Key Takeaways
- Blizzard will add Xal’atath to Heroes of the Storm on September 28, making her the game’s first new playable hero since Hogger arrived in December 2020.
- Xal’atath will hit the Public Test Realm next weekend, and Blizzard says more heroes could follow if players respond strongly.
- The update marks a potential revival for the crossover MOBA, which lost its esports league in 2018 and entered maintenance mode in 2022.
Heroes of the Storm is storming back into the conversation. Blizzard Entertainment revealed at BlizzCon 2026 that Xal’atath will become the game’s first new playable hero in nearly six years.
Xal’atath, the Harbinger of the Void and a major presence in World of Warcraft: Midnight, will arrive on the Heroes of the Storm Public Test Realm next weekend before officially joining the game on September 28, according to Polygon. BlizzCon attendees, however, already played the game as the character on the show floor.
More importantly for longtime players, Blizzard indicated that the release may not be a one-time event: Additional heroes could follow if Xal’atath draws a strong response.
That makes the announcement far bigger than a routine character update. Xal’atath is the first hero added since Hogger arrived in December 2020, ending a drought that began after Blizzard sharply reduced the resources devoted to the game.
Although Heroes of the Storm has continued to receive occasional balance adjustments and bug fixes, new characters and major content releases have effectively disappeared.
Released in June 2015, Heroes of the Storm assembled characters from Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo and, eventually, Overwatch inside one crossover multiplayer arena.
Blizzard initially resisted calling the game a traditional MOBA, marketing it as a “Hero Brawler” whose shared team experience, shifting battleground objectives, and lack of individual item shops distinguished it from League of Legends and Dota 2.
The game never matched those rivals commercially or competitively. In December 2018, Blizzard canceled the Heroes Global Championship and moved developers onto other projects, stunning professional players and organizations that had built teams around the esport.
Development slowed further in subsequent years, and Blizzard formally moved the title into maintenance mode in 2022.
Its history carries an added irony: The MOBA genre grew from Defense of the Ancients, a community-created map built with Blizzard’s own Warcraft III tools. Blizzard later unveiled Blizzard DOTA through StarCraft II in 2010, renamed it Blizzard All-Stars following a trademark fight with Valve and ultimately launched the project as Heroes of the Storm.
Despite the company’s proximity to the genre’s origins, its own MOBA entered the market after League of Legends and Dota 2 had already established enormous audiences.
Xal’atath’s arrival now fits into a larger BlizzCon built around reopening Blizzard’s biggest universes. The company announced the classic-inspired World of Warcraft Forever, showed an early look at Diablo V, confirmed a Netflix animated Diablo series, and placed a new open-world StarCraft shooter on its calendar for 2030.
WoW executive producer Holly Longdale described World of Warcraft Forever as “friendly, familiar, and new”—a phrase that also captures Blizzard’s broader push to revisit established games without simply restoring them unchanged.
Blizzard has not announced a full development roadmap for Heroes of the Storm.
