Heroes of the Storm

I haven't played Heroes in over a year but their new cross promotion with Overwatch has me revisiting the game.

Why Play Heroes of Storm

I'm a bit of a Blizzard fanboy so take this with a grain of salt, but Heroes is by far my favorite MOBA (oh, sorry Blizzard, I mean "Team Brawler"). Other than momentum, I don't understand the continuing popularity of League of Legends and Dota.

Heroes has a lot of team fighting and all of the characters have epic abilities that can change the game. It feels great to land a perfect hook with Stitches, snipe an enemy with Nova, or gobble three people with Zagara's sand worm.

The game has a lot going on and even after thousands of hours there is more to learn. Just consider taking mercenary camps. The thought might go like this, from lowest skill level to highest:

1. What are camps? Let's fight.
2. Camps are good if someone else on my team takes them.
3. We should take camps when the opportunity arises.
4. Let's take camps right before the objective spawns so they can push while we fight.
5. The enemy will be taking a camp before the objective so let's ambush them there.
6. We need good scouting to know if the enemy is ambushing our camp, taking their own camp, or doing both.

Drafting in Hero League is lots of fun. At the lower levels it's mostly about trying to make a half decent team from the few characters that your team wants to play. Then you get into countering enemy hero picks and finding synergy in your own picks. 

So basically, play Heroes of the Storm because games are reasonably short, have a lot of action, reward teamwork, and require both strategy and tactics.

Why Not to Play Heroes of the Storm

Some people don't like that style of game. But then why are you reading this review in the first place?

Teamwork can be difficult. In some ways low-level play is more difficult than high-level play because it's about mitigating bad decisions rather than making good ones. Sometimes a player will solo push his lane and wont fight with the team. Or a low-dps warrior might take a mercenary camp by himself when you should be capturing the objective. At higher levels of play, those obvious mistakes don't happen but at low levels you need to adapt.

Communication is lackluster. There is a decent system to ping the map, and there is team chat, but I don't like to type much. I find the chat is mostly filled with people blaming each other for their losses. I suspect voice chat would help. For some reason, the voice chat in Overwatch is actually helpful and not full of salt. I don't really know how to fix the communication in Heroes. I want more complicated planning, maybe pings that persist or an obvious way to declare an enemy to focus on.

Team composition is frustrating. In Quick Play it tries to balance number of healers and warriors but you often end up with really frustratingly terrible compositions. Maybe I kind of want to play Kerrigan but I don't want to be the only melee hero on my team. In Hero League, it is difficult to communicate preferences. You can "show" one hero that you are thinking of playing but that isn't enough. If I show a healer but the enemy bans that hero, the team might expect me to pick a different healer than I'm not comfortable with. Why can't I show three or five heroes that I'm happy to play? If someone shows five healers, nobody has to worry about healing and he focus on the best healer for our comp. If I show two healers, two assassins, and two specialists, people know that I can fill any role except warrior so they can be sure to draft a warrior early. Disclaimer: I haven't played unranked draft mode. Maybe it will replace Quick Play for when I want to play casual and only have a few choices I am willing to make.

The length of the game is almost too long for me. Overwatch has shorter games so when Real Life needs me I can say, "give me 5 minutes" instead of "give me 10 minutes".

Conclusion

Heroes of the Storm is certainly worth trying. It's free, easy to get into and lot's of fun.