Why Roles Are Bad

Roles are bad in competitive play. They limit your thinking and cause you to misread the game situation. They exaggerate the importance of trivia, and gloss over what is actually important.

HotS Basics Aren’t What You Think They Are

HotS is a game where you try and destroy the enemy core before the enemy team destroys yours. There are microgoals on the way that will help you achieve that—killing forts, defending forts, killing minions, getting mercenaries, and getting objectives.

None of that requires an archetypal medieval fantasy RPG party. One can imagine this being achieved by:

• a barbarian horde
• a crack squad of U.S. marines
• a band of wizards
• an army of ethereal ghosts
• a bunch of shifty, evasive elves
• a swarm of giant insects
• some rootin’ tootin’ cowboys
• a bunch of mindless zombies
• teleporting aliens
• Godzilla
• A bunch of self-healing rangers

There are a lot of different ways to fight. Tank-dps-healer covers only a tiny fraction of them, and many of those not very well.

“It’s cool that there are lots of ways to play, but why not just stick to what I know?” There are two problems with this:

• tank/dps/healer isn’t a flexible composition—it’s just a familiar one. It’s fine to stick with what you know if it works—but it has to work
• not to put too fine a point on it, but you probably don’t know tank/dps/healer. There’s a lot of depth required to play it well

In the end, the tank-dps-healer paradigm makes things more complicated than they need to be, limits our vision, and creates a lot of distractions on our learning path. So while we might have tanks, or dps, or healers in our comps, we don’t think in those terms. There are simpler, cleaner ways, that help us actually win games and have more fun.

Roles: The Good Part

When I began this I said that roles are bad in competitive play. This is true, but that doesn’t mean they’re all bad. Roles serve a social purpose in helping strangers queue up for a game without screaming at each other. However, on a competitive team, we can and do put away the training wheels.

What Goes In Their Place?

This is a good question—but it is out of the scope of this post and would distract from the main point. There are simple, clean foundations we can build our understanding of HotS on. But to understand those well, we need to sweep away the clutter first.

The HotS Series—Pt. 1

(I’m writing this Phoenix Rising Amethyst, my team, but anyone should feel free to use it)

Risk Is Bad

In competitive games, risk is bad. We want to eliminate random chance as much as we can.

The reasoning goes: we are trying to be good at the game.

• If we are better than our opponents, we want to get the benefits of that. We don’t want to lose to luck!
• But we don’t want to win by luck either, because it gives us bad feedback and encourages us to repeat risky strategies. But these are unsustainable by definition.

Being a team game, HotS has an additional reason risk is bad: it creates division in the team. The most common source of “team” errors is when one part of the team thinks a risk is worth it and commits, and the other part holds back.

But even without the team aspect—say you were shotcaller, and your team was perfectly obedient—risk avoidance is basic to competitive games. This is probably best explained by famed Starcraft player, commentator, and educator Day9, in his excellent article “The Marginal Advantage.” It’s a delight and you should read the whole thing (it’s not too long), but this is worth highlighting:

The marginal advantage embodies the notion that one cannot, and should not, try to “win big.” In a competitive setting, the strong player knows that his best opponents are unlikely to make many exploitable mistakes. As a result, the strong player knows that he must be content to play with just the slightest edge, an edge which is the equivalent to the marginal advantage. More importantly, a one-sided match ultimately carries as much weight as an epic struggle. After all, the match results only in a win or a loss; there are no “degrees” of winning. Therefore, at any given point in a game, the player must focus on making decisions that minimize his probability of losing the advantage, rather than on decisions that maximize his probability of gaining a greater advantage. In short, it is much more important to the expert player to not lose than it is to win big. Consequently, a regular winner plays to extend his lead in a very gradual, but very consistent manner.

The idea is that a small advantage we are certain of is better than a large advantage that might materialize. We can build on a small advantage; we can’t build on a dice roll.

Internalizing this single concept, and being guided by it, will do more for your game than anything else.

What Kinds of Fights Does Your Comp Want?

The way the community talks sometimes, you can simply a-move the enemy team if you’re up a talent tier or have a numbers advantage. Little attention is paid to how to fight—probably because it can be complicated. It is complicated, but we don’t have to tackle it all at first. We can start simply: at the team level.

Stand and Shoot: A comp with good ranged autoattack damage and good space control—say, with a Raynor, a Zul’jin, an Uther, and a Johanna. This comp wants to play defensively. It is more concerned with “keeping the damage alive” than “focusing” anyone down. This comp should mostly be standing still or kiting backwards in fights, moving forward only when the (ranged, auto) dps have nothing to shoot.

Pounce/Brawl: This comp wants to get in close and fight. Fights tend to be simple, but getting those fights tends to be hard: there is often one enemy ranged hero that you don’t manage to lock down, and that can make your “pounce” into a “suicide.” This comp likes flanks and does not like chokes. Closing the distance and escalating the fight ups the risk/unpredictability of the situation (and remember, risk is bad); compensate for this with more careful play to set up better fights.

Kite And Backstab: This comp wants to pull the enemy apart, then murder someone alone. Any comp with Lunara and Valeera is obviously this, but even a comp with Raynor and Tyrael might be best played this way. This comp can be a little hard to build intuition around, but believe it or not it is how most comps should play.

Playing A Comp: Common Pitfalls

Stand And Shoot:

• The tank plays too far forward, taking unretaliated damage that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
• DPS play too aggressively, taking damage
• Focusing on “focusing” someone down, rather than getting good overall trades, e.g. focus-firing someone, but clumping so you eat a lot of AoE
• Not being mindful of the possibility of getting flanked

Pounce/Brawl:

• Staying within enemy attack range without getting anything done. This comp should be in or out, not in-between.
• Attacking head-on, particularly when clumped, is usually a mistake. This comp likes flanks!
• Staying in a fight for too long, particularly if there’s a ranged hero you haven’t managed to pounce on
• Not being mindful of flanks, particularly on your healer.

Kite/Flank

• Overcommitting to a fight, particularly against multiple opponents, or when there are enemies nearby, or when you hero just isn’t that good at fighting.
• Clumping up. This comp wants to expand to bait enemies apart.
• Not macroing enough. The enemy isn’t (necessarily) stupid and needs a reason to split up—often part of that reason is macro.

What’s Your Size?

Different heroes are geared toward fights of different sizes.

Illidan and Zeratul, for instance, are fantastic for small skirmishes. Their high mobility and damage let them dodge attacks while putting out their own.

However, they’re not quite as great in larger fights. They can certainly be useful. But they’re generally less favored.

Kael’thas, on the other hand, can be very effective in large fights, with strong AoE attacks. He pays a price in low health/mobility, but it’s a small price to pay for all the AoE.

In small fights, however, the AoE has much fewer targets, and he’s still just as slow and squishy.

In general:

• short range heroes are better in small fights
• AoE is better in large fights
• single-target damage is better in small fights
• healing is better in small fights
• mobility is better in small fights
• escape mobility is at least no worse in large fights than in small fights.
• ranged heroes are better in large fights

It’s trivial to come up with heroes that fall in two categories—Nova, for instance, is both single-target (good for small fights) and ranged (good for large fights). Figuring out those nuances is another topic. But this is a good start.

Don’t Bunch Up

It sounds obvious: There are powerful AoE abilities in the game, so bunching up is risky. Hence, don’t bunch up. Everyone knows this.

Yet people do it all the time, and get punished for it. Why?

At root, it’s lack of imagination.

Here’s why people bunch up: something good happens in a fight. They move toward the enemy to capitalize.

Multiple people moving toward anything are going to be brought closer together:

Worse, they might have to go through a choke to get closer, making them bunch up much faster.

So the short version is: people bunch up because they’re trying to hurt the enemy team.

“But….we’re in a teamfight. What else is there to do?”

Lots of things! You felt safe to move forward—presumably you could move backwards, instead, and go get a camp, or push a lane, or walk around to set up a flank. You could stay right where you are and see how the enemy reacts to whatever just happened to them.

Lots of things, anyway, that aren’t moving right into an AoE.

Commit to not bunching up, and other options will start to suggest themselves naturally.

How To Play With A “Weaker” Comp

Sometimes, for whatever reason, it’s not a good idea to fight. Perhaps you have a defensive comp that can’t attack effectively. Perhaps your comp isn’t good at 5v5’s—maybe it has a lot of melee assassins. Whatever. If you take a fight, you’ll lose. What do you do?

Well, there’s a sort of rock-paper-scissors equilibrium:

• splitting beats grouping, because you can push multiple lanes at once
• ganking beats splitting, because you can have a numbers advantage
• safe macro play beats ganking

If you’re familiar with “Rush>Boom>Turtle” of RTS games, “Rushing” is equivalent to ganking, “Booming” is equivalent to split pushing, and “grouping” is equivalent to turtling.

So: when they’re grouped, you split. When they’re split (and you can see them on the minimap), you gank them. When you can’t see them, on the minimap, you play carefully.

Forts and Keeps Are The Objective

It’s common to talk about the “map objective.” The temples on Sky Temple, the seeds on Garden of Terror, etc.

It’s all wrong. There’s only one objective: the core.

Of course, you can’t just right-click the core at the beginning of the match: that won’t work. Rather it’s useful to go after some intermediate, achievable goals, that will make it easier later to destroy the core.

That’s where map objectives come in, right?

Nope. I’m talking about forts and keeps. Killing those gives you catapults, and opens the map up for you. Taking objectives doesn’t give you anything lasting—unless it’s in the form of destroying enemy forts or keeps.

Why do we want to win the objective? Because it makes it easier to destroy enemy forts and keeps. If you can do that without the objective, so much the better!

For many, the most counterintuitive consequence of this is that there are many times you don’t want to go the objective when it’s up. This sounds like a paradox—it’s the objective, isn’t it? But that’s the error of calling it “the objective.” A better term is “map gimmick.” It changes the landscape of the map, but the objective is always the same: the core, and before that, forts and keeps.

Quitting While You’re Ahead

There’s a common pattern I’ve noticed in games.

An example: the teams are both just poking weakly at each other. The Stitches on one team hooks the enemy healer, and his entire team dogpiles on him and kills him. Now it’s 4v5, so they run forward—

right into “The Kael’thas Zone.” They eat a ton of damage, lose one or two, and then the rest of the (low-health) team gets chased down and dies. The enemy team pushes down two forts and a keep.

All because the team succeeded (with the healer pick), and then didn’t know when to quit.

I think this is why it can be so hard to climb, even if you’re really good. You can spend the whole game creating advantages for your team—but often this only gives them more confidence to play badly.

If this post only gets one thing across: quit while you’re ahead.

Basic Macro Rule of Thumb

A lot of winning in HotS comes down to simple waveclear efficiency. Even if you’re “losing” in one lane, you can completely make up for it in the other lanes.

You can look at how different characters perform differently re: waveclear very simply: every character has needs (input) and performance (output).

For instance, Probius has incredible waveclear performance, with his exploding Warp Rifts. But he is squishy and very vulnerable to being flanked, and so needs safety, either through protection (other heroes nearby) or position (staying near his own forts and towers).

Tanks and bruisers (“warriors” for short) are particularly interesting in this model. A lot of warriors actually have quite good waveclear, if you’re just looking at raw damage output—usually through short-range AoE of some sort. However, they have quite strict requirements to actually use it—chiefly that they have to get close to the wave! In an uncontested lane this isn’t a big deal, but in a contested lane, it means giving the enemy a chance to “poke” and use ranged abilities on them, without fear of retaliation.

Contrast this with “mages” like Kael’thas or Tassadar, or even just characters with a ranged AoE ability like Tychus. They also do AoE, which is good for waveclear, but they can do it at range—which means they don’t have to get close. This makes them stronger than short range heroes at waveclear in contested lanes.

This leads us to a simple rule of thumb:

To maximize effective waveclear, put your short-ranged heroes in uncontested lanes, and your long-ranged heroes in contested lanes.

We’ll stop there—most of the reasons not to do this are measures to deal with bad teammates. But we don’t have bad teammates.

Against Unidimensional Power

There is a line of thought that goes something like this:

Some heroes (or units, or strategies) are simply OP (overpowered).  It’s very hard to get balance exactly right, and because the designers are human, they will inevitably make certain heroes (units, talents, etc) more powerful than others.

This simplifies player choice immensely: pick the OP thing!  Anything else is throwing—there is no reason to pick anything else.

I don’t agree with this line of thought.  Let’s look at why.

The biggest reason is that this assumes a single dimension of power.  We could call this the “Dragonball Z Theory” of power, in which you can sensibly talk about someone’s “power level.”

In very simple scenarios, this works fine.  Who can run faster?  Who can lift more?  Who has more cash in the bank?

But it doesn’t take much to complicate things.  For instance: which is stronger: rock, paper, or scissors?

But here’s a much more interesting question:  if the enemy has rock, and your two choices were scissors that were a little too powerful, or paper that’s a little too weak, which do you pick?

The paper, duh.  Even with strong scissors, you’re not gonna cut rock.  The way to beat rock is to wrap it up and cover it, period.  You can try and cut the rock with OP scissors, if you want.  Good luck with that.

In other words: more important than something’s “objective power level” (whatever that means), is whether it’s distinct.  If it’s distinct, that means it has access to some niche nothing else does.  It might not be a big niche.  But within that niche, it is the best possible choice, and thus won’t be competed out of existence.

This is not abstract, idealist theory.  This shows up in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of nature as well:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/biodiversity-may-thrive-through-games-of-rock-paper-scissors-20200305/

Mathematical biologists have found that nature is rife with ad hoc “counter systems” (my phrasing, not theirs).    From mating strategies of lizards to chemical traits of bacteria, rock-paper-scissors games (or “intransitive competition,” in the sense that A>B, B>C, does not imply A>C) from stable equilibria—in other words, they’re the rule rather than the exception.

Revival Post: Tao of Protoss, Orc Edition

What can I say reader, I just love this stuff. Beat me away with a stick, whatever.

No one can hold a zillion complex interacting things in their head all at once. An approach that does work is finding the simple principles at the core.

With that in mind, I’ve wondered for a long time: what is the Tao of Protoss? Are there any trends that apply to the whole race, that make the strategic problem of playing them easier?

Well, here’s what I got.

The defining traits of Protoss are freedom from specialization, and risk aversion.

Those two are actually the same thing.  A specialized system is a fragile system.  The longer the pipeline, the more weakpoints it has.

The thing to remember is that SC is a game created by humans.  One of the fears we humans have is that we are over-specialized, and vulnerable to our systems being hacked or circumvented.  Alien was basically “Specialization Paranoia: The Movie.”  Humans have all sorts of fun toys, but we are still fundamentally vulnerable if things don’t go the way we planned.  The Protoss fantasy is, basically, not that—as in, what if instead of scared humans cowering in the dark, we were badass psychic warriors with energy swords and shields, formidable individually, not just as a group with an armory.

Now, here’s the thing about specialization:  we hate it, but we love it, too.  It’s what civilization is built on.

It’s worth looking at another fantasy race to get an intuition: WC3 orcs.

Now this is counterintuitive, because the whole thing about orcs is that they are uncivilized.  Like the Protoss, they also shun specialization, though they do it by requirement, rather than choice.  The Protoss have advanced beyond specialization; the Orcs have not advanced to it yet.

But in-game, it actually plays out similarly:   tough, melee units.

This applies to more than just zealots and archons.  Immortals have 6 range; while siege tanks have 13.  Compared to siege tanks, Immortals are “melee.”  Further, immortals are durable, with their high shields/armor, and their Barrier ability.  This means that immortals are less vulnerable to firepower in general—and it’s the relative aspect that matters.  If there are two archers fighting, but one of them has a dagger and the other doesn’t, that one is now a “melee fighter”.

Now, the thing about melee units in Starcraft is that they don’t scale well.  Individual combat is different than mass combat;  being good at one doesn’t imply being good at the other.

So that’s how Humans in WC3 beat orcs, who are tougher fighters individually.  Humans will put footmen in front, and riflemen and priests behind.  This will beat an equal number of orcs, as long as they can never get past the footmen (specialization paranoia!).

How do the Protoss deal with this?

In two ways:

First, they don’t fully escape specialization.  They have units like high templar, disruptors, colossi, and tempests, which must be protected.  However, these units are added to an otherwise and mostly generalist army.  A Terran army, by contrast, is all specialists!

Second, they catch the Terran army off-balance.  A well-positioned Terran army is very hard to assault from the front.  So they attack from a different direction (often with the aid of teleportation), or when the Terran army is moving, and not well-positioned.