In Heroes of the Storm, there are 4 basic resources which are time, experience, health and mana. To improve as a player you must learn to manage the trade-offs between these resources more effectively. These resources are important to consider during the drafting phase as they will inform the strategy and play style you are your team should deploy to optimise your chances of victory.

This article will define what I mean when I reference each resource.

Time:

Players interact with time through: Death timers, ability cooldowns, map objectives, travel time, mana regeneration, health regeneration and mercenary camp spawn timers. Time can be traded for any of the other resources.

A good example of times interaction with other resources in Heroes of the Storm is Kael’thas’s heroic ability pyroblast. This is an ability that allows an efficient conversion between your mana and the enemy teams health pool, the main cost comes in the cooldown.

Death timers are perhaps the most important time resource as they interact with so many of the other resources. However you may choose to trigger your death timer willingly as there are occasions where it can be considered ‘worth’ sacrificing yourself to deny resources from the opposing team, or gain a significant amount of them for yours.

Experience:

This is a relatively simple and obvious resource, the more of it that you gather, a.k.a your macro game, the more powerful your team becomes. A noticeable difference between more skilled and less skilled players is their ability to make decisions regarding experience points.

Experience is gathered from being near lane minions when they die (or if damage from a hero cast ability or structure last hits a lane minion), killing enemy heroes, opponents structures being destroyed and by capturing mercenary camps. In Heroes of the Storm, the entire team shares the experience gathered by each individual.

Experience increases your teams level, with each level gained your health pool, mana pool and damage stats will increase. At levels 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20 you will also receive access to new talents. This means that teams will often avoid any interaction with the opposing heroes when they are ‘down a talent tier’ or if they themselves are about to gain a talent tier advantage and want to gain that advantage before an engagement occurs.

Health:

Health is not just the health of your heroes, it is also the health of your minions and your structures. The health of the heroes in the game is more easily replenished than that in the other pools however there are steeper penalties for losing it as it can result not only in the opposing team gaining resources but also the loss of resources for yours.

If you lose three quarters of your health and your support hero is forced to cast an ability on you then you have cost your team mana and time as a cooldown has been spent.

A common example of poor health pool management is when, in the early game, a player will overextend in the lane to try and pressure their opponent’s towers and then take damage from their opponent which then forces them to return to the hall of storms to recover. Your team is likely to lose experience in your lane and so you have effectively traded experience for early structure damage; rarely a good trade early on.

Mana:

Mana is often difficult to manage, being effective at managing can set the experienced and accomplished apart from the rest. This resource is different from all of the others listed as it is not universally applicable, some heroes do not even have mana, nor do your minions, your structures or the camps you capture.

Mana accelerates the interaction between a hero and the other resources. At the cost of mana, you can reduce the time taken to gather experience or increase the rate you remove health from an opposing hero, in the case of a support it increases the rate a friendly teammate regains their health.

There are several heroes in the game that become ineffective when they run out of mana and need to return to the hall of storms before they can be useful again, costing their team time. This can make heroes that have a difficult time managing their mana bar less desirable in drawn-out engagements or on maps where constant ‘poking’ will occur, because as soon as one team has a hero that needs to go to the hall of storms the other team can gain an advantage and do structural damage, capture an objective or take mercenaries.

Conculsion:

There is an incredible depth of interactions between these resources that occur during a game and this short guide does not even scratch the surface. But it should give you the ability to more clearly assess the choices that you make during the draft and in-game as I have often found that players do not consider these resources when making decisions.

Next time you play please keep these resources in mind! When I started to realise the resource implications of my choices the way I played changed dramatically and my rank did too!

About the Author: My gaming tag is Arena and I am a high-level Heroes of the Storm player. In my professional life, I have worked in a variety of industries at well-known companies and have been the founder of several companies.