The intoxicating high of overwhelming victory in Heroes of the Storm is stark in contrast to its painful, frustrating sense of crushing defeat. I left each game feeling either godlike because of its superb characters and combat, or worthless because of the disruptive secondary objectives and poor progression system.

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Heroes of the Storm is developer Blizzard’s MOBA-structured homage to its incredible history, a mash-up of its rich multiverse and iconic characters set atop team-based battlefields. It’s a fun blend of worlds with a colorful and unique art style with that distinctly Blizzard standard for quality, and a great sense of humor. Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, and other Blizzard heroes team up and go toe-to-toe, engaging in frequent, furious team fights where positioning, timing, and cooperation are essential to annihilating enemy players. These skirmishes are Heroes of the Storm’s specialty. With each hero playing a distinct role, and bringing unique abilities to the table, there are hundreds of awesome opportunities for satisfying ability combos.As Jim Raynor, I loved summoning a starship to slaughter enemies trapped by my teammates. Nova and Zeratul roam invisibly across each map, dealing high damage to pick off stragglers escaping the terrifying Kael’thas, who can burst down entire groups’ life bars in short order. It doesn’t matter who I play in a given match; I love these heroes in equal measure and for different reasons. I enjoyed healing allies as Tyrande because their success in battle was a result of me keeping them alive. Choke-slamming a wizard over Diablo’s head is both hilarious and a useful means of literally handing said sorcerer to your kill-hungry allies. Everyone has value, plays a core role to combat, and has a spectacular set of skills.Fights happen early and often, with crucial map-based objectives forcing players into brutal bottlenecks consistently each round. These bloodbath engagements are exciting to watch and a ton of fun to participate in, but their eventual outcome is also the source of Heroes of the Storm’s unsettling imbalance in player power.The rewards for taking the secondary map objectives are so disproportionate that they discourage laning and distract from the primary goal of sieging the enemy base. Whoever takes the objective gains an enormous advantage that dramatically accelerates them toward victory. This is true across all maps. Ignoring objectives is not an option, it’s suicide. If you disregard the Haunted Mines’ tedious skull-collecting mini-game, which happens in a separate area off the main playing field, the enemy will carve through your defensive structures like butter with a powerful golem built from the skulls you left behind. That single success grants the opposing team a nearly insurmountable increase in power and map control. In most MOBAs, this is known as “snowballing.” In Heroes of the Storm, it’s an avalanche.Defeat in Heroes of the Storm is a special sort of painful because losing frequently feels out of your control for one reason or another. Its novel approach to leveling up is another key contributor here. Teammates level up in unison, sharing the wealth of XP earned from killing minions in a lane, destroying enemy defensive structures, or picking off an out-of-position hero. This is a razor-sharp double-edged sword.On one hand, it discourages superiority within your team, granting everyone equal gain regardless of their skill, and giving you a clear understanding of what you and your four allies are capable of in combat. The unfortunate side effect is that there’s rarely an opportunity for a playmaker to carry their under-leveled team to an outstanding, unexpected victory. Trampling another squad feels fantastic, as winning often does, but falling behind a few levels after losing an objective and watching enemies skyrocket in power feels like a burial instead of a challenging struggle for an epic comeback. Recovery is possible, but rare in the 115 games I’ve played so far.Success can seem impossible as early as the screen informing you which of the seven maps you had the misfortune of loading into. When you select your hero and queue into a game in Quick Match, the basic multiplayer mode accessible to everyone from the start, you’re going in not knowing which map you’ll play or what roles random teammates already picked. Even with a party of five friends meticulously composing a lineup of healers, tanks, damage dealers, and lane-pushers, you’re still going into each Quick Match blind, hoping you’ll get one of the good maps, or at least one your team fits.With seven Battlegrounds at launch, each with a separate layout, lane structure, and important objective, there’s a lot to think about. Certain heroes seem outright stronger for certain maps than others. Tanks, particularly with the assistance of teammates wielding area-of-effect spells, are great for holding the Sky Temple control points -- which blast devastating beams into enemy buildings, wrecking their defenses. On Blackheart Bay, where collecting and turning in coins earns your team the assistance of destructive cannonballs, you may want single-target killers to take down an enemy holding a bunch of coins. But If you can’t prepare for the map when composing your team, how can you cook up victory tactics? Don’t get me wrong, I love improvisational tactics, but the inability to prepare is absurd.It wouldn’t be so bad if the overall map quality were more consistent. Some objectives, like the one in Dragon Shire, lead to intense situations, closer matches, and nail-biter team fights. Lose control of its control-point shrines, and the enemy summons the fierce Dragon Knight, who you then have to focus on defending against. Cursed Hollow is another story. My entire team would sigh in disappointment every time it appeared in our matchmaking rotation. We loathed the consequence of its objective -- a series of randomly spawning Tributes that, when claimed three times, reduces enemy minions to one hit point and disables their defensive buildings for a time. Worse, Tributes can spawn so far away from your team that you literally can’t get to them in time to stop your opponents -- who happened to be nearby at the time -- from taking them.Balance isn’t the only problem either. For a free game, Heroes of the Storm is expensive, whether we’re talking in terms of money or time. Newcomers don’t even have access to all of a given week’s free characters from the get-go; they’ll have to grind for the additional free character slots. Locking free heroes in a free game is just unlocks for the sake of unlocks.It’s an awful, greedy limitation solvable only by grinding or spending.Hero prices range from 2,000 to 15,000 Gold, or between $4 and $10 USD, with a handful of more expensive bundles included in the Heroes of the Storm shop. Thankfully, you’reallowed to try any hero in a single-lane bot match before you buy. Unfortunately, free heroes aren’t enough for competitive players. Owning characters is necessary to access Hero League, Heroes of the Storm’s ranked playlist. Qualification for entry includes owning 10 heroes, as well as a level 30 profile. Including the 30,000 Gold Blizzard provided me, and the numerous in-game Stimpacks I unlocked and bought to improve my XP and Gold earn rate, it took me about 40 hours of play before I entered my first Hero League game.I won’t say it was worth it, but Hero League is absolutely the best way to play Heroes of the Storm. I’ll never return to the Quick Match public wasteland again.Hero League’s structure alleviates some problems from Quick Match queueing. Not only do you know which map you’re going into, you can see what your opponent is picking, counter-pick heroes, and build a team with a group that wants to win. Hero League players, in my experience, were more polite than the salty, commanding pub-players. Ranked teammates were helpful, suggested ways to improve, and communicated via the in-game text chat. (The absence of VOIP communication is a massive disappointment, however, especially when you’re playing with random players.) I still didn’t enjoy playing on Cursed Hollow, or straight-up leaving the playing field for a separate, underground area in Haunted Mines, but it made things better enough to keep me interested in playing this, fun, flawed, messy, and different MOBA.