The Depth of the Storm

[BlinkBoy]

Hi everyone. I wanted to make a topic about the depth in heroes of the storm as I've been playing since November.

Some background for understanding:

I played LoL and Dota 1 for a long time. Both games were very challenging due to their complexity and mechanics. They have both last hitting, jungling, items and different role played.

I stomped into Heroes realizing that many of those mechanics were taken off so it looked more casual. What I didn't realize by then was that. It was just way more accessible. After playing for quite some time I finally understood that there's quite a lot of depth in heroes. Heroes is all about 5 essential things: strategy, timing, coordination, counterplay and execution

instead of explaining each of those aspects let's take a look at heroes of the storm mechanics and see how they apply into that.

• Objectives
• Split Pushing
• Xp soaking
• Talent selection
• Jungling
• Vision
• Maps

Objectives

Each map has main objectives that can help you push the enemy badly. They are indeed important but not supremely important. I've seen people throw themselves to fights in other to contest objectives and end up either wasting time, feeding the enemy team or getting meaningless trades. I'll elaborate further when I talk about each map's strategy.

Split pushing

Split pushing is extremely important aspect of heroes. Unlike LoL and dota, backdooring is a legal strategy in the sense, that keeps can be killed without destroying forts. Not always you need to push all the lanes, sometimes with just one is enough, meanwhile a specialist either can help backdoor a fort or if the enemy allows it, you can backdoor their keeps in the main base. In maps like garden terror, you could use the terror to start attacking the main base keeps rather than the outlying forts. Abathur is also a nice example of backdooring due to his locust spawn.

Xp soaking

Experience soaking is heroes version of farming. Just being 2 levels ahead is a huge advantage for your team and capitalizing on that is an even greater priority than main objectives. The first priority should always be to get to level 10 first by that time is when objectives really start to kick in and being level 10 gives everyone in your team heroics which is an extremely big advantage vs a team that has no heroics.

Talent selection

Sun tzu says "master yourself, master the enemy" Talents play a very important part on counterplay. Talents give you the ability to specialize and addapt to many factors: 1 your role on your team, 2nd the map's mechanics, 3rd the enemy team.

Builds

Having a preset build is not bad, it's actually a nice way to learn a herobut something that distinguishes good talent picking from bad talent picking is knowing when to pick certain talents and when to change decisions. For instance, many builds maximize one aspect like damage or tankiness but sometimes you may need some aspect. a good example is squishy damage dealers like falstad and valla, if you are against high burst assasins like nova, zeratul or kerrigan, it's not a bad idea to go for spell shield. Block is also another undervalued talent which is quite effective against sustain damage dealers like valla.

Active Abilities

Active abilities should be picked when needed rather that as standards. It makes no sense to get blood for blood on an enemy squishy team, normally there are better options for those teams. Shrink Ray is another situational talent, you should get it vs sustained damage dealers with high mobility like illidan and valla. Mule is also situational and depends on map.

Jungling

Jungling refers to capturing mercenary camps. This is a fundamental aspect and it has to do with synergy and timing. Mercenary camps are all about timing. Knowing when and in which order to capture them is extremely essential. A common mistake is to capture them just for the notion of having them. Mercenary camps should be captured strategically. There are 2 main examples: 1st in Haunted mines you should capture your siege golems, just when the enemy golem is passing through the enemy's team fort's door, this will help you defend and in case your golem is a lot stronger, you can use them to defend while your 5 man team pushes with your golem. The second good example is sky temple, the 3rd temple is always bot and spawns 2 minutes after the first 2,you should capture the top mercenary camp just when the 3rd temple spawns, this causes top to be pushed while everyone is contesting the southern temple.

Vision

Map awareness is way more difficult in HotS than in LoL or Dota. First keeping track of the enemy team is important and having intuitive feeling of their actions can result on contesting a golem or an important objective. Keeping track of vision towers, having supports or specialists that help with vision is very important in most maps.

Maps

The biggest strategic aspect of HotS is that the meta changes on each map. All the maps have different strategies and key points that should be taken care off. This is just a resume. Game Theory applies a lot on decisions and many of this aspects are valid on general situations but not always.

Blackheart's Bay

This map has many key points that should be prioritized:

• 1st soaking the 3 lanes
• 2nd secure atleast 5 coins at start
• 3rd don't waste time fighting for the happy face, get it afterwards
• 4th push the forts as much as you can and stall the objective, remember that each bombardment increases the gold needed for the next
• 5th never have the full team contesting the bot mercenaries after level 16
• 6th if the enemy team does 5th or has lost twice as much members as you in a tf, then capture the golem.

Cursed Hollow

• Think of tributes as chances.
• You should capture 1 siege camp before the first tribute,
• you should capture 1 bruiser camp before getting your second tribute.
• It's not necessary to have every tribute, give some to the enemy team if you are able to get more mercs, golems, push a fort or soak a higher level.
• During your curse, push! don't waste time capturing golem unless you are over level 22, by then both golems can destroy the core on their own.
• If you can't contest an attribute and you'll be cursed, capture mercenary camps. They are not affected by the curse.

I'll write the rest later on.

 

[jopi]

yes, you are right in many points, as you said, one thing I learned very fast but many players don't seem to understand, is that it is very important to get to lvl 10 as fast as possible (be the first team on lvl 10 preferably). The reason is pretty simple, unlike other MOBAs where everyone lvls alone the whole team lvls and thus does not get 1 or 2 ultimates but 5 (!!!), now simply imagine a teamfight with a team on lvl ~9 and one on lvl 10, it's pretty clear which team will win the fight (if both teams are one the same skill level). But instead of spreading and soaking xp many times I see teams clumping up after an won objective and zerging around ... what means loss of xp.

Also often fights errupt at the start of the game around vision-points (e.g. the 'smiley face' in blackheart's bay). But in my opinion those vision is not important at the start of the game, because most ganks won't be that strong due the low level of the heroes, or come from invis heroes (zeratul/nova) which simply get in the lane 'below the radar' anyway (unless they cap the vision-point just before they start the gank on you). These fights again are a big waste of time in my opinion, simply because you lose xp. In my opinion it's simply better to give the vision to the enemy team and take the xp. In the best case their whole team heads there (or at least 3-4 ppl) and when they come to the lane you already are ~1/2+ lvl ahead. A good vikings player could even allow your team to contest the fight by puting one viking in every lane (what he should be doing anyway).

I'm aware that you already covered these points but I wanted to give a bit more emphasis to them, as I think effective use of time is very important in every MOBA but HotS brings it to a next level with the shared xp. (Everyone who is interested in some more thoughts on this topic should take a look at this article by LanePushingGames about MTQ.)

Looking forward to read more here.

Also there is a small mistake you've made: in Cursed Hollow you don't gather 'attributes' but 'tributes' ^^

 

[BlinkBoy]

Here's a nice article about strategy in HotS:

http://www.tentonhammer.com/columns/here-comes-boom/moneyballing-heroes-storm