Choosing the right hero in Heroes of the Storm is more important than most mobas because you can’t customize your hero with items. If your hero doesn’t synergize with your team or bring something that the rest of them don’t, you’re going to have a tough game.

As a beginner, choosing your first heroes to unlock can be an intimidating experience when you’ve got over 40 to choose from, all of which have different roles and strengths. We’ve put together our picks of useful heroes that every player should have. Even if they don’t fit your play style tastes, each of them is easy to play, and has a proven track record of success.

Raynor

The ultimate beginner’s assassin, Raynor is an excellent pick for players looking to mix damage output with survivability. His kit is very versatile, offering a mix of crowd control abilities, a heal, and an area of effect ultimate ability that is useful against players and structures.

He’s also one of the more fun heroes to play, making that early grind for gold to unlock new heroes worth while.

Muradin

This sturdy dwarf is one tough customer, able to take a lot of damage and keep on charging forward. For a beginner that will likely find themselves out of place the odd time, not dying to each and every mistake you make is something you should look for in your early heroes until you get your positioning down.

His passive gives him extremely high heath regeneration, so if you do take a hit to his large health pool, just step out of the fight for a bit and regen it back. While you wont be doing much in the way of damage, your crowd control abilities are a great help to any team.

Zagara

Not the cheapest of heroes for sure, but Zagara is arguably one of the game’s best utility heroes. Her strength lies in her army of zerg units that she’s able to deploy against heroes and structures. Even though she doesn’t have a massive health pool, she can use her zerg units to create a barrier between herself and the enemy heroes.

Consider playing her in a lane with another hero so that you can focus on applying pressure to the enemy waves and taking out their structures while your lane mate deals with the heroes.

Valla

If you’re trying to get the most for your gold, Valla is a no brainer. At only 2000 gold, she’s one of the cheapest pickups you’ll find. Don’t let the price fool you though, she is a deadly assassin capable of dealing a lot of damage with some very easy to use skills.

Valla’s kit is very flexible, allowing her to specialize in powering up her auto attacks, area of effect abilities, or her primary single target attack. Being able to practice these three assassin styles on one hero is perfect for beginners.

Li Li

Arguably the easiest hero to pick up and play, Li Li is a powerful healer who can single handedly keep herself and her team alive in the direst situations. While she does little to no damage, she will almost always be welcome on any team at any level because of her extremely powerful (some might say broken) heals and hero buffs.

If you’re looking to add a support hero to your roster, Li Li is an excellent choice and she only costs 2000 gold to boot!

Uther

Uther is a support hero who can also take a hit. If he happens to take too many hits, he can heal himself or another one of his teammates with his Holy Radiance or Holy Light. However, his real strength lies in his crowd control abilities which come in both the form of a single target stun, and an AoE stun that locks down all nearby enemies for 1.5 seconds. Uther’s stuns in the right hands can turn even the most lop sided team fight in his teams favor.

Just be ready to shell out a whopping 7000 gold to get access to the awesome power Uther brings.