Nice, that place is so close to my house. I’ll be there.
wonder how much evander kane will be booed in his first game back in winnipeg
i bet you byfuglien will be begging to play defense in that game so he can paste kane into the boards when he forechecks
All this HotS talk is making me kinda want to buy it. But I don’t wanna pay $40 for a beta moba that I might not even like…
Did you check if they gave you beta access? I got it without even realizing, and it seems like that has been the case for a lot of people.
Yeah I haven’t logged in to my b.net account for a year or two so I just checked it the other day. I didn’t have the HotS beta checked off until now so chances are slim of getting in I think.
i checked it off about a week ago and i got the invite in about 3 days after that.
I just won a key on khaldors stream but i gave it to my buddy 
I don’t know how someone couldn’t like HotS. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth (I had to buy the beta ) and I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love it yet (including more than a few people who traditionally dislike MOBAs… and people who love MOBAs also seem to like it. If only fighting games could find a balance like that)
I was really down on Blizzard in general the past few years, and this game reminded me why they’re so great.
the best parts of hots are the little touches
it’s unreal how much putting war3 music into a map just makes it un-hateable. the dragon knight map is probably the worst one to play but I don’t even care because dat soundtrack
so what’s the flow of hots like
in dota the flow involves pushing your creeps and farming and stuff, what do you do in hots when you aren’t engaging in big team fights
or do you just go across the map looking for people to fight 100% of the time
The flow is based on the scenario (the map). You don’t always want to be team fighting. And often there’s other teams you just can’t beat in a team fight but there’s still other ways you can win the game (leeching xp, better management of the objective etc).
It’s definitely more team fight heavy than the other two big MOBAs though. You want as few people involved in the team fight as required to win them/the objective though.
Every map has a different objective, there are various mercenary camps you can “beat up” and capture to help push your lanes.
One map for example, will have night fall every couple minutes, during nightfall it spawns 2 boss plant monsters and various small plant monsters that will drop flowers when you kill them.
When you collect 100 flowers your team will grow a gigantic plant monster that is extremely efficient at pushing the enemy lanes, so you want to try and prevent the enemy from getting their terror, while getting your own and trying to do as much siege damage as you can.
Another map is entirely different where you need to collect doubloons (coins) to pay a ghost pirate to shoot cannon barrages at your enemies base to destroy their buildings. Coins can be farmed from various doubloon mercenary camps, or two chests that spawn periodically throughout the map. When you have coins it shows how many you have, making you a target for the other team because when you die with coins on you, they drop and the enemy can take them for themselves. It takes like 5 seconds to actually “pay” coins, that is interuptable so it creates tension by teams trying to turn in the coins, or preventing the enemy team from doing the same thing.
It’s basically just overall funner gameplay with the various types of maps that all differ vastly. Instead of just jungling to kill creep, farming gold, buying items and team fighting when you know you can win, or whatever those typical moba games do. It also takes way less time to finish a game… there has been games that were finished in 10-11 minutes, while the longest has been maybe… 28 minutes or so?
There is also a hero roster of familiar characters that you’ve been playing for the ~20 years or so, in oppose to some generic character named “Storm Spirit” or some shit you couldn’t care less about.
i have absolutely 0 connection to the history of blizzard’s games so that wouldn’t be a problem for me
the different scenarios sound interesting i suppose, but it also feels like more to learn
i guess i’d have to see someone playing it to fully judge
The other big difference I feel is that dying cripples your team a lot less. You can be down 15 kills and still win without much problem.
Yeah… some of the maps have incredibly high comeback potential… primarily the laser temple map lol
The thing you gotta understand is that when people who don’t play mobas think about mobas, it’s extrmely technical details like builds, itemization for 80 chars and extremely obscure things you need to memorize
Hots has none of this
U pick a dude, he’s got like 4 really obvious abilities. You stay in a lane for a bit then you run off and capture hold points or pick up items or whatever
There’s more strategy involved I guess, but there’s a small map pool means you don’t need to know much and most of the maps are more or less the same with cosmetic changes
isn’t that a problem, though
like, dota is an intimidating game to learn but the end result (for those that do) is a very rewarding game with infinite competitive depth
if this game is just super easy to learn and “you don’t need to know much”, won’t that affect its long-term skill cap
it’ll help get beginner players into the genre, perhaps, but how much is there to the game?
IS THERE ANYTHING YOU DON’T COMPLAIN ABOUT
Maybe
I personally don’t think losing the reward for the ability to click on health bars when they reach a certain level for 25 minutes before doing anything remotely resembling “playing video games for fun” a big loss
The different item compositions allow for more complexity I guess, but more options doesn’t automatically mean it’s better. I think the term kiss applies pretty well to moba games in general
I am hoping that this is what will happen. I am really liking HoTS right now but DoTA will always be my one true love.
I think that HoTS can remain relevant though, if they release heroes and new maps at a high enough rate it will remain interesting. It is a fairly deep game, the heroes are quite easy to understand but the mechanics and team compositions can work in quite a number of ways to keep you thinking. Will it ever be as deep a game as DoTA?.. probably not, but like Hearthstone I think it can carve out a place for itself despite being less complex than its competitors.
Also since the game is in beta, I am hoping that they can do enough work to make the trait system replace items a little bit better. Right now there is usually one line of traits you want to follow on each character to optimize them. With this latest patch they seem to be trying to remedy this and make it so more trait paths are viable and will vary from match to match (like how you should base a heroes itemization in DoTA on the heroes you are matched up against).
EDIT: Actually now that I think of it, one of the biggest things HoTS has going for it for me right now is how long games take. With my school schedule I rarely sit down for extended gaming sessions, but being able to hop and play for an hour and a half or so and get a significant number of games in really enhances the overall experience. Plus it definitely adds to it that we’ve had five-stacks pretty much every time I’ve come on to play.