I don’t think you can play a pure one-on-one, that is, a game with just you versus just one opponent (AI or otherwise). It’s always a team. But you can play a game of you plus four bots versus five bots, by selecting “Versus AI”. I think you might also need to check off a box that says something like “fill empty slots on my team with bots”.
To heal others, you do have to click on them, just like you usually need to click on enemies to do things to them. Usually, though, an ally who’s starting to get hurt significantly is either pushing far forward to pursue an even more injured enemy, or starting to pull back from the front lines, and in either case will be away from the big mass of characters.
What’s annoying me is that there are a lot of numbers the game doesn’t want to give you. What’s the range of an ability? How many HP does a tower or a core have? How much damage do they do? If something does 20 damage to minions, should I expect that to destroy them, soften them up, or just scratch them?
On another note, is there any use for gold besides unlocking heroes and cosmetic items? If not, I’ll just go ahead and start buying heroes once one I like goes off rotation.
Well I feel dumb. You are correct there is a checkbox. It says “A.I. Teammates,” which i took to mean that’s what an AI game was. In my defense the checkbox itself isn’t all that visible.
Pretty much just heroes and cosmetic features. (I have no idea if they have anything different planned for the future, but I doubt it.) I ended up buying enough guys so I have a familiar go-to dude for any given quest (one each specialist-warrior-assassin-support spread out across starcraft-warcraft-diablo - actually come to think I’m not sure I have a diablo hero in my collection). Have mainly been playing Li Li when I don’t have another daily to complete.
DOTA2 is much better… Blizzard is not Blizzard anymore. At least not the same Blizzard company that made games like StarCraft and Diablo and even world of warcraft (when it first launched)
It might be. I’m sticking with HOTS for a few reasons I’m at the ground floor. There isn’t years and years of meta-game I need to concern myself with. Also, from what I’ve seen, the HOTS community is making a concerted effort to prevent toxicity. DOTA and League are notorious for their horrid community. Even my friends who do play will say that it is an awful group of people. I’d rather not deal with that in my scarce game playing time.
I can already see a number of ways in which HotS is better than DotA. First and most importantly, the flaws in the game that DotA embraced, HotS actually fixed. When it’s to your advantage to kill your own minions, for instance, something is broken. The fix is not to give you new ways to kill your minions, and to track your progress at killing your own minions and to congratulate you when you do it. The fix is to make it not to your advantage to kill your own minions.
Second, HotS has maps. When I first started playing DotA, I asked whether the advice I was getting was relevant for all maps, or whether I might need to vary my tactics for some of them. Then I discovered that there’s only one map that’s used every time for every game. Where’s the interest in that? They couldn’t even make sprite-shifted variations? With HotS, though, the maps not only change in aesthetic, but also in topology (some have only two lanes instead of three, one has two different relevant zones), and all have their own additional gameplay effects. Much better.
I disagree. The denial of creeps and creep aggro characteristics in Dota adds another layer of strategy to the game. It doesn’t just deny your enemy the chance to last hit and deny experience, it also allows the better player to choose where engagements will occur.
I’m up to about five games in HotS now and I find it fun, but I wouldn’t compare the two. They are technically the same genre, but it would be like comparing Rising Storm and COD and trying to declare a better game.
They may add another layer of strategy, but it’s a layer of strategy that simply doesn’t belong in the game. If all you wanted was layers of strategy, then you could put a big Hex board in each of the bases, and instead of fighting on the front line, you could instead choose to play Hex, and the winner of each Hex game would get an extra creep in each wave until the next game finished. That would indeed add another layer of strategy, but it’d be silly. It’d be even sillier if it turned out that playing Hex was so much more beneficial than laneing that everyone did it, and new players got mocked for wasting their time trying to lane. Except that still doesn’t get to how silly denying is, because at least that Hex board would be something that was put in deliberately. Fratricidal denies are something that emerged as a valid tactic, when people realized that doing things that weren’t intended at all in the first place worked better than things that were intended.
So I finally won a game by myself against the AI (by chance, I previously won a game against the AI when I accidentally played with others). Anyway, I clearly have no idea what I’m doing. I played with Malfurion and I’ve come to realize I need to hang back or else I’ll get killed quickly. The problem is, if I hang back, the AI teammate I’m with also hangs back with me doing nothing particularly useful. I must be doing something wrong.
A ranged support character like Malfurion should be hanging back. As for the bot you’re partnering with, it depends on what they are. If they’re also ranged, they’ll also be hanging back. They (and you) should still be staying close enough to contribute in some way, of course, whether by direct attacks or spells. On the other hand, if the AI is playing a tough tanky melee character like Stitches or Diablo, they should be right up on the front line. In my limited experience, it doesn’t look like the bots take their cues on where to stand from anything you do.
You know, it seems like there might be enough people playing the game from here that we could form a sort of a… league-ish? thing?.. and maybe play with and against one another. Would there be any interest in that sort of thing? Is that sort of thing even possible within the game’s framework?
P.S. Tyrael is my favorite character so far, and I miss him now that he’s rotated out of the free collection. I’m buying him first.
If you see me on just invite me to a party for qm. I’m just short for being eligible for hero league, but I want to practice a lot more before I go there. Randmcnally#1224.
When I’m playing with AI teammates, is there something I should be doing to direct the AI teammate actions? I just played the map where you collect tributes and the ai Teammates completely ignored the tributes. The one we collected I collected by myself completely alone, which wasn’t a good idea since I was a squishy character.
It seems weird to me that the computer AI prioritized collecting tributes, but the teammate AI ignored them. Is there something I need to do to get them to collect stuff?
That would have been good to know that time my bot teammates abandoned the undefended core to go play the map’s gimmick. Also that one time when, after devoting all their effort to collecting zombie seeds, they let our Garden Terror rot on the vine unused (unfortunately, I was dead at the time).
As for playing with others, you are probably right, but I’d like to get a better handle on what is going on before playing with people. I still get massively confused.