The question is mainly aimed at those who really just flex - playing random heroes, or most usually filling drafts.
What is your focus, either on a per match or on a personal skill development (maintenance) level?
It’s a topic I visit regularly, trying to look at it with a positive twist now.
Flexing typically means that you only visit a hero once in a while - in my case, playing one hero a day, 88 heroes, it averages out as 3 months per hero, 2 matches per session, but stochastic of course.
While it perfectly prevents mastering heroes, there must be transferable skills, or limits to this flexibility somehow. To overformalise it: what would be the best KPIs for a flex? I suspect stuff like macro.
While im defiantly best on healer, I generally flex for everything but tank in drafts (unless i really have to tank). My thought process being you don’t have to be a good healer to be good enough in a team while being a bad top laner is definitely a big deal on some maps. Of if your team somehow doesn’t have a dps player, ill pick that.
Imo, if you want to be good at flexing, this is the wrong way to look at flexing. You shouldn’t be willing to pick any hero in the game but instead have a smaller pool of heroes in each role that your confident in. Don’t go forcing good matchups when it puts you on a hero your not completely confident in. Odds are, you will be fighting someone who is confident in their hero and you will get destroyed despite the good matchup. If you pick a middling zeratul in to my whitemane or hanzo, I will destroy you.
The lower in rank you are, the more important I believe this is.
You can absolutely still master heroes and you should look to opportunities to play those heroes even if your flexing (I’m not saying ruin your draft to force them where it doesn’t make sense),
Ive got for at least 4 heroes ive got 5/5 confidence in (i feel that ive mastered them) and they arent all even in the same role. Then a bunch of heroes im 4/5 with and thats generally what i flex with. i only resort to my 3/5 heroes when things are desperate in draft and all the 2/5 and 1/5 heroes are relegated to quick match if i even enjoy playing them in the first place.
for pug/casual play, I’d say the KPI is probably going to end up being team chat
There’s two distinctions in flex play I want to point out: role flexibility and hero flexibility.
Some players can do frontline ETC, some can do solo lane ETC;
Some players can do solo lane thrall, or the 4 man, or even a frontline thrall.
Many players fixate on only a 1 role/build type of play and tend to not think about how a hero could vary from their limited experience.
If other players don’t understand how/what/why a player is doing with the flex, then it’s probably not going as well as intended, or rather, sometimes the ‘allies’ are sabotaging the intent.
It’s been years now since I played ranked (doesn’t have time to play enough HotS to justify playing a mode I never really liked). But when I played it, I tried to Flex.
Most often this consisted of playing Tanks and Healers because ppl don’t like to draft them. I’m a really scary Diablo (AA build), so I often whent with him as my Tank, even against Johanna and the likes (it went great). As Healers, Deckard and Rehgar were my usual picks (safe and fun).
Since I played every Hero (except Nova) till reaching at least lvl 15, I personally gained a fair amount of knowledge about every Hero’s capabilities and niche. So when I didn’t play my strongest Heroes, I went for direct counters, or chose Heroes that are really good on the speecific maps. Like I picked Mura against Garrosh nullifying his whole kit (was a really short win). Or picked Kerrigan on Infernal Shrines since our comp was fine without a Bruiser. I picked Tyrael when our team needed not only a Tank but more sustain support. BW when being a global and burst heal/protection was necessary. DW against ETC. Junkrat to counter Alex (my solo QM wr as Junk is bad, but I carreid that game, we won and I got MVP).
For healer I usually go brightwing (if she isn’t banned) or anduin. Anduin is personally more fun for me.
For bruiser my pick is hogger or gazlowe (I fill this same role with probius if I think it’s safe enough to pick)
Tank ugh, if Im forced into the role that hard, I’d reluctantly resort to muradin or diablo.
For assassin my picks are more diverse, I can play greymane, tychus, valla, sylvanas, or reynor. Among these my tychus and greymane are best.
You never liked ranked? Was it something you grew to realize or was there a reason why you climbed?
This, I mean the things you said were on point. Sure bruiser is a class specialized for being offlane but really a lot of assassins can fill in too. The most stiff role is healer I’d say.
And even among all these specified roles theres still the diver that is just scattered around all the categories. I’d consider rehgar and bw as the healer equivalent of divers, they also compliment heroes that specialize in it.
I play HotS for its Heroes and I usually have a mood and desire for certain characters specifically. This approach is not fitted for Ranked, where you should cooperate and fill. Thus I was always QM focused.
The frustration and stress which ppl feel when they want to climb or starting to fall is a bonus on why I disliked it. Ppl there were toxic (even if they kept it civil). Now pair that with the fact, that unlike in QM, terrible comps is entirely my allies’ fault and a disadvantage we could’ve avoided, it was just not my cup of tea.
Yet I played it, because I wanted free stuff. I probably would’ve never played it without the Seasonal Rewards.
My climb from Gold to Masters was a natural process of me getting better and better in QM (mostly throughout my campaign to play everyone to lvl 15 at least, which I did to collect Portraits, so: to get more free stuff).
Bonus motivation was, that during that time when I reached Master (or was close to reach it again?) there was a troll who said that only Master+ should write guides (which is immensely dumb, because what works in Masters doesn’t necessary works in Bronze and vice-versa). So I reached Masters and wrote my Imperius guide. For me it was a joke, but it did feel super good to reach that high, since when I started the game I was a total noob who made even his friends lose against the AI.
During my noob period I also shared the same silly mentality that I thought certain Heroes were weak because I was bad with them, or others are op because they gave me trouble as opponents.
Rehgar, Sonya, and Thrall were the Heroes I thought were bad but then I became good with them during lvling and thus I learnt that there are no super weak Heroes just ppl who don’t know how to use them.
And Nova was my bane. This plus the fact that literally everyone had her in their 4 most played during Beta, I decided to never lvl up her, keeping her as my least played to “balance” things out (as a meme). Nova thought me that there are no op Heroes, just ppl who can’t play around them first and it’s a key to know what the enemy can do so you can counter them properly. I was really proud of myself when as Arthas, I could root her in the fog of war.
My climb also was supported by the fact that I started on a toaster where I had to play with 1-2 sec latency and cosntant lags, and I became better and better as I could get slightly better and better comps so I had less and less of latencies and lags.
Man, I got nostalgic
I try to make my matches feel as diverse as possible but sometimes I’ll stubbornly pick a character someone in the game played the previous round just to show them how to do it properly.
I’m confident enough with all heroes not to rush my pick so I let others take priority in what they’re most comfortable with.
As I float around mostly in Plat and sometimes Gold, it’s an MMR where few like to fill. Probably the most filling I’ve done is with Uther. On many occasions, our team has lacked both a tank and healer, so I will roll out cranky pants Uther.
I have won more of those “main tank” Uther games than not. I will struggle with this, if my team has drafted 4 ranged heroes. For my individual skill level, it’s somewhat easier to play Uther in this situation if you at least have some kind of bruiser or even melee assassin to assist on the front lines.
For me, I find it more enjoyable to flex when it’s not done out of necessity, like my above example. Many times “flexing” in my matches, usually means I’m trying to plug up a glaring hole in the draft, such as no tank, healer, or both! This can be a frustrating experience, but if I hadn’t encountered this so frequently, I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to learn to play tanks, with the added bonus that I found I quite enjoyed the role.
isn’t it obvious?
and we would study Shakespeare if we wanted to read the -th verb inflection constantly
or go on an English language A level course and study the evolution of the language from the 1600’s to 1900’s
this might be personal but when you spend two years of your life learning about “ye old English” and nothing fun like how to insult people in Shakespearian such as “thou art a yeasty cod-piece you illiterate cad”
ones opinion on old English can be a bit jaded.
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