Quick Look: Heroes of the Storm

I don't think so, I think that there isn't much choice compared to league or DOTA. Games new so can't complain.

I'm not interested in playing MOBAs, but this was fun to watch. A GB team-up of HoTS on premium stream would be great! Do it, guys, it would a license to print...lots of people interested in watching the stream.

I played this quite a bit in the beta. Would be interested in joining some other GB members if you guys ever need another player. Reggie186 is my battle.net handle.

I'd be real interested in watching a feature where Brad plays Dota and Dan sits in and asks about it.

shush ... you and your reason. Of course everyone but the crew is always perfect at any game within 15 seconds of playing it. They are just bad at games.

I'll be invoicing Dan Ryckert for the money I spent on this game last night.

i propose Magical Princess Dragon Change Simulator ++

@pogman: it was the first and only time i match maked but i panicked at character select and picked Medusa. Someone went "medusa, weird, ok" so i was already sweating. I then proceeded to start and in a huff picked mid and started my way down. I literally was just fighting creeps when someone else said something to the effect of "what the fuck are you doing?!" Call me spineless but i d/c there and then and pretty much gave up on dota 2. If that's the kind of people it matches you with right out of the gate then no thank you. I'm exaggerating, but it both scared me off and left a sour taste in my mouth. I had hopes for HotS but with the degree of seriousness people are taking it with now i'm fearful of the exact same thing.

I did have a dota human vs bot match with some duders here that actually went pretty pleasantly even though we were trounced, so i may be encouraged to join the GB channel.

Great, now I'm actually playing this. Thanks a lot, @danryckert

Also I'd love to watch a show of Brad teaching Dan a few things about DOTA or something like that. Definitely a better format than Daily DOTA for some one who isn't really into the whole MOBA thing already.

@kennybaese: I've been calling it Hots since the beta.

Yeah, if you've really spent "thousands" of hours playing Dota and HOTS and can't admit how many obscure, unapparent, or just straight up counterintuitive mechanics there are in Dota, you're completely out of touch with how beginners relate to that game.

You have no idea how strategic this game gets at higher levels. In the start it was a rofl stomp most of the time, only team fights. Now we have to properly communicate and work together in order to barely win. Heroes seem very balanced atm. Not to mention you can play them very differently and people do that a lot in higher rankings.

@ripelivejam: I just don't get why you care what other people think? Just play the game and have fun, ask for advice and tips, learn it, I've met nothing but nice people personally. However if people were being a dick over chat, I'd just go into troll mode and feed on purpose to piss them off if it was getting to me. Usually people who whine on are complete idiots and suck themselves...

I will say though if you go to the Dota 2 tutorial and you select the online games in there, you will get paired with completed noobs doing that. New players tend not to talk, but that seems like what you want while you get started.

For me though, I don't get why people fear a game or why people fear what other people say. You're only getting paired with people on your skill level, just say to them.. "if I'm a noob, why are you match maked with me?"....

@pogman: yeah i guess it's my problem and i'm only to blame but in general i have a shit ton of insecurity. I do want to have fun so for me personally crap like that unfortunately helps to negate it. I know i'm taking it too seriously but i guess it's just how i feel. Since it feels like the dota 2 ship has sort of sailed for me i'll give Hots an honest shot and maybe play with some duders on here. Thanks for the advice.

I absolutely adore Rocket League, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

@ripelivejam: Just go to the tutorial on Dota 2, go through it and then go online games, you get paired with other people in that tutorial matchmaking. The sooner you get over it, the better, it'll help you in other online games too. Play competitive 5 v 5 CS:GO matches, it's quite similar where you'll stick out if you suck, but it's fun and whocares? You're being paired with people on your level.

It hasn't sailed at all, Dota 2 is going to become increasingly popular with it's prize pool, it cannot be matched for the time being. It's in a growth period and there will always be new players.

I got into the first time a few months ago and I'm having a blast, you just gotta get over that fear, after a few games you'll be loving it. If you really want, just place something over that bottom left of the screen and turn off voice chat.

You will have people bitching in HotS just like Dota 2, it's that type of game.

I've played a decent amount of HotS (I'm above account level 30, don't remember the exact number) and I have never had a matchmaking queue as long as Dan had at the beginning of this QL. That was a freakishly long queue.

@ripelivejam: @pogman: If he thinks DOTA 2's ship has sailed for him you're really in no position to dispute him. Getting into a big huge olde game with a ton of complex and seemingly arbitrary rules just isn't something everyone wants to do. It's the difference between Magic and Hearthstone. One's newer and thus has less crust. It's cool if you've been playing the olde game for years and have come to know it like the back of your hand but some of us aren't looking for history lessons when we play games. Some people are, more power to em. Not me. Not him. Not Dan. Not Drew.

There is a huge amount of varability in Heroes of The Storm, talent builds can be tailored (and usually are) to a team composition. Items in DOTA are similar to Talents in Heroes Of The Storm. Some Talents will span multiple Heroes (Regeneration, Attack bonuses), but each Hero has a unique Talent (Q, W, E, R, D, 1-6).

Xp does vary by distant, each wave is worth one hero kill. There is more info all over the patches and wherever your google searches lead you. I'm a fan of Tempo Storm cause I am.

@danryckert, @drewbert I hope to see you both playing

@osiris: I admittedly have not looked into the high level play of HoTs recently, but last time I saw there was a straight up tier list where there were 3-4 characters that were stupidly overpowered

@pogman: you have a point. it's very important to find a reason to enjoy playing. having some friends to play with helps. thing is, if you lose consistently, it isn't that fun.

I actually tried HOTS for the first time in the last week too and so far I really like it. I had never taken the plunge with a MOBA before but the Blizzardified take on it seems to suit me. Now I need a mouse because playing with a trackpad on my MacBook is not always going so well...

Man I would have done the same as you and d/c'd as well. I don't need people yelling at me right at the very start of a match about not playing right when I have no idea wtf I'm doing. I played HOTS for the first time tonight with some duders from the giantbomb channel and even though we lost I had fun. No yelling or anything happened at all. It seems to help when you jump in with non serious like minded people.

Feel free (and anyone else out there) to add me. Battletag: Scrrr#1429

@themasterds: You're talking like you will be playing experienced players... no you play players as crap as you.

I've never known what MOBA stood for until Dan spelled it out at the start of the video.

Someday someone is going to cross this genre with the collectible figures / Skylander thing, and it's going to make so much damn money.

Even more if it was Pokémon.

@viking_funeral: Oh man, don't give them ideas. My kids have Disney Infinity 2.0 and while I have never played the game without them, it's a bit scary how interested I am in the figures themselves (and the Star Wars ones coming for 3.0). If say Blizzard was to do a game with a similar idea using some of their characters, I may not be able to help myself...

tried this in beta but it's so shallow and lacks strategic depth, plus the fact that it's yet another moba where you have to buy heroes sucks. i will stick with my doto

A lot of my friends play HOTS while waiting for people to get on in league, and a large amount of them are rank 1. Even my Gold level League friends. Game just seems way more mechanically and strategically relaxed, which isn't at bad thing, just wont have the following of League or even DOTA. Hell a good number of the pros are washed up League players who couldn't make it in the LCS

I've played this once. I thought that noone would play in a weird way. I was wrong. I had my brothers and a buddy of ours and his girlfriend gaming this, and what do we see them do? Moving along as a big SQUARE!

I got so angry that time I quit this game and decided mobas aren't for me at all. It's the stress that gets you... all the management. And if you get just a bit slow with any of them, you are finished. Even in this game. The square formation made the other teams level go skyhigh and their attacks unavoidable. That time we got slaughtered.

I decided to quit since the gamemakers which invites new players, invites those who are total experts at this and has no thought on the new players. That... shouldn't even be possible at these game to be honest, not to new players... I learned somewhat how it works... but that square formation I had no idea how to tackle.

It was fun for a time as well though, but I guess you need a lot of training to know how it is and my stupid team did NOT wanted to meet bots so I could train... I do blame them a bit since you have to start small when new. I might try out matches with "stupid bots", not experts who knows a trick to play. That square formation.... that square! Oo'

@maffrew: I started collecting the Avenger Infinity figures. The game sucks, but I like how they look behind my desk. I'm definitely getting the old trilogy Star Wars figures when they come out here.

This seems less chaotic visually than the little bits of Dota I've seen. I can actually follow whats going on.

I haven't liked a Blizzard game since the original StarCraft, but man, that WarCraft 2 music gets me every time.

Heroes suffers from the same problem that all MOBAs suffer from: they rely on other people to not be absolute idiots. This one just makes it objective-based, which makes it worse.

Love this game. Hate people who refuse to learn how to play it better.

I really wanted a Brad reaction camera for all the times Dan did something to get himself killed that could have been avoided with basic map awareness.

Like many MOBA-terrified folks in this thread, I've made several excursions into the genre, but HotS is the only one that has stuck.

First, I had a friend that wanted to sherpa me through LoL. For the first several matches, he just watched and coached me over voice chat. It was extremely stressful, and I saw a flurry of racial epiphets that shocked even my desensitized brain when I made mistakes. Mistakes only obvious after hours of combing video guides and wikis. That is decidedly not a beginner-friendly game. I did, however, like the fact that I only had a handful of heroes to choose from. If I could get the gist of playing a handful of heroes each week (and playing against a whole lot of the same), then eventually I would climb the difficulty curve up to the amateur level of skill. But it didn't feel satisfying and I gave up.

Enter DotA 2. I was really excited about the game, and decided to give MOBAs another shot. I've played quite a bit of DotA 2, and really enjoyed it. But even after maybe 200 hours of game time, I still have no clue what the majority of heroes do and much less how to play them effectively or when to choose them. While I love the idea that all heroes are unlocked and that each game isn't tilted by metagame levels, that doesn't amount to freedom for the starting player. It results in paralysis of choice. I tended to stick to the same few heroes, and while I would occasionally try someone new, it always felt terrible to put my team at a disadvantage by doing so. I know that I could level-up my skills by spending time researching on wikis, but I have zero interest in doing so to play scrub-level pub games. I eventually wandered away.

So HotS seems to have one priority laser-focused, player onboarding. That's totally my jam. When entering my first game, I had a good idea of how to play my hero and good information regarding tradeoffs that I could make in my skill tree. No wikis or item-build tools required. I had a limited pool of heroes to play with, and felt comfortable exploring their abilities in AI team battles. The ones I liked, I could buy with in-game currency. At first, I wasn't allowed to play against other players. This was a very good thing. Once my account leveled up enough, I played against other heroes and had a blast. When my account levels up in the future, I'll be allowed to play in draft matches. And after that, ranked matches. It's all smoothing an inherently rocky difficulty curve with checkpoints that prevent the frustrations I had with LoL and DotA. If the hardcore don't like the game, that's totally understandable. But this is the first game that has given me solid, achievable progress while not playing for hours per day.

This makes me feel like a MOBA will eventually get me.

One day, a MOBA will come for us all.

I've had some friends bugging me to play and, after watching this, I just might give in...

Oh cool, I'm in the chat at the end. I must've got on just as they were ending the QL haha

The fellows from the website known as "Giant Bomb" are saying the names for other things are dumb.

DRINK!

I was really looking forward to this QL! And then Brad talked.

Next video!

@brad So you see MOBA as something born out of a marketing office, but not MMORPG?

So can we just assume from now on that everything that @danryckert says sucks, but has never actually experienced, is wrong?

As someone who only plays like 5-10 matches a week, I like Heroes of the Storm for all the reasons people dislike it for. No meta-game and low skill requirements so you can easily jump in and enjoy it for a while

Whoa, wait, MOBAs have co-opted the term "ganked"?!? Screw MOBAs!

This is the correct response.

@stymie: I know this is an old comment, but I started disliking Brad when he started playing DoTA. He won't shut the fuck up about it and he compares everything to DoTA. Also his elitist attitude towards other MOBAs gets to me.