Been playing for a week, up to 15k gold now and am ready to spend. Are Anub'Arak (4k) and Valla (2k) good choices to start? Any other recommendations?

Valla good for sure. Anub is solid, I think.

Great, thanks!

Both good buys, Anub'Arak is currently the highest win rate % hero (apparently).

http://i.imgur.com/gYpKtaj.png

This is very interesting. I wonder if the cheap heroes are that bad or if noobs who can afford them drag their win rates down. Suppose it's a mix of the two.

https://www.hotslogs.com/Default

Some of the cheap heroes are the worst in their class. Li Li is by far the worst healer and Raynor is by far the worst ranged DPS. But Valla is also 2k and a very solid ranged DPS. So it just depends.

Price definitely has not much correlation with the strength of a hero. Part of it is just how long ago a hero was released as they are all supposed to drop in price over time. Blizzard trying to balance all heroes also means a hero you paid 10k for because it was good could easily get nerfed the next day. That is why I just bought all cheap heroes first and am now working my way through the 10k ones.

Finally got around to playing this game and damn it's mad fun. I actually started to give DOTA 2 a shot last week and just never enjoyed it. I'm not a hardcore gamer, so it doesn't seem worth the effort. This was very fun though. My biggest concern for its longevity (for me) might be a lack of strategy. Any thoughts on that?

For heroes, I basically did the tutorial things which gave me some Raynor experience, and then tried a versus ai match with him. Kinda don't like him, so I gave Valla a shot, and I enjoy her very much. I always felt versatile with the AOE and hungering options, and like I could take down a ton of damage on a hero pretty quickly. Might try Tyrael next, but I'm a big fan of ranged combat.

Very true. Especially with Blizzard's version of balance that typically involves hitting things with a sledge hammer if they are doing well. (ie: Stitches going from #1 to #37 in win rates thanks to "balancing").

Muradin and Malfurion are great values as well. If you expand to 4k you get Anu'Barak and Illidan who are both basically best in slot.

Yeah, definitely. It's very possible to build a strong roster while avoiding too many 10k purchases.

Disagree. Even if Raynor was worst (Tychus is), it's not by much. I think there are spots where Raynor is a better pick over Valla.

thedavid#1704

i usually play jaina/sylvanas/valla. around lvl 35 right now

Didn't mean to find myself back in the FOTM camp... but right now I'm mostly playing Brightwing/Anubarak/Illidan. Assuming I want to ascend the ladder playing a mixed 'fill' style what other versatile heroes would you guys recommend?

I would probably just try to make sure you have two good tanks, two good healers, and then a bunch of solid DPS that don't require specific comps. Two tanks out of Anub, Muradin, Johanna. Two healers out of Brightwing, Uther, Rehgar (Malf is ok too). Tassadar doesn't take the healer slot, but he's a good support that fits in variety of comps. And then for DPS, grabbing the highly picked ones would be good: Sylvanas, Kael'thas, Jaina, Valla, maybe Zagara or Falstad.

nice post daz, thx 4 suggestions

One might also suggest (while Daz is totally right too) to pick a hero you enjay a ton even if he is not top tier. You'll have more fun and a well played bad hero is still better than a badly played good hero.

Oh, I should've clarified in the other post. I was just giving suggestions for a generic lineup of characters that you can pick to cover almost any draft. (Also, I solo queue a lot, so that's obviously a different scenario if you play with premades.) I consider a general guideline for a draft to be 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 sustained DPS, and 1 other.

One of the reasons I didn't mention melee DPS isn't that they're bad, but they don't fit into as many compositions. The first thing is that if one of your teammates has already grabbed a melee DPS, you don't want to be picking a second one (this isn't true for ranged, obviously). Having one or two melee DPS in your lineup is perfectly fine, but just know that you won't always be able to draft them. Another reason is that I usually wouldn't consider them for first pick.

Illidan usually requires a synergistic support (Rehgar/Uther) at minimum and preferably a secondary support (Tassadar preferred) or Abathur to really shine in PUG games. Sure, you'll see competitive teams run Illidan with Brightwing or Malfurion as a solo healer, but their skill and coordination is way above what you're going to get playing HL with anything lower than a 5-stack.

Zeratul is good, but he lacks good sustained DPS in teamfights, so I'd consider him to take the "other" slot. If someone else has already picked a character like Nova, Abathur, Tassadar, Murky, etc, then usually Zeratul becomes a bad choice.

Kerrigan is good also, but again, I would just avoid her if someone else has picked or is looking to pick a different melee DPS.

The Lost Vikings I really like. Once I got comfortable with them, I tried to draft them every time I could during the climb from R10-R1 with an insane winrate using them (could've just been lucky getting bad opponents). Even with subpar play, they can still be really strong. Even though they're not full melee, I personally wouldn't pick them if there's another melee DPS.

That's just my $0.02.

I really dont understand the vikings, what is the deal with em?

I don't own them obviously.

They soak XP in lane and the boat deals a ton of damage.

That split soak can be devastating. Just had a match with a very good vikings and we just crushed them on xp.

Like other people have said, one of TLV's big strengths is that they have three bodies that can all soak. People used to split into multiple lanes, which let their teammates run around as a giant gank squad or push as four in another lane, but that's becoming less common since people have figured out how to counter that.

Nowadays, people just soak during objectives, which leaves the enemy team in a crappy situation where they can either soak too and give up the objective, or they go for the objective and inevitably fall behind in levels. For example, on haunted mines you can leave 1-2 vikings outside. This would lead to you getting a few less skulls on average, but you'd gain an exp lead. Or on cursed hollow, TLV can soak while the rest go to the tribute. This will often lead to a 4v5, so in this case, your team is just trying to stall the tribute, not actually get it. The longer they can stall, the further ahead in exp your team will be. On maps like sky temple of garden of terror, an extra viking or two at the objective usually won't do much, but having them in lane will get full exp from minions. On the other hand, if the enemy team leaves too many people in lanes to try to match, then they risk giving up the second temple or plant.

Add on top that they have a lot of auto-attack DPS, a W that gives invulnerability, and a second lifebar ult. They're really slippery and yield low reward for kills, so they're not even worth focusing in a teamfight, especially since it only takes one surviving viking to pop the boat.

Very insightful, thanks!

I really like this game and have been improving/ trying to improve. I found grubbys guides a couple of weeks ago and I think they are great, but he only has done 10 heroes or so. What other places can I go for good guides and build?

Since I don't know the names in the scene, googling a build is pointless because I can't distinguish the good builds from the randoms posting their imba nova builds.

I don't know where to find good guides. I usually don't read them for a couple of reasons. One is the reason you mentioned. On sites with user-submitted guides, you have to sift through too much garbage to find a decent one, and if you're unfamiliar with that character, it might not even be obvious a guide is garbage if it's well-written. The second reason is that patches (and to a lesser extent, meta changes) often change what is considered the go-to build, but the authors might not keep guides up-to-date. So it's possible what you're reading was correct a month ago, but invalid today.

Personally, I just use hotslogs to see what builds people are running. I find the MMR epeen aspect of the site to be worthless, but it's definitely useful for builds. Just go to the link below, select the character you want to see, and filter for diamond/master league. Most characters have a pretty cookie-cutter build, with a couple talents that are flexible. There are some characters with more than one build, but generally one is superior to the other.

https://www.hotslogs.com/Sitewide/HeroDetails

I'm not trying to discourage you from using less popular or supposedly inferior builds. Just like you don't need to play top-tier characters every game, you also don't need to run top-tier builds every game. It just means you'll have to work a little harder to be effective with that character or build.