Abyss' General Thoughts and Objectives / Aspects
About Me & Experiences
Hello everyone. I think it could be relevant to know a bit about my background in order to understand where my feedback is coming from. If you don't care, feel free to skip this section 
My name is Abyss, and I am an Information Systems Specialist for a non-profit that works with families to prevent child abuse and address it when it has occurred. I believe my job title is HR speak for "IT Jack of All Trades". I do a large mixture of System Administration, Network Administration, Software Development, Website Development, and Tech Support for End Users. Because of this, I am more technical and logical in nature. Additionally, I was previously a programmer for an MMORPG (very small, non-commercial hobby game).
As far as gaming is concerned, I've played a wide range of competitive games (LoL, SC2, Smite, Global Agenda, etc), most without notable results. I was a competitive Magic: the Gathering player (and now a judge for competitive tournaments). I have recently been involved in competitive Heroes of the Storm, hovering in ranks 1-10 in both Hero League (Solo Queue), and Team League (5v5). For those not familiar with HotS ranking, that should place me around the top 10-20% of HotS players.
General Thoughts:
I played 2 bot games after watching the intro video (1 solo with AI Bots, and a 2nd with another player and Zelda teaching us how to play), followed by 7 games in the PVP cycle (4 wins, 3 losses). Since, I've played a couple of bot games to complete stomps.
The game is really fun to play. I really feel like this game could become wildly popular due to it's combination of the RTS and MOBA genres elements. While not related to the game directly at all, the community so far has been incredibly open and accepting of new members, and that's great. I'm a really big fan of the minimalistic macro-game, allowing more focus on controlling units. From a casually-competitive standpoint, not having to constantly look back at my base and being able to do most of the macro I need is amazing. This really reduced the bad feeling when you look back at your base to build something only to find your army die without you helping it (this was a problem for me in SC2).
I enjoy that the 2v2/1v1 separate/laned approach is unique. It feels as if this will create an interesting and enjoyable strategy element to the early game, such as deciding when to "group up" or assist each other, while maintaining a lane-dominance "I won my lane and that's going to carry my team to victory" feel.
Objective and aspects:
I enjoyed the fact that there was a timed-objective causing often skirmishes with the enemy in the middle (HotS has a similar approach vs. League of Legends), however, I didn't really enjoy the actual objective itself. I'm not quite able to pin exactly what I didn't enjoy yet, honestly. Capturing the little circles was slow, the space was so large that you could avoid the enemy while still performing the objective, and once the enemy had a lead it didn't feel like there was a path to recovery short of completely wiping the enemy's army. Perhaps a smaller spread of the circles, with a quicker capture time may make it more engaging, but I'm not sure.
The aspect was incredibly awkward from my perspective. I actively attempted to give it to my allies instead of myself as I didn't want to have to deal with the micro. Additionally, until I learned after a few games from Global that I could remove it from the all-unit select, I wanted nothing to do with it due to not being able to properly control it, and feeling like it was lost value. Only attacking buildings was really unenjoyable to me. If the objective was purely building-damaging, I would rather an objective that just dealt the damage to buildings instead of requiring me to control a unit that does it.
Early game, the aspect felt almost useless. I would send it down a lane to get a tower, and it would die before really scratching the tower. Late game, it felt way too strong. We had an aspect on our nexus for a really long time by itself, and it took nearly a full army to kill it faster than it was regening (Maybe an item was affecting it? I never quite figured out why it was outhealing the nexus damage dealt to it).
I think I would enjoy it if the aspect had some effect on the enemies army as well. This way, even if I can't destroy a tower, I can get some advantage in some way. There may be better ways to do this, though. I would also enjoy if future maps had different objectives, allowing the game to develop new meta-games on each map.