Heroes of the Storm players

Mad Dog wrote: What is HotS?

I thought there was a cool new block for Hammer of the Scots.

jeb wrote: I think you and I are linked in Battle.net already @Disgustipater from HEARTHSTONE. Let me know otherwise.

My current friends list is at zero I believe. I'm pretty certain I've never played Hearthstone, and the only reason I had an existing Battle.net account is from when I signed up for the Overwatch beta I never got into. Is some imposter using my handle? That would be weird since I tried to use it but it was too many characters. I did enter that as my first name though. As you can see, I'm not familiar with how Battle.net works.

My mistake!

Anyway, add me as a friend: jeblucas#1574 . Pretty sure that's how it works, name#{some number}.

Jackwraith's post above lays the groundwork and the tutorial is well done. There are some "lanes" and the little minions will walk down them and you and your teammates alternately kill the opponents' minions, heal yours, activate some environmental stuff to get extra minions (mercenaries--the other team can activate these too), and engage in small tactical battles to sway the course of progress. At the end, you want the opponents' big tower to come down. Getting killed puts a timer on your resurrection, which gets longer the more leveled up you are in the session. Conceptually, it's not a huge thing, but in practice there are subtleties everywhere and its fun working them out.

I am currently vacationing in the Keys (my girlfriend is arching an eye at me even now for being on the computer), so I won't be back on BNet until the 9th (Saturday) at the earliest. Howevah, this is a good week to learn the game, since Blizzard is making all 50 heroes free-to-play from the 8th to the 11th as a celebration of the Heroes of the Dorm final four this weekend. Also, they're giving everyone 50$ bonus XP (which you get for player level and hero levels) for the same time period. If you play with a BNet friend, you also get +50% XP, so getting on and crashing around with somebody you know could earn you some serious gold (which you get for raising your player level to various checkpoints and for getting heroes to level 5 and 9) with which you could buy all of those cool characters you're trying out this weekend.

I know I'll be back on trying to get Chen to master level and then get the skin for him. It could also get you into Hero League faster, since you need 14 heroes at level 5 to participate, including toons in the F2P rotation (i.e. you don't need to own them.)

The free heroes week was a blast. My son is totally hooked, and I managed to get a dude to level 5 and see that gold rush in. I really like the F2P mechanics at work here. I have accumulated >10k gold and I am curious about what to actually do with it. Should I just buy some cheap dudes? Should I continue to accumulate gold and play more chars on rotation until I find my comfort zone? I was curious about your thoughts.

Unless you've found a character (or two, or three) that you really feel like continuing with off the free rotation, I'd consider saving the gold. There are several toons that are much cheaper than 10K gold and you could get two or three of them at a go so that you'd always have them handy if you wanted to play them. But that means wanting to play them regularly and learn their nuances. If you haven't found anyone like that, then I'd just bank it. OTOH, if you're going to play regularly, gold acquisition is pretty rapid, so you won't feel too put out if you drop the coin for someone and then maybe lose the fire for that toon or shift to someone else. I've bought every hero I own with gold except one: Xul, the necromancer, because I didn't have the gold at the time of his release and there's no way I was going to wait to play him. But, considering the amount of time I've put into the game, $10 is far less than the return I've gotten. (I've picked up a couple skins for $, too, when they were on sale. Always wait for the sale.)

And, lookee there. I was wrong. It was none of the aforementioned dragons, but Chromie. And Medivh. Chromie looks like a ranged assassin and Medivh looks like a support: cache-3.sendvid.com/ouefc2bh.mp4

Nice Watchmen reference with the Knight Owl skin and Hawkeye with Tyrande's skin.

I played a few games with a friend during the free weekend, and I enjoyed it. I'd like to spend some more time with it. But that time is not right now. My video game playing time is very limited currently, and the time I do have is reserved for Dark Souls. I'll get back into it at some point though.

That's cool. I understand the time constraints, for sure. I should probably be spending less time playing video games...

They made the big announcement today about ranked play, so when/if you return the game will be a bit more organized, too. They're doing Bronze-Diamond leagues like Starcraft and then Master and Grand Master above that. They also upped the party limit for Hero League (draft) to 3 people, so it'll be easier to get groups in draft if you don't quite have 5 people to play Team League.

There was a big patch this week that included a new hero, Chromie (For those of you that don't know the WoW lore, Chromie is the humanoid form of a bronze dragon, Chronormu, who is concerned with fixing problems in the timestream) plus the long-awaited revisions to Anub'arak and Arthas, the two kings of Northrend lore (again, WoW.) That made it really exciting for me, since I loved playing those two warriors but, as a couple of the earliest characters created for the game (Arthas, the Lich King, was the first, actually), their abilities were seriously lagging behind the rest and they weren't considered competitive at all.

The Heroes team is still really struggling with their classifications. The term "Warrior" is supposed to include genuine, front-line tanks that can take a ton of damage, but don't do a lot, and bruisers that are durable, but deal out much more damage. Anub and Arthas have both been identified as bruisers/anti-mage types. Anub has kind of been played that way for a while. I always played him as a harasser/initiator, much like Tyrael, so the fact that they added more durability and damage to him makes him a LOT better at the same role that he was performing before. Arhas, OTOH, wasn't really played at all (a sad fate for one of the iconic characters of Blizzard) and seems to be much of an anti-melee guy, rather than mage, since he's still slow but can have ridiculous impact on a close-in fight.

Chromie is cool, but has a pretty high skill floor, since they did the same thing to her basic abilities that they did to one of Dehaka's: put a delay in the cast. You have to take that delay into account when trying to hit her skillshots, which makes it difficult. She does truckloads of damage but has VERY low health, so skilled players are going to be relatively few right now. She's also the perfect victim for Anub'arak...

Two weeks from now, Medivh (of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and Warcraft III fame) arrives in the Nexus.

Jackwraith wrote: Chromie is cool, but has a pretty high skill floor, since they did the same thing to her basic abilities that they did to one of Dehaka's: put a delay in the cast. You have to take that delay into account when trying to hit her skillshots, which makes it difficult. She does truckloads of damage but has VERY low health, so skilled players are going to be relatively few right now. She's also the perfect victim for Anub'arak...

These anticipatory shots are some voodoo level bullshit with the top tier players. I'll watch some MOBA streams and some players just know where the opponent will be. And, at that level, the opponent knows they know, but it doesn't matter because the Sicilian logic goes all the way down and you see some sick plays. I am genuinely bad at this kind of leading in real time games. I will always miss without Aim Assist (thank you Bungie for this stat in DESTINY!) This makes some Nexus champions pleasant diversions for me, because holy shit am I bad at them. Usually they pack a Heroic with a broad enough line of fire that I can get something done, but I am pretty ineffectual for the early game unless my job is just killing mobs.

I find that Quickcast helps with this quite a bit on some heroes. If you go into Options, you'll find the Quickcast tab and you can then set it up universally or per hero or even per ability, which is badass, since most other games don't enable that. In other words, you can do press+left-click on Chromie's Q while using Quickcast (just press ability key and it goes where the mouse is) on her W, if you want to. With some skillshots, of course, you need enough time with the hero to know how fast the projectile moves in order to anticipate where your opponent will be when it lands (and, believe me, they're doing the same thing.) But, yeah, some players just have a better grasp of that kind of predictive gameplay.

Dreadnaught, who used to be team captain for Tempostorm, had a killer moment on one of his streams a few months back when he was playing Nova. A Zeratul tried to ambush him and Dread decoyed away but then followed the Zera player and shot him a couple times, such that he was pretty low on health. So the Zeratul blinked ahead, got into a bush near the top temple of Sky Temple, and was gone (i.e. his cloak reactivated.) Dread kept following, chattering away to his stream audience about how "This guy thinks I'm one of those dumbass Novas" and Double Tapped into the bush in the top right corner of the temple. Dead Zeratul. He knew right where the guy would retreat to in those circumstances and just nailed him. It was hilarious, but also a measure of the skill and time that Dread had put into the game.

Had an amazing Quickmatch game last night. My friend, Nathan, and I have been trying to get his hero margin to the point where we can get back to playing Hero League when the rankings reset on Tuesday, so he was on Lt. Morales (queen of the healbots) and I was fulfilling a daily on Anub'arak, a character that was one of my favorites even before the recent buffs that made him brilliant once again. We also had Xul, Kharazim, and Rexxar. So, double Warrior and double Support, which can work, but takes some solid play if we end up on a map that requires DPS... like Infernal Shrines, which is what we played. The enemy team had another Morales, Stitches, Sylvanus, Zeratul and Thrall. So, they have significantly more DPS (Zera, Thrall, Sylv) than we do, but our comp is more diversified. With Morales, Kharazim can go more towards damage while still doing some healing and Rexxar and I could tailor our builds toward our opponents, rather than toward a particular role like a tank. Rexxar also excels on maps with objectives to kill (like the skeletons on Shrines), rather than ones to simply capture (like, say, Cursed Hollow.) However, again, that takes some degree of coordination, especially since a lot of Rexxar players like to just hunt mercenaries all game because he's really good at it. Of course, mercs take timing, too, since just feeding them to the enemy does nothing.

This game was ideal in pointing out the problem with people who don't understand teamwork. Our Rexxar just wanted to hunt mercs the whole game and we lost the first Punisher because of it, since we were in a teamfight with our 4 versus their 5. But they had a similar problem and, likely even worse, since their Morales just wanted to soak lanes the whole game and try to siege; neither of which Morales is good at. In fact, Morales is pretty much only good at healing, which highlights the current problem with many Supports, in that they feel like they don't impact the game much other than to be a healbot. But if you're going to play Morales, you might as well support your team, rather than try to kill towers with your tiny pistol for the whole game. We ended up winning the majority of teamfights and Punishers for the rest of the game, as a consequence. But the game still took over 20 minutes because we couldn't do enough damage (especially without Rexxar) to finish off a lot of the enemy Heroes and really push their Core. We did finally win with their Morales across the map at one of our Keeps, rather than helping her team defend the Core but the tunnel vision of 2 players made it a lot more frustrating for the other 8 than it had to be. I only died once and got the highest XP score for the game as a Warrior, which is kinda nice...

And there's nothing like playing Murky to go on a QuickMatch winning streak. Had the Specialist quest up and hadn't played the frog in months, so Nathan and I dove in, him with Tychus twice and Diablo once, and we crushed it. Cursed Hollow, Blackheart's Bay, and even Towers of Doom where Murky is, uh, less favored. The opposition was Thrall, Valla, Nova, Rexxar, and Artanis, which is basically the ideal comp for Towers (tons of DPS, meaning the teamfights over the altars will frequently go their way) while we had Rexxar, Zagara, Kerrigan, Diablo, and the frog. But we ended up taking two of their bell towers because of the superior sieging of Zagara and Murky and their Nova was obsessed with tracking me (and killing me) around the map, which usually meant that we had a teamfight advantage because I could pull her out of position and then return in 5 seconds. What should have been a win for them was a 24-0 victory for us. We even ended up with more kills, 35-27. Frog power, man.

Mmmmm. Fish power... [Homer drooling noise.]

Having finally gotten my friend, Nathan, into a situation where he could play Hero League (draft mode; you need 14 heroes at level 5 or better, whether free-to-play or not), we set off last night to do the placement games and find our ranking. We lost the first two, since I drafted according to what the team needed (Thrall and Anub'arak) but things went awry (Our Nazeebo constantly diving into 3v1 situations was not helpful in game 2.) But Nathan and I ended up in first and second place in game three and he'd convinced me to go back to the Murk man to try to get an edge. As usual, our team gave us a ton of shit for him first-picking Leoric (a hero that is somewhat subpar at the moment, but which he plays well) and me second-picking Murky (a hero that is difficult to play and poorly understood by most of the non-amphibian populace.) But this is like being a Deep One in Innsmouth: I know we're going to win because we have the Ancient Ones on our side.

Sky Temple isn't the best map for Murky, since it's kind of teamfight-centric. A lot of action happens around the temples and holding them against the guardians isn't the easiest thing to do solo for characters much more powerful than a murloc. Additionally, they had Tracer, who is a serious counter to Murky because of her attack speed and mobility. She can burn down both me and the Pufferfish quite easily and the player in question was the best by rank of the group (Silver 5.) However, I've come to favor a build in recent months that really compensates for Murky's weakness in fights and doesn't detract much, if at all, from his siege power: www.heroesnexus.com/talent-calculator/30...ky#jPmPaM8J1KAKuYeAA

That's assassin Murky. Slime, Fish, BfB, Rewind, Slime, Fish, BfB is pretty much a kill in almost any situation. If you have teammates that know to take advantage of Octo-grap, so much the better. I actually changed up the build to protect me from Tracer and Lunara, taking Bubble Machine and Rejuvenating Bubble to nullify their constant DPS output. The key to any game of Heroes but especially on larger maps like Sky Temple is minimap awareness: know where your team and the enemy are at all times. All I did was constantly rotate through lanes, dropping slime and fish to get a minion and XP advantage and then stop off where the fights were happening to put a 3 second stun on Diablo or finish a kill on Morales. Murky is also one of the best in the game at clearing Zagara's Creep and she went heavy on the Creep build to try to keep vision on the map. Sorry, bug lady (really not sorry.) Credit has to go to that Rexxar player, too. Top Hero damage is, uh, not normal for that toon, especially on a team with Zeratul. Incidentally, the latter player was the loudest complainer about my Murky pick. He had the grace to thank me for the win afterwards, though.