Heroes Brawl: A Crash Course in Positioning
by JR Cook - 7 years ago show comments
Heroes Brawl is designed to be a fun, fast paced, and wacky game mode and it certainly delivers on all of those things. It could also be described as pure chaos, and I mean that in the best way possible. Heroes Brawl is Heroes of the Storm, but with the action and fun factor dialed way up. However, just because this game mode is meant to be fun doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned while playing it.
While there are many types of Brawls, if you boil the concept down to its basic form it is essentially one continuous team fight. This doesn’t mean there aren’t Objectives and there won’t be strategies that develop, but everything revolves around team fighting. The fight starts as soon as the gates open and it doesn’t end until the Core falls. Sometimes these fights are 5v5, other times they are 2v2 or 3v3, but if you are playing Brawl and you aren’t actively engaged in some type of team fight it is probably because you’re dead. This makes Heroes Brawl a great practice ground for one of the things that players in the lower to middle ranks struggle with the most: Positioning.
For the top players, proper positioning is a skill that almost everyone possesses. While some may be better at it than others, it is rare to see a player who is drastically out of position. For those in Bronze, Silver, and Gold, poor positioning is a fact of life. At the higher skill levels, poor positioning doesn’t happen often and when it does it is usually quickly punished. At the lower to mid levels, it happens almost every team fight and players often get away with it. That is part of the reason that players don’t realize what a problem their positioning is because they aren’t immediately punished for their mistakes. If you are an average player, one of the best things you can do to improve your game is to learn to recognize positional mistakes. This means working to improve your own positioning, as well as learning to take advantage of poor positioning by your opponents.
This takes us back to Heroes Brawl. A normal game of Heroes consists of long stretches of time without any team fights. This is especially true in the early game when team fights often only occur in conjunction with Objectives. In a standard 20-25 minute game, there might only be eight to ten team fights total. As a result, there are only so many opportunities to practice team fight related skills. When you compare that to Heroes Brawl, which is basically one endless team fight, the learning opportunities are obvious.
In a normal game, if you die during a team fight it will probably be over before you can rez and return. This means it will be several minutes before you have a chance to apply the lessons you learned, and even then the dynamics of that next team fight might be drastically different. In Brawl, you are almost guaranteed to be able to get back to the fight before it ends and when you do return the fight itself will be largely unchanged. If you died the first time because you picked a poor path into the fight and got picked off, you can learn and approach from a different angle the next time. Not good at flanking? Flanking opportunities abound in Brawl and if it doesn’t work the first time you are only a few seconds away from being able to try again. If you stood too close to a vent and got ganked, you can continue the fight from a safer location a few seconds later. The examples are endless, but you get the idea. The point is there will be ample opportunities to learn from your mistakes, or the mistakes of others, provided you are paying attention.
Heroes Brawl should be about having fun first and foremost. You don’t have to go super try hard or learn some next level meta strats, but be conscious of how positioning plays a part in the fights. Learn what works and what doesn’t, and don’t be afraid to try something new. Heroes Brawl is a great place for experimentation, and what you learn along the way will help make you a better player.
Good luck and by all means, have fun!
