Qhira

Qhira, Realmless Bounty Hunter, is a Melee Assassin Hero in the Heroes of the Storm universe. A sworn knight and holder of a singularity shard, Qhira's only desire is to seek out others who may have escaped the destruction of her doomed home realm, Iresia. While she searches, she gets by as a bounty hunter - a job she loathes, despite her exceptional skill.

Background
The ornate orbital sculptures and gilded mega-cities of Iresia were famous across the Nexus for their technological advancement and beauty. But power and prosperity breed conflict. When Iresia's competing factions tore the realm apart, shattering its singularity, the famous warrior known as Qhira had no choice but to flee. Now Qhira roams the Nexus, armed with a segmented chainsword, making a reluctant living as a bounty hunter while she searches for survivors.

Gameplay
Qhira is a brutal Melee Assassin who is adept at both beginning and ending fights.

Prime Targets
Qhira deals significant burst damage, making her very effective at taking down fragile Heroes. Stacking damage and healing with Blood Rage allows her to trade effectively with most enemy Assassins. As befits a solitary bounty hunter, Qhira excels at winning duels.

Battlegrounds
Qhira's powerful hunting capabilities make her especially strong on Battlegrounds that encourage roaming and ganking e.g. Dragon Shire, Volskaya, and Infernal Shrines.

Challenging Foes
Every good hunter knows the importance of choosing a good target. Warriors and other Heroes with high Health are difficult for Qhira to take down on her own, as are Heroes with strong Stuns and other disruptive abilities.

Hero Synergy

 * Anduin – Anduin can follow up Qhira’s engagements by rooting an enemy with Chastise, or pull her out of dangerous situations with Leap of Faith.
 * Malfurion – Malfurion's heal-over-time effects help Qhira stay alive even when separated from her team. Qhira can use Revolving Sweep to knock enemies into Malfurion's Entangling Roots.
 * Dehaka – Dehaka can dive into enemy lines alongside Qhira and help pull a target out of position.
 * Abathur – Qhira is greatly strengthened by Abathur's Symbiote, and can win 1v2 or even 1v3 engagements when timed correctly.

Abilities

 * See Data page for a table of scaled values at key levels.

Development
At the end of 2018, the Heroes of the Storm team revealed their first Nexus-original hero, Orphea. In July 2019, Qhira was revealed. Hero Designer Kyle Dates explained her creation: "Even before Orphea had launched, we were excited to explore the idea of other Nexus-born heroes and what that might mean for the game."

Senior Game Designer Jade Martin proposed a hero with a Chainblade to the Nexus who could swing around their enemies. Once he had the idea, the developers got some initial concept art done for her, and the team immediately fell in love with the idea from a design and artistic standpoint. The weapon was a focal point for both her artistic design and her gameplay, and largely dictated many of the directions that they decided to go during her development. After they designed her Chainblade, the rest of her kit fell into place fairly quickly. Her unique weapon also allowed the team to create a ton of new interesting gameplay moments. As an example, once she attaches to enemy Heroes, she has a few seconds to choose when she wants to pull herself in to Stun them, but since she is attached to the opponent, they can choose where both Heroes go when she pulls herself in. According to Kyle Dates: "The idea of this hero moving about the battlefield so dramatically really excited us! There weren’t any Blizzard characters who matched this identity the way we liked so it made a lot of sense to us to deliver this in the form of a new Nexus hero."

Lead Live Designer, Brett Crawford, talked with InvenGlobal about how Qhira came to be and why she was revealed: "We had this really cool idea for a hero with a chainblade who swings around the battlefield, a really flashy hero. We wanted to just bring her in alongside Orphea, but they are not necessarily related, so [her design] was really more focused on the kit and just being a really cool hero rather than having any ties to Orphea." The design team didn't mince words when it came to how Qhira was created. It all starts and ends with the chainblade. As there were no existing characters in the Blizzard universe that rocked the deadly weapon of choice, they decided to create a kit and hero around that. Orphea, on the other hand, was designed first then had a kit built around the concept.

Qhira's E (Revolving Sweep) becoming disconnected from Unstoppable targets was the most elegant solution to several issues the developers were having during Qhira's development. During a playtest game, the developers had a Qhira on one team and a Chen on the other. During the middle of the game in a heated team fight, Qhira used her Revolving Sweep on Chen and Chen used his Flying Kick on Qhira. Suddenly, Chen and Qhira both blasted off into the sky and disappeared off the map. This happened because of the way Qhira's Revolving Sweep moves her around her target. It is constantly and instantaneously updating her position. Chen was never able to resolve his Flying Kick movement, and since he has a bit of elevation to it, they would fly into the sky. As more playtests came, they started finding this issue more and more. Kerrigan would leap to Qhira during Revolving Sweep and the same thing would happen. Varian's Charge, Cassia's Fend and Illidan's Dive... The list went on and on. Clearly fixing each of these on a case by case basis would take a significant amount of time and effort and would probably still not cover all of the possible scenarios.

This led them to making Qhira untargetable during her Revolving Sweep - if she can't be targeted then no other Heroes can use weird movement abilities on her and none of this will happen. However, in the rare case that Chen kicks Qhira while she is casting Revolving Sweep, the same problem was still happening. So they had to Stun the target, too. That way it knocks them out of any kind of movement ability they're doing. Except for if they are Unstoppable. So in that case, the best thing to do is just not to let her Revolving Sweep hit an Unstoppable target. They explored many different solutions to this problem. They tried changing the way her movement worked, they tried adding special cases for all of the major movement issues that they could find, but ultimately, there would always be additional bugs and problems that would appear as a result of those changes. Each hero had a different special case that had to be set up in a different way. They found that the simplest and least bug-prone way of fixing Revolving Sweep was for Qhira to become untargetable, Stun the target, and pass through Unstoppable targets.

This actually meant they had to make significant balance changes to the rest of her kit to compensate for this huge power that was just added to this ability. In the end, they felt that since Revolving Sweep is Qhira's most iconic ability in the first place, it was ok for them to make these power adjustments and balance around it in other places. They also felt that becoming Unstoppable added a level of counter-play to the ability that was somewhat lacking before, as well.

Trivia

 * Qhira is the second original character to join the Heroes of the Storm roster.
 * Qhira's original title was "Iresian Bounty Hunter", as seen in her press release documents.
 * Qhira's concept and design was made by Luke Mancini, Jade Martin and Kyle Dates. Vadim Bakhlychev made her model. Qhira's animations were made by Jason Shum, Careena Kingdom, Lana Bachynski and Brittany Gleiter. Thomas Horwath, Andrew Kinabrew and Marcus Bruzzese did her special effects..
 * Qhira's second teaser contains trophies from several other characters, including ones not available in Heroes of the Storm at the time of Qhira's release. Clockwise from the top: Nova's sniper rifle, a skull, Gall's skull, Kel'Thuzad's skull, Arthas' crown, Ana's Biotic Grenade, Tracer's gun, D.Va's gun, Hanzo's bow, Genji's shortsword, Illidan's glaive, a Grave Golem skull, HS Sir Finley Mrrgglton's skull, 's shield, 's mask, an unknown skull (only lower part can be seen in the image), a skull resembling the  skull, and three unknown/unclear skulls in the center.
 * Qhira is voiced by Megalyn Echikunwoke.