as much as ToD has its flaws (I personally think its very snowbally), its still a huge leg up compared to all of the older maps before it.
I remember being told this back before the rework. I didn’t see to done super often in my small sample of games played on it.
Anyway, isn’t that only an issue if one of the teams doesn’t know about that strategy?
Made me google release dates. 
I’d say at least tomb of spider queen is better than ToD. 2 paying spots, gameplay makes people want to lane, and the big spiders are imo better than garden’s giant flowers, with the wave attacks behind gates and the spawnlings. Losing a tower also doesn’t gut your access to objective(s).
Unless you’re comparing ToD to OG variants of the other maps, which I don’t know.
The guaranteed objective when they spawn top is a nice thing, but it’s a double edged sword; if you’re too behind, you also have to risk overextending for the one on enemy’s side. Same for the boss being guaranteed value; it’s fun when you wipe enemy team and get it, not so much when on the receiving end.
Lack of knowledge of said strategies doesn’t mean the map is balanced on the lack of said knowledge of it.
You don’t win games by simply just collecting the tributes on Cursed Hollow, you win by capitalizing on the what the map provides, free reign and terrorizing the enemy under towers, not to get free push (which already happens automatically anyways but imagine the enemy team AFK for 40 more seconds respawning), unlike Hanamura, this map is balanced because the game doesn’t punish you until 3 tributes and defensive is trivial to just spread and “try” to soak lanes because usually the enemy loses more of the XP than gained.
On Hanamura Temple, the payload takes a very long time to get pushed and even gets pushed faster the more players near it (up to 3), if say you lose the objective because you cannot contest the cap or stall, then you reply back by doing the best thing, pushing for free the opposite lane of where they are about to cap, as a group or the solo lane, either works and you will get exact value.
This sounds neat the objective can be re-contested in other ways, but its heavily flawed that makes the objective itself extremely useless in the process, if someone pushes it, they are just asking themselves to get pushed back as a reply, Haunted Mines is exactly like this, if you are going to gather skulls, get the pumpkin camps and push HARD, they reply back to depush? Then you send someone to get most of the skulls in the mines, the game will just circulate like this back and forth people maybe at some point forget that there was a skull to collect somewhere.
Why both of these takes the heat unlike Curse Hollow? Because unlike both, in Cursed Hollow losing forts is huge big of a deal of map control and it happens fast because your defense got nuked for more than a minute, making the tribute very beneficial, in Hanamura however, you have multiple options that are just better than pushing the payload itself, making the payload weak and irrelevant unless you are already stomping the game so hard.
I can say though that this isn’t exactly only the fault of the map’s design but the game’s balance where they buffed generally a lot of heroes but not upping towers, they in general became weaker with every patch that increased numbers that at some point its normal to see level 10 team pushing fort after at least 2 kills WITHOUT MINIONS, 6 minutes into the game than say 6 years ago.
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Because of the 2 bosses that are really fast to do compared to any other maps and can push a lot by themselves. The real strat is to manage to maintain enemies in fight on the obj while your boss is pushing hard. It’s an overall design.
Tower control sets HotS apart from other “moba” games, where towers offer a sizable chunk of gold for items.
- HotS could have retained the ‘ammo’ mechanic for structures as rebuilding refills ammo, so it’s not a one-off cheese mechanic anymore.
- “Specialist” heroes could have had kits to work with the ToD’s objective controlling, rebuilding, shielding, towers, etc. So that would enable more unique heroes instead of the generalization that has hit some heroes with reworks to suit powercreep.
The core HP is an easy “score” to understand for a sports audience.
- HotS tried to be an “esport”, but a lay watcher isn’t going to know how to follow what is happening, how to tell who is winning, or feel for an upset. A lot of those flaws are less problematic in ToD compared to other maps.
- The “Hp” could count up instead of down, and the game could have had a time limit to better suit the expectations of a ‘sport’, or players that want to quit waiting out the clock.
ToD is a ‘hard’ map for pug players because they already ingrained a bunch of bad habits from QM. Of the games I watch, ToD feels like it has the higher comeback potential in organized play, which reinforces my impression on how the map may look to a wider audience as spectators.
If it had been the on-release map that shaped the first impression of the game, I think HotS could have stood out as a better, unique, experience instead of trying to be “LoL killer” that didn’t meet suit stock expectations.
I suppose I never thought about it that way because I mainly only played it in QM as Zeratul before his self sustain got moved to level 13. I could clean the entire mine if ignored, but that was pretty rare.
This is what they need to change, the top/bot neutral sappers, turn them in to vision camps (not my idea) but should make the OBJ more equal footing to getting all 4 camps
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I agree that sappers are not the best option on the map.
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