Experience of the Storm

Experience is the most important and possibly most misunderstood aspect of the game. Its embedded in all different strategies, and even though most of us have a baseline understanding, most of us don’t know the little details of how to get experience, the math behind it or the rules that apply. CavalierGuest and Heartless had an in-depth conversation about this in the first episode of an educational series. You can find the VOD right here.  

There are several ways to gather experience as they are stated in the game interface themselves, CavalierGuest and Heartless went over them one by one. 

Minions, passive (trickle), structures, mercenaries (and monsters) and heroes.

Minions 

Let's start off with minions. They are your main source of experience in this game. Every 30 seconds a minion wave spawns on every lane on every map starting at level one the melee (frontline) minions are worth 70 XP apiece, the leader minion (the mage) is 62 XP and the ranger (backline) minions are 60 XP apiece. This is 452 XP for the total wave. This different on Tomb of the Spider Queen where a wave is worth significantly less. Also on Aram maps the experience is less. 

The experience of the minions goes up per minute. And doesn’t change after they spawned. So if a minion wave spawns at 1:05 it will have the set experience until it dies, even if it stays on the map for over a minute longer. The scaling happens in a repetitive pattern. For a whole wave, it goes up by 11, 11, 10, 11, 14 and repeats itself again every 5 minutes. This coincides with the experience needed per level. If you soak your waves across all three lanes for a whole minute (two waves per lane) that is roughly equal to a whole level. So you can calculate how long it will take you to level up.

You can get minion experience in two different ways unless you're Abathur. Either you must be physically in range (body soaking) or you must last hit the minions. Abathur, for now, is the only hero that has an ability that allows not only his physical form to be in range of dying minions to gather experience, but also his hat to count as being in range to soak the minion experience. 

The range to soak experience from dying minions is 12,75 ingame units. This is roughly your sight range. However, the range of experience is measured from the inside of your hitbox, where the sight range is measured from the outer range (collision) of your hitbox. So, it can vary slightly per hero. Vision is a good rule of thumb to use to measure your distance to the minions, but it is unrelated to the actual range of soaking. This means that you don’t persé have to see the minions and the minions don’t have to be seeing you. You could safely soak from a bush, behind a wall or even just stand far enough behind. Medivh in raven form has a slightly smaller sight range than usual, meaning he can actually not be in visual range of the minions but still soak the experience by being near enough. Soaking range is an invisible radiance around your hero.

Even if you’re not in range but you or an ability of yours last hits a minion (killing blow) you will get that experience. This is for example relevant on Azmodan, hitting his globe across lanes and killing a wave, his trait that smites minions ever 6 seconds for their full health. Or even an Abathur’s locust or monstrosity last hitting a minion. This applies to all summons. Certain heroes have a bigger ability range than their vision range allowing them to get the experience from a saver distance, think for example of Chromie’s Dragon Breath.

Often time watching pro players you will see them quickly opening and closing the stats tab, and you think, what could they possibly get from checking that so fast. It's them checking the experience, based on the numbers it can be easy to see what the enemy team is doing at that moment in time.

Passive

Trickling experience starts at 35 seconds into the game, from there on both teams gain 20 XP per second, even if they're doing absolutely nothing. This will keep happening every second until the end of the game. There's nothing you can do to stop or change this, but it could be good to keep into account when you're doing a big rotation but are just that tiny bit off the next talent tier. The trickle experience should get you that talent tier while you rotate across the map. 

Structures

There's 4 type of structures in the game that will give you experience, the outer fort towers, the forts, the outer keep towers and the keeps. Walls, gates, healing fountains and the core will give you no experience. The outer fort towers are worth 250 XP per tower, the entire front wall is worth 500 XP, early into the game that's roughly equal to a full minion wave. Forts are worth 1200 XP. The outer keep towers are worth 800 XP each, so 1600 XP for the entire wall. That's quite some experience, so if you ever get to the point where you can choose between getting a fort down or getting a keep wall, not only would you be opening up a win condition with the wall, you’re also gaining a lot more experience that bringing down the fort. Keeps themselves are worth 2050 XP. 

Buildings don't scale over time. So they're slightly more valuable early game in comparison to minions. But there's always added bonuses to having a structural advantage. 

The belltowers on Towers of Doom start of as forts and stay a fort untill around the 12 minute mark the tunnel to the middle of the battlefield opens. At this same moment in time the belltowers get upgraded to keeps and will drop significantly more experience. You sometimes see teams holding back capping a tower back untill this happens. This way the enemy team killed a fort but you take back a keep and gain experience on them. 

Mercenaries

You only get experience for defeating neutral mercenaries, the last hit on the mercenary decides who gets the experience. Enemy mercenaries (when captured by the enemy team) do not give any experience for being cleared up. Mercenary experience scales slower than minions and gives relatively little experience compared to minions. You should not use them as a source of experience rather than to create opportunities for your team. The one exception being the mercenaries on Volskaya Foundery. 

The mercenaries on Volskaya work a lot different. These mercenaries will not give you experience by killing them, unlike other maps, but by capping them. The engineer + turret camps are worth 460 XP, scaling 10 per minute. The sentinel camp is worth 625 XP, scaling at 10 per minute. This is significantly more than camps on other maps and gives you the bonus item as well to use for the next objective fight.

*For the full table of mercenaries click here

Monsters are map specific. There’s an entire list. There’s, however, few that are significant enough to mention. The big guy with the knockback on the sky temple temples (Temple Guardian) will give you 195 XP scaling 5 per minute. That’s about half a minion wave. There have been tactics with Li-Ming on Sky temple where the middle temple was given up and traded for the top shrine, however, Li-Ming would position herself on the vision to snipe the last hit on the Guardian to deny and steal that experience. 

The BoE immortal will give both teams experience, no matter who caps it, but when and how you get that experience differences. The base experience is 750, scaling 35 per minute. The team that wins the race will get the full experience from this immortal straight away. The losing team gets a portion of the experience equal to the amount of damage dealt to the immortal directly, they get the rest of the experience when the immortal dies. So if you got the race halfway when the enemy team won the immortal you will get half of the experience the winning team got right there, and the other half when you kill the enemy immortal.

Heroes

There is actually a whole formula about calculating the experience you get from hero kills, it's not as simple or straightforward. The formula is as follows: 

Base XP of a hero kill = (Level of the hero killed + 5) * 50 * DeathValueCoefficient 

For most heroes the DeathValueCoefficient is 1, exceptions can be found in the table below:

As /u/wuron on reddit pointed out, killing Rexxar while Misha is still alive will add to a DVC of 1 as Misha dies instantly

Experience of heroes scales faster than that from minions, around the level 5 point a kill will be worth as much as a minion wave. (5 + 5) * 50 * 1 = 500 XP. However, when a team is ahead in levels the kill gives less experience, a modifier becomes active on the total experience the hero kill gives you. This modifier is based on the real level difference, so also accounts for how far into the level you are. (ie. level 9,2 vs level 7,4 is a difference of 1,8). In the table below you can find estimates of the amount of modifier applied to the base experience of the hero kill.

This means that if the kill of the level 9,2 hero versus the 7,4 hero the modifier would be 26% (1 level is 10% + 0,8 * 20%). The experience the higher level hero would get from killing the lower level hero would be (7+5)*50*1*(1-0,26) = 444 XP. If the lower level hero, however, manages to secure a kill against a higher-level hero, no modifier is applied.

With all these topics covered CavalierGuest and Heartless covered all possible ways to gain your team experience in the Nexus. They will be back shortly with a new episode covering a different subject on our twitch channel. If there is anything you would like to see in one of the upcoming episodes please don't hesitate to request this in the new educational channels that are set up in the discord server. There are also new channels set up to ask your questions, find resources of even practice mock drafts. We'll see you soon! 

Credit to Ahli Ahlers, for all numbers and some examples from this series (both in the VOD and in this blog post), came from his report 'experience of the storm'. Twitter & website