First Game in HotS - Beyond Tannhauser Gate

Types of Champions

Similar to League of Legends and other MOBAs, Heroes of the Storm breaks their champions into a number of categories to help players have a basic understanding of the play style each will accommodate. Those categories are Warriors, Assassins, Support, and Specialist.

Warriors – the tanks of HotS. These guys seem to be able to absorb a lot of damage and prevent teammates from taking damage.
Assassins – the dps of the game. These are the champions you want to play if you want to burst down the other team.
Support – these are the healers and buffers of the game.
Specialists- do other stuff that I am not sure about. I think I’ll stay away from these guys at the start.

Free Rotation

Each week, starting on Blizzard’s standard update Tuesday, a set of champions are put into a free rotation. Being a level 1 summoner or rather player, you have access to 5 champions. These champs are Anub’Arak, Arthus, Kerrigan, Malfurion, and Valla.

Anub’Arak and Arthus are warriors and I don’t tend to play tanks – at least not in WoW or LoL, so I am gonna stay away from them for now. Malfurion is a support champion and I tend to like those, but they can be difficult to play, so I decided to go for an assassin. Kerrigan is melee, and I prefer ranged classes, so I am going to go with Valla as my starting champion.

Recording Games

One thing I like about Heroes of the Storm is that the game automatically records your matches. LoL is a pain in the butt to record games – every week, it seems one or more of the recording mechanisms are broken, and each patch causes issues as well. HotS has recording built in. This is such a huge benefit when trying to improve your gameplay – just watch your games to see mistakes and compare your play to the pros you can see on YouTube. I definitely appreciate this feature of the game.

Talent Unlocks

When you start with a new hero, you are only allowed a certain set of talents. The number increases as you play and gain experience with that hero. Basically, you want to get a hero to level 4 before you start to seriously play that champion. This way, you have access to all of hate hero’s abilities. Prior to level 4, it is still a learning period and you can try to play against other people, but I would think you have a severe handicap by not having all your talents.

The Game

With all that preamble, I finally got into the game. The map was Blackheart’s Bay, which I had no clue meant anything – apparently each map has a different mechanic that makes them unique along with different mercenary camps and map paths.

Eventually I figured out what the deal was with the doubloons. You need to collect them form around the map and turn them into a guy in the middle of the map. Once your team gets a certain amount, he bombards the enemy buildings. It is definitely a neat mechanic, I just wish the explaination was more apparent and stayed on the screen a bit longer – load times are pretty quick compared to LoL.

Once the game started, I road my horse to the bottom lane and started killing minions. This is ok, but I soon saw that most of my teammates were running from lane to lane. There seems to be a culture of team fighting in HotS. This behavior is encouraged on this map by the collection of doubloons – there always is a fight at the chests and at many of the mercenary camps as well, and try to have someone at your back when turning in the loot as many ganks occur as people are turning in the coins.

In any case, this was an AI match, and we won. I think I did ok – scoring 5 kills and only 2 deaths. I didn’t do too well with the doubloons but that’s because it took me a while to figure things out.

On the whole, I enjoyed the game and was please with how I performed. I also liked how quick the game was.

#HotS #HeroesOfTheStorm

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