Managing your Health and Mana in an Optimal Way
A guide to help you understand how and why you need to manage and restore both your Health and Mana.
All heroes have a set amount of Health which increases with levels, and most heroes require Mana for their abilities. While your Health can be restored by a healer, you also can replenish it yourself in certain cases, and the same goes for your Mana. In this piece, we will examine the main ways to restore those resources and focus on the aspect of Hearthing at the right time to replenish your Health and Mana. This guide will help you be at the right place at the right time while full on resources to give your team your best!
Why Is Self-Sustain So Important?
If you dive in fights you need to heal to survive, and it's not only your healer's job to do so! Your healer can only do so much by himself and he needs to keep himself alive, so you should do the same. It's also nice to come back to the fight quickly after getting your Health dropped. Out of fights, you won't always be with your healer. In lane for instance, if you get pushed, ganked, or get low in any way, you will want to keep soaking the lane and need some Health to stay here safely. Restoring a part of your Health while taking damage enables you to tank more than 100% of your Health, whether you are a tank or not. This also applies for camps, you will take damage from camps and you want to sustain through this so you don't die doing it!
How Do You Heal Yourself?
You have baseline Health Regeneration, healing you passively every second you're alive. You can tap at your Healing Fountain to restore 40% of your Maximum Health over 20 seconds and collecting Regeneration Globes will restore 9% of your Maximum Health over 5 seconds. Some Heroes can regenerate Health with their basic attacks or abilities, which can be granted by talents or be a baseline property. If all this is not enough, you have to Hearth back to your base. Remember that healing yourself makes it so you effectively make the enemy need to drop more than 100% of your maximum Health. This cannot be highlighted enough!
As long as you have Mana, you can use your abilities. Without these, you're at a great disadvantage. If you have more Mana than the enemy, you will win long fights.
How Do You Restore Your Mana?
Similarly to Health, baseline Mana Regeneration will restore your Mana passively. Your Healing Fountain will restore 30% of your Maximum Mana over 20 seconds, and Regeneration Globes give 7% of your Maximum Mana over 5 seconds. Some Heroes can regenerate Mana with their basic attacks or abilities in the same way as Health. While it is important to have Mana for long fights, if your team is taking a short fight and you don't have a lot of Mana left, you should still help. If you end up not winning the fight quickly, retreat.
No need for Mana, what else do you use?
Some Heroes do not use Mana for their abilities; Samuro, Illidan and Fenix are some examples, and they can use their abilities whenever they're not on cooldown. Some others while still using Mana, will never run out of it because of a high restoration rate; Gul'Dan with his trait, Greymane with Insiatiable at lvl 4, or even Whitemane with High Inquisition at lvl 4 all can restore Mana strongly with proper Management.
Still, there are some other heroes who do have some resources different from Mana, either passive, or active types of resources. Passive resources are regenerated over time faster than Mana would, we can think of Morales and Valeera using Energy for a part of their abilities. The main point of passive resources is to force the character to wait until they have enough of it to actively do things, while preventing them from doing too much if they simply had no need for any kind of ressources.
On the other hand, active resources are gained only if something happens; Sonya's Fury is only gained by taking or inflicting damage, Chen's Brew can be gained by drinking it but not passively, and Auriel's Energy is generated by dealing damage. Active resources reward the player for playing the hero the way it is intended. I also have to mention Zarya, who gains Energy by shielding damage, although she doesn't need Energy to use her abilities it is still a high reward when the hero is played properly.
All those Heroes do not need to Hearth for Mana, and get an advantage of applying constant pressure on the map if they can stay healthy.
Global Management:
While all the above is listed mostly for laning or teamfights, the game alternates between those phases and there are specific times you need to restore your Health and Mana to full. It's quite obvious that if you're very low on life, you have to Hearth back to your Base. If you're extremely low on Mana, you should do the same as soon as you can!
However, that's not Optimal Hearthing... Optimal Hearthing is when you go back to your Base when it will be easiest on your team while preparing you for what comes next. Optimal Hearthing is mostly caused by the fact that you cannot always be full on Mana, but you want to have as much as possible, especially for objectives.
How to get an Optimal Hearthing?
You have half of your Mana, half of your Health, and your healer shouldn't dedicate to healing all that right now (for the Management of their own Mana), an objective will spawn soon... Don't wait until you're low on Mana, use your Hearthstone right now! You want to be prepared to fight for the objective!
Hearthing is also linked to taking camps. The objective will spawn soon, so you should put pressure on the map with a camp, and you have to get half of your Mana back. Sacrificing half of your Health doing a camp is not a problem since you have to Hearth for Mana anyway. This is only getting maximum value out of your Health!
Team Hearthing:
Now comes the final part of this guide, where team communication is effective (meaning it's not always possible to do so in Hero League). Since every member of your team needs Mana for the objective, the whole team needs to Hearth at some point. But it's not possible to all back at the same time, or you will lose experience, map pressure, and more. All members need to back in a specific order so you don't lose anything and are still ready for the objective!
The order I mainly recommend is:
- Healer backs for Mana.
- Solo Laner or DPS starts a camp.
- Main Tank Hearths.
- Healer helps finish the camp safely.
- DPS backs in any order with Solo Laner.
- Main tank comes guard the camp.
- Second DPS Hearths.
- First DPS comes to the team.
- The camp is taken. Everyone goes to the objective.
This will ensure the safety of your camp while keeping the experience soaked and replenishing your whole team's Mana. This order of Hearthing is not definitive, and you will need to adapt every game. You can also abuse Heroes who do not need Mana so the Hearthing rotation is quicker!
Even if you cannot execute coordinated Hearthing with your team, just do any rotation to at least keep the experience soaked and remember to not wait until you're low on your resources to Hearth back to Base!
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