Hi everyone,
and so Heroes of the Storm has taken a major
update yesterday. Not only do we have a new hero and a whole new map
to play with, but we have a completely new interface.
Essentially they've completely redesigned the client,
the way we interact with the game and so on. Everything has been given a good
tickle-up and is certainly starting to feel a lot more
like a well-rounded beta. Now
first of all let's discuss what they've added. Well there's a new hero,
Sylvanas Windrunner. We also have a new map
and we also have now a more filled-out hero progression
as well as a personal progression of your account as well. There's now rewards
all the way up to level 40 and also heroes now have rewards up to level 20.
What does this mean in real terms? Well, it means more gold,
which means faster progression for claiming all of those heroes and also
faster progression getting up to level 40 as well as they're doling out some stimpacks
as you hit certain levels. Now obviously the big thing here is whenever a new hero is
added and Sylvanas Windrunner is probably one of World of Warcraft's most
notable characters.
As leader of the Fallen she is essentially
an un-dead elf. Now her abilities
are kind of interesting. She's a range specialist
so she's all about the range but she has some options here and
a particular playstyle where once you manage to kind of get the hang of it
is very, very powerful. Now here's the set-up I've kind of been using.
What I go for is the ability to push out arrows
when I have my max arrow capacity, essentially. Now
I can gain ticks every time a minion dies,
I gain one. A hero dies I gain three, up to a maximum of five.
Now if you're already full, if you have your quiver full
you can then have an option where it overflows.
That means it instantly fires one of those arrows off without you having to press
a button.
Now you can hammer the cue key to quickly fire off all five arrows
in one burst. But, if you happen to use
the blade which allows you to infect minions,
doing damage to them and stunning them., Now if you time this just right in the middle
of a fight
you essentially do the following. Debuff the minions,
reduce their health, kill them,
gain a massive stack of auto firing arrows
which immediately pummel straight into the nearest
enemy hero. You then fire off the rest of the quiver
and then, if they're still alive by that point few more arrows and they're
dead. It's as simple as that. Now getting this play style to work
is very high risk but the reward
is also massive as well. Her ability to jump
in and out of combat as well allows setting up this kind of manoeuvre
or escaping if it goes wrong is quite
easy to do. She has basically an attack power which also acts as a teleport.
Later on as you level up your hero you can use that teleport
twice with two stacks, allowing you to jump into combat and jump back out again,
having executed your nuke-them-all move as I'm calling it.
Now essentially Sylvanas is a really good
power character. There's a lot of risk here if you get it wrong but
there's a lot of reward. She's a character that's very easy to play
so that means that the majority of users are probably going to go with this character but
not necessary get the full
effect out of her because she does have some very specific use cases.
Like I say if there's plenty of minions around her, other heroes do not want to go
near her.
I would say personally. You know if there's a whole stack of enemy minions that she
can essentially feed off to
fire out these arrows, someone like Illidan
is going to want to stay well clear of her. You're going to want to catch her
when she's on her own basically. When she hasn't got any minions near her she can feed off.
She's too powerful essentially to take on one-and-one
if surrounded by minions she can feed off to
build up those arrows.
Now the new map they've added adds
an interesting new play style but not necessarily a big twist on the playstyles
that we already have here. It plays a little bit like Booty Bay
in the sense, essence what we have to do here is kill
the enemy creeps, the minions and in doing so pick up gems.
Turn those gems in to unleash a spider minion.
Now those spider minions will operate down three lanes and lock your
opponents out from being able to call in their spider minions.
It's a fairly straightforward one. We've seen this playstyle plenty of times before in
other games
but here it's actually executed quite well. As
with picking up the coins on Booty Bay, you have to carry
those gems around with you until you can turn them in. If you happen to die
then those gems potentially could become claimed by the enemy team,
thus swinging things in their favour. That does create
a good risk-reward scenario here where you're going to have to kind of take
and control some of the ground around those turning points
to make sure that for instance you don't get ganked,
making sure you always have one hero effectively guarding giving you a little bit
of extra sight around that point can make a big difference on this map.
Overall I really like the direction Heroes of the Storm is taking.
There's an awful lot of good content here being pumped out on a really regular basis.
The new heroes they're adding are fun to play and complement the other heroes really well,
whilst adding in new play styles which keeps things fresh
and interesting. The one thing I always say with Heroes of the Storm is
there's a wide range of different archetypes here within
these hero classes and the kind of meta play for each hero is different.
It's really nice. There's no cookie-cutter heroes here particularly.