Alexstrasza

Alexstrasza, The Life Binder, is a Healer Hero from the Warcraft franchise. Alexstrasza, the queen of dragons, was empowered by the titans to be the guardian of all life on Azeroth. She has aided mortals time and again, even at great personal cost. Now, she soars across the Nexus, protecting life wherever she finds it.

Alexstrasza is a durable Ranged Healer who shares her Health with allies and can transform into a mighty dragon.

Background
the Life-Binder, former Leader and of the  One of the five Dragon Aspects and Aspect of Life, is the guardian of all life in the world of. She was one of five great dragons chosen by the to be empowered with a portion of the Pantheon's power and rule over her flight while they watched over Azeroth and its inhabitants. The titans also appointed her queen of all dragons.

Though not content to just sit back and watch, she has most recently assisted the mortal races of the world against the threat of Deathwing and his dragonflight. Sacrificing much of her power to see Deathwing destroyed, Alexstrasza now resides atop the draconic holy site of, having passed her guardian duties onto the creatures she once protected.

Gameplay
The Life-Binder is a versatile ranged Healer who manipulates life energy to heal her allies. When her life - or those of her allies - is threatened, she can transform into a mighty dragon.

Strengths

 * Burst Healing
 * Sustained Healing
 * Point Control

Weaknesses

 * Dive
 * Backline Harrasment

Abilities

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

Development
With the reveal of Ragnaros on BlizzCon 2016, the developers knew early on that Alexstrasza would the next new big BlizzCon 2017 Hero. With the experience of the intense development cycle of Ragnaros, they decided to start in January 2017 with working on her.

Concept art for Alexstrasza began with her elf form: As being the Queen of Dragons, the Developers wanted to make her humanoid form regal and decorated her with ornamentations and jewelry. The aesthetic of her big horns was also included into her armor. Her in-game ears were left out hid under her hair. File size played a part in the decision to hide her ears. Silhouette from game view played another reason: Simple readable shapes are very important and the silhouette of her horns are much more distinct aspect of Alexstaza's model and patently specific to Alexstraza herself.

For Alexstrasza's massive dragon form they wanted her to make as big as possible in-game. They didn't want a small drake, they wanted a full grown dragon. But Heroes of the Storm game director Alan Dabiri couldn't make her that big and powerful in the game. ''"We want her to be this bad-ass dragon that transforms on the battlefield," Dabiri told Compete in an interview at Blizzcon. "She should be huge and completely cover half the battlefield. Well, that kind of just broke the game. So, how can we make her as big as we can make her, while still being manageable and still being readable?"'' In the context of World of Warcraft's story, Alexstrasza's super-powered dragon form is a non-playable entity who serves as a godlike savior with one of the biggest health bars in the game.

This encapsulates a common problem for the Heroes of the Storm design team. The game features characters of varying power levels and sizes. "We have heroes that are everything from Murky the Murloc, to Kerrigan or even Alexstrasza, who's literally this godlike creature," Dabiri said. "According to Dabiri, no fans have complained about the suspension of disbelief required to play Heroes of the Storm—yet, anyway. "I think people get that it'’s in the nature of the game itself, our universe," he said. "It's in our own space. We can actually describe things differently, where these heroes have different power levels."

They used Azmodan to establish her scale a bit, because he's supposed to be of the size of a three-store building in the Diablo universe - in the Nexus however, he is at a functional size. Uther's model size is used for baseline comparisons for all heroes, so they used his model to make her the proper size for the game. With large heroes, it's weird to make them spin and turn instantly, so the animators developed a new turning technique to add extra frames for Alexstrasza. Additionally, she will follow your mouse cursor with her body and turn her head and tail in the direction you are going.

With her size, there were lot of things that she could interfere with. So body blocking and hiding smaller Heroes like Chromie and Murky behind her big body or wings became another issue. The art and design team spent a long time trying to make sure that she was this imposing force and felt really big and mighty, but didn't break the game.

For the Gameplay, the Developers needed to emphasize and to convey that she's a dragon and the aspect of life. They wanted to convey that properly by letting Alexstrasza interact with life and health in interesting ways. Her ability Abundance was inspired by the storm dragons primarly found in (the dragon mobs in, for example). Flame Buffet was inspired by dragon abilities. Her ultimate Life Binder was inspired by HS Alexstrasza (her Hearthstone card). The core concept behind her second Heroic Ability, Cleansing Flame, was originally meant to be for Probius. Probius was originally meant to have a Mothership heroic ability raining damage down on the battlefield. They didn't like it, given his builder-oriented gameplay. So they moved it to Alexstrasza instead.

Alexstrasza finally made her debut with Hanzo, during the Dragons of the Nexus event which was announced during BlizzCon 2017.

Trivia

 * Alexstrasza made her debut in  (February 2001).
 * Her game debut was seven years later, in  (November 2008).
 * Alexstrasza is by voiced Barbara Goodson in Wrath of the Lich King to early Cataclysm, and by Wendee Lee as of late Cataclysm.
 * Alexstrasza is the second dragon hero, with Chromie being the first, and the third being Deathwing.