Heroes Of The Storm Bug Lets Player Win Instantly

The goal in Heroes of the Storm is to fight your way to the back of the enemy team’s base and destroy a structure known as “the core.” The core is normally heavily defended with an outer shield and turrets that make destroying it a risky endeavour. But a newly discovered bug lets one hero simply one-shot the thing.

The bug affecting StarCraft hero Tassadar was first discovered and posted online by the YouTuber sam Kimula, and then shared on the HOTS subreddit. In the five-minute clip, you can see Tassadar and his teammates fend off an attack from the red team, which is three levels ahead at the start of the clip.

After pushing the enemy team back, Tassadar starts roaming around the map, tending to various defensive duties like pushing out waves of enemy minions and mercenaries. That’s when things start to look weird.

While Tassadar’s special abilities seem like they’re still working as intended — i.e., dealing a normal amount of damage to enemies caught in their target — the Protoss Templar’s auto-attack clearly isn’t. It instakills enemy mercenaries like these stone siege golems:

Even more suspicious is the fact that the game noticeably stutters whenever Tassadar attacks something he instakills.

The same one-shot “technique” (or whatever you want to call it) works on neutral jungle camps as well, which lets him recruit a bunch of mercenaries to his side in a pinch:

After taking out a bunch of minions and mercenaries, Tassadar heads up to the enemy base, where he starts one-shotting their defensive structures in the same way. First the towers:

…and then the rest of the buildings behind that defensive line:

…and then, ultimately, the enemy core:

GG. Or no, not really a GG at all. Not even really a “G.”

Reddit’s ScarletBladeTW, who posted the insane glitched-out super-overpowered Tassadar discover on the HOTS sub yesterday, suggests that whether the issue here is a bug or a hack, it looks like the person using it is doing so intentionally. He sure seems like he’s trying not to get caught wielding such an overpowered move. At one point, when Tassadar is wrecking his way through the enemy’s top lane defences, the red team sees what he’s doing and jumps on him. Tassadar doesn’t even try to fight back; choosing instead to just sit there and let them kill him.

That’s certainly a good way to avoid having the enemy team realise you’re using an exploit to your benefit.

When I reached out to Blizzard to ask what the Heroes of the Storm developers knew about this bizarre instakilling trick for Tassadar, they provided me with this statement:

We’re currently investigating an in-game incident regarding Tassadar’s damage output, which may be the result of a one-time bug. We understand players may find these types of bugs on accident. Please be advised that intentional abuse of game mechanics violates our in-game policies<http://us.battle.net/support/article/300736>. Accounts found to be in violation may be actioned appropriately. Players who have concerns regarding account actions can contact Customer Support <https://battle.net/support/help> to appeal.

It sounds like this could be a one-time problem. Or it could be an as-yet undiscovered exploit or form of cheating. I should point out that I’ve never seen anything like this in the 1,000-plus games of Heroes of the Storm that I’ve played.

Whatever caused this insane Tassadar-on-steroid glitch, let’s hope that Blizzard can tamp down on it before it pops up again. One-hit killing definitely makes a competitive MOBA a lot less fun than it normally is.