On my first day of Heroes, I only played 2 heroes: Raynor for the tutorials and Li Li for my 3 Quick Match games. Today, I played 4 more practice matches with Uther, E.T.C., Sonya, and Illidan. All of them seemed fine. I don’t know if people have preferences between the roles or heroes, but if they do, I figure I’ll just play the least popular one, because they all seem to require the same general level of engagement, just in different ways (healing, chasing, etc)

My main observation is that the Practice mode is pretty terrible. Maybe I missed the part where I could set the difficulty, but it was pretty easy to wail on the heroes in lane to force them out and then start accruing an experience advantage. It sounds like co-op mode is better adjusted for difficulty, but I think that they are both skippable modes.

I played Sky Temple and Blackheart’s Bay and today, I played Garden of Terror and Haunted Mines for the first time. Again, I’m pretty new to the game, but it seemed like all of the modes were quite similar despite being presented as a differentiating aspect to the game: there are objectives to collect around the map, and they feed into being able to push harder. I do like the focus on map objectives: camps, towers, and map objectives all seem to be big priorities, which cuts out the work of farming.

Of course, playing practice games didn’t seem to enlighten me much on strategy. Naively, it seems like the basic flow of the game is to look for a kill, then try to take camps or other map objectives while the other team can’t team fight. These objectives then allow you to push down towers more quickly. I haven’t tested this theory yet, and I don’t understand the subtleties past that.

I get the 4 different roles on the team at a high level. Past that, I don’t really understand team composition yet, though it seems very important. Given how Quick Match works, however, that aspect seems to be downplayed.

I’m looking forward to playing a bit more against real people to see what else is going on in play against people.