A Beginner’s Guide to Heroes of the Storm

Haunted Mines opens with teamfights, and ends very quickly. Choose your talents accordingly.

Cartography Counts

Speaking of maps: you also have to play differently depending on which map you’re on. Now, every decent MOBA asks you to adjust your build based on what your team has and what you’re up against, but Heroes of the Storm throws map variations into this.

Let’s have a specific example. A fair few Assassins have an early talent that boosts their attack damage every time they kill a certain number of creeps (or, at least, are in the area when those creeps die). This is generally a great talent, because it means that they do even more damage as the game goes later and later.

It’s also a talent that you really shouldn’t take on certain maps. Haunted Mines, for instance, tends to end very quickly, and dominance is established more by early teamfights than late-game strength. If you’re playing on Haunted Mines, it’s almost certainly going to be better to pick a talent that’s going to give immediate impact, because you’re going to need to contribute to early battles, and the match simply won’t last long enough for the damage-boosting talent to actually make you particularly powerful.

The point is this: knowing what you have and what you’re up against are only two elements of Heroes of the Storm. Knowing how a map is likely to shake out in terms of duration and space – how much time you’ll have to yourself and how much time is going to spent teamfighting – is of equal importance for a lot of decisions you’ll have to make.

The enemy team could really have done with putting someone in this lane.

The Lane Game

Before that actually happens, though, comes laning. Heroes of the Storm is (again) a bit different to most MOBAs in that there’s no last-hitting to acquire currency (because there’s no currency) and in that experience is gained by the team rather than by individuals. If someone gets experience from a lane creep dying, the whole team gets that experience.

This means that “soaking” lane experience is important. Early on in particular, you want at least one person in every single lane so that your team is getting the experience benefit from that lane. Actually “winning” the lane is relatively unimportant; as long as your team is getting the experience out of it, that’s something.

This applies throughout the entire match, but to a lesser extent. If you’re not going for a map objective, or a fight, or a push, or jungle camps or whatever, then you should be soaking a lane if it’s safe to do so.

Again, this is situational: it’s more important for some heroes to do this than others, like those with the aforementioned talent that permanently boosts their damage for killing minions. But generally speaking, if you’re not directly going for any objective – map objective or otherwise – this should always be your fallback, to make sure you’re doing something.

I… think Zeratul is hiding somewhere in this picture. Maybe.

Stealth, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Make Nova Sad

Now, two sections very specifically aimed at new players. Firstly: Nova and Zeratul.

These two heroes are the bane of newbies, because both of them are completely invisible until they attack or take damage. They can feel tremendously overpowered, appearing out of nowhere and murdering you before you can react. I know this, because I thought the exact same thing.

Buuuut… there are a number of tricks to dealing with them. No, you can’t buy detection, but it turns out you don’t actually need it.

Firstly: they’re not truly invisible, they’re just very hard to spot. They both use Predator-like optic camouflage, which means that there’s a little shimmer whenever they move. If Nova’s on the enemy team, and you don’t know where she is, and things seem awfully quiet, keep your eyes open for that shimmer. It takes practice, and you’re not going to spot an invis hero every single time – particularly because good ones aren’t going to run back and forth across a lane so that you can easily spot the shimmer – but once you’re used to it, they’ll jump you a lot less.

The enemy Nova is actually on this shot; I took it specifically because I saw the shimmer. Buggered if I can see where, though. Somewhere to my lower right, I think?

Also, you still can’t walk through them while they’re invisible. If you’re trying to get through a narrow chokepoint and something seems to be blocking you, it’s probably one of them.

Additionally, both of those heroes are made of paper. Any damage inflicted on them will reveal them, and while you can’t right-click an invisible hero, you can still hurl skillshots at them. If you manage to start the fight on your terms, chances are they’ll run rather than directly engaging you unless they have a serious advantage.

And, yes, there are some direct methods of detection. Tassadar’s Oracle is a big AoE detection field, while Malfurion’s Moonfire and Tyrande’s Sentinel are both rather more directed means of revealing people for extended periods. The latter two are skillshots, though, so they require some fine aim and a good sense of where the enemy is.

One thing to be careful of, though: Nova can create a holographic decoy of herself a little distance away. Sometimes this is used for scouting, but sometimes this is used in the hopes that the enemy will engage onto it, blowing all of their spells and abilities, so that the real Nova can then reveal herself and pick the opponent off in relative safety. That trick doesn’t work so well against experienced players, but Heroes of the Storm doesn’t offer any way of seeing what abilities unfamiliar heroes have in the middle of a match, so newbies unaware that her E creates a duplicate can be easily caught by this.

The big thing, though, is to watch for that shimmer. Pay attention to your map. See where people are and who’s missing. And if you’re playing a squishy hero yourself, then don’t overextend, and don’t go wandering the bushes by yourself: Nova, in particular, is pretty much designed to punish that sort of play.

No, really: what the hell is this thing?

What the Hell is Abathur

Finally, I want to address the question of Abathur, and that question is “What the hell is this hero and why isn’t it doing anything?” That hero is Abathur, and Abathur is not playing a MOBA. Or at least, not in the same way you are.

Abathur is the single weirdest hero in Heroes of the Storm, and he absolutely deserves a section to himself, because the quickest way to identify yourself as a new player is to loudly complain that Abathur isn’t doing anything. I mean, I guess he actually might not be doing anything, but a lot of the time an Abathur player is extraordinarily busy while looking like he’s not actually contributing. At all.

Abathur moves slowly, will die if any hero so much as looks at him, and will never personally take part in a fight. If he’s on your team, he’ll usually be spotted hiding in a bush somewhere on the map, seemingly doing fuck all.

Glance at the leaderboard, and you’ll probably notice that he’s also got a pretty high amount of siege damage and hero damage.

Think of a Zerg hat as being like a beer helmet, only instead of liquid, it contains murder.

Abathur has two main abilities, and neither of them rely on him being anywhere near a fight. The least intrusive is his ability to drop mines up to about half a map away; this has three charges which replenish fairly quickly. This can be used for revealing enemies, or annoying people hiding in bushes, or setting up hilarious death traps, because there’s nothing quite like watching someone blunder into 10 mines and explode.

His other ability is to give a little Zerg hat to an allied hero, creep, or building. He takes direct control of this hat and can use it to give that hero a shield, to fire out an AoE spray attack, or to launch a targeted needle – and this is where his uses come in. Those attacks deal a lot of damage, and depending on talents, he’s also a half-decent healer. So yeah, it looks like he’s doing nothing, but chances are good that your lazy Abathur is watching the entire map, giving hats to creeps to push back waves, giving hats to allies in team fights, dropping mines in choke points, and – eventually – using his ultimate to either create a lane-pushing monstrosity or to clone one of your team. And even while he’s sitting still, he’s spawning extra creeps that can help push down the nearest lane.

It looks like Abathur’s doing nothing, but while you’re playing a MOBA, he’s playing a very limited RTS.

Unless he actually is just doing fuck all, anyway.