Heroes of the Storm Team Fight Roles Guide

Heroes of the Storm Team Fight Roles Guide by ManWithYourPlan

For those who are not familiar with effective team fighting in MOBAs, here’s a quick rundown with some tips:

As far as an actual engagement goes, team fights aren’t won by just focusing the DPS. Every single role has MORE THAN ONE key function.

Support

“CC their guys & heal your guys.” If you have a long range CC, it can be used as an engage tool to catch someone out/make a pick (meaning catch a player out of position before a team fight even starts). Look to Chain CC with your warrior/engager, or on THEIR engager. Keep an eye on your team mates. If your assassin(s) has avoided focus at the start of the fight, then look to support the person under the heaviest focus. Knowing who to CC is extremely important. Don’t just CC someone to CC. Use it to create “options” in the team fight. Options to get a kill, protect a carry, or negate an enemy hero’s effect in the fight.

Examples: Tyrande stun as a pick tool/engage tool. Brightwing following up a muradin stun chain on the enemy illidan with a polymorph so that he’s removed from the fight after having little to no impact.

Warrior

This can be one of the more tricky roles to play to maximum potential. Your BIGGEST job is to judge when to engage, when to focus a target, and and when to peel for your team. Peel means to, like a banana, peel the enemies away from your carries through use of CC and damage as a deterrent. You are generally the primary engage tool, meaning itshould ultimately be up to YOU to decide who is being focused (though it is often difficult to coordinate with a team of 5 randoms), based on who you jump on. This will require you to be able to judge the ebb and flow of the game, a skill that is not easily gained. Who is winning their team fights? Can I afford to go all out on that hero? Should I try and play defense and just be a meat shield to absorb that hero’s effect in fights, and let my team play cleanup crew after? Can I afford to dive with my Illidan? Should I let them engage into us, and then just be a peel monster? How do their Heroes scale vs our heroes? Who has the stronger late game? How do I capitalize on this? While these are things EVERYONE should be thinking about, because of your nature as (in general) team fight starter, yours is the lap this tends to fall into the most.

Situation: Just last night I was playing with a stitches who was essentially clueless on his role as a warrior. In his mind “Land hook good. Gorge enemy good. must do.” was all he could think about. He, on at least 4 occasions, hooked their Arthas into our team, who essentially just used it as a free gap closer and proceeded to stun/slow the shit out of our entire team. He also ended up gorging a Hero we were all trying to kill on 3 different occasions, essentially giving them a stasis from the AOE our Tassadar, Kael’thas, and Zeratul tried to nuke them with. They’d come out almost full HP, in the middle of the team fight after Cooldowns had been burned, and then just annihilate us. A game that started with us face-rolling quickly changed into a loss partly because of this poor decision making. It would’ve been (arguably) better to save the gorge for the Arthas (negating all potential team CC) or the heaviest damage dealer (negating all damage) instead of the Tyrande (important, but not the biggest threat on their team at the time) and use the hook on a greedy assassin out of position.

Ranged Assassin

Don’t be a scaredy cat, and don’t be a hero. Simple right? Not really. Like the Warrior, you keep track of the enemy heroes’ power spikes, and who you can out-duel, and who you need to avoid. Positioning, positioning, Positioning. Normally, you should hit the closest enemy, while staying out of range of being blown up. If you see their engager blow their load on your tank or someone else, then look to move forward and dump some DPS. If you see a team mate out of position getting jumped on, do what you can to help, but don’t fully commit to the fight unless you know you can win it, or at least deter the opposing team long enough for you both to get away. This requires you to know your damage potential,probably the most important thing for an Assassin to know. I will say this though, you’d be surprised how quickly someone will turn tail when they see their healthbar go from full to 1/3rd in half a second. If you can manage to make that happen from a safe distance, then by all means do it.

Think of it this way, who is better at defending a fort? Jaina, or Muradin? Obviously Jaina. There’s no use in dying so that Muradin could make it away. That doesn’t mean play overly cautious, but rather you need to be careful in what fights you choose to pick, and always watch your positioning in these fights. Don’t be afraid to show the enemy team that you’re capable of blowing them all in half with a single well-placed skill rotation. Learn to Kite (attacking the enemy while retreating in order to deal “free” damage to them by staying out of range of their attacks).

Melee assassin

Similar to Ranged assassins, positioning and knowing your damage is very important, However, melee assassins tend to come with gap closers/escape mechanics that help you play with a little closer proximity. Knowing when to go in is a big factor to playing these guys. Can you 1 shot someone faster than the enemy team could potentially act? Great, go for it. Is there a high chance that you’ll be killed in the process? Most of the time, it isn’t worth it. Some people think trading for their carry is “worth” while others would argue “but you’re our highest damage source!” The truth is, it 100% depends on the match. If your team is behind and that Kael’thas is the biggest problem and you find you’re able to trade 1 for 1 with him to turn the fight more in favor of your team, then by all means do it. However, if you’re on equal or greater footing and you find the same opportunity, perhaps it would be better to wait it out. You should be seeking to Kill their carry and still get away. You do this by paying attention to when the enemy team uses it’s major engage and CC tools, and THEN going in. If you see the enemy Muradin use a stun, and the kael throws out his stun, that would be a much better time to go “all in” than trying to engage on all 5 enemies like you’re playing with God Mode. Melee assassin’s most common downfall? Hubris. Remember Icarus folks.

Specialist

This role is interesting. It can fit into many different roles. As far as actual Team fights go however, most Specialists fit into a more of an assasin-ish type role. Yes murky may prefer to just push towers etc and play keep away instead of looking for team fights all the time, but when it comes to actual team fights, these guys (currently) tend to play like the assassin class. Use what utility you have to the advantage of your team, but otherwise, many times you position similarly to either a ranged/melee assassin (depending on your damage type). I’m not extremely experienced with many specialists past Sylv and Sgt hammer, but as far as I can tell, this is generally the idea.

Anyways, feel free to Add or comment or ask questions here. Hope this helps someone.

Please note, this is just a very general guide. It will not instantly make you the best support/warrior/assassin/specialist. It will, however, help give you an idea about what you should be LEARNING to do in order to learn to team fight with your class/characters correctly.