Yeah, I know. Blizzard says that it is not a MOBA but a “Hero Brawler” even when we probably don’t know what it is just yet. I’ve never been a big fan of MOBAs although I played the mods at Starcraft and then Warcraft III, many time ago. The big odd of this kind of games is play with people that doesn’t know how to play its character or does a worst performance than the rest of the team resulting on a loss. Which also is an advantage when you do a proper team with your friends, which can be incredibly fun.

For this blog post I gonna start with some history of what a MOBA is and highlight which are the differences between Heroes Of The Storm and the rest of the other games that fall in the category of this genre. MOBAs are characterized for being a kind of game where two teams fight in teams to destroy other enemies with help of weak units that we call minions.

So we know now that MOBAs are based on Blizzard games, at least at the begin,  when IceFrog created his map at Warcraft III and got many attention, then Riot Games released League of Legends at 2009, the same year IceFrog was hired by Steam.

2010: Heroes of Newerth was released and Steam secured the rights for DotA: Allstars, also announced Dota 2.

2012: Blizzard announced Blizzard DOTA, and got into a dispute with Steam for the rights, as they bought DotA-Allstars, LLC. But still Steam owned DOTA trademark and they changed the name to Blizzard Allstars and at last to Heroes Of The Storm.

There are other games in the business besides League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and Dota 2, like Smite, but this are the most relevant ones.

 

Now lets talk about the specifics of Heroes of the Storm.

Here we can spot the first difference between Heroes Of The Storm with other MOBAs, some maps are not like this and don’t even share the same secondary objectives which is get mercenaries and use the map mechanics like coins, skulls, seeds depending on the map.

Talents instead of shop is an interesting thing to mention, in other games you can equip your character with all the stuff you need at the current game, to adapt the character to this exact game. But still, is a mess for a new player to know all the items, know which are the correct ones using a item shop that is way to big and that makes you lose time in-game.

The talents are granted at level 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20 (as far I can remember right now) and this ones can adapt your character to the current situation, increasing  healing, attack and powering other abilities. Bribes for the mercenaries too.

As there is no store, there is no gold. So what the minions drop? Experience. The experience is not given to the last hit but to the player (team) that is closer to the dying minion. The level is for all the team, not individual. Some characters are better killing minions, other can stun big groups of other heroes and others which are good at hunting your enemies, almost always, is your choice using talents.

Another difference with another games like this is that is more team oriented as it encourages the players to stick and work together to get the objectives (mercenaries, pay for map mechanics, breaking walls).

The characters are some that the ones that play Blizzard games know, Jim Raynor and Kerrigan of Starcraft, Thrall and Arthas from World of Warcraft, Tyrael and Diablo of Diablo, this with a lot of other characters that will make the game more enjoyable.

After about 100 matches in this last 30 days I can say that I’m very excited about the game and it’s final release, my win ratio has been around 50% so is quiiiiite okay. I wish I could blame my team mates but well, it’s teamwork and it depends on everyone.

My favorite map is by far Cursed Hollow and Haunted Mines where the turn around is always a possibility using map mechanics and the character I been using the most is Jim Raynor. Sadly, I can’t play Hero league just yet as I need a couple more of Heroes but I’m hoping to play it later this week and get rid of bad players which no  experience at all. If anyone is interested on seeing this game, go ahead and look for streams at Twitch and if it happens that my channel is online, subscribe!

GG.