Destroying Their Core Before They Destroy Yours

So I often get people asking me in any game how you can get others to do what benefits the team. Lately many of these questions have to do with Heroes of the Storm and how you can get your team to understand certain things are important. Why people should stop what they are doing and help out with something else. This brings me right into this week's Reader Post by Tidragon. Who has come up with a pretty fail safe way to go about explaining it.

There is only one important thing in Heroes of The Storm:

Destroying their core before they destroy yours.

As a corollary:

If anything they're doing can destroy your core, absolutely anything else you are doing is wrong unless it is "destroying their core first". You need to stop whatever you're doing and stop whatever they're doing that is going to blow up your core.

As a corollary to the corollary:

This means that if an objective spawns which is going to destroy your core, you need to grab that objective. If there is an attack on your core, you need to defend your core.

There is literally no point in defending your core from random minion waves if your foes are going to grab the Sky Temple and blow up your core from afar. Likewise, there's no point in defending your core if they're going to turn in to the pirate and blow it up with cannonballs. But there's also no point in capping the objective if your core is going to be destroyed before you destroy theirs.

In most of these situations, you effectively have to capture the objective unless the enemy team is pushing your core. The minion waves are less important unless they are going to destroy your core before them grabbing the objective will.

I know this may seem like an odd endgame thing, but it is actually a really important thing to keep in mind at all times. Your goal is to blow up the enemy core. That is the only thing which will end the game in your victory. Their goal is to blow up yours.

Whatever you're doing should be whatever it is which makes it most likely that you blowing up their core is going to happen before they blow up yours. If you understand this, you'll understand a great deal.

This is why capturing objectives is often so important - literally every single objective in the game is about pushing through towers. Curse disables all the towers - it means you need to push. The garden terror and dragon knight are both for pushing enemy towers down. The golem and webweavers are all about spawning in and attacking enemy towers. The Sky Temple and the Pirate Ship both directly blow up enemy towers. Getting through those towers - and most importantly, destroying keeps - gets you closer and closer to the enemy core. Destroying the core wins you the game.

After "losing your core", the next worst thing that can happen to you is losing your keeps. The next best thing after "destroying the enemy core" is "destroying the enemy keeps". The vast, vast majority of the time, destroying enemy keeps (the inside ring of keeps) is better than destroying an outer ring, because destroying a keep causes catapult minions to spawn in that lane. Catapult minions not only push through enemy minion waves, but attack the enemy core from outside of the core's attack radius. This forces the enemy team to devote resources to preventing that lane from destroying their core on its lonesome, because it will do so unless your own keep has been destroyed. This constant distraction makes it easier to destroy other enemy keeps or capture objectives, or generally bother the other team.

The only thing worth foregoing destroying an enemy keep for is either defending your own keeps, defending your own core, doing something which is going to destroy an enemy keep (capping an objective, for instance, or setting off the boss), preventing the other team from doing something which is going to destroy your core (preventing them from capping an objective or setting off a boss), or wiping the other team (this is okay, but still iffy unless you are going to blow up one of their keeps after you win your teamfight - though frankly, you should be able to).

There's this sort of... prioritization thing. And understanding this is pretty important to being a helpful teammate. If you're just randomly pushing a lane, and your keep or core is under attack, you're not really helping unless your teammates have it under control. If there is a teamfight going on, you need to be either helping, or it needs to be part of the plan (communicated to your teammates) that you're not going to be helping because you're split pushing, and their job is to delay and not die, and prevent the enemy team from rolling down and murdering you while you split push (which is bad). And even in that situation, your split push needs to be quickly earning you towers down - just poking stuff isn't enough. Some characters are good at pushing, others aren't. If you're a bad pusher, you shouldn't be split pushing.

But in the end, it is all about keeping your core alive, and blowing up theirs. As long as you blow up their core first, everything else is irrelevant. And if your core is going to be blown up first, everything else is irrelevant. The only thing which determines a win or a loss is that core, so if a chain of events is the only way for you to either blow up their core, or avoid your own core being blown up, you must adhere to that chain.

See now this may seem like pretty common sense to most people, but I think you would actually be quite surprised how it isn't. But now you have it a way to explain to all those people driving you insane each and every game. Have a good weekend!