Heroes of the Storm: a perspective from a veteran League of Legends player
A few days ago, I got access to the "Technical Alpha" phase of Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's entry into the MOBA game market.
Since this article will delve into the details of how these two games differ, I will assume it is being read by an audience who is already familiar with either League of Legends or DotA 2, or variants thereof.
First, a story about my first game. I hit "Play", and I was given a choice of 5 heroes currently on free rotation, so I picked Raynor, a Starcraft Marine. He's listed as "Easy" to play. Heroes are ranked as "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard" to play. After picking him, I hit "Ready", and soon after I was dropped into a team of 5 other players, and the game started to load. On the load page, I was informed that there would be some mines that would open periodically, and that we could kill things in there to collect skulls. The number of skulls collected would determine the strength of a golem that would be summoned to fight for our team.
Once the game came up, there was the familiar MOBA layout: two "Core" buildings to protect, with lanes (in the mines mode there are only two), towers, and creeps moving forward along the lanes. Additionally, there were moonwells, gates, and some other details on the map. I was immediately asked to choose a "Talent". I chose one that said that for killing things, my basic attack damage would be increased permanently.
While killing things in the lane, I found it very hard to tell if I was last-hitting the creeps or not. I wanted my basic attack damage to go up, so this was upsetting. I kept doing my best to last-hit. Soon, the mines opened. The rest of my team ran into the mines. I assumed that was good enough, so I stayed outside to farm my basic attack up like any good Nasus in LoL. I was pushing toward the tower/gate setup, and was pretty happy. Suddenly, the team started complaining that I wasn't helping.
Soon, the golems arose: ours was weak, and theirs was strong because I hadn't helped collecting skulls. I thought this wasn't a big deal since I was making progress pushing. Then the golem attacked, and destroyed one entire gate/tower system.
Another oddity that struck me during the game was that I could never tell who got the kill when we took out the enemy heroes. It just said "Enemy Slain" and the name of the slain hero.
Well, we lost. It turns out that in HotS, the main goal is still to push towers and get to the Core, but the map-specific objectives are the best way to do this. Also, I found out a few games later that last-hitting *never* matters in this game. This was why I was unable to determine if I was getting last hits, and why it never told us who was getting the kills on the enemies.
Already, we can see that HotS is very, very different from LoL and DotA. I'll now discuss many of these differences, and how they impact the feel of the game.
First up, you don't get into a lobby with 10 other people and draft your heroes. You pick one, and are dropped into a team. Presumably the matchmaker balances the types of heroes in there. This removes the fights that brew in a LoL game before it even starts over who will play which roles. It also removes a lot of interesting tactics in how you play the "meta", or the currently prevailing whole-team strategies that are important in LoL.
Without last-hitting, you never worry about who you're damaging, or who might need a kill for some reason or another. Even kill streaks are earned just by being in the area where an enemy is killed, not by getting the last hits. In LoL, you get these weird situations where player A is running from B and C who are trying to kill him, B is running right next to him and not killing him waiting for C to catch up so C can last-hit A and get credit for the kill. This removes a huge bone of contention in LoL (kill-stealing), but it also removes some interesting tactics on how you allocate resources to your team. By now, you see the pattern. HotS has removed a lot of the reasons LoL players on the same team can hate each other, but losing tactical flavor in exchange.
Along with removing last-hitting, they also added some resources that get shared in a similar way. Periodically, creeps drop health globes you can pick up to heal your hero. To stop fights over who gets them, if one person picks it up, everyone on your team nearby also gets the health. The moonwells in your base I spoke of earlier replenish a lot of your health and mana when used. They have a long cooldown, about 90 seconds. But that cooldown is only for the player that used it: if I use one, you don't have to wait 90 seconds, but I do. Everyone on the team can use the same moonwell and it maintains cooldown timers for each.
The intense focus on the map-specific objectives gives the game a lot of flavor. The maps are chosen randomly, so you're not allowed to play favorites and must understand them all. None are complex or hard to understand, but it's not always obvious in your first few games what the consequences of failing an objective will be.
The camera is much closer in HotS, making all of the characters larger on screen than in LoL. It seems they have compensated by giving skills smaller ranges on average, but it still feels crowded on screen until you get used to it.
When spawning, your hero is on a horse and moves faster until taking / dealing damage or activating an ability. At any time, a player can re-mount with a short delay to move faster again. The map is already smaller in HotS, and with this feature, it's easier to come to the aid of your fellow heroes.
There is no equivalent of "Summoner Spells" in LoL, which are two special abilities a player chooses separately from their hero. Again, there are fewer tactics, but it's easier to learn.
Turret mechanics are greatly simplified. In LoL, a turret will shoot creeps, even if you come in and shoot the turret while it is doing that. If the creeps all die, it targets you, and keeps you targeted even if more creeps arrive. You must leave the range of the turret to get it to re-target the creeps. While under the turret, if it is shooting creeps and you damage an opponent, it will re-target you. In HotS, the turret shoots you if there are no creeps, and shoots creeps if there are any in range. Count the number of sentences it took to explain those! This again removes a lot of interesting tactics LoL has regarding "tower dives", but makes it much easier for new players to come in and understand what's going on.
Each turret location has two turrets, flanked by two destructible walls, and a gate between. Behind that are a moonwell, another turret, and a fort (which seems to be just a bigger, tougher tower). Each tower/fort has a store of ammo (about 20 for a turret, double that for a fort), so they periodically have to reload.
There are mercenary camps dotted around the map in HotS. If you attack these, they become subdued, and will then join a lane and fight for you. Some of these are of medium power, others require a full team to take down.
The maps run left to right, not diagonally, so there does not appear to be any advantage for one side or the other. In LoL, the team on the bottom has a statistical advantage due to details of where things are positioned on the HUD and the misclicks that can occur while playing.
In most other MOBAs, each hero has a set of skills (usually 3 normals ones and a big one), and they can spend a point in each skill each time they go up a level. Players can customize their "build" by changing the order in which they spend these points, and by spending gold earned from kills and creeps to buy various items. At max level, a given hero will have maxed his skills in the same way as always, with only the items giving customization at that time.
In HotS, this has been replaced by the "Talent" system. Heroes still have 4 abilities, 3 normal ones, a big one, and a "Trait" (much like LoL's "Passive"). But the normal ones are immediately available. At levels 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20, a player can choose "Talent" from a list of 4 or 5 (or once from 2 when getting their "Heroic Abilities"). Each Talent only appears once in the lists, so you are making permanent customization choices as you go. This means that at level 20, your hero probably will not have the same skills as she would if someone else had built her.
Notice I have said nothing about gold or items: HotS has none. The Talent system is where players have the most ability to customize themselves to deal with their randomly-assigned team composition.
One of the biggest questions about any MOBA is, "How do you pay for it?" HotS uses a system much the same as LoL does: each week there is a set of heroes you can play for free, and you can buy permanent access to heroes you want with either real money or game-cash earned by playing. After doing some calculations, I determined that heroes in HotS are somewhat more costly in playing time, but players must invest 2-3 hours per day on average to complete "Daily Quests" to attain maximum efficiency.
Just playing a game is worth on average 25 gold. Completing a daily quest like "Win 3 games" earns 600 gold. So if you want to earn as much gold per hour as you can, you really need to commit to doing the quests. If the average game is 20 minutes, and it takes 6 games to win 3 at 50% win rate, you're looking at two hours (unless you win or lose more than the normal amount in the session) to get your gold. Heroes cost between 2k and 10k gold, with the most recent release being 15k for some period of time. The 2k heroes cost $4 US, and the $/gold ratio goes up as the heroes get more expensive.
As with LoL, your player levels as you play. This rewards you with some gold (6k available total), and two extra free rotation availability slots. Also, the heroes you play have levels. At level 1, you don't get access to all their Talents. This appears to be an accessibility feature, so that someone playing a new hero isn't presented with too many choices. These unlock fairly quickly (all by level 4), which only takes a few games to do. At level 5 you earn 500 gold, so there's some additional gold to be had by getting as many heroes up to level 5 as possible.
Of course, there are also hero skins and mounts you can buy for $, though at least one mount can be bought for gold (20k for the pig).
One problem with this system is that after you've competed your Daily Quest, you'll only get about 25 gold per game. This feels like Blizzard saying, "We'd rather you didn't play anymore today." The contrast in LoL is that it gives you one bonus of +150 for your first win each day, but every other game is treated the same. I never, ever get the feeling Riot wants me to stop playing LoL. Remember: don't turn off your free players, because they provide content for the ones who do pay. In a MOBA, the free players fill out the playerbase so you get better matchmaking and shorter game-search times.
So the big question is: do I think HotS is a better game than LoL? The answer is no. But I also do not think it is a worse game, either. It is a different game. I am certain that during game design sessions, people at Blizzard had it in their minds that their goal was not to make another MOBA just like the others, but to stake out new territory in the genre. I think their design is a resounding success in that regard.
After about 10 games of HotS, I went back to LoL to see how it would feel in comparison. For reference, I'm a Silver 4 ranked LoL player with about 2 years of experience. The characters seemed small. The game felt slower, with longer walk times to get back to the battle. Last-hitting presented me with micro-management challenges I hadn't worried about for a while. I am certain that the contrast made my play sharper, as I became more aware of the tools I had that were missing from HotS. I won 4 ranked games in a row with Ashe, which is a pretty decent streak for me. I definitely had a lot of fun.
The verdict is that I will continue to play both. I doubt I'll invest as much time into HotS as I have with LoL since I'm a pretty hardcore gamer. But its lighter demands make it feel like a welcoming diversion when I don't necessarily feel like sitting down to a hardcore 1-hour battle in LoL.
Since this article will delve into the details of how these two games differ, I will assume it is being read by an audience who is already familiar with either League of Legends or DotA 2, or variants thereof.
First, a story about my first game. I hit "Play", and I was given a choice of 5 heroes currently on free rotation, so I picked Raynor, a Starcraft Marine. He's listed as "Easy" to play. Heroes are ranked as "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard" to play. After picking him, I hit "Ready", and soon after I was dropped into a team of 5 other players, and the game started to load. On the load page, I was informed that there would be some mines that would open periodically, and that we could kill things in there to collect skulls. The number of skulls collected would determine the strength of a golem that would be summoned to fight for our team.
Once the game came up, there was the familiar MOBA layout: two "Core" buildings to protect, with lanes (in the mines mode there are only two), towers, and creeps moving forward along the lanes. Additionally, there were moonwells, gates, and some other details on the map. I was immediately asked to choose a "Talent". I chose one that said that for killing things, my basic attack damage would be increased permanently.
While killing things in the lane, I found it very hard to tell if I was last-hitting the creeps or not. I wanted my basic attack damage to go up, so this was upsetting. I kept doing my best to last-hit. Soon, the mines opened. The rest of my team ran into the mines. I assumed that was good enough, so I stayed outside to farm my basic attack up like any good Nasus in LoL. I was pushing toward the tower/gate setup, and was pretty happy. Suddenly, the team started complaining that I wasn't helping.
Soon, the golems arose: ours was weak, and theirs was strong because I hadn't helped collecting skulls. I thought this wasn't a big deal since I was making progress pushing. Then the golem attacked, and destroyed one entire gate/tower system.
Another oddity that struck me during the game was that I could never tell who got the kill when we took out the enemy heroes. It just said "Enemy Slain" and the name of the slain hero.
Well, we lost. It turns out that in HotS, the main goal is still to push towers and get to the Core, but the map-specific objectives are the best way to do this. Also, I found out a few games later that last-hitting *never* matters in this game. This was why I was unable to determine if I was getting last hits, and why it never told us who was getting the kills on the enemies.
Already, we can see that HotS is very, very different from LoL and DotA. I'll now discuss many of these differences, and how they impact the feel of the game.
First up, you don't get into a lobby with 10 other people and draft your heroes. You pick one, and are dropped into a team. Presumably the matchmaker balances the types of heroes in there. This removes the fights that brew in a LoL game before it even starts over who will play which roles. It also removes a lot of interesting tactics in how you play the "meta", or the currently prevailing whole-team strategies that are important in LoL.
Without last-hitting, you never worry about who you're damaging, or who might need a kill for some reason or another. Even kill streaks are earned just by being in the area where an enemy is killed, not by getting the last hits. In LoL, you get these weird situations where player A is running from B and C who are trying to kill him, B is running right next to him and not killing him waiting for C to catch up so C can last-hit A and get credit for the kill. This removes a huge bone of contention in LoL (kill-stealing), but it also removes some interesting tactics on how you allocate resources to your team. By now, you see the pattern. HotS has removed a lot of the reasons LoL players on the same team can hate each other, but losing tactical flavor in exchange.
Along with removing last-hitting, they also added some resources that get shared in a similar way. Periodically, creeps drop health globes you can pick up to heal your hero. To stop fights over who gets them, if one person picks it up, everyone on your team nearby also gets the health. The moonwells in your base I spoke of earlier replenish a lot of your health and mana when used. They have a long cooldown, about 90 seconds. But that cooldown is only for the player that used it: if I use one, you don't have to wait 90 seconds, but I do. Everyone on the team can use the same moonwell and it maintains cooldown timers for each.
The intense focus on the map-specific objectives gives the game a lot of flavor. The maps are chosen randomly, so you're not allowed to play favorites and must understand them all. None are complex or hard to understand, but it's not always obvious in your first few games what the consequences of failing an objective will be.
The camera is much closer in HotS, making all of the characters larger on screen than in LoL. It seems they have compensated by giving skills smaller ranges on average, but it still feels crowded on screen until you get used to it.
When spawning, your hero is on a horse and moves faster until taking / dealing damage or activating an ability. At any time, a player can re-mount with a short delay to move faster again. The map is already smaller in HotS, and with this feature, it's easier to come to the aid of your fellow heroes.
There is no equivalent of "Summoner Spells" in LoL, which are two special abilities a player chooses separately from their hero. Again, there are fewer tactics, but it's easier to learn.
Turret mechanics are greatly simplified. In LoL, a turret will shoot creeps, even if you come in and shoot the turret while it is doing that. If the creeps all die, it targets you, and keeps you targeted even if more creeps arrive. You must leave the range of the turret to get it to re-target the creeps. While under the turret, if it is shooting creeps and you damage an opponent, it will re-target you. In HotS, the turret shoots you if there are no creeps, and shoots creeps if there are any in range. Count the number of sentences it took to explain those! This again removes a lot of interesting tactics LoL has regarding "tower dives", but makes it much easier for new players to come in and understand what's going on.
Each turret location has two turrets, flanked by two destructible walls, and a gate between. Behind that are a moonwell, another turret, and a fort (which seems to be just a bigger, tougher tower). Each tower/fort has a store of ammo (about 20 for a turret, double that for a fort), so they periodically have to reload.
There are mercenary camps dotted around the map in HotS. If you attack these, they become subdued, and will then join a lane and fight for you. Some of these are of medium power, others require a full team to take down.
The maps run left to right, not diagonally, so there does not appear to be any advantage for one side or the other. In LoL, the team on the bottom has a statistical advantage due to details of where things are positioned on the HUD and the misclicks that can occur while playing.
In most other MOBAs, each hero has a set of skills (usually 3 normals ones and a big one), and they can spend a point in each skill each time they go up a level. Players can customize their "build" by changing the order in which they spend these points, and by spending gold earned from kills and creeps to buy various items. At max level, a given hero will have maxed his skills in the same way as always, with only the items giving customization at that time.
In HotS, this has been replaced by the "Talent" system. Heroes still have 4 abilities, 3 normal ones, a big one, and a "Trait" (much like LoL's "Passive"). But the normal ones are immediately available. At levels 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20, a player can choose "Talent" from a list of 4 or 5 (or once from 2 when getting their "Heroic Abilities"). Each Talent only appears once in the lists, so you are making permanent customization choices as you go. This means that at level 20, your hero probably will not have the same skills as she would if someone else had built her.
Notice I have said nothing about gold or items: HotS has none. The Talent system is where players have the most ability to customize themselves to deal with their randomly-assigned team composition.
One of the biggest questions about any MOBA is, "How do you pay for it?" HotS uses a system much the same as LoL does: each week there is a set of heroes you can play for free, and you can buy permanent access to heroes you want with either real money or game-cash earned by playing. After doing some calculations, I determined that heroes in HotS are somewhat more costly in playing time, but players must invest 2-3 hours per day on average to complete "Daily Quests" to attain maximum efficiency.
Just playing a game is worth on average 25 gold. Completing a daily quest like "Win 3 games" earns 600 gold. So if you want to earn as much gold per hour as you can, you really need to commit to doing the quests. If the average game is 20 minutes, and it takes 6 games to win 3 at 50% win rate, you're looking at two hours (unless you win or lose more than the normal amount in the session) to get your gold. Heroes cost between 2k and 10k gold, with the most recent release being 15k for some period of time. The 2k heroes cost $4 US, and the $/gold ratio goes up as the heroes get more expensive.
As with LoL, your player levels as you play. This rewards you with some gold (6k available total), and two extra free rotation availability slots. Also, the heroes you play have levels. At level 1, you don't get access to all their Talents. This appears to be an accessibility feature, so that someone playing a new hero isn't presented with too many choices. These unlock fairly quickly (all by level 4), which only takes a few games to do. At level 5 you earn 500 gold, so there's some additional gold to be had by getting as many heroes up to level 5 as possible.
Of course, there are also hero skins and mounts you can buy for $, though at least one mount can be bought for gold (20k for the pig).
One problem with this system is that after you've competed your Daily Quest, you'll only get about 25 gold per game. This feels like Blizzard saying, "We'd rather you didn't play anymore today." The contrast in LoL is that it gives you one bonus of +150 for your first win each day, but every other game is treated the same. I never, ever get the feeling Riot wants me to stop playing LoL. Remember: don't turn off your free players, because they provide content for the ones who do pay. In a MOBA, the free players fill out the playerbase so you get better matchmaking and shorter game-search times.
So the big question is: do I think HotS is a better game than LoL? The answer is no. But I also do not think it is a worse game, either. It is a different game. I am certain that during game design sessions, people at Blizzard had it in their minds that their goal was not to make another MOBA just like the others, but to stake out new territory in the genre. I think their design is a resounding success in that regard.
After about 10 games of HotS, I went back to LoL to see how it would feel in comparison. For reference, I'm a Silver 4 ranked LoL player with about 2 years of experience. The characters seemed small. The game felt slower, with longer walk times to get back to the battle. Last-hitting presented me with micro-management challenges I hadn't worried about for a while. I am certain that the contrast made my play sharper, as I became more aware of the tools I had that were missing from HotS. I won 4 ranked games in a row with Ashe, which is a pretty decent streak for me. I definitely had a lot of fun.
The verdict is that I will continue to play both. I doubt I'll invest as much time into HotS as I have with LoL since I'm a pretty hardcore gamer. But its lighter demands make it feel like a welcoming diversion when I don't necessarily feel like sitting down to a hardcore 1-hour battle in LoL.
posted by Almo at 6:43 PM
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