Heroes of the Storm

Tenks_sl said:

Also in response to the last hitting aspect. Personally I feel the lane phase of this game is heavily unexplored. Even at the top level of the game. For the most part people are so eager to team fight and engage the enemy I'm not sure if that is even the optimal response. I think there is a ton to be looked at in terms of zoning out the enemy from an entire lane and denying experience with that route. But usually people are very eager to push their lane using their AOE abilities to consume tower damage that it is impossible to deny this XP. But if you have a 3/1/1 lineup and you threaten with your 2 gankers to bully that lane then you DO NOT attack their creeps rather you let the creeps duke it out in the middle of the lane suddenly the enemy cannot gain XP. Then that brings up interesting rotations and responses from the other team. But if you kill all their creeps to absorb tower damage you are basically trading XP for tower ammo and damage. Is that good? Dunno. But in the early game a lane of XP represents an enormous XP gain. But right now people are still in the traditional MOBA mindset where if you're not ganking out of the jungle you're losing. And that simply is not the case in Heroes.

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The only issue with that is the map objectives are so so important that it's worth going after them and ignoring lane experience all together.

Edit: As to your strategy idea, it might be a thing, but that requires so much coordination that it would only be beneficial in a 5 man premade. LOL LCS teams have a lot of micro strategies that would never work in an actual soloq game because of this.

There's been a couple matches where the enemy team would get a couple early kills on us but would jam 4+ people in a lane or on an objective and we'd have one guy in each lane and still be a half level ahead of them.

I haven't decided how I feel about lane xp being so dominant for early advantages yet.

It breaks down to the first team to level 10 and win a team fight with ultimates and take objectives. You can parley that to an easy victory as long as you don't throw the game.

Draegan_sl said:

The only issue with that is the map objectives are so so important that it's worth going after them and ignoring lane experience all together.

Edit: As to your strategy idea, it might be a thing, but that requires so much coordination that it would only be beneficial in a 5 man premade. LOL LCS teams have a lot of micro strategies that would never work in an actual soloq game because of this.

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Sometimes for certain objectives sometimes not for others. On Raven if I notice the team abandons all lanes to get the first tribute I prefer to stay in lane instead of engage a 5v5 at tribute and hopefully have someone poke and disrupt their obtaining the tribute to delay as long as possible. Hell tribute isn't even as good as many people make it out to be. It generally means the minions will push down a T1 and that is about it. And not to mention since the team that got the curse actually gain XP because the team which won the tribute has their minions one-shot the enemy so that is a ton of lost XP simply by minions cutting down other minions too quickly. Kind of the same deal on Sky but I'm more unsure on how to play that map than the others. With mines the objective is strong enough to abandon lane XP. That used to not be true. Mines used to be a lot bigger than it is now so it took forever to clear them and the golems were a bit weaker. Also the boss at the end gave the lion's share of skulls.

Dragon and Blackheart pretty much have the objective in lane, though.

I would really like to try a couple of these strats in a 5 man game like we had last night. For one, I would like to see a team with a real merc/jungler like Thrall and coordinate merc camps with nearby lanes as he moves from place to place. Right now you have roamers with stealth trying to pick players out.

Something lulzy like Gaz/Azmodan in one lane, Gargantuan Nazeebo in another with a Thrall ripping merc camps and going after objectives. Double split push and see what happens.

Zags would probably be better than Nazeebo. Probably Zag + Azmo pushing lanes then have 3 real heroes like Thrall, Stitches, Uther.

-edit-

Actually I wonder of Thrall/Arthas would be a sick combo. Thrall's biggest issue is staying on a target and Arthas refuses to let targets get away.

I think we should always have an arthas for every team comp

No way I'm ETC main now

Funny enough Arthas indirectly got nerfed last patch and is still god tier

Tenks_sl said:

Zags would probably be better than Nazeebo. Probably Zag + Azmo pushing lanes then have 3 real heroes like Thrall, Stitches, Uther.

-edit-

Actually I wonder of Thrall/Arthas would be a sick combo. Thrall's biggest issue is staying on a target and Arthas refuses to let targets get away.

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Naz can push decently if he specs into Gargantuan. It's a free merc camp every minute. Zags is still good too though.

I have never played Abathur and I know that champ got nerfed to fuck according to all the whining on the forums. Anyone experience with the new Abathur?

I haven't played him since the redesign but I've played WITH him and I think we've won each game. He's still great at getting lane XP while doing other things and he got some really nice talents on his carapace. It seems like his new ult is now better than his clone ult. If we do some QM tonight I may dick around with him. Maybe these people were just used to him being blatantly and completely overpowered and now that he's more tuned down they're sad.

He also suffers from map hell. Like he's really good on Raven and Plant map but absolutely sucks on Dragon and probably on Sky as well. He's decent on Blackheart and Mines.

Yeah I could see it working in a pub environment but honestly you should just have gankers bouncing between their lanes and never letting the specialists establish dominance in the lane

You guys remember that double healer comp with arthas.. god that wasn't very fair.

In what sense Ao-

The object of each game is to destroy the other teams base.
Each map has it's own specific objectives that help you with the overall objective. You can go wiki these.
MOBAs have metas which are essentially over all game strategies that the majority of the public follow. Currently it's the Deathball meta.
Heroes are catagorized into different types of roles. They are standard RPGish interpretations. A good team comp goes a long way just like a WOW Raid.
The game is click to move.
You have 3 abilities, 1 ultimate (QWE+R), you also have some traits that give you additional "clickies".
As you level you gain traits. There are trait calculators out there for you to mess with.

Those are the basics.

Honestly I tried to learn DOTA2 from textbooks and it just doesn't work. MOBAs are much about a sense and feel. Like "I am pretty sure I'm about to get ganked" instead of a tradtional RTS like Starcraft which you can hammer home builds and responses. Best bet would to just be load it up and get comfortable with a few heroes in co-op mode then take them into quick. Since quick doesn't have a visible MMR or ladder people generally don't care a whole ton win or lose.

But a few things of note:

- Watch your minimap. You should watch your minimap more than the actual gamescreen as it will give you a picture of the entire battlefield. See 3 enemies and only 2 team mates? Go help them. Notice one of their gankers entered the fog coming towards your lane? Beware.

- Do not throw yourself headfirst into losing engagements. If someone gets ganked 3v1 you rushing in trying to save them to make it so there are 2 deaths on the team instead of 1 won't help anyone.

- If you don't know where the other team is expect them to be coming to get you. So if you're extended just plugging away on a tower and you don't know where the majority of the team is you're probably in danger.


These are just a few general rules of thumb. Things that really translate from MOBA to MOBA. Like Draegen last night doesn't have a ton of HOTS play but it was clear he's played MOBA before because he did much of this stuff as well. But you'll get people clearly new to the genre trying to take on 3 heroes at once for no reason. Basically I always err on the side of caution instead of on the side of making a killer play. Many new people err on the side of getting a kill instead of getting killed.

Here are pick/bans from the latest competitive NA tournament if anyone cares

FlintlockFreedom comments on Kings of the Storm Weekly #9

I'm also totally new to MOBA's and HotS Ao, I just did a couple practice games and then played a lot of Co-op games to get a feel for heroes etc. You do want to level heroes up to level 4 in Co-op I believe in order to unlock all of their talents etc.

Not sure if you own any Heroes or what but you can check tier lists to see the "best" ones to learn or whatever. As has been said though none are really unplayable bad, specialists would be the only ones I would really even be wary of.