Blizzard Heroes Of The Storm – Team Based MOBA With Objectives

Blizzard Delivers Again

Heroes of the Storm or “HOTS” for short is one of the best multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that I have ever played. It is no mystery that I have been a Blizzard fan since the company started developing games. How can I pass on the opportunity to play with all the heroes across all the games Blizzard has released. Blizzard did get into the MOBA market a little late since this game was released on June 2nd, 2015. There were already high popular games already out such as League of Legends, DOTA and Heroes of Newerth. Nevertheless, Blizzard always finds a way to make their games distinguish from anything else that is out there.

Basics

Blizzard has released this game free to play. As most MOBAs, Heroes of the Storm is a 5 vs 5 player game. Starting off you can play 6 heroes provided by a weekly rotation. If you like the hero you can purchase it with either gold earned or money gaining it permanently. Once you reach level 15 an additional four slots are awarded. As of today Blizzard has released 54 heroes within the four different roles (Warrior, Assassin, Support and Specialist). Warriors are tanks/bruisers, Assassins are damage dealers, Supports are healers/buffs/debuffs and Specialists are siege/summoner. Each hero gains a power boost and a talent point at levels 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, and 20. Heroes also have a full variety of mounts ranging from horses to flying carpets to unicorns.

Different Gameplay

Blizzard put a lot of emphasis on teamwork and planning. This is something no other MOBA game has out there. The experience earned by any player is shared with the entire team. This automatically eliminates the MVP syndrome and feeding issues we dealt with other games. There are four main ways of earning experience. Killing mobs, neutral units, enemy heroes or doing team objectives. Team objectives are new to the world of MOBA. Completing these objectives deal a crazy amount of damage to the structures of the enemy team. The objectives can either make the team or break the team for the most part. Killing mercenaries will automatically make them fight for you making the lane pushing easier. Out of the 10 maps, 8 are traditional 3 lanes and 2 maps have 2 lanes. The maps with 2 lanes have a dedicated objective area. Overall Blizzard has redesigned the MOBA gameplay shifting focus to teamwork, planning and completing objectives. Most importantly let’s not forget this gem is free to play.