GAF User List:
Overview:
Heroes of the Storm is Blizzard's entry into the MOBA genre. While it shares a lot in common with MOBAs, it actually works rather differently in practice, arguably drawing more of its inspiration from MMO PvP.
Starting Tips:
Q. I'm completely new to this genre. What should I do?
- Play all three tutorials. They're fully voiced and will walk you through the basics of the game.
- Select the lowest skill level when asked. This selections helps determine how you match make.
- Each hero has an approximate difficulty rating as assigned by Blizzard. Choose Easy or Medium difficulty heroes until you feel comfortable.
- The heroes marked as Easy by Blizzard are Raynor, Malfurion, Uther, Valla, Li Li, and Azmodan. Presumably they would make good starting choices.
- If playing Versus seems too intimidating, start by playing Practice (you and bots vs. bots) or Co-op (you and other people vs. bots) mode.
- Remember, the matchmaking for Versus will try to ultimately make you win 50% of your games, so don't be surprised if you eventually only start winning 50% of your games.
- Blizzard's suggested starter (Easy) heroes are Azmodan, Li Li, Malfurion, Raynor, Uther, and Valla.
- The game inherits its balance from MMO PvP instead of MOBAs. This means that the archetypes are Assassin (damage dealer), Warrior (tank), Support (healer), and Specialist (utility). Please note that carries do not exist, as it is the easiest mistake to make as a regular MOBA player.
- Similarly, if you're composing a team with friends, you ideally want at least one Warrior, one Assassin, and one Support with healing (aka the MMO trinity).
- There are different maps with different objectives. In the early to mid-late part of the game, these objectives are significantly important to ensuring map control, experience leads, and eventually victory. Very late in the game sometimes it makes sense to ignore the objective and just charge their base if you're way ahead.
- The number of players you have in a team fight can have a notably large impact on whether or not you will win that fight. If you're outnumbered, consider running unless you're feeling confident you can win or will have backup soon.
- Matches generally last 15-25 minutes. 20 minutes is an especially common game length.
- Lane minions give more experience than killing other heroes. Try to keep at least one hero in each lane until at least level 10 when you get your ultimates unless you need to do a map objective. It can definitely be useful past that point too.
- Experience is shared between all players on a team and there is no gold so don't worry about last hitting or kill stealing.
- Mercenary camps aren't farmed for gold or experience, but rather when you kill the minions there you capture them for your team and they attack the enemy in the nearest lane. Siege Giants absolutely destroy towers/bases, Knights tank a ton of damage, and Golems (if present) are like a combination of both.
- There are no items in the game. Instead, at levels 4, 7, 10*, 13, 16, and 20, you get to choose one of 2 to 5 talents. Level 10 always has two options (sans Abathur) where you pick one of two ultimate abilities.
- There are currently five different maps. Instead of explaining them, just follow the links in the Battleground section below.
- You have to buy heroes like League of Legends, but there is no rune system. There's a weekly rotation of free heroes and you unlock two more free hero slots as you level up.
- The fastest way to get gold to buy heroes is by doing daily quests and leveling every hero to level 5.
- The heroes play like you would actually expect them to based on their lore. Usually this leads to a lot of really cool and distinguished designs different from both each other and often other MOBAs. For example, Zagara (Zerg Broodmother) spreads creep across the map with creep nodes, summons in lots of zerg units, and has Nydus Networks she can travel through. However, sometimes you end up with a Raynor.
- Blizzard changes the game's balance very frequently, even often redoing heroes both from a talent and ability perspective. Maps and other mechanics change regularly as well. Nothing is considered sacred.
- Select your hero before playing the match, and get assigned to a random map.
- You can only have one of each hero per team, but the other team can have the same heroes.
- You can match in a party of any size. If you're matching with a party, you will have to decided who is playing who among however many of there you are.
- The game tries to match teams against similarly sized teams. So if you're a group of three with two solo players, they will try to match you against the same or 4/1 or 3/2.
- The game tries to make your team composition make at least some sense though doesn't always do the world's greatest job.
- You see the map you will be playing on before choosing your heroes.
- Your heroes are chosen in a rotating draft order (the first team chooses a hero, then the other team chooses two, then the first team chooses two until everyone has their heroes).
- You must have at least 10 heroes unlocked (not included free heroes of the week) and be at least Level 30 on your account to play Hero League.
- The game will strongly try to match you with a team of the exact same composition, so a group of thee players with two solo players would wait notably longer than Quick Match in trying to find the same type of match up.
- Ideally your team would be easier to make a good composition with given you're drafting heroes, but that's up to the players.
Released Heroes:
Click the image to see details about each character. Note that Sylvanas and The Lost Vikings aren't out yet.
Unreleased Heroes:
These are heroes who are very significantly in the files and/or have been explicitly confirmed by Blizzard, and often have already have their character model shown. Sylvanas and The Lost Vikings would technically be here too.
Unconfirmed Heroes:
These are heroes that at least have a trace here or there in the files or have been mentioned in an off-hand way by Blizzard.
Battlegrounds:
Blizzard has really nice interactive webpages that explain each of the five maps so just click the image to go to the Battlegrounds page on their website.
Daily Quests:
There are currently four types of quests. To note, if you're unfamiliar with Blizzard universes, the game doesn't tell you whether a hero is from Warcraft/StarCraft/Diablo on the hero select screen.
-Play 2 Games As A [Warcraft|StarCraft|Diablo] Hero (200 gold)
-Play 3 Games As A [Support|Assasin|Specialist|Warrior] (300 gold)
-Win 3 Games (600 gold)
-Play 8 Games (800 gold)
Unlocks:
Hero Unlocks: (Per Hero)
Hero Level: Reward
1: Heroes Start Here
2: Second Heroic Ability
3: Six Additional Talents
4: All Remaining Talents
5: 500 Gold
6: Hero Portrait / Mount Variation 1
7: Skin Variation 1
8: Skin Variation 2
9: Hero Master Portrait / Mount Variation 2
10: Master Skin Unlocked
Screenshots:
