This thread serves 2 purposes:
- it could help newcomers. If this thread helps only one person, then it is worth it;
- because I am not a samaritan, writting this thread would also help me clarify and internalize (see Understanding versus internalizing / mastering) these features for myself.
I first intended to provide some gameplay tips. But it ended up in another way and is more focused on mindset than anything else. Actually, mindset is interesting to discuss because it is something that can change really quickly and have a really huge impact on your game and how you perceive the game.
I would say that most of what is in here is common sense or can be deduced. So this is not some grand ideas and most of the ideas can be found one way or another, even on this forum if you read it a lot. But sometimes it is important to remember that common sense, especially during the flow of a game. And a summary is always interesting to have.
By no means, I am saying that I am a good HotS player. I would rather say that I am a below average player at the moment (just went to Silver 5). This thread is only my personal point of view. You are perfectly fine to disagree with me and try something else. You can think of this thread as being advices. Following or adapting them is up to you. For the adpatation part, I would like to tell something I said to my guild during my WoW days. Part of my guild wanted to do exactly what the top guilds were doing for some boss. I replied something like “Oh well, you can take those guilds as a guide but don’t try to do exactly what they are doing. If you are trying to drive as (Sébastien) Loeb (or it was maybe Michael Schumacher the example I took), the only thing you are going to do is to crash your car.”. At some point, one may drive like Loeb (or not 
), but it does not magically happen. It takes practicing time.
I admit that sometimes I don’t follow the advices I’ll give in this thread. Often, it is because I am tunell visioning something, too often because I focus on my micro management. Hopefully, this happens less and less. So it is somewhat OK.
Also, while answering in this thread, please be civilized, constructive and open-minded. It helps to obtain civilized and constructive answers. Who is wellcoming a “You sucks.” comment? Mostly, you will get a “u 2” reply that is going nowhere. A better comment would be “You sucks because x, y and z.”. But even then, I would argue that there are better ways to word this. A better wording woud be “I disagree because x, y and z.”. That being said, nobody is perfect (did I ever mention that I find perfection boring?), but do try to have an actual dialogue and not monologues.
Finally, there are knowledgable persons on this forum. If you ask something constructively, and with an open mind, you will obtain inputs that you can use for yourself.
Erf, a rather lenghty introduction.
Inside the game
The game itself
It is a pity I don’t know how to underline also. I would have done it if I knew how to. Destroying the enemy core is what gets you win a game: anything else is a mean to an end. Getting the objective? A mean. Getting kills? A mean. Soaking? A mean.
I’ll just cover some game concepts that are needed for this post to be self-contained.
Experience and levels
Gathering experience from minions is called soaking. Taking camps or killing heroes also give experience. When enough experienced is gathered, the team gains one level. With each level, the heroes of the team gains 4% health points, damage on their auto attacks and abilities (generally since there are some exceptions such as Tracer). Note that being at 99% or 1% in a level is the same in terms of fighting power. When a team has more levels than the other team, this team is said to have a level advantage.
The amount of experience given by soaking and taking camps depends on the time in the game. The amount of experience earned by killing heroes depends on the level of each team. A team with a level disadvantage gains more experience by killing an enemy hero than the team with a level advantage killing an enemy hero.
Level and talent
A talent is what you can choose at level 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20 that enpowers your hero. When a team reaches one of this level before the other team, this team is said to have a tier talent advantage. A tier talent advantage is actually a level advantage for the specific levels where you choose your talents which gives a double advantage: the increase in statistics and the talent itself.
Vision
For the purpose of this thread, it will be the same as knowing where the enemies are. For an explanation on vision, see Tanking 102 - Using and Abusing Vision.
Lane pressure
Putting lane pressure means to threaten the enemy structures when that lane is left alone. This can be achieved by taking camps. This is also the case if your team has already destroyed more structures (fort or keep) than the enemy on that lane. The interest is that the enemy team needs to send someone to defend while your whole team can do something else.
Hanamura Temple
It is a map where you escort a convoy. The more (up to three) heroes escorting the convoy, the faster it moves. When the convoy reaches its destination, it shoots 12 rounds, damaging structures. (Note: actually, the Sentinel is important on this map. Here I explain the objective only because it serves the purpose of the thread.)
Tower of Doom
It is a particular map in that you cannot directly damage the core on this map. There are four ways to deal damage to the core and it is worth noting that the last one is sometimes not known at all:
- channeling the objective: each channel deals an amount of damage to the core equal to the number of towers the team controls plus one for the core;
- controlling the six towers: if a team controls all the towers on the map, their core deals one damage to the enemy core regularly. The frequency of this damage increase over time while controlling the six towers;
- boss camp: it deals 4 damage to the enemy core;
- sapper camp: each sapper that manages to go inside the enemy protected area (for a lack of another word) deals 1 damage.
Mindset
I’ll cover here the mindset to have, or at least I think one should have, to improve and win more.
Think!
Actually, everything I say in this post could be summarized as “Think!”. It is an utter common sense but I’ll take an example here about panicking to stress that it is not that easy to do in some situations. In a situation where someone is loosing a teamfight or is low life, in brief, is in a dire situation, some person (me included) could begin to panic, smash their buttons and waste their abilities in an unwise way. Although it is easier said than done, don’t do this! Think how you can use wisely your abilities. Maybe you can still secure a kill safely, save a team mate with a crowd control or deal enough damage to a chaser so that he abandons the chase… Here, “Think!” is the same as “Don’t panic in the first place: it is the best way to mess up! Keep cool!”.
Weight the pros and cons
This is self-explanatory and an obvious thing to do. However, this requires game knowledge and is quite hard to do for a new player. In the thread Tanking 103: How to Pick a Fight - The Art of Engaging, it is well covered for engage from a tanking point of view. Actually you may misjudge the pros and cons for doing something as a new player, but be assured that, if you ask yourself about it and reflect on the situations you encountered, you will get better given time.
Adapt to your team
If you visit often enough the forum, you will certainly see a player complaining about his team mates being bad and dumb and that he is the only good and smart player in his game. Obviously, he lost the game. Actually, it does not matter if that player is right or wrong. I would say “Hey you want to win the game? You think your team is dumb and that you are the only smart one? Since your team is not smart enough to adapt, be smart enough to adapt to your team and do what it takes to win the game.”.
Sometimes, it means following “bad” calls instead of doing what you think is a “good” call, alone, taking the risk to be utterly deleted in a 1v5 and putting your team at a disadvantage because they are now at 4v5 and you, the best player in your team, is no longer here to support them. In some sense, doing the “good” call alone was a “bad” call given the context.
Sometimes, it means endlessly brawling and neglecting the macro. In a situation where you have the two team which really wants to brawl all the game, and if you see your team being overpowered by the other team, it may be more efficient to brawl with your team than doing some macro stuff. But if you see that your team can hold, you might as well go soaking a little bit to gain some level or even tier talent advantage, take a camp to put some lane pressure or even destroy the enemy structures yourself.
More generally, adapt to the current situation. This requires knowledge and analysis of the situtation and you may not adapt correctly as a new player. Again, this will come with knowledge, practice and self reflection.
Be positive or put yourself in the shoes of others
Here, I mainly cover the communication with the players of your team, and mainly written communication as I don’t encounter much player in voice chat.
I see a lot, really a lot, of players flaming and venting when something went wrong for their team. Something along the lines “wtf are you doing?”. Just think about the player at the end of the “wtf are you doing?”. Will he be pleased? Will he be more inclined to save your butt after that? … This has so many negative effects. Another thing to consider is that, if a player is already doing something you think is wrong, he will not understand a “wtf”. You will need to be more constructive and explicit. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, just don’t type anything. If you need to vent, vent for yourself. Shout something at your computer or anything but don’t type something negative during the game.
Now you can also be positive and say “Well played”, “Nice”… when something went good. It has only positive effects on people! If you are a helpful player, you can always chat with that player after the game. This is better because it is not during the heat of battle and people are generally cooler.
Be patient
Being patient is quite good in a team fight. I see some players are like “Go! Go! Go!” during a teamfight. Well, no, wait for a good opportunity. I’ll refer again to the thread Tanking 103: How to Pick a Fight - The Art of Engaging for a “Be patient” clip for the engaging phase.
I can also see some players fighting over the objective when their died team mates are almost respawning. I can only assume that this is because this is the objective and the objective must be taken NOW! On Hanamura Temple (and other maps), the objective is not instantaneous. If your team mates are nearly respawning, just wait for them and attempt a 5v5 instead of some 4v5.
How to unintentionnally throw a game
As the title suggests, this section covers some behaviours I observed in game that can lead to loose a game.
Being cocky
At my level of play, I see (really) often the currently winning team, or at least one player, to become cocky. They would sit in front of your core and neglect every other things that would be more interesting to do. Or a player would wander alone on the map because you know “Oh well, we won all our team fights, it is easy peasy.” or something similar. And often, the currently winning team would die one by one, or at least one of them would die, leading to a come back and potentially to a win of the currently loosing team. See Thanks for a GG - Deposit your joy here! for a personal example.
Being greedy
There is a saying: the best is the enemy of good. You don’t need to win more: you just need to win. For example, let’s say you are fighting over an objective. It happens that an enemy is low life and he is retreating. Your team is actually winning the fight and the objective because there is already one less enemy. But, it is better to have a kill since it is more definitive and you get some more experience. Since the enemy player is retreating, to secure the kill, you need to go past, more or less, his team. You can actually get killed yourself trying to obtain the kill. I don’t say that you shouldn’t kill an enemy. By all means, if it can be done safely, do it! But this is a matter of “is it worth trying?”.
Another typical situation of being greedy: let’s say you are winning map-wise. But your team is currently one man down. It can be tempting to invade the enemy camps because it will be an even larger advantage for your team. Is it really worth attempting a 4v5 over a camp?
The urge to do something
This is something I experienced recently. It was on Volskaya Foundry and we were winning hard! Something like all keeps down for the enemy and all forts up for us. We tried to destroy the enemy core but couldn’t and were left with only two heroes still alive. The enemy team depushed and then dissapeared from our vision. At that point, there were some minions waves fighting and my team (those two still alive, that includes me ) went clearing the waves for a lack of something else to do. Guess what? We died.
By all means, if you can think of something that can be done safely, do it. But sometimes, just do nothing and wait.
Outside the game
Which type of player are you?
If you are playing to have some fun, or because you like Blizzard heroes, you don’t actually need to read / search for information on the game. Chilling is chilling after all.
If you are however a competitive player and want to win your games, you will need a mindset to improve yourself. It may be possible that, at some point, you have reached your goal as a competitive player and do not want to improve anymore, or at least put less effort in improving. And this is fine as long as you are aware of it.
Be critical about yourself
This is a sine qua non condition for improving. Nobody is perfect (did I already mention I don’t like perfection ?) and there is always something you can improve, the final goal being winning more games. Watch the replay of your game and look at what you do right and what you can improve. The difficult part here is that it is not always easy to see yourself what you can improve and how.
Obviously, you can also ask for help from other people. Be open-minded and take what other people say for what it is: advices. Those advices may fit your playstyle. Or maybe, you need to adapt them to you. Or maybe, this is really not for you. But, keep in mind that you may learn some new things if you think carefully to the advices.
What I mean by “carefully” is to avoid the cognitive biases we all have. Since I am not a psychologist and there already is a Wikipedia page for this, I prefer to link: Cognitive bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias) and List of cognitive biases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases).
So basically, being critical about oneself is actually hard to do, reason why you should be carefull.
Also be open-minded. It can be that you don’t understand now and think that advices given to you are just crap. It can be true but it can also be that you don’t have the knowledge / skill currently to understand. I am working in research and we had a temporary employee at my lab. When he was struggling to do something, he would ask for help to my boss. He wouldn’t understand and still kept in mind what he would have discussed. And later, he would say “Hey I understand now what we discussed 6 months ago.”.
Focus on what you have control on
At some point, you will encounter player who you think are bad. First, thinking another player is bad should be stated as “worse than you”. And it often concerns only one aspect of the game. Generally, this would be the micro as it is more easily noticeable that the macro. It may well happen that that player is worse than you at the micro but better at the macro and that player is overall as skilled as you, or even better.
That player may be worse or better than you. Actually, it does not matter because you don’t have control on those players: prefer focusing on the aspects (likely your gameplay and communication skill) you have control on and improve those aspects.
Focus on trend
Because people are humans and can have some bad days, because the match maker isn’t perfect, you are bound to loose some games. There is no point in focusing on a particular game to see if you have improved: focus on trends while avoiding the clustering illusion cognitive bias.
Knowing / understanding versus internalizing / mastering
Because it helps you to make a good decision, knowledge of the game helps you win a game. But there is a huge difference between understanding something and internalizing / mastering it that can affect your decision making during a game.
I’ll just take an example to show this. It was a game on Tower of Doom. I knew the means to damage the enemy core on this map and how they work. Now the situation was the following: we wiped the enemy team just before the objective actually poped, that is we wiped the enemy team during the countdown of the objective. Two altars were poping (middle and bottom). The enemy core was at 9 and we had control over 3 towers. A good decision here would have been: destroy one tower and channel the two objectives to end the game. What I did: channel the objective… While I was channeling, I was thinking “OK, the core will be at 3 after the channelings. What can we do to deal 3 more damages?” and I checked over the timer of the boss that deals 4 damages. Basically, what I have internalize is that a channel deals 3 damages (since I was remembered wrongly this part, I don’t really know how I could end up thinking 3 damage for the channel of the objective. This is a perfect example of the “Anchoring” cognitive bias). Also note that I did not checked the timer of the sapper camps (we had the control of the bot lane) meaning that I did not internalize the fact that sappers can damage the enemy core. The good thing is that, after the channelings, the enemy was at 1 health and I was like"Wtf? Why is it at 1?" and it helped me internalize I think.
Terminology
This is a short terminology list:- Auto attack: hum... I don't even know how to describe AA. It is just your basic attacks.
- Bodyblock: prevent a player to go where he wants to by putting a hero as a barrier on the path.
- Catapult: a minion that will spawn with the wave when the fort (and keep) is destroyed. The catapult has a longer range than the structure defense so that it can destroy every structure (even the core) if left alone.
- Core: the enemy structure to destroy in order to win a game.
- Experience globe: when you kill a minion, you directly get the experience. If the minion is killed by another minion or a mercenary, it drops a small blue / violet globe. To collect the globe (and the experience), you just need to be near the experience globe. After some time, the experience globe will disappear. The exprience globe can only be collected by one team.
- Fort: a structure. Destroying a fort gives a catapult every three minion waves.
- Hit and run: as the name suggest, dealing damage and running away to avoid taking damage.
- Hitbox: if you select a hero during a game, there is a circle below the hero. This is the hero's hitbox. Only the hitbox (and not the hero model) is used to determine whether a skillshot or aoe hits a hero or to determine bodyblocking.
- Keep: a structure. Except on Tower of Doom, destroying a keep is needed to make it possible to damage the core. When the fort and the keep is destroyed, a catapult spawn each minion wave.
- Lane freezing: making the minion waves to colloide at some specific point of the lane.
- Lane pressure: threaten the structure when the lane is left alone.
- Regeneration globe: when you kill the central minion, it drops a blue globe, this is the regeneration globe. It gives back an amount of health and mana over time when collected. If one of your hero collected the globe, all the hero of your team nearby benefits from the effect of the regeneration globe. After some time, the regeneration globe turns violet / purple and can be collected by both tem. After some time, it disappears. The enemy regeneration globe is red and can only be collected by the enmey team. It also turns violet / purple and can be collected by both team, and dissapear after some time.
- Soak: gaining the experience from the minions on the lanes.
- Stalling: delaying something. Usually used for a channeled objective and performed with a range ability.
- Stutter step: it is a sequence of doing something (AA or use of an ability), moving, doing something. It serves two purposes: 1) by (almost) constantly moving and preferably in an unpredictable way, it is more difficult for the enemy to hit you; 2) position yourself in a better position while not loosing opportunity to do something (generally, dealing damage).
- Wave clear: killing a minion wave.
. Actually, I know about the Sentinel being the “real” objective of the map.