After seeing yet another teammate that runs back and forth near healing well or cancel Z / B, I thought I’ll make short thread. Maybe some people dont know about it.
Shift allows you to queue commands and is popular mechanic in basically every RTS game. While it mostly just makes your life easier in RTS, in HOTS it can help you win.
There are 3 things shift actually does:
- remove player mistakes
- remove input delay
- remove “player delay”
Examples
Diablo
Im sure you had many situations when you Q someone (with no wall nearby) and despite E spam and lack of any movement buffs/cleanses, enemy just walks away. Main reason behind it is input delay. If instead you use shift + Q + E, your combo is basically guaranteed to land. You can even use it with shift + APO + Q + E. Simply put, due to input delay removal (and maybe player clicking too late), things literally happen faster.
Stitches
Similar as above - you Q someone and despite E spam, you dont land it and enemy walks away. Same story, shift + Q + E/Gorge.
Funny thing - you can do 4/5 ability Diablo combo without touching keyboard when it happens. Just queue it up and wave your hands in the air like you don’t care .
Mount (Z)
This is simple one. Sometimes you move too early and cancel mount up animation. You shift + Z + RMB (or Z + shift + RMB if you are moving). Not only you remove potential own mistake, but you also remove input delay, making all of it happen faster.
The same applies to healing wells:
shift + RMB (well) + Z + RMB
or objectives:
shift + RMB (objective) + Z + RMB
ALways mount up using shift. This simple trick speeds up your rotation immensely. not really, but its something!
Pathing
Ive seen few threads about issues with pathing. I dont have this problem, not because of having some kind of better version of the game, but because of shift. I never walk across the map just by using RMB on the other lane. Always choose your own path, including scouting bushes.
PS - remember to hold shift when issuing commands.
PS2 - I should probably add that Quick Cast is your friend.
A bit of trivia.
Both Johanna and Maiev W’s work similar way. Both of them also got mini-stun: .25s. Why its useful, is obvious - interrupting channels. But there is also another benefit - stuns cancel movement commands. That basically means stunned player needs to re-order movement command, what contributes to the effectivness of displacement (loss of distance covered). Its possible that both abilities would be much worse if stun got removed completely, compared to just reducing its duration to 0.1s (ignoring channels part here). Stun alone is arguably more important for movement impairment than .25s duration.
It wasnt such a short thread in the end :’
TL;DR - shift is a magical button that makes your life easier and makes things happen faster.
