As a Blizzard game, it's not terribly surprising that Heroes of the Storm is fond of buffs and debuffs as core mechanics. Lots of buffs and debuffs are extremely specific to exactly one Hero, and such effects aren't really presented to players as 'statuses', but there's a slew of 'standard' buffs and debuffs that get icons and in-game names and are more-or-less standardized in their behavior.
I put 'standard' in scare-quotes because some of these effects are only available through a very limited number of sources. I similarly say more-or-less standardized because various rules for various of these get broken in specific cases, and even the most consistent ones still get tied to a variety of sources/conditions/etc. eg some sources of Stealth demand the Hero hold still to trigger them, even though this isn't a baseline part of Stealth's mechanics.
The status system itself is oddly opaque compared to eg Warcraft III and Starcraft II. There is a 'buff bar' below your Hero's HP meter in the lower-left, which will track various bits of info, but many effects simply never get listed there, and for effects on other units there's no way to get clear summaries. (Unlike Warcraft III and Starcraft II) The window summarizing a unit you've selected will never list statuses directly, and only a few effects can be implicitly tracked by looking at it. The game instead tends to prefer to rely on in-engine visualizations, and some effects apply a brown duration meter under the unit's HP meter, but for one thing the latter consideration gets distinctly unhelpful when multiple such effects are in play on a given unit, and even when only one is in play you just have to already know that eg Illidan suddenly having a duration meter appear while his model turns somewhat transparent is signaling that he's activated Evasion.
All this opacity being of course part of why I'm making pages to cover statuses in detail.
Anyway, first up:
Stealth
Stealthed Heroes cannot be targeted by effects that directly target enemies (Including effects like 'bounce' attacks), are not displayed on the minimap, and enemies see their model as a transparent version of itself. (Making it easier to overlook them) Experience Globes will also refuse to move toward them, but can still be picked up by touching them. If a Stealthed Hero holds still for 1.5 seconds, they become Invisible, which causes their model to stop displaying entirely to enemies and also disables their unit collision. Invisibility breaks if the Hero moves or breaks Stealth, while Stealth breaks if the Stealthed Hero Basic Attacks, takes damage, or uses an Ability. (Some Abilities do not break Stealth when used)
Stealth is one of the most widely-available statuses, including that multiple Heroes are actually able to apply it to allies, so even Heroes who don't have innate access or Talent options can still end up Stealthed through ally action. (Except Deathwing, of course)
It's also one of the most opaque statuses in the game. In the first place, it's not an 'announced' status: several statuses have unique icons and display the status' name to all witnesses, but Stealth is not one of these.
First, let's explain that Invisible sub-state a bit more. It's a comparatively late addition, and, well, it shows. Stealth-applying effects pretty widely include a mention of turning Invisible after 1.5 seconds of holding still, but don't clearly communicate that Invisibility stops if you do start moving or taking action, and also don't clearly communicate that Invisibility means... well, true invisibility to enemies. If Invisible is currently active on your Hero, you do get a distinctive UI effect involving purple Nexus Triangles flowing in from the edge of the screen, but the game doesn't do anything to communicate that this UI effect is tied to the Invisible state. It also gets confusing with The Lost Vikings, and potentially with Rexxar or Samuro, as any member of your controlled Hero units ending up Invisible will trigger this UI element globally. So if you take Spy Games, anytime Erik is left idling for long enough you'll get this UI element kicking in, even if you currently have only Olaf and/or Baleog selected. Rexxar and Samuro require an ally Stealths Misha or a Mirror Image, and Samuro has to have taken Illusion Master as well for this to be possible, but still.
I should also seriously emphasize the part where Invisible disables unit collision. I semi-regularly see players attempting to search for a suspecting Invisible enemy by simply walking around, clearly hoping to bump into the Invisible unit and then attack them to properly reveal them, but this is a futile hope: you'll walk right through them as if they aren't there! (Well, it's not futile if you have a passive damage aura, but that's a different consideration)
Also, Invisible is quietly barred from kicking in if the Hero is considered to be on an Objective capture point. This specifically means Volskaya Foundry and Braxis Holdout, and notably does not apply to contesting the Payload on Hanamura Temple: you can be an obnoxious Invisible contester there! I'm also unsure whether this blocking applies to Mercenary Capture Points; if it does, this would be largely irrelevant and essentially impossible to test, because if you're uncontested you'll just take the point, and if you're contested then they probably already know you're there. It would require, like, setting up in the Camp before they hit it, and then require that they defeated the Mercenaries without ever incidentally revealing the Invisible Hero.
Anyway, backing up to the more basic Stealth state, its effects can largely be separated into the strategic, vs the tactical.
The strategic part if the straightforward part: since Stealthed Heroes don't show up on the minimap, they can get away with maneuvers other Heroes can't do as readily. For example, on Cursed Hollow there's a pair of team-sided Watchtowers that are designed so it's easy for their respective teams to casually watch for enemies trying to sneak the nearby Siege Giant Camp: if Malthael goes riding through the area, you'll see it on the minimap. If instead it's Nova riding through that area, her foes may well have no idea the Siege Giant Camp is in danger of being snatched prior to it being claimed. (This was more pertinent back when Watchtowers being claimed didn't time out, mind) More generally, Stealthed Heroes can walk through lanes openly, look around behind enemy lines to hunt for vulnerable enemies with minimal risk, and otherwise move about without enemies accounting for their movements so long as the Stealthed Hero isn't in the immediate vicinity of player-controlled entities with minimal odds of being spotted. (A player can just move their screen over to see a Stealthed Hero that's visible to Minions, but generally players mostly look near their Hero unless dead, recovering after Hearthing, or traveling a long distance through safe areas)
I should note that this strategic invisibility is pretty broad. For example, players can ping the portraits of Heroes at the top of the screen: if this is done to an enemy Hero, it will either result in a 'kill this Hero' ping, or it will result in '(Pinging Hero) warns that (pinged Hero) is missing!' A Hero currently under Stealth produces this 'is missing' ping even if they're actually wandering in view of the Hero making the ping.
Tactically, there's two broad implications to Stealth. The easier one to explain is that it makes most non-Heroic entities entirely ignore the Hero: Samuro can simply walk right through an unoccupied enemy Minion wave and be totally ignored if he has Wind Walk active. The only serious qualifier to this point is the Revealed statues I'll be talking about more next page, which effectively makes a Stealthed unit function as if it isn't Stealthed. (They still are Stealthed, which matters for various effects that care about whether a given Stealth effect is still active, such as Valeera's 'openers') Notably, enemy Forts, Keeps, and Cores all Reveal in a large area around them, and so Stealth cannot be used to safely scout around those.
The harder-to-explain tactical implication of Stealth is that a Stealthed unit cannot be targeted as a direct, intentional act. (Unless currently suffering the Revealed status) I'm putting in all those wording qualifiers because Stealth does not prevent being hit. As a concrete example, say you're playing Malthael, and as you're riding from the middle lane to the bottom lane you spot Valeera while she's Stealthed and also traveling from one lane to another. You'd like to hit her with a Basic Attack, but her Stealth means you can't click on her model to issue an Attack order. If you have Last Rites, you similarly can't drop it on her, because it's directly targeted on units.
However, you can hit her anyway. Death Shroud can be tossed in Valeera's direction, and if she doesn't move out of its way she will in fact be hit by it, at which point her Stealth will break. If you have Tormented Souls, you could also activate it while standing nearby her to break her Stealth. But also, the reason I'm using Malthael for this example is that his Basic Attack 'cleaves', striking a large area: say you do toss Death Shroud at Valeera, but she just keeps dodging it, and you don't have Tormented Souls, and you give up and both you and her move on to a lane. You as Malthael start Basic Attacking a Minion, incidentally hitting all enemies in a large area nearby: if Valeera is foolish enough to stand within the cleaving strike zone, she will in fact be hit!
This tactical implication is unfortunately one of the steeper learning curves of the game, as it isn't necessarily obvious from an outside perspective what the mechanics of a given Ability on a given Hero is. For example, 'cleaving' effects have no respect for Stealth, but 'bouncing' effects do respect Stealth: Tyrande taking Huntress's Fury and firing on a Hunter's Mark victim is a Basic Attack-derived multiple-targets effect, just like Malthael's innate cleave, but unlike Malthael this isn't a method for Tyrande to strike Stealthed targets indirectly. Effects that autonomously attack nearby targets in a targeted manner are especially inconsistent on this point: the various 'fire aura' Talents will all automatically hit and thus de-Stealth nearby enemies, even if they're Invisible, whereas Imperius' Molten Armor is conceptually a fiery aura, but is in fact foiled by Stealth. Similarly, Deflect on Genji can't fire shots at Stealthed enemies, whereas Jaina's Frost Armor Talent retaliating against Basic Attacks by Chilling the attacker doesn't care if the attacker was visible at the time their Basic Attack impacted.
It's also not necessarily intuitive for several atypical cases: for example, Mephisto's Consume Souls could be reasonably described as 'directly targeting' enemy Heroes, but it isn't foiled by Stealth. Similarly, Diablo's Apocalypse isn't foiled by Stealth. How about the automatic firing of the Longboat that The Lost Vikings can hop into? That is foiled by Stealth.
A further layer to the learning curve is the unpredictability of how sustained targeting effects will behave. If Leoric successfully attaches Drain Hope to a victim, the victim becoming Stealthed is no protection. Same for if Falstad attaches Lightning Rod to a victim. If Gul'dan initiates Drain Life on someone, however, the effect stops instantly if the victim becomes Stealthed, and same for if Kharazim has Way of the Hundred Fists and Radiant Dashes to someone: if they then Stealth before he finishes his series of punches, he stops punching.
Also, something I should explicitly point out is that damage over time mechanics like Lunara's Nature's Toxin will in fact attempt to break Stealth with every damage tick. This is worth pointing out because damage over time tends to be treated as a 'lesser' sort of damage for the purposes of effects that can be broken or interrupted by damage, and Stealth is an exception to this tendency. That is, if Valeera gets 9 seconds of Nature's Toxin on her, then activates Vanish, she'll de-Stealth in short order, but if Valeera instead Mounts up, Nature's Toxin won't terminate the Mounted state, even though the Mounted state is also a mechanic terminated early by damage. To be honest, I don't really get why damage over time gets this counter-Stealth implication, especially since there's multiple damage over time effects that can apply Revealed per se, which is pretty strange: Reaper's Mark on Malthael is only very slightly better as an anti-Stealth tools than Qhira's Bleed mechanic, even though Reaper's Mark has the Stealth-defeating status attached!
On a different topic, I should get a bit more into the Experience Globe point. I actually feel this 'doesn't move toward Heroes' behavior really ought to kick in when Invisible is active; Stealthed Heroes are in fact meant to be reasonably easy to spot with your eyes, to the point that at one point a patch reworked Stealth's visual modification to make it harder to overlook Stealthed units. The main time it's appreciated that Stealth causes Experience Globes to ignore you is when you're Invisible, so enemies can't figure out Valeera is standing in lane by virtue of spotting enemy Experience Globes drifting to and vanishing at apparently-empty space. It's not like Stealth is completely blocking Experience Globe collection, such that you have to become visible to collect Experience: it's just making it more of a nuisance to collect Experience when you are Stealthed.
All this stuff makes Stealth one of the most opaque (so to speak) mechanics in the game...
... and I haven't gotten into its other sub-status!
Let's do that.
Unrevealable
Most effects that apply Stealth apply Unrevealable for a brief period. (Usually 0.5 seconds or 1 full second) Unrevealable prevents Stealth from being broken by taking damage and prevents the Revealed status from being applied. Normally, Stealth will still immediately break if the Hero Basic Attacks or uses an Ability that breaks Stealth.
This is not displayed as an explicit status: it's only announced when something should reveal a Stealthed Hero, but fails to do so thanks to Unrevealable. (At which point Unrevealable! pops up in dark red text) Indeed, the game is inconsistent about mentioning Unrevealable in tooltips, with only some Stealth-applying effects bothering to mention that they include a brief period of being Unrevealable. Some cases that don't mention Unrevealable genuinely don't apply it, but it's a rarity.
Unrevealable's interaction with the Revealed status is also a bit odd, in that Unrevealable just hard-blocks the application of the Revealed status, but many forms of Revealed are ongoing effects that repeatedly try to reapply themselves and so will Reveal the target as soon as the Unrevealable status ends. (Most widely relevant: Forts, Keeps, and Cores Revealing in a large area round them) It's thus easy to be confused with the handful of effects that don't work that way; for example, Tyrande's Sentinel applies Revealed for several seconds after hitting a Heroic target, but if the target was Unrevealable at the time, its Reveal attempt is simply negated, which can leave Tyrande's player unclear what happened.
The fact that Unrevealable is largely unmentioned by the game and is pretty easy to overlook even its popup text is, as I alluded to earlier, another layer to the steep learning curve involved in understanding Stealth's mechanics.
Unrevealable is also pretty design-wonky. It's pretty clear that its primary design function is to ward against the scenario of 'getting hit by damage right after Stealthing wastes your Stealth application', in a similar manner to how Sleep is broken by damage but has a brief window before this behavior kicks in so cross-player accidental sabotage is harder. In this role, Unrevealable does function (Outside when the devs forget to include it on a given Stealth effect...), but the exact implementation in regards to the Revealed status has a lot of oddness. Being able to waste some Reveal-applying effects with a well-timed Unrevealable simply because they happen to be coded as a one-time application of the Revealed state is not an intentional aspect of balance, but a functionally-random distribution of odd advantages/disadvantages. There's no design reason why a well-timed Vanish can let Valeera stay hidden from a Sentinel impacting her but not from Chromie scouting the area with Timewalker's Pursuit.
Similarly, this occludes other aspects of the design. For example, The Butcher's Ruthless Onslaught Reveals his victim, and its channel terminates if targeting them becomes illegal. Stealth prevents targeting, but on its own it wouldn't interrupt Ruthless Onslaught because the Revealed state would overrule Stealth, and indeed in the cases where a Stealth effect doesn't apply Unrevealable, The Butcher will stay on his target. It's pretty easy to misunderstand and think the Stealth state on its own is breaking the lock, as for one thing Unrevealable's popup doesn't even occur in this case!
Exacerbating all this is the following two unique points: firstly, Nova's Triple Tap has the completely unique property of overruling Unrevealable. There's other Heroic Abilities that Reveal their target, but while they tend to be pretty unimpressed with Unrevealable (eg Pyroblast on Kael'thas will pursue its target once launched even if the target becomes Unrevealable), Triple Tap is unique for outright blocking the status. This behavior is of course completely unmentioned within the game, and so if you've picked up on the Unrevealable status existing, you can be left with no idea what happened that you stayed Revealed in a teamfight or something.
Secondly, Valeera's Smoke Bomb is a completely unique example of the Unrevealable status, applying it to Valeera continuously so long as she remains in the Smoke Bomb radius, and crucially refusing to let her Stealth break even if she takes action. This latter point is weird: if Samuro activates Wind Walk and then activates Bladestorm within the first second, he still loses his Stealth even though he has Unrevealable in that first second. I assume there are players who tried out Smoke Bomb and incorrectly got excited about the possibility of other Stealth Heroes pulling similar 'attack from Stealth without breaking Stealth' tricks...
Oh, and of course these two unique exceptions interact to produce another exceptional situation: if Valeera is targeted by Triple Tap, this does in fact overrule Smoke Bomb's Unrevealable, potentially heavily wasting Smoke Bomb in this one Hero matchup. As the game prefers, in Quickmatch, to try to ensure both teams have equal counts of 'stealthy' Heroes, this can come up more regularly than you might expect if you like queuing as Valeera or Nova...
There's further edge cases to this whole thing that can be quite janky. For example, The Butcher's Lamb to the Slaughter will trap and Reveal a victim it impacts, but the Reveal is, rather bizarrely, apparently only applied on initial impact and not continuously so long as the victim is hooked. As such, lobbing it at a target that reactively activates a Stealth effect can result in the victim being hit and trapped, but still Stealthed.
I get why the Unrevealable status exists and applaud the apparent design goal, but man is its implementation janky.
All this criticism about Stealth and its sub-statuses said, I should actually emphasize that I like Stealth in Heroes of the Storm, far more than I expected going in.
The MOBA genre is directly an offshoot of the RTS genre, and as far as I'm aware RTSes still struggle to this very day, decades after the earliest RTSes came about, with getting stealth mechanics to be all of the following:
1: A mechanic worth caring about with clear use-cases.
2: Not a tool to abuse for purposes the devs didn't intend and don't actually want to be part of the game. (eg 'Harvester hunting' in the Command & Conquer series, which was one of the clearest use-cases for Stealth Tanks and so on, and which the devs clearly didn't like how much it dominated the meta of these games, to the point the series ultimately abandoned huntable Harvesters outright!)
3: Actually used by players in sneaky ways. (For example, in classic Starcraft, you might activate Cloaking on your Wraith squadron to... make them invulnerable, openly attacking your enemies but impossible to shoot back against. This is clearly useful, but it's not at all sneaky)
Stealth in Heroes of the Storm is flawed, but mostly for oddities of code and other details of execution. The general MOBA context, particularly how Heroes of the Storm executes that context, is actually a really good support to sneaky shenanigans, while cutting out a lot of the classic RTS 'this is a use-case for stealth, but not one the devs are happy with' issues.
For starters, in Heroes of the Storm the default expectation is that players can keep pretty good tabs on enemy Heroes with minimal effort. Much of the map is kept visible by ally Minions and Structures at the start of a match, and crucially the game consistently endeavors to minimize Useful Activity one can do out of sight. In a traditional RTS, you can build economic expansions, work up through your tech tree, set up defenses at chokepoints, etc, and if the enemy isn't actively making an effort to scout, they don't know what you're up to. In Heroes of the Storm, capturing Mercenary Camps is the main thing one can potentially do that is productive and that can be done in the fog of war: if you're helping push a lane, your enemies can see that you're in that lane. As Heroes of the Storm has units made visible anytime they perform an offensive action upon one's team, even if an enemy Hero is supporting their Minions from beyond the sight radius of your Minions, you still get them popping into visibility, including that this puts their icon on the minimap.
Since Useful Activity is largely visible, and Mercenary Camps are few in number and go on a long cooldown when successfully taken, even when you don't mechanically know what a given enemy is doing, you as a thinking player still tend to have a good sense of what's going on. (If you're experienced and paying attention and so on, of course) Genji gets beaten up and runs behind his Gate, and then goes missing for a while: probably he's just Hearthing and then riding back out to a lane's conflict point. Sonya hasn't been seen in a while for no clear reason: she's probably at a Mercenary Camp and we should check those. Illidan hasn't been seen in a really long time, and the Boss Camp has been possible to take for a while: we need to stop him!
In turn, this makes Heroes with the ability to pretty freely wander around under Stealth meaningfully, well, sneakier than other Heroes. If you haven't seen Nova in a while, that's not as useful to notice as with other Heroes. Sure, maybe she is sneaking your Siege Giant Camp, or maybe she literally just ran through the middle lane toward the Objective, same as everyone else on her team, and her Stealth just prevented you from casually knowing that via minimap info. Maybe she went stalking behind your Fort in hopes of catching someone Hearthing away, didn't spot anything, and left, all without showing up on the minimap. Maybe she actually is lurking in the bottom lane, actively picking up Experience Globes under Stealth, and if she weren't a Stealth Hero you'd know she was lingering down there. Maybe she briefly passes in view of an ally as they're wandering between lanes, but nobody notices, where if this was an ally crossing paths with Li-Ming you'd have gotten to know she's heading from the bottom lane in a northerly direction. Or maybe Nova is sitting somewhere in your team's sight, waiting to gank a passerby. There's just a much larger possibility space for what a Stealth Hero might be up to while going unseen for a while.
This is all cool and functional! I do hope various of the oddities I've raised get ironed out one way or another, but seriously, Heroes of the Storm has the best implementation of stealth-type mechanics in an RTS-esque space I've ever seen, with the most sneakiness and lowest amount of 'you use it to accomplish things the devs don't actually want to be possible and that I as a player really don't enjoy being part of the gameplay'.
Evasion
Basic Attacks that would otherwise affect this Hero instead Miss, doing no damage and causing most effects attached to Basic Attacks to not be applied.
A general mechanics point I should note: 'under the hood', Heroes of the Storm doesn't actually automatically negate Basic Attack-riding effects just because the Basic Attack Missed. The devs have to explicitly code in 'don't run this effect if the attacker is Blind or the target is Evading'. There are cases where it's intentional that an effect isn't negated by Missing, such as how Raynor's Give 'Em Some Pepper cycles its counter every time he shoots, not every time he hits, but for Talents the general rule of thumb is 'if it is triggered by a Basic Attack, it's meant to fail if Missing'; when I first got into the game, there were a lot of cases where this was missed, but thankfully patching has consistently gone after those, so these are much rarer and hopefully someday will all be dealt with.
Evasion's default visualization is a frustratingly subtle increase in in the transparency of the Hero's model, often easily overlooked in the chaos of combat. Individual Evasion effects activating also don't tend to have distinctive strong audio feedback. For example, Illidan activating Evasion produces a specific laugh/grunt, but he does a lot of this type of thing, constantly. It's easy to go a very long time without realizing he has a specific one used only for Evasion.
Exacerbating this is that Evasion doesn't get a textual announcement or icon in the manner of eg Protected. Evasion does display a duration bar over the Hero, but such a bar can appear on a Hero for a number of possible reasons, including 'a negative status was applied to them', so it's not necessarily obvious that Evasion is why you're seeing such.
Genji further exacerbates things by having a special form of passive Evasion from a Talent, with no audiovisual cues at all to suggest it's at the ready. You just have to check the score screen for his Talent, or notice the Missed! announcement. (This is an improvement over its old state of secretly not being an Evasion effect at all, mind...)
So who all has Evasion?
Only Illidan has baseline access to standalone Evasion
Only Qhira, Chen, Genji, and Xul can Talent for standalone Evasion.
Yeah. 5 Heroes. Surprisingly rare!
That said, I should do a bit of an aside about Parry here, as Varian has it, it's mostly just Evasion with different audiovisual signaling, but... not entirely.
First of all, Parry is actually coded to negate Physical damage in a general sense, not simply to negate Basic Attacks. In the game's current state, this should only matter when Varian is fighting Maiev, and only if she takes Blade Dance, as this is the only case in the game of a Hero being able to cause Physical damage without performing a Basic Attack, but if patching ever gets around to adding more non-Basic-Attack-derived sources of Physical damage, the distinction may get pretty widely pertinent.
Second, for reasons I have yet to determine, Maiev's Umbral Bind inexplicably responds to Parry slightly differently than to Evasion. If Maiev's primary target is the Evading/Parrying unit, the result is the same either way: Umbral Bind is wasted. If instead the Evading or Parrying unit is a secondary target, they produce different results: Umbral Bind will succeed against most targets in its strike zone if Illidan is Evading inside it, only missing him, but if Varian is Parrying when Umbral Bind attempts to include him as a secondary target, this will cause Umbral Bind to completely whiff.
I should emphasize I have not tested Parry thoroughly in regards to eg other cleave effects. It's entirely possible it has similar unexpected advantages against other effects and I just haven't discovered those interactions yet.
Still, most of the time, Parry really does just function as 'Evasion, but harder to overlook'.
But yeah, if you count Parry as another Evasion effect, you can say that 6 Heroes have access to Evasion. So about 7% of all Heroes!
Anyway, getting more into mechanics, I should explicitly point out that the game decides whether Evasion is applying to a given attack at the moment of impact, not when an attack is launched. That is, say Tyrande fires an arrow on Illidan: if Illidan activates Evasion before her arrow strikes, he dodges. By the same token, if Tyrande fires on him when Evasion is close to timing out, so the arrow arrives after Evasion is over, he doesn't dodge. (To be clear, this extends to Parry) This is how Heroes of the Storm tends to work in general, mind, but video games are sufficiently prone to Basic Attack-type damage delivery mechanisms working differently from other forms of damage delivery that it's absolutely worth emphasizing.
Conversely, while Evasion's framing might suggest that it is dependent on movement, this is not so. Illidan can be Rooted in place and still ninja-dodging Sergeant Hammer trying to blow him to smithereens. By a similar token, I've already implied this multiple times but I should explicitly state that Evasion negates even area-of-effect attacks so long as they're sourced from a Basic Attack. Which can be pretty visually counter-intuitive in what counts, unfortunately: if Leoric swings his mace in a big arc that hits everyone in front of him, do you Evade, or do you get hit? Depends on whether it's his Basic Attack's innate cleave you're looking at, or him using his Skeletal Swing Ability that uses basically the same animation but isn't a Basic Attack at all...
A particularly odd example of this in action is Catapults and Siege Giants, who lob area-of-effect attacks to a visibly-targeted region, where you can in fact avoid being struck by just moving out of the danger zone, a behavior normally only true of Ability-derived effects, but these are in fact Basic Attacks and so Evasion will completely neuter them regardless.
By a similar token, while it's largely design-accurate to think of Evasion as a counter to Physical damage, this is a side effect of Basic Attacks mostly doing Physical damage and Physical damage almost never coming from anything except Basic Attacks. Various Heroes can Talent to have some of their Basic Attacks do Spell damage instead of Physical damage, and Evasion (and Parry) will still negate those Basic Attack hits. Similarly, most Summons do Spell damage on their Basic Attacks, and Evasion still protects against them.
Getting a bit more into player-usage aspects, I should also point out that non-Heroic entities generally rely entirely or at least heavily on Basic Attacks to deliver their damage. Minions and Structures and most Mercenaries simply don't have Abilities, and most Mercenaries (and Monsters) that do have an offensive Ability tend to have just one, maybe two, with pretty long cooldowns between uses. As such, Evasion is pretty widely protective against non-Heroic targets; I suspect the game is as reluctant to pass Evasion out as it is precisely because it confers consequences like 'can dive after someone in their Fort's shadow and completely ignore the Fort'; Illidan and Varian are both strong campers, both able to fairly safely pursue people even under Structure shadows, both able to safely kill the enemy's Core if simply ignored, and this is pretty heavily down to their Evasion/Parry Abilities being sources of the Evasion/Parry statuses that can be used fairly frequently and don't have any limiting conditions. (That is, Qhira can Talent for Evasion, but the Talent in question requires she has recently been fighting multiple Heroic targets: she can't give herself Evasion on-demand to support Camping or to make it easier to execute a lone Hero fleeing under a Fort)
It's also worth emphasizing that Evasion is an absolute defense when it does apply. That is, a Hero with high Armor takes less damage than a Hero with no Armor, but they do still take damage: if 210% of your HP in damage is coming your way, gaining 50 Armor just means you maybe die slightly slower. Evasion doesn't care how strong the incoming hits are, and doesn't fundamentally care about how numerous they are, you just ignore incoming Basic Attacks entirely. As such, it can have a shockingly high impact in teamfights if faced with a team skewed toward Basic Attacks being their focus.
This absoluteness is something Heroes of the Storm plays with a fair amount, such as with:
Protected
The Hero's HP is not lowered by incoming damage while Protected. (The damage is otherwise fully treated as having occurred)
I've seen some parts of the internet claim that Protected automatically includes Evasion. I;m unsure if this is because it did at some point and these claims are correct-but-out-of-date, or if they were never correct, but certainly by the time I got to the game this wasn't true,
Indeed, the Protected status behaves pretty substantially opposite to the Evasion status, in that the Evasion status not only prevents the damage but also prevents anything else that was supposed to occur alongside or because of the damage, which is not at all how Protected works. For example, Illidan and Whitemane are both very heavy on generating HP by delivering damage to targets: if they fire Basic Attacks into an Evading (or Parrying) foe, the damage doesn't occur and their damage-derived healing doesn't occur. If they're Basic Attacking into a foe who is Protected, the victim won't lose HP but Whitemane or Illidan will still generate HP as if they did damage.
By a similar token, negative statuses can still be applied right through Protected. I should specifically point out that with Stun and Silence, if they slam into a channel-based Protection state (ie Genji's Deflect, Anduin's Holy Word: Salvation, or Cassia's War Matron-backed Fend) will interrupt the Protected state, but Protected will still negate any damage that was delivered alongside the interrupt. (eg if Muradin Storm Bolts Genji mid-Deflect, Storm Bolt doesn't do damage to Genji, even though it Stuns him and thus ends the Protected state) Alarak would also be in this list, but Counterstrike includes Unstoppable, rendering the point moot.
If you're having a hard time wrapping your mind around Protected's strange, counterintuitive behavior even with my above explanation, a useful way of thinking of it as 'the Hero has functionally infinite Shield HP for the duration'. After all, hits to Shield HP do result in things like leeching working, but of course hitting Shield HP doesn't reduce the underlying core HP of the victim. It's an imperfect comparison, but mostly for edge-case points I suspect most players are unaware of or wouldn't think of in relation to this explanation. (eg when someone has Shield HP from multiple different sources, the game depletes from the earliest one first: if Protected actually were implemented as infinite Shield HP, this would produce different behavior from its actual implementation when another Shield HP source was applied before the Protected status)
Anyway, the Protected state is another positive status with very few sources:
Only Genji and Medivh have baseline access to Protected.
Only Cassia, Varian, Leoric, and Deathwing can Talent for Protected.
Anduin, Alarak, and Lieutenant Morales can access Protected via specific Heroics. (In Morales' case, she needs a Storm Talent)
9 Heroes in total, or exactly 10% of all Heroes.
Mind, Anduin, Medivh, and Lieutenant Morales all specifically can gift Protected to other Heroes, so every Hero can potentially be Protected at any given moment. (Even Deathwing, since he has internal access)
Protected being an absolute defense has comparable implications to Evasion, but more so, except with a bunch of asterisks. That is, it can in fact enable things like executing someone in their Fort's shadow and ignoring the Fort turning its attention on you, just like Evasion, but the exact implications are a bit different since attackers still get to benefit from all non-damage outcomes, unlike Evasion.
The Fort-diving example is in fact such a case, since Forts and Keeps apply a Universal Armor penalty to Heroes they successfully shoot. Evasion negates that consequence, whereas Protected does not: if Illidan performs the Fort dive and gets out before his Evasion times out, he's gotten off truly scot-free. If Genji uses Deflect to eat a hit from a Fort and then gets out, he won't be missing HP but he will be temporarily more vulnerable to damage, which may well matter.
Similarly, plenty of Heroes have effects for somehow gaining a boost to their performance when landing Basic Attacks on Heroic targets. Samuro's Advancing Strikes will still give him Movement speed (And potentially still other benefits, depending on his Talent choices) if he's striking into someone Medivh Protected with Force of Will, but not if he's attacking into Illidan's Evasion.
Protected does of course have the advantage of additionally warding against Ability-caused damage, but it's arguably even more important there that impacts still 'count' for basically every purpose. Abilities are more fundamentally prone to having effects like applying Slows or completely disabling the target, and there's tons of examples of 'gain a permanent reward of some kind for landing an Ability hit on Heroic targets'. Genji Deflecting in the face of Puncturing Arrow Valla lobbing two Hungering Arrows into him is still letting her add damage to Hungering Arrow for the rest of the match!
There's also plenty of more tactically-relevant examples of Heroes being rewarded for landing hits on Heroic targets even if no damage is done. Orphea will get to heal herself, and if she landed Shadow Waltz in particular she'll get to dash about and fire it again much sooner: simply standing there, letting her hit you because you're confident in your invulnerability may get allies killed or enable Orphea's escape or the like.
As such, while the Protected status can be very strong if leveraged, simply absorbing damage on the idea that It Doesn't Matter can absolutely be a mistake, and I'd argue it often is a mistake if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Oh, and the Protected status is our first case of a status that mostly-reliably announces itself, with a name and icon used in-game, and with a specific visual effect over Hero HP meters that attempts to visually communicate Protected's effect on HP. I'm sort of unfond of this latter point, as it hides the actual HP: in a chaotic moment, it's easy to think someone will be less or especially more vulnerable once Protected ends than they actually will be. (eg you're trying to finish off Varian while Shield Wall-backed Parry is active, and don't notice the Alexstraza used Gift of Life on him and he triggered Second Wind during the Protected state and so he's not that low)
Unstoppable
The unit is immune to Slows, Roots, Stuns, Blinds, Silences, Displacements, and hostile Stasis effects. Gaining Unstoppable will remove ongoing Slows, Roots, Stuns, Blinds, and Silences, but not Displacements or hostile Stasis effects.
Unstoppable is honestly the most ubiquitous positive status, with quite a few Heroes able to apply Unstoppable to themselves, and a good portion of Healers (And a few non-Healers) able to gift it to allies. (And Deathwing just has it passively at all times)
It's usually announced, but not always. A number of Abilities that give Unstoppable very briefly don't actually communicate it at all (Such as Sonya's Leap), and Deathwing doesn't announce it in any way beyond the expectation that of course you know he's permanently Unstoppable, right? As such, it's even more pervasive than I suspect a lot of players realize.
Specifically...
Leoric, Mei, The Butcher, Johanna, Hogger, Maiev, Artanis, and Anub'arak all have innate access to Unstoppable. Deathwing is uniquely Unstoppable at all times.
Sonya, Blaze, Chen, Malthael, Stitches, Garrosh, Zarya, Sylvanas, Nazeebo, Tassadar, Raynor, Sergeant Hammer, Yrel, and Imperius can Talent for internal Unstoppable.
Uther, Li Li, Whitemane, Kharazim, Johanna, and Lúcio can Talent for applying Unstoppable to an ally. Garrosh, Rehgar, and Anduin can innately apply Unstoppable to allies.
Sonya, Leoric, Chen, The Lost Vikings, Lunara, Tychus, Valeera, Gazlowe, Alarak, Tyrael, Murky, and D.Va can gain Unstoppable through a Heroic Ability.
That's over a third of all Heroes who have access to Unstoppable, even considering some of these are redundant. (eg Sonya can get Unstoppable from Leap and Striding Giant, Johanna has Iron Skin and can apply Unstoppable to allies via Falling Sword) It's pretty hard to fully escape!
Furthermore, Unstoppable-type functionality is quite a bit more common than the above suggests. Stasis and Invulnerable both include Unstoppable's benefits in practice, I'm leaving out cases of Unstoppable that aren't directly applied to actual Heroes (eg Lieutenant Morales can de-facto provide/acquire Unstoppable via Medivac Transport, and similarly am leaving out that Gazlowe's Rock-It! Turrets are permanently Unstoppable), and also leaving out 'cleanses', some of which could be reasonably described as 'Unstoppable with a 0-second duration'. And even if every Hero in a match genuinely lacks Unstoppable-type functionality, it's still pretty reliably relevant anyway, because the standard Battlegrounds all have at least one Unstoppable Mercenary and/or their Objective generates at least one Unstoppable unit. It's thus only in ARAM and some Brawls that it's genuinely possible for Unstoppable to never come up.
Anyway, broadly speaking it's reasonably accurate to think of Unstoppable as 'Protected, but for all the non-damage things'. It's not fully accurate, with the game only being reliable about Unstoppable blocking/cleansing statuses that constrict a Hero's ability to act, but it's a useful rule of thumb when you're new to the game: 'this bad thing isn't a damaging thing, so Unstoppable is probably an answer' is usually correct!
A distinction here that's important to be aware of is 'delivers damage alongside a negative effect' vs 'delivers damage via a negative effect'. For example, Deckard and Malfurion both have a Basic Ability that Roots and damages units in its area; with Malfurion, an enemy Hero that's Unstoppable won't take damage from Entangling Roots, because it Roots enemies and applies a damage over time effect to victims it Roots, whereas with Deckard, Unstoppable will prevent the enemy Hero from being immobilized but they'll still take Scroll of Sealing's full damage. Most effects that tie together a negative status with damage have them independent of each other, but... not remotely all of them. Knowing which is which can be quite important, most obviously when fighting Deathwing, where he's simply permanently immune to all damage effects that require they deliver an Unstoppable-blocked effect.
I should, however, explicitly clarify that Unstoppable nullifies the application of statuses entirely. (The ones it protects against, I mean) That is, if Lunara gets 9 seconds of Nature's Toxin on someone, and then Protected is applied to her victim for, say, 3 seconds, they will come out the other side with 6 seconds of Nature's Toxin. If instead we say that a 9 second Slow was applied to our poor victim, but then they gained 3 seconds of Unstoppable, they come out the other side with... 0 seconds of Slow. So this is a way that the 'Protected and Unstoppable are equivalent' explanation can be very misleading.
The other major way in which that equivalency is misleading is the difference in how widely applicable they are. Protected does in fact block all damage ticks that apply themselves while it's active: there's no forms of damage that happen to bypass it. Unstoppable blocks most of the standard negative statuses, but it doesn't block all of them (Attack speed penalties, the Revealed status, Healing Received penalties and Time Stop are all standard major statuses that are not affected by Unstoppable), and Hero-specific negative statuses are only rarely blocked by Unstoppable. (eg Murky's Slime applies a Slow and a 'Slimed' status: Unstoppable will block the Slow, but the victim will still be Slimed, and so take more damage from follow-up Slimes)
Unstoppable itself is something I'm mostly positive on from a design perspective, albeit I'm critical of some of the details of the execution. (eg it's counterintuitive that Movement Slows are blocked but not Attack Speed slows, and there's no obvious design purpose to the latter being immune) There's a long tradition of games tending to prefer extremely targeted answers to status-type effects, and while I'm often critical of those in in practice, in broad terms the approach is fine enough, but Heroes of the Storm is a competitive game with a wide variety of Heroes who have wildly uneven access to different capabilities. Having a status that protects against just the Root status (And one for Stun, and one for Silence, and so on) would be much more erratic in its relevancy than Unstoppable in its current state: since Unstoppable is so broad, it's essentially impossible for eg Deathwing's continuous Unstoppable to be wholly irrelevant as an advantage. (Slows are absurdly common, and of the 7 Heroes with no access, only 3 don't have some other effect Unstoppable does apply against. The game would need 2 more such Heroes for it to be possible for Unstoppable to be guaranteed to be useless)
I say 'mostly' positive from a design perspective, because there's still funkiness, especially for the collage of Talent-derived extra Abilities that do nothing except apply a brief amount of Unstoppable with no particular conditions. For starters, Unstoppable is applied somewhat inconsistently in a 'conceptual' sense, where eg Lunara's Leaping Strike makes her Unstoppable for the duration of the jump, but plenty of other 'leap through air' Abilities don't include Unstoppable and so unexpectedly their users can be abruptly stopped mid-air. Similarly, the game is pretty inconsistent about whether Unstoppable effects can be used to escape Roots: Abilities that are 'pure' Unstoppable generally can be used in this way, but Abilities whose primary function is mobility (or defense) that happen to include Unstoppable mostly can't be used if already Rooted. (eg Lunara's Leaping Strike and Maiev's Vault of the Wardens are both Unstoppable jumps, but they can't be activated while Rooted... but Leoric is totally allowed to activate Wraith Walk while Rooted to cleanse it)
More abstractly, my impression is that the devs passed out Unstoppable largely in expectation of it being a defensive supporting effect, when the mechanics are such that it lends itself quite well to making more offensive plays impossible to counterplay. I'm unsure of this interpretation, but it's what the game design seems to skew toward, and some of the relatively clear exceptions look more like 'sanity checks' or the like. (eg Lunara's Leaping Strike probably has Unstoppable less as 'to give Lunara access to Unstoppable' and more as 'because she jumps so high in Leaping Strike's animation that it looks incredibly bad if interrupted'; it being pretty difficult to describe as a 'defensive' Unstoppable isn't a clear strike against my theory)
Anyway, I should also emphasize that the 'Unstoppable' name is a bit... over-optimistic of a name. While it protects against statuses, a beneficiary is in fact perfectly stoppable by other means: enemy Heroes can body-block them (ie maneuver to be in the way), and Heroes who can generate pathing blockers or produce real terrain can entrap Unstoppable Heroes with such effects. (Unless a given source of Unstoppable throws in the ability to ignore collision with units, like Tassadar's Shadow Walk, or more generally ignores normal pathing considerations, like Garrosh's Into the Fray throwing its target to their destination without regard for intervening objects)
I have some more things to say about Unstoppable, but mostly in relation to specific statuses, so I'll get to that next post. For now, it's on to...
Invulnerable
The Hero cannot be affected by enemy action, and any negative effects on the Hero are removed. (Time Stop works on Invulnerable units)
Invulnerable is incredibly rare. Murky is literally the only Hero in the game to have reliable baseline access (via Safety Bubble), and other access is always anchored in a Heroic: Uther and Tyrael both have a Heroic for providing Invulnerable, Johanna secretly has a brief moment of Invulnerable as part of Falling Sword (The game doesn't announce it, unlike the other Invulnerable sources), and Anduin can take a Storm Talent to upgrade Holy Word: Salvation so it grants Invulnerable to his allies. (Well, Tyrael now has a Storm Talent for temporarily gaining Invulnerable, but it's a particularly unusual example)
This is less meaningful than it sounds, mind, as Stasis is much more common, and is often used to produce a comparable result. The main reliable distinction here is that Stasis prevents a unit from being targeted with friendly effects -Murky in Safety Bubble can be targeted by Alexstraza with Gift of Life and also be healed by Preservation, whereas Ragnaros entering Stasis with Submerge cannot be targeted by Gift of Life, and Preservation going off will fail to heal Submerged Ragnaros even if he's sitting inside it.
Stasis also usually prevents the affected Hero from moving, where Invulnerable leaves benefiting Heroes free to walk about, but some Stasis effects are exceptions, such as Mal'ganis' Carrion Swarm.
Invulnerable is also 'under the hood' used more often than my above list suggests. Heroes in special death states (Such as Tyrael's Archangel's Wrath or Uther's Eternal Vanguard) are generally mechanically simply turning Invulnerable, disabling unit collision, and turning off their Basic Attack and Abilities. This mostly matters when oversights in Invulnerable cleansing occur, where for example Qhira spent a while able to trigger her Blood Rage heal off dead Heroes because the Bleeding status wasn't getting purged by Invulnerable.
Anyway, it's tempting to think of Invulnerable as 'Protected and Unstoppable together', and that's kind of accurate, except Invulnerable is largely better than what happens when getting Protected and Unstoppable simultaneously. As I noted earlier, Protected doesn't cleanse damage over time, whereas Invulnerable absolutely does. Similarly, Invulnerable purges an even wider array of negative effects than Unstoppable; as far as I'm aware, it is in fact supposed to clear all negative statuses (Even Hero-specific ones like Sylvanas' Banshee's Curse), and any examples of it not doing so are oversights rather than intended gaps.
The biggest difference by far is that Invulnerable simply prevents hostile effects from interacting with Invulnerable units, unlike Protected preventing HP loss but still letting hits land and do any non-damage things they're supposed to do. The game isn't perfectly consistent on this point (Thrall spent a while being able to gain Frostwolf Resilience stacks by throwing Feral Spirit through Invulnerable targets, for example), but by virtue of coding errors slipping through: in terms of intended design, Invulnerable is 'hostile actions don't interact with you'. So eg I emphasized earlier that leeching effects are harmed by Evasion but not Protection, and by the same token leeching effects are harmed by Invulnerable, because you can't target Invulnerable enemies and non-targeted effects still won't interact with them. (eg Li-Ming's Arcane Orb will simply fly right through Invulnerable enemies, and even if it impacts something to detonate atop Invulnerable enemies, it won't even try to apply damage ticks to these Invulnerable units)
Time Stop being of course the big exception, but it itself is a rare status and since it simply pauses durations the main case where Time Stop could be called a counter to Invulnerable is with Tyrael's Sanctification. (Which has its timer 'on the ground' rather than on the units) More roundaboutly, Chromie, Zeratul, and Mei can apply Time Stop to allies to potentially shift the clock in their favor. (So Uther's Divine Shield target stops being Invulnerable before your own buffs time out, for example)
Also note that by default Invulnerable units still retain pathing collision. Li-Ming's Arcane Orb will fly right through a Divine Shield recipient, but Sergeant Hammer will still be blockaded if the Hero in question stands in the chokepoint she wants to pass through. This is especially pertinent to Tyrael's Sanctification, since his teammates may have difficulty crowding into the fairly small area it applies to if his team trends large, but is in general something worth keeping in mind.
To be honest, I'm a bit unfond of the Invulnerable status, and am very okay with its rarity. Its baseline mechanics don't innately allow counterplay, the exact nature of its implementation has a lot of odd and inconsistent-feeling implications, and Heroes of the Storm doesn't do a great job of doing interesting things with it. I broadly understand why it exists and why it works the way it does (The short version is: because of Warcraft III's Divine Shield), but I sort of wish Heroes of the Storm hadn't tried to do it.
(Friendly) Stasis
The unit (usually) cannot act in any way, but is also unaffected by hostile effects. (Including damage and Displacement) Almost all negative effects are removed when Stasis is applied. (Usually) They cannot be targeted by friendly effects either, though friendly effects applied beforehand can resolve inside Stasis. (eg delayed heals) Passive damage auras are usually disabled by Stasis.
Friendly Stasis is an uncommon status overall, but noticeably more common than it seems, because though the game has an icon and all to announce it being in play, only a pretty small portion of Stasis effects actually announce it.
For example, in terms of access that doesn't require a particular Talent choice to be made, Jaina appears to be the only Hero in the game with a 'baseline' Stasis: her Improved Ice Block. In actuality though, the list is the following:
Baseline: Ragnaros, Samuro, Tracer, Dehaka, Fenix, Alexstraza, Jaina, and Deathwing
Heroic: Auriel, Johanna, Mal'ganis, Imperius, Alexstraza, Kharazim, Lieutenant Morales, Chen, Zagara, Illidan, Abathur, Blaze, Junkrat, and Genji
Talent: Kerrigan, Ragnaros, Chromie, Nazeebo, Brightwing, and Cho
That's 26 Heroes who have at least potential access to friendly Stasis, 8 of whom have it baseline. That's almost a third of all friendly Stasis sources!
And, again, most of these aren't announced. Cho's Molten Block, Brightwing's Phase Out, Chromie's Time Out, Auriel's Crystal Aegis, Mal'ganis' Carrion Swarm, Kharazim's Divine Palm, Jaina's Improved Ice Block, and Dehaka's Burrow are the only friendly Stasis sources that announce this fact to everyone. Funnily enough, that's also 8 examples.
Further complicating things is that friendly Stasis is inconsistent in its behavior. Most sources prevent the Hero from acting in any way except maybe canceling the Stasis early, but Dehaka's Burrow and Mal'ganis' Carrion Swarm allow regular movement, Johanna's Falling Sword, Junkrat's Rocket Ride, and Imperius' Wrath of the Angiris switch control to a marker for the duration, Zagara's Nydus Worm lets her place Nydus Worms while in a Nydus Worm, Blaze's Bunker lets him (And anyone else in the Bunker) cast a custom Ability from inside it (Two, if he takes the relevant Storm Talent), and Ragnaros' Molten Core, Deathwing's Dragonflight, Abathur's Ultimate Evolution, and Chen's Earth, Storm, and Fire switch them to a completely separate unit with its own Abilities for the duration. (Well, units, plural, for Chen)
Similarly, most friendly Stasis sources also act as a cleanse, removing basically every negative effect that can be applied to a unit, but not all. Genji's X-Strike, Fenix's Warp, and Illidan's Metamorphosis all either don't do cleanses at all or do very limited cleanses.
My straightforward list also doesn't draw attention to some further details. Dehaka, for example, has two Stasis sources: in addition to Burrow, Brushstalker is actually another entirely unannounced Stasis, allowing Dehaka to do things like cleanse himself of a lethal amount of Nature's Toxin applied right after he exited Burrow and so most players would expect him to be unable to cleanse himself again so soon. Similarly, Samuro has two self-Stasis effects that are cleanses: Mirror Image, but also Image Transmission!
Anyway, friendly Stasis is very comparable to Invulnerable, but is slightly less favorable to affected units. It doesn't cleanse quite as many negative effects (Even aside the cases of having even more reduced cleansing), it usually takes away control, but otherwise the rules are pretty similar, in that a unit in Stasis doesn't really interact with things. Unlike Invulnerable, Stasis tends to also stop a unit from having collision with other units, though through a different mechanism I should explain here because there's nowhere else natural for me to cram it in:
Removing a unit from the ground plane.
This is a term you may have seen on eg the wiki, probably with zero explanation of what it means. What it means is that... well, basically, in mechanical terms all units are standing on the same flat surface: the ground, or the 'ground plane'. Even when they visually are not on the ground, they're still mechanically on it: no matter how high Lunara leaps visually while using Leaping Strike, she's mechanically just sliding on the ground and phasing through units and terrain and so on. However fancy the 3D graphics might be, most interactions work as if the game is all a flat surface. Deathwing isn't his unit model: he's the radius 1.25 circle at the base of his model.
When the game wants to stop a unit from interacting with, well, basically everything, removing it from the ground plane is an option that neatly does so. You're gone from Flatland, and no other Flatlander can find you, wherever it is you've gone. I assume the game is specifically shoving such units underneath the ground plane, where they would also be naturally hidden from player view, but I have no idea how one would go about confirming this and the broader internet seems uninterested in the topic.
Anyway, many Stasis effects remove the relevant unit(s) from the ground plane, which naturally creates immunity to most effects. I'm not entirely sure what mechanical implications this truly has compared to simply applying Stasis and disabling unit collision and unit input: I suspect it matters in ways I haven't registered, but, well, I haven't noticed them, so...
Regardless, Stasis functions fine overall and I like it better than Invulnerable. My two main complaints are 1: it's kind of ridiculous how often the game uses it without mentioning it and 2: there's hostile Stasis that we'll be talking about next post, which is a concept the game never conveys exists at all!
But if those points were communicated, I'd be pretty straightforwardly happy with Stasis.
Unkillable
If the Hero's HP should reach 0 and kill them, they instead remain at 1 HP.
Unkillable is a very rare status:
D.Va's Self-Destruct is the only baseline access.
Zul'jin's Taz'dingo! is the only Heroic source.
Morales, Stitches, Tracer, and Lúcio can Talent for it at high levels.
'What do you mean D.Va has Unkillable?' you might be thinking. After all, Unkillable is announced by all the other cases, whereas nothing with D.Va suggests she has access to Unkillable... but mechanically, when D.Va activates Self-Destruct, her Mech is turning Unkillable. This is hidden by the fact that hides its HP meter, but it's what's happening! This does in fact matter, since for example Malthael's Last Rites can be upgraded to leech, while being an attack that scales off missing HP. If the Mech were just turning Protected until it detonated, that would have a different outcome for this interaction!
Anyway, Unkillable itself is pretty straightforward in concept but not explained well by the game, and its rarity makes it easy to not intuitively grasp it for quite a while. It's also just weird compared to the game's other defensive effects, as it does literally nothing unless the beneficiary's HP should hit 0 and kill them: in that case, their HP refuses to go below 1 and they don't die, but otherwise the damage has fully occurred. (In the sense that eg Illidan will leech based off the damage he applied to an Unkillable unit, not based on how much HP went away when he made the swing)
It's also functionally slightly more common than the above list suggests. Several Heroes have a Talent for refusing to die when killed, all of which functionally behave like an invisible Unkillable status that removes itself in response to preventing their death. (eg Johanna's Indestructible) More insidiously, Artanis' Shield Overcharge functionally gives him Unkillable anytime it's off cooldown: Artanis can be at literally 1 HP when you somehow hit him for ten thousand damage, and if Shield Overload is ready to trigger, what will happen is he'll suddenly have all his Shield Overload Shield HP and be at 1 HP.
I actually wish the Unkillable status was used a bit more than it is, though. The fact that it's a powerful defensive effect if you have it ready when you should die but does literally nothing if you don't take enough damage that you should die gives it a high risk/high reward aspect, where you want to trigger eg Taz'dingo! as close to your would-be death as possible to maximize its value. That's nice design! Alas, the game is unfond of it...
One thing to keep in mind with Unkillable is that it doesn't prevent or purge damage over time effects or delayed damage effects. (eg Last Rites) It's entirely possible to activate Unkillable, then die the second it times out not because anybody tapped you at that point but because somebody applied an effect to you during the Unkillable. By a similar token, it only protects at the moment of impact: it's possible to start backing away while Unkillable is active and you're at 1 HP, and then that arrow Tyrande fired while you were Unkillable finally arrives and you die even though you weren't in her range at that point. This is true of Heroes of the Storm's defensive effects in general, but is especially janky/frustrating with Unkillable.
Untargetable
The Hero cannot be targeted by or impacted by some portion of effects specific to the effect granting Untargetable. Existing effects are not necessarily removed, and can still do damage or otherwise affect the Hero.
never announced
Absorbing
When Yrel should take damage, she instead is healed for 50% of the damage she would've taken if Absorbing weren't active.
Absorbing is, strictly speaking, unique to Yrel, but Medivh's Force of Will has very similar implications and functionality in most contexts. Force of Will delivers a heal at the end of the state, rather than healing the second the damage occurs, so Healing Received modifiers need different timing to be useful for each, and for effects that respond to missing HP the distinction also matters. (eg Last Rites will deliver less healing to an Absorbing Yrel if she takes other hits, since she'll immediately heal, whereas a Force of Will target would be healed just as much)
Though honestly, the only reason I'm bothering to put Absorbing in this list is because it's named and has an icon to itself in a manner otherwise only seen on 'major' statuses. I suspect the devs intended
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Next time, we cover the negative statuses of the game.
See you in the Nexus.
