I tried to vote for MoM style combat calculation during the beta, but no such luck.
In MoM, every point of attack had a 30% chance of scoring a hit, likewise for every defense point. The probabilities for damage come out equal, a 10 point attacker will do the same amount of damage to a 10 point defender, but the variance is far lower since there's a bell curve involved. In other words, for an attack value of 100, it would be far more probably to score 50 than 1. In the current system, 1 and 100 have exactly the same chance as 50. Attack 100 versus defense 100 could easily score 99 points or 1 point of damage.
Not very good for heroes like you pointed out.
