Post 2

General Tips

1) Staying alive is more important than getting a kill. This is especially true during the early game when a hero kill gives you less exp than killing a minion wave.

2) DON'T CHASE INTO FOG OF WAR. This goes hand in hand with #1. This is an easy way to get ganked.

3) If you're behind on levels, try not to get into team fights. Just stay in safe positions and soak experience until you've closed the level gap a bit.

4) Never engage in a fight where you're outnumbered, or in a bad situation (low health/mana). I commonly see people rage in chat "WHY WEREN'T YOU THERE, WE JUST LOST A 4V5 BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T WITH US" truth is that while you probably should have been with your team, they DEFINITELY should not have engaged knowing that they were outnumbered.

5) You may have heard this before, but making a bad decision with the whole team is better than making a good decision by yourself. Maybe your team wants to get a merc/boss at a bad time. You might know its a bad time, but they're doing it anyway. You can protest by not helping, but you should just help them. This will allow your team to clear the camp faster, and then you can move as a team towards whatever objective was more important.

6) Never flame your teammates. I've seen plenty of comebacks in hots, I've won the unwinnable games, and lost the unlosable games. The only time that a comeback is not possible is when your team is fighting among themselves. I've seen people flame each other about making bad decisions DURING A TEAM FIGHT. Now tell me again, who is making a bad choice at that time? Putting your allies on tilt isn't going to help them play better, it'll just make them angry or unsure of themselves which will cause them to play worse.

7) This is very important. In the moba genre, you're going to have someone flame you at some point. Don't let it get you down. I've thought a lot about why people feel the need to attack other players, or why they give up early in the game as soon a mistake is made, etc etc. I think this happens a lot because people are insecure about their own abilities. They don't want to admit to being wrong or making mistakes, so they pass the blame off to another as soon as they can. They are afraid of failing when they try their best, and so they'd rather give up early on and blame the loss on their "noob team". Just ignore them, consider muting them, and laugh it off. Usually the people who do this are the worst on the team, and they're never going to improve because they can't admit to their own mistakes.

8) Here's the most important tip of all: HAVE FUN! I mean, this is a game after all. I hope that you all found this useful (especially because I had to write it twice). I've been doing how-to-play Heroes of the Storm streams where I talk about hero choices during ranked matches, strategy and other things. Even if I lose a game, I'll point out what I (and others) did wrong to get us to that point, so hopefully it's a learning experience for everyone! If you're interested in watching, check out www.twitch.tv/xkdvd[1] give me a follow there or follow me on twitter so that you can get notifications when I go online. Thanks and go play some Heroes of the Storm!