Warriors are one of the most difficult roles to gauge your effectiveness on. Someone new to the class might question what exactly their role is. Other classes have straight-forward metrics: healing, damage, and to some extent, siege numbers.
These offer a general principle that can guide players towards doing the right thing. Damage taken supposedly works in the same way, but reality tells a different story. How much damage a warrior takes is rarely ever an indicator of skilled warrior play.
Instead, focus on doing these 4 things right.
1. Identify your win condition
One of the most important things warrior players need to do is understand their role in a team fight. This changes every game depending on the battleground and team compositions, but it is the warrior player's job to understand their hero well enough to know what it is they are supposed to do.
Assassin and Support players usually don't have this problem. All they need to do is deal damage and keep people alive. It can be more nuanced than that, but the end goal is always the same.
Warriors, on the other hand, must choose between one of these likely scenarios:
- Understanding their team is filled with ranged poke damage, the warrior's job is to protect them from the enemies' dive potential.
- Understanding their team has high burst damage potential, the warrior's job is to initiate their team's dive.
- Understanding the enemy team has a weak front line, the warrior's job is to bust through it and cause chaos.
- Understanding their team has multiple support heroes, the warrior's job is to lead the slow march towards the objective and soak tons of damage.
The list goes on of potential jobs a warrior has and it's why the role can feel so rewarding when played properly.
2. Scout Ahead
Some of the best warrior players in the world all deploy the same tactic -- they sit in a bush, a whole screen away from their allies, completely alone and scout ahead like a mobile sentry ward.
Too often, the fear of feeding or dying unnecessarily causes warriors to play way too cautiously, and the ripple effect this has on a team is disastrous.
This usually happens before an objective spawns or when the enemy team is missing and its importance cannot be understated. Warriors are the only class with enough defensive options and escape tools to make this type of aggressive positioning possible.
There are tons of advantages this brings to your team:
- It allows the rest of your team to take merc camps or clear waves safely, knowing there is no impending gank.
- It opens your team for the chance of getting the jump on the enemy team rotating, or ganking a single hero.
- It keeps the enemy on their toes and sets the precedent for overly cautious play on their part
- It helps your team make smart decisions and lets them rally around you if something happens.
This is an advanced warrior tactic and some warriors are better suited for it. Leoric, E.T.C, and Muradin excel at this thanks to their escape abilities.
3. Live dangerously
Damage taken may not be a reliable metric to judge a skilled warrior, but we can't ignore it completely. The best warrior players cheat death constantly and are aware of their hero's ability to absorb damage and escape.
A warrior player should always be in front of their ranged assassins and supports. This is almost always the correct positioning decision. Too often, the fear of feeding or dying unnecessarily causes warriors to play way too cautiously, and the ripple effect this has on a team is disastrous.
If you don't play aggressively, your assassins can't do damage. If your assassins are diving on a target, you should have already been there leading the charge. Part of what allows a Warrior player to take so much damage is the threat of damage that follows them.
Think of your role as someone that enables the other heroes on your team to do their job. Engage the enemy and try to kill them, but don't make it your sole mission. Assassins are far better suited for this and can easily mop up the enemy if a skilled warrior is paving the way for them.
4. Lead the charge
More so than any other type of hero, a team relies on their warrior for most major battleground objectives. A bunch of squishy heroes can't bully their way onto a capture point, tank boss damage, or face check a bush the way a warrior can.
On top of this, It's simply too difficult to engage with a group of enemies if a warrior is not present with a stun or some sort of CC ability to get the ball rolling.
This underlines the most important part about playing as a warrior: You are far more effective when your team is following you, not the other way around.
Make a call, and stick with it. Even if it is the wrong one, it's common Hero League knowledge that even the wrong play done as a team of 5 is better than the right play done by only a few. With the help of pings, aggressive scouting (Tip #2), and some key stuns, your team will naturally start following your lead.
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