I’ve been thinking about a writing project for a little while now, combining two aspects of my life that I love: Heroes of the Storm and writing about video games. Before the Ranked Preseason ends on June 14, I would love to climb the ladder and attain Rank 20 for the Elemental Wolf Mount. However, in an effort to climb the ranked ladder, I simply need to get better at the game.

I’ve read plenty of guides, I’ve watched the pros play, and there is always going to be the unknown element of matchmaking: getting put with trolls and verbally abusive players. Even though there are a lot of outside factors in a match, I can only control my own gameplay. To truly become a better Heroes player, I need to take an additional step: watch replay of my ranked matches and analyze my gameplay.

This will be the first edition of my Heroes of the Storm Replay Analysis, in which I watch one of my Hero League matches and attempt to pinpoint what I’m doing correctly and what needs improvement. Initially, I thought this match wasn’t going to teach me much about my own gameplay due to some terrible teammates. Ultimately, I learned a lot from simply looking back at the game with a critical eye.

Match #1 Sky Temple (LOSS)

My Team: Sonya, Thrall, Nova, Zeratul, LiLi (Me)

Enemy Team: Muradin, Artanis, Illidan, Rehgar, Sylvanas

Overview: Wow, so this was one of the more frustrating games that I have played in Hero League. It’s like the universe knew I was planning on writing my first Replay Analysis today and decided to give me one hell of a curve ball. With this match, I fully believe that our loss was 100% decided in the draft.

I picked 5th in the draft, so I let my teammates know that I could fill in. 1st pick was Thrall, 4th pick was pre-selecting Greymane, and picks 2 and 3 weren’t showing us who they were going to select. When their turn came up, they selected the two stealth assassins at the same time: Nova and Zeratul. Rightfully, our team exploded. 4th pick Greymane had to swap to a tank, and I picked up the slack with LiLi as the healing support.

Thrall and Sonya’s anger was met with nonchalance by Nova/Zeratul, making the toxicity that much worse. Nova/Zeratul had some early kills, but the team was never able to recover and work together due to the massive amount of typing from all 4 teammates. I didn’t type a single message after the match started and quickly muted my team about 1 minute in.

Positive Takeaways:

I don’t mind playing support, and since the other team had picked Rehgar 1st, I had to resort to a support hero I’m not as experienced with. Lt. Morales was banned, so I picked up LiLi to blind the enemy team’s Illidan, Muradin, and Artanis. The blinds were awfully helpful.

With two stealth teammates, I had to solo lane a lot, but I did my best to keep us relatively even on XP as we marched toward Level 10.

I rotated to the second temple objective right on time, despite soaking in the top lane at the time. However…

Room for Improvement:

I took too bold of a path to get to the second temple at the bottom of the map, and got hurt along the way.

I missed the 1st objective call, and didn’t start moving toward a temple until the enemy already had it.

Once we got to the first temple we had a great team fight, but the enemy team had already fired off a lot of the shots from it.

In my efforts to soak, I was attempting to get us caught up to level 10 behind the enemy team, but I overextended and ended up dying right as we hit 10.

After the 10 minute mark, I hopped around too much with who I was helping on our team. Overall, we were so spread out that I wasn’t sure where I should be – I didn’t want to follow our tank because Sonya was extending incredibly far behind enemy lines.

I hearthed to recover mana, and my team decided to march into a team fight without their healer.

Near the end of the match I moved away from 2 of our teammates to go save Nova, which then allowed the enemy team to pick off three of our heroes.

At the very end of the match, our team attempted to start a team fight to steal the boss, but I hesitated in wanting to go refill my health. I got to the fight a little to late to save a few of our heroes.

Overall, my positioning and decision making was very erratic because I was so rattled by the toxicity within our team. I need to get better at shaking those things off after I have muted troublemakers.

Effect on my Rank: A loss is a loss, this one put me at a 30-42 overall record for Hero League. Fortunately, I had some points built up, so I stayed at Rank 35.

Random Observations: The Nova/Zeratul duo began chatting in Spanish about halfway through, and our Thrall replied back with a wonderful endorsement of resident presidential joke: Donald Trump. Great to know this Thrall is a xenophobic asshat.