So, I can't get my head around HotS coming from LoL.

When should laning stop and skirmishes start? How should lane composition play out? Who should be in the solo lane? Which lane should that be? Should everyone just go all in and start ganking from minute 1? Is there any point to pushing different lanes or should everyone just stick to the weakest one? Is anyone else struggling with this stuff?

If so, let's try to brain trust this out. If not, well please grace us with your wisdom so we don't noob it up out there.

MegaManic#1966

Here's a thread I wrote some detailed nova posts in a long time ago.

You should only really lane until the first event starts, then focus the event. After the first event is done, focus on siege camps until 10, then once you get level 10 and have your ults (hopefully you have them before the other team) you proceed to hunt down enemy heroes and gank, before they can respond. After that it's an ever changing strategy of events/creep camps/ pushing weaker lanes.

Been playing since the alpha in October so I'll just share some things I've learned over time.

When should laning stop and skirmishes start?

To keep it simple, you should focus on laning up to level 10. The only reason to leave lane before then is to do objectives or grab camps. Generally you only want to leave lane to camp if you are not in a solo lane and are also a hero who can solo camps like zagara, gazlowe, sylvanas, and so on. If you are solo lane never leave your lane for anything but objectives unless someone comes to fill the lane for you. After level 10 it will vary depending on map. Blackhart for example you will spend more time killing camps and turning in coins than you will being in lane after 10. On every map, however, getting ults first and contesting the main map objective when it appears are your main priorities. Focus on that and figure out the more complex strategies as you go.

Should everyone just go all in and start ganking from minute 1?

Do not focus on hero kills right away. Get them if you can, but don't give up lane xp to gank early on. Death timers are short and xp rewards are minimal early on so its not worth trading lane xp for. Some people can roam as long as you have enough people who can solo lane to keep the xp flowing. Eventually you'll get to a point where death timers are long enough that you can gank and have enough time to break the wall or bring down a fort. That's when ganking becomes more relevant. Before this it can be worth it to gank if you're ganking a solo lane to deny them xp, but only if you don't have to give up another lane to do this. As with everything in the game, however, the map and objectives have an affect on this.

Who should be in the solo lane? Which lane should that be?

You'll have to look up who's good at solo laning if you really want to know. Or experiment. Tassadar is great solo. Tyreal, Stitches, Anuburak, ETC, brightwing, Valla, Zagara, and Azmo can all solo well in most cases off the top of my head. Brightwing and ETC in particular benefit from having abilities to "jump" into the fight from the other side of the map. So they can solo soak longer when objectives appear. There are others as well, but I'm not going to list them all. Oh, and try not to solo with Sylvanas. You can and its fine, but shes better paired with someone else so you can really pressure a lane.

There aren't any real hard set lanes where certain characters go. Like there's nothing to say that the assassin should always go bot or whatever. It just depends on the map and what heroes the other team is putting in lane. If you're illidan, you may want to play bot. That's cool, but if you get there and see a tychus and a muradin you should definitely move your ass up to the top lane and switch with someone. As far as how to fill the lanes go it depends on the map. Most people will 2-1-2 every map which is ok. Certain maps work better with other layouts though. On mines you usually want to 4-1 if you can with the four being in your golums lane. (unless the enemy team has sylvanas, then you want to put 4 in whichever lane she is in cause she is a huge threat on this map) Dragon Shire will usually be 2-1-2, but if you're in a pre-made team of 5 I recommend trying 1-1-3. It will allow you to guarantee one shrine capture and you can really push that lane hard while you hold that shrine early on. This won't work as well in pubs though because you can't count on them to be good.

Is there any point to pushing different lanes or should everyone just stick to the weakest one?

You really want to push every lane. Each fort helps you get to your next tier of talents faster than your enemy team. You can go straight for a keep in one lane, but its riskier. You have to create an opportunity in your favor first or you'll just meet 5 heros and a coin flip will determine if you can actually take the keep or not unless you have some advantage in your favor like a terror, golum, talent advantage, dragon knight, and so on.

Again these are all just off the top of my head. May be some mistakes here and there.

OH. One thing you may see a lot is a 5 man deathball in one lane. Counter it by defending with 3 people where ever they go and put 1 person in the other two lanes. You'll out level them provided that you aren't giving their deathball kills. Outleveling them means you win even if they damage the one lane. The three who are defending have to stay back in the wall and poke from there. If the enemy team is using a pick composition with kerrigan or stitches or the like then walking out of the gate will mean they get a kill if they are good.

I'm definitely struggling with who goes where and who solos and whatnot. I typically stick with the team from minute 1. Since objectives are the most important thing in this game I usually get those whenever convenient and when I'm with teammates.

It's not so strict about sticking to lanes like that (and neither are the mobas really), but you should rather choose for yourself what to prioritize. Going with the team to fight for objectives is far and beyond the most important thing in the game, while harrassing and soaking exp in a lane becomes secondary. Though still somewhat important. Try and strike a balance where you are covering any emtpy lanes during downtime and then team up when you need to, and it'll probably be ok in the long run. At least as far as queuing with random players goes.

Dno if hero skills count as strategy but here go my frustrations:

I'm personally finding some of the hero choices kind of obsolete, yesterday I played Kerrigan and Azmodan and like 90% of the choices are kind of dumb, I mean why choose the mercenary option(bribe?) if you still can't solo elite camps until super late game. Did anyone find the bribe skill useful? is it like a group thing? where everybody gets it together so you can get creeps really quick?

On Kerrigan why choose the attack damage feats when its like a lot less useful than the skills and will almost never catch up to them in burst damage(Kerrigan), it even seems silly to choose the damage per kill option for her without locking yourself into all of the attack feats because they all synergize rather well.

The Azmodan choices also seem kind of dumb, like the fire orb choice in the beginning, either do 50% more damage or get more damage every time you achieve a kill... well to achieve the same kind of damage as the 50% you need like 200 last hits... which would only happen in like 10% of games you play(and you can't know until you've played them).

@mentaldisruption: Thanks for going point by point. I'm playing with a buddy and we usually go aggro, but we may start pulling it back a bit. Sounds like ganking is not worth the risk early on. I guess it tosses out any notion of a "jungler" role.

@takayamasama: Any tips when to start hitting up camps? I usually forget about them until we already have an advantage, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next.

@fredchuckdave: Haven't messed with Nova yet. Where do you usually find info for other heroes? Blizz forums?

@tobbrobb: I've been really timid about solo pushing with how much this game seems to favor rolling around in a group. I'll try to be more mindful of that though.

Thanks all.

Join the Giant Bomb chat channel by typing "/join giantbomb" into main chat. That's as good a way to meet up with bombers as trading tags one by one.

Quick Answers for your Questions.

When should laning stop and skirmishes start? Early.

How should lane composition play out? Depends on the map. On Haunted Mines you want 4 in one 1 in the other. On Sky Temple start with 2 in top and mid. In some others doing a 1 3 1 is correct.

Who should be in the solo lane? I usually play it by ear but I'm pretty sure characters with high mobility are real good in their own lane like Brightwing, Falstad or ETC (after 10). You know, characters that can join a fight wherever it happens on the map even if it's not there. They can be getting XP right up to the very second the team needs them for a fight.

Which lane should that be? Depends on the map and the distance between lanes. I believe the solo lane should be the farthest removed lane more often than not.

Should everyone just go all in and start ganking from minute 1? Maybe.

Is there any point to pushing different lanes or should everyone just stick to the weakest one? Sure. Pushing lanes is good.

Is anyone else struggling with this stuff? Probably.

@gamefreak9 said:

I don't remember the Kerrigan talent upgrades well enough to comment on them, but I agree that some of the talent choices in the game are not really viable choices. Bribe is better than you're making it out to be, though I mostly see Brightwings take it more than anything else. I agree that it's mostly a waste for Azmodan to take it, because at that level he has much better talents he could be choosing that help him to be more useful. Most characters have better upgrade options than Bribe, but not all. Bribe especially shines on Blackheart Bay where it allows you to quickly get merc camps and the associated coins.

However, some talents are just baffling and almost never picked (I can count the number of times I've seen someone pick Mercenary Lord or Fury of the Storm on one hand), and some characters pretty much have The One True Build with only one or two minor deviations. Maybe things have changed, but last time I checked everybody is still picking the same upgrade path for The Lost Vikings because the various activated abilities they can gain are way better in fights than [some random-ass passive ability that only benefits one of the Vikings].

Also, some of the choices for ults/"heroic abilities" are still kinda uneven. Maybe it's because she's new, but Sylvanas' ult choice is a joke; you can either do an AoE silence that deals damage, or an ult that lets you permanently and kinda cheaply mind control enemy minions onto your team. The problem with the latter ability is that it makes Sylvanas way worse in team fights, and frankly her other abilities are already tailor-made to obliterate waves of minions, so why would you want to gain an ult that makes those skills obsolete because now you're mind controlling minions instead? Also everyone still picks Longboat Raid for Lost Vikings, Li Li's Jug of 1000 Cups is way more useful in general than the water dragon slow thing, personally I think Kerrigan's Ultralisk is kinda bad compared to her purple energy storm whatever, and now that they nerfed it I think Tychus' O.D.I.N. ult is kinda not that great and the laser beam ult is more effective.

@gamefreak9: the bribe thing works by you getting minion kills then every x kills you get a token. When you use the token on a mercenary its just as if you "killed" that mercenary. Last hits aren't a thing so that's a non issue.

@esahk: If you are playing a hero that can solo them, or can get another team mate to help tackle them, I would hit them up as soon as the first event is finished and everyone kinda retreats to regroup

@themasterds:Already there :) It's always a joy to play with the GB crowd. There's always a good level of chill.

@takayamasama: Awesome. Thanks. I'll have to try that out.

@gamefreak9: Bribe used to be awesome and Merc Lord used to be awesome in the closed beta too, especially on certain heroes. They just got the shit nerfed out of them over time. And yeah, last time I've played there were a lot of cookie cutter builds with only occasional choices to make, only a few heroes had good alternate builds.

@tennmuerti: @konig_kei: On bribe, last time I tried it was about a year ago but the way I remember it was that you stack it and get an insta kill on ONE minion. This is generally insufficient for you to overpower the elite mobs, so you still need your teammates, which if they were with you to begin with then there's no point in the Bribe(alright it saves you like 10 seconds of creeping).

@esahk: If you want to have a jungler you're better off going with Zeratul or Nova to fill that role. Tyrande and Diablo can also fill this role as well if they move together and time their stuns/flips together. The thing is though you have to set up the rest of your team around the idea that you won't be in one set lane, so when you're getting matched with randoms it doesn't always work out. If you can get enough people together then by all means practice it! It's a viable alternative given proper team compositions.

@mentaldisruption: That's not a Jungler, that's a ganker/disabler you're describing. Assuming Jungler means "guy who can easily deal with creeps in the jungle by himself", Sylvanas or Gazlowe would be a Jungler.

But yeah, it's much harder to get things done by yourself in this game unless your opponents are especially thick, and stick around way too long. Every character is just so damn tanky, even the "fragile" characters. They've done a good job of making "warriors" necessary because their stuns and slows and knockbacks are needed to enable kills, in a lot of cases.

What I found really made this game click for me was to get out of traditional dota/moba thinking and approach the mechanics here as more akin to regular rts games (wc3 in particular). With the small maps and predictable objective spawns, the name of the game here is map control, know your "tech" (ie. at which lvl is your team comp statistically superior to the opposing team), and deathballing. There's even an equivalent of a zerg rush where you go with 3 seige specialists who can spam summons (azmodan, zagara, gazlow) and just push right off the bat. Under 4 min win:

Laning doesn't mean much other than you just need someone to be there to soak xp. The shared team xp and no last hitting means there is no advantage to dedicating yourself to a lane, and more importantly, there is no inherent disadvantage for not laning. Every hero, even the slow ones, have easy and free mobility options in mounts and unlimited hearthstones. This combined with the small maps where it takes maybe 10 seconds max to get from top lane to bottom means the focus should be on controlling the entire map, not just your lane. Go where you would be most effective at that moment, don't just tunnel vision down a specific lane til some defined "phase". If an objective is up, get that. If you see a teamfight or an easy gank the next lane over, go. Teammates have all the lanes under control, hit up a merc camp. Even when you're playing a seige specialist it's better to pick and choose your spots while helping the team than always pushing the same lane.

As far as deathballing goes, remember to count creeps/mercs/objective spawns as part of said ball. Ideally you want to coordinate your pushes around these since they help immensely in getting your push to critical mass. 2 merc camps down the same lane + full 5 man team is usually good for at least a fort.