EPTWhat You Can Learn by Watching Competitive Heroes of the Storm
The competitive Heroes of the Storm scene has been growing steadily since the Beta. This means that there are a plethora of established live tournaments and archived competitive matches to dive into when looking to improve or killing time waiting for your queue.
If you are new to Heroes, your first instinct might not be to watch someone else play it when you could head into the Nexus yourself and start mashing buttons. However, if you want to get the most of your experience, competitive Heroes is a great source of knowledge and champion insights. You can learn and become a better player by watching the best in the world play against each other. Even if you’re not intently analyzing Rehgar’s talent choices or watching every second of Lost Vikings micro, you will pick up strategies and develop good habits. This will speed up your learning curve and make you a better teammate.
Even if you are a veteran Heroes player with several Master skins, there are plenty of tips and tricks you can get by watching professionals play. More importantly for experienced players, watching competitive matches will help you stay ahead of the curve when you enter the Nexus yourself!
Twitch is by far the most common place for major tournaments with Blizzard embracing it as a go-to spot for many of their sponsored events including the Road to BlizzCon tournament series. Most Videos-On-Demand (VODs) can be found on both Twitch and YouTube. With the evolution of eSports, there are new sites and services popping up trying to get in on the scene, so stay tuned to social media and Liquipedia to see where the newest tournaments can be found.
Watching live can be a lot of fun, especially if you’re at a LAN for an event like the Heroes of the Dorm Finals or BlizzCon. One of the downside of live tournaments is that there is often a lot of downtime between matches and they can sometimes run long if there are technical glitches or scheduling snafus.
VODs, on the other hand, are easily accessible and allow you the luxury of watching on your own schedule. Some prefer VODs because you can rewatch key parts or skip past breaks to what you really want to see. The downside to VODs is that they are not necessarily available right away, sometimes taking several days to become available for public viewing. By the time they become available, the content might not be as relevant if you want to learn new builds or comps.
Professional players have a strong understanding of the current Meta and will be picking top tier heroes and ignoring less optimal ones. This can help you decide which heroes to try, buy and master next if you are looking to play Hero League. Top teams admit that games are often won and lost in the drafting stage when players carefully strategize comps that will capitalize on their own strengths or take advantage of their opponent’s weaknesses.
Drafting is more complex than just learning which heroes are “best.” Throughout the draft, the casters will break down each hero choice and talk about alternative options as well as counter picks and how heroes will likely fair on the current map and synergize as a team. This is invaluable insight into building a proper team composition, and will help you figure out how to make your own teams in the future.
Heroes that are banned frequently are often just as strong as those that are picked first, and the casters will reveal the synergies that the bans are trying to block. For instance, you might see Uther or Brightwing banned because a team has a lot of stuns that they do not want cleansed. Insights like this allow you to learn which heroes best counter one another and give you a general idea on what your ranked team will need when facing heroes with crowd control abilities.
Keep in mind that bans, while a part of almost every tournament, are currently not a part of Hero or Team League. Since Heroes is still a young game, draft formats are not consistent among all tournaments. Currently the standard draft format for most tournaments is a double-ban system which allows each team to ban one hero at the start and one midway through the draft. It remains to be seen if the double-ban system will become the standard, but considering that the Road to BlizzCon uses this format, most top teams will want to practice that draft method going forward.
In order to properly learn from a professional match, you need to be able to interpret what is happening on the screen. This is where the tournament’s user-interface (UI) comes in handy, and you should familiarize yourself with it at the start of the game. Look around the screen and figure out where the important indicators are so that you can more easily follow the action. During the Heroes of the Dorm tournament, Blizzard opted for a very clean interface which did not even have a map, so you were forced to watch what you were being shown and trust the casters to keep on top of the action for you. Many web tournaments use a much more detailed layout with the heroes on top alongside levels and death timers, Heroic Ability timers on the sides, and the talent/stat window and the minimap near the bottom of the screen. Currently, the Road to BlizzCon tournament matches use a mix of the two UI styles that does not include ultimate and talent tracking. If you are watching to learn, simplistic UIs make it more difficult to track talents and builds so you need to make sure to listen to casters when each talent tier hits.
When watching competitive Heroes, you are guided through each game by a caster or group of casters. Casters explain the game to you, from introducing the teams and explaining hero choices through to wrapping up each match. If there is something especially notable about a hero selection, they will tell you why. If they see an interesting situation developing in a lane, they will bring it to your attention. They will often mention statistics such as win percentages and pick rates for heroes each match. They will familiarize you with tournament trends, team records, and analyze every facet of the game. Casters are an instrumental part of watching competitive games.
One thing that may be off-putting to first time viewers is that casters will often refer to players by their names rather than their hero names. This can be confusing to follow in the midst of the action, but If you follow what the casters are showing you, you will start to remember the players over the course of the series.
Along with basic hero selection, you will hear the casters discussing the “Meta” a lot. Here is a simple definition of metagaming from Wikipedia:
“Metagaming is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.”
In other words, metagaming is when you are making decisions based on information that exists outside the game, most frequently taken from the community. When it comes to Heroes of the Storm, the Meta is comprised of popular community choices on heroes, talent builds, and strategies. You can see metagaming in action with specific strategies like 4-laning on Haunted Mines or rushing a watch tower at the start of a game. Another example would be the tendency for team compositions to favor double Warrior or double Support. Early in the Alpha, double Warriors were the standard team comp in competitive play, but the Meta later shifted to a two Support team composition as heroes were added and changed in the Beta. The Meta also ranks heroes by “tier” which is also dictated by the community. A top tier hero might drop out of favor due to a talent change or a new hero that counters their stronger abilities. Hero quality and versatility is what people most often discuss when they reference “the Meta.”
While Blizzard does have the greatest overall influence on the Meta via patches and new hero additions, competitive teams also dictate the sway of the Meta within the community immensely. Because stakes are much higher for competitive Heroes players, they tend to innovate with new hero builds and team comps. When successful, those innovations filter down all the way to solo-queue Quick Matches. Recently in the ESL Major League Season 2 Playoffs, Cloud9 Vortex had several strong games with a specific Abathur and Zeratul build that lead to a huge amount of damage. Other teams were forced to adjust their bans and picks to counter Vortex’s strategy. This lead to that team composition appearing more in online play.
Another interesting factor of the Meta which you may hear addressed by the casters is the idea of different regions having different Metas. Most often this will be a comparison between the North American and European Meta, but do not discount the Asian Meta as competitive gaming is incredibly popular there. While most top tier heroes are used in every region, the Meta will occasionally differ on a hero or two. If you are loyal to a specific hero that is not being played a lot in your region’s tournaments, you can look to other regions to find ways to make that hero work. At this point, most Heroes competitive play is separated by region so there is not a great deal of crossover between teams, but that does not stop the debates over which Meta is superior. Unfortunately, cross-region tournaments are rare so you can learn about both sides of the debate and make your own decisions.
One of the most basic things to learn from watching competitive Heroes is the talent builds of played heroes. For players coming from other MOBAs, Heroes can sometimes seem too simple since there is no item shop or ability levels; however, there is still a lot of wiggle room in talent selection. You can easily look up talent builds online, including at TeamLiquid.net, but not all builds talk about the options you have and how to best take advantage of them. Watching a tournament game, you can get a better of understanding of why to take the more flexible talents and learn to make your own decisions in your games. Often a team will try to synergize their talents together by choosing multiple heroes with talents like Promote or Calldown: MULE, despite that not being the standard build. Watching a tournament and seeing how a team coordinates talents in order to take advantage of each hero’s strengths will help you make decisions in your own games.
Previous tournaments can offer great insight into heroes that are no longer common in the top-level Meta. You can glean valuable tips from older matches on talent builds even if patches or Meta changes have made them seem unviable. This can give you the ability to tweak you spec slightly when you are facing heroes that you are not accustomed to facing. At one point in the Beta, Imposing Presence was highlighted often during tournaments because it was especially helpful against Sgt. Hammer since her splash damage triggers the debuff. In team fights she is very likely to hit someone with Imposing Presence and that significantly cuts her damage. Currently Sgt. Hammer is not seen in as many tournaments, but this is still useful information you can apply when facing her in your own play.
Most casters will take time to address talent choices when they are selected, but you can also track them on the streamer’s UI. Unfortunately in the chaos of a match, they sometimes read through them quickly without detail so either use the pause/rewind buttons in VODs or try to focus on specific heroes that interest you. The casters will definitely let you know if they spot a very unusual build and will go over all the talents to discuss how it might make a difference in winning or losing.
You might have found a cool build online, but it is not as easy to maximize the build by playing it properly. There are many helpful guides that will give you detailed instructions. The more research you do, the better you will end up playing. Read the guides, try the playstyle yourself, and then check out how the top players are doing it. Watching professionals play a build will show you how to optimize your own play, or you may see a game that is lost because the build was played poorly.
Prior to the Kael’thas patch, ETC was an excellent split pusher who could solo soak a lane while waiting to jump into a team fight with Stage Dive. Determining when to stay in lane and trust your team and when to jump on your opponents’ heads was a big game changer that takes practice and understanding of the situation. If you are new to a hero or struggling with skill timings, watching a seasoned player do it can save you and your teammates some time and painful deaths.
If you have spent enough time in the Nexus, you have probably picked up map strategies like the order of the first two temple spawns on Sky Temple or the Meta-based strategy of sending a global presence or strong solo-pusher to bottom lane at the start of Blackheart’s Bay. This ties into the previous discussion of the Meta, and how the community has picked up these strategies and propagated them throughout the game. Many of these strategies carry over into professional matches. You should pay attention to hero selection on certain maps, as some heroes perform much better on specific maps like Lost Vikings on Haunted Mines since they can continue to soak two lanes and assist with skulls during the mine event.
You may have tried the “Smiley” strat at the start of Blackheart’s Bay where your entire team zergs to the watch tower that looks like a smiley face between top and middle lanes (a personal favorite of mine). Usually professional teams will choose not to use this strategy, believing a few extra seconds of vision is not worth the expense of losing experience from someone positioned in bottom lane. This is an example of how the community Meta might not always be the correct play. But then again, zerging the Watch Tower is really fun. It’s a smiley face, you have to go there first!
Many of the standard map strategies can be found in our guides on each battleground, but you can see them in effect with professional teams, and you can see new innovations by keeping up to date on the tournament scene.
Knowing your level and your opponent’s level is a key determining factor for when to engage in team fights. This is the area of the game that is easy to forget about in the heat of battle, but it gets brought up a lot by casters when watching matches. Since everyone on a team unlocks talents at the same time, the first team to hit that talent level has a decided advantage in any fights until the other team catches up. For many players, they most associate this advantage with the Heroic Abilities unlocked at level 10, but every talent tier offers a similar opportunity.
When watching the pro games, teams will very carefully play around these level differences and even ignore map mechanics or initiate aggressive ganks when they have a talent advantage. Pay careful attention to how a team acts when they are either ahead or behind, and try to play similarly in your own games. Sometimes you can even see this shift take place in the middle of a battle as one team is backing away waiting for their talents, and as soon as they unlock, they push forward and take out enemies that overextended.
Keep in mind that level 16 talents are the most powerful other than 10 and 20, so this is a great time to push the advantage. Level 16 talents include Blood for Blood for applicable heroes, so you can even surprise a Warrior by popping multiple Blood for Blood’s on him quickly after hitting 16 (better with Blood for Blood hero comps).
Team positioning and knowing when to rotate around the map is hard to describe, and equally hard to master. Heroes is built around pushing your lanes to the enemy Core, but it is crucial to get map objectives that will assist you in your goal. Balancing your decisions on which lanes to push and when to leave a lane for an objective is one of the most complicated parts of the game. Other than team composition and overall skill, this decision making is probably the most influential part of determining who will win a game. It can be tempting to roam around and gank, but the enemy might escape and costing you valuable lane experience or a map objective.
Remember that good positioning does not mean always moving towards the enemy. Sometimes you can get just as good a gank by waiting your opponent out if you know they are coming your way. Rather than going all out for objectives or mercenary camps, you can hide in a nearby bush and waiting for the enemy to come get them instead. This is sometimes called a “party bush” by casters, and is a great habit to start. Having good map vision with Clairvoyance or Tassadar’s Oracle ability helps to locate enemy heroes or, conversely, foil your enemy’s party bush attempts. With enough practice, you’ll be able to predict your enemy’s movements based on what they’re most likely to be doing without the use of either of these abilities. Wiping the enemy team as they attempt to capture a boss camp is game changing, especially if you can steal their boss camp. Since they’ll be weakened or dead, they’ll be unable to respond quickly to your push and you’ll gain much-needed experience and map control.
When dominating your opponent, it is really tempting to extend the game because you are having fun or just feeling cautious. If you watch pro games, you will see how they seize on the tiniest opportunities to end the game. If there is a keep down, the game can easily end after a decisive teamfight regardless of other lanes. Many games end without all the losing team’s keeps down. There is no reason to push every lane equally when you have the chance to take a win, especially when playing for prize money.
Being decisive and recognizing opportunities is a great advantage when you play because it gives you to comeback to win any game, even those you might be losing by a wide margin. Your goal should be to take down a keep, wait for a team fight to end strongly in your favor, then charge their Core and end the game before they resurrect.
You do not always need to use this strategy in a comeback; you can try to eliminate teams with strong endgame heroes early by pushing aggressively in the mid-game and winning a team fight around level 16.
Sometimes this can backfire, and result in a wipe and their team rushing your base before you can resurrect, so it is risk vs reward. However, if you watch enough competitive Heroes and get a feeling for the time it takes to cross each map, you can pull off these wins too. Pay attention to the rez timer and take advantage of it like the pros do!
These are highly coordinated, extremely skilled players so you cannot always use the strategies they use in your solo-queues. The strategies they employ always require team support and are sometimes tailored for a specific maps or enemy comps. That does not mean you cannot try it for yourself, but it could explain why you struggle to accomplish the same things they do. Sometimes you need to admit that your individual skill level is just not the same as a professional gamer, and that it will take you a lot longer to master a hero or playstyle. That does not mean you should give up, but this is just a reminder to be patient, do your research online, watch these matches, and practice a lot.
Often it is not just that professionals are more skilled, but that they carefully choose the right situations to use a hero or talent build, and try to maximize its potential with proper team synergy and map awareness. The Taste for Blood talent build of Azmodan was popularized by Tempo Storm’s Arthelon, but it is done in specific situations by professional teams. Remember that you cannot get as many stacks of bonus damage as the pros because they use it on maps with close lanes like Dragon Shire and they often lane with AOE pushers that weaken the minion wave to maximize early stacks. As this build became popular, the buff was capped at 500 to prevent it becoming too powerful, but it is still a difficult task to pull off without a lot of coordination and teamwork.
Not everything you see in tournament games works, but you can still learn how to be a better player or at least have fun with crazy ideas. Just as you are not a professional Heroes player, your opponents (usually) are not either, which means you might be able to get away with cheeky plays like a three Warrior team comp or bringing five Assassins. In the end, it is just a game, so do not be discouraged if you are not reaching the same heights as professionals. Just have fun!
Remember that Heroes rewards versatility, and having a good understanding of every hero and many play styles will help you a great deal. Since you probably are not able to play as much as you want, you can take advantage of these tournament matches to fill the gaps in your knowledge and hopefully come back to the Nexus as a better player. Watch pro games and try to absorb enough so that you will be able to make your own decisions on the fly.
Ultimately, kick back and enjoy the Heroes action and try to learn a few things. You probably will find yourself in the heat of battle, and realize you learned more than you realized!
If you are new to Heroes, your first instinct might not be to watch someone else play it when you could head into the Nexus yourself and start mashing buttons. However, if you want to get the most of your experience, competitive Heroes is a great source of knowledge and champion insights. You can learn and become a better player by watching the best in the world play against each other. Even if you’re not intently analyzing Rehgar’s talent choices or watching every second of Lost Vikings micro, you will pick up strategies and develop good habits. This will speed up your learning curve and make you a better teammate.
Even if you are a veteran Heroes player with several Master skins, there are plenty of tips and tricks you can get by watching professionals play. More importantly for experienced players, watching competitive matches will help you stay ahead of the curve when you enter the Nexus yourself!
Finding Tournaments
Twitch is by far the most common place for major tournaments with Blizzard embracing it as a go-to spot for many of their sponsored events including the Road to BlizzCon tournament series. Most Videos-On-Demand (VODs) can be found on both Twitch and YouTube. With the evolution of eSports, there are new sites and services popping up trying to get in on the scene, so stay tuned to social media and Liquipedia to see where the newest tournaments can be found.
Watching Live vs On-Demand
Watching live can be a lot of fun, especially if you’re at a LAN for an event like the Heroes of the Dorm Finals or BlizzCon. One of the downside of live tournaments is that there is often a lot of downtime between matches and they can sometimes run long if there are technical glitches or scheduling snafus.
VODs, on the other hand, are easily accessible and allow you the luxury of watching on your own schedule. Some prefer VODs because you can rewatch key parts or skip past breaks to what you really want to see. The downside to VODs is that they are not necessarily available right away, sometimes taking several days to become available for public viewing. By the time they become available, the content might not be as relevant if you want to learn new builds or comps.
Watch the Draft
Professional players have a strong understanding of the current Meta and will be picking top tier heroes and ignoring less optimal ones. This can help you decide which heroes to try, buy and master next if you are looking to play Hero League. Top teams admit that games are often won and lost in the drafting stage when players carefully strategize comps that will capitalize on their own strengths or take advantage of their opponent’s weaknesses.
Drafting is more complex than just learning which heroes are “best.” Throughout the draft, the casters will break down each hero choice and talk about alternative options as well as counter picks and how heroes will likely fair on the current map and synergize as a team. This is invaluable insight into building a proper team composition, and will help you figure out how to make your own teams in the future.
Heroes that are banned frequently are often just as strong as those that are picked first, and the casters will reveal the synergies that the bans are trying to block. For instance, you might see Uther or Brightwing banned because a team has a lot of stuns that they do not want cleansed. Insights like this allow you to learn which heroes best counter one another and give you a general idea on what your ranked team will need when facing heroes with crowd control abilities.
Keep in mind that bans, while a part of almost every tournament, are currently not a part of Hero or Team League. Since Heroes is still a young game, draft formats are not consistent among all tournaments. Currently the standard draft format for most tournaments is a double-ban system which allows each team to ban one hero at the start and one midway through the draft. It remains to be seen if the double-ban system will become the standard, but considering that the Road to BlizzCon uses this format, most top teams will want to practice that draft method going forward.
Examine the Tournament UI
In order to properly learn from a professional match, you need to be able to interpret what is happening on the screen. This is where the tournament’s user-interface (UI) comes in handy, and you should familiarize yourself with it at the start of the game. Look around the screen and figure out where the important indicators are so that you can more easily follow the action. During the Heroes of the Dorm tournament, Blizzard opted for a very clean interface which did not even have a map, so you were forced to watch what you were being shown and trust the casters to keep on top of the action for you. Many web tournaments use a much more detailed layout with the heroes on top alongside levels and death timers, Heroic Ability timers on the sides, and the talent/stat window and the minimap near the bottom of the screen. Currently, the Road to BlizzCon tournament matches use a mix of the two UI styles that does not include ultimate and talent tracking. If you are watching to learn, simplistic UIs make it more difficult to track talents and builds so you need to make sure to listen to casters when each talent tier hits.
Listen to the Casters
When watching competitive Heroes, you are guided through each game by a caster or group of casters. Casters explain the game to you, from introducing the teams and explaining hero choices through to wrapping up each match. If there is something especially notable about a hero selection, they will tell you why. If they see an interesting situation developing in a lane, they will bring it to your attention. They will often mention statistics such as win percentages and pick rates for heroes each match. They will familiarize you with tournament trends, team records, and analyze every facet of the game. Casters are an instrumental part of watching competitive games.
One thing that may be off-putting to first time viewers is that casters will often refer to players by their names rather than their hero names. This can be confusing to follow in the midst of the action, but If you follow what the casters are showing you, you will start to remember the players over the course of the series.
The Almighty Meta
Along with basic hero selection, you will hear the casters discussing the “Meta” a lot. Here is a simple definition of metagaming from Wikipedia:
“Metagaming is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.”
In other words, metagaming is when you are making decisions based on information that exists outside the game, most frequently taken from the community. When it comes to Heroes of the Storm, the Meta is comprised of popular community choices on heroes, talent builds, and strategies. You can see metagaming in action with specific strategies like 4-laning on Haunted Mines or rushing a watch tower at the start of a game. Another example would be the tendency for team compositions to favor double Warrior or double Support. Early in the Alpha, double Warriors were the standard team comp in competitive play, but the Meta later shifted to a two Support team composition as heroes were added and changed in the Beta. The Meta also ranks heroes by “tier” which is also dictated by the community. A top tier hero might drop out of favor due to a talent change or a new hero that counters their stronger abilities. Hero quality and versatility is what people most often discuss when they reference “the Meta.”
While Blizzard does have the greatest overall influence on the Meta via patches and new hero additions, competitive teams also dictate the sway of the Meta within the community immensely. Because stakes are much higher for competitive Heroes players, they tend to innovate with new hero builds and team comps. When successful, those innovations filter down all the way to solo-queue Quick Matches. Recently in the ESL Major League Season 2 Playoffs, Cloud9 Vortex had several strong games with a specific Abathur and Zeratul build that lead to a huge amount of damage. Other teams were forced to adjust their bans and picks to counter Vortex’s strategy. This lead to that team composition appearing more in online play.
Another interesting factor of the Meta which you may hear addressed by the casters is the idea of different regions having different Metas. Most often this will be a comparison between the North American and European Meta, but do not discount the Asian Meta as competitive gaming is incredibly popular there. While most top tier heroes are used in every region, the Meta will occasionally differ on a hero or two. If you are loyal to a specific hero that is not being played a lot in your region’s tournaments, you can look to other regions to find ways to make that hero work. At this point, most Heroes competitive play is separated by region so there is not a great deal of crossover between teams, but that does not stop the debates over which Meta is superior. Unfortunately, cross-region tournaments are rare so you can learn about both sides of the debate and make your own decisions.
Talent Builds
One of the most basic things to learn from watching competitive Heroes is the talent builds of played heroes. For players coming from other MOBAs, Heroes can sometimes seem too simple since there is no item shop or ability levels; however, there is still a lot of wiggle room in talent selection. You can easily look up talent builds online, including at TeamLiquid.net, but not all builds talk about the options you have and how to best take advantage of them. Watching a tournament game, you can get a better of understanding of why to take the more flexible talents and learn to make your own decisions in your games. Often a team will try to synergize their talents together by choosing multiple heroes with talents like Promote or Calldown: MULE, despite that not being the standard build. Watching a tournament and seeing how a team coordinates talents in order to take advantage of each hero’s strengths will help you make decisions in your own games.
Previous tournaments can offer great insight into heroes that are no longer common in the top-level Meta. You can glean valuable tips from older matches on talent builds even if patches or Meta changes have made them seem unviable. This can give you the ability to tweak you spec slightly when you are facing heroes that you are not accustomed to facing. At one point in the Beta, Imposing Presence was highlighted often during tournaments because it was especially helpful against Sgt. Hammer since her splash damage triggers the debuff. In team fights she is very likely to hit someone with Imposing Presence and that significantly cuts her damage. Currently Sgt. Hammer is not seen in as many tournaments, but this is still useful information you can apply when facing her in your own play.
Most casters will take time to address talent choices when they are selected, but you can also track them on the streamer’s UI. Unfortunately in the chaos of a match, they sometimes read through them quickly without detail so either use the pause/rewind buttons in VODs or try to focus on specific heroes that interest you. The casters will definitely let you know if they spot a very unusual build and will go over all the talents to discuss how it might make a difference in winning or losing.
Playstyles
You might have found a cool build online, but it is not as easy to maximize the build by playing it properly. There are many helpful guides that will give you detailed instructions. The more research you do, the better you will end up playing. Read the guides, try the playstyle yourself, and then check out how the top players are doing it. Watching professionals play a build will show you how to optimize your own play, or you may see a game that is lost because the build was played poorly.
Prior to the Kael’thas patch, ETC was an excellent split pusher who could solo soak a lane while waiting to jump into a team fight with Stage Dive. Determining when to stay in lane and trust your team and when to jump on your opponents’ heads was a big game changer that takes practice and understanding of the situation. If you are new to a hero or struggling with skill timings, watching a seasoned player do it can save you and your teammates some time and painful deaths.
Map Strategies
If you have spent enough time in the Nexus, you have probably picked up map strategies like the order of the first two temple spawns on Sky Temple or the Meta-based strategy of sending a global presence or strong solo-pusher to bottom lane at the start of Blackheart’s Bay. This ties into the previous discussion of the Meta, and how the community has picked up these strategies and propagated them throughout the game. Many of these strategies carry over into professional matches. You should pay attention to hero selection on certain maps, as some heroes perform much better on specific maps like Lost Vikings on Haunted Mines since they can continue to soak two lanes and assist with skulls during the mine event.
You may have tried the “Smiley” strat at the start of Blackheart’s Bay where your entire team zergs to the watch tower that looks like a smiley face between top and middle lanes (a personal favorite of mine). Usually professional teams will choose not to use this strategy, believing a few extra seconds of vision is not worth the expense of losing experience from someone positioned in bottom lane. This is an example of how the community Meta might not always be the correct play. But then again, zerging the Watch Tower is really fun. It’s a smiley face, you have to go there first!
Many of the standard map strategies can be found in our guides on each battleground, but you can see them in effect with professional teams, and you can see new innovations by keeping up to date on the tournament scene.
Team Levels for Team Fights
Knowing your level and your opponent’s level is a key determining factor for when to engage in team fights. This is the area of the game that is easy to forget about in the heat of battle, but it gets brought up a lot by casters when watching matches. Since everyone on a team unlocks talents at the same time, the first team to hit that talent level has a decided advantage in any fights until the other team catches up. For many players, they most associate this advantage with the Heroic Abilities unlocked at level 10, but every talent tier offers a similar opportunity.
When watching the pro games, teams will very carefully play around these level differences and even ignore map mechanics or initiate aggressive ganks when they have a talent advantage. Pay careful attention to how a team acts when they are either ahead or behind, and try to play similarly in your own games. Sometimes you can even see this shift take place in the middle of a battle as one team is backing away waiting for their talents, and as soon as they unlock, they push forward and take out enemies that overextended.
Keep in mind that level 16 talents are the most powerful other than 10 and 20, so this is a great time to push the advantage. Level 16 talents include Blood for Blood for applicable heroes, so you can even surprise a Warrior by popping multiple Blood for Blood’s on him quickly after hitting 16 (better with Blood for Blood hero comps).
Rotations & Positioning
Team positioning and knowing when to rotate around the map is hard to describe, and equally hard to master. Heroes is built around pushing your lanes to the enemy Core, but it is crucial to get map objectives that will assist you in your goal. Balancing your decisions on which lanes to push and when to leave a lane for an objective is one of the most complicated parts of the game. Other than team composition and overall skill, this decision making is probably the most influential part of determining who will win a game. It can be tempting to roam around and gank, but the enemy might escape and costing you valuable lane experience or a map objective.
Remember that good positioning does not mean always moving towards the enemy. Sometimes you can get just as good a gank by waiting your opponent out if you know they are coming your way. Rather than going all out for objectives or mercenary camps, you can hide in a nearby bush and waiting for the enemy to come get them instead. This is sometimes called a “party bush” by casters, and is a great habit to start. Having good map vision with Clairvoyance or Tassadar’s Oracle ability helps to locate enemy heroes or, conversely, foil your enemy’s party bush attempts. With enough practice, you’ll be able to predict your enemy’s movements based on what they’re most likely to be doing without the use of either of these abilities. Wiping the enemy team as they attempt to capture a boss camp is game changing, especially if you can steal their boss camp. Since they’ll be weakened or dead, they’ll be unable to respond quickly to your push and you’ll gain much-needed experience and map control.
Know When To End the Game
When dominating your opponent, it is really tempting to extend the game because you are having fun or just feeling cautious. If you watch pro games, you will see how they seize on the tiniest opportunities to end the game. If there is a keep down, the game can easily end after a decisive teamfight regardless of other lanes. Many games end without all the losing team’s keeps down. There is no reason to push every lane equally when you have the chance to take a win, especially when playing for prize money.
Being decisive and recognizing opportunities is a great advantage when you play because it gives you to comeback to win any game, even those you might be losing by a wide margin. Your goal should be to take down a keep, wait for a team fight to end strongly in your favor, then charge their Core and end the game before they resurrect.
You do not always need to use this strategy in a comeback; you can try to eliminate teams with strong endgame heroes early by pushing aggressively in the mid-game and winning a team fight around level 16.
Sometimes this can backfire, and result in a wipe and their team rushing your base before you can resurrect, so it is risk vs reward. However, if you watch enough competitive Heroes and get a feeling for the time it takes to cross each map, you can pull off these wins too. Pay attention to the rez timer and take advantage of it like the pros do!
Things to Keep in Mind
These are highly coordinated, extremely skilled players so you cannot always use the strategies they use in your solo-queues. The strategies they employ always require team support and are sometimes tailored for a specific maps or enemy comps. That does not mean you cannot try it for yourself, but it could explain why you struggle to accomplish the same things they do. Sometimes you need to admit that your individual skill level is just not the same as a professional gamer, and that it will take you a lot longer to master a hero or playstyle. That does not mean you should give up, but this is just a reminder to be patient, do your research online, watch these matches, and practice a lot.
Often it is not just that professionals are more skilled, but that they carefully choose the right situations to use a hero or talent build, and try to maximize its potential with proper team synergy and map awareness. The Taste for Blood talent build of Azmodan was popularized by Tempo Storm’s Arthelon, but it is done in specific situations by professional teams. Remember that you cannot get as many stacks of bonus damage as the pros because they use it on maps with close lanes like Dragon Shire and they often lane with AOE pushers that weaken the minion wave to maximize early stacks. As this build became popular, the buff was capped at 500 to prevent it becoming too powerful, but it is still a difficult task to pull off without a lot of coordination and teamwork.
Not everything you see in tournament games works, but you can still learn how to be a better player or at least have fun with crazy ideas. Just as you are not a professional Heroes player, your opponents (usually) are not either, which means you might be able to get away with cheeky plays like a three Warrior team comp or bringing five Assassins. In the end, it is just a game, so do not be discouraged if you are not reaching the same heights as professionals. Just have fun!
Last But Not Least...
Remember that Heroes rewards versatility, and having a good understanding of every hero and many play styles will help you a great deal. Since you probably are not able to play as much as you want, you can take advantage of these tournament matches to fill the gaps in your knowledge and hopefully come back to the Nexus as a better player. Watch pro games and try to absorb enough so that you will be able to make your own decisions on the fly.
Ultimately, kick back and enjoy the Heroes action and try to learn a few things. You probably will find yourself in the heat of battle, and realize you learned more than you realized!
