Heroes of the Storm’s next patch brings back Brawls – permanently – after nearly five years

January 7, 2025 9:00 AM

As has now become almost a regular habit, another patch has gone up the test realm for Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard‘s ostensibly maintenance-moded MOBA. Like the patches that have been rolling out for the past year or so, this one includes a selection of bug fixes and small balance changes, but also something much bigger: a return of the Brawl game mode.

Brawls are a special mode that feature shake-ups to the game’s usual formula, ranging from making everyone play as Nova to completely unique mini-games and even a couple of co-operative PvE modes. They were largely removed from the game in September 2020, well before the game entered maintenance mode in 2022, with the ARAM (all random, all mid) Brawls spun off into a permanent game mode and the others abandoned.

But now those other Brawls are coming back permanently, with Brawls rotating on the 1st and 15th of every month once the patch goes live (there is no release date announced).

When Brawls were removed, the reasoning given at the time was that it required too much development resources to maintain the Brawls, as each new patch and its associated balance changes threatened to introduce new bugs to the Brawls. That makes this is an especially surprising change for a game in maintenance mode. Depending on your level of optimism, this could be seen as a sign of good things to come for the game – or that the flow of new patches is about to dry up again.

Regardless, fans of the game can at least look forward to once again revisiting old favourite Brawls like Pull Party and Escape from Braxis.