Chen

Chen Stormstout, the Legendary Brewmaster, is a melee Bruiser Hero from the Warcraft universe.

Chen is a potent Bruiser who will dominate if the enemy team is lacking mobility.

History
is a wanderer, adventurer and keg-emptier -- and this world-class brewmaster has left an indelible mark on Azeroth's history.

Chen Stormstout was born and raised on the, a massive landmass on the back of the giant turtle. There, he developed his superior fighting skills and the desire to explore and discover new lands (and new ingredients for his legendary brews) like the traveling pandaren who left thousands of years past. Chen's wanderlust led him into adventure after adventure, from the creation of the wildly popular event to the very founding of Durotar, where he fought along with the re-formed  to establish it in its new home.

Years later, along with his niece, Li Li, Chen embarked on a quest that led him to the mystical, and with the help of the artifact, he visited his ancestors' home, Pandaria, for the first time. Not long after, the Horde and the Alliance discovered the continent and rekindled their conflict, placing Chen (once again!) squarely in the middle of history.

Gameplay
Chen is a very unique and durable melee Bruiser with upsides like having solid damage output, high self-sustain, disruptive capabilities and even conditional mobility, which allows him to do well in a multitude of ways. Chen functions around his trait, Fortifying Brew to shield himself and recover a resource called "Brew", which replaces mana. "Brew" is used for two (three) of his Basic abilities: Flying Kick, leaping over an targeted area, dealing a medium amount of damage. Keg Smash deals a small amount of damage and applies Brew to enemies in the targeted area, a debuff that Slows enemies and can be Ignited with Breath of Fire, which deals area of effect damage in a cone-shaped area in front of Chen. Chen's third Basic ability is called Stagger and requires no "Brew" to be activated, instead it is a Basic Ability that negates all damage taken for a few seconds and then applies 75% of that damage to Chen.

His first heroic ability is Wandering Keg, that turns Chen into an Unstoppable barrel with high Movement Speed and some Armor that can also Knockback enemies into dangerous positions or be used to escape in case of danger.

His other heroic ability, Storm, Earth, Fire, allows Chen to split into "3 Elemental Spirits" that have 70% of his maximum Health each and give him access to 'unique Abilities in place of Basic Abilities'. When all the "Elemental Spirits" die, Chen dies too. When  Storm, Earth, Fire ends, Chen returns with exactly the same amount of Health he had while successfully casting it.

The unique Abilities offered by Storm, Earth, Fire are:


 * Storm.png Storm is a survivability tool that gives a Shield to every Elemental Spirit for a few seconds when not empowered or extend the duration of every Elemental Spirit from 12 to 17 seconds and give them a more powerful Shield without a time limit when empowered;
 * Earth.webp Earth is an engage tool that allows you to close the gap with the enemy Heroes with a jump towards a target area within 9 range, then deals 32 damage and Slow enemies hit when not empowered or deals 128 damage and Root enemy Heroes hit when empowered;
 * Fire.webp Fire is a damage boost that increases Attack Speed and Attack Damage for 5 seconds to every Elemental Spirit, by 50% when not empowered or 75% when empowered.

Strengths

 * High single target sustain damage versus heroes
 * High in-combat sustain through shielding
 * Dive potential
 * Not reliant on mana
 * Conditional mobility
 * Powerful and flexible Heroic abilities
 * Strong bodyblocker
 * Versatile playstyle
 * Hard to gank

Weaknesses

 * Prone to being interrupted
 * Low waveclear and camp clear as a Bruiser
 * Very draft dependent, only useful in limited circumstances
 * Weak in fights before level 10
 * Weak against most crowd-control based compositions
 * Predictable playstyle

Abilities

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

Rework
On June 10, 2019, the Heroes of the Storm development team released the patch notes on the Public Test Realm (PTR) that included a full-blown rework to Chen. The task of ripping apart his kit and putting it together in the right order was put in the hands of Live Designer Adam Jackson. Jackson sat down with [http://www.invenglobal.com/ InvenGlobal} to discuss his point of attack for Chen.

For Chen, Jackson saw an opportunity to create a new, more dynamic playstyle for him while keeping the fantasy of playing as a Pandaren brewmaster alive. There were a few problems that he saw in the kit that they were really looking to solve. The biggest one was his Trait. It was really hard to design around and to balance around because there are really two parts as to what the identity of Chen is. The first is that he has kind of a cadence to his abilities. They are all very low cooldown. He has a rhythm that he gets into where he kicks in, he does his Keg Smash, he breathes his fire to light the brew and then he drinks to mitigate the damage before he cycles and does it again. That is kind of his thing. The key issue was that so much of his power was tied to drinking brew and it was so important to the rest of his kit. And while that is not necessarily a problem for a lot of heroes when they have one main thing they want to focus on, for Chen, it kind of defined what he wanted to do and his counterplay. It created a lot of binary interactions where a lot of the counter-play to Chen was, 'Do you have CC (Crowd Control) to stop him from drinking?' And 'Can you kill him before he drinks again?' For Chen, it was, 'How do you not let that happen?'

At first, it seemed like it worked pretty well but then as we made more and more heroes that bring different types of CC to the table, it became pretty easy to draft a team that has at least one CC or multiple interrupts that could stop him from drinking. The natural question of "Why doesn't Chen's Trait grant him Unstoppable so he isn't impacted by CC when drinking?" floated around the Heroes' community. But Jackson felt that might cause more issues than it solves. Making it Unstoppable would have definitely made him better and it would have made him more viable. But, in Adam Jacksons mind, it would not have really solved the issue of creating interesting play and counterplay moments with Chen. All that it would have done was removed counterplay from him. Now the interaction would have become more binary where it is 'Can Chen out-drink the amount of damage that the enemy team is dealing to him?' If yes, then he just wins. If no, then they will just pump damage into him and kill him. Jackson and the team found a middle-ground by tweaking the numbers on his Trait and adding Stagger as his E-ability to mitigate damage. According to Jackson, he wanted Chen to have the feel of a World of Warcraft multi-phase raid boss where you have to pay attention to multiple things at once.

Long-time Chen players know that hitting level 10 meant two options: Do I go with the fun/meme-y Heroic (Wandering Keg) or the thematically awesome but pretty low-impact one (Storm, Earth. Fire)? Neither of them turned the tide of team fights very much but Wandering Keg could prove useful, if used properly, so it was generally the go-to selection. Jackson knew that had to change, so he tackled the seldom selected one and gave it a facelift: "I really wanted to improve the Heroics in different ways. Storm, Earth, Fire was a bigger headache because it is such an iconic ability that I didn't think we can get rid of it but I wasn't too happy with the way the ability worked on live because it was kind of spammable. You just used it and it frustrated the enemy team and you use it to get out of a bad situation and then Chen's clones would just kind of hop away and become more difficult to manage. It was kind of simple to execute sometimes but frustrating for opponents because you couldn't really do much about it as it was difficult to kill all three. With that Heroic specifically, I really wanted to try tone down the mobility a little bit. I kind of figured it's cool that Chen can bait opponent's a little bit before he dies as you start channeling his Heroic then you can pop it and run away but I thought I was a little too easy to get away. Instead, I wanted to play up, 'Okay, what if we had these abilities be really, really strong and Chen could only use them once?' So we tried that and I felt like it was a pretty big hit. We just tried to rip off of that and we thought 'What if the power wasn't in the abilities themselves but in the order that you use them?' So that is how we came up with each ability being really strong but the last one that you use is empowered and that, when we first played with it, was a slam dunk. Depending on the situation at-hand, Chen's empowered move can be used to deal added damage, increase survivability or create some CC of his own."

Trivia

 * Chen first appeared in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (July 2003).
 * His book debut was a decade later, in (July 2013).
 * Chen's Heroes of the Storm incarnation's Keg Smash and Breath of Fire abilities, as well as the Elusive Brawler and Storm, Earth, Fire talents, strongly resembles the Pandaren Brewmaster hero that represented him within Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.
 * Chen is voiced by Keone Young.
 * Chen was one of the three heroes revealed at Gamescom 2014.
 * Chen is one of two pandaren heroes in Heroes of the Storm, the other being Li Li Stormstout, his niece.