remetheus

I miss hots, it was like the one moba I could just slot into, play, and not feel like i was drowning in toxicity

I played League and HotS side by side, and as much fun as I had in League I was always super focused and rather stressed. I only got some of that when I played HotS, mostly when I played solo lane - which was rare, thankfully I was good at the teamplay heroes that stuck to the multi-man lanes. It really was a super unique game, and of all the games I miss from not playing Blizzard games anyway, I think HotS takes the cake by far.

Also, don't forget the mutators! Weekly gamemodes that could be COMPLETELY different, a number of them weren't even MOBAs. The HotS team really had a lot of fun coming with new ideas or implementing classic ones well, and it showed.

As much as I love Dota 2 dearly, HotS will always have a very special place in my heart as well. For me, both games were the best of their respective worlds and anything else felt (feels, even) like a half-measure in either direction. HotS committed to its vision and design philosophy without compromise, and it mostly worked incredibly- at least, on the gameplay side. They made one too many mistakes with the financing of the game, and bloodthirsty Kotick started to circle like a cost-cutting vulture. Not my first time losing a game I loved dearly to money-hungry corporate bastards (RIP City of Heroes - except not?) but that doesn't make it hurt any less

Absolutely adore HotS (and the fact it didn't have in-match item shop). The community was one of the better ones. I remember encountering the occasional toxic person and the general response was just go play a more "serious" MOBA.

i loves hots too, for the exact same reasons. i have a lot of cool memories from playing it. watching the pro scene was a ton of fun too! i could easily follow what was going on but there was still enough complexity to make things wild and interesting. i cannot say the same for any other moba tbh. what was done to that game, the people who worked on it, and the people who played it, is one of the gaming industries many tragedies. RIP to a real one.

HotS was the only MOBA I felt I could play and enjoy at a casual level without feeling stressed out, and remains so to this day. I didn't enjoy Unite after a few rounds and after the monetization got rolling, and all others just go too hard for me.

I also feel like since DOTA was originally a custom map in WC3, that there was a sort of pedigree there even though Blizzard didn’t actually make the map

I played LoL exactly once. It was the tutorial. It was very long. I was something like 15 minutes into it and the first tower wasn't down yet and I was just bored out of my mind. I didn't even finish the tutorial! And matches can go for 40 minutes??? Nooooooo thank you! A few years later, HotS comes around and an entire match can be played in the amount of time that it took me to bounce from LoL's tutorial. Like, that's what hooked me instantly. Things actually happen in HotS! It's great!

My #1 favorite mechanic of HotS is that XP is shared. From what I have seen/heard of LoL, people are super toxic towards their teammates because whoever gets the last hit on a kill is the one who gets all the XP. Like, why the heck do you have to compete with your team for progression? That's ridiculous! And Blizzard agreed and was like, "hey, you can sit in a lane and kill minions and that still helps the team because you're soaking XP for everyone else." Everything you can do benefits the team in some way!

Oh, and the brawls! My favorite was Escape From Braxis, the co-op PvE one with the zerg and the boss fight at the end. Great stuff! From what I've seen, everyone liked Braxis! Oh, if only they had done more of those, make HotS really stand out from the crowd. And also the events? The King's Crest event with the quests and the art, the winter gameboard (that lasted like 2 years because it was the last event before the game died), the new hero launches that had interactive elements in the background that you could click and make things happen (like Hearthstone boards!). HotS was just all about fun, everywhere. Spinning a hero around in the store and making them dizzy!

I think what killed HotS was twofold:

1. The 2.0/cosmetics/lootbox update. We went from being able to buy just skins (or heroes) to slot machines and nobody liked it. Blizzard saw how the slots were funding OW and thought, "hey, we can hook people in HotS, too!" and then it just didn't work out, because the system that existed before was better for players.
2. I have no evidence to back this up but from what I saw, there were a lot of women playing HotS. Like, women play every game, but there were a lot of women visibly playing/streaming HotS, that (from what I saw) it looked like HotS had so many more women playing than the average game. And we all know how this kind of audience plays out for cartoons. "Eww, women play this game, that's the wrong demographic! Kill the game."

The other week I was thinking about what kind of art style I like. I like the Mega Man Legends' chunky thick-to-thin designs, fantasy and sci-fi, handpainted textures, flashy/comic-y effects... If I were to somehow synthesize all of these elements into my art, then I would make—oh, what's that? I've just described the art of Heroes of the Storm? I guess I just want to make art that looks like HotS then, and I'm fine with that. The game looked so good!

HotS is the most traditional MOBA I've ever actually enjoyed. The "safer" characters from the start provide a good baseline to get the general mechanics and then the later characters build on that in weird and wonderful ways. That's how multiple character games should work, not just slight tweaks for all eternity.

Also, Cho'Gall allowed for pairing people with different strong points. One of my friends at the time had been top 100 in League before medical issues took a lot of his ability to physically play. I'm decent at twitch but have none of the map awareness or strategy. Pair us up in a voice call and we actually did pretty well, and both had fun.