Wipe enemy team

General Discussion
1

Ping to do boss.

Playing tank… forcibly start boss when nobody comes to me after 20 seconds.

Another 20 seconds, nobody coming. I start ping spamming.

Nobody coming. Valla and Malth are less than 1 screen away from me, attacking lane minions. And standing around, waiting for the next wave to come.

About 10 seconds later, enemy team starts trickling in to defend boss.

I die. Our Murky dies, whom was trying to help me do boss. (But it’s Murky so whatever.)

Malth says…

MALTH SAYS…

“Boss was a bad call.”

P.S.
These numbers are not exaggerated. I have saved the replay.

2 Likes
2

When you wipe the enemy team, you should push a fort/keep down. Doing a boss is OK, but not as valuable as destroying their real estate. Without seeing the replay, I might agree with your Malth.

10 Likes
3

I mean boss isn’t always the best call, but it’s probably better than minion waves.

4

Which is why I said to push down a building. Depending on respawn timers, it is often best to break something that can’t be replaced, even if it is just the towers and front wall.

3 Likes
5

I mean, as always, EVERYTHING is subject to situational elements. But this was clean, everyone had HP, etc etc.

I DEFINITELY agree that you wanna push forts/keeps. That’s a BIG gripe of mine, that people always just DO NOTHING and never push. Even just good old fashion sieging, when enemy team is alive, which is still very strong in Hots. You just have to be winning the war, and it’s very much worth doing.

However, doing boss while they’re down lets you THEN get your forts/keeps WITH boss (since an enemy team can’t fight your team AND boss, it’s an automatic winning situation). And then you ALSO deny THEM boss, and you don’t have to worry about it. Two super solid reasons to take boss. The forts/keeps are right after, so why not?

6

that always happens on bronze-silver ranks, dont even bother to make them think because they don’t

1 Like
7

Well, on that note, my counter-point is that… the buildings can be killed at any time. And they can only be killed once.

Killing something like boss, that can be done as many times as you allow it.

In other words: Plenty of time to get that fort/keep later. (And will actually be doing it in literally 1 minute, btw.) But this boss? We can do it now, and be able to do it again that much sooner when it comes back up later on.

8

Killing a fort/keep means passive XP, vision advantage, and a permanent team fight advantage since they do not have a safe place to retreat. A boss is temporary, and doing the boss, especially in the early game when they are weak, just gives the enemy team time to respawn and defend, meaning you actually accomplished nothing during the time they were dead.

If the enemy only loses two heroes, that is a good time to boss. A full team wipe? Break their stuff.

5 Likes
9

Too much time wasted. You either need to start a merc camp immediately or not at all. During that 20 seconds you stood around you could have done well over 2,000 damage to stuff and not ended up giving the enemies a kill and an easy boss.

I usually suggest taking the boss by ping and start heading towards it, but if it appears that I will be a one-man show then abort before wasting too much time. Even if taking the boss was the right decision, trying to solo it when an enemy team will be up is a bad idea. The enemy team will know what you are doing as they can see the other players and you are missing so you are likely alone, taking some kind of camp with minimal allied support.

4 Likes
11

There really are people in this world who immediately start boss after Cursing the enemy team.

12

Right or wrong call on the boss, if you are with a bunch of strangers in your game and you ping to help you with something you can’t do on your own, give it 5 second to see if they start heading your way or ping back at you, if not just leave it. At best you wasted some time at worst you’ve died and left your team in a jam.

You can try to lead the horse to water but you can’t make’em drink.

Edit LordWarp beat me to it! but yeah pretty much what they said.

1 Like
13

So, I forgot to include… The reason I forcibly started it was that I was hoping it would make my team go, “Oh, gotta get to it, it’s starting.” Since, sometimes, the reason players don’t get their butts to something is because they think they have more time than they have to go get to it (rather than them just being brainless zombies doing nothing all game).

It actually works a good amount of the time. Just, not this time… Yeah maybe I shoulda just backed off even after that. But I guess I was too wrapped up in my amazement and rage. I’m only human.

The EXP from finite sources is… exactly that. Finite. You will get that EXP at some point during the game. Why sacrifice something like a boss for that? Boss will even give you EXP. That’s like, say in League of Legends, sacrificing a dragon in order to get an outer tower (with no first tower bonus). It’s… actually exactly like that.

In fact, I totally think your analysis is backwards. If you kill about 2 enemy heroes, that’s a good time to push buildings. Three remaining enemies can easily fumble your boss attempt, since a threatening monster is attacking your team. But if you press your body advantage in a fort/keep push, you can easily overpower them like it’s nothing, and get that building down AND anyone who dared try to defend it.

…

And… there you go. Lol.

14

Not sure how it is in LoL but in HotS taking down forts/keeps >>> boss

The xp is the smallest contributing factor, them losing map presence is a huge thing and makes the next objective/boss much more deadly.
It still depends on comps but the average team can deal with a boss before it even completely destroys the towers.

Taking boss is a safer bet when there’s less enemies over pushing forts because boss damage can largely, if not completely be negated by a decent tank and/or support.
If a team can get caught in a wombo because of boss abilities when fighting 5v3 then I don’t think it’s the boss that’s the real issue.
When pushing in their lanes it puts you directly under an armor shredding beam and also puts you much closer to the place they’ll respawn from.

But again it really depends on what the current comps and map is because every scenario will have a different “right” call.

2 Likes
15

It also depends on the stage of the game. Early bosses are all but useless, but a late game boss is often a win condition.

16

Bosses are mostly a push enabler. For example if you wipe the enemy and take the curse you push the enemy on all lanes hard to get a massive advantage. Then as curse is ending and you killed stuff you fall back to take boss as a 5 group. When the enemies revive they will be busy de-pushing the lanes so by the time they can get to boss it is too late and you now have a boss to push with. Pushing with a boss is good since it acts as a hazard and deals a ton of damage to stuff in the lane it is in. This allows you to force a team fight and gives you advantage in it on top of your likely level lead. At this stage you have quite likely won the game as there is usually little the enemy can do to stop a boss on a largely cleared lane with a level disadvantage.

1 Like
17

If you don’t want to do a boss, fine. You may be right, and we can disagree, but saying it after your ally dies when you intentionally torpedoed any chance of its success by not contributing is pretty cowardly.

Could have easily just pinged a fort to indicate you want to push and someone would have gotten the clue.

18

Yeah, the Malthael’s comment was unnecessary, for sure. But whether or not the boss was the right call depends on too many things we do not know, so without the replay, the best I can do is reconstruct what I can from the few details in the OP.

What we know:

It was a map with a boss, likely a single boss based on the description. My guess is Sky Temple based on the draft picks we know, but it could be Tomb of the Spider Queen.

The OP’s team had a Malthael, a Valla (no idea which build), a Murky, a tank of some sort, and I would guess an unnamed healer. The healer may have been dead, given that no mention was made of them at all.

It may have been early game, or the enemy team probably had structures up, given that Malth and Valla were clearing a wave close by. I am discounting the time stamps in the OP as people are notoriously bad at estimating lengths of time.

We don’t know the enemy team comp at all.

With this in mind, a boss call was likely not the best decision, as their team has bad boss racing with a Malthael and Murky, so even if they came over, it is unlikely that it would be down fast enough to get any value in lane. It might have been doable if the Valla went Q build, but given that it doesn’t sound like a good Q build map, it is more likely she went Multi-shot if she was good, AA build if this were Gold or lower. If the OP were playing a Sledgehammer Muradin, it might have been doable.

Although they don’t have great push with their comp, even just getting some towers down makes a difference. Especially on the two maps this could have been, the boss area is known as the “throw pit” for a reason!

Bosses can definitely be a start to a snowball, or a win condition, but from the description in the OP, there just isn’t enough information. When I am tanking, if my team wants to do a boss, I will follow along as it is better to do the wrong thing as a team than the right thing on my own. However, in that situation, I probably would have pinged the structure and tanked some tower shots for them.

If the OP has the replay, it would be very interesting to see what actually happened, as for all we know, the boss may have been the right call.

19

We don’t know, but I think your analysis is a bit off. First off, they most likely wiped the enemy team together unless for some weird reason, the team wiped separately in different lanes. So, the fact is they were probably all together at one point. That probably means some of the teammates chose to not come. The tank even waited 20 seconds before engaging. If they all had come together, that boss would have been down no matter what comp you had.

What makes it even worse is the OP said they were clearing minions, not structures, and even worse, doing nothing and waiting around waiting for the next wave. Malthael and Valla are also good at boss just from their traits alone. The optimal spec for boss rushing, though matters, is pretty marginal in the grand scheme with those two. A Valla’s AA damage at full hatred which is easy to do against bosses will shred bosses even without talents.

Like you said, a replay would best illuminate the choice, but I despise players who are snide about their self fulfilling incompetence after the fact. I’d have so much respect if you just said, no your strat sucks, I’m not coming.

20

I agree that they likely fought together, but the fact that the healer for the OPs team is not mentioned at all, my guess is that they died in that fight. I also agree that standing around in a lane doing nothing is worse than throwing in a boss pit, but as the tank, I would have tanked a building for them before tanking a boss, especially without a healer, and no competition from the enemy team. I think too many people overvalue bosses compared to getting some real push accomplished.

It would be nice if the OP would post the replay, as this is really all just speculation.

21

The healer was alive. They came to my aid a little late, about when the enemy team finally showed up. They agreed my call was correct but that nobody did anything for a hot minute.

Boss is better than forts 100% of the time, and usually better than keeps… because you will also get forts and/or keeps by pushing with that very boss. The only time the keep is better than the boss is if, for some weird reason, you REALLY can only get one of the two. But the ONLY reason that would really happen is if you’re losing ALL game, just a total disaster, nightmare game. Then the enemy team makes one big throw, and if you got boss, you’d frankly not even get anything after boss because your team is just that abysmal. That’s when you’d take the keep instead of the boss. But 99 times out of 100, you can take boss AND THEN the keep (plus make a push on the core, if applicable afterwards with the boss). There’s no universe in which you take a keep, only, and not boss, in a game where it’s at least equal footing or back & forth all game. Because a boss is also a keep, and then some.