that can be purchased with gold: the Exploding Sheep. It also changes the way Healing Fountains work: as it already happened in ARAM, they can’t be individually destroyed anymore, they just fall alongside their fort or keep. To compensate for this change, the health of forts and keeps has been increased to include the former fountain health points.



Rehgar is the reworked hero in this patch. The Warcraft shaman has never fully disappeared from the meta, but he used to be more of a situational pick, far from the usual healers. The last change he received was the nerf to his heroic ability Bloodlust in 2020. The core aspect of this rework affects Rehgar’s trait. All the information about Ghost Wolf has been moved to the mount tooltip and has been replaced by a new trait: Purge. It inherits the utility of the level 7 talent Cleanse, which has been removed. However, the new trait doesn’t only make allies unstoppable, it can also be casted on enemies to slow them by 80%. The cooldown of Cleanse was 60 seconds, while the first Purge version on PTR had only a 30 seconds cooldown. The live version of the trait is somewhere in between with a 45 seconds cooldown. Moreover, it can be improved with two talents: Purification, at level 7, and Pit Fighter, at level 20. The first one reduces the cooldown by 40% when removing a crowd control effect from an ally and deals damage to shields and reduces incoming healing when hitting an enemy. The second one allows Rehgar and his nearby allies to gain attack damage and spell power stacks up to a 50% and 20%, respectively. If Rehgar has at least one ally near him, Purge cooldown refreshes twice faster.



Apart from his trait, Rehgar has received many buffs and new functionalities for his E (Earthbind Totem) and W (Lightning Shield). It looks like the shaman will be a powerful healer no matter which of these two abilities he’s built around. It will become one of the most adaptable characters in the whole Heroes of the Storm roster, as he can be played to counter mages (level 1 talent Grounded Totem) and crowd control effects (Purge) or to synergize with hypercarries (level 4 talent Electric Charge) and meat chunks (level 20 talent Elemental Conduit).

What Else?

Even if the shaman is the hero affected the most by patch 55.0, he isn’t the only one to receive some changes. Though Probius hasn’t been officially reworked, his patch notes are almost as interesting as Rehgar’s. Photon Cannon doesn’t require pylons to work anymore, but if it isn’t in the range of a pylon, it will have lower attack speed. Warp Rift lasts less, but explodes on expiration, being much more versatile.

The balance changes beyond Rehgar and Probius affect many other heroes. Imperius, Johanna, Junkrat, Raynor, Tyrande, Jaina, Falstad, Auriel and Zarya have received buffs or quality of life improvements, while Dehaka, Brightwing, Stukov and Lunara have been nerfed to some extent.