by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

Srey made an interesting post on Reddit yesterday entitled, The definitive guide to why you probably shouldn’t split-push as Azmodan (and why Hotslogs stats can be misleading). For those not familiar with Srey, he is currently the Warrior player for Dumpster Tier Superstars, and formerly of Tempo Storm and Vox Nihili. While he has played with several major North American teams, he may be best known for his Solo Queue Tier List.

His post centers around the premise that the average Heroes player lacks a fundamental strategic understanding of the game, or what he calls the meta basics. In order to illustrate his point he provides a brief pop quiz for players to take. Let’s see how well you do.

1. What is the meta for each map? I.E. Does the map have a solo lane, which lane is the solo, should you rotate between lanes, how important is wave clear, do you need a Hero specific to the objective? You should be able to answer each of these questions for all 11 maps.
2. Using Tomb of the Spider Queen as an example, how should you split your Heroes for the first turn in? How much should you expect to gain in terms of enemy structures destroyed? What about a late game turn in? You should have expectations for the completion of the objective on each map or a plan for what to do after.
3. When should you take out Mercenary Camps? Let’s use Sky Temple as our example.
4. What is an extremely standard Valla comp on Tomb of the Spider Queen?
5. On Battlefield of Eternity, Team 1’s comp is Muradin, E.T.C., Malfurion, Greymane, and Falstad. Team 2’s comp is Arthas, Tyrande, Valla, Li-Ming, Alarak. What should each team do during the Immortal phase? Note that both comps are pretty awful.

What makes this quiz so valuable aren’t the questions themselves, which are certainly helpful, but the fact that it highlights how players should be approaching the game. It isn’t enough to just be able to land a good Kerrigan combo or stutter step effectively. You have to also be able to out think your opponents.

Heroes is a game that is less about mechanical skills and more about decision making and teamwork. You can be the most mechanically skilled player in the world, but you are going to struggle if you can’t be in the right place at the right time and coordinate with your teammates. Conversely, you can have a crystal clear understanding of what the right thing to do is, but that knowledge isn’t worth much if your teammates aren’t on the same page. That is why we need to get players thinking more tactically. Players have to look beyond the mechanics, and play the game on a more strategic level. This requires not only knowing what to do, but also understanding why you should be doing it. It requires players to ask themselves questions like the ones Srey poses.

His post also goes on to talk about how different strategies can be more or less effective at certain skill levels, how to properly use tier lists, and how to get the most from sites like Hotslogs. The post itself is quite lengthy, but it contains a lot of thought provoking information. It also contains the answers to the above questions, which is why you should click here to check it out for yourself (the answers are at the bottom).