Heroes of the Storm news in 2026. I know, I didn’t really expect to be writing about Blizzard’s MOBA either. Well, despite being put on life support back in 2022, HotS has just received a new major patch, which not only reworks the long-suffering Arthas, but also brings back one of its OG maps, Haunted Mines.
While the Heroes of the Storm patch notes don’t show clear before and afters for Arthas’s kit, the often unpickable tank has ostensibly had an overhaul of his abilities and talents. By the looks of things, nothing’s really moved around, but a lot of the values tied to each skill have been tweaked, and new effects have been added. Arthas has been in a pretty torrid spot for years now, so it’s great to see one of the HotS launch characters, and one of Azeroth’s most iconic denizens, get the love he deserves.
The return of Haunted Mines is a massive throwback moment for HotS vets. Having released alongside the game back in 2014, Blizzard struggled to keep it on the same level as subsequent maps, and it was eventually removed in 2018. Then-senior live designer Alex Neyman said in a 2019 Reddit AMA that the team “couldn’t find a way to get it to the same level of fun that our other battlegrounds could provide,” ultimately leaving it obsolete.
However, the players yearn for the mines, and now, after years of ‘Blizzard pls’ from the community, the Haunted Mines are back – in Quick Match, at least. By the looks of things, the map remains unchanged from its last iteration, albeit with some pacing adjustments. Now, the Mine Golem drops an additional ten Skulls over its lifetime, and the map’s objective gets cleared when one team collects 55 Skulls, rather than all 100 as it was before. As an extra little switch-up, delving into the mines will reduce hero vision, so prepare for some well-engineered chaos and a few close encounters.
Elsewhere in the HotS patch notes, the original Garden of Terror, now Garden of Terror Classic as to avoid being mixed up with the current version of the map, is back in custom games. Meanwhile, Warhead Junction is now nuke-ier than ever. There are plenty of hero balance tweaks, too. Most notably, Chen has had his Accumulating Flames moved from Level 4 to Level 1, trading places with Eye of the Tiger. As always, there are a bunch of bug fixes to go around, so prepare for a hopefully-smoother experience should you opt to jump back in. I’m glad Blizzard is putting out a patch like this after so long, and I hope that, similarly to Overwatch, HotS can eventually have its own renaissance moment.
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