New Diablo-Focused Event for Heroes of the Storm Brings a Map and Characters

Blizzard today announced a Diablo-focused event for Heroes of the Storm that will see a variety of new Diablo content come to the game over the course of several months, beginning with a new character and map.

Following the recent release of Johanna, who serves as HotS' version of Diablo III's Crusader class, the Eternal Conflict event will add the Butcher, a boss from the first act of Diablo III. Whereas Johanna is a warrior class character who functions as a heavy-duty tank, the Butcher is a melee assassin. As he kills enemy minions and heroes, he's able to collect bits of meat that each offer a one percent attack bonus (up to a total of 25 percent).

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Perhaps most interesting among the Butcher's abilities is his Butcher's Brand, which allows him to mark a target and then heal for 75 percent of the damage dealt with basic attacks to that target. If you've marked an enemy hero, that figure goes up to a whopping 150 percent.

Whether or not the Butcher is of interest to you, there will be a new Diablo-themed battleground (the game's parlance for maps) added called the Battlefield of Eternity. This, like all of the others in the game, has a unique hook: it's a two-lane map with a large area in the middle. Each team will occasionally have a large minion, called an Immortal, that spawns here and begins to attack the enemy team's.

Players will need to defend their Immortal and attack the enemy's to ensure theirs survives the encounter. Once one of the two is defeated, the other Immortal will move into one of the lanes and begin pushing the enemy base.

A public test realm version of Battlefield of Eternity will go live on June 23 before launching in full on June 30, when the Eternal Conflict kicks off. The event will last for several months, bringing additional, unspecified Diablo content to the game.

While it doesn't sound as if Blizzard plans on immediately jumping into another franchise-specific event like this right afterward, director Dustin Browder suggested to GameSpot that World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and even Overwatch could have similar HotS events in the future.