



The common answer to this will be "just because a weird teamcomp wins a game once doesn't mean it's good", "their chances of winning would be much higher if they were in a traditional comp instead", among other things defending the notion that traditional one-healer double-frontline teamcomps should be absolutely enforced in Hero League and Quickmatch.



First-principle Thinking: Central Problems of Hero League

1. The enemy team's healthbars just don't seem to be going down.

2. Enemy heroes keep getting away at 1HP!

3. When they die, we don't get anything out of it but when we die, they get forts and keeps!

If Yrel had lived instead of Thrall, Yrel wouldn't have the damage output necessary to take down two keeps, and likely Abathur would only be able to take one keep with his Monstrosity. But Thrall and Abathur together have enough damage to take two keeps instead of one, and this difference in value makes or breaks games in Hero League.

4. We're always low on health!

5. We were winning early, but the enemy team won one fight at 16 and turned everything around!

6. The enemy tank constantly walks at our team and zones out our damage dealers for free!

7. All our lanes are pushed in all the time and I miss EXP if I go for objectives or Mercs.

Breaking it down; the pillars of easy wins in Hero League

allows your own minions to push up to deal structure damage (I still maintain that the damage bonus to ranged minions is rather unnecessary and makes waveclear too important in the game)

tank structures to allow Heroes to siege

denies enemy vision of your side of the map

frees your team to leave the lane and to pursue an objective elsewhere while the enemy team is forced to soak or lose EXP. This is particularly relevant in the Dragon Shire and Braxis Holdout solo lanes; the solo laners there all have good waveclear such that if the enemy solo laner has poor waveclear they are either forced to give up the point of lose EXP. This is why Rexxar with Bird of Prey is the king of solo laners on those maps.

when your team has lost keeps, waveclear heroes are what keep you in the game ready to make a comeback by preventing the classic catapult win while your team is contesting a possibly game-breaking objective

heroes with waveclear tend to also be heroes who can take Mercenary Camps easily, which helps greatly in map pressure

heroes with waveclear also clear Mercenaries relatively easily, reducing the value of enemy camps massively

reduces the importance of objectives because the purpose of most objectives is to do structure damage; why not just clear the wave, push up, and do structure damage on your own?

let's not forget the subtle, but non-negligible, attack damage of Ranged Minions to heroes as well; these often make a significant difference in 1v1s in lane

create distance between a threat and an ally (peeling)

as a gapcloser on an escaping enemy

prevent a high-value target from getting value out of their skills (Silencing a Genji Dragonblade or Tormented Souls Malthael)

secure kills by preventing the use of defensive cooldowns

make skillshots easier to land

cancel enemy channelled abilities

Going back to the 5 Specialist game

Bringing it home to your Hero League games

Conclusion

Earlier today, I had the privilege of catching chu8 win a game in Korean Grandmaster with a fabled 5-Specialist team composition: Azmodan, Medivh, Abathur, Xul, Nazeebo, vs a relatively stable, traditional, "meta" team composition. He even expresses delight at the end of the game, saying that the game was pretty damn fun.Personally, I was unsurprised by the outcome of this game and chu8 himself has expressed similar opinions that triple specialist team comps often have decent value and are able to win Hero League games fairly regularly; that is to say, they really can't be considered bad teamcomps in the sense of winrate.Hopefully, after we go through some of the reasonings a bit, a reasonable number of readers will come around to this.In order to examine what makes a good Hero League team composition, first we should explore the common problems that occur in HL games, or in other words, things that we think to ourselves when games aren't going our way.There are a variety of reasons why this might occur, but the central idea behind this is that. Healing isn't just from healers, they also come from self-sustain talents and abilities like Thrall's Frostwolf Resilience, ETC's Guitar Solo, and even shielding such as Abathur's untalented Carapace. Likewise, damage doesn't just come from Assassin heroes; there are a number of ways that non-damage dealers can work in damage, such as from Muradin's auto-attacks or specialised talents such as Malfurion's Celestial Alignment.At the same time, it's also equally probable that this problem arises from execution issues rather than team composition issues; "their Greymane gets in 3 autoattacks for every autoattack our passive Valla manages to sneak in", "their Rehgar works in so much damage and secures kills", or the classic "our Li-Ming just isn't landing her spells". I've covered this in my previous blogpost, On Value, but this isn't what this article is about, so on this issue I will leave the parting remark that it is important to know exactly whether the enemy team not dying is from team composition issues or simply the enemy team being better than you at the video game.The art of securing kills is somehow simultaneously an undervalued and an overvalued one. Overvalued because at low skill levels, too many eager Valla players attempt to chase Johanna with no kill potential and eventually get kited all the way to towers or a waiting ambush. At the same time, it is also undervalued because there is an equally-sized class of passive players at all ranks who, due to lack of confidence in execution, never pick fights that they should, never chase heroes that have kill potential and in the end, eventually lose to confident damage-dealers because in the end, player-killing after Level 20 is the central way to winning the video game.The central problem here is, but at the same time team compositions can also make this easier when the team hasorarea-of-effect abilities. Examples include Kaelthas' Level 20 Flamethrower talent, Thrall's Chain Lightning or simply a mobility skill plus a ranged auto-attack, that we all know too well that Genji or Greymane are capable of pulling off. An honorable mention goes to Medivh's Portal which gives this capability to basically every member of his team, but again depends on the team's execution level.This is a problem that some players don't even consider to be a problem. Up until mid-Platinum or so, a significant portion of players are content to just have the enemy team dead without taking advantage of their death timers. This is because half of the time, there is a giant notification on the screen telling them that there is an objective that they can take advantage of to get structure damage while the enemy team is dead.But sometimes fights happen right after objectives during the dead-time of the map, where all the camps are taken and there is nothing to do. The mindset that low-level players default to in this kind of situation is to just soak EXP and waves, but it's infinitely better to take down enemy structures because this removes vision and limits the amount of safe space that the enemy team has to roam the map.Then again, not every hero is capable of doing so. Suppose that after a teamfight, you are the only hero left standing; your other 4 teammates are dead and the enemy team is dead for 60 seconds. There is a huge difference in value that you can create if you can take a keep during these 60 seconds, vs. if you are unable to. So what heroes will be able to take down a keep?Greymane certainly can, Sonya might, Rehgar may be able to. Auriel, Chromie and Hanzo certainly can't.The central theme between all these isand. Waveclear because you need minions to tank the fort while you do damage, and single-target damage over time can arise either from auto-attack damage or low-cooldown abilities.Additionally, waveclear can be made up for with, since structures prioritise summoned units over heroes. Summoned units provide their own attack damage to siege as well, which is why the traditional Specialists are so good at sieging.An opposite problem to problem 1, maybe sometimes you notice that 10 seconds into a tribute fight, your entire team is at half HP or less while the enemy team is still 80% or higher, and your team is just forced to fall back.Teams with Uther or Rehgar (prior to the recent 27th June Patch, at least) may find themselves in this situation quite often due to ineffective use of Uther's Devotion damage-mitigation, for example. Maybe your team drafted Uther into Lunara.But on the other side of the coin, there are also many Hero League games where Uther is successful. The way to complement Uther's low healing throughput is to have, such as Thrall/Fenix, ETC/Sonya, which will heavily reduce Uther's burden on healing.A secondary corollary to this is that it's possible for Tyrande solo healer teams to succeed in Hero League if her allied heroes complement her stunlock with other lockdown toolshaving their own sustain so that her job of healing is equally spread out throughout the team. Examples include Thrall with Feral Spirit and Frostwolf Resilience, E.T.C. with Powerslide and Guitar Solo (especially with Prog Rock), Gul'dan with Horrify and Drain Life.Alternatively, this problem can also be mitigated by execution; don't tank ranged minion damage, don't tank Siege Giant camps, and avoid stray Flamestrikes or Chromie's spells, and your healer will thank you.There's truth in the fact that some heroes are more late-game than others. Infinite stacking quests like Chromie's Sand Blast and Zul'jin's You Want Axe? certainly contribute to a team's lategame potential.But more often than not, the late game is determined by talents. Sure, Greymane scales at 4.5% per level and gets a decent-value attack speed buff at 16... but Kael'thas gets to inflict Living Bomb on Flamestrike targets. Valla gets a very good upgrade to her safety in Farflight Quiver, but Nazeebo instead gets to paint entire health bars yellow with Vile Infection.Just as much as hero picks can contribute to the lategame, there is also a decision-making element to preventing comebacks as well. When you were level 10 while the enemy team was level 9, were you passively soaking or jungling? Or were you trying to get your team to push a fort for free as 5 with your Heroic advantage? When the enemy team was dead for 20 more seconds did you choose to clear a wave, or take down a Keep's outer gate to open up the Keep (hence an opening to end the game after another team wipe) and get 1600 EXP for taking down the two outer towers?Pressing the advantage is a skill that many lower-level players neglect in favour of just playing safe and hoping that the enemy team does not come back. But games are won on value, not safety, not hope; if an existing advantage permits your team to get more value, then giving up that opportunity is in its own way a throw.Let's first ask ourselves a rather simple question: If I were an ETC, what exactly is preventing me from just ignoring the enemy tanks and sliding onto the backline healers and damage dealers?Simple questions beget simple answers, and the answer to that is that 5 enemy Heroes would be attacking me and I would quickly go down to focus-fire.Yet there are many situations in Hero League games where a tank is somehow allowed to just walk at the enemy team and either push them out or even make a game-winning dive-engage on the backline past the tank. There are multiple reasons for this; perhaps the enemy tank was busy doing their own engage on the enemy backline and not contributing to the focus-fire.But more often than not, situations like this arise due toon the tank. Tanks should not be allowed to be within 5.5 range of damage dealers without taking damage themselves, andTeam compositions can further worsen this issue if the damage output is easily prevented (dodging Li-Ming or Chromie skillshots) or mitigated (Blinds vs Raynor). If your damage is spell-heavy, you need to land your spells; alternatively, auto-attacks are point-and-click, sowhile avoiding enemy Blinds.Lastly, pressure can also be applied on the enemy tank by means of peeling. If an Arthas is slowed and takes 1 extra second to reach your Valla, Valla (and the rest of her team) is given an extra second to deal damage to the Arthas. In terms of slowing an engage, it's roughly equivalent to a second-long stun by allowing your team that crucial second of damage output.provide immense amounts of utility for this reason.Some people reading this may first think of "waveclear", others may think of "globals". In truth, both are roughly equivalent in the question of map control. Consider the following: Suppose that on Towers of Doom, two teams are fighting 4v4 on the bottom Altar, a Jaina clears the waves top and mid and then mounts up and rotates down. What exactly is the difference between that and a Falstad doing the same, and then Flying down to join the fight at the bottom Altar?Jaina clears waves (in general) much faster than Falstad does, since all she does is just cast a single Blizzard (after level 7 or so; early game she needs to throw in a Cone or some autos) and then mounts up. Functionally, it's not that much different to the seconds gained by Falstad using Fly to join his team in another part of the map.(not just good waveclear)in terms of soaking EXP.There are differences, of course. Globals can be used outside of soaking as mobility in teamfights, while excellent AOE waveclear helps more against summoned units (Specialists) and massive accumulated minion waves or minion waves with Mercenaries (a Falstad will be hard-pressed to clear a Knights camp, a Xul has a much easier time due to his Skeletons and having his damage be Physical). Having excellent waveclear while rotating also leaves you vulnerable to ganks and ambushes mid-rotation.Lanes can also be pushed in by Specialists like Zagara and Nazeebo to deal massive amounts of structure damage. But the way that Specialists work in general is by using summoned units to tank enemy towers and minions to allow their own ranged minions to deal damage to structures, while having summoned units to tank allows the Heroes themselves to apply a lot of auto-attack damage to structures. Without minion waves, Zagara's Hydralisks and Xul's Skeletons simply don't do much on their own, and Zagara isn't allowed to spend much time contributing her own auto-attacks to dealing structure damage. A lot of structure damage is prevented simply bySo now we look at what elements heroes "solve" the problems that arise from team compositions above.Problem 1 arises from lack of, as opposed to burst damage.Problem 2 is mitigated by something I will define asProblem 3 is a bit more complex than the first two; it's prevented by a mixture of(including non-support self-healing), structural damage and. Structural damage arises fromand, but care must be taken because some abilities' damage against structures are amplified (Nature's Culling, Amateur Opponent) while others' are reduced (Magic Missiles).Problem 4 is prevented by having, or damage mitigation (Armor, Shields), which I consider to be under total """"healing"""" (see The Value of Execution, an article coming soon ™ ).Problem 5 is is centred around havingProblem 6 is prevented by having(which I consider to be a mixture of Stuns, Roots and >25% Slows), and having a healthy amount ofProblem 7 is simply a problem of, which is aided a bit by having a global, but by no means is a global essential to having a stable team composition.We now have the features of a Hero League team composition that produce easy wins:refers to, quite literally, the total damage-over-time a team is capable of putting out to a single target. It can vary between whether this target is a Hero, Structure or even a Boss or Immortal, but in general the concept remains the same. Intuitively, it arises from a combination ofand ability damageHowever, not all ability damage is equal. Teams with Li-Ming and Chromie frequently find themselves struggling simply because the respective heroes aren't landing their spells. Sand Blast and Magic Missiles are the some of the highest damage and lowest-cooldown abilities in the game, but it is actually a superhuman task to be able to land these consistently enough to even rival the total damage output of an auto-attack assassin such as Fenix.Does this mean that burst damage is overrated in Hero League? In a sense, yes. People pick Jaina and Kael'thas not primarily for their burst damage potential in a team composition (although it certainly is valuable), but because they have incredible waveclear.The issue is that having so much burst damage on a hero is pretty unnecessary because in Heroes of the Storm, basic attack damage and total health pools are tuned in a way such that. 80 is considered on the low end for a Basic Attack at level 0, but 80 damage from 5 heroes applied to a single target is 400 damage, which is greater than a Kael'thas Flamestrike while having no cooldown. In other words, burst damage in this meta is in a way redundant because it's simulated just by having auto-attacks and any crowd control.is an often-overlooked element to a team composition that has a surprising amount of value. If a healer is about to get away with 10% health but a Muradin jumps in and gets the kill, that is reach. Even Gazlowe's Deth Lazor counts as reach at its highest charge; fully charged, it outdamages Li-Ming's Calamity, as a comparison.The difference between a team composition that has reach and one that doesn't is similar to the difference between a Li-Ming with Calamity vs one that has Seeker or Zei's Vengeance. The former will find it extremely easy to secure the kill on a low-HP target, while the latter will struggle to finish off even a Zeratul at 15% Health barring any serious misplays from the Zeratul.To quote a Blizzard employee, "When it comes down to it, ending a game in a timely manner relies on players actually dying". The value of reach lies in the fact that too often, the lack of reach is the difference between a player dying and surviving, which can easily be the difference between ending the game right then and there or giving the enemy team a chance at a comeback.is a concept roughly understood by players in that they understand Malfurion has higher total healing than Uther or Rehgar, who are understood to be more "anti-burst" healers, who have their lower healing throughput mitigated by the fact that their heals come in larger batches (large heals often have a surprise factor in allowing turn-arounds once the enemy team's cooldowns are depleted).But healing isn't the sole burden of healers. Plenty of heroes come with self-healing. And in the grand scheme, if Johanna's health goes up by 500 does it really matter whether that healing came from a Rehgar or from her own Laws of Hope?A team with 5 heroes with their own self-sustain finds themselves less bothered by long-range poke, and in general, have more staying power on capture-point objectives.is a concept as old as the entire genre of games itself. The value of waveclear lies not only in getting the team the valuable EXP needed to win teamfights, but also:That's quite a list, isn't it? There's a reason why Dreadnaught has been on record saying that waveclear is the single most important thing in the game.The defining criterion of waveclear is. Splashing auto-attacks (Junkrat, Leoric, Kerrigan with Fury of the Swarm, Xul's Cursed Strikes) give a high damage dealt per second, but they still pale in comparison to Jaina's Blizzard or Kael'thas' DW+Q combo, which essentially allows them to fire-and-forget their spells, mount up, stick around to soak the XP for a second while the melee minions die to residual damage, and leave the lane.The central idea behind waveclear is the ability of a hero to, and clear out minions that areat out-of-lane objective fights. Falstad and Brightwing have lacklustre waveclear (pre-level 7 in Falstad's case at least), but they are still considered "waveclear" heroes due to their ability to ignore geographical distance and be at fights despite taking a longer time to clear the wave.Also of note is that waveclear comes in many flavours. Artanis' Amateur Opponent grants him a bit of waveclear, but it's still nothing compared to Jaina. Where it truly shines, however, is single-target damage output on Structures and Immortals. Meanwhile, Lunara's Nature's Culling grants both waveclear and structure damage/mercing capability, and Johanna's Condemn works only against Minions but not against Mercenaries, Monsters or Structures.is another thing that everyone knows about, but isn't always very well understood. Crowd control can be used to accomplish many goals:Some articles attempt to distinguish crowd-control effects as either hard or soft CC, but even then the lines between the two can get blurry at times. A Xul Rooting a Kerrigan after she has Ravaged him won't make her any less capable of Impaling him to death, but a Sgt. Hammer using a Concussive Blast while Kerrigan is mid-jump will completely remove her threat. Yet Roots are commonly sold as "hard CC" while displacements sometimes aren't considered CC at all.It's more clear to just talk about what the CC aims to accomplish rather than attempt to sort them into ill-defined categories. An Emerald Wind won't get the teamfight-winning cancel on Li Li's Jug of 1,000 Cups, but it Dazes the Butcher long enough to allow allied focus-fire to get a kill. A Horrify won't make it any easier for your Tyrande to land her Lunar Flare (and may even throw her aim off!), but since Fears are coded as Silences, they work well enough to cancel an Yrel's charging Vindication that would save her life, while forcing her out of Sacred Ground.Successful teams in Hero League have a healthy amount of crowd-control to be able to accomplish all the goals above. Whether it be from Rehgar's Earthgrasp Totem getting that 90% Slow to secure a pick or a Malfurion's Twilight Dream to completely shut down an overeager Li-Ming, crowd-control heavily reduces the burden of execution on your team and can get incredible value by shutting down the enemy team's gameplan.happen for every hero, but some powerspikes are better in Hero League than others.. Stukov's Controlled Chaos is a very high-utility tool, but requires a bit of nuance to use compared to, say, Murky outright doubling his Health while retaining a short respawn time.Some powerspikes occur due to incredibly high-value synergies. Gul'dan's Echoed Corruption turns his Ruinous Afflication bonus damage proc from an incredibly unlikely event to a regular occurrence. Kael'thas' Ignite wreaks havoc on backlines and forces them to scramble around or force their teammates to suffer the Sun King's Fury.Powerspikes that are also significant are those that extend a Hero's capability, through drastically changing an ability's functionality or adding a new activatable. Li-Ming's Calamity adds an entirely new damage button for her, while healers' respective Cleanses allow them to completely negate an enemy team's kill potential, and Tyrande's Iceblade Arrows allow a flanking Tyrande to completely shutdown the enemy team's damage with some Shadowstalk-boosted autoattacks. And of course, let's not forget the powerspike that adds a new high-impact activatable ability for every Hero, which is level 10.Other powerspikes considered strong in Hero League are Kel'thuzad's Master of the Cold Dark, Nazeebo's Vile Infection, Anub'arak's Epicenter and Lucio's Rejuvenescencia. Do you see a trend there? These powerspikes don't require any change in playstyle;orSo let's go back to the game in the Clip I showed at the start of this article. We have, on chu8's side of the ring, Azmodan, Xul, Medivh, Nazeebo, and Abathur. On the other side, we have Thrall, Stitches, Rehgar, Sylvanas and Zeratul.On the side of, neither side is particularly lacking. Medivh and Nazeebo both individually have reasonably high damage output with Sake on Medivh finishing his Arcane Rift quest rather early. Chu8 himself farmed up his Taste for Blood stacks reasonably well (due to Xul's help early game) and was dunking 1400 damage globes on the enemy team by the end of the game. The damage output was also greatly aided by Abathur's Medivh clones. We don't really need to talk about the total damage output potential of Thrall, Zeratul and Rehgar either, though Stitches and Sylvanas may be rather disappointing on this front.One might expect chu8's team to fall behind on, but between Medivh's Force of Will and Mystic Assault, Xul's Bone Shield, Abathur's Regenerative Microbes and Sustained Carapace, and Nazeebo's Blood Ritual, the entire team was pulling their weight in keeping themselves alive throughout all the teamfights that occured (well except for Azmodan, but chu was too busy stacking instead of fighting anyway). On the other side, Stitches' Devour, Rehgar and Thrall's Frostwolf Resilience (and Zeratul's Shadow Mending) provided a more than healthy amount of total healing. Moreover, Xul's Cursed Strikes put a dampener on the auto-attack heavy melee assassins on the other team.is where the cracks start to form in the enemy team's composition. By Level 10, chu8 had enough damage stacks on Taste for Blood to one-shot the ranged minions and combined with Xul's Skeletons, the enemy team found themselves losing forts despite winning Protectors. On the other side, Sylvanas, Rehgar and Zeratul are certainly no slouch at waveclear but they found themselves having a bit of difficulty dealing with Xul's Skeletons on top of the normal waves, plus having your healer be one of the main waveclear heroes poses some obvious problems, as shown in the mid-game fights where the enemy team was too scattered around the map to take a proper fight.On, both teams are pretty light. While the 5-specialist team had Xul's Bone Prison (talented with Amplify Damage too!) and Nazeebo's Zombie Wall, the enemy team had only Hook and Feral Spirit as non-Heroic sources of crowd control. As a result, Medivh was allowed to run circles around the enemy team early game, finishing Arcane Rift at 6 minutes while Azmodan and Xul were allowed to rotate between middle and bottom lanes uncontested. Crowd control was also less necessary to the 5-specialist team than to the enemy team; the win-condition of chu's team was to waveclear and siege, while the win-condition of the enemy team was to kill heroes, which they failed to do due to Portals and their own lack of crowd control.is also where the 5-specialist team was the clear winner. Portal gives unprecedented reach to the entire team, while Azmodan himself has a long-range large-aoe nuke. On the other side, Zeratul is pretty sticky to heroes and Sylvanas has a bit of mobility, but both of them paled in comparison to the value granted by Portals. There were multiple times where Nazeebo or Medivh got away at low health, but no low-health enemy hero was granted the same mercy in the course of the game.of the 5-specialist team are also clearly stronger than those of the enemy team, too. Zeratul gets Void Slash and Shadow Mending, but that's about it. Stitches' Slam build comes online at 16, but it's merely a difference between having zero teamfight presence and slightly more than zero presence, considering how much value the Hooks were getting throughout the game. Sylvanas, Thrall and Rehgar all have mediocre late-game talents. Meanwhile, they had to deal with Azmodan's Taste for Blood which was making his globes hit for 1000 damage as early as level 13, Nazeebo's Pandemic-boosted Toads of Hugeness coupled with Vile Infection, Medivh's completed Arcane Rift quest coupled with Enduring Will and Arcane Explosion, Xul's Amplify Damage-powered roots, and Abathur's Adrenaline Boost and Hivemind. It just wasn't a contest who was stronger late-game, really.I won't pretend that any 5 average Joes attempting this composition won't end in disaster. The goal of this article isn't to put readers under the illusion that 5 specialists is a stable guideline to making a successful high-win-rate Hero League team composition, but to illustrate theof team compositions that allow them to win games or otherwise. Far and above, the most important thing in Hero League is your team's execution, but that's something best left for another article.When confronted with an abnormal draft, the first thing to ask yourself is what are the strengths and weaknesses of the draft your team has given you, using the 6 ideas above as a guideline. People may disagree, but the balance situation in HotS right now is one of the better situations across its history, and even the weirdest drafts have some strengths. Good knowledge of the game and your allies' heroes are essential; falling back on labels and pretending that Alarak is as much a "solo-laner" as Malthael will quickly trick yourself into falling into a weak team composition.(Answer: Alarak has superiorandwhile having a slightly strongerwith Lightning Barrage, but Malthael has moreand self-. Draft Malthael for waveclear-weak teams, and Alarak for teams centred around synergising crowd-control.)Moreover, it is important toto shore up the weaknesses in your team composition. Chromies always find themselves taking Bronze Talons or they risk falling behind inand(since despite her range, her spells are unreliable as finishers), while a Malfurion whose allies are Tyrande/Garrosh/Blaze/Alarak should consider the highergranted by Celestial Alignment over the mobility of Nature's Swiftness, which is the more common (and generally-better) talent.There are certainly situations and team compositions which have different win-conditions to outright teamfighting and objective-contesting. In the 5-specialist game above, the 5-specialist team found themselves sieging without the objective and deliberately giving up the first two Protectors in order to soak and stack Azmodan's Taste for Blood. However, identifying win-conditions and adjusting playstyles accordingly goes way beyond the scope of this article and would require another thorough (and lengthy!) article on its own.There are often disgruntled cries to Blizzard to enforce team compositions in Hero League and Quick Match by either forcing role-queues in HL or forcing healer+tank matchmaking in QM. This doesn't solve the root cause of the problem: that lower-level players are more concerned with what heroes, not what theyMore importantly, the best games that occur in Hero League are the ones where unorthodox comps that go against the standard Healer + Tank + DPS + Offlaner + Flex meta win,we don't expect them to, and it's a huge sign that the off-meta team outplayed the other team incredibly. Who was watching the first Heroes World Championship and has forgotten the momentous occasion in Cloud 9 vs DK ? Don't forget that the one of the oldest memes in HotS would never have happened with role-forcing, either.Heroes of the Storm in its current state has the potential to be a pretty complex game in terms of decision-making and execution. Attempting to force roles into team compositions just because there was a particularly bad game in Hero League is an insult to the complexity of the game, and in the end is mostly just a crutch for players who are overeager to lay the blame of a loss entirely on one thing (a team composition) rather than re-examine the hundreds of things that could've gone better during the game.I won't deny that the team composition matchmaking in QM is currently a mess. Low-healing, skillshot-dependent heroes are regularly matched together against teams with self-sustain and more waveclear, while the matchmaking regarding non-Abathur, non-Medivh specialists is equally a mess as they're all relegated equally under "not healer, not tank, not semi-support".Still, this kind of matchmaking is more true to the game than forcing healers and tanks in QM, however. For every game that is insta-lost due to faulty QM team compositions, there is also a game where the wonky team-composition won because the team played to their comp's strengths better and generally got more value out of their heroes. I mentioned above that squishy mages kept getting lumped together against self-sustaining melee assassins with more lane presence, but the games I've had where the general sustain levels were even across both teams weren't bad at all, even if there were no tanks or no healers."Tagging" heroes with "waveclear", "self-sustain", etc. is an alternative suggestion that's probably better in the long run... as long as the tags are done properly, of course. But forcing healers and tanks is a low-effort, low-imagination solution to an issue that doesn't address the underlying problem, that players in general fail to recognise fully what heroes can offer.Which is why this article was written. I hope readers who have made it this far along will go back to their Hero League games with a more problem-solving and a less self-victimising mindset, because the former means that I've achieved my goal of upgrading the playerbase, even if only a little bit.