Heroes of the Storm: Introduction
If you've ever played MOBA games, you'll love this one. Blizzard claims this is not a MOBA game and it's really not. This is a completely new experience for anyone to discover, but if you have some previous experience in MOBAs, you'll find this much easier to figure out. If you don't have any, don't worry, you've got a nice tutorial which walks you through the basics and later it's up to you to master the skills of every hero possible. The goal of the game is relatively simple, but the way you need to achieve is not. All you have to do is destroy enemy's core before the same thing happens to you. There are more than a few maps to play on and each map has a set of different rules. The game itself is very demanding, meaning you'll need a newer PC/laptop to run it smoothly and even those great laptops are likely to have overheating issues after a couple of games. My GPU has reached 75 degrees Celsius this summer, so I had to make half an hour pauses every now and then to avoid possible damage to my laptop. Heroes are playable characters, every game players get to pick one to play and all the heroes are from Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft series (also Blizzard's games).
At the end of every game, there are certain rewards you get, depending on your level, game result, your hero level (yes, every hero has it's own level, but that doesn't affect gameplay too much). The possible rewards are: gold (for in-game purchases), hero skin variations and mount skin variations (including mount themselves). If you'd rather speed up the process of getting heroes/skins, you can always purchase stuff with real money, but I'd wait with that before I'm sure this is the right game for me. Now I've played MOBAs before: Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, even DotA a DotA 2. What HotS doesn't have and all of these do is a childish community. I mean of course, you can find raging kids in every game, but these can be found very rarely at HotS. The reason for that is, instead of every character having it's own hero level, your team has a level and enemy team has a level. What you do affect's the whole team's experience, levels and so on. So nope, you won't see someone yelling at the other players because he is level 21 and the rest of them are 18. Nuh-uh. Blizzard eliminated that in a smart way. All information you can get is how much damage someone did to enemy heroes, enemy forts and minions, how big their EXP contribution is and what is their score, but you actually get a "kill" even if you were near a hero that died, so don't take KD score as a measurement of a players's skill. Also, there are no more items to buy. All you have is a talent tree you develop over time while leveling. This way, you can choose how your hero acts, how his abilities develop and every single talent counts, but they all have certain pros and cons. I've never seen anyone raging at someone because they picked wrong talents, maybe only because they refused to cooperate, but Blizzard takes care of these guys very quickly. Also, don't ever go AFK while in the match. If you do, you're forced to play with other players who tend to go AFK and your game experience is going to be ruined. If you have a bad connection, you should avoid this game as the game system is gonna mark you as a leaver because of disconnecting all the time which is gonna end up in the same way as if you were AFK. One more tip: Lag in HotS usually looks more like graphic lag than network lag. If you want to check your ping, your graphics card temperature and your FPS, press CTRL+ALT+F while anywhere inside HotS and you'll see a little information window appearing in the top left corner so you can identify the source of them problem. And in the end, a little picture so you can see what the teamfights look like:
