Heroes of the Storm players

stonecutter#1990

I'm pretty bad

Hey jack, which of the bundles do you recommend? I was thinking the balanced one but wanted to get your take.

I got the pile-o-tanks. When you suck (as I do), tanks are the smart play, as you last longer and MIGHT be able to recover from a mistake or overextension. Plus it has Rag and he's hilarious.

Jeb is right. The Tanks and Bruisers one is probably the safest for newer players, since it has some high durability guys that you can make some mistakes with like Muradin (probably the most forgiving character in the game) and Thrall, but still has some more unusual picks like Xul and Alarak so you're not totally confined to a "You play Warrior now!" situation.

Sorry. I was on all night and forgot to add anyone to my friends list, if you were looking for the request. Didn't see any come through, either, but it would have been pretty easy to miss with the overwhelming glut of eye candy. I played 8 or 9 games and managed to complete at least one, if not more, loadout for all of my toons. Crafted a couple things, too. I'd gotten the Toxic Diablo Prime skin on the PTR and didn't roll it in my chests, so that was 1600 shards immediately gone. But it's SO cool! Unlike the gallop of his other skins, this one scuttles in mounted mode like it's stalking something, Had a great comeback on Infernal Shrines. We were getting wrecked in the midgame; like "17 to 13" wrecked. We had a Cho'Gall who was having trouble and my friend, Mike, had decided to go with Nova, whom he's really good with, but Nova does jack-all on Shrines because she can't contribute to the objective at all and also can't waveclear and we're down a lane presence already with CG. So, I was gritting my teeth a bit when he opted into that but, again, he's really good with her.

So I look up at one point and see the level difference and I'm ready to resign myself to the loss. But here's where the "6.5. No comebacks." meme truly reveals itself. They had two problems: 1. An ETC who was really aggressive and setting himself up for a lot of picks. 2. They bunched up a lot. The former was easy to take advantage of. We won a teamfight shortly after the 17-13 disparity because ETC chased me into that little alleyway by the middle shrine and I promptly Overpowered him right between me and Cho'Gall. One dead cow later, we won a 5v4 which really became a 5v3 when Nova erased their Li Ming. You gain yuuuge XP for killing heroes that are higher level than you. The next shrine came up and they kept piling into a corner to either chase us or kill guardians. You know what's really good against bunched up heroes? Apocalypse and Shadow Bolt Volley. Especially after 20, when the latter pierces. That's a quadruple kill and a walk to the core to win a game we really shouldn't have. Mike ended up with a dozen kills. I got top siege and top XP and still didn't make the MVP screen. sigh...

Also played a ton of the new Uther. He's teh awesome. www.heroesfire.com/hots/talent-calculator/uther#kHzr This is kinda the build I was using, but I swapped in stuff all over the place, pending circumstances. I love Holy Fire. I want to use Holy Fire! But Shock is so good. I racked up so many kills with a last second Shock. Plus it refunds mana and still heals me. That last point is key because people are very aware that Uther is quite good right now and they will try to focus you down even more than before when they figured you were a chump and an easy kill (and were right, most of the time.) That's why Pursuit of Justice isn't outrageous on that tier.

Tier 1: I like all three quests, but Wave is the easiest/least risky to complete and brings the most benefit to your team and not just you.
Tier 2: Take your pick. I still favor Shock, but you could make an argument for any of them.
Tier 3: Hand of Prot (aka Cleanse) is the best IF (50 point font IF!), you know how and when to use it. If not, go with Guardian, which can effectively do the same thing (i.e. save someone who's gonna die.)
Tier 4: Shield is still so, so good, especially if you have the awareness/skill to save someone at a clutch moment. OTOH, most QM fights are such clusterfucks that Storm has insane value and even more right now with so many new players.
Tier 5: Spell Shield for if you're really getting focused, but Well Met can set up kills like nothing else and Uther, now being a true front-liner, can set them up as good as many Warriors. I wish Blessed healed for 20%.
Tier 6: I took Beacon because I was getting hit hard at the 16 power spike, but I swapped out for Benediction a lot because Piano Uther is still a thing. That said, if you end up in a double Support comp (I had one, maybe?), Tyr's can easily be the pick.
Tier 7: I stuck with Redemption because I'm weak and was getting focused (this is like a chorus) I didn't try Divine Prot but it looks amazing. First thing I'm doing the next time I hit 20. But... Redemption...

Anyway, he's huge (yuge!) fun and I'm probably going to craft that Felflame skin, even though I have the Judgement one and love it.

Invites sent.
I went with the balanced bundle but I still have 66k to spend. Who else should I buy?

Hm. Depends on what you like to play.but I'd try to round out your roster with a couple from each of the other classes. A couple good and cheap supports are Li Li (solid damage, easy to use), Uther (burst healing, can stand in the front line with the warriors), and Brightwing (sustained healing, great CC with Poly, global presence,) Plus you already have Kharazim, but he's a fairly high skill cap guy.

You have three of the best melee assassins in Illidan, Thrall, and Ragnaros. So you could grab some ranged assassins like Kael'thas (awesome waveclear, high burst potential), Tychus (tank killer, short range, decent mobility), and Falstad (great single target burst, amazing utility with Gust, global presence.)

I continue to love Lucio. I get really sad when I don't get to play him in unranked draft (which is where I almost exclusively play now).

Speed kills.

Lucio is the shit. I love playing with him and as him. I spent some of my shards to get his amber formerly-master skin, which will probably be the only one I ever use. However, if you ever want to team up in draft and we can get the Arthas/Lucio combo (Arthas was one of my favorites from when he was a killing machine in the beta; I have almost all of his skins), then we will murderize people. Arthas already has such great self-sustain that being topped off occasionally by Lucio makes him basically immortal. And Arthas with a speed boost is redonkulous. You... cannot... escape! And your attack speed now sucks, too!

I was goofing with Lucio yesterday against bad AI and could not get enough of booping retreating enemies back into our team's kill zone. Holy shit that is a good time. I can't imagine what a skilled player can do with this guy.

Save me, jeebus. I hate Nova. I HATE Nova. And yet, it's the character that my friend, Mike, loves to play. And it's not like he's bad with her. 6-8 takedowns per game plus an unknowable number of assists is a solid Nova player. But she's still so limited that it drives me nuts. "Hey, Nova! Let's clear this wave-! Oh. No. Never mind." "Hey, Nova, help us take this Knight camp-! Wait. Don't bother." It's the definition of monochromatic:

"What do you do?"
"I kill people."
And she's not even as interesting as Leon . Gimme the fucking houseplant any day.

We're in a game last night on Towers. I'm on Li Li because she's OP OP right now in the damage build. The reason I went damage is because we had a Morales, plus Leoric and Li Ming. The even greater upside to playing Li Li in this situation was our opposing team: Butcher, Tychus, Varian. Li Li's most overpowered ability right now is Blinding Wind. A blind. Against three of the most powerful auto-attackers in the game (they also had a Li Li and a Genji.) It was hilarious. I don't think the Butcher got a kill the whole game. Every time he'd dive in, I'd just blind him and we'd turn and try to erase him. That said, that's a ton of DPS on some fairly durable (or evasive) toons, so we went down 8 points in the midgame. But proper soaking gave us the XP edge and we reached 20 while our opponents were still at 18, so we were able to take two rounds of altars without much trouble and then won a teamfight 3-0 and closed it out.

Also, for anyone who may not know, Alt + whatever ability you want to use is a self-cast. I had to inform an overzealous Medivh of that last night so that he could save himself a couple times with Force of Will (Alt+W), rather than trying to pick himself out with the mouse in the midst of a chaotic fight.

Brewmiester wrote: Invites sent.
I went with the balanced bundle but I still have 66k to spend. Who else should I buy?

Assuming you mean the flex bundle...I'd get Kharazim.

Kharazim is a support but if you go with his E build he can do insane damage. The way Kharazim works is all of his abilities that do damage do it via basic attacks.

His E ability, deadly reach, doubles his attack speed and attack range for 2 seconds, with a 10 second cooldown.

You take insight at level 1. Every 3 basic attacks gives you a bit of mana back, and you gain a stack of insight. and at 100 stacks, every three hits causes all of his cooldowns to be reduced by 1 second.

At level 7 you take blazing fists, which reduces the cooldown of his E by 0.75 seconds, which will stack with insight once you get your 100 stacks.

His level 13 doubles the duration of E to 4 seconds.

His BASE attack speed is 2, so with deadly reach active, you're hitting 4 times per second, and with a duration of 4 seconds, you're landing 16 blows. 16 blows will proc both insight and blazing fists five times, reducing the cooldown of deadly reach by 8.75 seconds, and since the duration of the ability is 4 seconds, you can literally always be using deadly reach so long as you're close enough to something to punch. If you have to stutter step, 4 procs will still allow you to use it indefinitely, and 3 procs will let you use it with only a 0.75 second gap. As if that wasn't enough, insight's mana return will more than cover the cost of reactivating deadly reach.

This doesn't even factor in you hitting W on cooldown for sustain or using seven sided strike as your ultimate which keeps landing blows and makes you invincible for the duration.

His damage isn't THAT high, so It's not as broken as that might make it sound, but it's fucking FUN when you get it going, because you can go Q>E>Q>E to initiate, pound, chase and pound again, and god help anyone who doesn't realize what you're about to do. Backline supports just melt to this and king of the hill type objectives become your killing fields.

I'd probably also get Lucio. He's ridiculous right now. He's almost as effective as Morales but a lot more fun to use as he has the escapably that Morales lacks.

I'd get Gul'Dan, too. He has a really high skill cap in that he has no natural mana regen and must spend life to keep his spells fueled, but oh man, those spells.

His Q is a cone that does a great deal of damage and can be cast in quick succession. his W is a life steal effect that can help him keep his mana full, and his E... oh man his E. It's 3 columns of damage that hit hard initially and then even harder over time.

I don't think there's a non-ult, non-disable ability I fear more than GulDan's E. Chromie's W does more damage but is easy to avoid, same for Li Ming's W, Kael'thas's Q is close, but that's also easier to avoid. A skilled GulDan can place it so it hits you with all three columns as you run away,

You already have them, but I'd spend time learning Varian and Nazeebo, probably my two favorite heroes and two of the easier heroes to play. Varian's taunt build will end up getting nerfed soon edit: apparently not, they seem to have just buffed it, actually, lol because it's ridiculously OP but as long as they keep his twin blades of fury build he'll still be a blast. Nazeebo is one of the best laners in the game. Both spider build and toad build are viable (zombie probably is too, but I almost never use it) and his trait can stack infinitely, and at level 20 you can take a talent that will apply the poison damage to heroes.

Also, learn Abathur. I can't even begin to express both how rewarding he is, and how much better I got at the game because I learned how to play Abathur, even though I'm still not very good with him. There are so many ways to build and play him. Here's a good video. It's a bit old but it gets the basics down

Got into a couple solid games last night; the first one with Stonecutter and my friend, Mike. We hopped on Team League and ended up in Hanamura. The jury is still out on this map for me. Unlike Towers of Doom, which I immediately enjoyed, Hanamura still kind of bugs me in some cases. With the Core health bars being so low and the objective so linear (not a random number of altars in random locations after the first couple, as in Towers), it seems like getting an edge in the escort game means that the chance of a comeback becomes very limited. One of the common strategies is to gangbang a fort right at the start and go up 7-5. At that point, you can trade payloads for the rest of the game and your opponents will never threaten. It's weird.

Anyway, Stonecutter was on Li Li and I went with Thrall to try to solo a lane, Mike went with Zul'jin, even though he doesn't have a ton of experience with him. We also had a Johanna and a Sonya (Thankfully, they didn't have any blinds.) We traded payloads 1-for-1 for most of the game until we won a couple fights late and were able to get a 1 point edge. As soon as their Core dropped to 1, I started pinging the boss so we could close it out, but we didn't put it together until we went through another fight. Thankfully, I had the healing coin which ensured that we won that engagement, even though my health dropped significantly. We finally got on the boss, but the opposing Tyrael was back by then and, of course, had Holy Ground. I died to boss damage (man, he hits hard) and the Tyrael tried the steal but our team was able to outlast the Holy Ground and take the boss and the game.

Stonecutter had to leave to spend time with other humans (Who does that? We have XP to gain here, man!) so we switched to Unranked, since the queue time for 2s in TL was long. Somehow, in his first ever game of Unranked, Mike ended up being the banner. We were on Shrines and he had no clue. Classically, my first thought would have been Kerrigan, but this was Unranked, so I didn't know if that was even on their minds. I suggested Ragnaros and he banned that. They banned Stitches. Za? Mike wanted Abathur and two others had already pre-selected KT and Butcher. So damage wasn't going to be an issue, but sustain might, so I went with Tyrael as a front-liner. He's decent on the Shrines with Smite and is one of the best peelers in the game for KT and can try to keep Butcher alive on his inevitable dives with Righteousness. Our last guy was happy to play Brightwing, which at least gave us a global. Our opponents had already lined up Li Ming, Morales, and Nova. I told Mike he should ban one of the better tanks and someone else suggested Varian. My initial thought was Dehaka, to deny them a global. Their last two picks were, of course, Dehaka and Kerrigan.

So they had assloads of single-target removal, but were also kind of fragile on any target but the one Morales was on. Thankfully, our team recognized that and set about trying to erase anyone but Morales and her target. We lost the first two Punishers but played both of them correctly (i.e. behind the wall), so we had no teamwork issues. Mike had windowed out for a moment and, in clicking back into the game, took Survival Instincts, instead of the hat build (Glands) he prefers to play. As it turns out, the Instincts may have been really helpful, as he took down the bottom fort alone and fairly early. I took a mixed build with Tyrael: www.heroesfire.com/hots/talent-calculator/tyrael#hCCB

I went with some damage talents like Purge and Burning Rage because they were SO fragile. If I El'Druined next to Nova or Li Ming, they were going to die (and did, frequently; I think I had 8 or 9 kills. With Tyrael.) But Sanct is still Sanct and it led directly to my highlight of the game. We'd gotten into a lengthy fight on the third shrine, an Arcane one on top. At first it seemed like we had the edge, but then things imploded and we were in retreat. Morales and Nova had already died for them, but then KT, Butcher, and Brightwing all got run down by Dehaka and Li Ming's resets. I came late to the party after clearing a wave in mid. I immediately teleported next to Li Ming and killed her and was then engaged by Dehaka and Kerrigan returning from in front of our keep. Righteousness buffered the initial attacks and then exploded and Burning Rage just kept grinding them down. Dehaka burrowed to try to survive, but died when he emerged. Kerrigan was doing good damage (and gaining shields) so I flipped Sanctification and Smited to stay close to her when she started to run and took her out. So, yes, that was a 1v3 that I won. With Tyrael and about 10% health left. I walked into the Shrine, took the Punisher, Brightwing revived and 'ported to me and we escorted it in to take our first keep. Abathur took the second and suddenly we had a 20-17 advantage and wrapped up the game shortly thereafter.

Yeah that was a fun game. I didn't feel like I was particularly effective, but that's basically every Lili game. I would have gone Lucio but he was first ban, I probably should have taken brightwing.

Regardless, I think I hate Hanamura. Every HOTS map has a mechanism to encourage team fights, and that's a good thing, but with the way Hanamura staggers the payloads you're basically forced to leave team fights once your payload spawns. I did that several times last night because everyone else was engaged and nobody was pushing the cart. Plus, if you do start down 6-5 your odds of coming back are lower than on just about any other map, which is one thing that HOTS is normally great at.

Ironically, this week's Tavern Brawl which more traditionally mirrored Overwatch's payload levels was a ton of fun.

No worries. I didn't play well, either. As I noted during the game, I kept trying to do too much, overextending, and getting killed. I think I'm just rusty as Thrall, too. I'm also not sure that trying to solo a lane on that map is even worth it, since rotations are so frequent by dint of the objective and the XP gain from minions isn't nearly as significant as that of mercs. Since the latter don't push on that map, you get a huge XP boost just for taking the camp and getting whatever gadget they drop. That's why I kept pinging the health guy. I wanted the XP edge, in addition to the healing coin, so we could win the next fight for sure. Li Li was far more effective before Tuesday, when they reverted some of the buffs they'd applied to Blinding Wind. I was wrecking people with it for a while in QM. She's thisfar from hitting level 10 for me, as a result (not that that's nearly as impactful as it used to be.)

I haven't played a Brawl in a while. I got out of the habit because I was generating enough gold to buy heroes just by doing dailies (I seem to get the 600 and 800 ones on a regular basis) and since I've owned the majority of heroes as the game has moved along, I had less compulsion to get gold. Now that the brawl only gives a loot box, I have less reason than ever. They did enhance them by allowing heroes to gain XP when used in brawls, which was another point of reluctance, but it's still not really enough to pull me out of the regular game. It's too bad, because I really liked the ARAM and Punisher Arena ones. My favorite Arena ever was a Caverns where I was on Chromie. People just stroll down the only lane there, ignoring the side paths, and It's almost literally like shooting fish in a barrel with Sand Blast. I racked up 13 or 14 kills.