I feel kinda weird when I’m not sure if I’m playing “correctly”.
Don't feel weird. Heroes of the Storm has never done an effective job of explaining to it's players how to play it. This is one of the primary reasons the game failed, as far as I'm concerned. It has to do with branding, I think; HotS was always sort of marketed as a "brawler", like Antaeus said. It was meant to appeal to folks who don't enjoy MOBAs, for whatever reason. It was actually really strange, I thought, how Blizzard actively avoided referring to HotS as a MOBA, and instead just kept insisting that it was a "brawler", whatever that meant. I believe that it was always meant to be a "for the lols DotA2", and even if it weren't intended to be that, it's certainly the way more hardcore MOBA fans regarded it. Personally, I came to Heroes of the Storm from DotA2 because all of my friends were intimidated by DotA, and I felt like a "casual" game like HotS would kind of bridge the gap and become something we could all enjoy. The truth is that Heroes of the Storm is every bit as complicated as DotA2 or League of Legends, or any other hardcore esport MOBA; maybe even more-so, because in HotS, there are dozens of maps with dozens of different victory conditions, so what's "best" (in terms of heroes, strategies, builds, etc) changes from game to game, sometimes wildly so.
Anyway, the end result is that Heroes of the Storm has a really mixed community: one (large) part who regard it as a "brawler" and just wanna ARAM it up fucking mid all game, and another part who understand how it actually fucking works.
So it's totally normal for you to feel weird about it. It's totally normal to feel like you don't understand how to play it "correctly". The truth is, almost nobody knows how to play it correctly, from Bronze all the way up to certain Grandmasters. My best advice is to find players to group up with, and figure out what works best for all of you. There are dozens of active players in this thread, and I know we're all happy to add folks to our friends lists. With regard to what you said about trying to go soak XP when both teams are ARAM'ing it up mid ... that's a tough spot to be in. Because on the one hand, you are 100% doing the correct thing by going to lane. But on the other hand, your teammates (who, let's be honest, probably don't understand the importance of proper XP generation in HotS or even how it works) are going to ARAM it up mid, regardless, and they're going to lose because it's a 4v5.
Everyone has an opinion on how to deal with that situation, because we've all been there. A lot of people will tell you that "doing the wrong thing together is better than doing the right thing alone". Personally, I say fuck 'em. I say go do the right thing and learn to do it well so you can gain MMR and not have to be placed in matches with dickheads who just wanna ARAM it up mid all game. There's a reason I learned to play heroes like Malthael so effectively -- because he has insane rotational speed, fast wave-clear, can effectively take any standard mercenary camp at level 1, trades up on almost everyone in the solo lane, and he can show up to a teamfight just long enough to jump in, burn somebody down with Last Rites, and then return to doing what he was doing.
Malthael is my response to the Heroes of the Storm clusterfuck of a community. He is the ultimate "fuck it, I'll just do it myself" hero.
The wife plays a game or two each night, almost exclusively as Zul’Jin in QM. While she’ll a lane, she’s really all about the stack life. She tends to rotate to wherever the enemy Tank is and feed off it. A typical game is 300+ stacks and highest team damage, something I believe she only gets away with because QM.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
Enemy Team: ETC/Varian/Brightwing/Alarak/Tracer
My Team: Muradin(me)/Alex/Zuljin/Valeera/Nova
we started getting rolled pretty hard around level 10, and around that point I just said in chat
"man, we really got screwed by the matchmaker on this one, comp wise"
"how so?"
"well, they got a bruiser to go with their tank, plus a ton of burst. We got two gankers and can't get a punisher to save our life"
I then got lit the fuck up by both Val and Nova. I never called them out as bad players, just felt the match was against us due to draft (or lack thereof) more or less
Found out after the game that those two queue together and basically ruin QM games.
I get annoyed when I'm the solo laner and somehow I have top hero damage on my team even though they've been dicking around mid for five minutes straight.
I work about 45-minutes to an hour away from home, so every day, I've got between an hour-and-a-half and two hours built into my schedule where I can think about shit like HotS without interruptions. Today, I was thinking about why "dicking around mid for five minutes straight" is so appealing to people, and why that phenomena leads to fundamental misunderstandings about the game, for both new and veteran players. It can be very frustrating to watch, because it inhibits your ability to generate XP effectively, which is, in my estimation, the literal sole purpose of the early game. I firmly believe that the HotS playerbase, by and large, does not understand how XP actually works, so I'm going to use this post to try and alleviate that issue in any way that I can.
The first thing you need to understand is that there are multiple ways to generate XP:
The first is through passive experience, which is earned at a rate of 23 per 35 seconds after the gates open at the start of a match. Destroying a Fort or a Keep will provide your team with a stacking 20% increase in passively-earned experience. In terms of minion waves, that amounts to about one bonus wave every 2 minutes. Since both teams receive this bonus, it has only a small impact on the game, especially in the early game; Killing minions, however, will be your team's primary method of gaining XP. Waves spawn every 30 seconds (this is going to be important when I talk about the 4-1 split later, but for now, just file that information away), and players need to be within 12.75 units of a minion when it dies to receive the experience they grant (there are exceptions to this, like Abathur, but that's not the purpose of this write-up). Additionally, every minion has a base value for it's experience. After every passing minute, that value increases based on a pattern. This value is "saved" or "imprinted" on every minion at the moment that they spawn from the Core, and does not change during the lifetime of that minion. Since minions spawn every 30 seconds, every second wave, starting with the one spawning at the one-minute mark, receives better stats including a higher experience reward; another source for gaining experience are the enemy structures on the map. As previously stated, destroying a Fort or a Keep will provide your team with a stacking 20% increase in passively-earned experience, but Towers grant a static amount of XP when they're destroyed, regardless of whether a hero is nearby or not; capturing mercenary camps also grants a scaling amount of XP for your team; and finally, killing enemy players provides global experience for your team. Teams that are behind gain an "underdog bonus" to this value that scales significantly based on how many levels apart your teams are (capping off at a four-level difference). Bonus XP will be granted in this manner until team levels are even (also, teams that are ahead in levels receive a corresponding XP penalty for enemy player kills). Notably, at even levels, hero kills grant only 66% of a minion wave's worth of experience.
I'm going to repeat that, just in case anybody felt like skipping that wall-of-text paragraph:
At even levels, hero kills grant only 66% of a minion wave's worth of experience.
So if you're dicking around mid and not scoring at least two kills per minion wave, you're costing your team XP.
I'll be honest; we talk an awful lot about the importance of the 4-1 split (4 players rotating together between nearby lanes, while an offlane hero handles another on their own), but I very rarely see it executed effectively, if at all, even when we're all grouped up and on comms. People get caught up, early and often, skirmishing with the enemy team, until a couple of minutes into the match when the whole thing's completely fallen apart. I'm gonna do my best to explain why that behavior is incorrect:
The most important lesson I ever learned about HotS is that, if the enemy minion wave in my lane is gone, I can safely leave. Maybe more pointedly, if the enemy minion wave in my lane is gone, I should leave. There are a number of reasons why a 4-man should rotate together as one unit, like protection against the enemy's rotation, but the primary reason in my opinion is that 4 players can clear a minion wave a hell of a lot faster than 1 or 2. Why is that important? Because minions spawn from the Core in waves every 30 seconds. The faster you clear your wave, the more time you have to go do other things. If your team can clear a wave in 5 seconds, let's say, that means you've got 25 seconds of free time to rotate to the next lane to clear, and to gank the enemy solo lane, or to set up a bush-gank on the enemy rotation, or to capture a mercenary camp to further your XP gain and lane pressure. If your opponent can clear those same waves in 10 seconds, you've gained a 5-second advantage in every rotation that will culminate until your opponent begins to lose XP on rotations due to minions crashing into towers before they can arrive to clear.
On many of the maps in HotS, the team that clears lanes faster has an overwhelming advantage in terms of options and mobility, and of course, in XP. That's why I always try to hammer into people the phrase "Clear the lane and leave." I genuinely think it's the most important piece of advice I can ever give a player: "Just clear the lane and leave". You don't need to fuck around and fight people; it almost never amounts to anything but wasted resources before an objective. Remember that hero kills are worth only 66% of a minion wave's worth of experience, so unless you can get at least two kills every 30 seconds by dicking around mid, you're actively losing XP.
Please just soak. I know it's fucking boring. But that's how the game's meant to be played. Just clear the lane and leave, and you'll find that you have so much more time to do all the extra shit on the map everyone's always complaining about not being able to do.
This is great advice.
If you ever want to just cool down with a match where your teammates won't just fight mid all game, then do this one strange thing: Queue up as Abathur in a bot match. Explain to your teammates that you want to try to soaking lanes with Abathur. Without saying a word, your teammates will evenly distribute themselves between all of the lanes. From my experience trying to rush through XP quests this past winter in "the Greatest Board Game EVER", I can confidently say that his will happen EVERY TIME.
The difficulty in general to get teammates to soak may be in part because of the game's absence of a gold mechanic. Without greed to motivate players to farm minion kills, they may not properly grasp the importance of the minion kills. Although I do wonder which is worse, teammates neglecting their soaking in HOTS or the drama of people fighting over gold in other mobas like DOTA.
Also, seriously though, my teammates in bot matches never let me soak a lane as Abathur. They stick to the minions like glue.
The way the game relies on XP soak always made me feel bad about playing Nova. Like, she can't wave clear for shit until 16, at which point why bother, but I found myself doing it because no one else would. Then I'd catch hell from teammates because I'm not free roaming for ganks. When I ask someone to switch, nobody does. So...I guess I'm staying in this lane then?
It's super frustrating since I really like playing her but am not allowed to take her in HL/UD and QM is just a shitshow.
MNC Dover on
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
We have a PA HotS discord now? Or is that cool people only?
0
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I've been thinking a lot about how this game is designed lately.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the optimal way to play does not confer enough of an advantage to outweigh the noise inherent in the matchmaking outside of a consistent competitive environment (e.g., teams playing teams regularly). The primary culprit of this issue is, I believe, the team-wide experience mechanic.
This isn't to say that I think last-hitting should be a thing. And it's not to say that you can't ever balance the game around team-wide experience (i.e., that the only solution is to remove it). But giving every player on your team the exact same experience even though they may be doing completely different things is entirely counter-intuitive and does not provide enough immediate feedback to intuitively teach proper gameplay.
There's a whole confluence of factors around experience, level advantages, hero deaths, etc. that go into why I believe this is the case. But I'm pretty strongly convinced that if they got rid of team-wide experience in the absolute fashion it is implemented now (everyone on the team gets exactly the same experience), the game would be fundamentally altered in ways that would have benefited its development and player base over time.
+1
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
It's the discord for the PA NGS teams really
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
ed: welp, murky did really well vs dehaka in the solo lane!
either stalled out or pushed just a bit, enough to let dehaka go a little deep and get picked a couple of times
munkus gave a pretty sufficient response already but i'll expand on it a bit
it is as munkus said, a discord for the PA/NGS teams. there is no "cool kids club".
it's honestly nothing secret or anything like that, just normal stupid dumb shit. like i posted the screenshot of that game to vent and people commented on it. i thought the comments were funny so i decided to share them here.
His last-pick ally goes with the ultimate fish... snip
ed: welp, murky did really well vs dehaka in the solo lane!
either stalled out or pushed just a bit, enough to let dehaka go a little deep and get picked a couple of times
Thinking about this a bit more.. murky was actually not a horrible pick.
Octograb was very useful in any rotation where Tyrande wasn't there with a cleanse.
Also, looking at the 3 GM team, there's no real true tank... right?
No real CC either. Tyarel went sanct...
Cris' team won pretty handidly, only losing 1-2 forts all game.
hanamura, the only map in the game where the objective isn't the objective
the real objective is the fucking sentinel camp
those'll push up to fucking Keep if you ignore them
Dibby on
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
+3
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Hanamura.
The map where you pick sylvanas and go "lol gg"
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
At least with haunted mines people realized they should stop doing the objective and just push.
People don’t seem to grasp that about Hanamura
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
i can't stand Brawl (or ARAM modes in general, i guess)
it's so fucking boring and meaningless, just isn't fun at all to me
smashing dicks mid for eternity is not why i play the game
Dibby on
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
+2
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Voracity and Forte absolutely love doing brawls
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
I don't mind it, honestly. Whether I like it or not, people in HotS just want to fuck around and ARAM it up mid. Like, that's the reality we live in. I don't PREFER brawls, but sometimes it's more fun because there are no expectations. People are going to fuck around mid and fight all game ANYWAY, so sometimes it's good for my mental health just to fucking embrace it.
Just a heads up in case anyone is experiencing the same stuttering problem as me. Basically the game is freezing up for maybe half a second every 24 seconds like clockwork.
I've experienced the problem twice. The first time was because I had enabled some experimental features in my NVIDIA drivers. Disabling experimental features resolved the issue.
This past week I updated my NVIDIA drivers because their older drivers had a security flaw in them that could enable an attacker to compromise the system and elevate their privileges to do all sorts of nasty stuff. After updating the drivers, the stuttering problem returned. I presume whatever "experimental" feature that was causing problems got rolled into the baseline features. Disabling the NVIDIA overlay will fix the stuttering problem. Sadly, disabling the overlay disables the overlay, which is its own problem.
Posts
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Don't feel weird. Heroes of the Storm has never done an effective job of explaining to it's players how to play it. This is one of the primary reasons the game failed, as far as I'm concerned. It has to do with branding, I think; HotS was always sort of marketed as a "brawler", like Antaeus said. It was meant to appeal to folks who don't enjoy MOBAs, for whatever reason. It was actually really strange, I thought, how Blizzard actively avoided referring to HotS as a MOBA, and instead just kept insisting that it was a "brawler", whatever that meant. I believe that it was always meant to be a "for the lols DotA2", and even if it weren't intended to be that, it's certainly the way more hardcore MOBA fans regarded it. Personally, I came to Heroes of the Storm from DotA2 because all of my friends were intimidated by DotA, and I felt like a "casual" game like HotS would kind of bridge the gap and become something we could all enjoy. The truth is that Heroes of the Storm is every bit as complicated as DotA2 or League of Legends, or any other hardcore esport MOBA; maybe even more-so, because in HotS, there are dozens of maps with dozens of different victory conditions, so what's "best" (in terms of heroes, strategies, builds, etc) changes from game to game, sometimes wildly so.
Anyway, the end result is that Heroes of the Storm has a really mixed community: one (large) part who regard it as a "brawler" and just wanna ARAM it up fucking mid all game, and another part who understand how it actually fucking works.
So it's totally normal for you to feel weird about it. It's totally normal to feel like you don't understand how to play it "correctly". The truth is, almost nobody knows how to play it correctly, from Bronze all the way up to certain Grandmasters. My best advice is to find players to group up with, and figure out what works best for all of you. There are dozens of active players in this thread, and I know we're all happy to add folks to our friends lists. With regard to what you said about trying to go soak XP when both teams are ARAM'ing it up mid ... that's a tough spot to be in. Because on the one hand, you are 100% doing the correct thing by going to lane. But on the other hand, your teammates (who, let's be honest, probably don't understand the importance of proper XP generation in HotS or even how it works) are going to ARAM it up mid, regardless, and they're going to lose because it's a 4v5.
Everyone has an opinion on how to deal with that situation, because we've all been there. A lot of people will tell you that "doing the wrong thing together is better than doing the right thing alone". Personally, I say fuck 'em. I say go do the right thing and learn to do it well so you can gain MMR and not have to be placed in matches with dickheads who just wanna ARAM it up mid all game. There's a reason I learned to play heroes like Malthael so effectively -- because he has insane rotational speed, fast wave-clear, can effectively take any standard mercenary camp at level 1, trades up on almost everyone in the solo lane, and he can show up to a teamfight just long enough to jump in, burn somebody down with Last Rites, and then return to doing what he was doing.
Malthael is my response to the Heroes of the Storm clusterfuck of a community. He is the ultimate "fuck it, I'll just do it myself" hero.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
My Team: Muradin(me)/Alex/Zuljin/Valeera/Nova
we started getting rolled pretty hard around level 10, and around that point I just said in chat
"man, we really got screwed by the matchmaker on this one, comp wise"
"how so?"
"well, they got a bruiser to go with their tank, plus a ton of burst. We got two gankers and can't get a punisher to save our life"
I then got lit the fuck up by both Val and Nova. I never called them out as bad players, just felt the match was against us due to draft (or lack thereof) more or less
Found out after the game that those two queue together and basically ruin QM games.
This is great advice.
If you ever want to just cool down with a match where your teammates won't just fight mid all game, then do this one strange thing: Queue up as Abathur in a bot match. Explain to your teammates that you want to try to soaking lanes with Abathur. Without saying a word, your teammates will evenly distribute themselves between all of the lanes. From my experience trying to rush through XP quests this past winter in "the Greatest Board Game EVER", I can confidently say that his will happen EVERY TIME.
The difficulty in general to get teammates to soak may be in part because of the game's absence of a gold mechanic. Without greed to motivate players to farm minion kills, they may not properly grasp the importance of the minion kills. Although I do wonder which is worse, teammates neglecting their soaking in HOTS or the drama of people fighting over gold in other mobas like DOTA.
Also, seriously though, my teammates in bot matches never let me soak a lane as Abathur. They stick to the minions like glue.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
It's super frustrating since I really like playing her but am not allowed to take her in HL/UD and QM is just a shitshow.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
I mean, it's not my team scoring the kills, but they're happening.
Hero.
Brawler.
Not an "experience tracker" or "lane soaking simulator".
A hero brawler.
You pick a hero. You brawl.
Don't listen to anyone in this thread who tells you about "strategy". All you gotta do is brawl.
BRAWL BABY BRAWL
We have a PA HotS discord now? Or is that cool people only?
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the optimal way to play does not confer enough of an advantage to outweigh the noise inherent in the matchmaking outside of a consistent competitive environment (e.g., teams playing teams regularly). The primary culprit of this issue is, I believe, the team-wide experience mechanic.
This isn't to say that I think last-hitting should be a thing. And it's not to say that you can't ever balance the game around team-wide experience (i.e., that the only solution is to remove it). But giving every player on your team the exact same experience even though they may be doing completely different things is entirely counter-intuitive and does not provide enough immediate feedback to intuitively teach proper gameplay.
There's a whole confluence of factors around experience, level advantages, hero deaths, etc. that go into why I believe this is the case. But I'm pretty strongly convinced that if they got rid of team-wide experience in the absolute fashion it is implemented now (everyone on the team gets exactly the same experience), the game would be fundamentally altered in ways that would have benefited its development and player base over time.
And Dibby for some reason :P
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
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illidan/tassadar in may 2019 LUL
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Cris' is the only GM on his team.
His last-pick ally goes with the ultimate fish...
ed: welp, murky did really well vs dehaka in the solo lane!
either stalled out or pushed just a bit, enough to let dehaka go a little deep and get picked a couple of times
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
it goes all the way down and ALL the way up
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
munkus gave a pretty sufficient response already but i'll expand on it a bit
it is as munkus said, a discord for the PA/NGS teams. there is no "cool kids club".
it's honestly nothing secret or anything like that, just normal stupid dumb shit. like i posted the screenshot of that game to vent and people commented on it. i thought the comments were funny so i decided to share them here.
that's all~
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Thinking about this a bit more.. murky was actually not a horrible pick.
Octograb was very useful in any rotation where Tyrande wasn't there with a cleanse.
Also, looking at the 3 GM team, there's no real true tank... right?
No real CC either. Tyarel went sanct...
Cris' team won pretty handidly, only losing 1-2 forts all game.
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
SHOTS FIRED
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
i dunno mig, you kinda just self-burned yourself there, eh?
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
the real objective is the fucking sentinel camp
those'll push up to fucking Keep if you ignore them
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
The map where you pick sylvanas and go "lol gg"
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
People don’t seem to grasp that about Hanamura
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
it's so fucking boring and meaningless, just isn't fun at all to me
smashing dicks mid for eternity is not why i play the game
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
I've experienced the problem twice. The first time was because I had enabled some experimental features in my NVIDIA drivers. Disabling experimental features resolved the issue.
This past week I updated my NVIDIA drivers because their older drivers had a security flaw in them that could enable an attacker to compromise the system and elevate their privileges to do all sorts of nasty stuff. After updating the drivers, the stuttering problem returned. I presume whatever "experimental" feature that was causing problems got rolled into the baseline features. Disabling the NVIDIA overlay will fix the stuttering problem. Sadly, disabling the overlay disables the overlay, which is its own problem.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012