Heroes of the Storm - Blizzard MOBA

well, at least Blizz has plenty of experience dealing with raging hardcore elitist assholes.

The technical alpha is now open!

Nothing else needs to be said.

I've been watching the Day Nine videos of this game, and I have to say, I really hope my computer will be able to run it when they release a more widely available version. It looks like it could well be everything I like about League of Legends but without most the stuff I don't like about League of Legends. Almost like ARAM without the titular elements of the game mode.

well, it supposedly runs on the Starcraft 2 engine, so I imagine if you can run SC 2, you should be mostly fine.

In addition to taking on the MOBA scene, Blizzard now assaults the world of fighting games!

Blizzard Outcasts: Vengeance of the Vanquished

Mankrik's wife versus Gamon

Funny, I missed the joke about Blizzard Outcasts that it's all the minor villains and NPCs in the games that you fight with, as opposed to the heroes.

edited 1st Apr '14 9:23:38 AM by Fighteer

My favorite part is the Revenue Enhancing Device that makes it easier to give Blizzard money.

edited 1st Apr '14 10:10:30 AM by Rotpar

I liked the Shoulders of Doom Treasure Goblin.

I liked the Battlecruiser versus the Treasure Goblin. That's a bit of a Curb-Stomp Battle if I've ever seen one.

I'm not sure if the Battlecruiser is a joke about some meta-game shit I don't recall/know or if it's a story thing where they keep crashing.

There are a lot of crashed Battlecruisers in Starcraft's story, but I was not aware that it had become some kind of meme.

Really, there are so many... now that I think about it, it's almost as bad as the First Rule of Helicopters: if one shows up in a work, it's got a 90% chance of crashing.

edited 1st Apr '14 12:33:36 PM by Fighteer

They do have a tendency to take terrible, terrible damage.

Being so big and powerful (they're the iconic image of Terran technological might), it's almost a foregone conclusion that they suffer from The Worf Effect.

edited 1st Apr '14 1:17:29 PM by Fighteer

Battlecruiser to fight on the Hyperion Bridge stage? :P

Battlecruiserception?

The other Heroes joke from yesterday appears to have been overlooked: Pajamathur!

That is

Pretty amazing.

But does this sound like a subtle L2Pnoobs to you?

It's pretty funny they bothered to think of how the abilities could actually be useful though.

...aside from Tantrum of Terror. That one's just evil.

edited 2nd Apr '14 8:33:11 PM by VutherA

Does that make three distinct Blizzard AFD jokes this year? Or are there more I'm not aware of? (Pajamathur, Outcasts, and some 'Hot S' renaming of the Starcraft 2 Protoss expansion are the ones I know.

I think there's another sublte joke in there. Don't forget HotS is the joke of the MOBA community, the game with all the skill leeched out.

Seven, I think. They did a Flappy Bird-style Diablo game. WoW also had fake patch notes, a quest to betray your faction, and a horrible new model for a player race.

edited 2nd Apr '14 9:38:14 PM by Rotpar

Ah. I thought at least a couple of those were fan-created jokes. Namely the patch notes and the betrayal quest. I had forgotten the player model thing though, which I don't even remember the origin of now, even though I did hear about it yesterday.

The faction betrayal quest was a fansite joke, not an official one, as were the "Necruid" class for Diablo and the "Golden Basic Campfire" card for Hearthstone. Fake World Of Warcraft patch notes are a Blizzard tradition.

Oh, and Penny Arcade weighed in yesterday on Heroes of the Storm by calling everyone nubs.

I'm a serial editor today. Should I be looking to play this game? It's the first Blizzard title in a while that has not really captured my interest, because I've never played a MOBA before.

edited 3rd Apr '14 7:52:09 AM by Fighteer

It promises to be a very different MOBA. They are trying to get away from the conventions established in the original Warcraft III maps; three-lanes, buying items, "last hit" mechanics, etc. Heroes of the Storm may well be MOBA genre 2.0, like how Everquest Next is trying to be MMO genre 2.0.

The best thing is, as a free to play game, you can just hop in whenever you get an invite or open beta begins, or the game is launched.

MOBAs are a lot of fun, I'm playing League of Legends (one of the big stand-alone successors to the "original" Defense of the Ancients), Smite (based on real mythology), and Infinite Crisis (the DC Comics game). They just have steep learning curves and a pretty rancid player base.

edited 3rd Apr '14 9:00:08 AM by Rotpar

Getting roflstomped by pay-to-win folks doesn't amuse me very much, but I may check it out given that it's free.