Types of Value

Teamfight Value isn't energy; it can be created or destroyed

The line between an insane Support play and a game-losing one

Value is something that everyone understands on some level; an Ana who shoots a Healing Dart that hits an allied Hero has generated more value than an Ana who missed her Healing Dart. That doesn't mean that everyone knows how to maximise it, however. Value has a lot of subtleties that, while simple to understand, many players just don't really think about. This article exists to talk about value a little more.I could write an entire article about all the different kinds of value that exist in Heroes in proper rigour, but that's not particularly interesting. So let's cut to the chase; we define Value to beGoing by that, we have that types of Value are simply. Guiding our exploration of this idea would be many pleasant and less-than-pleasant memories of Hero League occurrences:- Two teams fight at Level 20. One team gets fully wiped and the enemy goes on to take down the enemy Core.- Two teams fight at Level 20. One team wins, but they lose the game because they ignored a Zagara at their own Core.- At level 8, a team pushes with a Boss and 3 Nukes on Warhead Junction. They win the game at 7 minutes.- Two teams fight at Level 20. No one dies and no team wins, but one team's core dies to catapults in the middle of the teamfight.The first situation is an example of, where value comes from the enemy team being dead and hence having less players available to create value for the team.The middle two are examples of, where value comes from the central goal of the game; to destroy the central enemy structure known as the Core.The last may seem to be another kind of structure damage value, but I choose to call it. Threat value is when you create situations under which the enemy team is. "I can't contest trib 5v5 because catapults will kill our core", "We can't move up to take a keep because our core is 2% and Illidan can just destroy it by himself if we don't stop him", "we have to give up punisher because we will lose the fight regardless without 10", "I can't push up the lane to destroy front gate because enemy team is missing from the map".Threat value is different from structure damage value in that it requires little commitment. Zagara has to push up to a keep to get her structure damage in, but catapults are just an ever-present force that will slowly push and destroy the enemy Core without you having to do anything. The threat of Zeratul missing from the map will make a seasoned Zagara think twice about pushing up even if Zeratul himself is actually on the other side of the map.Most players have a rough, intuitive idea of teamfight value. "Don't fight 4v5" is a very common form of this; the teamfight value coming from 5 Heroes each with their own set of Abilities and auto-attacks obviously outstrips any 4-man. Similar along that vein is "Don't fight 9v10" where the advantage in Teamfight Value clearly comes from one team having the advantage of strong Heroics.But these rules often get violated. Every day in Hero League teams win outnumbered, on talent disadvantages, at 30% health vs 100% health, etc. And it follows that the above rules that were mentioned, while very good pieces of advice, do not fully capture the idea of value. In the examples I'm about to show, the line between creating insane value and zero value is actually very, very thin.

The person to watch here is Lucio. At 2:03 we can see that Lucio gets stunned by Apocalypse and that Sound Barrier goes on a 10-second cooldown.



Looking closer at 0.25x speed, at the frame just before Lucio gets stunned he already had his blaster in the air ready to drop the beat. We can also see that Lucio's hurtbox was only just barely scraped by Apocalypse's hitbox:



From Lucio's animation just before he got stunned, we can tell that if Sound Barrier had gone off it would have mitigated most of the follow-up from Apocalypse.



From Lucio's positioning, it's easy to see that one microscopic step over the line was the difference between saving the team from a huge combo and losing the fight.



This is the kind of minuscule error that both Grandmasters and Bronze players are very much capable of committing, but also makes the biggest differences in teamfights. Sometimes getting immense value out of a skill vs. getting no value out of it at all is a matter of the tiniest detail, and not an indicator of that player's skill level at all.

How does a team with Storm Talent Advantage and a Boss pushing an exposed keep almost lose the game?

3:11 Anub'arak gets a 4-man Impale on the Red team 3:14 Dehaka pops both Adaptation and Essence at the same time, resulting in significant waste of healing 3:15 Uther casts Divine Storm only to damage two Unstoppable enemies (narrowly missing a stun on Anub) 3:15 D.Va's Bunnyhop got full damage + slow value on 3 members of Red Team peeling them off from focusing a Feared Lunara 3:18 4 people from Red team chase the Blue team while staying in D.Va's Defence Matrix for the full duration 3:33 Anub gets a 3-man Epicentre while Auriel gets two reduced-cooldown Sacred Sweeps on the enemy team

errors

Manipulating value

Shields





In the above example, Falstad continuously stutter-stepped while attacking Chen. Almost all the time this is a sign of a better player, but in this particular case stutterstepping inevitably reduced the damage output and whether Chen died or not was the difference of one auto-attack which could have been there if Falstad had stood still and auto'd for a while instead.

Crowd Control

Kiting

Skill Level and Value

On Supports: How much should healing be valued?

Conclusion

Looking closer at the clip, there are a few situations where either red team lost a lot of value or blue team gained a lot of value:In point of fact, if Auriel had moved forward for a whip-stun at 3:22 (preventing Uther from stunning Genji or healing Arthas and allowing Genji to potentially reset off a low Arthas) or if Lunara had dodged the Corruptions better over the fight, it's not out of the realm of possibility for Red team to have lost the fight and Blue team to have defended their core, 19 vs 20+Boss, and proceed to win the game by pushing through Mid Keep which was opened up by a Knights camp.The lessons to learn here are thatand that, considering that it gave Red team such a huge breathing room forways they could have played better.We've seen that teamfights aren't as simple as "have ults - win fight". In order to win the fight, the ults have to gain value. Moreover it's possible that a team gets so much value from their basic abilities that they can overcome talent disadvantages. The important takeaway here, then, is how to increase the value you get out of your team's plays and how to decrease the value of the enemy team's plays.Shields are a big part of Heroes of the Storm. For the most part, they're equivalent to "temporary Health" - they get consumed before your Health depletes, but if you don't take enough damage in a certain time you lose the protection of these Shields.Tassadar's Plasma Shield is a moderately large (455 at level 0 - or a whoppingof Tassadar's own Health pool) shield, but its uptime is 4 seconds on an 8-second cooldown. Zarya's Personal Barrier is even more massive at 560, but lasts 3 seconds over a 10 second cooldown. In a 1v1 lane, the proper counterplay is to conserve cooldowns for when these shields are on downtime - a Valla Multishot/Hungering Arrow that gets shielded obviously has less value than one that hits an unshielded Tass in a 1v1 situation.Lucio's Sound Barrier compared to those two is mammoth at 1296 at level 0. Anyone who gets shielded simply isn't dying for the next few seconds. It's very much like a multi-target Divine Shield as a life-saving ability. But it's simple to play around if your entire team just disengages. The shield quickly decays over 6 seconds; theoretically, if the shields take no damage during that time, the ultimate has been wasted and you've reduced the value of the enemy team's play.Like some Hero League teams, however, if the enemy team chooses to throw even more cooldowns at the Sound Barrier, they've maximised the value of the ultimate and will find themselves having no cooldowns against a full-health enemy team - a bad situation to be in value-wise.The counterplay to a disengaging enemy team would of course have Lucio's team press their shielded advantage and engage forward with his Amped Speed Boost, but the window of this opportunity is vanishingly small for an uncoordinated Hero League team; the defenders are virtually guaranteed to waste the Sound Barrier if, for example, they have a nearby fort to retreat to.Some shields obviously don't follow this rule. Probius' Shield Capacitor is a very significant anti-poke tool and the counterplay is to prevent the shield from recharging by continuously pressuring him. Chen's Fortifying Brew can be channelled for 5 seconds, has a 5-second cooldown and shields persist for 2 seconds after he stops drinking. The important metric is total damage output; as much auto-attack dps as possible.Consider the following two situations:Ana is caught out of position in the middle of the lane by an Illidan and is quickly taken down because she misses her sleep.Ana is caught out of position in the middle of the lane by an Illidan. A friendly Kael'thas manages to land a Flamestrike on Illidan, but Ana still dies and Illidan just leaves with 75% HP instead of 100%.Herein lies the central issue: Damage is central to the idea of teamfight value since Damage makes people die. But Damage, unless it actually results in a kill or forces someone out of a fight (theof a kill). A Li-Ming at 10% health is still perfectly capable of dealing 2000 damage with a single Mirrorball as a Li-Ming at 100% Health.That's where status effects come in. Status effects / Crowd control allow heroes to reduce the teamfight value of enemy heroes without having to kill them (a particularly tall order), by preventing them from either attacking or casting abilities. Slows, stuns and roots also enhance your team's teamfight value by making it easier to land spells, and more importantly keep the enemy in range of auto attacks and spells.A common idea among the average player is the idea of "effective cc". A full-health Garrosh doesn't particularly mind eating a Muradin Storm Bolt to the face; he gets stunned, eats probably 20% of his Health in auto-attack damage, then walks away. The story would very much change if the Garrosh was at 10% Health instead.Clearly not all stuns or roots are born equal in value. But the value of a CC effect extends past "did it happen to a full-health hero or a low-health one to secure a kill".Blinds are important because auto-attacks are a cooldown-less method of dealing damage. With an exception of maybe one hero (Abathur) in the game, all heroes' auto-attacks contribute non-negligible DPS. A team of Morales, Li-Ming, Sylvanas, Diablo and Sonya wouldn't exactly scream "autoattack dps", but if an Artanis blinded all five and caused 4 autos from each of them to miss, he would have mitigated 2534 damage.More importantly, Blinds prevent on-hit effects. Butcher will not heal (or slow, if he took Nexus Blades) off of Branded targets, Illidan will not reduce the cooldown of his Basic Abilities (or heal), and Greymane will not extend Inner Beast.Having your Blind cancel such "moments of power" from these auto-attack heroes is one way to increase the value of the Blind. Notably, a well-timed Artanis Suppression Pulse is sure to end a Greymane's Inner Beast and shut down a Butcher's healing.Notably, two talents in the game, Li-Ming's Cannoneer and Kel'thuzad's Chilling Touch, turn Basic Attacks into spells which allows them to bypass Blinds and Evasion.: Stuns and Silences are pretty straightforward. Abilities are a central part to any Hero's power pool. Prevent them from using them and they're pretty much gimped for the teamfight. Heroes with no Autoattack damage are gimped more by Silences, but a Valla would still think twice about continuing to fight without her Vault.Part of the utility of silences however, is that they interrupt channelled abilities. A Muradin gets much more value out of a Storm Bolt when 1v1-ing an Azmodan if he saves it for when Azmodan attempts to start All Shall Burn, which wastes the 1 second that Azmodan used to wind-up All Shall Burn and the first few seconds where All Shall Burn does only laughable damage. Consequently, all an Azmodan can do against a Muradin who goes up against him is to auto-attack him and summon Demon Warriors to help until Muradin uses his Storm Bolt, since his other two abilities have significant windup and will actually reduce his DPS.: A Hero is Dazed when they are being displaced. The longest Daze in the game is Brightwing's Emerald Wind, while the most commonly-seen is E.T.C.'s Face Melt. Because they are not officially an actual Crowd Control effect, Dazes are one of the most overlooked and undervalued tools in the game. For the most part, they act like Stuns; Heroes who are Dazed are unable to auto-attack, any spells that a Hero is in the middle of casting will be cancelled and they lose movement control of their Hero for the duration.The reason they are overlooked is mostly because they are mostly too short to notice. But there are many situations where even a minor disruption can make a huge difference:- In order for Chromie to combo off of Temporal Loop, she has to cast Dragon's Breath exactly when the Loop over her intended victim shows 6 o'clock (1.5 seconds). If Chromie is Dazed during this time, she will be unable to cast Dragon's Breath for the duration of the Daze (at least 0.25 seconds). This minor disruption gives the Temporal Loop victim an opportunity to escape with a mobility skill once they have been looped back. Skills that provide long-range dazes to ruin a Chromie's day includes Lt. Morales's Displacement Grenade, Li-Ming's Wave of Force, Tychus' Frag Grenade and Zarya's Expulsion Zone- A Li-Ming with Wave of Force cannot be killed by a Butcher 1v1 without the use of Lamb to the Slaughter. If a Butcher charges her, she can self-cast Wave of Force slightly before the Butcher stuns her. The spell's delay will make it such that Butcher is pushed away before he gets a chance to attack her, but after the stun occurs and Butcher is no longer Unstoppable. The displacement is just enough that Li-Ming will be able to get away after a quick Teleport. However, A Butcher will still be able to queue a Lamb to the Slaughter to be cast right as Li-Ming is Stunned and prevent her from escaping (unless she times her Wave of Force exceedingly well).- E.T.C. after taking Loud Speakers at Level 4 has one of the best skills in the game. The push distance of Face Melt with this talent is so extreme that with a single cast it can put a healer out of range to help a tank - Brightwing's Emerald Wind moves outward extremely slowly, and Dazes enemy heroes while taking them along for the ride. For the duration that they are being pushed, they are effectively Polymorphed; because of this, Emerald Wind is often equivalent to a lower-cd-but-selfcast-only Horrify. A team that can capitalise on this opportunity to blow up a target while a healer is Dazed will find Emerald Wind to be one of the most valuable set-ups for kills on top of being excellent peel.- Particularly notable is that the Displacement effect of Dazes interrupts dash-abilities. These include Genji's infamous Swift Strike and Cyber Agility but include pretty much every ability that causes the user to move quickly to a target unit or target location (but isn't a teleport). A well-timed Concussive Blast by Hammer will prevent ETC from sliding into her, while ETC himself can react to Muradin's Dwarf Toss and cut it short, wasting Muradin's only escape and potentially securing a kill.- Combo-heavy Heroes such as Zeratul are particularly sensitive to the disruption of Dazes if they are in the hands of someone without complete mastery of them. Since usually players would practice such combos in Try Mode, having said combos be disrupted by a Face Melt for example would force the player to consider which part of the combo they were disrupted in and re-queue their skills accordingly, and this second-guessing will massively reduce their kill potential, or even result in their death.- Dazes also help in PVE. A quick ETC Face Melt will put catapults out of attack range of your Core and immediately stop the Core damage, since they will now fixate on ETC instead of the core. ETC, Johanna and Kerrigan can also displace Siege Giants into the attack range of allied structures and allow them to be taken down quicker with the aid of Fort shots or Cannon shots.: These are also pretty straightforward. Slows make it easier for your team to land kills, and slows also make it easier for your team to escape/disengage when the enemy team has a "moment of power". The same goes for Roots and Stuns, although both effects tend to last much shorter than slows and have a lesser overall effect on the total distance the target moves over time.Any slow past 50% is effectively a Root for the purpose of landing skillshots, outside of the target possibly dashing away with an Ability, because of how slow Heroes move in this game by default even at 100% speed. In particular, slows are like Armour in that a 20% Slow is barely noticeable vs normal speed, but the difference between 20% and a 40% Slow is night and day; 80% vs 100% is a difference of 1.25x while 60% vs 80% is 1.33x.A salient point to pay attention to is the numerous talents which take advantage of Slowed enemies. Going past Executioner-type talents (Cassia's Martial Law, Muradin's Give 'em The Axe), we also have Lunara's Unfair Advantage, and on the other side of the coin we have Ana's Purifying Darts which actually makes Arthas' Frozen Tempest a liability because of how much healing output it allows Ana to accomplish.Suppose two Vallas are slightly less than one Hungering Arrow's range apart. One Valla starts moving left, closer to her structures to retreat. The other Valla chases, and they maintain the same distance. If the Valla on the left shoots a Hungering Arrow, the enemy Valla will walk into the projectile since she is moving forward. If the Valla on the right shoots a Hungering Arrow, however, it will fall short since the Valla has had time to walk out of range.This is the power of kiting;. If an enemy is chasing you their movement also becomes significantly more predictable, allowing you to get more value by landing skills.More importantly however, kiting allows you to choose where the fight occurs. Around the Infernal Shrines are many chokepoints where Diablo thrives. If, however, the Diablo tunnel-visions on a kill and chases someone out of the area into the open lane, it is possible to bait him into disadvantageous terrain and to reduce his teamfight value.Kiting also allows the choice of when a fight occurs, as previously mentioned as disengaging from "moments of power".Theoretically, a Sonya would beat Thrall in lane. The amount of healing that Whirlwind provides is massive and the low-cooldown damage abilities that Sonya has, along with not being limited by Mana and having the choice of one of the best lifesteals in the game at level 1, tilts the odds massively in Sonya's favour in the 1v1.But what is Sonya attempts to chase Thrall in hopes of a kill and eventually tanks 4 Cannon Tower shots before getting Rooted by Thrall and subsequently dying? In everyday terms we'd call that Sonya anything from "gold" to "useless". But for the purposes of this article, we say that the Sonya player simply didn't get enough value out of her skills as she should have and actually createdvalue by chasing into towers with no kill potential. The fact that one Sonya player died to a Thrall player 1v1 doesn't change the fact that Sonya still beats Thrall in lane, but it is a sign that the Sonya player simply has a much weaker grasp of the idea of Value.That, in essence, is the difference between high-skill players and low-skill players. A high-skill player simply creates much more value with everything they do than a low-skill player does. They maximise their damage output (vs. a Malfurion that forgets his Moonfire is off cooldown), have better knowledge of how to play around enemy abilities (vs. a team that engages into an enemy Sound Barrier), so on and so forth.If there is a significant average skill disparity between the two teams, the lower-skilled team simply feels helpless. They're not feeding or making drastic mistakes, but everything they do is just out-done; the enemy team clears waves faster since their Li-Ming detonates her Arcane Orb on 5 minions while ours detonates her Orb at minimum range on only 2 minions. Their Valla weaves attacks in and out and gets 2 attacks on our tank for every attack our Valla manages to sneak in. Their Malfurion rotates Regrowths efficiently over 4 people, our Malfurion mis-clicks and heals a lane minion instead. Their ETC has the presence of mind to walk over and pick up a globe that heals his entire team for 12% Health, our ETC pushes the wizard minion further with Face Melt and zones himself out of picking it up.Some other instances of subtle plays to generate value:- Ana's Healing dart grants vision in its path for a very brief second. This brief second is enough for Lunara to target any heroes hiding behind structures to finish them off, or for an Uther to cast Holy Shock or Kel'thuzad to cast Frost Blast. In fact, after Piercing Darts is completed Ana's Healing dart becomes one of the best scouting tools in the game.- When you are being chased, almost always save mobility for after your pursuer has used any gap-closers. If a Valla Vaults before an Ilidan Dives on her, then Illidan's Dive has gotten the value of countering Vault, since it is a targeted gap-closer. If the Valla saves Vault for after Illidan Dives her, then she has reduced the value of Illidan's Dive.- In a PVE situation Li-Ming should always move backward before casting Arcane Orb to give it more travel time, and hence damage. In this clip it is readily apparent that had Li-Ming cast Arcane Orb closer to the immortal instead of making the conscious decision to move further downward before casting, they would have lost the immortal. This clip shows pretty clearly how much a difference of value Auriel gets vs Kel'thuzad. Kel'thuzad needs to land his spells to get value out of them but every skill after the first Death and Decay was dodged. Auriel maximised her value by constantly auto-attacking and healing herself while landing her own Sacred Sweep.The idea that Heroes of the Storm is a game that can be significantly influenced by decision-making, drafting and counter-picking is both partially true and idealistic. On some level it is possible for a player with poorer reflexes and mechanical skill to win games with superior decision making. For the most part, Value can be determined by decision-making but at the same time the value-creating effect of just being better at everything than your opponents cannot be underestimated. Individual skill may not be the main game-winning factor in games, but it would be dishonest to say that it does not make a difference.One thing unique to Heroes of the Storm in its genre (compared to say, Dota 2) is just how much healing there is in the game. Rehgar's Ancestral Healing, Uther's Divine Shield (combined with with a rotation of his two heals) and Kharazim's Divine Palm are just a few examples of the life-saving capability of Supports in Heroes that extend to even giving their ally a second life.Herein lies the problem. In order for that ally to have been close to death in the first place the enemy team needs to have committed resources. Maybe a few stun cooldowns, some burst damage ability cooldowns, and traded away some of their health in the process as well. They traded off these resources in order to get a kill. To have their kill completely denied with a single support's Heroic is a sign of just how absurd the teamfight value of having such a life-saving skill is; a Support basically had the teamfight value of maybe 0.7x an Assassin's damage, 0.7x an average Hero's waveclear, his own CC AND the ability to get a whole other Hero's worth in teamfight value by saving a life.Recently there has been a short-lived controversy around the 5% Support nerf. The idea behind nerfing Supports was that if a Hero were to have both the ability to give a second-life and have decent teamfight and waveclear ability on his own, that Hero simply brought too much to the table.Naturally the Support players weren't particularly thrilled. As a healer myself I enjoyed being able to soak instead of having to depend on my team to do it, merc instead of having to depend on my team to do it, and contribute a reasonable amount of Hero damage as well. Healing and life-saving is a type of teamfight value that depends on the ally to take advantage of. Waveclear and DPS are types of teamfight value that the Support player can capitalise on himself. It doesn't feel good to have most of the value in a Hero's kit be dependent on allies.The simple fact, however, was that Supports had had it too good for too long. To have the incredible teamfight value of healing/cleansing and acceptable hero damage / PVE potential on top of it just meant that Supports have more value pound-for-pound than other classes, and picking a second healer just meant an obnoxiously strong teamfight ability without losing too much on Structure Damage value or Threat value in the macro of map-control. The nerfs were completely warranted (and I may be crucified for this) but not even enough.A completely valid point, however, was that it's possible the Supports that had less of a healing capability were unfairly gimped more than others. A particularly confusing case was Malfurion, who had acceptable healing only if the enemy team allowed Malfurion's team to gain value out of his heals-over-time by disengaging, and yet he still lost the 5% off of his Regrowth, and even more puzzlingly, his Tranquility which is currently the weakest healing Heroic in the game.I hope this article has helped you go slightly deeper into how exactly a team can win from a disadvantage by quantifying how well plays are executed with the idea of Value. The purpose of it was partly to explain situations that make you go "how did we lose this?", but also to highlight the fact that sometimes just because someone made a game-losing decision or play does not necessarily mean that that player is of a lower skill bracket.Pro players, grandmaster players are all capable of choking and committing mistakes that lose a lot of value. The difference between a high-skilled player and an intermediate Platinum-tier player is consistency in how often (or rather rarely) these mistakes are committed rather than whether they are committed at all.On the other side of the coin, it's possible for lower-tiered players to accidentally get massive value out of their plays if they interrupt a significant ultimate or just land powerful AOEs on multiple heroes. Again, skill level is a matter of consistency and the average value you get over many, many games rather than one-off occurrences.Part of the reason why games of HotS can feel so bad is because games can easily be won or lost based on small details that could have made all the difference. If Lucio had gotten that Sound Barrier off. If Auriel had stepped up and stunned the Uther earlier. If Lunara hadn't gotten hit by so many Corruptions from Gul'dan. Here's the secret: more than one person on your team has one of these "if onlys" that could have made a huge swing in value and turned around the game. The key is not to find blame and pin responsibility but to be able to identify these situations ahead of time so that you can take it upon yourself to make the difference to win games in the future.I haven't actually talked about Structure damage value or Threat value much at all. This blog post has already become long enough; maybe another time.