This year’s Gamescom has brought some fantastic Heroes of the Storm news and welcomed additions to Blizzard’s take on the popular MOBA genre. The opening day of the show has revealed two new maps and two new characters as well as some new skins and a new mount. This is a huge upcoming patch considering in the past Blizzard has typically released just one character or map at a time. The overarching theme for this patch is Starcraft meaning both of the maps we are getting are focused around Blizzard’s popular RTS game. Minions, forts, keeps, and each team’s core have been transformed into Marines or Zergs or Marine/Zerg hybrids. I have to admit I am a bit disappointed that it seems the Protoss got left out with the exception of one of the new characters being Protoss but more on that later. Each of the two maps have unique objectives which we come to expect with Heroes of the Storm.
First we have “Braxis Holdout”, which involves capturing and holding two objective points, similar to “Dragon Shire”, and holding these points builds up a legion of Zergs in a holding pen. Once one team reaches 100% capacity in their holding pen, both teams holding pens release and a wave of Zergs go after enemy structures and heroes. Even if your team doesn’t successfully reach 100% first, you still get whatever percentage you built up during the point capture phase which is a nice touch. From the gameplay I watched through Twitch streams the Zergs were more devastating to the heroes than the structures, but that could be the lack of experience of the people playing new maps. This is a two lane map which typically lend hand to specialist type characters to push the lanes effectively to snowball their opponent. The two capture points give the advantage to team fights though so it will be interesting to see the strategies that come from players once they are added.
The second map is called “Warhead Junction” and as the name suggests it’s all about the warheads. This objective is very unique and is something I don’t believe has ever been seen in the MOBA genre. Nuclear warheads spawn in various locations around the map similar to the beacons from “Towers of Doom” and you must capture the warheads before the enemy team. Whichever person captures a warhead is able to then call in the warhead to be dropped where you see fit and when you see fit. There is a range on where you can cast it so you can’t just drop all the warheads you pick up on the enemy core, but this unique objective allows some great gameplay and strategies. From the Twitch streams that I have watched of this map, the warheads were used to destroy enemy forts, gates and keeps but also to kill enemy heroes. I even saw one Twitch streamer get a triple kill by dropping a nuke on three unsuspecting opponents while they were boxed in a corner providing a ton of laughs for all the viewers. I think we can expect a lot of unique plays like this to occur on this map in the future along with basic strategies such as dropping the nukes onto the objective to secure the win at the core.
There are two new characters about to enter the nexus. First is Starcraft 2 character Alarak. a protoss melee assassin that seems quite powerful with some abilities to crowd control and a silence for taking down those pesky ranged mages. The second character is the latest example of an Overwatch character moving into Heroes of the Storm. That character is Zarya, the Russian Tank class character, who moves almost unchanged from Overwatch to Heroes of the Storm. The Heroes team has done a wonderful job bringing characters from Overwatch into their game without changing them up at all. If you have played Tracer in Overwatch you will be able to seamlessly transition to play her in Heroes and it seems that same treatment has come for Zarya which is promising. Although she doesn’t exactly mesh with theme of Starcraft 2, I believe most players are excited to see her and more importantly another Overwatch character make it into Heroes of the Storm.
Lastly, there are a slew of new Starcraft related skins for characters such as Kerrigan, Rexxar, and Butcher. Along with all of this there are some re-working of some characters such as the Butcher and Sgt Hammer to try to bring them back into the meta in store for this patch. It is shaping up to be a good Winter Season for Heroes of the Storm. Once the patch drops expect to see reviews of the maps and characters here on Enemy Slime. The patch is scheduled to drop September 13th.
