Hello, My name is Shawn Boyle & I go by the tag Jin. I'm the Offlane player for No Tomorrow. I began playing HOTS in August 2016, and I'm here to give an educational blog on the concept of mindfulness within heroes, while not entirely in the psychological term of the mindset, but using the concept of it in which you should always be aware of your actions & what is going on around you on a conscious level.

This blog is going to touch on some subjects that are often talked about within the community and are quite simple, but are things that you should be actively mindful of and considering at every point of the game. It's one thing to know the concept of these subjects, but it is another to be able to consistently be capable of applying it.

I will be breaking down bullet points of concepts I'd like to explain the value of, & teach you how to apply them to your gameplay to give you a list in a way of things to check off at each moment you are in a train of thought, a way to evaluate yourself and how to play the game. They will sound simple and they are, but I'd like to extend these simple concepts to you guys and explain a little bit more about them than you usually hear, as well as how to apply them to yourself.

1. Your Map

Look at your map, what are you doing with this information, what are the extents of your capabilities with this information? Let's go in depth, first taking a look at the two types of information you can use on your map.

Visible Information This means any information presented to you by your map that you are immediately aware of by using your eyes, not your brain.



Logical Information This means information that you create for yourself by considering the circumstances of the game, understanding where people will be on the fog in your map based on logic.



Visible

Visible Information & Logical Information share a 50/50 balance and reflect on each other in their value. If you see somebody on the map, you know where they are. If you don't see somebody on the map, you know where they aren't. This doesn't mean that you should act based on one alone, as there are always factors that effect your actions.

Visible Information is quite simple & doesn't need much depth of explanation. If you see 4 people bottom, you know there can only be one person top. If you see 3 people bottom, nobody mid, and 1 top, it's possible that one person could be anywhere at that time. How you determine their positioning is dictated by Logical Information.

There are many different ways to utilize Visible Information. When opportunities present themselves, such as 2 showing top and you have 4 on the bottom side, this likely means it's possible for you to take a 4v3 engagement. If you see one top and you have 4 bottom side, you are likely able to do your mercenary camp safely. Visible Information will often present obvious concepts that you should always be checking for & making use of.

Logical

Often the minion waves are the primary tell of logical information. All of the movements on the map early game are largely dictated by minions, because experience is so valuable that your priority is to ensure you are maximizing it at all times. Missing one minion wave will very likely be the difference between you winning or losing the next objective, based on talent advantage. Because of this importance, you can understand & even predict where players will be at any given time based on these minion waves.

Let's say you're bot lane on Dragon Shire, and you want to know whether or not you can play for the point. Your first step should always be to look at your map, see the lanes & understand the probability of your number matchups. Are you going to stay in a 2v2, or could this turn into a 2v3? If your players in the mid lane are pushing out their opponent, and you see 4 minions crashing into their towers, it's very likely that you are safe because the enemy should very, very rarely miss the soak to make a play when there is no guarantee it works out. This means that even if you don't see someone showing on the map middle, if you are playing early game as in about pre-10, you can often rest assured they are sitting behind the gate or in a bush soaking the wave rather than looking for you.

Throughout the progression of the game, in theory the experience holds the same amount of value relative to your level & talents, although it takes longer to level up you still need to get your talents, so falling behind will still hurt you just as much, BUT, you gain more getting things outside of experience compared to early game due to longer death timers, scaling against structures, and having ultimate abilities to secure your plays you go for rather than them falling flat early on.

To summarize the relevance of value in relation to Logical Information, understanding your priorities such as experience, win conditions & risk reward assessments, as well as theirs, will help you understand the probability of player locations on the map outside of your immediate visibility. If you are very ahead of the enemy, it's likely they look for riskier plays and more bold proactive positioning on the map. If you are slightly ahead and they want to take a fight on talent before you hit the next, the same can be said. This goes both ways, it just ties into the natural flow of experience as well as your relevant structure advantage or disadvantage. Additionally, your win conditions, such as if your comp scales or excels early game, or the best positions for you to fight at, will dictate where people will want to be at any given time.

Win Condition

Your win condition comes in a few forms, which I will list off individually and go in depth about.

Regardless of your type of win condition, it's important you are consistently mindful of it to best reach optimal scenarios for it.

Talents

All 10 heroes in each game have different escalations of strength within their talent tiers and these should always have a visible impact on the game. Some heroes get their biggest strengths in the late game, some don't get particularly stronger in comparison to other heroes as the game goes on. Your decisions should be made keeping in mind your strengths at those particular points of the game your heroes are strongest, early, mid, & late game.

Your greatest strength at any point in the game is going to be determined by your talents, or your condition for combat which I will mention next. The difference between 5 heroes having an extra talent or not will very surely win you a fight. Consider the impact of each talent and know when you should fight or not.

Combat Condition

Where you fight is also significant for a lot of heroes & compositions. For example, fighting in a small, narrow area VS Kael'thas & Maiev will very likely have poor results for you. Additionally, fighting in a shrine as Diablo is a solid condition to win a fight. Fighting in an open space as Kael'thas or Maiev will not be as beneficial for you, pretty simple. How you play around these conditions makes a difference for sure, If you run away from your team vs Abathur Genji, you're much more likely to die than if you stayed close to your team in a choke where you can counter engage. Consider your surroundings, and how talents spike your strength in them.

Cooldowns

Keeping track of & fighting around your team's cooldowns as well as the opponents is a surefire way to find yourself winning fights, calling them out & timing ultimates is always going to help.

Structures, Experience & Minion Waves

Experience

Something people don't often take into account is that the level difference between teams doesn't just mean that you are closer or further from a talent tier, every level is 4% stats to all 5 players. Every time you fight the enemy 5v5 down one level, you are fighting at a 4& disadvantage statistically across the board, which makes more of a difference than you may think. Sometimes, not always, it's actually better just to soak it out and I will explain why.





The amount of experience required to level up changes every 4-5 levels, varying a bit. This means that if you are level 6 and you want to fight once you hit 7, you have a bit more time before they get a stat boost from hitting 8, because it takes another 1K more experience for them to hit the next level. You're given particular periods of catch-up that you can play for, as well as in general if you are behind you can likely find weak structures to take down due to buildings not scaling once you level up a bit, because you likely haven't taken them down yet. If you're level 13 and they have fort towers up in a lane, you can knock them down super quickly with a simple rotation, which will get you that extra experience needed to make 16 on time for an objective.



The experience you get froma kill is increased if you're behind and decreased when you're ahead due to Blizzard's catch-up system in place. Keep this in mind as finding somebody out of position with a clever rotation or punishment of an overextension can do worlds for getting you back in the game. Kills are worth very little early on in the game, as the experience hasn't had time to scale in proportion to minion waves, so a wave at level 1 is worth about 150 EXP more than a kill. Once you hit about level 16 kills will be worth quite a bit in comparison to waves, due to the scaling of hero kills being multiplicative from the hero level, while minion waves are additive. Obviously kills are also much more valuable later because of death timers.



Lastly, structures do not scale. The only structure that scales is the health of the core, all other structures keep the same stats & experience throughout the game. When you're level 30 keeps will die in seconds, when you're level 1 they will take a century to kill. The experience of structures is less meaningful (but always plentiful) as the game goes on, but that doesn't decrease their importance of course, as there are many reasons why you want the structures.

Structures

The amount of structures taken on each team as well as the levels for each team dictate a lot of decision making.

If you have 2 of the enemy's keeps and they have none of yours, you will have consistent pressure on their base that they have to clear while you can get advantages with numbers while they do so elsewhere. Falling behind with a global is much easier of course for clearing lanes, but that's a specific case. From the other perspective, if you are down 3 keeps and the enemy is playing passive, it's very likely you want to hard force something because you cannot deal with 3 lanes of catapults when an objective phase comes.

There are other factors to this such as thinking about which lane you want to engage vs Stitches in if their walls are down in some or not, or if you have a composition that needs a lot of space (Illidan), to run at people, et cetera. You should constantly be aware of your terrain and structures play a part in this. One big thing to watch out for is in scenarios you are looking to dive, that you watch your waves because getting hit by a fort is extremely detrimental due to the slow, attack speed slow, and high damage.

Minion Waves

Knowing what you actually want to do with minion waves can be tricky but it's an intricacy that people do not always take note of, this is a short little segment but just a few things to note.



Priority Having wave priority is the most commonly impactful part of waves and the simplest thing to take note of. If your minion waves are crashing into their towers while you're rotating, you have priority. Having waveclear is very essential and the best way to use it in most scenarios is to force your opponents to catch experience while you can do something else on the map such as turning in gems, doing a camp, stealing a camp, ganking a lane, etc.



Freezing Freezing waves is pretty simple, if you don't want your wave to be far into the lane, you want to freeze it. Basically if you want your wave to build up, kill the ranged minions as they do more damage, but leave the tanks as they will give your next wave time to arrive.



If you want your wave to freeze but you actually want to deny them experience, kill 1 or 2 tank minions and posture aggressively on their ranged minions. You can only really do this if you have a massive advantage in your matchup as you'll be taking damage, but it's definitely the best way to zone experience as your wave still hits the tanks but doesn't actually build up enough to push into them because the ranged minions are thinning your wave.

Doing Nothing Sometimes it's best to actually do nothing, no reason to give your opponent experience before an objective if you already have the experience you need, if you don't really get much by getting wave priority, and there isn't a favorable situation to freeze, don't do anything to the waves and they won't be getting experience!



Teamfighting, Skirmishes & Ganks

Mechanics Straightforwardly, you should be thinking about your cooldowns against the opponents, using this information to execute optimal sequences with your hero, thinking about when you should be throwing a stun, holding it, what skills you need to be watching out for to dodge, etc.

Positioning Whether you play in the front line, on a flank, entirely on their rear or inside your gates vs a dive comp, it's important to constantly think about the best place for your hero to actually be standing, it's seriously so important if you have a hero who can match the flank of something like a Genji or a Jaina, you need to cover the bases your team needs, you probably can't have both your frontlines flank together because your damage need a wall to walk with, etc.



Active Decision Making

My final case for thought here is in the essence of itself for mindfulness, actively making conscious decisions based on the circumstances I've listed above. The best way I've found to be consistently in check with my thoughts is by finding a way to implement them into my games & executing a decision based on that information I've consciously given thought to.



Example being, the enemy has 2 keeps down but we're level 20 over their 18 so we will siege the third keep, as there's no reason to give them space if we have talent advantage, we shouldn't lose a forced engagement on their part.

You come to these conclusions by first considering experience, then structures, as well as circumstance being that you should use your lead and are favored in an engagement.

Practice these concepts and apply them to yourself, it's easy and valuable, cheers!