Welcome to my maddest quest yet, and hopefully the most mad quest I ever undertake for Vigaroe: documenting and staying on top of Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's MOBA that they spent years trying to insist wasn't a MOBA, possibly because 'MOBA' is one of the dumbest genre names the video game industry has ever come up with.

To be fair, this quest was, when I set out on it, quite a bit less insane than it might seem to someone reading this right now: I discovered Heroes of the Storm existed at a point when it had been years since it had major updates, and within a couple months of me getting into it, an announcement was made that it was going into 'maintenance mode', which seemed to mean no updates whatsoever. By the time I decided I liked Heroes of the Storm enough to try to pretty deeply understand it and write about it, over a year had passed with no updates, so my plan seemed reasonable!

Alas, various life circumstances interfered heavily with this quest; I'd expected this series to start going live in 2024-2025 when I first started on it, but my time in the Nightmare Apartment came to an end in a really terrible way, I lost access to accounts, and my health problems were intense, so it got put off for ages, then still further put off by Vigaroe's old backend refusing to work. By the time I was seriously thinking about getting this project ready to go live, many pretty major updates had already happened, and just a few days before the time I originally wrote this introduction you're currently reading, an entire new Hero got announced.

So now my quest is quite mad indeed, for when I set out I did decide to commit to staying up to date as best as I could. I made that promise to no one but myself, but still; by default, these pages will try to stay accurate to current Heroes of the Storm. Yeah. I know, I'm insane.

In part as a concession to the above consideration, pages are going to tend to be a bit more 'narrow' than my usual style. I originally intended to do things like tell you how much percentage damage does to Top HP Hero Stitches for useful comparison points, but now that I know his HP may well change or he may be superseded by some still tougher person, I'm not going to subject myself to needing to rewrite dozens of pages if his 3020 HP ever ceases to be the apex of base HP. That kind of thing.

When it comes to individual Heroes, I will also lead each page with giving you some idea of how experienced and competent I believe myself to be based on my experiences, so the Rehgar players will know I'm a scrub whose advice is probably terrible because I've barely played him, while the Deathwing players will know that if I think something is a good idea, it's not pure theorycrafting by an ignoramus. There is simply no way I will ever be a master of every Hero, even aside the cast resuming expansion, and no, I'm not going to ask some Good Rehgar Player to write his page for me. If you want that kind of approach, go to Icy Veins or something.

On that topic, further note that I'm not coming from the perspective of 'pro' play, in basically any sense. I don't expect to ever compete for money in Heroes of the Storm or be attached to a pro team, and as of this writing I've never even gotten around to trying out Storm League. If you are hoping to get 'leet strats' from the best players in the world so you too can strive to stand among the best, this is probably not the site you want to look at. If, however, you want a deep dive into fiddly mechanics details where I obsessively split hairs and inform you when a mechanic works differently in a mostly-unimportant way from how the game says it works, you're at the right place!

Also, for the most part these pages are intended to be roughly standalone; I fully expect the overwhelming majority of people will come to Vigaroe exactly and specifically for just one Hero and not care in the slightest about the rest of the pages. That said, anybody bothering to look at this index should probably actually read the pages from the 'game basics' sub-index, as I explain several broadly relevant mechanics points that the game itself never communicates properly and that the wider internet, when it alludes to these elements at all, tends to organize the info in manners that make it difficult to get to a proper understanding of things like 'what even is Level scaling?', let alone 'how does Level scaling actually work?'

Time for sub-indices:


Game Basics. Level scaling, general damage mechanics, how 'laner' AI generally works, common major positive statuses, common major negative statuses, how 'Spell Power' actually works in most cases, and other universal or near-universal systems that aren't necessarily clear in just playing the game and the game isn't very good at explaining.


Ranged Assassin Heroes. The single most common type of class, which in usual gamer lingo would simply be labeled 'damage' or similar. Ranged Assassins are, on average, the frailest of the classes, but also usually some of the best able to output damage. Many of them have poor access to negative statuses, particularly major statuses like Root and Stun. That said, Heroes of the Storm loves all its rules to have exceptions.


Melee Assassin Heroes. One of the rarer classes, and also a bit poorly-defined, blurring together with the Bruiser category, to the point that for example Malthael was introduced as a Melee Assassin and then reclassed as a Bruiser with minimal changes to hit kit being made at the time. On paper, Melee Assassins are 'Ranged Assassins, but restricted to close-range fighting'. In practice, Melee Assassins are generally quite tough, out of necessity given their poor ability to output damage at a distance, and are more freely given access to major statuses and self-heals than Ranged Assassins are. Also, Murky is in here, and he's a giant weirdo all-around.


Bruiser Heroes. Probably the game's fuzziest class, Bruisers are presented as combining damage and durability together, tending to have strong ability to self-heal and often being very good at clearing Minions swiftly and efficiently. The idea seems to be that they're meant to go solo and hold a lane by theirself while their teammates hang together. In practice, Bruisers sit in a blurry place overlapping with Melee Assassins and Tanks, to the point that some communities will literally ignore the official label and assign their own on specific Heroes.


Tank Heroes. Tanks are defined by two things: they are very, very durable, and they have ready access to hard disables. Almost all of them have a Stun out the box, and as of this writing Arthas is the only Tank who is never allowed to Stun per se. Tanks are also usually pretty bad at clearing Minions, but not all of them are (Which is one of those 'Tanks and Bruisers blurring together' design issues), and are typically mediocre at outputting damage. (But far from always) They're mostly also focused on fairly close-range combat, which itself is part of how they're often mediocre at damage output. Regardless, they almost all excel at interdicting enemy escapes and enabling ally escapes.


Healer Heroes. The most tightly-defined of these classes, Healers are uniformly able to restore missing HP from teammates, so much so that often a good Healer can substantially offset the damage output of the entire enemy team in sustained combat. Non-Healers sometimes have the ability to heal or shield allies, but usually vastly less powerfully than proper Healers. Healers run frail in raw HP but can usually heal theirself quite well, and usually have good access to disables. Also note that while their damage tends to be on the low side, it's rare for it to be truly trivial, and some Healers are quite able to duel various other Heroes to death.


Support Heroes. The rarest class, 'Support' is a funny euphemism for 'complete weirdos', Heroes who simply don't fit into the other class boxes at all well. In practice, currently Supports mostly do one or both of the following: providing superior ability to soak experience and monitor much of the map, and/or providing Healer-like ability to deny or undo damage, but with esoteric mechanics and typically weaker throughput compared to actual Healers. Oh, and all current Supports are surprisingly deadly when they get serious.


Battlegrounds. The maps you play on. Distinguished by several factors, but a common thread (outside ARAM) is that each Battleground has a different Objective: a task that periodically attempts to force the two teams to fight in a 5v5 by making it so that earning the Objective is extremely valuable, far more valuable than what can be accomplished by split-pushing while the other team focuses on the Objective.