Game-A-Week Episode 13: Heroes of the Storm

[9:48 PM]

Well, we did it. After League, this just felt like the only natural path we could go down.

[9:49 PM]

Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA like league but with a little bit more graphical polish.

[9:49 PM]

The game excels at trimming the fat of the features that most MOBAs including League, are bogged down by.

[9:50 PM]

Instead of characters being based around dedicated laning roles, they have more straight forward RPG-esque classes.

[9:51 PM]

Levels are party-wide instead of individualized so you can't feed unless you do it on purpose.

[9:53 PM]

Instead of an item shop, each character gets their own personalized skill tree so you don't have to worry about gold and each character has another layer of depth to them with their talents interacting directly with their abilities instead just getting some kind of general buff effect from an item.

[9:54 PM]

This allows for more fun, crazy stuff to happen. Like my toad Nazeebo build which makes his ability to Summon Toads absolutely bonkers. Each character even has TWO ultimate abilities you can choose from thanks to this system.

[9:55 PM]

Heroes of the Storm does a really good job of taking all the best qualities of the MOBA genre and cutting out all the worse qualities. This makes games a lot more fast paced, dynamic and fun.

[9:56 PM]

Each map has its own unique mechanic that MUST be played to your advantage otherwise it could mean a swift end to your side.

[9:57 PM]

Compare this to League's SINGLE map with no special mechanics.

[9:57 PM]

Although, there is ONE thing both League and Heroes have in common.

[9:58 PM]

And that's a lack of balance.

[9:59 PM]

The difference is, in League's case, there are only handful of characters worth using out of their one hundred-something to choose from.

[9:59 PM]

In the case of Heroes (of the Storm)..... There is a single character that's just better than anyone else.

[10:00 PM]

And wouldn't you guess.... It's the World Breaker himself, the Cataclysmic Destroyer, the reason a lot of people quit WoW because his exapnsion truly was the beginning of the game's decline.....

[10:00 PM]

Yes... His name.... Is Deathwing.

[10:01 PM]

Deathwing is just better than anyone else you can pick to be.

[10:02 PM]

He does obnoxious amounts of damage, he has boss-level amounts of health and he's completely immune to CC (So no stuns or debuffs of any sort)

[10:03 PM]

His only weakness is that once he starts breathing fire, he can't move until he's done. But that only works if you're not standing in front of him because anyone caught in his fire is DEAD before they can reach him.

[10:04 PM]

Now, Deathwing is the newest hero added to the game and he came in after the official Heroes of the Storm esport circuit permanently shut down.

[10:04 PM]

So this just screamed to me a big ol' "Fuck it, we don't care anymore. Its not like anything we do matters now"

[10:05 PM]

Deathwing is the single most unbalanced character I've ever seen in any competitive game ever. It feels great when you're playing AS him but playing AGAINST him is just the worst.

[10:06 PM]

Now, I have a story to tell about Deathwing and I promised the guys in the group chat yesterday I'd tell it so here goes:

[10:07 PM]

So last night as I was doing my final day on Heroes of the Storm for Game-A-Week, someone in general chat asked how everyone was liking Deathwing.

[10:07 PM]

So I answered with what I just told you above.

[10:08 PM]

And I immediately got told "You're new, of course someone like Deathwing would seem too strong lmao"

[10:09 PM]

So I said "My Hots account is 4 years old, I'm far from new"

[10:10 PM]

His response? "4 years and you only ever got to level 69? You're new."

[10:10 PM]

I said "Well, I quit a while back but I don't have to be an expert on the game to know he's busted."

[10:11 PM]

He said "You can't possibly know what balance is, you're not a high enough level for us to take you seriously"

[10:12 PM]

What? Are we back in 2004 where your Runescape combat level is the only thing that mattered when talking about the game? So I told him I had a college degree in game design so I think I have a fair idea of what game balance is since, you know, I've studied it for four years.

[10:13 PM]

Suddenly he starts mocking me in all caps, saying I was SO desperate to have people take me seriously that I'm digging up random credentials.

[10:13 PM]

How did this escalate so quickly?

[10:16 PM]

So I just said "When did I ever say any of those words?" (In response to the all caps mocking) and I said, I just meant to say that I'm not some random guy, I've actually studied this topic and I know what I'm talking about. I even say a QA tester will play a game for less than an hour and report on the game's balance based on that.

[10:17 PM]

He continues to mock me and say that only a pro with hundreds of hours in the game can understand what balance is.

[10:17 PM]

And at this point, I gave up.

[10:18 PM]

It wasn't just one guy either. I was constantly being mocked and harassed in and outside of PMs about this from several different people.

[10:20 PM]

I don't know what the deal with Blizzard games is but they somehow manage to attract THE most toxic people I've ever encountered. Apparently, according to this guy, you can't form an opinion on the game unless you're a pro. I couldn't even FATHOM the amount of stupidity that I had witnessed.

[10:20 PM]

But enough about that

[10:21 PM]

I had mentioned that this is a game I've quit before. Yeah, I used to be really into this game but I dropped it for some reason.

[10:21 PM]

Well, on my first day back, I remembered who I mained. His name was Gall and he was one half of the two person controlled character Cho'Gall.

[10:22 PM]

I try to queue up for a match and.... "You cannot choose Gall because there is no available player to choose Cho"

[10:23 PM]

In that moment, I remembered EXACTLY why I quit the game.

[10:25 PM]

You can't queue up as Cho'Gall. You have to be in a group with another person that picked the other half that you picked. I never understood why it was this way. Just put a little warning that queue times will be longer because it has to find another person queueing up as the other half in addition to other players

[10:26 PM]

The game does have a party finder but most folks would rather queue up solo than group with strangers. And even if you DO find a group of randos, most won't want to play the other half of Cho'Gall with you.

[10:26 PM]

I can understand why, there's no way for you to get any practice as either halves of this character.

[10:27 PM]

And since my friends are trash, getting to play my main is unlikely at best. Most of the time, its impossible.

[10:29 PM]

And as you can imagine, being unable to play my main, pretty much ruined the game for me. Imagine if you couldn't play your favorite character in a game. I think it would ruin it for you too. It also didn't help that OverWatch came out just a month later so it was easy for me to stop caring about this game after another, better competitive game by the same company was released. In fact, I pretty much stopped caring about the game the second OverWatch came out.

[10:29 PM]

So that's why I quit the first time.

[10:29 PM]

And its going to be why I quit a second and final time.

[10:34 PM]

Other than a boatload of new characters, some of which, are Heroes of the Storm originals (Which, kinda goes against the core concept of the game). These orginal character do not steals gross me out. When I play a game like this, I want to play as characters I care about like Elite Tauren Chieftain not some rando I've never heard of before. That'd be like if Master Hand was playable in Smash Bros. OF course, nowadays, we'd all love to play as Master Hand, he's an iconic part of the game. But think back to Smash 64, the first Smash Bros. You wouldn't want to play as Master Hand, you'd want to play as Pikachu. (Until you found out he was the final boss and that makes him instantly cooler but I digress)

[10:35 PM]

There's also a loot system. Every time you level up, you get a loot box that contains four items in it. This is nice because you can get skins for free this way.

[10:36 PM]

But.... There's a lot of junk included like spray, profile pictures, emojis, VOICE LINES, just a lot of stuff I REALLY don't care about.

[10:37 PM]

Plus, you can even get a skin for a character that you don't even own so when you DO get a skin, you can't even use it half the time.

[10:38 PM]

Also, unlike League, you have to equip skins on the character select screen BEFORE you queue up which is very hard to find. I got a really nice skin for Tyrande but it took me a few matches to figure out how to actually use it.

[10:39 PM]

There's a tiiiiny button that says "loadout" on the bottom left corner of the screen and THAT takes you to the menu where you can equip skins.

[10:39 PM]

Its a very backward and annoying system.

[10:40 PM]

But once I found it, I cloud finally see Tyrande's feet. Aaaaand then switch back to using Deathwing because why wouldn't I?

[10:44 PM]

I give Heroes of the Storm a 5/10. While, thanks to its fast paced and dynamic gameplay, I DO like it better than the other MOBA seen here on Game-A-Week, League of Legends, being unable to play as my favorite character really does ruin the game for me. I will continue to play this game temporarily just to see how far I can go in Ranked without ranking down. And then I'll quit again. Permanently this time.

[10:48 PM]

Also, Jaina's hot bod is in the Warcraft III remake so nothing of value is lost.

[10:49 PM]

Then again... I DID find there were more hot bods in the game since the last time I played....

[10:49 PM]

[10:49 PM]