Hello i'm Trace the murky main, and i play a vary of games from mobas to fps and stream most of them while doing stupid stuff including:
- climbing HL with lili, only pressing Q (this one got me super sleepy for some reason) - Playing illidan blindfolded irl (this one didn't really work that well, dced due to inactivity(was running into a wall)) - Playing murky without egg (this one did work 25min 0 deaths) - playing lane slapathur (well I'd a lot of fun) - splitpushing with tychus (Worked surprisingly well) - being demoted to tin league in fighting games (my team is holding me back ofc) - and more, all in the name of science!
The goal of this guide is to become the ultimate source for murky info and general murky tips.
The road to rank 1(before the placement system)
I were able to achieve my first Rank 1 with murky who at the time was considered a "troll" pick and still to this day is seen as a troll pick by people who don't understand what he brings to the game.
The fact that people were considering him a troll pick were the main drive behind picking him up as my main, i wanted to see if he really was a bad hero or it was a lack of knowledge that drove the blind frog hate.
So i set out on a journey to see if it was true or false.
To begin with i played him in QM to figure out his limits while trying out different ideas, builds, map strategies etc etc.
After about 100 games and some knowledge i went into ranked (was already rank 44 from earlier remember this was under the old ranking system were you always began at rank 50 and there were no placement games)
After less than 100 games (all solo, 0 party) i manged to reach rank 1 with little murky.
Here is some general data from the first climb regarding Hero league solo ques.
ALTERNATIVES
Only 2 games had proper trolls/afks (people that did really say "omg murky i'm afk" and went afk)
only 2 games as far as i could tell was proper premades 1 for the enemy team (they lost badly) and one for my team (we lost badly)
only 2 games had someone else take murky, 1 win and 1 lose.
only 5 games were proper stomps.
About 50% of the game we lost were due to
- bossthrows
- fightning when 2 levels behind or powerful talents
- Lemming train
- Failing to relize we couldn't go a certain objective
Smurf account results after 2 days during live stream under the old ladder system (always began at rank 50 without placement games Hotslog for this account
+ Fun! + #Bigplays! + cute! + great comebacks. + Great learning materials
Murky highlights:
- On a longer note even if you don't fall in love with murky he is a great hero to learn and understand macro play with, but more importantly you can train crucial skills such as map awareness with murky without suffering the usual penalty when the frog explode.
A key point to understand when a player watch a higher rated player play and see him/her fail in their mind they will think "Even i at rank 35 know that was stupid and a bad play" and "how is this guy rank X/Y/Z" Or see a play and think "what is the big deal I've done that as well"
The keyword here is consistency, on average a high rated player will have a much higher consistency in his gameplay compared to a lower ranked player and won't do as many mistakes which stack up over time.
The other point to make is maybe you can do the same thing as the higher rated player on your Best day and top performance but again consistency is the key thing to remember, you might need all of these things to go the right way for you to do X while the higher rated player can make it happen 10 times in the same time frame it takes you to do it once.
1) Why not puffer build?
- Aright lets expend upon this whole topic and cover everything.
To start of regardless of build The murky ult (octograb) can win fights/game alone due to its simplicity and power (point and click stun)
So when it comes to a creating a pick with our team behind us the build won't matter but that is true for any hero.
Example)
you can press qwer randomly on tyrande and win the game because of a stun on a lonely KT in the late game regardless of early game impact.
1) damage.
- Blade offers more damage compared to pufferbuilds in raw burst as well as sustain damage (but not more sustain damage than Living/slime/cont, (see note 2) throughout the game, we will go through the math at later parts of this guide in case you are into numbers and theory-crafting showcasing the damage difference.
- One of the keypoints which makes Living the dream competitive is the increased damage on your W and Q but the price of the damage is something often overlooked by many murlocs and that is the time it takes to get living the dream to the 20% mark and even then in raw numbers the damage output will be lower compared to Blades without any Cd's taken into the equation.
Note 1: if you are to skip slime advantage the sustain damage takes a huge hit and over time you will lose out on both kills against players and waveclear versus mercs.
Note 2: if you take living the dream, silme advantage And continuous slime you will have the highest murky DPS that is possible, this is what i often use when there are no really good target to burst.
2) utility
- Both builds provide the same utility for the team, the difference is puffer size and blood for blood slow but in general both won't make nor break a game, there are, however, a few times were an extra slow can catch another target but this rarely happens and can be overlooked.
- When it comes to puffer zoning; in a real game, if you are to throw out puffer most of the time you will find people killing it or walking away, in fact because you are throwing out puffer not only are you tell the enemy team that a large portion of a pufferbuilds damage is gone for 15sec you are also pushing people away and reducing the chance for a pick with octograb.
3) pushing power
- When it comes to pushing power you would think living the dream would provide the greater sustain damage, but because we have continuous slime in Blades the sustain damage will actually be higher and bring a stronger push.
- Another factor we must consider when we are using living the dream is the penalty of death, if we ever die our pushing power will become even weaker until we have restored our dream to 20%
This sometimes prevent us from going crazy and doing risky pushes etc, while a Blade murloc has no such fears.
4) Dueling power
- Because of the higher burst and sustain damage Blade has an easier time dueling 1v1 and catching people of guard with our utility burst (blood/envenom)
(clip showcasing late-game burst on unsuspected zeratul)
Also because our dueling power is better our natural pushing power becomes better because, whoever, is trying to stop our push must be more careful if he/she is to survival a quick all in.
5) Mercs
- Pufferbuilds are better here due to the fact they can do merc camps faster and safer and can give an edge depending on what part of the game you are in, while a blade murky has to spend a bit longer in order to secure the bruiser camps.
6) waveclearing
- Both builds gets the job done with different pros and cons.
Living the dream/puffer builds.
+ Can clear normal minion faster
+ can clear more normal minion faster if chosen to take increased puffer size
- has to expose himself to clear larger waves risking losing living the dream to an unexpected death
Blades
+ can clear mercs faster due to slime advantage
+ can engage a fight if someone shows up and secure a kill
But in reality most of the time both builds clear a wave equally fast without seeing any action apart from a random valla strafing by.
7) Teamfight presence
- We have already established that both build can create a pick equally, but when it come to a full on teamfight blade can provide the additional damage to kill a target or threaten the backline easier and has an easier time 1v1 someone on the side of the fight thus swinging the game in his teams favor.
Note: I've also found a lot of would-be-kills that could swing a fight and the game are lost when not having the burst from Blades and the faster Slimes (Q) from continuous slime.
8) The ability to avoid puffer damage with stasis/bolt/movement abilities.
- The sad fact of puffer is regardless of build the target can often avoid all the damage if the player posses any kind of quick movement/stasis/bolt ability
The most common abilities that can nullify a puffer are;
Improved iceblock
Bolt of the storm
Vault
Phase shift
any of these abilities can be used before pufferfish blows if you were to try octograb + puffer combo
assuming the target has decent ping and the knowledge, because of this puffers value is removed versus certain targets.
here are 2 videos showcasing 2 different scenarios, as you can see in the murky clip there is about a 0.3 sec window before puffer blows up where the target can use an ability to get out and avoid the damage.
(the clip below is only meant to showcase the timing needed and not meant to reflect the value of the target)
While in the monk clip you can see the target had time to cast Divine pam before receiving fatal puffer damage.
2) What is this build/guide all about?
blade is all about using all aspects of murkies kit in order to create a balance and stable gameplay experience rather than just create single highlight plays.
Also See table of content at the top, remember you aren't suppose to just read all in one go and become a murloc in one read but rather use it as a reference point to use and improve your overall gameplay, the key here is constancy which i'll talk a lot about later on.
This chapter will go through how to efficiently use the compendium in order to make learning easier and to grasp how the compendium is written
PS: let me know if this font and layout is preferred to the standard dark themed, i find it easier to read with lighter colors and helps me focus a lot more.
- The key point to remember when reading the compendium is to look for the topic you are currently interested in, no one is expect to read a whole math book when all you wanted to know at that moment was how to calculate 5 + 5
Saying that, if your basic knowledge isn't that great going through the basic level chapters first is recommended in order to get the most out of the more advanced stuff, just as with the math example you could go and read about Matrix and understand the Math but not understanding how to apply the knowledge due to lack of basic knowledge
- Finally if we look at the table of content at the top we can see the guide is separated into 3 levels (basic/expert/advanced) which are used to gauge the difficult of the concepts talked about.
- Matchups and maps can be found at the end of the guide these are severing as general guidelines and referrals points whenever needed, in a future update each chapter will contain a TLDR or a short list of the topics talked about in the chapter.
- In chapters 3.1 to 3.9 we will talk about the basic concepts that makes a murky powerful, while also covering key skills to learn and to master in order to be able to understand more advanced concepts, we will save the concept of pushing to the expert section in order to build a better mindset and not enforce the stereotype of a pushing murky.
- Once we have enough ground to stand upon we can start exploring more complex things, such as how to handle 2v1 lanes and what to prioritize which is covered in the Expert part of the guide.
- Finally once we have learned enough and have a couple of games under our belt we can dive into the advanced play styles which puts all previous knowledge to the test while teaching us advanced macro concepts in order to prepare us for the ultimate murky challenge: S.
In this chapter we will cover my general thoughts about all murkies talents while giving context to the thoughts.
[h7]]Level 1[/h7]
Block This allows you to take more damage and thereby make fights last longer which in turn means more Slimes and auto attacks, without this talent dueling becomes a nightmare and many kills will be lost due to less durability.
Bubble Breeze a weaker talent, offer a slight burst of speed while signaling the other team you are coming for them, also because of the slow from your slime (q) and its duration you will be able to catch your target if you can land 1 slime, this make bubble breeze one of the weaker talents especailly when you compared it to the rest in the tier.
Assault Egg A fun little egg, this Can be taken instead of block, it allows you to scout around corners, and allows you to control part of the map until the egg is found.
Some of the best spots are Coin turn in on bay, garden of terror bosses (if put it above the boss and you can see when it is about to die, which in turn allows you to rush in and steal a lot of seed)
There are a lot of more uses for this little egg which we will go into later.
Warning: until you have a couple of games under your belt you should stick to block, assault egg requires a more aggressive mindset and more general game knowledge.
Bribe I don't use this but there is an argument here
This could be taken if you are going with special timing in mind but you need to time it well, however, and not having the camp taken, not being in a bad spot etc, and you lose some of your 1v1 strength without gaining the vision control assault egg brings.
Example cursed hollow, taking the siege giant before the second tribute or stealing the enemies giants denying them the push.
[h7]Level 4[/h7]
Bigger Slime On paper this talent looks decent, bigger slime bigger potential damage with more targets but with a lot of practice you will be able to outrange any any melee heroes and wear him out with slime pokes without needing the extra range and we have to take into account that if we are to taking bigger slime we lose both living the dream and envenom damage which boths adds more sustain damage in a fight.
Tufferfish One of the weakest talent murky has, it can secure puffer explotion if there is only one enemy with slow attack speed but just as with bigger slime you are giving up living the dream/envenom by taking this.
Living the Dream Note: before going into a pufferbuild rant, do note living the dream is a decent talent on its own if we aren't thinking about pufferfish combos, i find taking living the dream when you have no real target to to assassinate to be the reasonable thing to do.
example)
The enemy team have; chogal, sonya, uther, stiches.
There is nothing i would consider easily killable so i would rather go with living the dream here to up
my sustain damage.
But in general most teams do have someone squish you can single out throughout the game.
We have already covered some of the weakness of living the dream (in puffer builds) and we will cover the math later on for now what we can theorist why living the dream is average murlocs pick.
Back in alpha when marsh of the murloc were broken and took down building after building together with puffer there was no reason to not ever take living the dream, it was the strongest talent at the time.
After the murky nerfs reducing the murloc population in a single night the murlcos that were left still tried to play the same style as we used to play when murky was the king of backdooring and splitpush (this was all before abby loctus backdoor)
And this never really evolved, after the nerf there were so few murlocs left and very few players tried him leaving very few resources for new murlocs and those that came learned from the old murlocs that only ever saw pufferbuilds and living the dream.
With such a small population of murlocs left living the dream became the norm and no one really explore anything outside of it nor did anyone check the math to see which the most efficient talents were after the nerf of the murlocs.
There were a few slime murlocs back after the nerfs but majority of them still lacked the damage missing blood for blood and evenom, bubble murlcos didn't come until much later in order to create a more annoying murloc for the new blood seeking an easier way into the way of the murloc.
TLDR: living the dream was best in alpha, nerfs happened to other aspects of murkies kit, everyone tried to play the same, no evolution, bubble murlocs came as a way in for new murlocs, still no one did the math in a public way in order to stop the dream madness, and here we are.
Envenom This is your first nuke, this allows you to to take out low targets and securing kills, it adds a lot of the element of surprise, very few people expect envenom from murky and will misjudge the damage causing their team having to try contesting objectives 4v5.
It is also a powerful laning tool making sure the enemy stay honest and don't try a to risky push in fear of being run down by murky.
Note: if someone escapes within the walls and gets to the well envenom will no longer kill them.
[h7]Level 7[/h7]
Slime Advantage More dueling power, this is another core stone in the build, those little hands do some work, try a game without this and you will see the damage drop.
This really bring out the damage in murky, and if you are able to slime your target you will be able to run it down while continuously hitting them with auto attacks.
Hindering Slime This slow is very powerful if you have a great team and you don't feel you are going to need a lot of dueling power in the game this can be taken, it will also help versus heavy dive teams keeping them away from your backline, but in all honesty more damage from slime advantage will secure your backline a lot more rather than hoping they have the wits to move away.
Compressed Air This adds to puffer size quiet a bit but the downside is the sustain damage lose form slime advantage.
You will add some waveclearing versus larger waves of normal minions and make it easier to land a puffer octo combo but if your internet is good enough you should be able to combo without this talent 99% of the time.
Clairvoyance if you play more for the team this could be taken but you lose the 1v1 dualing power of slime advantage without gaining the normal minion waveclear from compressed air or the combat utility from hindering slime.
But if you are more interested in a more control style of play this could be taken together with assault egg and adds a lot of vision control due to its global range.
[h7]Level 10[/h7]
March of the Murlocs This ability is better than it appears, it falls under the whole "play for your team" which is risky in SoloQ and should only be taken if you "know" before level 10 that your team will:
1) take a teamfight with your setup. (if your team is a pickcomp or splitpush march is very weak)
2) that your team is competent and will follow up.
What this ability allows is securing a victory or forcing your enemies down a certain path.
The slow from these little murlocs Stack, so if an unaware team get caught in the middle and get a few murlcos on them and then tries to retreat it is over they will be hunted down by your team and killed.
But if you can't take the fight the enemy team will ignore your murlocs and keep trampling over your team, in essence it is a judgement call, we will break it down further in control build section.
Octo-Grab Yes! this is so good, it allows you to get puffer of followed by slime/envenom/blade(blood for blood)
it allows you to get picks with your team, stop ults etc etc just so much utility with only 50 sec cd.
[h7]Level 13[/h7]
Continuous Slime More dueling power and more sustain damage by having Slime up more, the number of times people escape early game because of Slime being on 1sec cd is quiet infuriating, this also allows you to take on warriors easier.
Wrath of Cod adds 35% more puffer damage if the target is already slimed, the problem is majority of the time versus good player they will back of when you are going forward trying to slime them making it very hard to get the bonus damage benefit.
Also the high % is very deceiving making it out to be more valuable than it really is, at level 20 it is only about another 300 damage per pufferfish while bringing down the sustain damage.
Later on we will go through the math of the strange pufferfish.
Bubble Machine A safe talent for newer players just picking up murky and need that extra bubble uptime form taking way to many skillshots, the issue here is the higher you go in term of mmr the less likely people are to just stand around while you are floating around in a bubble.
Hidden Assault This can be taken in a control build or when you have another stealth character, a lot of people freak out when they see stealth and start to panic, this is why it falls under the control section and will be talked about in a further update.
[h7]Level 16[/h7]
Slimy End your plan was? (there is a hidden murky dive build that isn't very common but can work to a certain degree, it will become part of the Control update)
But in reality this has to be one of the weakest talents in the game with very few upsides.
Slimy Pufferfish This is sometimes taken by pufferbuilders if the enemy team proves to be elusive and can help secure more damage on the target if you can't get a pre Slime before trying to combo.
But one has to remember you are giving up blood for blood by taken this talent and you are already dealing less damage compared to Blades and you are losing rej bubble sustain healing as well.
Rejuvenating Bubble Another talent made to easy a new murloc into the ways of murky, provides safety and increase the longevity of the said murloc, but it lacks the offensive power of blood for blood and the surprise factor which often comes in handy and helps you secure a lot of kills by people overstaying trying to kill murky.
As noted before while you float around you are giving the enemy team a few seconds without your presence.
Blood for Blood This offers more dueling power, another nuke to finish of a low target, allows you to bait people 1v1 and take out warriors easier, a lot of kills happens because people are not expecting or respecting murkies damage and go to far forward while trying to kill said murky it also allows us to save our bubble for something else rather than forced to use as a heal only to take the wrong skillshot a moment later.
[h7]Level 20[/h7]
Never-Ending Murlocs can be taken in a control build but for the most part overshadowed by bolt/rewind
... And a Shark Too! Amazing damage, together with blade/puffer/envenom and allows you to combo kaels and illidan.
Note: at level 20 without livivng the dream the shark deals 300x3 damage for a total of 900 damage.
Rewind if you need insane instant burst this could be taken, it also confuses people when murky bubbles twice.
Bolt of the Storm This could be taken instead of octo's damage, you lose your combo-instant-killing-none-tanks-at-20 but if you really need to get that cowardly nova for your team or you just can't hold down their valla.
In this chapter we will go through the different thoughts about murky and his role in the game, covering the major ideas.
1) splitpusher
In essence splitpushing is a simple concept; create pressure in order to draw attention and secure other part of the map for your team.
However, many players don't understand that you need to setup a splitpush proper and ensure your team either has the wits to stall objectives or fights in order for your push to work or when to splitpush in order to create favorable fights for your team.
Blades falls into a 3rd playstyle where we often create splitpush pressure in order to make 1v1 plays and turn them into 5v4 scenarios.
Later on we will talk about how to create good splitpushes but before we can delve into the knowledge we must first talk about a lot of basic knowledge in order to make sure we have the tools to deal with the outcomes of a splitpush.
Note: a key mistake many splitpush murlocs do is looking at splitpush as a mean to killing a keep or a fort rather than the means to create pressure or soaking experience creating level leads.
2) initiator
There is no doubt murky is a great initiator, however, we must also take care before we make a risky play, is the target really alone? can my team follow up? can we still win the fight if we commit and kill this target? these are all topics we will cover later on, but lets cover some general thoughts right here.
Lets start with the topic about getting a pick.
Now if the guy is truly alone you should very often go for the kill, but don't forget to think if you really needed to use that ocotgrab to kill the valla that had no where to run, or if it was better to save it for the next fight/target.
Also don't forget to check if someone else and provide the CC so you may save your ocotgrab for later on, maybe your uther was right next to the fleeing raynor but had stun on 2sec cd.
The second key topic we will cover here will be "should i trade myself for this play?"
In these situations you must consider if you get the octograb but die doing it can your team still win the fight while you try to get back from wherever your egg is.
And even more importantly even if your team get the kill will they trade to many cds and lose to fight anyway? in this case you almost baited your team and caused a lost fight, I've seen lot of games when people overdive a target because it seems like the right thing to do, only to run of CDs and being killed even tho they were left in a 5v4.
3) soaker
Just as with initiating, murky is great when it comes to soaking (keyword here is soaking, not waveclear, your waveclear is only powerful when you can grantee puffer will explode) while on average soaking is a simple concept below the surface lurk the knowledge of knowing when to soak and when to join your team for a fight, this come with map awareness and foresight something we will talk about later in chapter 3.4
4) assassin
With Blade murkies burst damage and assassin potential becomes a real threat to most heroes, however, just as with the other playstyles there are things you need to know in order to profit from this playstyle.
To begin with you need to understand that just because you have this assassin potential doesn't mean that is all you are doing, for the most part a blade murky spends his time waveclearing and creating picks with his time and only uses his assassin power when it has a greater effect on the outcome of a fight or game.
Or splitpushing in order to create a situation where he can use the power of Blades in order to create a 5v4 game.
Here we will break down the general gameflow of murky the murloc, these are best seen as general guidelines of what to do during certain levels of the game.
Note: there is always a chance that you can kill someone as murky
1-4 you are waveclearing/soaking and hoping the enemy do something silly, try to get level 4 in time for object and preferable before the other teams hits 4.
5-9 waveclear/soak, you might wanna go to a teamfight but most likely you just wanna soak and pray your team don't do to many strange things that could sink your boat (game)
10 try to get 10 before the other team, regardless if they are 10 or not, try to group up with your team and get a pick with octograb, if you fail fall back to waveclear/soaking.
10-15 more waveclear while trying to 1v1 people and getting picks with Octograb while trying to control the map.
16 you can 1v1 anyone but chen and vikings, go and spread the terror of murky while waveclearing/soaking.
20 you can burst almost anyone, use this, sit in a bush and wait for that annoying nova or go and solo diablo, it is up to you.
Note: some issues with murky is pre 7 your damage is lowish, you can still teamfight with him but he doesn't give as much as a 7+ murky, usually you want to trade objectives early on.
This chapter will tie into the concept of splitpushing in general, while understanding why splitpushing is a more advanced concept and require not only good game knowledge but also knowing your heroes limits and your team's limits.
Lets start with saying the obvious, Most people in any moba have Awful map awareness and in general bad Screen awareness to the boot, however, it isn't just that they lack the awareness they also lack the foresight (the ability to see something coming) which make it even worse.
How often have you seen someone on your team:
A) Going blind into the lane while no enemy are showing, die to a level 1 gank and type "team?!" in chat afterward.
B) your sylvanas splitpushing while either 1) no one is showing on the map or 2) the enemy team just leaving midlane, only to 1 second later kill your sylvanas followed by "team?!"/ "call mia"
Now you might wonder why map awareness is tied into splitpush and why the concept of splitpushing is so much later in the guide, but if i give you the Basic knowledge you need to successfully splitpush on a cosistant** bases you will understand:
1) knowing your team is very unlikely to be enraged upon
2) knowing if your team is engaged upon you won't lose the fight or the game as a result
3) knowing how long it would take you to either get a objective in return of a teamamtes death or to join your team in time to make a difference
4) knowing if staying 10 more second will buy you another talent in order to take a fight a few seconds later
5) knowing if staying would cause an enemy to lingered behind to deal with you.
6) and more.
As you can see not only do you need the knowledge of what is most likely to happen (foresight and experience) but you also need to constant checking your map in order to figure some of these things out.
Now what can we do to train map awareness and foresight?
Lets start with map awareness
The basic concept of map awareness is the ability to be aware of the map and being able to draw conclusions from the information given to you.
Here are the basic guidelines which can help you improve your map awareness, try to do them all the time while you are playing and it will come naturally to you.
1) Whenever you are alone in the lane, look at the map, look where your team is and where the enemies are and try to think "what is going on there?" after thinking for a moment click on the map and have a look and see how the situation matches up with your expectation.
Do the same thing whenever you are alone and PvEing. (this also includes just walk to another lane or going home)
2) Before making a play: look at the map, are there any friendlies that can help you?/ are there any enemies missing or close by that could endanger the play?
don't fall victim to the temptation of going for a seeming alone healer only to have either his team help him and either making your play fail or endangering your teammates who tried to follow up.
You will often find people with bad map awareness go for the play dying 1v4 to 3 enemies showing up suddenly and type "team? no followup?!"
3) Try to look at the map while doing a play or in the middle of a fight, the more you do this the more natural it becomes, this is also what enables you to splitpush better by knowing when to split and when to back off.
You will often hear me on stream randomly saying "yeah i'm aware of the siege giants in top lane" or "yeah i know diablo is coming" while i'm in the middle of a chase or a fight, this all comes from a lot of experience and high map awareness even tho it doesn't look that i focus on the map at all.
Foresight
Foresight is the ability to see something coming by drawing conclusion from information and experience.
example 1) the sky is dark = rain is very likely to occur soon.
As you can see in Example 1 you used the information "the sky is dark" to draw the conclusion "rain is very likely" which comes from experience and knowledge.
The same thing applies to in game, but because of the experience factor you can't just learn it by reading about it, to bring up another example; you can read about how it "feels" to skydive but until you have done it yourself you can't understand all the factors which made the "feeling" of skydiving.
For a more game related example lets set up a scenario.
Scenario A)
Diablo has just left top lane.
From this you can draw the concluession that Diablo is looking to roam and gank from experience and as a preveting messurement you can back from your own lane in order to not die.
However, from the scenario we don't know if this diablo in question have a habit of faking a gank to another lane only to return to his original lane and pick up the unaware player in the lane.
What we need here is ingame experience from how this diablo plays.
In conclusion just like with the weather we can draw a general conclusion what will happen when the diablo leaves his lane but we still need the ingame knowledge to be "certain"
How do we train foresight then?
Part of it is just playing a lot of games so you get an average baseline of what players will do under certain circumstances, one key thing to remember though is to always remembering thinking about what the outcome of a scenario was, if we don't we will keep playing the same and not adapting.
Another part is being willing to put yourself in a bad situation and learn what caused it to be such a bad spot to be in.
Example) if we are to try taking enemies siege giant we will learn over time how often this play have a fatal outcome, but we must also learn when these fatal outcomes occurred, maybe you only died at the giant when you tried to steal them at min 7, 13 and 24? and always got them any other time.
Later on when we read about Z we will learn a more extreme case which will train us to understand when something is likely to happen and when something is safe.
Here we will go through the most common murky mistakes and find ways to fix or reduce the chance of occurrence
1) randomly going for octograb + pufferfish
with no clue if the target is within kill range or not being sure where the backup is.
This will tie into map awareness and foresight and will come over time, but it also can easily be fixed but just looking at your tooltip and check the damage before going crazy all over the place.
2) thinking dying in lane is no big deal.
You will be back in 5 seconds + travel time right?
What you fail to understand is A) you still give a tiny bit of experience to the enemy team.
B) you might miss 3-4 creeps before you can get back, add it together with 4 early deaths now it is 16 creeps and you are level 3 while the enemy are level 4 and win the first objective because of it.
3)Losing lane control
This is something more complex but we will talk about it briefly.
IF you die in lane you lose the control over the lane and as a result will be shoved in under your turrets and reducing the chance of being able to do drivebys on your mount and making your waveclear way more obvious, it will also drain more ammo from your turrets and over time those 2 early game death could lead to an experience lead for the enemy in form of 1-2 early tower kills.
4) think just because you are murky and have ocotgrab you should always innate the fight
You must always be aware of your surroundings and see if going in is the right thing to do and take into consideration "if i land this octograb what will happen? can my team follow up?"
5) I'm murky dying in the teamfight early on doesn't matter i'll be back in 5 seconds
Very often murlcos die early in teamfights then spend a long time getting back due to forgetting where in the world your egg were and as result your team died. Or
Because of you died the enemy butcher felt diving your KT was no longer a risk and forced your healer to have to ult said KT to save him due to no peel or threat protection.
Lastly even if your egg is close you still need to find a new position in the fight itself, maybe because of where your egg were you are now forced to wander through the enemy frontline.
6) this applies to everyone but it is the most common mistake people will ever make:
"we have to get the objective!"
sometimes the smart thing to do is trade or allow the enemy to take an objective in order to make an even bigger play.
The best example is cursed hollow and people getting the curse but all their lanes are pushed to their gates and they spend majority of the duration of the curse waveclearing their own side of the map.
same applies to trying to get both dragon shrines which we will cover much later on in the guide.
Lets talk about how people in general mismanage their cooldowns and as a result losing more games.
When it comes to CDs most people don't spend much thoughts how they use them, you will see people using ultimates for a target that was for certain dead already and as a result lose a fight 30 sec later due to not having said CD ready, now it has to be said sometimes moshpitting the one target is the right thing to do but most of the time people do randomly throw out their CDs and hope for the best.
As a murloc lets try to avoid such mistakes by always asking ourselves "should i use X here?"
examples)
1) Should i bubble now or should i save it in order to avoid a fatal skillshot that could hit me in 3 seconds?
2) Should i use blood for blood now or wait and try to dodge the skillshot instead and save blade for later.
3) Should i envenom here or and try to get this kill or should i wait for the objective that is about to come up?
This all builds upon the knowledge of map awareness and foresight, perhaps if you had looked at the map you would have been able to tell the enemy healer was 2 second away and because you waited with doing your burst the target survived, or the other way around; you did your burst but the healer was sitting the bush the whole time and you tried to force a play without any knowledge of the enemies movements.
Sometimes it is better to hold your CDs
for example lets say you are ETC, holding your mosh pit will make the enemy very afraid to be near you and can secure a lot of space for your team, flanking the enemy as murky threatening an octograb can buy time for your team to setup a play or get away.
sometimes doing an all-in without getting a kill is the right thing to do
Because it might force the enemy to use x/y/z CD in return in order to survive, maybe you didn't get the kill on the zeratul after trying to ocotgrab him and burst him down but as a result you made him use his VP and you know there is about to be a teamfight and now zeratul is much weaker and vulnerable to you and your team in the upcoming fight
The special case of Envenom and pressuring the lane
Envenom is extremely powerful in a 1v1 lane scenario due to the short CD, it enables you to force an all-in forcing the enemy to take a well/drink very early on or in a untimely manner, and gives you a lot more lane control due to the risk of an all-in which could result in a kill.
A key point to mention here is if you are trying an early or forced envenom trade make sure you are doing more than just hitting the target with envenom, ideally what you want is at least 2 slime and a few auto attacks to go with the envenom in order to call it a success, i see many people with envenom on different heroes randomly using it without any follow-up damage resulting in a waste of CD.
Conclusion
Knowing when you can use your CDs will come down to practice and knowledge and you need to understand yourself when you can secure the kill as a result of your CDs or if using your CDs will result in a lose later on even if you were to pick up the innate kill.
Lets go over the basic concept of just dealing damage with some key points to remember before going all in with damage.
Notes:
When it comes to dealing damage the first thing you should always remember is unless you can secure a kill clearing the wave first and soaking experience is a safer and more stable way to ensure victory.
You should always seek to do damage while waveclearing and soaking but you shouldn't feel helpless if your target is to far away as long as you can protect your buildings and deny global experience from the enemy.
Damage type: poke
To start with we must understand that the majority of murkies kill potential only comes after the target has already been damage by poke over a longer period of time, to often murlocs can be seen trying to open with a puffer + ocotcombo only to the damage being avoided or only bring the target to above 50%.
What Blade excels at is the sudden burst and turnaround which can be achieved, but most of the time this only comes from a longer period of poke.
Poke can often be achieved while either the enemy is busy with waveclearing or by runbyes on horse in teamfights it is often achieved as a result of backward kiting or flanking and is kept up until there is an opening for an all in attempt.
Nova is one of the few heroes which poke is rarely recommended against and all-in is the preferred method to deal with a Nova
Damage type: all in
All ins are often attempted by seeing an opening, maybe the valla is low and just used her vault and can no longer get away from a pufferfish combo, same can be said for a jania on low hp without iceblock.
All ins can also be used as a effort to distract the enemy from another threat or to save a teammate who is trying to get away and the threat of a counterkill stops the chase
IF the all in is an attempt for a kill be sure that it is either successful or that it will force long CDs from the enemy, never attempt an all in out of desperation for a kill.
Damage type: combos
Combos are a sequence of spells/attacks used to create high damage in a short window but unlike all ins aren't meant to always get a kill but are instead another form of poke/harassment. (some combos are all in attempts of course but we will cover more general smaller combos here)
** for formatting reason the combos will be in a spoiler tag below. **
Spoiler: Click to view
Note 1: due to limited space only the first auto attack will be shown, but in a real fight auto attack should always be used in between spell and CD usage.
Note 2: remember that kiting is a key element in murky gameplay until you know the target is within killrange, randomly trying all in will result in more death and kills.
This chapter will build upon previous knowledge such as map awareness and cooldown management
Knowing your limits ties into everything we have talked about so far, a common key mistakes tons of people do at all MMR is tunnel visioning on whatever they are doing and miss the small things, the most common failures are:
1) Going to hard for a kill, even if they get it they might trade themselves for a less important target.
2) Splitpushing without any clue where anyone is then type funny comments in chat when ganked.
3) focusing on one target to much and not notching the enemy sonya flanking, dies to her then type "peel?!" after using all CDs to get to your first target
4) not being aware of what the target is capable to do in terms of damage, example) chasing a low hp jaina then get turned on and blown up due to having to real concept of her burst damage aside from the fact "jaina is an assassin and deals damage"
In order to learn ones current limits one has to either overextending or force a play in order to see where ones current limits are.
example 1) Maybe you current knowledge lets you understand: slime + slime + envenom is enough to kill a target with 750 hp at the current level, this knowledge now always you to take out <750 Hp targets.
example 2) a more knowledgeable murloc might know: slime + auto attack + slime + auto attack + envenom + auto attack is enough to kill a target at 1500 hp at the same level and is able to kill more targets at with the same certainty as the murloc in example 1
Over time Murloc 1 will learn the same limit of his damage as murloc 2 but this will take trails and the right mindset to learn every time one fail and go "oh i was that much of in terms of damage" or "oh i was that close and if X hadn't happened i would get the kill every time"
We have already talked briefly about this before but the biggest mistake murlocs do is having no clue about how much his puffer + octograb will deal in term of damage.
Always look at your spell bars until you can guess within the 100s of what your spells will deal in term of damage, this will make you more certain at your damage output and how much time you have to make the play rather than random use your skill and hope you get the kill.
Note 1: every Bar that makes up the hp bar is 250health on the target, while every chunk of is 1000hp.
So if you were to look at a valla and see 1 chunk you know she has 1000 health, and if you look at your evenom/slime/auto you can quickly learn "oh i can deal 1250 damage if i can get 1 slime of!"
Note 2: if you aren't willing to force a play rather than being annoyed what someone else can do say to yourself "today this is my current limit" rather then "i wish i could do something as well as X player"
Note 3:You will often hear me on stream as well even tho when the target seem low saying "won't get the kill i would need another 2 slimes and it would take 8/6 seconds"
In the final Beginner chapter we will talk about the value of soaking and how to apply a basic mindset when trying to learn new things. As a final introduction words for this chapter due note the average rank 1 player don't even have half of these concepts working for them (i'm speaking to you my dear friend who are rank 1 and somehow can't stutterstep as raynor and have 0 map awareness(how did you really get rank 1 again)) Key thing to point out is what the average rank 1 player has is decent consistency when it comes to his gameplay even if he can be blind to other aspects of the game
Lets start with understanding why Soaking is important
1) if your team is able to out-soak the enemy team, you will create level leads and these can either give you a talent edge or/and a damage/hp edge.
Lets look at an example)
You are 2 levels up, as a team you have 1k more hp than the enemy team, but you also have 50-100 damage bonus per ability per player and another 20-30 damage per auto attack per player, this all stack together.
Together it would be if every hero had 3 damage ability 1125 additional damage which could be focused upon one target which in return to mean the difference between a kill and not.
Due to the soaking nature of a murky you will often find ourselves 2x/3x up in experience contribution in a wining game and either tied or above anyone else in a losing game.
And if we were to do our soaking right we will often find ourselves hitting level 10 first and being able to snowball that lead into objectives.
These leads often comes form staying behind and not rushing blinding into objective while ensuring we hit the crucial level in time.
An important aspect with a level lead
Is to keep it, often people will start to relax when they have a level lead (this goes both ways) and will force to many fights while being unable to to secure kill while the enemy has someone soaking and slowly catching up.
Note 1) Later on we will take about how to soak and pressure a lane but for now remember "could I've gotten more from soaking than wandering of for a random fight" and "as a result of not soaking/wavecelaring did we lose another tower to siege giants allowing the other team to hit a spike or pressure a lane they shouldn't have?"
Note 2) Always consider "Do my team need me right now or i'm better of shoving this lane and taking these structures in order to extend our lead"
Note 3) and consider when you do it right, "hey we just won a fight because an enemy had to wander of to deal with a massive creep-wave crashing into their structures and as a result you were able to catch someone 4v5
The right mindset for training and improving
This will just cover the basic mindeset one need to constant improve, always look if you yourself could have done something different, and Don't care if your teammates failed or not.
Because if you are focused on what they did wrong all the time you aren't improving yourself either since all your energy will be spent on thoughts about your team.
The best environment to train in are losing games!
For context let's assume the game really is over, your raynor is a melee hero, your medic is a splitpush and your warrior is a jungler, rather than "FFS team <words> <words>" go and try something new, since you already can be certain you will lose,
Here is your chance to try a random all in on a zeratul and see how it goes without any fear of failure leading to a lost teamfight later on.
Always remember if your teammates really are potoates don't waste energy on them but rather focus on what you can practice before the game is over, maybe you could try pushing down a fort and see how long it would take and how many minions you need etc etc.
At a later date (read: once I can be bothered get the recordings) there will be some training videos below showcasing different scenarios then giving you time to think of the most likely out come, below in a spoiler tag will be the answer or the conclusion of the video.
The chapters 4.1-4.8 will build upon previous knowledge and made to create more constancy in your gameplay and teach you more advanced concepts in order to help to get the constancy.
While 4.9 will be all about Math and Blade/pufferbuild damage values and is only for those interested in raw number and theory crafting.
4.1 Experience soaking, lane control and zoning (update pending) Top
In any moba it is commonly known that the player who shoves the lane first controls the lane, the logic behind this is simply if the player that shoves the lane then leaves (roam) he will be the first player to the spot but also the player that is getting shoved has to either
1) leave the lane and miss all the creeps And have his buildings lose Hp
or
2) Stay in lane and clear the creeps then follow, and while he follows he must be sure the other play isn't sitting in the bush on the way to the spot.
The same thing applies with murky, you want to be the one shoving in the other guy and forcing him/her to stay under turret and waveclear while you be the first to the spot.
example:
Cursed hollow lvl 4:
You shove in a valla just before the tribute spawn, you leave the lane first,
she now has to walk blind into 2-5 bushes on the way to the tribute and at any point there might be a pissed murloc in one with envenom ready to kill her,
If on the other hand you were shoved in first and valla left the lane you would lose any chance of a surprise kill on the way.
This is when you stay behind a wave and soak it if it would grant your team a level.
The best way to control a lane is to either
1) have the better/faster waveclear
2) have kill pressure so the other player don't dare to clear as fast as he could.
for example maybe there is a valla on 50% that has had envenom cast on her earlier, she won't take any risk now when trying to clear the wave and she sees a murloc slip into a bush.
Experience
When it comes to experience in Hots you want to get every last creep to get your team ahead, so often people leave a lane to help somewhere else and leave 5-10 creeps behind or even worse mercs hammering at the gate.
Or rush an objective as soon as it spawns while leaving a few minions behind.
As murky one of your main goal is to just soak as much Exp as you can, you will often find yourself up 2x/3x exp when wining compared to anyone else on the map, this is what makes murky decent when you are behind, you can safely clear a wave without risking being 5 man dove.
You will often find yourself going from lane to lane shoving it in, collection exp and forcing the enemeis to come to you when you are ahead making those 1 v 1 highlight plays.
Here is a video showcasing the value of Exp soaking with the lost vikings (This is a full replay length video with commentary
Zoning
Zoning is a simple concept, it means to keep the enemeies at bay from xp/objectives etc.
In lane you do this by creating kill pressure on the other player and freezing the lane.
Freezing the lane is simple, you don't attack the creeps just keep them close to your side of the map (while there is an enemy in the same lane and you have kill pressure)
and poster yourself on the enemies side of the map forcing the other player away from your dying minions and denying him/her exp.
When you are ahead you can do this by walking forward forcing the enemy to flee or be in kill range by octograb or a prolong chase.
In this chapter we will expand upon the concept of a level advantage and how you must adappt to it depending on which side of the advantage you are on.
Behind by:
1 Level.
One level doesn't matter that much what matter is
a) did they hit talent spike? (a talent that matter in form of damage/cc etc, chen getting 40% more healing received isn't going to change the flow of the game unless he is begin focused and can be bursted down without expending any momentum, while kael getting 13 is game changer and change the way your whole team must approach a teamfight)
Normal talents are fightable. Ultimate abilities are risky, early game you should just trade something else if they hit 10 first and you are halfway through 9.
The key point to take away is for the majority when you are behind you should focus on soaking and at least getting back to an even level.
Behind by:
2 Level.
You need to have a lot of damage here to win, if you win a fight here it's usually because someone got caught or someone misplayed, maybe their rehgar missclicked and healed the 100% leroic instead of the raynor next to him.
Your best option here to soak exp and avoid taking fights while looking to setup a pick with backup or splitpushing which we will cover later on.
The key here is to not become to desperate, many games that are still winable are thrown because people feel the need to act as soon as they are behind and because of this they take bad fights and end up falling further behind.
Another key element here is trying to control the creepwaves, a lot of people will forget about the none active lanes when ahead and this can give you openings to counter-shove one or two lanes and either gaining more experience from structures or prolonging the game by forcing someone to deal with the sidewaves.
Behind by:
3+ Level.
Do not fight this you won't win it unless the other team went afk trying to chase a cat.
The damage just isn't there for your team.
So many games that was still winnable have been lost because people just refuse to not fight.
What you can do if you are 3+ behind is
a) exp soaking trying to catch up and trading buildings, it is ok trade a keep/fort for getting xp back in return when you are this far behind.
b) getting picks a lot of people start playing greedy when ahead use this, 1 kill while being 3+ level behinds gives A lot of xp as well as relieving pressure on your team.
Level advantage part 2)
Being ok with losing stuff.
this is the thing so many people refuse to do, instead of trading or trying to out-soak or trade fort for a fort they will try to fight while being a level behind, two levels behind, awful team comp etc (but amazing split) this rarely works in and will only cause more loses.
The basic concept of early game murky is stay in lane during the first object for long enough to soak 4 before the enemy team hits 4 thesmelves, once you have reached level 4 you can look at your options (of course some maps have eariler objectives and we will cover the ideas for those maps under the map section of this gudie)
Here are some of your options once you have secured level 4 for your team.
A) you keep pushing forcing someone to come back and deal with you, making it a 4v4
B) you try to delay someone and making it 4v4
C) you try to split the fight up by being annoying to the backline (risky if you die your egg will be far away so you will be forced to splitpush or lose xp that you could have been soaking)
Always look if helping is a good idea or if you are better of pushing a lane.
E.g your team is at 20% hp close to your base, you are next to a fort, if you run now maybe you could be useful but more than likely it won't do anything and you are better of pushing down the fort while team heals up.
4.3 Transition kills into objectives (update pending) Top
if you are left in a 1v2 you have to waveclear until something else happens, if you are lucky maybe get in some poke vs greedy enemies.
Advanced:
Priority
1Waveclear/xp soaking
Your first goal in a 1v2 is waveclear and soaking exp
which one you choice as number 1 is up to you, here are the 2 argument for each:
Waveclear
by clearing the wave with any means will save turret/ammo ,however, if you have to suicide clear it, you will lose some exp derby keeping it the game closer in XP
Soaking XP
By focusing on the XP part you may put your team ahead in xp depending on how the enemies react
there is a certain threshold you can aim for by going mad soaking, this is the level 4 talent spike, by staying in lane for just 1 wave after the enemies leaves, you may put your team to a 4 level vs 3 level advantage for maybe 20-30 sec which could mean a free tribute etc.
So how do i waveclear?!
If you are dive clearing then throw in puffer > run at puffer and start slime and hit the range minion which drops the orb, by standing on puffer or close to him your enemy must choice to either attack you, or puffer most of the time they will try to go for you in which case you use Safety Bubble followed by slime, together with puffer this should clear most of the wave, if they don't hit you and instead kill puffer you will get 2 slimes of anyway and kill the wave regardless
If you are trying to stay alive then start in a bush or from the side if you can, run in then Slime > puffer and run into the other bush or to the other side.
2 drain mana
This comes after xp/waveclear
what your goal is here is to get the enemy to waste mana, so many people just wanna kill murky so badly and will over-commit for a murky kill, e.g using 40% mana for a murky kill right before object.
Why are you doing this? The goal is to drain the enemy for mana for the objectives and forcing them to take earily hp/mana wells making them sit on cooldown during objectives
3 poke
This is all about the slime, remember slime 1 barely deals damage but any following slime will melt health-bars (within 8seconds)
Depending on the enemies you may get away with waveclear and poke but most of the time you must choice which one you do (in a 1v2 lane)
if you really wanna poke do this, rush in on your trusty pony Q in their face, throw puffer at the wave preferable closer to your wave and run back, this will bait some ppl to move forward to hurt puffer, Slime them in the face for a second slime and depending on the lane you might get even a 3rd in.
Mid game:
After level 10ish if you find yourself in a 1v2 lane your goal is to keep the lane from pushing towards you and keeping your towers/forts safe.
If you can bait out major CDs it is a + but it isn't a necessity. Late game:
depending on who you are against in the lane you might be able to try 1v2 if you think you have the damage, otherwise you just should try to keep them there so your team can have a 4v3 and win the game that way.
Another way to play it is trying to faking an all in 1v2 and try to get some of their CDs without using to many of your own, then join your team in a fight, this is more risky since without major CDs your damage isn't that high and your zone control of the backline is lessened.
Don't forget most things that is said in Playstyle A applies to B as well.
early on murky is all about poking people, get in a slime here and there maybe an auto and bubble away (Don't forget to wavecear)
My goal in a 1v1 is to ensure if the other player leaves for the first objective he will be either low on mana or if he leaves i can threaten taking a building. (sometimes i do follow but rarely until lvl 7)
No matter how far ahead you are, you should always be thinking about what should i save bubble for? for a zagara hydra? for a jaina blizzard or cone etc etc, you are still just a little murloc.
you don't want to all in before someone is about 50-60%hp until you have blood for blood (level 16)what you can do however is get a slime of, if it lands and you can make another 1-2slime stick throw in a poison as well this should take about 50%hp away and force the other player to either base or take a sip from the well, leaving you free to either roam or push up the turret depending of what you can see on the map.
note: envenom has 1min cd. a well has 1min 30.
What makes the 1v1 murky work is poking slowly away with Slime and auto attacks while block takes a lot of the pressure of, there is also the fact that people don't expect murky to suddenly take 0 damage so they overcomit and suddenly they are at 50% with Slime taking chunks out of their hp bars.
The first thing you should learn is the range of your Slime, get a feel for it, but also don't forget your auto attacks hurts as well. (level 22murky about 340? dmg per auto attack it adds up and is what allows you to kill warriors)
Note: don't forget that even tho death doesn't hurt murky to much it hurts your team, you could end up losing some xp and over time it stacks up, also if your egg is on the other side of the map well better have something to push or you gonna look bad if you can't get something on the way back.
When it comes to teamfights we have to break down the different ways we can influence teamfights.
A) we can be the the initiator with octograb going for the juice medic/kael, however, if we initiate the risk of being killed and missing the teamfight afterwards is a risk we are taking by initiate. don't forget if they have cleanse by trying to iniate you will waste your ult, die and leave your team in a 4v5 until you run back.
b) we can be in the frontlines poking down their warriors, this is much safer because you can react to what happens, either help your backline or go for the enemies if they overextend.
c) we can flank their backline and annoy it or try all in someone forcing the enemy team to turn around to peel of allowing your team to collapse.
d) we can force a pick before everyone is there and make the fight 4v5 before anything happens, this is the most common way murlocs fight.
e) we can peel for our own team if the enemy team is melee heavy and force the enemy to play passive due to the fear of being octo grabbed.
f) we can try seperating someone and make a 1v1 on the side, this is most common when the enemy team have a nova or zeratul.
Whichever road you chose to go will be up to your own playstyle and what you feel works the best for you and the team you currently are a part of.
Base egg:...it is inside the safe zone...ZZzz (nova i hate you) Safe egg: inside base. standard egg: close to a fort or back far enough to not be stumbled upon Greed egg: forward placed egg or in a place someone might stumble upon. Yolo egg: place the egg next to the next fight, gl. Bait egg (advanced): You place egg where you know:
1) someone is gonna check soon (oh murky just repsawn and came from above lets check it out!, oh an egg! slap slap slap "an allied have been slain")
2) someone is gonna walk upon soon (tribute is about to spawn, oh what is this an egg?! slap slap slap "an allied have been slain")
3) someone is egg hunting, make it easy for them. (ha! that was eas..slap slap slap "an allied have been slain")
example A) (bait egg)
example B) (bait egg)
You can either have your team backing you up, or a member, this has bigger risk of turning bad if more than 1 player shows up, Or
You can be alone and hope for the best.
Another option is having your egg destroyed (they get vision of you) then try to make yourself seem alone while someone has your back.
You can do it solo as well for style points.
Note 1) Care for good nova's they will kill you then strike your egg with PS right after, you Have to base your egg here. Note 2) care for good t***/zera that are looking for easter eggs, might have to place a Safe egg here. Note 3) the more greedy the egg the higher reward there is.
4.9 Pufferbuild and Blade math (formatting update pending) Top
Edit: with the change to scaling the math shown below are not the live numbers, however, I've ran the new numbers and they show Blade is still has a greater burst value and sustain value compared to living the dream/puffer builds,
I'll update the math below at a later date.
For now you can see the Raw new math at this google spreadsheet doc
Alright we will split this into two parts i think, first of we will have just math and logic then we will added comments in italic style, lets see how to it works!
To long i don't like math: post level 13 blade always have greater sustain damage, if including envenom into any all in atempt blade will always deal more damage, later on we will cover the whole Blood for blood versus Rej bubble and sustained fights.
Spoiler: Click to view
For a full sheet of numbers please refer to the google spreadsheet, due to formatting only major breakpoints will be taken into account here, for the most part we will be looking at level 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20.
Slime (q) math.
Spoiler: Click to view
TO start of we will be talking about Slime Q against a target already affect by slime in order to bring up a baseline for sustain damage from Q in the real world pre 13 we would often only care about our damage number in conjunction with envenom due to the more waveclear nature of murky early on, even so this part will only be Stacked Q
All values below are shown with 20% living the dream.
raw data.
Levels
4
7
10
13
16
20
LTD
289
325
365
411
462
541
Blade
240
270
304
342
385
450
From this we can see in terms of raw numbers LTD deals more damage per instance and we are ignoring in the real world envenom would be used if there was a kill closeby
However if we are to move to level 13 and forward (this is when Blade gets continuous slime we can see that the sustain damage is now greater for Blades
The values below are for Slime Stacked q damage over 12 seconds.
Levels
4
7
10
13
16
20
LTD
867
975
1095
1233
1386
1623
Blade
720
810
912
1368
1540
1800
What we can see here is as soon as Blade hits level 13 the sustain damage will grow bigger and bigger for each slime being applied and is really rare for blades not not be able to hit slime on Cd, this is true for any build.
Puffer (W) math.
Spoiler: Click to view
Not much to talk about here we know that puffer will always deal more damage for a pufferbuilder hence the name, what we can look at is the diffrance after level 13 and compared how much damage a pufferbuilder gain from the 35% no slimed target.
Levels
4
7
10
13
16
20
LTD
548
616
693
780
877
1026
35% talent
x
x
x
935
1183
1384
Blade
457
514
578
650
732
855
Envenom scaling
Spoiler: Click to view
Just as a backup data which we can use later on.
Levels
4
7
10
13
16
20
Envenom
412
463
521
586
659
771
Blood for blood/octograb
Spoiler: Click to view
Nothing really to add here, we know blood for blood always deals 10% of targets hp.
And we know ochtograb with "and a shark too!.." deals 900 damage at 20
Auto attacks
Spoiler: Click to view
Final topic to cover before we go into different scenarios
Levels
4
7
10
13
16
20
LTD
70
79
89
100
112
131
BLades
70
158
178
200
225
263
Scenarios!
Spoiler: Click to view
it is time for the fun part, lets use all the numbers we have to setup different scenarios, now to as said earlier due to the way blizzard round up and me being super tired when writing this some of the numbers are of by 1-2 due to being half asleep and not properly rounding each value.
Right so as of writing this i'm so tired i can barely keep myself awake so we will go with some very basidc scenarios for today and go more complex at a later date.
Scenario 1)
Level 4, you find yourself alone with a valla coming up behind you going for a tribute, you lay and wait in some grass before striking (i'd a really good recording of this sadly pc crashed and had to reinstall.
4 auto attacks, 1 puffer in the grass as she walks by, 3 stacked slime (envenom for blade)
LTD 1695 Blade1869
Scenario 2)
Random jaina walks into your bush followed by "an enemy has left the game"
Later on we will go into more complex scenario and solve the riddle of level 20 all in double puffer vs blades.
(spoiler dual puffer will deal 3655 versus blade 3718 versus a Jaina in that scenario)
Below here you can find the old math before the scaling rework, i'll add the new scaling math above at a later date when i'm not as tired.
Spoiler: Click to view
As before we first have to look at the + and - between the two builds most of this is just repeats from the introduction if only in a hashes langues
- Any decent player won't allow you to splash him while you Waveclear, and since you don't have envenom to harras him/her with, you will lose the lane. - Less damage. - Less outplay options due to less damage outside of Puffer. - Become the 1 min murloc, that is only useful with octograb up. - You become a burden to your team because outside of octograb you are Weaker than Blades, and with octograb you are still just a weaker version of Blades. -Do not forget, if Living the dream murky dies he has to wait 75 sec until back to 20% stacked!
Math We will use as an example throughout our tests.
Lets Begin at level 4, This is the Level that gives us our second talent choice, either envenom or Living the dream Level 4
Spoiler: Click to view
hp: 1130
Build, Blades.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
envenom
total
430
80.8
202.0
278
36
329.56
926.36
Build, Living the dream.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
total
430
96.96
242.4
333.6
36
708.96
(note: only 1 auto attack is taken into the the formula due to the value being the same unless 1 build doesn't take )
All in Blade pre 16/octo
→
→
→
(+)
All in Living the dream pre octo
→
→
→
As we can see an all in Blades (envenom build) at level 4 would deal:
926.36 - 708.96 = 217.4
more damage than living the dream, and this is assuming you would have the full 20% bonus from living the dream, so if you didn't have full living the dream stack your all in damage would be lower.
The difference of the Slime (q) damage at level 4.
The one thing living the dream provides is a higher spell damage output from Slime (q)
At level 4 with Dream = 20% slime deals 30 More damage compared to no living the dream. (on slimed target)
242.4 - 202.0 = 40
But remember in an all in scenario living the dream is still short 245 damage compared to envenom.
So if we were to take 245/30 = 6.125, we can see we need to another 6 yes 6! Slimes on the target to â€catch up†to Envenom at lvl 4 in a â€all in†scenario.
(6 more slime with slime cd at 4 sec = 8 * 4 = 24 sec.)
Level 10
Spoiler: Click to view
hp: 1910
Build, Blades.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
envenom
total
790
118.0
295.0
494
144
509.08
1560.08
Build, Living the dream.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
total
790
141.6
354
592.8
72
1160.4
1560.08 – 1160.4 = 399.68 (400)
as we can see envenom still deals more damage than living the dream in an all in scenario (and we now have octograb on both builds)
Living Slime Q , now deals 59 more damage which would result in
400/59 = 6.77 (number of silmes needed to even out damage)
Don't forget most puffer builders don't take slime advantage at 7 which mean our auto attack damage with Blade build will deal 72 more damage per auto attack so in reality we would deal
72*4 = 288
more damage over 4 sec (the time until murky's next Q) if we were to auto attack the target, which would Increase The damage gap and make it impossible for living the dream to catch up if they didn't have slime advantage
Level 16
Spoiler: Click to view
at 16 we get blades! (and ofc our Q cd has gone down from 4 to 3 second due to continuous slime)
hp: 2690
Build, Blades.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
envenom
blade
total
1150
155.2
388.0
710
216
688.6
269
2426.8
Build, Living the dream.
murky hp!
Slime
slimed
puffer
auto
total
1150
186.24
465.6
1150.2
108
1910.04
damage difference
2426.8 – 1910.04 = 516.76
Slime(q)
465.6 - 388 = 77.6
more damage with living the dream per Q.
516.76/77.6 = 6.65 auto Q slimes needed to catch up.
But now the fun begins!
Don't forget we now have Q slime on 3 sec cd due to taking continous slime at 13 instead of 35% more damage to slimed target with puffer.
Which means over a 12 second period we will get 1 more slime of compared to living the dream.
Which in turn means:
Build Living
slime damage/ how many times slime can occur over 12 sec
465.6 * 3 = 1396.8
Build Blades
slime damage/ how many times slime can occur over 12 sec
388 * 4 = 1552
Blade is still dealing more damage over time so no matter what after 13 Living/puffer builds Cannot Catch up in damage over time nor in burst damage
rej at 16 1150/2 = 575
blade healing at 16
2690 * 0.2 = 538
575 – 538 = 37 more health than blade vs Kael (lets ignore the fact that you could blade something with 4000 health at 16 and get 800 health back and you lose 592 damage.
Conclusion
Spoiler: Click to view
There are almost no upsides with puffer builds, the one and only upside is more Puffer damage, but with Blade and Envenom the burst is still lower, and may murlocs rain down upon those who kills puffer.
And do not forget if Living the dream murky dies he has to wait 75 sec until back to 20% stacked!
In these chapters we will talk about Advanced concepts that requires all previous learned knowledge in order to apply successfully.
We will also go through different playstyles which are certain gameplay ideas which one can apply to different parts of a game depending on the situation and are judgement calls when to apply, they can also be used to train certain aspect by going into extreme aspects of one certain playstyle.
Finally we will cover some out of game aspects which can help and improve ones overall performance in heroes of the storm.
In the sections below you can find general guidelines for hero matchups, remember they are general notes to think about when you are facing X/Y hero.
In honour of the oldschool illidan he has a whole section all to himself, the rest of the roaster will find themselves grouped in a chapter.
Note: To find a matchup use "ctrl+f" then search for F"name of the hero" e.g "Fillidan"
Raid: Heroes of the forums, cleared 1/1 - the murloc guild
Many murloc lives where given to discover the secret...but finally one murloc made it after so many cries about OP, after so many forum threads.
Note: only Chen and arthas can rival illidan when it comes to 1v1 murky in difficulty, with kharazim now joining top 5 murky threat.
In lane:
You can't trade with him until you have blades, he will kill you.
What you can do, however, is poke away at him until he no longer dares to walk into melee range of your creeps, don't be a fool tho he can still kill you quickly if you get to cocky.
"i poke him all the time but he just heals up!"
You are doing it wrong, don't forget first Slime dosen't hurt, it is the follow up that hurts, if you get the feeling that he outheals your damage you are missing slimes, don't foreget illidan can't dodge spells so you can Slime him during evasion.
there are 2 ways to get poke in. (both depends on how illidan plays it) a) my name is illidan you killed my kael prepare to die!
If illidan dives you as soon as you get close to the lane or after you throw puffer back of as soon as he jumps at you and apply Q, however, do not walk towards him while waiting on slime cd, pull back and wait, the slow will not permit him to get to you after dash.
If he starts to walk back to the lane, follow him but be careful many murkies were lost when Illidan turned back and sliced him in the face, i repeat your goal here isn't auto attacks just Slime.
If he dives at you again after your second slime Bubble and kite away again and try to get a 3rd Slime in, here even more murlocs lost their lives.
Keep doing this until he hits 40% ish hp then you can start taking auto attack trades (usually you have envenom here, use it and burst him down)
b) puffer you are my hero, hold me!
If illidan gets wary after taking bad trades he will instead try to go for you as you try to clear the wave.
What you need to do here is throw puffer in the middle of your and his melee minion and walk on top of puffer, if he dives you Slime him and use bubble, however, stay on puffer, he either has to take puffer damage here or back of.
If he takes puffer damage but isn't in kill range, well you are dead slime and auto attack as many times before your demise, (guys lets wipe it..."the murloc guide has wiped to illidan the betrayer, 47deaths recorded")
If he backs of, follow and get another slime in and run for you life. ("raidboss in progress illidan the betrayer 67% 13 wipes recorded")
Never forget a low illidan can still kill you.
TLDR: poke him with Slime until kill range with either puffer combo/blood/envenom don't auto attack until you are sure you can win trades.
in the wild:
Same rules as in lane applies here, the word is kite until low enough to risk autos (if you can auto an illidan he is most likely fleeing) don't forget most illidan has their first aid to counter envenom
In teamfights
There are 2 types of illidan's
a) yolo i saw this on a youtube clip also known as "Highlight Iliidans"
This type of illidan's dives in when team isn't ready, use this, slime him and use octo and burst him down with your team Or ignore him and burst down his healers/team trying to follow him.
If this isn't doable then seperate him from the rest of his team by annoying his backline.
A lot of people die to yolo illidan's because they are afraid even tho he is mostly alone.
b) Smart illidans.
These are the hard ones, they wait with their team, don't go to deep, falls back in time even with a killing being close, you cannot annoy his backline most of the time, what you do is focus him instead and kite and just wait for that perfect timing to octo, this can't really be taught you need to figure out when to octo him or his team by experience.
Note: outside of his evasion your damage is higher than illidan's this is why you focus him rather than his support/team.
6.2 Matchups (1v1 all stages) (update pending) Top
Note: To find a matchup use "ctrl+f" then search for F"name of the hero" e.g "Fillidan"
For Qm/Fmurky
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
Regardless of build this tend to be whoever is better at Q (slime)
However you are stronger at all levels.
In lane:
Try to figure out what his goal is, killing you or waveclearing?
If he is focused on killing you then shove in the lane and try to avoid him, once his lane is pushed he will start going for waveclear, this is your time to start trying to kill him and not before.
If he is trying to waveclear...well waveclear faster i guess, then try to take trades as you both pass eachother to return to your side of the map.
in the wild:
Dodge his slime and hit yours, if you take a slime be sure that you are able to time your bubble to dodge his second slime, if you fail here you will be the lesser murloc.
In teamfights
Try to kill/zone him before anything happens, the reason you wanna kill him (with envenom/blade if needed) is because usually his egg will be far away and it will leave your team 4v5 with your octo ready for a pick.
Make sure you move your egg up for a fight if you feel you can risk it, in worse case you might trade yourself and your egg for a kill.
tip: always try to time how long it takes for the other murky to come back into the lane, you can use it to try to find his egg.
tip 2: also check where he is coming from, is he back in 7sec but coming from a strange angle? the egg is more than likely not inside his base.
threat...boredom Fjohanna
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
waveclear and poke her with slime, you can take trades she deals 0 damage, save bubble for pull.
Eearly on when she isn't that tanky yet you can really mess up her hp with slimes.
in the wild:
takes about 30sec to kill, erm just delay her, her value with her ult is greater than yours most of the time, so if you can stop her from joining her team for a few moments your team might get the upper hand.
In teamfights
no reason to grab her ever, just leave her alone.
Cleaving onto her with Slime is always helpful, not only for the added damage but for the slow allowing your backline to peel backwards.
Ftassadar
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
You are stronger at every part of the game. (well you can't just run up to him and hope he falls over)
In lane:
You shouldn't have kill pressure unless he walks up to you.
What you do have is lane pressure, t*** can't clear the wave fast enough and will run dry after a while, try to get poke in by doing runbys with slime/auto (don't forget it is the Second slime that hurts)
Your goal here is to force him to come to the first object with little mana and health.
Forcing him to use bubble or phase is good since both cost a lot of mana.
Warning, place the egg more backwards then usually 1 storm is enough to kill it.
Warning, t*** can easily find your egg with his oracle and can tell a nasty nova about it, (you know girls talk)
If you place a forward egg close to a fight be very careful and check how people respond to t*** oracle, if they see your egg, you can use this to your advantage if there are any greedy people thinking of egg dinner
in the wild:
you have kill pressure here, keep sliming him and try to figure out where he will come out after phase.(there is a bug currently that sometimes shows t***' unit circle movement during phase)
if he hasn't phase octo + puffer is a waste of time, t*** will be able to phase before puffer blows up.
(don't forget to save bubble for Storm if he stands in it)
In teamfights
he is no threat to you, however, a good t*** with wall can change a fight so try to get him before he even gets there or zone him away from the fight.
Fzagara
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
You should focus on waveclear first then poke or driveby pokes with clear, the only danger in here is the hydra it melts you, save bubble for it. (stay away form the hydra as long as it is up)
you should soak the baneling,s all 4 takes you to around 40% so it is fine, allows your wave to stay health and will drain her mana as well, this is also doable if she tries to fire them at the turrets.
Use poison on cd at low levels.
in the wild:
slow poke her/auto attack and wait for hydra, bubble hydra and poison/blade her afterwards.
you should kill her easy using octo/puffer combo whenever hydra isn't up OR if puffer will kill her if you should happen to die during the grab.
Note: you can bubble before Maw takes you if are standing in the cast area.
In teamfights
The maw is a danger for your team but her damage is low without hydra's up (unless she got battle moment, if she has She is a prime target a BM Zagara deals some of the highest damage in the game)
try to either annoy or igonre her there are usually a higher priority target.
If you have to go for her stay in her face and auto attack away until she tries to go for you, hold bubble until the very last second then bubble > poison and burst her down.
Ftychus
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
Note: early on unless he is very low on health you can't go anywhere near him without Bubble his Q (overkill) will shred your whole hp bar in 1clip you need bubble.
In lane:
Tychus dosen't have fast waveclear (without Nade melting point in which case you need to make sure he is t o scared to go past the halfway of the lane)
Without Melting point however his waveclear is slow, risky and drains a lot of mana, shove him back and try to poke him, but make sure you have bubble ready or you sir are dead.
You always have kill pressure on him.
Note: puffer is better used here to allow you get damage on tychus, his auto attac kis to fast for puffer to blow up.
in the wild:
use bushes to poke away at him, try to save bubble as long as you can and try to see if you can use it when he throws his nade, if he is good, however, he will force you to bubble before nade, kite is the word here.
In teamfights
Go for him either with octo for a combo with team or just to keep his damage at bay, if he ignores you make use of it and poke him down until he has to take notice of you, don't forget to try to make Slime hit more than 1 player.
Fli li
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
Waveclear and shove her into her turrets she has 0 waveclear.
You shouldn't have any kill pressure but you can drain her mana with Slime spam and autos.
You can kill her if she gets greedy and walks to far iin the lane, start hammer away at her then when she is about 30% use poison/blood.
in the wild:
you can kill her justs takes forever, wait until she get a bit lax with the healing then suprise burst her with Poison.
In teamfights
Try to either catch her before the fight with Octo or zone her away with dmg/octo mid fight, if you are ahead by 1-2level or more she can be ignored if you think you have the damage to burst her mates.
Fnova
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
Note: bubble breaks her tripple tap.
In lane:
Nova has 0 wave clear, shove her in and stay in the middle of your creep to avoid being sniped, poke away at her with Slime, making her waste mana her is the key to win, a oom nova is useless.
in the wild:
Dodge/bubble snipe you win, you might win even if you don't if you use Blood for blood fast enough, the slow from your slime won't allow her to escape.
In teamfights
Look for her and try to solo her in the background or force their tank/healer to help her out, even then you might still kill her if you use your bubble right.
If the nova is good and tries to flank your poor helpless kael then stay with him and hug him like he was a pufferfish, the reason is simple you are standing between nova's snipe and her target while allowing your team to pushfoward, she either has to change angle or go all in trying to get your damage dealers (dosen't work 99% of the time)
Fthe lost vikings
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
Note: easy = only 1-2 viking soaking exp in the lane, luke= 3in your lane. this guide will focus on the trilane vikings.
In lane:
I'm sorry but you will have an awful time here, vikings can 1 hit puffer together making poor puffer useless, you can barely get 2 slimes of, you need to play so very careful 1 wrong click and you get slowed/stunned, spinned and smashed.
The best thing you can do is bait Spin and do drivebys but even that is very risky, you could try poke bale or erik but really any option here is bad sorry. (viking nerf hype)
If they push all the wave to your gates just yolo clear and try to get erik at the same time (erik is the little red viking)
in the wild:
bait spin and bubbled it, then kite don't try to take the fight without backup.
In teamfights
be careful for the viking flank they can seriously mess up your backline, equal to a murky really, peel if needed or go for the enemies backline it is a judgement call.
When the boat is up you can help nuke it or change target but nuking the boat can help a lot.
Fchen
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
chen is a terror to poor murky in lane, you can't get pass his shield and clearing the wave is scary since he can easly slow you and breath fire all over you, if you can bait breath combo then you can clear but don't forget his combo is only a 5sec cd so be fast, try to shove him under turret, stay alert tho.
in the wild:
if you really want to fight him kite him for about 15sec then turn with blade make sure you dodge breath.
In teamfights
ignore him, no really do he dosen't bring anything to the fight that you can stop, if you get a catch be 99% sure he will go down or don't waste octo.
Farthas
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
The issue with arthas for little murky is the frost aura, it allows arthas to catch up and smack you with frostmourne.
Your goal is to push him under turret without dying.
Save bubble for howling blast (the root) bubble breaks it, don't try to take melee trades, instead kite him.
If he gets to close you need to be at the very edge of the aura's range in order to get Slime of, one wrong step tho and you will be close enough for frostmourne.
you do always have kill pressure on him but you need to be careful, respect frostmourne burst.
in the wild:
same as in lane, kite him until he is low then turn with poison/blade.
If he has ghouls they will more than likely kill you before you can kill arthas.
In teamfights
Not a good target unless your backline is sticking together, if you have to go for him try switching targets all the time and save bubble for ice path and octo him when you know your team has the burst to kill him.
Fbrightwing
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
No dmg, decent waveclear but cost a lot of mana and dosen't instantly clear, shove her into her turrets.
Pre 7 you shouldn't have any kill pressure. Note: if you got octo and bw is in the lane don't try to go for kill unless 100% sure you can get it, instead wait until she tries to fly away to her team, octo her and allow your team a 4v4.
in the wild:
Just chase her a down, takes a few Slime to get those nice scales of her.
wait with blade/poison until she is low and burst her.
In teamfights
a decent target to go for, if you can get her to fly away form her team, , she is a good catch for octo if you can get the right flank, be careful tho if the burst isn't there she will fly of leaving your team in the middle of everything (ops)
Fmalfurion
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
Just like BW furion has no real waveclear or damage, abuse it, shove him in and try to poke him, your goal is to drain his mana, you always have kill pressure here, save your bubble for root.
in the wild:
Chase him down just remember to save bubble for root, if he ults then back of you can't kill him during it.
In teamfights
if you can catch him with octo you can burst him with your team.
Else try to keep him away from the fight or get his team to help peel for him while your team either run away or get free damage of.
Frehgar
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
weakest healer to lane against low damage, low waveclear, you know the deal shove him and make him burn mana. if he make a mistake you can burst him down with envomen at low levels.
in the wild:
Just try to chase him he is killable but will take time, at best you get a kill or his heal at worst he gets away.
In teamfights
This one is tricky you can.
A) try to octo him and have your team burst him down, the issue here is; it could bait the team to move to much forward and end up in a collapse with wolf dying but half your team dying to aoe or nova flak, judgement call if you wanna grab him or not.
B) go for him solo and zone him out of the fight, many illidans cried over no heal while wolf was busy chatting with a squid.
Futher
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
slightly stronger than wolfi in lane if he tries to all in you, however, without going all in you will drop him low after a while, kite him around with slime unitl he backs of. you do have kill pressure on him.
in the wild:
kite and kill takes all while tho will most likely get help and run, aim to drain mana over kill.
In teamfights
If he has Storm be careful when you grab him if you got melees, just as with reghar this could turn very bad judgement call again.
if he has divine you can either
1) grab him and have your team nuke him forcing divine (could go bad as well if your teammates go to ham)
2) grab him in such a way your team can't follow, but allows them to bring other targets low or kill them.
note: if utter has no mana leave him alone no reason to give him free healing in his holy form.
Ftyrande
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
low waveclear, low damage, low sustain...shove/kill, save bubble for her stun (if she can land it, more than likely you can just walk to the side)
in the wild:
chase her down, should always be killable after 4/7, just make sure you don't get caught in the stun.
In teamfights
not a prime target but you could try to solo her in background forcing her team to help her, but in reality just leave her alone.
Fgazlowe
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
trick is to drain his mana, his spells cost a lot and if he is forced to spam you will gain the lane after 3-4min, care about the turrets they are your prime targets, might have to do drivebys.
in the wild:
without his turret setup you can just chase him down, save bubble for TNT then kill him.
In teamfights
Very risky to grab if he has gravity bomb could bait your team into a penta, make sure if you grab him that you will kill him, less risky if you only have 1 melee. not a high target tho key is to force his team away from eachother so they cannot use the gravity bomb, just igonre him if he got robo pre 20.
Fnazeebo
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
his waveclear is good but it takes time and drains mana fast if you shove him in early (forcing more spells), try drivebys to get his hp low forcing him to cast more, killable but tricky wall deals a lot of damage to a little murloc, try saving bubble for the frogs/spiders.
in the wild:
killable just make sure you don't eat all the frogs or you will fall over.
In teamfights
decent target to solo in the background, a prime target to octo if he got spirit, either burst him down or if you can't save octo for the channel.
Fdiablo
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
decent waveclear, however, slime outrange him and allows for safe poke until he charges you, as with illidan after diablo throws over himself run the way you got thrown rather then try to run back to through him, with slime you can keep kiting him. killable but take some time.
in the wild:
killable but takes a while, kite him with slime until low then go in for the kil.
In teamfights
low target, you can't stop his ults anyway best left alone to his own things.
Fe.t.c
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
cow is decent in lane, however, slime poke works fine, save bubble for Dash and you will be fine, if you get low just use the illidan/diablo deal of runing the other way if you get caught in a charge, killable but takes a while.
in the wild:
Kite and slime until ready for slaughter..mmm beefcake.
In teamfights
risky to grab with mosh pit he could easily turn on your team if he dosen't get bursted down and there are no else to interupt his ult.
if you don't grab him save grab for Dance and try to zone his damage dealers until he start to dance (if your dps/healer gets caught and are in danger)
Fmuradin
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
another boring tank, you can't poke him with autos only slime, takes forever to bring low but the lane should be yours.
in the wild:
killable but takes forever even longer than a chen, better of just delaying him.
In teamfights
no reason to grab him or damage him unless he overextends a lot or has maker.
Fstitches
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
tank..kite and poke him while waveclearing, drivebys work fine here, killable after 7.
in the wild:
killable you can trade with him until your block is gone, after just kite and be ready to burst him down.
In teamfights
Only reason to grab him is if he swallowed your illidan and carried him of.
Fjaina
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
her waveclear cost a lot of mana, save bubble for blizzard and you will be fine, try to poke her while waveclearing you take a lot of her hp if you get 2 slimes of.
in the wild:
more than killable, just save bubble for blizzard and poke her to death with your claws.
In teamfights
grab her if she overextend else just zone her of in the background/kill her, save bubble for blizard.
Fkael'thas
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
note: if you get caught in the stun but have good ping you can Bubble before flameblast gets you.
In lane:
just like jaina his waveclear cost a lot, drain and poke him, always killable after 4 dodge flamestrike and stun and he is yours to kill.
in the wild:
same as in lane, save bubble for flamestrike and dodge stun after that /dance then you can kill him.
In teamfights
try to zone him out/solo him in the background, good target to grab as well.
Fraynor
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
you need drivebys here, make sure you dodge his knockback and the lane is yours, if he is smart and pushes with his minions and is able to land Q/force bubble it could be somewhat tricky but even then his clear is slow.
in the wild:
killable but you need to take his passive first and back of before you can kill him.
In teamfights
Prime target for octo and shark, hold in place and nuke him with team.
Fsylvanas
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
tip: if she is trying to make a highlight escape (read press E twice) just walk after her wave, regardless if she takes it or no your slow from slime will not permit her from escaping if you start following the wave as soon as she cast it.
In lane:
a good sylv won't let you get near her, tbh she don't even need to be good as long as she press Q she will stop any drivebys and stop you from entering the lane, best to wait until she push you under turret, try flank drivebys to drain her mana (her Q spam cost 0 mana for some reason)
in the wild:
killable if you can get close, use bubble as you see fit make sure you follow her wave to so she can't make a hightlight escape (i pressed E over a wall i'm good now right?!)
In teamfights
decent octo target but not all to important, you can zone her of as well (tbh i have yet to see a good sylv so can't really value her, read: a sylv that dosen't use her ult on a target that was already dead)
Fsonya
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
3 slams is enough to kill you, poking her is hard since her sustain is great, the only way to win the lane is to get her to greed and take enough damage to scary her away from the wave (read towerdive)
tends to be you just sitting at the gate trying to clear.
in the wild:
kite and slime until low enough to be taken down, if you get speared you might as well go afk until you respawn. (there is a joke in here)
In teamfights
can be ignore/cleaved by slime unless she tries to kill your backline and they are unable to deal with her (they should be able to tho)
Fvalla
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
a good valla won't allow you to get near her or the lane, she is to fast to catch, to much attack speed to get puffer of, best way is to try false drivebys, run up to her on mount, throw puffer at the wave and help puffer blow up, you are going to need bubble here.
Note: always try to save bubble for her arrow it eats your hp bar.
in the wild:
killable, save your bubble for her arrow, no real threat when no minions in the way
In teamfights
good octo target, dies easily, always be careful with baiting your team tho. you can also try to solo her in the background.
Fabathur
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
you can't shove if abby is in your lane, the wave will stop in the middle, be careful tho his burst is almost enought to kill murky.
Killing his monster is a must before it get to strong.
in the wild:
wth is abby doing in the wild?
In teamfights
why is abathur's body in a teamfight?
Fazmodan
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
you can't push vs azmodan you can't kill him unless he takes way to much damage, you must kill his commander first (the big glowing demon)
driveby works to get him low, however, you will lose a lot of time better used to clear the wave trying to poke him.
Save bubble for his beam.
in the wild:
killable but takes a long time, poke and run works best here.
In teamfights
can be ignored 99% of the time.
Fsgt. hammer
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
hard one to master, you need to throw puffer under her when she go into her long range mode then run towards her, however, you need to predict her knockback and use bubble at the right time.
Note: drivebys might work here but you really need to dodge the knockback.
in the wild:
her thrusters make it hard to catch her but she is killable, again you need to dodge her knockback.
In teamfights
getting her with octo grab is your goal here the danger is baiting your team to deep in here tho so be careful.
Ftyrael
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
You can't go near him, nor can you clear the waves easily, his blade hurt to much, in order to do anything you need to bait his blade away from the minions so you can walk to them without taking damage from more than smite.
in the wild:
try to delay him and kite him, going for kill is risky his burst is insane for a little murloc.
In teamfights
not a prime target can be ignored, only ever go for him if your backline can't deal with him.
Ffalstad
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
birds like murlocs for a quick snack, save bubble for lightning or you will fall over, make sure to dodge his hammer as well, as long as you are able to dodge/bubble both his spells you can shove him in, drivebys works great here to drain his mana
in the wild:
Killable, save bubble for lightning, dodge hammer and chase him down
In teamfights
Try to force him out of the fight, octo him is a bad idea unless sure of a kill, a lot of people dies to his lightning if he gets away.
If he is a yolo bird flying in on the side then grabbing him is safer.
Fkerrigan
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
you can't trade with her, however, her waveclear cost a lot of mana, save bubble for stun or pull depending on her playstyle, you should win the lane.
If you get combo you will die, poke is hard to pull of due to the damage of her jump alone.
in the wild:
killable but be careful dodge combo with bubble and be ready to burst her down, if her ult is up make sure she is low or it will burn you during octo combo
In teamfights
only go for her if she is in a bad spot or is threatening your backline.
Fzeratul
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
skill matchup.
dodge his cleave with bubble = your lane.
eat a cleave = his lane.
eat a poison = his lane
Dodge poison = your lane.
you need block to deal with him or his auto attacks will melt you.
if you can't trade poke him with slime, low health pool. in the wild:
killable but tricky, save bubble for cleave and dodge poison, at later levels you need to time blade well and save it for the very last second, screw it up and you lose.
In teamfights
feast or famine hero.
If he go for your backline save octo and burst him down together with the backline, the risk here is you might push the fight to much backwards allowing his team to collapase on your front killing of your tank, there is also a risk he might survive and prison your backline making his frontline melt your damage dealer once prison ends.
the best way to deal with a zera is to find him before he can engage forcing him to blink away or in best case waste prison.
Fanub'arak
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
his waveclear is better than yours sorry, takes forever to kill and even with low mana is dangerous.
you need to dodge every spell here to keep even.
trick: if you are facehuging him he can't land his borrow the animation is to slow.
in the wild:
meh he belongs in the wild, if you wanna kill him you will have to kite him for a some time and even then his bugs might kill you for him.
In teamfights
stay away from him his bugs will murder you, only grab if you are sure on a kill or your backline can't get away from him
Fthrall
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane:
low waveclear unless forced to spam spells, save bubble for wolf or wind, do not try to fight him while wind is up and you should be fine, some kiting might be needed.
PS: your bubble breaks wolfis stun.
don't fight him if you don't have bubble.
PS ps: care once 16 wind can melt you if he got the talent for more damage.
in the wild:
a bit like a tank takes a while to kill but more than doable, just make sure you run when Wind is up.
In teamfights
feast or famine hero, if he tries to get your backline save octo for him and turn on him with team, otherwise ignore him.
warning: a good thrall deals insane damage even to tanks, you might have to octo him just to keep your tanks alive.
Fbutcher
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane
The butcher can be seen as a warrior in lane vs murloc, for the majority of the time you clear and poke him with Q.
Save bubble for charge or if he tries to all in you with slow > melee.
Note 1) if he is push to his turret always save bubble for charge even if tries to engaged with slow > melee.
Note 2) always make sure you are close to 100% hp in lane or he will cleave you and make sushi.
Note 3) bubble stop his charge.
In the wild
IF he has all his cds up you won't ever win before he kills you, to much sustain and slow, you can't outkite him with Slimes either, but if he gets afraid of murky and tries to run he is killable.
In teamfights
Majority of the time he is your prime target to octograb even if they have cleanse just to force out the cleanse, afterward you can blow him up with your team.
And the majority of butchers charge to far away from his team anyway.
Fkharazim
Raid cleared
Spoiler: Click to view
In lane
...no, just no, try to run away from him if you can, unless you can fake a gank.
- you can't bully him out of the lane,
- you can't waveclear,
+ you do win the lane once he runs out of mana, which he shouldn't do before first objective.
if you are forced to lane vs him you will be forced to play around his E (increase attack range and speed)
as long as it is up you can't be near him or you will be shredded, but since the cd is shorter than your bubble if he plays it right you can't really do much.
TLDR: it is his lane to lose until some form of help comes.
In the wild
Poke and harass him, try to make him use cds without spending any yourself, all you are looking for is lowering is mana/delay, only use cds if you know a full combo will kill him, and he don't have Palm up.
In teamfights
ignore him, doesn't have enough value to have the honor of getting octograbed.
Maps are what makes Heroes such a different game compared to other mobas, they dictate the flow of the game and forces aggressive play, because they are so different from each other we must look at every map as a different game with different timing as to when you do certain tasks.
One thing to remember when reading any type of guidelines is that they are just guidelines, just becomes something has a higher priority in general doesn't mean there won't be situation that where something lower in priority suddenly become the most important part.
Note: one thing to take into account when reading map guides for murky is the "for murky" part, these tips and starts are tailored for murky which means a lot of the information is only valid for murky.
Note 2: Murky like any hero works on any map, picks really doesn't matter until you play at the upper end of Rank 1, until then play whatever, you like.
What causes people to lose isn't the picks, it is the the mindset "We are going to lose because these picks, because i read on X Tier list" rather then playing the game out, see vod section for the video "2man splitpush"
6.0.1 General map priority.
Note: Always consider, do my team really need me or do i get out more from doing something else? +1 (ahead)
Spoiler: Click to view
1) Do my team need me?
more than often when you are ahead your team can function without you, use this time to push down a lane and try get forts/Keeps forcing the other team to either
a) send someone back to deal with you.
b) hard engage on your team before losing a keep.
More than often they end up trying to do A and B at the same time, resulting in an even greater disadvantage.
2) Objective
If the objective is up/about to spawn either
a) group up with your team and look for a fight with an octograb.
b) try to catch someone on their way to the objective getting a 1v1 kill.
c) yolo run into the enemy team to buy time for your team to setup around the objective.
note: don't forget to move up your egg before the objective spawns.
3) Lane status
If there is no objective up and you are unsure what to do, check every lane and see which way the creeps are pushing, go and push back the lanes that are going the wrong way.
4) Jungle/counter-jungle
If all lanes are going the right way and there is no rush go into the jungle and grab some camps, you can take the small camps without any issues, the larger camps you are gonna have to take in turns, kill 2 then back of then kill the rest.
Also don't forget to check if there are any enemies missing, and try to judge if they could be going for a camp, if that is the cause go and check, maybe you can get a kill or have your team collapse on the camp if you find them.
5) Soaking exp
When you are far ahead soaking exp comes with the flow of the game and you won't be forced to think about the xp at all as long as you keep doing stuff around the map.
6) 1v1
Last on the list, when you are ahead 1v1 comes by themselves or more often than not the other team ends up losing to your team in a 5v4 fight due to a level lead/tilt.
+0 (even)
Spoiler: Click to view
1) What can be taken?
When you are in an even game you always have to think about, "what can the other team do in order to get an advantage or force us to react to them"
Usually this boils down to.
a) can they sneak a boss? if there is more than a 66% chance they might sneak boss your best option is to either check it (but only if there are allies close enough to help if they were to try boss) else create pressure by yourself, so in case they are sneaking a boss you are getting something in return.
b) camps, same as boss but has a much lesser impact on the game.
c) the enemy team might look for a pick in another lane, just like with the boss you have to chose between checking bushes or create pressure by yourself, more than often pressure is my preferred playstyle rather than scouting.
2) soaking xp/wave status
When the game is very even any kind of even that causes xp to go either way will create momentum, by soaking xp and pushing out lanes you are creating a situation that will either help your team if you are to gain xp from kills, objectives etc etc.
while if you were to lose a fight by soaking a lot of xp and pushing out the lanes you are making the loss less damaging than if you were to lose your whole team without trading anything for it.
3) 1v1
Much higher priority compared to when you are ahead due to fact you can swing the game by yourself and you can force the enemy to react to you if they see their jaina being push into her towers by a murky.
4) objectives
Very risky in an even game to try to go for an objectives rather then trade them hence why it is lower on the list.
5) camps
for murky camps take a lot of time and by taking a camp you are losing lane pressure and allow your opponents to make the move which could end up with you taking a camp but your mid being ganked and killed.
6) grouping up
By grouping up you are saying "we must take a fight soon or push a lot or we will lose the exp war due to being bunched up"
Of course if you have an amazing siege team, hammer, furion etc and you just hit 16 grouping if is one of the best think you can do, it is all about the circumstance.
-1 (when behind)
Spoiler: Click to view
1) Xp soaking/1v1
When you are behind gaining experience is your ticket back into the game, grouping here is so risky simple because if you don't get a pick instantly you will lose pressure on the map, soak on the map, vision on the map.
Getting a 1v1 when you are behind is a golden jackpot you will gain a huge xp boost and you will prolong the game as well, this is were murky is great because you don't have a risk trying to get 1v1 if you fail at you respawn at your egg next to a justice wave of xp.
2) wave-control
making sure you don't get pushed in everywhere is the key, because if you end up not clearing the waves well when the other team kills your team you are left trying to 1v5 with murky and as slimy you are they will catch you and make shushi.
3) anything else.
no need explanation, anything that isn't related to xp soaking shouldn't be thought about unless you can make it safe, e.g for some reason the team tries to boss the best thing you can do is granting vision or run for the hills and push another lane.
There is a common misconception that murky should go Bot lane on blackheart's bay, this is bad, by sending murky to the bot lane you are making sure you lose the bot chest because a level 2 murky can't secure the chest by himself unless the other player in the lane makes a huge mistake.
You can go bot if:
you have talked with your team before hand and agreed that someone will come bot and help you during the first chest and give up the top chest/stall top chest.
But under normal circumstances you want to go top and contest top chest once it spawns.
how long do i stay top?
stay top until 10, if everyone leaves top and mid just rotate between them soaking the exp (note if puffer blows up and kills the minions while you are far away you will still get the exp)
Your goal is not get buildings but to create pressure forcing someone to stay top with you, in best case you get 2 players top camping you, just keep the pressure up and don't be scared to yolo clear vs 2 players while your team do whatever they want to bot.
i hit 10!
Good, go and try to get a pick with octo with your slightly tilted team and hand in some coins, don't spend to much to here tho.
If you can't get the pick go back to top and keep applying pressure.
Our goal here is to get to 16 without losing a keep.
after 10 but before 16
Keep looking for picks either alone 1v1 top
or catch people rotate
or rotate fast and get picks with team.
but don't forget to soak it is key here to keep your team even due to losing early chests.
16-19
Keep going top and create pressure while looking for rotation picks, your main goal tho is to make people camp you 2v1 giving your team more map control.
your egg should be somewhere close to the middle so you can join your team on your demise and look for picks while the people that camped you top trying to get back in time.
20
go rotate all over the map forcing the other team to either loss pressure in lanes to huge creep waves or getting caught in bad rotations.
Level guide TLDR version.
Spoiler: Click to view
1-9 top
10 go for Pick
11-12 pressure top
13-15 pressure top with 1v1 in your favor
16-19 pressure top and kill anyone 1v1
20 Lurk in a bush try to get a pick to close out the game.
Edit: due to the new scaling system these numbers are no longer close to the original value Dragon scaling notes:
Spoiler: Click to view
damage
dragon scales with 100+20x where x = game time in 1min
e.g) at 14min the damage is = 100+20*14 = 380
The dragon deals double damage to buildings
health
Health seems to scale as following
pre 10min, 5600+400x
pre 20min but after 10 min 5600+800x
after 20min 5600+1600x
assuming 5600+3200x after 30min (not confirmed)
The common mistake
Spoiler: Click to view
The most common mistake on dragon shrine is that people try to hard to get the early dragon, and end up running all over the place while losing exp and randomly fighting (see fightclub chapter)
The most common way to play Dragon Shrine is going 1-1-3 (1top,1mid,3bot)you do this because you can then control the bot merc which are more powerful than an early Dragon, however, since most HL game devolve into x-x-x followed by 0-0-5 followed by 1-2-2 and random shouting about the dragon we will focus more on the random chaos no brain approach.
in short lest ignore any good tacts on dragon shrine and focus upon cleaning up the mess that the team will make trying to yolo dragons ( guy guys i got shrine top!...wtf why you die 2v5 bot?! omg report report!)
General murky info
Spoiler: Click to view
Where do i go?
You want to go in a lane that you can push in, you don't want to be in a 2v1 here or versus a strong early game hero that can keep your waveclear down, usually you end up in a 2v2 lane which is fine as long as you can control the lane.
How do i control the lane?
You always want to clear your creeps and push in Before trying to get the tower, and if you can't take the tower just ignore it and keep pushing, after a while the other player/players have to stop afk at the tower and come and clear the lane, at this point you can go and take it back for a few seconds before clearing the next wave, to many people just afk at the tower while losing their lane, use this to get early xp lead by getting free gates while the other player stands around waiting for you to contest the tower.
If the enemy team got the dragon early on
Early dragon doesn't do anything, in fact sometimes i even give the enemy the dragon before 3 min and watch it walk away while i outsoak the enemy team who tries to siege with a weak dragon, regardless of what happen you want to keep shoving in your lane if the enemy team gets an early dragon the chance of it taking more than 1-2 towers is very low
how long do i want to push the lane?
In an ideal world you want to splitpush the whole game, but most of the time you will forced to move lane to soak another lane while the team do camps or rotating around for ganks, you should always leave the lane if another lane is being pushed.
Example) if there is an azmodan pushing in top you want to go and stop it, but if it is a valla then your team are more likely to deal with her.
What if my teammates dies?
This all depends on game by game, but as a general rules:
1)
a) if the enemy don't control both shrines try to get a solopick on one of them.
b) If you have a teammate close to you try to set up a pick or ambush together making it a 4v4.
2)
a) if you can't get a pick, just push the lane in and hope not much you can do here.
b) try to push in the lane to force someone to come back and defend creating a 4v4 once whoever died is back up.
What if a player form the enemy team dies?
As a general rule you want to keep pushing in lanes and soaking if your team gets a kill, don't fall into the trap of trying to rush a tower trying to get the dragon.
By pushing in the lane you force the enemy team to deal with you which in turn allows your team to safely take control of the shrine, you can then later join the team in the middle for a fight or try a 1v1.
how do i close the game?
Either with a solopick allowing your team to grab the dragon and end.
Or
keep the lanes shoved and allow your team to collapse as the enemy try to get 1 shrine when it spawns.
Any lane is good here, i prefer to go mid so i can roam if needed but this is overkill and not really needed.
What to do when the first tribute spawn?
If you think you could fight the enemy team at level 4, stay in a lane close to the tribute and soak to 4 then join your team, if you can't take a fight even if you are level 4 then you want to run to the lane farthest away from the tribute and start soaking that lane and push it it.
This applies to the second tribute as well, keep in mind the goal is to get to level 10 before the enemy or at least make sure your team is level 10 by the time for the tribute that would give one of the team the curse.
If you get cursed
Pick a lane where you are more likely to be 1v1 in and waveclear until the curse is over, not much to it.
If you curse the enemy
You want to push as much as you can, more than likely your team will try to get bosses, and in worse case they will just end up have random fights, make sure you use the time to get a few forts/gates while you can.
How to deal with someone going PvE?
If there are an illidan, sonya, rexxar etc they will go for camps after the first tribute, what you wanna do is figure out which camp they are going for you may then either chose to fight for the camp or push in the lane the camp is going to reducing the value of the camp assuming you can clear it.
how do i close?
As a general rule it comes down to random picks before objectives or getting 1v1 kills in order to secure 4v5 fights or a curse.
Whatever happens before the first night doesn't really matter so there is no general tips early on.
The thing you want is to be in the jungle as the seeds spawns and try to take the seeds from the other side.
Later on once people start the boss you either splitpush or you wait and try to steal a lot of seeds from the enemies, be sure you wait long enough because most of the time people will stop attacking the boss once they see the murloc approaching.
When the time come for the boss you can either pick it up or once again splitpush the other side of where your boss go.
If you choose to pick up the boss you want to just drag the enemy team around early on when the boss is weak and let your team split for you or get kills if they follow you around.
When the enemy team have the boss you want to stay away from it and splitpush forcing the enemy to either dive your team or someone to come to deal with you.
Late in the game when the death timers are long you want to force fights when you have the terror, it hits really hard late game, and when the enemy got the terror you want to avoid fighting and force them to scatter, one trick here you can do is run around the enemy and show yourself behind them, this makes people shy when it comes to engaging your team and might split them up with half going for your team and half chasing the murloc around.
This is a very linear map for murky, you tend to rarely do something outside of a set pattern.
Once the first shrine spawn you want to be as far away from it as possiable and soak, the reason you always chose to soak the first shrine is due to the fact you are so weak level 4 and the minions gets in the way, and because it takes so long to get those 40 skulls you should be able to carve yourself a huge level lead from soaking 1-2 lanes.
In the most ideal scenario you will be up 2 levels after the first shrine, but it is more common to only be 1 level up, what matters is getting to 7 in time for the second shrine where you can really shine due to the all the small minions helping you.
Note: the top camps are very strong, if you can get them just before the second shrine you will gain a lot of experience while you fight for the second shrine or force someone to go and deal with the shaman and his dogs.
As with most maps the way you want to end is with a pick of some sort before the shrine gets up either with the team or by 1v1 someone with splitpushing.
You can chose to give away the first immortal/titan here while you soak if your team can stall it long enough making the soak worth more.
Most of the time however, you can join your team and defend after the titans switch place, until the swap you do want to try soak and shove in a lane in order to edge out a level lead.
Because this map is so small it is rare you get fights or 1v1 opportunity because everyone tend to roam together, what you do want to do is splitpush anyway and try to force the enemy team to get into a bad spot or split up allowing your own team to get a 4v3 somewhere else.
Don't forget you always want to defend first before attacking early on, unless there is a hammer in which case you need to get to the hammer spots before the enemy team has time to setup a defense for her.
Another very scripted map for murky it goes as following:
1 go bot
2 stay bot and shove it in during the first towers, your objective is to destory the enemys well or force someone to stay bot with you.
3 stay bot until the next shrine which always will be bot and try to harrase the enemy while securing the tower
4 if the enemy takes the top mercs and leave someone to shove the top lane get a quick kill and move up to contest top, your team should be able to secure the tower 4v3.
After the second tower spawn the map becomes much more flexible and you can go back to setting up picks or splitpush forcing 1v1s or unflavored fights on another part of the map.
The boss on this map tends to be a major source of throws for both teams as a general rule don't ever try this boss unless the whole enemy team is dead, so many games are lost on this boss due to the whirlwind blocking someone in a bad spot which leads to a whole teamwipe.
This is a really fun map to play murky on, of course rule number 1 is to be careful with your gems, now just like the pirate bay you can transfer your goods by dying to a merc camp and having a teammate pickup your coins.
One thing this map shares with dragon shrine is people are way to obsessed with the spiders and turning in coins when they only sit on a couple.
If you get to early spiders they will die way to fast and be almost 100% waste, any spiders pre 5-6 min tend to die before they ever reach a gate, this means that you can let the enemy get early spiders if you have decent waveclear on your team.
Just as with the dragon knight map you want to shove the lane before going to the objective early game.
In the later part of the game you can secure a lot of kills at the turnin points due to all the good hiding spots and splitpushing can yield a lot of 1v1 kills.
As a final note be careful when it come to the boss this one tend to be taken by someone early on while people are busy fighting over the turnins, because of this you want in an perfect world splitpush top to reduce the chance of a random boss walking down the lane.
28/05.
- Few videos added.
- added furion, bw, arthas, chen, viking matchup.
11/06.
- added more matchups.
13/6
- added all matchups, and added some more info on certain matches.
- started on Blackheart's bay guide for murky.
16/7
- envenom thoughts added More updates are coming!
17/7
- added walkthrough videos for blackheart bay (ahead/even/behind)
19/8 added more content, cleaning up writing, adding spoilers and random stuff, more to come!
(new videos as well)
22/8 added chapter Data and fun stuff (4.1)
1/10 added chapter 3.1
9/10 added more videos, added new formatting, working on random stuff.
Conjurer's Pursuit - Mana regeneration, while important, shouldn't be a huge issue if you're a right click machine. Take this if you feel you won't be stickin' around lanes or camps enough to reach 15 stacks of Seasoned Marksman, and want to be more active in throwing around your hammer.
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Updra#0080ff[[Dog Fight - The utility parts of Barrel Roll. I'm very iffy on ever taking these, because I do not feel they actually give enough of a benefit for the Talent slot. A longer lasting shield sounds great, but if you're getting bursted, it won't last anyways. Longer range on Barrel Roll, again, sounds great, but many enemies have similar gap closers, and while this might get you over the wall a few times, enemies will try to stop you from Barrel Rolling all together.
Bribe - Definitely my second choice on Tier 1. There are many maps that have easy to capture Siege Giants, and a Flight -> Bribe combo can create pressure in far away lanes, allowing you to either land some critical building damage, or distract an enemy from the map objectives or team fights. I wouldn't take Bribe on Garden of Terror, however, as sometimes Night phase can last a loooooong time, thus disabling creep camps for extended periods. The other consideration is if you have a Gazlowe or Nazeebo on your team; best to leave them to their Mercenary Lord tactics, and to continue focusing on split pushing and burst.
Damage type: combos
Combos are a sequence of spells/attacks used to create high damage in a short window but unlike all ins aren't meant to always get a kill but are instead another form of poke/harassment. (some combos are all in attempts of course but we will cover more general smaller combos here)
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Heroes of the Storm Build Guides
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