Do you want to own all of the heroes? Are you trying to get 10 heroes as soon as possible to hop into ranked play? Do you care about owning skins and/or mounts? You need to assess your goals, and alter your spending methods accordingly. You should check all of the available bundles and weekly sales before buying anything you want at face value so that you can get a higher Gold per Penny ratio.
How Will Gold to Cash Value be Represented?
Gold to cash value will be represented in a gold per penny value. Gold per penny is defined as the value of gold gained per penny spent (the higher the gold per penny the better). Now, let’s take a look at the current price tiers in Heroes of the Storm.
Tier 1 - 2000g / $3.99 or 5 Gold per penny
Tier 2 - 4000g / $6.49 or 6.16 Gold per penny
Tier 3 - 7000g / $8.49 or 8.24 Gold per penny
Tier 4 - 10000g / $10.00 or 10 Gold per penny
As you may have noticed, the higher the tier, the more gold per penny gained. At the highest value (tier 4), $10.00 of real money is worth 10,000g (this is to say each penny is worth 10 gold). If you are going to spend real cash on a Hero, you should make sure that it is on a 10000g one.
What Are Hero Bundles Worth?
In this section we will analyze the two bundles that have been around for a while and look to be staying around. Other bundles are generally introduced during patches, whether the patches are bringing back previous bundles or the skin/hero bundle for a new character release (this post will not include the value of these limited time bundles).
Note: No heroes included in these bundles overlap.
Nexus Bundle
Total Gold Price - 46k
Cash Price - $39.99
Gold per Penny - 11.5
Note: This doesn't take into account Skins/Mounts
Starter Bundle
Told Gold Price - 6k
Cash Price - $4.99
Gold per Penny - 12.02
Note: This doesn't take into account Stimpack/Mount
The main thing to consider when looking to buy these bundles is how much value you place on the skins, mounts, etc... included in the bundles. Obviously if you value any of the extra content included the gold per penny skyrockets. It is worth noting that if any bundles come about that contain overlapping content and you are looking to purchase the bundle the gold per penny decreases.
How Good Are the Weekly Sales?
Every week Blizzard puts out weekly sales. During these weekly sales, the price of content is cut in half. For the price of Heroes this doubles the value of the gold per penny. These sales are usually announced every Friday, and commonly can be found on the Heroes of the Storm Sub-reddit
Tier 1 – 2000g / $1.99 or 10.05 Gold per penny
Tier 2 – 4000g / $3.24 or 12.35 Gold per penny
Tier 3 – 7000g / $4.24 or 16.51 Gold per penny
Tier 4 – 10000g / $4.99 or 20.04 Gold per penny
The thing to note is that you double your gold per penny when purchasing Heroes during these weekly sales.
What Is A Stimpack and What Is Its Value?
The Stimpack is Blizzard’s system of an experience and gold boost. It is similar to boosts that exist in other MOBAs such as League of Legends and Smite. The boost is almost identical to that of Smite’s due to the fact that they both increase experience and in-game currency.
As stated in the Heroes of the Storm client, “Stimpacks increase the amount of experience earned per match by 100% and gold earned per match by 150%.” It is worth noting that buying another Stimpack while on one, will only extend its duration and not further increase its effects.
While Stimpacks can be a great resource to obtain extra gold, and account/hero experience, there are a couple things to keep in mind:
Stimpacks give no in-game benefits, it is purely post game.
Stimpack benefits are additive (This means the bonuses provided are added to the base amount of experience or gold you receive after finishing a game).
Stimpacks will not provide additional gold or experience benefits to any Quest rewards or other experience bonuses (such as Play with Friend, Double XP Weekend, and etc.).
Stimpacks are sold in two forms:
7 Day Stimpack for $3.99 or 5 gold per penny
30 Day Stimpack for $9.99 or 10 gold per penny
As mentioned above this means that a $10.00 purchase is equal to 10,000g, meaning to achieve the highest value it is always more beneficial to invest in the 30 Day Stimpack. It is also worth noting that if you play very infrequently that you might find better value by simply buying a 10,000 gold character outright.
How Do I Get Gold?
Blizzard has introduced many ways for a player to get gold to spend on heroes, rather than just by winning or losing games. Players are rewarded for leveling their accounts, leveling up Heroes, doing daily quests, and for just playing the game. So lets analyze how much gold you are given for “free”.
The Road to Level 40
The Milestone Levels for Gold are as follows:
Level 2 – 1000g
Level 4 – 1000g
Level 6 – Unlock Daily Quests (these reward gold)
Level 8 – 2000g
Level 10 – 2000g and a 7 Day Stimpack (this gives 150% gold per match)
Level 20 – 2000g
Level 25 – 2000g
Level 30 – 2000g
Level 35 – 2000g
Level 40 – 2000g
Total Gold Gained: 16,000g
What Are Daily Quests?
Daily quests are specific in-game goals that Blizzard distributes daily after your account is Level 6. You can hold up to 3 daily quests, this means that you should always aim to have one daily quest spot available for maximum gold gaining efficiency.
Daily quests come in a number of different forms and have varying gold values. It is worth noting that you cannot have more than one of the same daily quests, this means you can stack your dailies in favor of getting a better quest. For example you can keep two 300 gold dailies to further increase your chance at getting the 600g or 800g daily, although it could also work the opposite and you may end up with the 200g daily.
Here is a List of the current daily quests
- Play 8 Games (Any Mode) - 800 gold
- Win 3 Games (Any Mode) - 600 gold
- Play 3 Games as an Assassin Hero - 300 gold
- Play 3 Games as a Warrior Hero - 300 gold
- Play 3 Games as a Support Hero - 300 gold
- Play 3 Games as a Specialist Hero - 300 gold
- Play 2 Games As a Warcraft Hero - 200 gold
- Play 2 Games As a Diablo Hero - 200 gold
- Play 2 Games As a StarCraft Hero - 200 gold
This means that for simply completing these goals you are rewarded greatly. The lowest value daily is the equivalent to winning 4 games, and at the highest value it is equivalent to winning 16 games.
Note: It seems as of the Eternal Conflict patch, Blizzard is not opposed to implementing special event dailies.
Leveling Heroes
Each hero has a progress bar that fills with experience after every game until capping at level 20. The hero levels have many milestones that reward the player for their time investment in the hero.
Here is a list of the Gold Rewarding Milestones
Level 5 – 500g
Level 9 – 750g
Level 15 – 1000g
Level 20 – 2000g
Total Gold – 4,250g per hero
Note: Getting a character to level 9 or higher takes extreme dedication and a lot of games.
Because you are rewarded 500g for every character at level 5, I highly recommend that you level every character to level 5 simply for the easy gold. This puts an extreme importance on the leveling of every character on the free week to 5 for maximum gold efficiency. In a best case scenario you can net yourself 3500g simply by leveling all 7 free week characters to at least level 5 (you have to be at least account level 15 to have all 7 free week heroes available). Obviously this will have diminishing returns due to the limited hero pool and overlapping free week heroes. To put this in perspective, currently there are 37 Heroes and if you got each of them to level 5, you would have obtained 18500g (not including gold from games played).
Completing the Tutorial
Once you have gained access to the game you can hit options and click the tutorial. You will see 3 more tutorial missions that Uther neglected to shove down your throat. The first two missions are worth 250g each and the third is worth 500g
Total Gold- 1,000g
Note: If you just want to speed through them for the gold then ping all the cpus to make them follow you. From there just push hard down mid lane and you will finish all 3 in about half an hour.
Okay So I know How To Get gold. Now How Do I Spend It Wisely?
More often than not, people tend to spend their hard earned gold frivolously. Here are a few things that can help you allocate your gold as efficiently as possible.
First and foremost I recommend trying a hero during a free week before deciding to invest gold into a hero that you have never played before. If you find yourself saying, “I played X during the last free week and it was so much fun!” then buy that hero. You should always be looking to invest your gold into heroes that you enjoy playing.
Try to allocate your gold purchases to heroes in more than one role. This will make you a more well-rounded player and also give more insight into what you may find “fun”.
Don’t 100% commit your purchases to tier lists. Tier lists can be great tools, but you have to remember that tier lists are not an ultimatum. All heroes in the game are viable to some capacity (Yes, even Gazlowe).
Don’t make any hasty purchases prior to patch day. Often times I will see posts surface on Reddit such as, “I just bought X for 10k gold yesterday, and now they are aren’t even viable!” because these players simply failed to follow the rule of not buying heroes when a patch date has been announced. It is also not unheard of for Blizzard to reduce the price of heroes via gold. Although this doesn’t happen very frequently you should still be aware that you can be screwed over via a patch.
For every patch in which a new hero is released, for the first two weeks of that patch the heroes are priced at 15000g and $10.00 cash. If you can afford to wait 2 weeks for the price of the new hero to drop from 15000g to 10000g, you should do so in order to save money. By buying a hero at the 15000g price point you are throwing away 5000g or the equivalent of $5.00 cash. If you simply cannot wait to buy the hero then plan accordingly and spend real money on them.
Should I Buy All the 2000g Heroes?
This is a question that is brought up quite frequently, and can be a delicate subject.
There are currently 6 heroes at the 2000g tier. This means that if you buy all the 2000g heroes you are using 75% of the gold earned from leveling your account on these heroes.
If you are someone looking to own all of the characters, then sure, go ahead and purchase them. For people looking to hop right into ranked-play, I wouldn’t recommend it personally, but if you are that dead set on playing ranked, go for it. I don’t recommend it because there are often times players will spend a lot of their gold on these heroes and not be able to buy the heroes that they find enjoyable. They end up regretting the purchase of these 2000g heroes simply because they were cheap and/or gave access to ranked play.
The thing to always keep in mind is that in the end this is a game. Regardless of your goals in it don’t feel bad for playing or buying a character that you want because it resonates with you. Don’t let tier list be your Shepherd. At best it’s a 3 or 4 week guide before you find out that you made some regrettable purchases.
I hope this guide was of some use to all you new players out there, and remember: wait until patch day!
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