Hi there. I want to talk about what makes a good team comp in hots because things are quite different here compared to other mobas.
The first thing I’d immediately like to dispell is that the traditional comp of 1 tank, 1 support, 1 mage dps, 1 AA dps, and 1 bruiser, does not inherently give your team the tools you need to win.
What makes hots different? Well, there are 2 major differences between hots and other mobas.
First, hots pve is just plain powerful. Even early on, minions deal quite alot of damage to buildings and they can stack up quickly when left alone. Many maps incentivise leaving lane so large waves of minions simply will happen. Additionally, camps push down lanes as what are essentially super minions that you can bring out just about any time.
Second, healing is just completly off the charts in hots. Other mobas tend to hevily limit healing, especially in the early game. Hots on the other hand has powerful healing sources everyone. Health regen is 4 times stronger then it is in other mobas, if not more. Health globes and sustain talents are plentiful, healing fountains exist, even hearthing back to base heals you instantly for over 1000. Then, we have actual healers. Very potent ones.
So with these in mind, what is nessesary for a team comp? A team needs sustain, wave clear, peel, engage, and damage.
Notably, many of these things can be preformed by any role so your not locked in to the traditional moba team comp.
Let me go in to more detail.
Sustain
Healing is, and has always been OP in every moba. It protects you from poke and chip damage. Damage over time effects and summons are pretty powerful in hots and healing is often the best answer. Good healing also means you dont have to hold back nearly as much as you’d need to in other mobas.
The easiest source of healing is obviously a healer but a team where everyone has an easy source of self healing can be just as effective.
Wave clear
The nessessity of good wave clear is more or less a direct response to the strength of all the pve stuff in hots. We’ve all lost to a lack of wave clear. This one’s pretty straightforward.
Engage
Due to the strength of healing (and assuming your not just being handed picks by the enemy team) it takes quite a bit more to take someone down then usual. Specifically, engage refers to anything that can force the issue. CC that is difficult to react to and especially reliable, extreme bursts of mobility are the easiest examples of this.
Its worth noting engage in particular can easily come from any role and that a heroes ability to absorb damage is not as big a factor as one might first thing. Leap, Medivh portal and leyline, both Chromie ults, maiev or Kerrigan flank, stukov slow when talented are all fantastic non tank engage tools.
peel
Good peel is a direct response to the nessessity of a good engage and the interplay between these two elements is often what decides teamfights more then anything.
Notably different from peel is that slower CC and excessive amounts of healing or damage can do this.
Danage
I mean, duh.
But I want to talk about what kind of damage you take and why. Aswell as the strengths and weaknesses of various damage types.
Contrary to popular belief, stacking mages is not inherently bad. The difficulty in stacking mages is that they often require set up to be their most effective. many of them also can struggle to switch targets and adapt to a fight that ebs and flows to much. However, this can be overcome with enough CC and fighting in choke points.
Auto attackers are really only called that because that’s what they are called in every other moba. These sustained damage dealers bring flexibility. They are defined by being able to easily and instantly switch targets and they give your team the option to win a fight by burning down the other teams tank. While pretty much every auto attacker can do this, heroes like guldan, orphea, malthael, and sonya can do this aswell and can make a double mage comp work. One of the benefits of doing a double mage comp in this way is that your wave clear will be fantastic. The most commonly shared weakness between sustained damage dealers is often that they can just be walked away from.
Finally we got all the melee assassins who I define as usualy (but not always) bursty damage dealers who who trade range or flexibility in return for the ability to just ignore abilities and mechanics.
These guys are a bit of the odd ones out. Their strengths and weaknesses tend to be all over the place on a case by case basis. Whether or not you play one mostly just comes down to if your good at them or not and on the map as many of them are also good duelists with high kill pressure.
Now that I’ve laid all the foundation, I can finally get in to what I want to say.
And yes, this is another QM match maker complaint.
QM simply does not account for this. Simply matching roles. Its possible your already starting to pick up what I’m implying but a solid team composition does not nessesarily need a tank or a bruiser, or in rare cases, even a healer. On the flip side, a team that does have each role can quite realistically lack a good engage or good wave clear.
I believe that this is the game biggest, realistically solvable flaw.
This is what creates imbalances in QM more then anything. This is what leads to the game matching roles against roles to create imbalanced matches and this is what gives partied players their advantage. Parties of players can make sure they have all these basses covered to make up for the game not doing so.
And with matching roles against roles among 10 solo players, this can realistically lead to a team that does not have all these basses covered while the other team does purely by chance.
I believe giving every hero some sub role or classification and matching bassed off that would help quite a bit.
For example, take thrall vs ragnaros. Its not even a question as to which one of them has better wave clear. If the rest of artanis’s team cant pick up the slack, lava wave js just going to become an extremely uninteractive win con.
Imperius has a fantastic engage and when he’s matched up against a team that didn’t get a great engage tools, team imperius, gets to control space so much more easily then the other team just by default.
Honestly, an imbalance of wave clear is the biggest one. Just because having to much more wave clear then the other team just makes for a super uninteractive game. If a team has wave clear, the other team should also get atleast one source of wave clear.
Its kinda hard to get a team that is incapable of peel or damage but the other two really hurt to not have.
