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.