Heroes of the Storm defines itself as a Hero Brawler and as new players soon realize, there might be more to it than a mere whimsical name.

It’s not uncommon for players that come from other games of the genre to be confused when they first play Heroes of the Storm. People expect this game to be played in the exact same way as the others, but in reality, Heroes of the Storm plays very differently from your traditional MOBA or ARTS.

On this guide, we will explain how each one of its differences, such as no gold and shared experience, impact the general gameplay throughout a match. With this, we hope you will understand the mechanics of this game better, and hopefully make your transition easier.

Heroes of the Storm defies the established conventions of how these games should be played, so it is important that you understand what every change is trying to accomplish. There a three main differences that will dictate how the game will play, those being the shared experience, the different maps, and the character development through talents, with that in mind, let's begin.

The impact that no-items, no-gold, and shared experience have on gameplay.

On Heroes of the Storm, there is no shop, which means you cannot buy items, and therefore, there’s no gold. And because there is no gold, experience becomes the only thing you can farm. Much as in the other games, you will get experience just by standing nearby when a minion dies but that's about where the similarities end. As you probably know, there is no individual experience, instead the game features ‘Team Leveling’. If you gather experience, all your team gets it too and this has a lot of consequences on the general gameplay.

First of all, only one hero per lane is needed to gather all of the experience there. Having two heroes on a lane won’t make you get more experience, but it will make you get it faster.
Since only one Hero per lane is needed to gather experience, on a 3-lane map this frees up two heroes to do whatever their team needs. Does a hero need help defending the bottom lane? You can rotate there to help him without being afraid of losing out on experience. Maybe you want to take a mercenary camp? You can do that too and not leave any lane completely alone.

One of the drawbacks of this mechanic is that because when you gain a level, all your team also levels up, your entire team, instead of just one person, could be way stronger than the other team, which leads to a binary interaction between them. Either you have more stats and more powerful skills than the other team, or you don’t. Experience being shared makes being behind on it very impactful. You're not down 1 level against your rival on the other team. Your team is collectively down 5 levels. This is especially true at level 10 as contrary to other games, on Heroes of the Storm you have available all your basic abilities from level one, however at level 10 you unlock your Heroic Abilities, which bring a great amount of power with them, and if one team gets them before the other, they could use them to gain an even greater advantage. Because of this, the game features an special comeback mechanic, where the team who is ahead will gain very little experience from hero kills, while the other team will get a massive amount of it. This makes every kill very rewarding for the weaker team, which enables them to quickly catch up in experience if they capitalize on the mistakes of the enemy. This mechanic makes comebacks a pretty easy thing to achieve and also enables late game focused team compositions to be successful at the game. But, even with the comeback mechanic of the game, the power difference between two teams at level 9 and 10 is very notorious, and you should avoid engaging a team with their Heroics available until you have your own.

It should come without saying that since there is no gold to farm, last hitting is an unnecessary thing to do. And since you don’t need to time your last hits, you can freely attack the minion waves instead of waiting on the sidelines for the time to deal the final blow, helping push your lane faster, which is actually a good thing to do on this game since towers give a considerable amount of experience. Obviously this applies to enemy heroes too. You don’t get any bonus for last hitting them, so it doesn’t matter who dealt it as long as the enemy is dead. Because of this the game removes both Kills and Assists, and replaces them with Takedowns. You helped bring a hero down? Then you get one takedown. This is a much more straightforward approach which removes toxicity and confusing mechanics, after all you are playing a mighty hero in a big arena, you want to be part of the battle, and not be worried about your support dealing the last hit instead of the carry. If an enemy is dead, that’s a win for everyone.

Since there is no gold, it also means that even if you get killed, you aren’t as far behind as you’d be in other games from this genre. On League of Legends or Dota 2, when an enemy hero is killed not only is he not getting experience, he will lose the possible gold he could have earned by last hitting in the lane, and in Dota he will also lose some of the gold he holds. This has the effect that when you kill an enemy, it makes it harder for him to catch up with you, and makes it easier for you to gain even a greater advantage over him, creating what most people define as a “Snowball Effect”. By removing the gold, this effect is heavily reduced in Heroes of the Storm, especially early on, making it easier for you to catch up, and helping you not drag around your early mistakes all match long .

The different competitive maps

Even though all of the features explained earlier have a big impact on how the game plays, one of the biggest influences are without a doubt the different maps.

There is one main objective exclusive to each map, these objectives will define what your team should be focusing on and also how long the laning phase will be. On Tomb of the Spider Queen for example, since the objectives of the map, gathering the spider gems, drop constantly from the minions, you will want to focus on laning and ganking for most of the game. But there are others that will shift your attention away from the lanes very quickly since the objectives appear in the jungle.

Mercenary camps are another kind of map objective, the difference being that they can be found across all the maps. Those mercenary camps when defeated will push the nearest lane, and can serve to either push your advantage further, or to help minimize the damage received from other objectives your enemy captured. The number and type of mercenary camps will vary from map to map and a good player will capture them when they can supply the most benefit to the team. Mercenary camps have a big impact on the gameplay throughout the game, and good use of them can make a very big difference at the end.

These two simple types of objectives in conjunction make for a surprisingly deep gameplay. Just think about all the changes and possibilities the single map on other games has had throughout the years, and then multiply that for the number of maps Heroes of the Storm has. One of my favorite examples is Cursed Hollow. Sure, collecting 3 tributes so the enemy structures stop attacking for a while sounds simple enough, however when you take into account the mercenary camps it adds a big amount of depth that may not be so obvious at first. Since you need to gather three tributes to have an impact on the map, you could decide to leave aside a tribute at one point and pressure a lane instead to gain a more immediate advantage. Or maybe you can try to take the Boss in the timeframe between two tributes, that way when the next tribute spawns, the enemy team will be forced into the difficult decision of choosing to either give up the tribute, or choose to focus on it and receive a lot of damage from the Boss. These are just a couple of examples of how map objectives add depth to the gameplay, and you can find more like these on every one of the maps. When and how you approach the map objectives will be one of the main differentiators between a good player and an average one.

The structure of the lanes is different in Heroes of the Storm too. Every lane features two sets of structures. There are two towers and a gate on the front of every set. Behind the gates, you will find a bigger building called a Fort, or a Keep if it is part of the inner set of structures.

But not only is the layout and number of structures different, they also work differently as well. First of all, Forts and Keeps apply a 50% reduction in both attack and movement speed to their target. Another difference is while in other games towers do increasing damage with each hit, in Heroes of the Storm they always do the same damage, in fact they don’t even scale over time. Towers always deal 100 damage, while Forts will do 150 and Keeps 200. As if this wasn’t enough, structures don’t even focus you when you attack an enemy hero in its range, they will only attack you if there are no minions or mercenaries close to it.

But how does this impact the gameplay? Well, since they are much weaker comparatively to the ones in other games, a lot of the time you are there to protect your structures, instead of them protecting you.

Since towers don’t attack enemies who attack your Hero, you won’t be able to hold it for very long if you are out numbered. Add to that the fact that towers have ammunition, which is rapidly depleted, and you’ll find that defending yourself or your structures is not an easy task.

All of these changes are focused on reducing the overall length of the game, from 40+ minute matches on average, to around 20 minutes of play. This ideology of short, fast paced games is one of the big differences of this game compared to the others.

While Forts and Keeps may not focus you when you attack a hero under their range, the 50% reduction of attack speed they apply shouldn’t be underestimated. Minion waves aren’t particularly durable, so the defending team could quickly wipe them enabling the structures to target an enemy Hero. If that Hero happens to be an Assassin, the damage plus the attack speed reduction could have a significant effect. Even If the target is not an Assassin, the significant movement speed debuff and the damage dealt makes whoever has the misfortune of being attacked an easy target, especially vulnerable to stuns and skill shots.

For these reasons, one should still be careful when attacking Forts and Keeps, preferably using mercenary camps or bosses that will help tank the damage for you. Attacking these structures without that kind of support should only be done when your team is sure they can destroy them fast and when the enemy team is at a disadvantageous position to defend.

Lane distribution and rotations.

As many veterans from the genre surely know, having a good lane distribution is very important, and while this holds true to Heroes, it works in a different manner. First of all, popular lane distributions like the famous 2-1-2 aren’t necessarily the most common on Heroes of the Storm, and they will vary from map to map. Furthermore, roles and lanes are not set in stone trough the match, and having good rotations between the lanes can give you a big advantage over your opponents.

The first thing you should do is to cover every lane with a good wave-clearer. There are heroes that can kill those minions faster than others, Specialist are usually good at filling this role but even some Warriors and Assassins can do it efficiently. If your team has heroes with a good wave clear, such as Zagara or Valla, it may not be necessary to have more heroes on that lane.

The enemy team also has a major influence into the decision on how many heroes you send into each lane. It is possible that even heroes that are good at clearing minion waves could find trouble holding a lane outnumbered or even when faced against certain heroes. In those cases, sending one player to that lane will help you react and hold your ground.

That being said, the different maps are the biggest factor. On some maps, the bottom lane may be the shortest, on some others top and middle might be very close to each other, and some maps even feature only two lanes! You will have to think where and when more heroes are needed depending on the map you are playing on.

On maps like Blackheart’s Bay for example, because of it’s layout, your team will want to focus on the top of the map at the start of the game. As the game progresses, the focus will shift towards the lower half of it, and you’ll want to have only one or two heroes on the top side of it, rotating the rest of your team to the bottom.

When you take into account all those factors, you will find that there is no such thing as a standard lane distribution in the meta, as it will vary greatly between the maps and compositions. In general though, it is advised to have good wave clearing heroes on every lane, and the rest either roaming or going to the lane they can be more useful in. For example, Jaina is a ranged Assassin that has a very good wave clear, however she is a squishy hero too, because of this having either a Warrior or a Support could be a great fit for her lane, not only because you could help her sustain her control of it, but since both Warriors and Supports in general have strong Crowd Control abilities, combined with the damage output of Jaina you could secure a few kills too.

As lane distributions are influenced by a lot of different factors, where the heroes should go should be analyzed on a case by case basis. Because of this, it isn’t something we can cover in depth on this guide as it would make it excessively long, but if you want to know more about the different lane distributions on every map we invite you to check out our dedicated map guides where we cover the topic in depth for each one.

Carries, talents, and character development.

Talents are here to make you able to personalize your hero's abilities and stats, much as items would do in other games. However there are a few key differences that you should take into account.

Contrary to items, where you get gold by farming and then you buy them, talents are unlocked at certain levels. Since the experience is shared, this means that every hero on your team scales in power at the same time.

One of the main virtues of the talent system is that it is easier to balance than a shop and items. On other games, since everyone can buy the same items, you might find that a certain one can be very strong with a specific champion, and be balanced with another one. In that case, if you nerf the item, you are not only bringing down the power of the first champion you are bringing down the power of everyone. So when you nerf an item, you are removing variety and strength for the rest too.

Now, there are two kind of talents on Heroes of the Storm. First we have Hero specific talents, that are exclusive to one Hero and in general change how the basic abilities work. This type of talents can change the way a Hero plays, and just like items, you should be aware of which talents your teammates and enemies take so you can react to them better. These are not very problematic since they only apply to one hero and can be changed on a case by case basis.

Then we have the generic talents, which usually change base stats or resistances and add extra abilities for the hero to use. These generic talents are shared between different heroes, making them the most similar thing to items. The difference, and what makes it easier for the developer to balance them, is that if X talent is shown to be problematic on certain Hero, but it is working fine on the other ones, they can simply remove it from said Hero, while not reducing the strength of the talent itself. Other possible options are adding a specific, nerfed or buffed, variation of the talent, and replace the generic one with it, which is something Blizzard has already done on certain Heroes, making talents a much more easier system to balance, which is something that the playerbase certainly appreciates.

Talents, however, have their downsides too. They aren’t as versatile as items, which you can change on the go if you deem it necessary; once you choose a talent, you are stuck with it for the rest of the match. While this makes you think better which talents will you choose, it also makes it impossible to react on the go to some of the things that happen on the battlefield. Since they are restricted by level too, you can’t get a talent that could be useful for you until you meet the required level. For example, maybe you really need Spell Shield to help you fight against Nova or Jaina, however, you may still not have enough level to select it, and so, you must play around it until you are able to. This can be seen either as a downside or as a restriction that adds strategic depth and decision making, either way, it is something you must take into consideration when you enter the battlefield, because it surely will have an important effect on your decisions.

As we mentioned, everyone on a team scales at the same time, so the relative power of every player is the same, and this is in fact, the very fundamental idea this game was designed on.

ADC, or simply Carry, is a hero capable of getting feed, and become so powerful that they can single-handedly, as their name implies, carry their team to victory. This design decision, has it pros and its cons. For one part, being able to carry enables you to win games where your teammates are not as skilled. As long as the Carry is powerful and plays well enough, you may have a good chance to win. This ideology has its problems too though, the most obvious one being that the rest of the team is, at the end of the day, playing for one of the players, instead of playing for the team.

Heroes of the Storm was built around the ideology that every player must be of equal importance, no matter the role he is playing, and the fact that ultimately, on a team game you should be helping each other to win the game, and not relying on one person to do it.

Because of this, Carries as known in other games simply don’t exist. Being able to outfarm your teammates is impossible, so you can’t be more powerful than the rest of the team. This forces everyone to work together because you alone won’t be able to achieve that much. That being said, it would be unfair to say that you can’t carry a game, you can, just not in the traditional way.

Carries on this game will need to play as well as they can, but also lead their team through good decisions and teamwork. Some heroes are better suited to carry a match than others, Zeratul is the prime example of a hero who can, in its own way, carry games. He is a high skill-cap hero that can deal great amounts of damage and has a lot of mobility, which enables him to outplay his opponents and set up favorable team fights. But is that enough to win a game just by himself? Not really.

This is where the real depth and beauty of this game lies. If you have good mechanics, you will have an edge over the rest, and good players with the right heroes will indeed tip the balance of the match in their team’s favor, but being skilled is simply not enough. This is a team game, and you will need to coordinate with the rest of the players if you want to win the match. A carry in this game isn’t a hero that becomes so powerful he can beat anyone easily, a carry on this game is a hero that, through good play and teamwork, will lead his team to victory. Good teamwork is the most important aspect of this game.

The different classes and their roles. What’s a Specialist anyway?

As we mentioned above, Carries don’t exist on their traditional form in this game, but what about the rest of the classes?

On Heroes of the Storm there are 5 main roles: Warriors, Melee and Ranged Assassins, Supports, and Specialists.

Most heroes fall under the first four categories. The role of Warriors is to initiate fights, soak damage and in general disrupt the enemy team. Being a Warrior not necessarily means they are just tanks though, as some of them act more as bruisers and don’t feature an enormous amount of health. Supports focus on Crowd Control abilities, healing and shielding their allies, however much as Warriors, not every Support is fixed into one role. Heroes like Rehgar can be considered as healers, while others such as Tassadar and Tyrande, have limited healing capabilities but compensate by having a lot of utility and versatility. Melee and ranged Assassins are what you’d expect, however there certain heroes that cannot be classified into any of them, and so they are named Specialists.

Specialist cannot be described as just one type of hero, as they fulfill different roles. Azmodan and Zagara are good examples of heroes that can pressure lanes and get mercenary camps very fast. Others, such as Nazeebo, focus on AoE damage over time abilities. All of these heroes are different enough from the other classes to deserve being put into a category of their own, but some of them take things to the extreme.

Murky is designed to die and respawn in seconds very close to the battle field, while The Lost Vikings are actually three heroes in one, each with a different set of attributes, and with the possibility to soak experience from all three lanes at once. Abathur is a hero that well, just stays in base all the game, using his abilities from afar through other heroes.

These kind of heroes simply wouldn’t be possible in other games. Abathur would be useless on Dota 2 because he could never receive a meaningful amount of gold and experience, but in Heroes of the Storm he has found its place.

As a little note, just because your hero is good at pressuring lanes, it doesn’t mean that's all you are supposed to do every game. The laning phases varies from map to map, and there will be times to lane, times to team fight, and times to split push. As you gather experience from playing, you’ll understand better when those times are, but please remember that there is a reason why Specialist are called just that, and not Pushers or Siege Heroes. They can and should be used for taking mercenary camps and team fight, and as a general rule it is not recommended to push past the middle of the map alone after either team has reached lvl 10.

So, about the junglers, well, they don’t exist. The reason is that there are no monsters to farm on the jungle. The closer thing to those monsters would be the mercenary camps, but there are only a handful on every map and don’t provide enough experience to make farming them worth it, and well, experience is shared anyway. Heroes that are good at roaming and ganking certainly exist but their roles in the game simply can’t be defined as junglers.

The general pace of the game through the early, mid, and lategame.

We have covered the main three differences and how each one of them influences the gameplay. Now, we will explain some of the effects those three have when combined in a single match.

A lot of people when they first start playing, will treat the early game just as they’d do in the other game. They will stick to a lane and stay there farming for 20 minutes. The problem comes from the fact that Heroes of the Storm matches are around 20 minutes long, and if you stick to one lane all the time you will actually be hurting your team. Usually, after those players learn that sticking all the game to one lane is not optimal, they start to underestimate their importance, and abandon them completely, which as we mentioned before, is also something that will hurt your team. If you are one of those players, don’t worry, we are here to guide you on what you should be doing.

At the start of the game you should be focused on farming and controlling your lane, trying to get to level 10 as fast as you can. The problem though, is that map objectives can appear as early as one minute into the game, which is something that will interfere with your farming.

As was mentioned, the different maps and objectives are one of the things that make this game unique, and on most cases, they should be prioritized over the lanes. On other games you farm so in the lategame you can be more powerful than your enemy and destroy it, on this game you farm so that when an objective spawns, you are able to capture it more easily, so it will help you gain an edge and eventually win the game. In short, although farming is crucial in the early game, map objectives give a very big and immediate advantage over the enemy, therefore they should generally be the top priority.

Because most of the maps are much more smaller compared to those like the Summoner's Rift, rotations are much more easy and frequent, as we briefly mentioned before. Throughout the early game setting up ganks will be something pretty easily done so you must pay a lot of attention to the minimap. The early game, which in other games is mostly restricted to farming and the occasional gank, is transformed into a very interesting time frame with lots of movement throughout the map, ensuring the action starts from level one.

One thing that needs to be said though, is that although early kills are very valuable on other games, as they don’t allow the enemy to farm, they aren’t as important here. A little unknown fact is that before level 10, minion waves actually give more experience than a Hero Kill, and because of this, if you are losing lane experience just so you can kill a hero it is probably not worth it. Now, that doesn’t mean early game takedowns are completely useless. If you got all the lanes covered, and you manage to kill an enemy, you will get bonus experience that you wouldn’t have received otherwise, which will make you get to the level ten faster than the enemy team. Because of that extra experience and map control, rotations and ganks are so frequent, that even if the game rewards pressuring a lane, it is something that shouldn’t be mindlessly done because in just a couple of seconds, you could find yourself with two enemy heroes right behind your back. This game heavily rewards map awareness, so always check your minimap.

Once you get to level ten, the way you should play will change drastically. Killing an enemy Hero gives more experience now, and applies a longer Death Timer every time a hero levels up, also because everyone unlocked their Heroics, every player has a big boost in power, but in general not in resistance. By this time the first tier of structures will be destroyed on some lanes, making it harder for a team to maintain control of them. For all of these reasons, it is recommended to not push a lane alone from the midgame and forward, unless you are a 100% sure you are safe and you know where the enemies are.

When you take into account all of this, you realize the game now favours sticking together with your team to minimize the chances of getting picked off, and to maximize your chances of killing a lonely enemy hero. Because of this, and the fact that most objectives require the presence of all the members of a team to safely secure them, it's not strange at all to see groups of 3 to 5 heroes roaming across the map past the level 10.

This marks a 180° turn in the gameplay. Early on, the game rewards you for splitting up, but from the mid-game, the game will reward players for sticking together, as a team.

The late-game follows the general gameplay established on the mid-game, but it amplifies the importance of sticking together. If in the mid game you could squeeze behind the enemy team and manage to survive after being alone, you should definitely stop doing that and stick with your team. Seriously, on Heroes of the Storm it is extremely easy to make a comeback in the lategame, and dying because you were half the map away is one of the best ways to throw a game.


While death timers exist in every game, the difference is that they are much longer in this game compared to the total length of the match, and because the maps are much shorter, you can capitalize on kills a lot faster. The relevance of lategame deaths cannot be understated. If you are behind, killing enemy heroes will give you enough time to destroy some of their structures or capture map objectives. If you are ahead, a 60+ death timer could make you win the game right there. At level 20 it doesn’t even take 30 seconds to destroy a Core by a five man squad, and if one or two of the enemies are a minute away from respawning, their teammates won’t be able to defend.

Now with this I’m not saying you should stay within inches of the rest of your team all the time. If your team is on the bottom lane and 2 of you are capturing a merc camp which is located between bot and middle, that may be fine. Now if your team is at the bottom lane and you are attacking the top fort at the minute 20, well, consider yourself dead.

In short, through the early game you’ll still be farming most of the time, but when an objective spawns it is generally considered the top priority. In the midgame and lategame, because there is no gold and carries, farming is not as important, although lanes shouldn’t, and can’t be abandoned completely. Sticking together with your team is crucial to your success, and players will have to stay close and work together towards capturing different objectives and pressuring the lanes if they want to succeed.

Conclusion

Heroes of the Storm brings refreshing ideas to the old formula of the genre, that have a direct impact on how the game is played. The game is focused on fast, team oriented matches, that seek to reduce the learning barrier so you can jump straight to the action, while maintaining the depth and strategic decisions that you’d expect from this kind of games. You might like these changes or you may not, and feel free to discuss about it on the comments below, but we believe those changes don’t make the game better or worse, they make it different and it will be up to you to decide if you like the kind of gameplay they promote. When you try Heroes of the Storm you should do it with an open mind, because it defies the current standards set by League of Legends and Dota 2 and even though they come from the same genre, these are vastly different games, each with a lot of virtues of their own. Maybe you will fall in love with the game, or you may end up not liking it that much, and that is totally fine. It is possible too that you will find that you like two games, and that will be alright too, it's a game after all, and you are not forced to play any over the other.

It doesn't matter if you are trying Heroes of the Storm for the first time or if you’ve been playing it for a while and just want to know more about the consequences of all the changes, we hope that after reading this guide, you have a better understanding on how all of these changes affect the gameplay and you’ll be able to appreciate the things this game brings to the table.