Heroes of the Storm

Talents are functionally equivalent to items. Take Muradin for example:

At level 1 you choose one of these:

Path of the Warrior
Your Hero gains an extra 25 Health for every level gained.

Skullcracker
Every 4th attack against the same target will stun them for 0.25 seconds.

Perfect Storm (Q)
Stormhammer's damage is permanently increased by 5 for each enemy hero hit.

Infused Hammer (Q)
Stormhammer refunds 37.5 mana for each enemy hit.

There are generic talents that show up on multiple heroes like:

Resurgence of the Storm
Upon dying, revive back at your Altar after 5 seconds. This can occur once every 120 seconds.

Nebuchadnezzar_sl said:

Removing items is one thing, simplifying builds is one thing, but what's left in lane? They're trying objectives, we'll see if it works out. It's funny to, because if they took out items and builds and allowed people to actually concentrate 100% on the last hits without the information overload, it probably would have made it a funner wack-a-mole for newbie players.

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No, it wouldn't. Last-hitting to make more gold quicker in the early game means you're doing everything except engaging with the enemy players. It makes for a very boring opener and a long, stale game.

Grayson Carlyle_sl said:

No, it wouldn't. Last-hitting to make more gold quicker in the early game means you're doing everything except engaging with the enemy players. It makes for a very boring opener and a long, stale game.

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Ignoring the enemy laner solely to last hit is a quick ticket to being harassed or ganked to death. Competent last hitting in lane forces interaction.

Yea, in League at least, you have to last hit 6 times in 30 seconds. That's a shitton of time you should be doing other things as well.

MaulNutz_sl said:

People like tedious nontrivial game mechanics because it weeds out the retards and casuals. Number of people I did end game content with in EQ that were bad players...maybe 2? Number of people I did end game content with in WoW that were retards...too many to count and it made a great game not fun to play. HotS will not have a competitive scene that is taken seriously (if it has one at all) because it lacks "shitty mechanics" aka hard to master skills.

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Ok, this isn't an eq vs. wow thread so let's not turn it into one, especially with such a retarded statement like that. Any skill or barriers in end game eq had *nothing* to do with the actual end game itself. Had eq had more fights that made more than a handful of people responsible, you'd have quickly picked out the idiots.

It is the same thing here, or can be. More emphasis placed on every individuals contribution to the whole, instead of literally feeding one or more players to steamroll for you. It's why I tend to like lol more than Dota2 - get a powerful character on the opposite team and I just felt fucked. In lol, I felt there was more of a chance to shut down their one carry and still win based on abilities or specific items. This is largely perception, but lol appealed to me for this.

Blizzards schtick seems to be to take a game and remove the barriers, essentially distilling the experience into the core. To shamelessly use lithose's term, it's essentially removing the layered difficulty; the last hits, denies and items. The end result is more focus on the team fights and objectives. Last hits and whatnots are still strategically sound and obviously play a role in the end game of lol and dota2, but without that there are less variables to a win. It's why teams with good execution will rofflestomp other teams , because they'll be most adept at translating on screen info into counters and pushes.

Dota is too different and lol too popular (and also still quite different) to be overtaken, and I doubt I'll play long or replace lol with it. But it probably has a place all it's own, just the same.

Zeratul is awesome. Hero gives absolutely no fucks about the squishier heroes on an enemy team.

Nebuchadnezzar_sl said:

...they assumed last hitting was just more tedium, while it's actually gameplay.

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This is the problem right here. You, and many of the 'hardcore' moba players, are confusing last hits with gameplay just because it takes skill to do well. Break down the mechanics of what last hits entail: Intentionally stopping and/or slowing down your damage in order to score an arbitrary goal. It's COMPLETELY nonintuitive. You are letting your opponent live longer than is necessary, not for any strategic purpose, but simply so you can score a killing blow instead of someone else on your team (your creeps are part of your team too).

I really am confused as to how so many people can claim it as some kind of thoughtful, integral part of moba gameplay. It only exists in current moba's because it existed in the original DOTA, and it only existed there because that's just how Warcraft 3 worked. Just because it takes practice to do well, and needs to be done with 2-3 other things going on, doesn't make it gameplay, let alone GOOD gameplay. It DOES make it tedium. You could have a fucking calculus problem you had to work on in the corner during the whole match if you wanted, and I think I would actually have more fun with that.

Here is the problem with this argument though. Some of the people in this thread are proposing that last hitting is merely a form or archaic tedium and make this case by comparing it to other genres of games. This is flawed because the aspects of control across the entire map of Dota or League is predicated on a very balanced and stable opportunity for both teams to earn money through the task of last hitting as a non combat non objective form of income. If there is no resource that can be secured without directly fighting the enemy team the game becomes very binary. You can't have an RPG style setting (levels/talents/skills/items) and not intrinsically create a natural imbalance over the course of a game in one of the available resource pools (Money, Levels, Vision, Towers, Map Control, Items). That imbalance is baked into the progress of each players hero.

Take Counterstrike as an example of this in the FPS genre. If you win the opening pistol round your team has much greater than the map's average win loss in round 2. You have money, the other team doesn't. The pistol players must play in an economy round where they are heavily outmatched in terms of firepower. However it is intrinsic to the balance of what CS is. They arn't worried in CS that a map has a 50/50 CT/T winrate. What they are worried about is that each team has an equivalent opportunity to take each round and the benefits and costs of winning and losing are both very important and make the game exactly what it is. No other FPS game, even though the genre is broad, introduces the variable of economy, and saving. Making a clone of Counterstrike where winning or losing a round doesn't yeild a side advantage is no longer Counterstrike. The economy is core. Just like its core to Dota and LoL.

There are only four ways to give players an income in a "Moba" passively (+x GPM), actively (PvP - Hero Kills/Assists), actively (PvE - Last Hits), or globally (Team splits). The first three being individual and the last being well global. This is relevant to why removing last hits immediately changes the game because that mechanic is one of the gates to the economy that League and Dota games revolve around. You can win a little tiny bit at a time until its large enough to take the game. There is a duel over the right to contest and secure last hits and they drive the action of the map.

HoTS has removed the economy in a huge way, deciding that it is not a core feature of what Dota and League are. I would suggest that without economy you don't have a moba. The mechanic of last hitting puts a premium on every second of both games. Most of my friends do not enjoy this constant pressure to perform coupled wth the fact that when they do have moments of failure both games require the solving of an even harder problem i.e. they are now further behind in gold and experience than they were before they died died.

On last hitting. Even in League with flatter animations and projectile speed, no denying, and no turn rate it is still a very difficult task to execute perfectly. This high skill ceiling is important, both games are very playable at any level of mechanical skill because income is relative to the skill bracket. Pro's get X item in 10 minutes, average players in 17, and even less mechanical players in 25. Numbers made up - but the ratio and relativity is there.

Snowballing - HoTS is going to snowball in its own way and I have very low expectations that there are legitimate come back mechanics that will function in anything resembling League or Dota. Once behind in HoTS unless some rapeface NPC is spawnable by the team behind or the map win condition has nothing to do with fighting the enemy team people are going to find the same problem exists. HoTS has ultimates - Engaging in a teamfight when your team has its ultimates and the opposing team doesn't have theirs or is a level behind (in ultimate power) will almost certainly guarantee victory. When experience is the only currency relevant to character power (no items/gold) the snowball will just roll off of that. Items in Dota and LoL allow characters to translate economy into direct power/utility upgrades in addition to the power granted by experience gain.

HoTS will be popular, the RTS style hero based gameplay is mega super fun - Re; Dota/LoL. Even comparing HoTS to Dota/LoL I feel is a disservice, if they make an awesome little arathi basin hero based game I'll have a great time playing it with my friends that don't like Dota/LoL. If my friends don't love it, I will not be compelled to play it and most people who really enjoy the essence of Dota/LoL probably won't either.

The game is probably really fun to play, and I will definitely give it a shot. The problem, for me anyway, is that the game is not fun to watch. When I watched a few games the other day, it felt like I was watching some retarded WOW BG match from a bird's eye view. There didn't seem to be any way for a single player to stand out. I really enjoy watching the laning phase in LOL because 1v1 or 2v2 matchups are where player's individual skills really matchup. I love watching Junglers attempt to control the map and set the pace of the game. Is there any place in HOTS that allows this kind of play?

In HOTS it looks like skirmishes are very slow and a player can just run through their gate quickly to be safe (no tower diving).

While the no item thing really doesn't bother me that much, the gold thing does. If the whole team earns experience, it really takes away individual success because it's spread out through the whole team. It just really sterilizes the whole process to me.

Other explained it better, especially Dandain. Last hitting and making gold is early game resource control. Just like wards and vision. Just like tower control. Just like Jungle control. When I first tried MOBAs out (HON alpha) I thought last hitting was the fucking dumbest thing in the world (and frustrating). I never really looked back to playing the genre until last year. Once I got better at it, and realized how it effected the rest of the game. It became essential.

What Blizzard should of done is create some other mechanism to generate a lead in game or generate a comeback in some fashion. But I guess that might take away from having shorter games.

I too thought last hitting was the dumbest thing in the world. I never got over it, though.

Kreugen_sl said:

I too thought last hitting was the dumbest thing in the world. I never got over it, though.

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This. If the majority of people who start your game go "wtf" at one of your mechanics, you are going to lose a lot of players.


I mean, I get it. Last-hit adds skill to the game. The thing is, not everything that adds skill to a game is good. If they released a LoL+ that had a QTE every 30 seconds that you had to do on top of everything else, it would be a "more skillful" game. It would weed out the casuals, make it easier for experts to differentiate themselves, etc. However, I doubt many people would say it was a better game.

Now I grant you that adding QTEs to LoL would be silly, it doesn't "fit" moba's in any way. Yet to a new player, who just saw some streams and heard about it, when I started playing, last-hit seemed also completely out of left field. It seemed absurd to me that I had to worry about getting the final hit on a mob to get xp. Hell, any modern MMO divides up xp from mobs. The idea that I had to even compete WITH MY OWN TEAM for xp on mobs felt like I went back to the dark ages of MMOs. Just not fun.

All I can say for a certainty is even when I was super casual and just learning DOTA2 I haven't had as much fun as I have had in HOTS so far. The game is twitchy and without the burden of gold I don't have to constantly monitor my gold count and know exactly what I'm going for next. The "what I'm going for next" goes in the way of the talents. Since that is really what develops your individual character that round. Not having to learn every hero, every item and how to build each hero and his item builds takes a huge learning curve off the game. You can jump in and they even limit you in your choice off the bat. Not until profile level 7 (or 8?) do you have full access to all the talents. Mostly they keep all the passive talents available to newbies then once you achieve that level they unlock many of the actives. But it takes maybe 10 games to achieve that level but it is a nice 'easing in' period.

And skill shots. Dear god skill shots galore. Abathur is insanely fun because his main form of attack (basically you latch onto another hero and fire a bunch of stuff on short cooldown) is nothing but skill shots. I had quite a few kills by taking his talent for extended range and predicting where people were running away from me. Nova's ultimate is basically a 60s CD Sunstrike. Many heroes primary form of damage is a 10'ish second cooldown skillshot. Game is fun as shit. It doesn't take ultimate skill and it may not be the next great esport but it is fast, gets over with in 15-20m and doesn't really have a boring phase. I'm only somewhat bored in the first few minutes when everyone is level 1 and it is nearly impossible to score kills because you do no damage and no events have occured yet.

If I want to play a frustratingly high skilled game I'll queue for Starcraft. If I want to just chill and play a competitive MP game I'll queue for HOTS.

Pyros_sl said:

Always go for the kill, unless it's absolutely sure the opponent isn't getting away(people all around him, he's just running away, he's one hit away and stunned/slowed so your carry is getting hit regardless etc).

I think I said that like 2pages ago but removing last hits is a fine decision. Not adding anything is where it's questionable. Autoattacking isn't any better than last hitting, there is 0 input, you just stand there and wait until the map objectives start spawning. The lanes are too short and the power levels too low early on for doing anything but pushing your lane, only time you get kills is when the opponent makes the mistake of thinking he can get a kill when he can't(which I guess means it happens all the time, but really it only happens if people don't understand that it's pointless). Only once the objectives spawn stuff starts happening in the game, lanes change, some ppl stay and push the tower, others leave to grab the objectives/gank enemies getting them and so on. The first 2-3mins or whatever before the first objective spawns are a snooze. At least it doesn't last 10mins like laning in lol/dota so that's a plus but still.

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I don't know if I agree with the latter. Maybe if people are playing super, super passive but since many characters off the bat get SOME for of spacial manipulation on a target you can get some work done. Like on Raynor I like to set up shop in the middle originally but then if I see the top or bot pushing too far I make my way down there via the "jungle" and penetrate round the enemy hero past his creep wave. At that point I hope one of the other heroes has a stun/snare so we can just bop him down. If three heroes are focusing on one (esp. if a tower is also hitting them) that enemy dies very, very quickly.

Then on the flip side unlike DOTA2 (maybe LoL, I don't know it's mechanics) there is very little downside to pushing the creep wave. You get some damage done to the towers and if you are consistently pushing the creep wave the tower will eventually run out of ammo and you can get free shots on it. Without the burden of last hit mechanic having your creep wave fight under a tower isn't a huge deal. Like I said as long as you know where all the other enemy heroes are so you don't get ganked.

I played this a decent amount this weekend and here are my initial thoughts. At first blush, it does, indeed, feel like a dumbed down LoL. I do get the sense that people are just 'doing it wrong', however. Everyone seems to be playing it like LOL where you try to have a laning phase and then midgame objective control and then end game teamfighting. It doesn't really seem to work that way. If I had 5 of my buddies in at once, I would probably meta the game this way. One person in each lane with good wave clear/escapability, with 2-3 roamers. The roamers would set up ganks/team up for mercenary kills and try to secure objectives. The laners would try to push the lanes to the other tower forcing the tower to run out of ammo. Once out of ammo, the roamers would roll there and push the tower down/dive as appropriate.

The skill of the game will be managing map control at the right times. For example, you want to push the lanes to control access to the underground area in the skull map. The best way to do that would be to push the lane and try to keep them from going in through map control. You could have one brawler type collecting all of the skulls, while the other 4 secure the entrance while still getting exp from the lanes. That seems to be to be the best way to go about it. But, right now, eveyrone just abandons the lane, giving up the exp, and then dives in the underground for a big brawl.

So, while the game does seem very dumbed down as of now, I see potential for there to be really complicated gameplay that is more centered around map control and teamfighting very early. It is MUCH more of a team game that LOL for sure, but I am not sure if that is good or bad right now.

If anyone is playing it and wants to mess around in a pre-made. Shoot me a PM.

khalid_sl said:

This. If the majority of people who start your game go "wtf" at one of your mechanics, you are going to lose a lot of players.

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League of Legends is the largest game in the world. Dota2 is the most played game on Steam. It's just you that has a problem with it.

I have pretty much the same impressions as Oloh. Right now most of my games are going 2-1-2 in a pretty standard pub-eque MOBA setup. But since you really only need 1 person per lane it seems to make the most sense to me to have one on top, one on bot and three in mid. The mid group would simply punish if top or bot push too far. But trying to explain this concept to a pub would be quite difficult. Similar to Oloh it feels like most people are just winging it at the moment. Objectives spawn, people zerg the objective without any real thought behind their actions. They just know the need to kill the other guys so they can get control of the objective. But it is in a mindless way.

It may also increase the complexity of the game if they add maybe double the amount of free to play heroes and introduce an all pick concept. Instead of just getting paired up with four other random heroes not knowing if you really mesh. I've been on quite a number of teams where we have no melee heroes. So it is pretty similar to if you rolled into a DOTA game of pure semi-carries.