Heroes of the Storm’s first PVE Brawl is also its best yet — and it’s great for XP farming!

For the past couple days, Heroes of the Storm has had an unexpectedly unique Brawl available: Escape from Braxis. What makes the Brawl unique is that it’s the first entirely PVE-focused Brawl to appear in the game. Where previous Brawls have all had some sort of PVP aspect to them, this one is purely a five-person, all-teammates adventure.

The Brawl has three phases, each progressively harder than the last (though not too much harder), and we running you through each below. There’s a bit of a fun factor behind going in totally blind, but some groups tend to speed-run the Brawl. When this happens, it can be hard to know what’s happening among the chaos. Because of this, having a bit of a heads up can’t hurt.

Phases one and two

Each phase starts behind a locked gate, and you’ll have a small window to choose various talents before the gate drops — in phase one, you choose the first four talents up to and including your Heroic Ability, while in phase two, you pick your level-13 and level-16 talents. Keep in mind, some talent options may be unavailable for the Brawl. For the first two phases, when the gates drop, the goal is to reach the checkpoint as quickly as possible.

On your way to the checkpoint, you’ll encounter various Zerg-ified enemy Heroes as well as Ultralisks which use a charge ability that stuns anyone caught in the way. Upon hitting the checkpoint, you’ll have to fend off waves of both tiny Zerg and the Zerg Heroes. What you’ll want to especially be on the lookout for — both on your way to and after hitting the checkpoints — are signs of Abathur and Murky.

Murky can be surprisingly frustrating if you don’t kill his egg, and Abathur will try to burrow away once engaged. Both of them tend to hide on the outskirts of the map or behind steam grates that block vision, but if you watch for where Murky arrives from and where Abathur’s Locusts spawn, it’s usually pretty easy to find them.

The other things to keep an eye out for are the special power-ups that enemies will occasionally drop. These can be an AOE heal, a powerful-as-heck nuke, a team-wide stimpak, reinforcements, or a psionic grenade that attracts all enemies and then explodes for damage. These do carry through phases, so if you’re not struggling at any point, it can’t hurt to save them for phase three.

Phase three

The last phase, as any proper PVE experience should, ends with a boss encounter. You’ll have another small window to pick your final, level-20 talent and then it’s off to Bossville.

The boss is the same type of Zerg boss you’ll encounter on Warhead Junction, but with some obvious mechanical differences. In the first part of the fight, things are fairly straightforward — attack the boss and watch out for the Banelings and their green goop. Not too long after this, the boss goes into a transition period.

During the transition, the boss is unattackable, and you’ll have to deal with a mix of small Zergs and enemy Heroes. The difference between this and previous checkpoint encounters is that the boss spawns two waves of enemy Heroes, three at a time. However, these Heroes start in an egg that can be killed, and if you kill an egg before the Hero spawns from it, you won’t have to fight that Hero. For this reason, it helps to set an attack order ahead of time (e.g., top, middle, then bottom). They do spawn with reduced health if your team splits damage, but ideally, you’ll focus fire one egg at a time.

When you’ve taken care of the six Heroes, the boss becomes attackable again. From here, you’ll want to watch out for Banelings as before, but you’ll also have to keep an eye out for an AOE grab/stun combo. It’s fairly well telegraphed, but just be sure not to be standing in the red zones when they appear. Keep this up until the boss dies, and you’re done!

Experience earned is great

If, for some reason, the above doesn’t sound appealing, then maybe the idea of leveling Heroes super quickly will grab your attention. Each successful Brawl yields 118,828 baseline Experience for whichever Hero you used. Of course, the Hero pool is slightly limited, but not to the point of being unreasonable. If you can’t tell from the picture above, you’re able to play any of the following Heroes:

• Warrior: Artanis, Arthas, Johanna, Muradin, Sonya, Tyrael, Varian, and Zarya
• Support: Brightwing, Karazhim, Li Li, Lt. Morales, Lucio, Malfurion, Rehgar, and Uther
• Specialist: Azmodan, Gazlowe, Sgt. Hammer, Nazeebo, and Xul
• Assassin: Cassia, Falstad, Greymane, Gul’dan, Illidan, Jaina, Kael’thas, Kel’Thuzad, Ragnaros, Raynor, Thrall, and Valla

The Brawl does benefit from Stimpacks and Friend bonuses, which means you can get well above 300,000 Experience for what could end up being an 8-minute run. And even if your team takes the full amount of time and you’re queuing solo, you’re still getting close to 120,000 Experience for a 13-minute run. Honestly, this is some of the best Experience per hour you could ask for.

There’s only a couple days left of this Brawl, but that’s still plenty of time to farm Experience on whichever Heroes need it most. And if you can put together a full pre-made team, you’ll not only get more Experience, but you’ll get it faster as well.

We need more of these

It’s hard to put into words how much fun I had the first time I ran this. I’d heard great things, and the concept of a PVE Brawl definitely sounded promising, but I still managed to be surprised with how great the Brawl was. In a way, it felt like I was playing an entirely different game, something closer to StarCraft or Warcraft 3 than Heroes of the Storm.

This Brawl gives me hope that we’ll see the PVE experience in Heroes expanded more and more. In a perfect world, there would be at least one PVE Brawl each week. But even having a couple on a rotation similar to Timewalking in WoW would make me beyond happy.

Sure, the Experience portion would probably get nerfed, but that’s not what made the Brawl so much fun anyway. Given the response so far, though, Blizzard would be silly not to do more of these. My mind is already working overtime imagining how else PVE in Heroes could work, and I absolutely love it.