Heroes Of The Storm's Newest Character Is Causing Major Headaches

Heroes of the Storm players have found a devious way to use the latest playable character Leoric. As it turns out, Leoric can wreak havoc inside enemy bases all by himself.

The infamous strategy relies on Leoric's passive ability, Undying. This passive lets Leoric turn into a ghost upon dying and eventually resurrect himself. As a Leoric player levels up, he can choose talents to speed up this resurrection process.

While a ghost, Leoric players can pass through the gates of the enemy's base. Once inside, they can start attacking the enemy forts and eventually even the Core, the building that has to be destroyed to win the match. Leoric can die pretty quickly here thanks to the enemy players along with the A.I. turrets and minions. However, thanks to Undying, they can quickly resurrect and start their assault all over again. You can see this "backdoor" strategy in action in the video below, starting at the 3:50 mark:

The result is that Leoric can just sit in the enemy's base and chip away at their defenses. With the Symbiote buff from Abathur, they can dish out a surprising amount of damage to these structures as well.

On this Battle.net thread and elsewhere, players have been debating the strategy's effectiveness. On the one hand, Leoric needs to be a fairly high level to pull this off. Plus, every time he dies he's giving the enemy team essentially free experience points. Plus, while Leoric is chipping away at the enemy base, his team is outnumbered by their opponents in battling for objectives.

On the other hand, Leoric's ability to slip behind enemy lines is a huge advantage. He's able to bypass several turrets with his ghost ability. That saves him a ton of time in taking down the base. What's more, the enemy team needs to spend time babysitting him to make sure he dies quickly every time he's revived.

Still, effective or not, I doubt Blizzard intended Leoric to be used in this way. They want players to face down the enemy team and play the map's objectives. With this strategy, though, the Leoric player is just putting their head down and mindlessly smacking enemy buildings. I'm sure that the person who first devised this strategy got some thrill out of discovering it. The actual execution of this strategy though, is tedious and simple.

Heroes of the Storm players brought the backdoor Leoric strategy to designer Dustin Browder's attention over Twitter. He suggested that a fix is on the way:

It's unclear what the fix will be. It seems like the easiest way to prevent this strategy will be to prevent ghost Leoric from getting through enemy walls.

Leoric was added to Heroes of the Storm as part of a Diablo 3-themed event called the Eternal Conflict. Blizzard also introduce the Butcher and a map called Battle of Eternity to the game as part of this event. Eventually Diablo 3's Monk will be added to the roster as well.