Battlegrounds—more widely known as “maps”—are an essential part of Heroes of the Storm. Over the years we’ve decided which maps we love and which ones we hate. And, of course, which ones we would permanently remove from the game if we had the chance. We know many things about battlegrounds, but there are still a few secrets to unveil.
Map Monarchs
We usually talk about the winrate as a global stat for each hero, but that’s not always true. Global winrate can help us have a general idea of how strong or weak a hero is in a specific meta, but that doesn’t necessarily make them viable or unviable for every single map. Could you guess which is the best and worst pick for each battleground?
All data used in this section comes from Heroes Profile and might have changed since this article was written. The criteria are Storm League games from all ranks played in the current patch.
Alterac Pass is ruled by Probius (63.73% winrate), who can use the treacherous terrain around the Prison Camps to deploy the pylons and maximize their damage on the enemy team. Same thing happens in Cursed Hollow, where the probe sits on a 60.87% winrate. The third map of Probius’ kingdom is Sky Temple (61.61% winrate). All these maps have three lanes and really important mercenary camps, including bosses. On the other hand, the heroes with the lowest winrates in these battlegrounds are Murky in Alterac (38.94%), Medivh in Sky Temple (39.81%) and Cho’gall in Cursed Hollow (36.84%). Unlike Probius, the two-headed ogre struggles when dealing with the intricate terrain.
Another multimap ruler is Rexxar, who becomes a huge threat in every map where mercenaries are especially important. That’s the case of Towers of Doom and its sappers (59.76% winrate), Hanamura Temple and its sentinels (57.68%) and Garden of Terror (59.09%). The statistically worse picks in these maps are Chen (38.82%), Murky (39.50%) and Medivh (39.50%), respectively. Speaking of Medivh, the Last Guardian and his portals also struggle at Infernal Shrines (39.27%) and Warhead Junction (36.90%), where the best picks are Tracer (56.29%) and Rehgar (57.74%).
The highest winrates in Dragon Shire and Tomb of the Spider Queen belong to Mephisto (56.71% and 59.10%, respectively). His low-winrate counterparts are Chen (42.06%) and The Lost Vikings (30.30%). TLV, precisely, exemplifies the importance of maps against the global winrates. Despite being the worst hero in Tomb of the Spider Queen, they are the best hero in Braxis Holdout, sitting on a 63.64% winrate. The worst pick in this latter map is Zeratul, with a 41.46% winrate.
Last but not least comes Battlefield of Eternity. We could think long-ranged heroes such as Hanzo or Valla would rule this map, but Maiev takes the crown away from them with a 56.43% winrate. The hero with the lowest winrate in this map is Fenix (41.09%). The difference between these two characters makes BoE the second most winrate-balanced map, slightly behind Dragon Shire. On the other hand, the battleground where the highest and lowest winrates differ the most is Tomb of the Spider Queen.
The Contenders
To finish our map recap we’ll dive a little into the importance of map objectives in a few of the battlegrounds. This time, our data comes from HOTSlogs and might have also changed since this article was written.
One of the most popular map objectives is the Punisher from Infernal Shrines. The average damage of the Arcane Punisher is slightly higher than the one from its Bombard and Frozen counterparts. 67% of the teams that take the first Punisher win the game, raising this digit to 80.9% if they also secure the second one. The other map introduced during the Eternal Conflict event, Battlefield of Eternity, favors the teams in a similar way, with a 65.7% winrate for the ones that win the first Immortal race and 80.9% for those that win the first two races.
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Dragon Shire has similar objective winrates (66.8% and 80.3% for the first and first two Dragon Knights). Statistically speaking, taking the Dragon Knight at any point of the game is quite important, as 37.4% of the games end with a Dragon Knight push. Moving to Tomb of the Spider Queen, the push-with-objective victories fall down to 28.8%. However, if a team gets the first two Webweaver spawns—that’s turning in 105 gems before the enemies turn in 50—the odds of their victory are 87.5%. Generally speaking, all these numbers prove map objectives to be as rewarding as they feel when playing the game, though this data may be affected by team experience difference.
Which are your favorite maps? Which objectives do you think are the most important?
