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HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.
Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.
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