I for one can't wait to play this, I've been playing DOTA 2 for a while now, and it's getting a little stale. Anyone who plays a MOBA will agree the best part about playing these games are the team fights, and this is all this game is. They made the game seem super simple but in a way Blizzard pulls off, meaning it looks simple but has depth if you want it, just like Hearthstone. No laning phase, not items, just straight action all the time, the characters level up each have their abilities that then branch into other abilities that you have to choose from some can lower cooldowns, grant magic immunity of a couple seconds etc. These branching abilities take the place of items.

A lot of people are a little unhappy because they wanted a traditional MOBA from Blizzard. However, for those people there are already DOTA, League and a ton of other games just copying each other. This is a MOBA but it's different in a great way, the objectives cause people to gather around areas creating large 5 v 5 team fight quite regularly and I believe each map is different with unique objectives and maybe even different layouts. I haven't seen a video posted of the gameplay here yet so here is a long one.

With Hearthstone and this Blizzard shows they can make new and exciting IP's, and it gives me hope that their new RPG will not just be an updated WOW but something new. If that's the case maybe it'll be the first online RPG I play.

My wife is interested, she is fascinated with DotA 2 but the difficulty curve is a little to steep for her. I think the biggest deciding factor of whether I'd play HotS is what their payment model is. I feel that League has pretty disgusting microtransactions. you're looking at spending over $500 to unlock all of the champions, plus whatever you want to spend on pay-to-win runes. If HotS does a similar model, I'll have nothing to do with it.

You clearly have very little idea about League's payment model. Runes are not "pay-to-win" because you can't even buy them with real money only with IP which is gained through matches. On top of that you don't need to buy every single champion with real money. I was discussing this with a friend and it seems the split comes because in Dota, counter-picking is so core to the strategy that not having certain characters would put you at a gross disadvantage. This is not really the case in LoL, matchups are more often than not skill based more than "This champion hard counters mine so I lose". Hell, I've played the game for 4 years now and even though I don't own every single champ, I've never felt at a disadvantage just because I didn't own a certain champion. Is the business model perfect? Of course not. But it's far from "disgusting".

Note that only champion, skins, and rune pages can be purchased with money. Runes themselves can only be acquired through the usage of in-game currency, while champions can be purchased with either in-game money or real money.

Many champions are significantly cheaper than others, taking only a few games to get enough currency to unlock them. And those are generally easier champions to help newbies come to terms with game mechanics quicker, as opposed to more complex champions.

While this might not be as 'free' as DotA's PICK ANYONE YOU WANT system, I sort of prefer it League's way. You learn the champions as you acquire them slowly over time, until the option to play in ranked games is finally available and you probably have a roster of characters you're comfortable with.

I'm probably biased though, because playing DotA generally turns into some chap yelling 'OI. OI RAWTEXT. PICK IO.' '... But I've never played Io bef-' 'PICK IO'.

Still. HotS seems interesting. I'll definitely give it a whirl.

When Brad posted his DOTA New Years Dailies to the site earlier I remembered this was a thing and wandered into this game's forum and found this topic. I then watched that video and sought out all the other ones I could find because I was immediately hooked. Here, have some links!

There were two matches casted by Husky and Dustin Browder, the game's Game Director, quite recently. One on Cursed Hollow and the other on Blackheart's Bay. Here's an Overview Panel from BlizzCon. Here's a Q&A Stream from a week before Christmas. They sure sound like they know what they're talking about in those. Enjoyed watching both. Very informative.

Really hoping the Beta is soon. It's not out yet by the way, if you do end up stumbling upon a site claiming to have keys don't believe them, they're scum. They don't exist. I'm really looking forward to it. I've never been interested in a MOBA before. Brad's DotA 2 streams put me to sleep and all his explanations of the mechanics only made it sound crazy dumb. This game excites and interests me. It looks really really smart and really really fun. I love what they've done and I want to play it.

I'm pumped. I'm going to watch whatever I can find on this game and follow it as much as humanly possible. I've also rewritten most of the wiki page because it was terribly out of date. It still said itemization and gold were things before I fixed it. It's all better now though.