Gladiator's Medallion

Gladiator's Medallion is a Nexus Anomaly introduced in September 2020. Each hero (excluding Deathwing and Gall) begins with the Gladiator's Medallion ability on their action bar, which grants Unstoppable for 1 second every 5 minutes.

Gameplay

 * "Our goal for the Gladiator's Medallion is to give players more opportunities to commit to aggressive plays and relieve some of the helplessness felt when players get stuck in long CC chains."

All heroes begin with Gladiator's Medallion on their action bar (the extra buttons from hotkey 1-6) in position 6. The only exceptions are Deathwing, who has no use for it, and Gall, who uses it through Cho instead. It functions as a self cleanse on a long cooldown, allowing everyone to escape Crowd control abilities or chains a few times each game.

Using it as The Lost Vikings grants the effect to all three Vikings simultaneously, and using it as Rexxar grants it to himself and Misha.

Tips for making the most of your medallion

 * Don’t be afraid to use these to stay alive in the early game! A 5-minute cooldown may sound long, but you can get multiple uses out of it per game if you use it early.
 * You can activate your Gladiator’s Medallion while Rooted or Slowed but not while Stunned or Silenced.
 * It can be helpful to create a custom hotkey (accessible in the Hotkeys > Advanced menu) to make it easier to use your Gladiator’s Medallion.
 * Activate your Gladiator’s Medallion right before casting a high-impact channeled ability such as Mosh Pit to prevent being immediately interrupted.
 * It can also be useful to activate right before using an escape ability. Valla can use Vault immediately after the Gladiator’s Medallion to get away from danger while under the effects of the Unstoppable buff it provides.

Development
Here’s what Senior Designer Kyle Dates had to say about this new anomaly:


 * What were the team’s goals for bringing this new anomaly to the Nexus?
 * Our goals for the Gladiator’s Medallion are two-fold. The first is providing power directly to Heroes, while the second is creating more opportunities to make plays or escape long crowd control chains. Our previous anomalies have centered around modifying the game surrounding the Heroes. XP globes, tower and fort changes, and even the weather system were things that just “happen” outside of the player’s direct control. This anomaly is putting the power directly into your hands, giving you the choice of when to utilize it.


 * Any insights from the experimentation, development, or playtesting process that you could share?


 * Early on we experimented with the idea that the cooldown would reset if you died. Our thought was that it could encourage you to use it more often (instead of holding it all game), but it ended up being used way too much for our liking. Every team fight would see all the medallions being used, and the losing team would get theirs reset, allowing them to come back to the next fight with their cooldown refreshed and ready to go.

The developers had this to say about its eventual removal:
 * We liked how the Medallion gave players some agency over countering CC chains, and how it added a new vector of skill expression that was universally available to everyone who played the game, no matter which hero or role they played as.


 * However, over time, we felt that, as a whole, the Medallion took away from cool plays more than it added them to the game. Setting up combos with teammates is a large part of what makes Heroes of the Storm exciting to both play and watch, and having 5 possible instances every 5 minutes of these plays not working anymore was taking away a bit too much from the game. We had tried some other iterations of the Medallion internally to solve this exact problem, such as only having it available once per game for each player, but found that lowering the frequency too much led to Medallions only being used during the last fight, which ended up not hitting the mark for a new feature that should made the game better as a whole.

Background
is a player vs player in World of Warcraft that removes all impairing effect from your character. It was created to replace s with similar effects, giving every player a more even playing field when entering PVP for the first time.