Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro In-Game Quests mean you can still dictate how the game goes
The fact an entire team shares a level had players worried, but with personal Hero Quests, you can now take greater gameplay risks that yield immense power and reward skilled players for good plays sooner rather than later.
Pro Hero and playstyle diversity
Blizzard has gone above and beyond to introduce Heroes that break the standard molds for Tanks/Support/Damage characters. The talent system allows for diversity in how a character plays. Some heroes can even talent into multiple roles, like Varian, who can become either an assassin or a tank. Each Hero has 2 Heroic Abilities (Ultimates) to choose between, providing even more diversity in how each character can be played. Also, Blizzard has introduced several highly unconventional heroes, from The Lost Vikings, who are three separate characters controlled by one player, to Cho'Gall, who is two different players controlling one character, to Abathur, who doesn't venture out into the battlefield himself but manipulates the map and assists teammates from afar.
Pro Fun emotes from heroes upon team work and team kills and more
If you play Nova and Kill Vala, Nova will say "HUNTER!? More like Hunted!"
Or if you play support and heal Raynor he will say "This medic is my new best friend".
These emotes make it very clear what happened, and add a dimension of fun that you don't see in other MOBAs.
Also you can hear some emotes after other events, like your own hero death/respawn or during starting second of the match.
Pro No last hitting, no gold, no items
The game does away with the shop mechanic entirely. No last hitting means players don't have to focus on a minigame for the first 20 minutes so they can jump into the action much faster. No shop means that supports aren't starved for cash and can remain strong and relevant throughout the game. No items allows for the hero-specific talent system to shine, which provides a much more unique and easily balanced way to enhance your character.
Pro It's always possible to make a comeback
Even if you are in trouble because you lost almost all the game, you can still win by killing the enemy team on a stupid move they made at the end of the game. And it's never unfair: it's always because the losing team was overconfident and the winning one was focus.
Pro Community
Has a relatively smaller playerbase than other MOBAs and Blizzard games, but one that comes from fans of every franchise represented in HotS, whether it be WC3 or Starcraft, leading to a wide range of players of all ages familiar with raiding in WoW, or the micromanagement in Starcraft. Regardless, many HotS players will share a common love for at some Blizzard franchises. All chat is disabled outside of Custom games, which arguably leads to less toxicity, as well as the fast paced nature and shorter match time which means less time for trivial flame wars as well as no surrender option and many comeback mechanics, as well as very little last hitting or kill stealing to be had leads to a far more relaxed environment.
Pro Deep but not complex
The game removes a lot of pointless features of other games like last hitting and out-of-game rune/card buffs. It's also much clearer, with natural percentage based increases for characters rather than "armor/intelligence" stat increases. It also has a large map pool with greatly differing objectives in each one forcing you to consider how your playstyle will adapt to the opponent and the map itself. It may appear to be simple, but there is a lot of hidden depth.
Pro Easy to learn
Heroes of the Storm was created to be a streamlined, modern take on a MOBA, something that many others have aimed for but HotS succeeds in. Shared XP keeps teams leveling together; No Last Hits means that everyone gets XP from minions and puts less importance on who gets the kill, since there is no Carry-player. Choosing talents instead of having to buy items gives the game complexity without forcing players to wade through menus and travel back to base. The game still offers a challenge to master at higher levels, but is more accessible to new players.
Cons
Con Reconnect system
It's extraordinarily difficult and frustrating to reconnect to a game in Heroes if you disconnect for any reason. Reconnecting players can't simply "pick up where they left off", they have to simulate everything that has happened in the game between the moment they disconnected and the present time, which causes the reconnecting process to be extra slow and occasionally impossible.
Con Terrible matchmaking
In any of the matchmaking queues, the chance of being put against someone with much higher skill than yourself is very high. The ranking system goes in this order: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster. On multiple occasions, silver players have been placed against an entire team of Grandmasters with bronze allies, leading to very poor experience.
Con Slow fights
Heroes inflict little damage to each other, which has the potential to make fights seem long. On top of this when one falls behind many of their skills will become useless making for a fight that one is delegated to a support role, which will also add to the slow feeling of a fight.
Con Lack of good talent diversity
Compared to the flexibility of an item system, the talent system limits the number of ways you can build a hero. The talent system is often structured so that there is 1-2 primary builds which usually focus on empowering one of the heroes basic abilities, and then a handful of niche talents. This causes a hero to feel very much the same every time you play it.
Con Individual skin quality has dipped in exchange for numerous mediocre skins
Gone are the days of high quality skins with cool spell effects and amazing visuals. What was once a dime-a-dozen, skins of actual "worth buying" quality now come once every 6 months or so, as the game's conversion to "2.0" switched their skin philosophy from QUALITY, to QUANTITY.
Con Can feel difficult to make an impact as a solo player
Since Heroes was designed to be more team-centric rather than individual players carrying games, games can often feel beyond your control. For example, ranked games can often feel like a coin flip of which side gets lucky and avoids players prone to tilting or toxicity.
Con Lower playerbase game knowledge
The average Heroes of the Storm player is less informed about the mechanics and basic strategies of the game compared to the average player of other MOBA games. This is due to a variety of reasons, like the popularity of Quick Match and the relative lack of learning resources both in-game and out because the game isn't like other mobas so people bring the wrong knowledge and expectations to this game.