HotS Replay Analysis #1

 

Climbing up from Rank 35 is kind of ridiculous…

I’ve been thinking about a writing project for a little while now, combining two aspects of my life that I love: Heroes of the Storm and writing about video games. Before the Ranked Preseason ends on June 14, I would love to climb the ladder and attain Rank 20 for the Elemental Wolf Mount. However, in an effort to climb the ranked ladder, I simply need to get better at the game.

I’ve read plenty of guides, I’ve watched the pros play, and there is always going to be the unknown element of matchmaking: getting put with trolls and verbally abusive players. Even though there are a lot of outside factors in a match, I can only control my own gameplay. To truly become a better Heroes player, I need to take an additional step: watch replay of my ranked matches and analyze my gameplay.

This will be the first edition of my Heroes of the Storm Replay Analysis, in which I watch one of my Hero League matches and attempt to pinpoint what I’m doing correctly and what needs improvement. Initially, I thought this match wasn’t going to teach me much about my own gameplay due to some terrible teammates. Ultimately, I learned a lot from simply looking back at the game with a critical eye.

Match #1  Sky Temple (LOSS)

My Team: Sonya, Thrall, Nova, Zeratul, LiLi (Me)

Enemy Team: Muradin, Artanis, Illidan, Rehgar, Sylvanas

Overview: Wow, so this was one of the more frustrating games that I have played in Hero League. It’s like the universe knew I was planning on writing my first Replay Analysis today and decided to give me one hell of a curve ball. With this match, I fully believe that our loss was 100% decided in the draft.

I picked 5th in the draft, so I let my teammates know that I could fill in. 1st pick was Thrall, 4th pick was pre-selecting Greymane, and picks 2 and 3 weren’t showing us who they were going to select. When their turn came up, they selected the two stealth assassins at the same time: Nova and Zeratul. Rightfully, our team exploded. 4th pick Greymane had to swap to a tank, and I picked up the slack with LiLi as the healing support.

Thrall and Sonya’s anger was met with nonchalance by Nova/Zeratul, making the toxicity that much worse. Nova/Zeratul had some early kills, but the team was never able to recover and work together due to the massive amount of typing from all 4 teammates. I didn’t type a single message after the match started and quickly muted my team about 1 minute in.

With this much typing, I don’t know how my teammates expected to you know, play.

Positive Takeaways:

• I don’t mind playing support, and since the other team had picked Rehgar 1st, I had to resort to a support hero I’m not as experienced with. Lt. Morales was banned, so I picked up LiLi to blind the enemy team’s Illidan, Muradin, and Artanis. The blinds were awfully helpful.
• With two stealth teammates, I had to solo lane a lot, but I did my best to keep us relatively even on XP as we marched toward Level 10.
• I rotated to the second temple objective right on time, despite soaking in the top lane at the time. However…

Room for Improvement:

• I took too bold of a path to get to the second temple at the bottom of the map, and got hurt along the way.
• I missed the 1st objective call, and didn’t start moving toward a temple until the enemy already had it.
• Once we got to the first temple we had a great team fight, but the enemy team had already fired off a lot of the shots from it.
• In my efforts to soak, I was attempting to get us caught up to level 10 behind the enemy team, but I overextended and ended up dying right as we hit 10.
• After the 10 minute mark, I hopped around too much with who I was helping on our team. Overall, we were so spread out that I wasn’t sure where I should be – I didn’t want to follow our tank because Sonya was extending incredibly far behind enemy lines.
• I hearthed to recover mana, and my team decided to march into a team fight without their healer.
• Near the end of the match I moved away from 2 of our teammates to go save Nova, which then allowed the enemy team to pick off three of our heroes.
• At the very end of the match, our team attempted to start a team fight to steal the boss, but I hesitated in wanting to go refill my health. I got to the fight a little to late to save a few of our heroes.
• Overall, my positioning and decision making was very erratic because I was so rattled by the toxicity within our team. I need to get better at shaking those things off after I have muted troublemakers.

Effect on my Rank: A loss is a loss, this one put me at a 30-42 overall record for Hero League. Fortunately, I had some points built up, so I stayed at Rank 35.

Random Observations: The Nova/Zeratul duo began chatting in Spanish about halfway through, and our Thrall replied back with a wonderful endorsement of resident presidential joke: Donald Trump. Great to know this Thrall is a xenophobic asshat.

Vote Donald Drumpf 2016!