Medivh joins this week’s free hero rotation

It’s patch day for World of Warcraft, and while the servers are down what better time to talk about Heroes of the Storm? After last week’s mega balance patch and the addition of Gul’dan we’re a week into an all-new meta game. While there are definitely some big improvements, the patch brought some bugs into play, too.

Alex: The patch introduced some truly bizarre behavior with collision boxes where you can physically push certain units and other heroes around the map. You can shove things into a corner by walking into them, not even using a positioning ability like Diablo’s charge. They’re going to fix it, but in the mean time, games can get weird when players take advantage of it.

Anna: Yeah, Rexxar is completely broken. Misha gets bodied hard.

Alex: You can even test this by going into Try mode. You can shove the training dummies around the map.

While fixes are coming, for now the bugs remain — so if be aware that you could run into excessive body blocking until hotfixes arrive. Now let’s get into this week’s rotation plus the team’s thoughts.

 Assassins

Kerrigan

Mitch: Kerrigan was always fun because I could talent her to restore health and mana with her leap ability and just chain it from minion to minion if I got low on HP.

Thrall

Valla

Liz: Forever my fav.

Specialists

Medivh (unlocked at player level 15)

Liz: Welcome to the rotation! It seems like all of the new heroes are pretty high skill-cap and wind up at locked at level 15. I wonder if Blizz will ever add lower skill heroes.

Mitch: This marks Medivh’s first week being on the free rotation, and I would suggest giving him a try due to how different a hero he is. He’s incredibly squishy for a Specialist, but he can be a major asset to your team. His ability to scout the entire map freely is completely unique to him, and thanks to the recent changes, he can actually pump out a LOT of damage with his Q ability, thanks to the changes that make it automatically refund its mana cost in combination with the cooldown reduction if it hits a hero. Plus, the usefulness of a well-timed shield should not be overlooked. Invulnerability to everything is major. Also, Poly bomb. So. Much. Fun. t’s especially fun in AI matches, because the AI will not always spread out… which means you can get for a long time with the entire team sheeping each other.

Sylvanas

Anna: She got a SUBSTANTIAL buff with the Winions buff.

Mitch: Oooh, I hadn’t even though of that, Anna.

Anna: Because her trait (i.e. shutting down opposing towers and minions) is so tied into the efficacy of minions it turns out that a buff to minions is a buff to her; who knew.

Mitch: Sylvanas is one of my favorites and not just because I’m obsessed with the Forsaken. One thing I really want to call attention to is her ability to disable two towers at once. So often, I see players rotating between one tower or the other in order to help the team nuke one down quickly… but if you stand near one tower and then autoattack the other, your autoattacks will disable to one and you’ll be close enough to the other to spam your Q. It’s very frustrating to find a Sylvanas NOT doing this and unexpectedly being hit by a tower.

Anna: That only works if you’re in AI or your QM opponents don’t know to shut her down.

Support

Malfurion

Tassadar (unlocked at player level 7)

Warriors

Sonya (unlocked at player level 5)

Anna: Sonya kinda goes in bursts in popularity. One patch she’s a damage dealing berserker, the next she’s a whirlwinding tank, the one after that she can’t do anything so she’s on the sideline.

Anne: Is it bad that I mostly forgot that Sonya is a character in this game?

Anna: I’m gonna guess a certain EIC is going to be fussy because superhero Sonya is his favorite.

Stitches (unlocked at player level 12)

Liz: With last week’s patch adding the ability for Hook to grab allies as well as enemies, this week is going to be a prime opportunity for Stitches to troll everyone.

Mitch: I hate the way they implemented the new Stitches mechanic. And by that, I mean, I hate that it’s two clicks… one click to change your hook into an ally-pulling hook, another to actually use the hook. I don’t see why they didn’t just make the extra action button an insta-hook that incurred a cooldown on both types of hooks, but if this were WoW, I’d be macroing this into one button.

Liz: At least that means it’s somewhat harder to troll your own team.

Mitch: Still though, I love Stitches. And I love him even more now that I bought myself a Stitches plushie because it means one thing… Bikini Stitches!

Liz: Even more terrifying than regular Stitches.

Mitch: But so, so delightful! It even makes funny noises when you use his abilities because he’s using beachwear to fight.

[Ed’s note: We are absolutely not posting the Bikini Stitches image Mitch shared with us. Really, it’s best not to think about it.]

Tyrael

And that’s this week’s rotation! Are you going to be picking up Gul’dan when he goes live, or waiting for the price to drop? Or, perhaps, waiting to finally pick up a new Support when Auriel arrives next month? Let us know what you think about the latest hero in the comments!