We had a chance to tinker with some of the new heroes and the Sky Temple map at BlizzCon 2014. As we march toward the January closed beta and these new additions, Heroes of the Storm is really shaping up as a MOBA choice, with fast gameplay and accessibility that’s uncommon for the genre.
We played the Sky Temple map several times, once with Jaina and another with The Lost Vikings. Jaina can unleash absolutely deadly cold-combos by stacking her chilling effect with each cast, and can summon up the iconic water elemental as her ultimate ability to add to the icy insanity. You can talent the elemental to mimic your abilities, which makes for an extremely powerful burst of damage. Jaina’s absolutely fragile though, and plays like a sort of mage assassin – getting in, casting her abilities on a target in succession, and getting out as soon as things get hot. Jaina can also take a powerful frost ring over the water elemental, but it’s Jaina – you’ve got to take the water elemental. Players that love doing a ton of damage quickly using successive, slowing attacks are going to love taking the Warcraft universe’s iconic mage out for a spin.
The Lost Vikings are going to be a big deal, and if you’re a Murky or Abathur player or just want to show off your micro skills, controlling all three of the Vikings is a rewarding task that offers a substantial skill challenge. For ease of use, each Viking is bound to keys 1-3, and 4 selects the entire group. Sky Temple showed just how interesting this three-in-one character can be, sending out the team to collect different objectives at the same time. I had one Viking joining the team in taking a mercenary camp, one sitting on a captured obelisk to blast the opposing base, and one pushing a lane all at the same time. These characters are going to be a favorite for StarCraft II and Meepo players for sure, and while mid-range players can probably stumble about with them as a clumsy pack, I expect to see some crazy plays and skill displays on the competitive scene with the colorful trio. It’s also great to see Blizzard tapping into one of their other IPs outside of the big three to help populate the Heroes of the Storm roster.
The Egyptian-themed Sky Temple houses three different obelisk objectives on top, middle, and bottom. When a player steps onto these, the obelisk will fire blasts at the opposing base objectives, similar to the cannons in Blackheart’s Bay. The catch is, these sort of Anubis-golems will come to life and try to push you off the platform – they’re strong foes, and can’t be soloed easily until late game. So basically your team will try to capture one of these points to take the advantage, be fighting off the Anubis-monsters, and then the other team will race in and try to kill you while you are under duress. It forces the action heavily, and it was rare in either of my matches to have time when one or more obelisk wasn’t the staging grounds for massive team fights or 2v2 skirmishes.
Although we don’t have many details on it yet, Blizzard has also announced that a Heaven vs Hell Diablo themed-map will be coming to Heroes of the Storm, which means we may be seeing other Blizzard universes for maps as well.
