Draft: The draft in a MOBA, also known as the “pick and ban” phase, is the period of time where you, your allies, and your opponent are tasked with choosing which heroes your team will be comprised of.

In Heroes of the Storm, drafting plays as much as 40% to 60% into the game’s outcome. Therefore, it is essential to understand how to compose your team and avoid getting out drafted and potentially losing the match before even entering the arena.

The goal of this guide is not to analyze the drafts and counterdrafts you might find in high tier matches like Dignitas vs Fnatic or MVP Black. It’s more about giving you—dear gamer-reader, sitting comfortably in your chair—some keys to understanding who, what, when, and how to pick during your Hero League draft.

Glossary/Role List

The idea of “roles” is popular in Heroes of the Storm. As a reminder and a guide for noobiest of readers, here is a list of terms used throughout the guide.

• Tank: Hero meant to engage or disengage from a fight, “peel” for allies, absorb damage, and provide crowd control
  
• Poke: Hero equipped with a large variety of long range spells used to chunk the enemy’s HP before a fight
  
• Finisher: Hero used to end an opponent’s life before they runs away
  
• Healer: The source of healing for a team
  
• Support (or Utility): Hero meant to support by bringing offensive or defensive tools to their allies or disrupting the enemy team
  
• Bruiser: Melee hero whose role is to kick some arse AKA the damage dealer
  
• Assassin: A hero who looks for weak targets in the back line
  
• Pusher: Hero with a high sieging potential (or sometimes great waveclear)
  
• Giant-Killer/Sustained DPS: Hero used to kill tanks/high HP targets and provide constant damage
  
• Burst DPS: Hero whose damage is ability-based and can quickly deal a lot of damage

The Draft

Pick comfort over meta

It is of the highest importance to secure heroes who are strong or “OP” in the current meta. However, don’t make the mistake of picking a hero you cannot play for the sake of picking an OP hero. It’s better ask the person in charge of banning to remove those heroes instead.

Don't pick too many assassins early

Communicate with your teammates and leave yourself options during the draft. If your team picks three assassins in the beginning of the draft, you’re generally locked out of the ability to counterpick or adapt to enemy picks. Instead, try to start with complementary heroes and leave the draft open for more choices later on.

Ask questions during draft

Once you have the core of your composition, you can adapt to your opponent—but first you need to understand what you’re up against. Several questions come to mind when thinking about draft counters. Here is a list (which is by no means comprehensive) of examples:

• What kind of damage?
  
  • Burst : Magical damage (Jaina, Falstad, Sonya)
    
  • Sustain : Auto attackers (Raynor, Tychus, Thrall)
    
  • Poke : Long range siege (Chromie, Li-Ming, Lunara)
  
  
• What kind of control?
  
  • Restrictive : Stuns, Roots, Silences, Knockbacks
    
  • Non-restrictive : Slows, Walls, Blinds
  
  
• What kind of protection?
  
  • Heals (Karazhim, Auriel, Malfurion)
    
  • Shields (Tassadar, Tyrael, Zarya)
    
  • Invulnerability (Medivh, Uther)
    
  • Cleanse (Rehgar, Brightwing, etc.)
  
  
• Pushing Strength?
  
  • Brick Breakers : Most specialists, some assassins
    
  • Weak : Most tanks/supports and assassins
  
  
• What kind of map control?
  
  • Global Presence : Abathur, Vikings, stealth heroes
    
  • Global Movement : Falstad, Brightwing, Dehaka
    
  • Mounts: Everyone else
  
  
• What kind of engage?
  
  • Hard engage : Charges, leaps (Anub’arak, ETC, Muradin)
    
  • Gank : Surprise assaults (Kerrigan, Stitches, Butcher)
    
  • Roman tortoise formation: Unstoppable advance of tanks (Johanna, Arthas, Leoric)
  
  
• What kind of tank?
  
  • Magic armor (Anub’arak, Stitches, Tyrael)
    
  • Crowd control (Arthas, ETC)
    
  • Physical armor (Muradin, Johanna)

Once you know what questions to ask, you can begin to identify what you need and pick a hero accordingly.

Adapt to your opponents

Example #1: Your opponent takes Li-Ming, a magical burst and poke hero. To counter her, you either need tanks who can absorb magic damage (Anub’arak, Tyrael), healers who can heal through the burst damage (Kharazim, Uther), or heroes that can spawn minions to block the skillshots like Zagara. Avoid soft tanks that are not resilient to that type of damage like E.T.C. or Leoric. The same goes for sustain healers like Brightwing or Lucio who can’t keep up with the burst damage.




Example #2: The enemy team picks heroes with massive engage or “dive”. Aim toward anti-dive tanks like Johanna, Arthas, or E.T.C, or high mobility heroes (leaps, dashes, blinks) like Falstad, Valla or Zeratul to avoid getting caught easily. Heroes with a lot of crowd control will make your opponents think twice before jumping in, and Cleanse is usually mandatory.

Example #3: Your opponent stacks several melee heroes with high HP pools which can easily peel for themselves and won’t die easily. The best way to deal with them are giant killers and sustain damage heroes like Raynor or Tychus.

Burst heal vs burst damage
Sustain heal vs sustain damage
Double tank vs hard engage
Double support vs triple assassin
Etc….

Niche picks and how to exploit them

A niche pick is a hero that usually is not considered strong in the meta but has a peculiar set of skills that can reverse some drafts. Usually those heroes are less popular, but a mastery of them can bring more to the table than an average meta pick.

Niche picks tend to be easy to counter, so it’s best to pick them at the end of the draft to exploit the weaknesses of your opponent’s composition. If your opponent opens in a predictable way, it leaves room for strong counterpicks that can unravel their composition, and vice versa.




Certain niche picks may not always work with your team though. People have such strong preconceptions about heroes and their efficacy that they will scream in anger if they see Murky, Nova, or Gazlowe on their team. While these picks can make a serious impact if played correctly, the weight of your team spending more timing whining about the pick instead of focusing on winning the game can be too much of a problem.

Prepare your picks by talking to the team during the draft and explaining why you think it’s a good pick for the draft or map. You’re more likely to lose with a negative attitude, so if your teammates can’t tolerate it, just play something less “fun”. Remember, this game is all about teamwork.

Communication

Communication is 100% necessary in Heroes of the Storm due to its emphasis on teamwork. If you can’t get along with other players and work as a team, it’s much harder to pull out a win, so practice having a good attitude even during draft. Bad attitudes in the draft spill over into the game, so keep it positive!

Should I sacrifice my pick for the greater good?

Situation: You have first or second pick and your team doesn’t pre-pick anything. You try talking to them, but they’re not answering. What do you do?

My daily quests line up for a melee specialist from the Warcraft universe, so I guess I have to play Gazlowe, right? Luckily the Machines of War patch from last September has taken care of that quandary; all heroes in ranked and unranked matches count toward quest progression.

Jokes aside, the best way to open a draft while retaining the most options is to pick a balanced, all-around hero who doesn’t get easily countered—for most intents and purposes, a standard “meta” hero.

But why should I sacrifice playing whatever I want to play for them? If you only want to play your favorite heroes, go play Quick Match. This is a game, and you should have fun—but the main goal in Hero League should still be to win. The more people start thinking toward the same goal during draft, the less likely you’ll be “sacrificing” yourself...you might even find out that you love playing a different role.

Knowledge is the finest weapon

The best way to win draft is by knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each hero—and the best way to do that is to play everything. It doesn’t mean you have to master everything, but experience on every hero will get you adjusted to them and what they can do. Ask yourself this: I main this hero, how do I counter it? You probably knew the answer quite easily. Once you get to know all the heroes, you can apply this question to everyone.

This will also help a lot in first pick situations. Knowing the heroes and knowing who is strong in the current meta will not only allow you to open the draft with a solid pick but also save you from picking a hero that is easily countered.

It’s up to you—learn, practice, and master the draft.

My team went full YOLO-draft, what do I do?

Our draft went completely wrong...we have Abathur on Tomb of the Spider Queen and no tank. ggwp?

Not necessarily. It’s still about knowledge. You can evaluate the strength of any draft and play accordingly. For example, if you know there’s little to no chance for you to win a teamfight, then don’t teamfight; exploit the map, split your enemy team, and gank isolated heroes. If they group as five and push, counter push elsewhere. It might be difficult (and sometimes impossible) to do, but it is the best way to salvage a lost situation.

Their team went full YOLO-draft, what do I do?

Never underestimate a “wtf” draft. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and exploit them. Don’t let them bait you into playing how they want to play. If they have a ganking squad with little push potential, group as five and hard push a lane. If they have several pushing heroes, never leave one lane unattended and set up a ganking squad to punish their attempts at splitpushing.

What about Quick Match?

Drafting is not only picking the right hero at the right time, it’s also finding a synergy between them. Despite the blind pick situation of Quick Match, you can still work on team compositions with friends. When you prepare a balanced draft for a cheese strat, make sure that the heroes you select work toward the same goal or make up for weaknesses in the rest of the draft.

Objectives and their effect on draft

Instead of listing the heroes that are good or bad on each map, the key is to ask the right questions so you can find the answers in future metas with new heroes and new maps.

What kind of objective does the map offer?

Heroes of the Storm contains a few different objective types. Before you start drafting, think about what kind of hero need to complete the objective. Most maps can be reduced to these four:

• Gathering of resources: Kill special creatures on the map to work toward the completion of the objective. Ex: Haunted Mines, Blackheart’s Bay.
  
  • Usually you will have to fight in one or several locations to kill NPC creatures and plunder their loot. Therefore it is best to aim for self-sustainable heroes like Sonya or Illidan.
  
  
• Channeling objectives: Capture a specified item to work toward the completion of the objective. Ex: Cursed Hollow, Towers of Doom, Warhead Junction.
  
  • Items draw heroes toward a single point at any given time. Global heroes like Falstad and Dehaka can contest these objectives while simultaneously putting on pressure in lanes. Poke is also very important for interrupting channels.
  
  
  
  
  Dragon Shire has points you have to hold on either side of the battleground, so having heroes with good skirmishing and rotational power is incredibly important. Globals are also especially powerful.
  
  
  
• Holding points: King of the Hill style objectives where the longer you hold the required points, the bigger the reward. Ex: Braxis Holdout, Sky Temple.
  
  • You need to hold one or several points, which makes teamfights inevitable. Sustainable heroes, tanks, and teamfight oriented heroes like Johanna and Malfurion are ideal.
  
  
• Escorting: Different kind of King of the Hill where the point you need to hold is moving. Ex: Hanamura.
  
  • Similar to objectives focused on holding points but with a little more mobility. The same kind of heroes are good. Globals like Falstad and Dehaka are also good for keeping up with the moving objective.

Where are the objectives located on the map?

The number and position of objectives are a defining factor of what kind of heroes you need as well.

• Single objective at a time: This type of objective forces team to clash 5v5, so teamfight compositions are expected. Teamfighting comps can focus on different things like dive or long range poke. Examples are ETC and Butcher for dive or Chromie and Lunara for poke.
  
  
• Multiple objectives: Multiple objectives will tend to pull your team apart by offering several rewards on the map at once. The ideal way to deal with them is to build a composition with a strong 4-man group to contest one objective—something like two heavy front liners, a support, and a ranged assassin—and a global hero. Alternatively, you can pick a hero with a long range spell in order to delay opponents at one objective while contesting the rest.

How many lanes and how spread out are they?

The number of lanes and their spacing will directly influence the strength of each hero and determine how well they can push or exploit mobility and rotations.

• Close lanes: Close geography will offer opportunities for aggressive rotations. Ideally you want four players rotating between two lanes while a solo laner takes care of the third. On two-player maps, it’s usually just a 4-1 split. Aim for lots of waveclear in your 4-man group (Johanna, Kael’thas, Gul’dan) and get a solid, sustainable solo laner (Thrall, Sonya, Dehaka).
  
  
• Far lanes: When rotations take ages, years, (lifetimes even, in the case of Sgt. Hammer), you should look toward having a 1-1-3 or a 2-1-2 setup. The first setup usually aims toward a heavy push of a lane, or moving a pair of gankers through lanes to outnumber your opponents. The 2-1-2 is a more defensive setup which gives you more strength against gankers and more control about the first rotation of your foes. Although rotations are long, having a duo of roaming heroes can also create a lot of mental pressure on your opponents. The best kind of roaming duo couples hard crowd control with a burst damage dealer.

Miscellaneous

Other questions you might want to ask yourself are:

• What kind of objective reward is available?
  
  
• Is the map objective a direct pushing mechanic (Infernal Shrines punisher) or one that you have to set up (Cursed Hollow tributes)?
  
  
• Play around the map pressure created by direct pushing objectives like the Dragon Knight or a punisher. Do you want to accompany it or split push while it’s active?
  
  
• Are there a lot of mercenaries? Bosses?
  
  • You generally might want to have at least one hero able to capture mercenaries on their own and some kind of boss control. Boss control comes in the form of area control (Mighty gust, Holy ground, Expulsion Zone, etc).
  
  
• How late does the map usually go?
  
  • If you’re on a map that tends to snowball early, picking heroes that have late power spikes might be a bad idea. On the contrary, heroes that scale strongly are pretty good on late game maps. Mages are usually strong in early game, but heroes that depend on quests to unleash their full potential are more often late game oriented.
  
  
• How is your wave management? Do you have the tools to react to pushing objectives or the opposing heroes?
  
  • There are heroes like Xul, Arthas, Probius that can soak two lanes at once while the rest of the team pressures elsewhere. You will want to either stop those heroes in their tracks or match them against a hero of similar potential.

Once those questions become part of your standard thought process, you will be able to combine it with your knowledge of heroes to become a master of drafting.The draft is like a chess game, if you don’t know the rules, you will end up just shoving pieces around and hoping to generate a successful outcome.

See you in the Nexus!

Usually, a good draft has:

A solo laner, melee—bruiser or off-tank
A support
A ranged sustain DPS
A ranged burst-dps or crowd-control (or both)
A tank

To start a draft, several points come to mind. First is the map; do we need global heroes to take the advantage on a wide map or do we need more waveclear to ease rotations on close lanes? This applies to both picks and bans. Denying your adversary is as important as having those heroes yourselves.

Example: Blue team opens with Dehaka, red team answers with Malfurion and Arthas.

The blue team will have to make sure that Arthas doesn’t have too much freedom in fights and can pick heroes that punish him—for example, Tychus (with his trait) or Greymane (with Cursed Bullet). But that’s not the only option. You can completely ignore Arthas and go for a dive comp. You can, in that case, go for Anub’arak, Cocoon Arthas, and simply rush the opponent’s back line.

The point is that there are many strategies and ways to draft.

To push this a little further, the draft then goes on to the blue team picking Anub’arak and Lucio. The red team now knows that the blue team won’t have access to Cleanse since Lucio doesn’t have one. Therefore they can opt for heavy CC or massive ults like Gul’dan’s Horrify.

Of course, drafting is not only about teamfights. You have also to keep in mind the global plan of the game, starting from laning phase and finishing with victory (or defeat).

Thank you for reading.