Reinhardt

Reinhardt is a proposed hero from the Blizzard Entertainment Overwatch franchise.

Trivia

 * Reinhardt has been in testing since at least 2019, according to a Destructoid interview with Brett Crawford. The team ran into issues prototyping his Barrier Field ability, and created Mei in the mean time to serve as an Overwatch tank.


 * "At that time, we had already begun prototyping a Barrier Field ability to explore the possibility of bringing Reinhardt into the Nexus but were met with some issues. Unfortunately, we were not super-confident in the general direction that was heading, and while we were working through that, another Hero designer chimed in with the thought that he could translate Mei’s Overwatch kit into a Tank role for Heroes. After the designer put together the paper pitch, we all got super excited and the rest is History!"


 * Kyle Dates later wrote during a Heroes of the Storm AMA on Reddit:


 * ''"Reinhardt presents several challenges to the team that we haven't been able to cleanly solve in a way we are happy with.


 * The first of these is of course, his barrier. Blocking projectiles isn't a huge problem, but blocking AOE abilities is! I think everyone would expect basic attacks or abilities like Frostbolt and Hungering Arrow to be blocked but what about abilities like Cone of Cold or Multishot? Then of course there's the case of abilities like Flamestrike simply being able to be cast behind Reinhardt's barrier. Should basic attacks like Tassadar's beam be blocked by the shield if the targeted hero moves behind it? At the end of the day, we felt there would just be a ton of confusion as to which abilities pass the shield and which shouldn't, plus the fact that it would be a massive amount of work to do a sweep through the game and add special cases for all of the things that shouldn't bypass the shield as well. We wouldn't be able to dedicate a lot of Reinhardt's power pie to his shield which is unfortunate because that's one of the most unique aspects of his overall kit.


 * Next is the rest of his kit. His charge is very similar to Diablo's charge or Stukov's heroic Massive Shove. His projectile attack is nearly identical to Varian's Q ability, Lion's Fang. We would have to put a lot of work into redesigning his kit or making it feel uniquely different from other heroes we already have in the game.


 * Because of these and several other factors, we ultimately came to the decision that Reinhardt would simply be too much work and require too much engineering time to make everything work the way we wanted it to and in a reasonable time frame. That being said, the team has a long list of Heroes that we would love to bring to the game, so while we are working on new Heroes we'll definitely keep Reinhardt in mind. It's not uncommon to have Heroes on the backburner until we get the right inspiration or ideas to make them the best they can be for Heroes!"