If you have never played a MOBA or just new to the genre and Heroes of The Storm (HoTS) is your first round below will be a helpful guide of what to and what not to do:

“Team, please come to the objective.” -Me on so many occasions I feel like pounding my face on my keyboard. This is just one example of many things that I find myself typing in chat in around ninety percent of my games. It gets extremely frustrating and demoralizing to see the same problems with almost every team in almost every game. I find myself asking why people do not do the same five things over and over. These same questions I ask of my teams over and over are why are you not going to the objective? Why are you not going to the objective on time? Why are we not soaking experience in all three lanes? Why does our support not have the healing heroic, and why did you choose those talents? I am so tired of repeating these questions to almost every team and would love to not have to say them anymore. So to hopefully correct these problems I see I am going to give five basic things every player should do, why you should do them, and maybe some helpful tips to improving on these things.

Go to the Objective

“Their player stayed, so I stayed because it was a 4v4.” -Every Split Pusher Ever. Why not go to the objective and make it a 5v4 in favor of our team? This almost guarantees that our team will win the objective and get a lead in the game. Now I will say, there are varying degrees of importance of objectives, but for the most part it is a safe bet that going to the objective will be advantageous to your team. If you are a new player and are looking to get better at the game, go to the objective. You would think this is an obvious aspect of the game that everyone knows and everyone does. I promise you, it is not. Go back and check the replays of your games. It will shock you how many times team members and even how many times you yourself did not go to an objective and it cost your team the objective. Heroes of the Storm is built around objective gameplay. The objective is the most important thing in the game. It gives your team a massive advantage and sometimes is the only way to actually win the game. The biggest problems I see that hinder people from going to the objective are dying right before the timer starts, soaking experience, and not giving themselves enough time to use the healing well and make it to the objective on time. If you find yourself struggling to make it to the objective, make a clear goal before every match to always think about when the objective might spawn and what you need to do to be prepared for when it spawns. If you have this mindset you will always be playing safe to avoid ganks, proactively healing, and paying attention to your mana bar. Going to the objective on time with full health and full mana will massively increase your chances of winning the objective fight.

Go to the Objective When the Timer Starts

This may look like the same problem as the one above, but I can not count the number of times that someone has typed in chat “so and so, why were you not at the objective,” and the response is “I was there, I was just late.” There is no excuse for this. The game makes a loud noise, the announcer for the map says something, and the game also flashes a big shiny countdown timer on your screen.

Now some of you higher skilled players may refute this statement by pointing out that it does not take the full timer to get to the objective by the time it spawns, so there is a brief window where experience can be gathered beforehand. This is one hundred percent true, but is that small amount of experience worth the one or two people you might lose because the enemy team was waiting at the objective to gank whoever showed up? You also might point out that some objectives, such as the tributes on Cursed Hollow, are not extremely important to fight for immediately. This is also true, and I will say that it can be very valuable if you are a split pusher to push during the first few tributes, or on objectives that can be traded. However, you must communicate this to your team. Tell them well in advance that you do not plan on going to the objective because it is not crucial, and that they should not die trying to defend it. In most cases it is always safer to show up to the objective as a group before the timer finishes counting down. I promise you, your team will love you for this, you will get to be the team that picks a couple heroes off before the spawn, you will secure more objectives, and because of securing said objectives, win more games.

Soak Experience Properly

The objective spawns, the enemy team has level ten and you do not, people immediately start typing “give it up, we can not fight them.” This happens way too often. In a game like Heroes of the Storm, falling behind in experience and levels can turn into a snowball effect that costs your team the game. There is no gold in this game, there are no items in this game, the only things to separate you from the enemy team are hero level and talent tiers. Now that we know experience is crucial,how do we soak experience properly?

Make sure you have at least one hero in every lane, at all times, except for when the objective is up. If you are the person that is designated to lane alone, there is a specific way you need to play. If your hero has an escape (Valla, Li-Ming, Falstad, etcetera) hold your escape as much as possible in preparation for enemy ganks. Use your abilities to clear the wave. Do not worry about poking the enemy hero with your abilities. The return from doing this is generally much lower than pushing the minion waves into the tower. Pushing the minions into the tower does chip damage to structures and drains ammo from them. This strategy also gives you time to recall before objective timers in order to have full health and full mana for the upcoming team fight.

If your hero does not have an escape (Raynor, Kael’Thas, Xul, etcetera), stay back by your gate. Do not worry about hitting the minions with any abilities except for ranged, area of effect abilities. Let the wave push to you so that you can clear it from safety. This takes away one of the gank options from the enemy team and keeps you from dying and leaving a lane empty with no one soaking the experience. The main thing you want to avoid with both of these strategies is dying. Dying gives the enemy experience, but more importantly, it takes away from the experience gain of your team.

Pick the Healing Heroic

This is something I have talked about in the past. Healing is critical to this game and many times there is only one support on the team. I can not even explain how big the disadvantage is for your team if the enemy support picks a healing heroic and you do not. Unless you can automatically kill their healer at the beginning of every team fight, you will lose every single one of them. If I could make one change to this game, it would be removing the choice between heroics for supports, that is how strongly I feel on this subject. I’ve stated this in the past, but for those of you who have not read my previous article on supports, I would make them all like Tracer. Let the support heroes have their healing heroics at the beginning of the game, upgrade it at level ten, and then upgrade it again at level twenty. Good supports that use their healing heroics at the right times win team fights for their team, and generally, the more team fights you win, the better your chances are to win the game. The only scenarios in which you should not pick the healing option for your heroic is when you have two supports and you have coordinated with your team as to who is picking the healing heroic. This is a very simple concept, but it amazes me how many times I see this problem. In ninety-nine percent of scenarios it is better to take the healing heroic, just do it!

Picking Talents Based on the Game You are in

Do you autopilot every game and pick the same talents without even thinking about it? If you do, it is probably because of one of three reasons. You are unfocused, in a hurry, or are just feeling too lazy to consider all the talent choices. This happens to everyone at some point and many players do not realize how big of an issue this is. I will be honest, there are some talents on certain heroes that are a must pick (Nazeebo Death Ritual), but for most talent tiers there are at least two options you should consider based on what your team or the enemy team is playing. These choices can be as simple as deciding whether to choose regeneration master or block, or as complicated as whether you want to go auto attack, multishot, or hungering arrow build on Valla. Now, I’m not going to tell you which builds to go or even which talents to take, because you honestly should be variating your build every game based on the game you are in. However, I will give you some scenarios to consider based on the role you are playing

Warriors: Is the enemy team’s damage mostly ability based or auto attack based? If it is ability based (Li-Ming, Kael’Thas, Jaina), you probably want to take dampen magic or spell shield. If it is auto attack based (Raynor, Greymane, Tychus), you probably want to take block or imposing presence. This decision takes just a small amount of time to think about at the beginning of the game and will automatically help your survivability when you make these choices. There are exceptions to this concept. Some heroes such as Valla or Falstad have a choice on what type of damage they want to do. In these cases it is best to hold your talent until you know which build they are going. Also, many teams will try to have variety in their damage type. If they have damage of both types it is best to pick hybrid defenses or talents that give flat health.

Supports: Does the enemy have high sustained damage or are they more burst focused? If they have more sustained damage it is better to pick talents that can heal over time and keep players topped off. If the enemy has more burst or poke damage it is probably best to pick talents that will protect allies or heal them for large amounts instantly. Also, keep these things in mind during the draft. Some supports excel at burst healing and some excel at sustained healing. Try to pay attention to what the enemy team is drafting and look to pick supports that counter the type of damage they have.

Assassins: The major things you have to pay attention to are the reverse of what warriors and supports have to pay attention to. If they have a warrior that has talented to counter auto attacks, try to build more ability based damage into your talents. If the warrior has talented to counter ability based heroes, try to maximize your auto attacks and sustained damage. The same goes for trying to counter supports. Talent in a way to counter the type of damage mitigation and sustain they have.

Specialists: Your main choice comes down to deciding whether you want to be an effective split pusher or another damage dealer in team fights. The things you are looking for is how much team fight damage your team has if you exclude yourself. If the damage is low, you probably want to maximize your team fight potential. If it is high, you may want to build to split push and destroy structures more quickly.

If you only remember one thing from this section remember this: Always think about what your team has and can do, what the enemy has and can do, and what unique qualities your hero has before you pick a talent. Try to think about what your job in the team composition you have is. If your job is to tank as much damage as possible to protect your backline, if your job is to top your team off during objective fights, if your job is to nuke one priority target, or even to be a building killer, no matter what it is, build in a way that maximizes your potential to do that job.

Conclusion

There are many facets to being a good player at Heroes of the Storm. A few of the basic, but important ones are going to the objective, going to the objective when the timer starts, picking the healing heroic, soaking experience properly, and picking your talents based on the game you are in. If you do not focus on the basics before trying to move up to more complicated concepts your game will be lacking. This is the foundation for your growth as a player and are crucial elements to becoming a great player in Heroes of the Storm. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this article and hope some of you take this advice. I am really hoping that more people start to develop these basic things, both to improve the quality of games and for my own personal mental health!

-Caleb “PanDuhChuu” Jones

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