Heroes of the Storm

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mianmian
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Heroes of the Storm

#1 Post by mianmian »

Hey everyone.

Heroes of the Storm alpha recently got a LOT of new invites and more will happen on the 13th for Closed Beta. Anyone playing? I'm Llum#1875

The game has some bits that remind me of Eota for sure, and I think its pretty fun objective based gameplay.
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Jouven
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Re: Heroes of the Storm

#2 Post by Jouven »

I managed to get a key to play the beta of heroes of the shitstorm and well... being brief it's pretty different from EotA.
Let's enumerate the major differences:
1. It has AI but it sucks big time, and this has effects on multiplayer because it takes over if you dc or the game crashes/closes, but HOTS allow to rejoin games. It's the only option (that or not playing hots at all) when the game you "left" is still happening.
2. It has several maps with different mechanics which compared to EotA lack of creativity, basically the gimmick of getting the control in every map involves having a better siege opportunity, no artifact win here. All the maps are just a 3 or 2 straight lanes with a different landscapes (Egypt, mines, gardens...) with hiding spots and that's it. No cliffs and the only LOS gimmicks are the hiding spots and several walls (natural like trees or destructible). Map size wise they are all like verdant, a bit bigger a bit smaller.
3. No items at all, no shops. There are buildings, fountains in each base, that give regen hp/mana buffs, the initial spawning spot makes you invulnerable and constantly regens hp/mana. Some units drop orbs that give regen buffs and that's it.
4. No stat scaling, only level scaling, skills/spells get more powerful automatically each level.
5. The "skill strategy" is 1 initial skill + 3 basic abilities (sometimes less) + 1 ultimate (at level 10, max level is 30, normally everyone gets to level 20~~ during a regular game), they are all fixed, except the ultimate which you can choose between 2!!1!, this and talents are the only things you can decide during every game. The talents some improve the basic abilities and the initial skill and others add entirely new skills i.e: a teleport, a polymorph, a shield... nothing really creative here.
6. Games are shorter like 15-30 min.
7. The game is/will be free but you have to buy the heroes with gold or real money, and the only reliable way to get gold is leveling your account, leveling heroes (not in-game leveling, every game you play hero you gain an amount of experience and the hero "usage?" levels) and doing daily quests (you get 1 every day, you have slots to stack up to 3 quests if you don't complete them on time), winning/losing games only gives you like 25-50gs, so it's pretty hard? to get heroes with gold. I'm currently level 22 on the account and have like a dozen heroes on level 5 or more (level 5 hero is when the gold bonus happens) and I'm sitting around 17000g~~ (0 heroes bought), the cheapest heroes cost 2000gs and the most expensive 10000gs. Every week there is rotation of free heroes, a half dozen or so, you can level them to get more gold. You can try ALL the heroes in small map (alone).
8. It has REALLY BAD performance for what it is, playing like two or three games skyrockets the ram the hots process uses to 2gb-4gb, it crashes for no reason, suffered 2 or 3 already, you can rejoin the ongoing game so np, but during that time the AI may choose the talents for you... which sucks, you can't undo those for the current game. But then again it's a beta, but even for a beta I think it's pretty bad.
9. "No troop upgrades", the only "upgrade" that happens is when you destroy the enemy forts catapults start spawning automatically. There are troops scattered on the map that can be "recruited" after fighting and then doing a short waiting on place, a short capture gimmick, to get them go to nearest lane and start pushing.
10. The hero types/classes:
Support = healer / some cc, some of them have about 0 destructive power which can be a PITA to play, because even the troops are hard to deal with those, even on later levels.
Assassin = skill are mostly pvp oriented
Specialist = gimmick hero, basically their skills force you to a narrower style of play than the other classes, but it varies.
Warrior = tank
11. No air heroes, at least not flying permanently.
12. The only unit collision is between the hero type units, everything else just clips through, it really feels unnatural.
14. Game modes: practice, quick match, cooperative (against the AI), and leagues solo and team, haven't tried these last ones because they require owning 10 heroes and being a higher level. No draft, no all random, no capture, no zombie mode, no ai difficulty setting, no full skills...
15. No gens
16. No tower building. Some tower repairing, a few heroes have skills for that. The towers have a certain amount of ammo, which regens really slow, so once they are out they become nearly useless. No base recapturing mechanic, no troop redirection mechanic, no troop upgrading mechanic (some heroes mostly specialist/support have skills to buff troops and add extra spawns).
17. Different resources to use skills, still mostly mana, but some use rage or other stuff, but well war3 engine doesn't allow for this. Maybe SB is the closest thing we have to this.
18. No zoom option.
19. Only one teleport to the initial spawn spot, with no CD, yeah maps aren't that big.
20. Mounts, allow you to travel 40%? faster, you dismount automatically on any skill use/attack/"getting damaged".
21. Hero skirmishes last less than in EotA, those hp pools go down pretty fast and the LOS range of the heroes seems shorter (or the skills have more range) than in EotA.
22. No songs (Stormwail).
23. Only gold, no crystals.
24. Some maps feature locations to capture for vision.
25. Tree's can't be destroyed. I think nothing is destructible except the buildings of the other team.
26. There are cloaked hero units, the cloaking doesn't make the units completely invisible, a small ripple happens when they move and you can see it if you pay enough attention. The cloaked heroes like Zeratul or Nova are permanently cloaked, it's not even like the RTS version where it uses resources (not for dts though) and you have to decide when to use it. The cloaking happens if the unit doesn't attack or gets attacked. After a reveal, the cloaking happens automatically after 2-3 seconds or so of not attacking/receiving damage. There are a few hero skills to reveal cloaked heroes, but the most common way to deal with, if you are good, is to spot those ripples and use damaging skills on the ripple locations damaging the cloaked hero revealing it.

I like? HOTS but not on the same level as EotA, HOTS has faaar less depth, but yeah updated graphics and some epic music feel good?. If you ask me to play HOTS or EotA I would still choose EotA anytime, but then is when the lack of players in EotA comes in...
HOTS skills are less creative, troops can be important, because there are boss units to recruit on the map that help a lot with siege but you need nearly everyone cooperating to get one of those. Maps are pretty "flat", as I said previously only the style changes, they are always the 2-3 straight lanes. The map/mechanic that is more similar would be verdant, IMO, the vf mechanic is exactly the same of most of hots map control mechanics, after a certain period of time go to x place and control it for y time for extra siege help, repeat after another period of time... some of these mechanics differ a little, as in go to x place and pick 1 or 100 something instead of straight control.

But yeah nothing that excels in any field, except that you are able to play with many iconic characters of the blizzard franchises and it allows for some short fun/obnoxious games.

PD: I might have left some stuff worth mentioning, but I've only been playing for a week or so.
Last edited by Jouven on May 2nd, 2015, 8:31 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Heroes of the Storm

#3 Post by jamn455 »

Nice Blog.
Line 'em up.
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