Art Map
So the art map is indisputably beautiful. I like the style and I think it fits the characters well.
I get a little frustrated chasing the gems around the map. It seems to me they should be more evenly distributed.
There are some spots on the map with some really interesting grass placement. I've really actually enjoyed the grass as a vision tool, though once I found out that wards see through grass it got easier to fight against, but against bots its still easy to abuse. I mean it is the exact same as Starcraft grass I think in terms of mechanics, but it feels like it has more of an impact, probably because there's more of it.
The middle thing to fight over is a little wonky. It came with no explanation, and just started happening like ten minutes into the game (which is a really long time!) and the victory condition for the middle point was not clear. Every time I look at the global chat in the out-of-game client I see someone asking about what it all means. It feels gimmicky in a sort of Heroes of the Storm way, and I'm not sure I enjoy that. I want to be able to size up the map at a glance and not have to figure out the trick to the map too. Though the moving arms animation is pretty sick when you're taking the middle point.
I feel like the placement of the expansions was a solid plus over the standard map. The lack of neutral creeps caused me to wildly overexpand though so I had no gems to actually end the game. That's my fault, but I enjoyed that the neutral creeps helped me gauge when I should be expanding. Knowing that if I can kill of the camp guarding the expo, its probably time to take it is a really big help in terms of my game sense.
The shape of the map is much better than the standard map. It mattered a lot less which position you spawned in, but still allowed for some positional 1v1-ing in a specific "lane", which was the real advantage of spawning bottom in the standard map. Where you should be attacking and defending also made a lot more inherent sense.