Under Picked Maps in Professional Play

These battlegrounds fall into two different categories: the objective is extremely flawed, or the battleground isn’t picked for tactical reasons. Blackheart’s Bay and Garden of Terror fall into the first category while Cursed Hollow and Warhead Junction fall into the second.

Despite their common categories, when you split these battlegrounds up and look at them individually you find very different problems. The first battleground I want to take a look at is Blackheart’s Bay because it has been marginalized in the meta since the beginning of professional play.

Blackheart's Bay

• It is much too easy to generate a snowball effect. Whichever team can find an early lead generally has no trouble maintaining it.

• The core objective de-emphasizes team fighting and emphasizes PvE. This adds to the difficulty of coming back because generally winning big fights are the way to get back into games.

• There is no way to defend against the objective once it has been taken. It simply bombards you and the only defense is Mule, Tassadar shields, or Zeratul's Void Prison.

 

All of these things boil down to the fact that it's way too difficult to come back.

In the words of Srey of team Dumpster Tier Superstars, “Basically, the objectives are optional and you don't need to win fights to win the objective, which is totally different than basically any other remaining battlegrounds.”

Garden of Terror

The second battleground that seems to have big problems with its objective is Garden of Terror. The major problems here are:

 

• Being able to trade or even sneak the seeds making it so you don’t have to fight.

• The objective is extremely weak after the most recent changes. With many compositions, teams can be more productive by pushing or taking mercenaries than taking the seeds and pushing with the Terror.

• Game times get incredibly long which can make the game hinge on who makes a mistake first in the late game.

 

In the words of Jayce “Gillyweed” Gluck, “Sometimes Garden of Terror is picked, but its objective is pretty lackluster, especially once the nerfs stopped the “hit-and-run” style of Garden Terror attacks.”

Warhead Junction

    The next battleground we come to is Warhead Junction. This Battleground has less difficult problems to manage than the two above and part of its issue is being new. Its problems are:

 

• The size of the battleground is too large. It almost forces you to pick globals to be effective.

• It can be very easy to hold onto nukes and save them for ending the game.

• Four nuke spawns happen often enough that it makes it difficult for teams that are behind. Four nukes and a boss pushing is game over in most situations.

 

Breez, Fnatic’s tank player puts it best, “Me personally, I like the warhead objective, especially after they nerfed it down a bit, but I just find it rather strange that it spawns 4 nukes so often.”

Cursed Hollow

Cursed Hollow has been around since the beginning of professional Heroes of the Storm and has been one of the better-balanced battlegrounds in the past. It is one of the least flawed in this list. A couple of the problems as far as professional players are concerned are:

 

• The randomness of the tribute spawns. It can give one team a big advantage based on luck if it spawns next to them while the bosses are being traded.

• The tribute can spawn too quickly for one team to contest.

 

Breez weighed in on this Battleground as well, “The reason why cursed hollow wasn’t picked a lot on the international stage is probably because it’s such a perfect battleground. You can play basically any comp you want on this battleground, so you have to fear what the other regions play since you cannot ban everything out.”

These two Battlegrounds definitely have fixable issues. They are not major problems with the core objectives, just slight issues with battleground mechanics.

However, Blackheart’s Bay and Garden of Terror seem to have some major core objective issues and will probably require reworks in the future. These battlegrounds are the only two of the list that don’t see much professional play because they are so flawed. as Srey put it, “Their core objectives just work too differently to be fixed. Those battlegrounds are cheese.”

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