First, a bit of terminology. "Macro" in this context refers to the broad strategy of the game. "Micro" is sort of like the opposite, and it refers to the raw mechanics of controlling your character, what abilities to activate when, etc. This guide isn't going to touch on any of that stuff. Instead, we'll be looking at how you judge what to do, when and why (that last one is very important). Most of the information here is surprisingly role-agnostic (i.e. it doesn't matter which character you're playing), but not all. I'll try to call out wherever I'm assuming one role or another.
The minimap is life, love and happiness. There are no words for how important the minimap is. Get in the habit of looking at it all the time. If you don't need to micro-manage your hero at this precise moment (i.e. you're pausing in a bush, waiting for a gank; or maybe sitting behind your minions, laning), then look at the map! Learn to recognize at a glance which hero has what icon and where they are at all times. If someone is missing off the map, assume they're coming for you! Remember where they were and guess where they might be going.
Seriously, map awareness is so important. It's probably the most significant distinguishing factor between lower level players and higher levels. Being aware of the map allows you to overextend as a Sylvanas and take down towers (or forts!) because you can see the entire enemy team in bot lane, and it tells you the precise moment you need to back off because they all disappeared a few seconds ago. Map awareness tells you when you're safe, and when you're about to die, and it tells you those things a long time in advance of the actual happening.
In the first 20 seconds of every match, you have literally nothing to do. At all. In a pug match, you're just going to be making people feel comfortable that you're handling X lane, etc. (note: in higher level pug matches, this is irrelevant for reasons that will be explained later) You often see in pro matches where the team will body-block the center lane minions to try to move the first clash closer to their walls, but this is out of boredom more than anything else.
In the early game, you have three major goals as a team:
- Never miss a minion death anywhere on the map
- Don't die
- Get kills
Balancing all three of these at the same time is what makes the early game a very enjoyable part of the game, despite not having most of your hero's power unlocked. Most teams, especially in lower-level matches, will broadly accomplish the first two goals while ignoring the third by splitting up roughly evenly across the map lanes and just blindly soaking/pushing. In higher level matches though, you start to see some real strategy here.
For most maps (but especially smaller three lane maps like Spider Queen or Towers of Doom), you accomplish the second and third points most effectively by rotating between lanes as a group of two or three, while your remaining team members either cautiously sit behind their minions in a lane or act as bait. Bushes/smoke are your friend. Be patient. Wait for a laner to over-extend and punish them with an instant death. Clear the minion wave and then rotate back down to the other lane. The trick is doing this fast enough that you don't miss minions in either lane.
In a lower level pug match, you can generally rotate by yourself between two lanes as long as you're very careful. Reinforce one lane, push it back, rotate down and do the same for another lane. This is a good way to carry a match if your skill level is higher than that of your teammates, since it will push your team to win multiple lanes and put the enemy on the back foot almost immediately. Solo rotating is an easy enough strategy to counter (literally counter-rotate yourself and gank the soloer between lanes), but you can get away with it more often than not, and map awareness can keep you alive even against better teams.
Don't underestimate the importance of point one! Don't miss minion deaths. It may seem like a very little bit, but it's actually a surprising amount of XP (to put this in perspective, a hero kill counts for one full minion wave worth of XP; that's it!). Never wasting minion XP adds up over time, and it's a good way to keep your team in the game if you're losing or magnify your advantage if you're winning.
Some maps have very early objectives that you need to be aware of. Blackheart's Bay is the best example of this, where the first pair of chests spawns at the 50 second mark. You need to make sure that you're in position at the relevant chest when it spawns. It's very important that you get at least one coin from the first pair of chests (though getting five between the two is ideal for a balanced match). If your team doesn't get any coins from the first chest spawn, the enemy can get an immediate turn-in. Also note that, with BHB, if you have three or four players in the mid lane (and one/two bot), you can nuke the top chest quickly enough to get someone up to the top lane before any minions die in the first creep wave.
Other early objectives are the following:
- Towers of Doom altars
- Cursed Hollow tribute
- Sky Temple top & mid temples
- Battlefield of Eternity immortals
- Infernal Shrines shrine
All of these objectives spawn at the 80-90 second mark, so you have more time than you do with BHB. But still, you should always plan on being full health and mana before the objective spawns. A player without mana is just cannon fodder. A player without health is worth even less. Be ready for the objective.
Note that, on many of these maps, it is completely valid (depending on your hero!) to ignore the first objective and just push your lane. XP helps a lot! The most notable maps where this strategy is often employed are Shrines, Sky Temple and Cursed Hollow. It happens on Temple of Doom as well, but less frequently. Be sure to tell your team that's what you're doing though (so they don't flame you for non-participation in the objective), and always be aware of the minimap when solo pushing a lane as you are a very easy gank target.
It seems intuitive, right? You kill the enemy heroes, you gain an advantage. It's important to understand what you're gaining though. In general, the XP you get from killing someone is quite minuscule. If you're behind in levels, or if the hero you kill is on a kill streak, you will gain a very appreciable amount of XP (this is why one of the best ways to come from behind is group up, rotate around and pick off lone heroes). If you're on even levels though, a hero kill is exactly one minion wave. Not all that great!
What is great is the death timers. When you kill someone, you take a chess piece off the board for a certain amount of time. At lower levels, this doesn't feel as impactful (though it is!). At higher levels, taking a single player out of the match for 60 seconds (the death timer post-20) means almost certain victory, because a 4v5 is such a strong matchup. When you kill someone, you gain time. Use that time to gain something permanent, usually a structure (at low levels, a tower, at mid levels a fort, and at high levels a keep or the core). Structures are the only permanent advantages in the game. You kill people to get structural advantages. You cap objectives to destroy (and/or prevent destruction of) structures. You do merc camps to kill structures directly or distract the enemy so you can kill other structures. It's all about the structures.
Level 10 is important. Really insanely important. Backing up though, the following levels represent talent tiers: 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 20. Of those, 10 and 20 are by far the largest power spikes, with 16 rivaling 20 (for most heroes; it depends on the composition). You should never, ever try to pick an even (e.g. 5v5 or 4v4) teamfight with a team that has a talent advantage over you! Level advantages of 1 or even 2 are not that big of a deal (though they do matter), but talent tier advantages are huge, especially late game.
And of all the talent tier advantages, level 10 is the biggest. For every hero, acquiring their ultimate is the biggest power spike they will ever see, and it's an almost guaranteed teamfight win. In fact, level 10 is so important (especially for some heroes with particularly strong ultimates) that I've seen 3v5 teamfights fought and won by a level 10 triple against a full level 9 team, just because of the strength of their ultimates. Don't underestimate this advantage!
When you're level 9 (or your opponent is), you should be glancing at the XP bars every few seconds. The instant either team hits 10, you should know it. If you're pressuring someone in a lane and they hit 10 before you, BACK OFF! They will murder you very quickly. Similarly, if you're being pressured (or stalemated) right as you're about to hit 10 before your opponent, try to bait them into a bad situation just as you hit 10 and punish hard. I've gotten so many kills that way it's not even fair.
But in general, if you have a talent advantage, try to force a teamfight and/or turn that advantage into a more permanent advantage (like capping an objective, or a fort, or even a boss). If you have a talent disadvantage, avoid teamfights and try to poke at the enemy team, safely disrupting whatever it is they're trying to do (like capping an objective) while your team soaks back up the difference with some quick wave clear. Don't die.
You're around level 10 now, and pushing higher. You've probably gone through your second wave of objectives. Now is the time you need to start feeling very fragile. Even the tanks are pretty easy targets for a group of three or four at this point in the game, especially if the enemy heroics are up. If you're a squishy, stay grouped. If you're not a squishy, find a squishy to group with. If you're not doing something more important, rotate between lanes en masse and clear waves. Watch your minimap for lone enemy heroes and punish their foolishness AS A GROUP. Safety in numbers.
By the way, if you haven't discovered Alt-Click to ping (you can hold the click and directionally select one of four types of ping messages), you should discover it now. This is by far the fastest and most effective way to communicate with your team. Also be ready to mash that V button to call for a retreat.
One other good thing to do is remember that, for most heroes, their ultimate is on a very long cooldown. If you see a Raynor use Hyperion or Malfurian use Tranquility, you know that they won't have that ability again for a minute and a half. Baiting out a heroic is an important strategy, and if you can bait a heroic, retreat for a moment, and then reengage you will be at a significant advantage. It's almost like deleting that player's level 10 advantage for a minute or so! By the same token, be very careful about your own heroic. Don't waste it, but also don't delay! It takes practice.
Be safe. Retreating and missing a kill is far preferable to overextending and getting killed. If an enemy is low health, they're basically out of the fight for 20-30 seconds anyway, which is almost as good as a kill at level 10. You've won the fight at that point; there's no need to actually kill them, and overextension is by far the easiest way to die yourself.
Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't press your advantage at times, but it takes very careful judgment. Dying is one of the worst things you can do in the game, and dying as a full team is one of the worst things that can happen to your team (in a pro match, a full teamwipe almost guarantees the enemy will win the game eventually, if only because of the advantage they gain in that interval of unhindered activity).
Oh yeah, camps and bosses. As a general rule, people massively overvalue these things. They're just not that good! Most heroes can solo clear a camp pushing one of their lanes in about 10-15 seconds. So that's what a camp is worth: 10-15 seconds of a single enemy player's time. Sometimes that's valuable! But it's a short-term advantage, just like a kill. It's not an end goal in and of itself. No one wins the game with camps, or even bosses.
Speaking of bosses, taking one is very dangerous. They hit hard (especially the one on Towers of Doom) and they are positioned in very vulnerable locations. Don't take a boss unless you have a significant advantage on your enemy and/or they're all showing and you want to take that advantage and turn it into something more potent than what you could get by just pushing down a keep as a team. Also, remember that a boss is a short-term advantage just like a camp is, just a slightly longer term. If you can't turn that short-term advantage into a longer term advantage, you wasted it.
Camps, bosses and other short-term advantages are good ways to get objectives. Cap a camp right as an objective is about to spawn and you'll pull an enemy player away from the objective to deal with the camp (trade the short term camp advantage for a long term objective advantage). Or cap a camp and then push another lane to get a tower or two (or maybe a fort). Always trade your short-term objectives for longer-term objectives. Capping a camp and then calmly going back to laning is a waste of all that time and mana you spent on the camp, and it technically gives an advantage to the enemy, even accounting for the fact that they need to clear the camp.
Never solo a camp. Seriously. Some heroes can do it pretty well (notably Sonya and Sylvanas), but that doesn't mean they aren't really really vulnerable doing so. Do camps in pairs or triples. Goes much faster, you miss less minion XP, and you'll be less vulnerable to ganking.
Ok, you're level 20. The enemy is level 20 too. You've managed to kill one of their keeps, they've killed one of yours. All five heroes are up on both sides, and you just had a relatively even contest on an objective. This is the endgame stalemate. What do you do?
First, rotate around. Paint the map blue. You don't have much better to do, and while merc camps aren't too helpful at this stage of the game, they're something. Don't try to take the boss (if applicable), since it will take too long and the enemy will just realize it and wipe you (every boss is a "throw pit"; don't do it if you're not sure it's safe). If there's a fort up, see if you can take it (ideally if the enemy team is "showing" on the other side of the map). If there are towers up, poke one of them down and then retreat. Clear minion waves. Remember that the lane without a keep will have enemy catapults, which will push the lane by themselves and can actually take down your core!
Basically, stall until the next objective. Your goal is to be in a good position for the next objective and win decisively there. Sometimes you don't win decisively at the next objective and you need to keep stalling. Repeat the process.
Here's the thing though, if you manage to tip the scales, even for a little bit, you can win almost instantly here. At level 20, a group of five heroes can 100-to-0 the enemy core in about 15 seconds. On even levels, a group of four heroes cannot stop a group of five heroes from doing this. If at least one keep is already down, and you manage to kill an enemy hero (even just one!), it's time to win the game. Don't go for camps. Don't go for the boss. Just end the game. If you don't have a cleared keep already, then clear a keep with your 4v5, back off and get some camps waiting for the next objective (killing the keep takes enough time that the dead enemy has time to respawn). But don't be afraid to end the game when the time comes.
- Don't die
- Don't miss XP
- Punish players who are out of position by ambushing from bushes
- Always watch the map
- Take a short-term advantage (like a talent tier or a kill) and turn it into a long-term advantage (like a fort)
- Hint: mercenary camps are not long-term advantages
- Camps are distractions. They are short-term advantages that you can turn into long-term advantages
- Bosses are big distractions. They are also insanely risky plays and surprisingly rarely the right thing to do
- Don't die
- Objectives are long-term advantages, but some objectives are worth less than others (e.g. one Tribute when both teams are 0/3). Sometimes, there are better long-term advantages that you can gain by giving it up
- Talent tiers are important. Know what they are!
- Retreating is almost never the wrong choice
- Chasing is almost never the right choice
- Over level 20? Won a team fight? Good. END THE F***ING GAME! Don't wander around and cap mercenaries like they're candy
glhf