With Heroes of the Storm finally ending its technical alpha phase, starting its closed beta phase and everyone and their mother trying to get a key, I thought it’d be a good time to drop some information about those of you lucky enough to get into the closed beta.
Heroes of the Storm is a game of the extremely popular MOBA genre made by the well-known Blizzard. Anyone that’s played a MOBA before will know the basics of HotS and can pick it up as easily as any other MOBA. However no good game can stand out from the crowd without being unique in its own way and thats what Heroes of the Storm does well.
1. Heroes
All of the heroes in HotS are characters from other Blizzard franchises, whether it be Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo. There’s even a hero coming from the less known franchise, The Lost Vikings. There may be some similarities here and there with characters from other MOBAs but the heroes in HotS all have their own play styles and design. From having a hero never leave base by providing global support or having a hero designed to just suicide into enemy objectives over and over, HotS has a many heroes to choose from.
Heroes are split up into one of four categories: Warrior, Assassin, Support or Specialist. A Warrior acts as the tank of the group, always in front taking the damage and protecting their allies. An Assassin acts as the damage dealer of the group, picking a target and making sure that they die. A Support is the priest of the group, healing, shielding and buffing allies to make sure they live to do their own jobs. Specialists are the heroes that do things the others can’t do. From sieging down objectives alone or providing a global presence, Specialists are in a class all their own.
2. Levelling
A strange thing that Heroes of the Storm does differently from all other MOBAs is that there are zero items to buy. You don’t have to kill minions for gold and you don’t have to farm for ten minutes to keep up with someone far ahead of you.
“Well how do you power up your heroes?” someone might say.
Well instead of relying on buying items, how strong your hero is depends on the level your team is and what talents you pick. Yes that’s right I said what level your team is. In Heroes of the Storm, you do not have an individual hero level but rather an overall team level. Everyone that kills objectives, stays around for minion deaths, or team fights, contributes to XP to the team. The more XP that you contribute, the more ahead your team will be.
3. Talents
Remember when I said that each hero have their own play styles? That plural is very important because each hero can be built very differently depending on what talents you pick. At certain level benchmarks, a player is allowed to pick one of several talents for a hero. At level 10 a player can pick their ultimate ability from one of two abilities. Certain talents and the second ultimate ability will need to be unlocked by playing the hero but everyone starts out with a couple of basic ones for each hero. Each hero has a set of different talents unique to them as well as a couple of talents available to other heroes.
Talents will decide how you will play and what your hero will do. You could build an Assassin with a focus on auto-attacking or maybe you could build that assassin with a focus on casting a certain spell, maybe you could focus on their other spell. You could build a Warrior that focuses on crowd control or maybe you could focus on regenerating health and tanking damage. Its all up to the player.
4. Battlegrounds
Another thing that will decide how you play will be the maps. Unlike most MOBAs that focus on one map, Heroes of the Storm has 6 battlegrounds as of Open Beta. Each battleground have different layouts and different objectives to go for. Some maps may have a second level or they may only have 2 lanes, no two maps are exactly the same.
The Haunted Mines: Gather skulls in the mines to awaken a Grave Golem to siege the enemy structures.
The Cursed Hollow: Gather tributes for the Raven Lord to curse your enemies.
Blackheart’s Bay: Gather doubloons to pay the Ghost Pirates to fire upon your enemies.
Garden of Terror: Gather seeds to grow and become a Garden Terror to siege your enemies.
Dragon Shire: Capture shrines and become a Dragon Knight to demolish your enemies.
Sky Temple: Capture and hold the temples to blast enemy forts with a blistering onslaught of magical energy.
All maps are displayed in a horizontal orientation so that no one side has an advantage over the other and which map you play will be random(at least in quick play).
5. Objectives
Each map has a unique objective to obtain as well as having other common objectives found on other maps.
There are watch towers on several maps, if you capture a watch tower it will provide vision over a certain area as long as you
Each map also has a jungle riddled with neutral monsters. Like in other MOBAs you can eliminate these neutral monsters as you please but, unlike other MOBAs you don’t get buffs or gold. Instead, you can capture the camp and they’ll push a lane for you. If you’re lucky enough you can stumble upon an enemy clearing a jungle camp and push them out to capture the camp for your team.
6. Team Work
All MOBAs stress that cooperating with other players is paramount to victory but it has become something that is even more necessary in Heroes of the Storm. Teams that coordinate are usually the ones that take the objectives that win games. Even a team that’s behind can swing a game back into their favor by grouping up and taking an objective. Its possible for players to win games and take objectives on their own but teamwork is the key to consistently win.
Many people played the alpha stress that forming teams outside of the game is the way to play the game and I will as well. By forming groups and making friends outside of the matches, you can coördinate team compositions as well as form strategies to win games. Players will also receive XP boosts for playing with friends.
Now all the things I’ve said are just the beginning to Heroes of the Storm, I’ve only covered some of the basics. Every game has its own level of depth and not all of that depth can be described through words alone. Get a key and get out there and experience this game for yourself.
So to those of you lucky enough to get into the beta, I’ll see you on the battlegrounds.
