“Heroes of the Storm” has always been hamstrung by both hero and role compositions on any given team, which create too many independent variables that lead to a variety of chaotic outcomes. Inflated victories in which a player thinks they did well individually, but in reality they just had a “God comp,” are very common. Snowball losses are also common. In these cases, the player most likely won or lost by just having a better or worse composition of heroes i.e. more cc, more easily thrown down damage, wombo-combos, flashy ultimate abilities, familiar/comfortable heroes etc. Typically, you want to have a tank, a healer, a melee cc, a ranged damage, and a fifth pick that’ll tie the team together. More often, a player finds other players don’t obey this logic and instead elect to go outside the norm. This leads to toxicity, madness, feeding and reporting…just a bad time. There is a solution though; Mirror Mode ARAM matches that exhibit the same heroes on both sides that occupy certain roles guaranteed to give a normalized outcome. In the draft room, each player would choose from five heroes and as they locked a hero in, just like they do in ARAM, they would grey out. Perhaps a little more time could be given to flesh out the discrepancies in picks if a player doesn’t feel comfortable in their role. The teams would be made of the same heroes, but different on each team (Diablo, Zarya, Zagara, Rehgar, and Varian vs. Diablo, Zarya, Zagara, Rehgar, and Varian).
To back this up with real world examples, I’ll use basketball and chess. Heroes of the Storm currently operates in a way that just doesn’t seem right in determining who is actually better than who due to the amount of independent variables associated with any given game (except for literally all the same hero, but everyone hates those games in ARAM). If basketball was like Heroes of the Storm, the ball would change size and shape every time it passed from one team to the other. A team would select a certain size and shape of ball that would benefit their play style, thus giving them a certain strategy the other team couldn’t use. If chess was like Heroes of the Storm, certain pieces could be exchanged for other pieces, such as a rook for a bishop (three bishops), and then develop a strategy around it, which would become total madness. That’s how Heroes of the Storm is, total madness, where nothing makes much sense outside of five-on-five teams where a central captain can actually know the strengths and capabilities of their teammates before each match begins. In most games, with solo to four man teams, you’re going to have too much chaos because even one person picking out of role could ruin the entire twenty minutes of gameplay. You only need one independent variable, the players (teammates) themselves or the roles they occupy. Once you add different heroes on both sides, who knows why a player won or lost? More often, a player comes out of games saying “the comp sucked, we didn’t have any cc” let alone whether or not a player’s teammates are skilled or not.
If you had the same heroes on both sides, then you would eliminate most independent variables that lead to total chaos. I say most because there still is one final independent variable, which is talents chosen by a player; however, that’s a whole separate argument.
P.S. Whether or not this mode would actually be fun is left up to a player’s discretion. I am simply arguing that a player cannot tell, with so many independent variables flying around, which player is actually better than another in current modes.