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Garden of Terror
Garden of Terror
Battleground Information
Unique Objectives
  • Queen Nightshade will periodically summon a Seed. Defeat its Shambler Defenders and gather it for your team!
  • Upon gathering three Seeds, Garden Terrors will immediately burrow to each lane.
  • Garden Terrors disable enemy towers and Forts, so fight alongside them!
First Objective 2:30 minutes
Subsequent Objectives 50-80 seconds after the last captured seed, or 90-120s after all Garden Terrors die.
Lanes 3
Announcer Queen Nightshade
Realm King's Crest
Release Date July 23, 2014

Garden of Terror is a battleground featuring seeds which can be collected to summon Garden Terrors. The first Battleground objective event will activate 2:30 minutes into the match, following a 30-second warning.

Background[ | ]

Once the royal gardens were a splendor to behold. But lately a shadow has fallen over them... Writhing tendrils creep across the grounds at night, and a number of servants have disappeared while walking its twisting paths. Queen Nightshade claims to be unaware of these incidents, but some are beginning to suspect she has gone mad.[1]

Map layout[ | ]

Garden of Terror is a huge map that consists of three lanes with relatively windy jungle areas and quite a lot of bushes to hide in.

Garden of Terror map-full

Areas of interest[ | ]

Minimapicon gardenseed Seeds of Terror
Amount: 6
Location: Located all over the area between top and bottom lanes.
Description: Each Seed-camp spawns with a few Shamblers that needs to be defeated in order to capture the Seed.

Mercenary Camps[ | ]

There are six Mercenary camps to be recruited in this battleground. Mercenaries are disabled during the Primary Objectives.

Minimapicon merccamp Siege Camps
  • Amount: 4
  • Spawns: After 1 min and respawns 3 min after the Camp has been captured.
  • Location: Located near each of the four Forts. Moves down the top or bottom lanes.
  • Description: Siege Giants are found in groups of 2 and can easily take down enemy Forts from outside the Structures' attack ranges.
Minimapicon elitemerccamp Bruiser Camps
  • Amount: 2
  • Spawns: After 1 min and respawns 4 min after the Camp has been captured.
  • Location: Located near the northeast and southwest forts. Moves down the top or bottom lanes.
  • Description: The Knight camp contains 3 tanky frontliners and a single ranged "Wizard", who emits a Spell Srmor aura to buff all nearby allies.

Primary Objectives[ | ]

Core Ability: Absorbing Seeds[ | ]

  • Every 5 seconds, the Core shoots a seed under a nearby enemy Hero. When the seed explodes, Heroes inside are Polymorphed for 3 seconds.

Seeds Spawn[ | ]

Loadscreen gardenofterror icon1 new
Garden of Terror Seed Spawn

Seeds spawn locations

  • Six Seed-spawning locations are spread across the map.
  • At 2:30, a Seed spawns in one of the two bottom side "corner" spawn locations of the map (4 or 6 in the picture).
  • For subsequent spawns, the seed can never be on the top half or bottom half of the map 3 times in a row. It also cannot be in the same location as any of the 3 previous seeds, and it can never be in the same column of the map twice in a row. Otherwise, the location is random with each valid location being equally likely.
  • Protecting the seed are four Shamblers with medium-high hit points and medium-low DPS.

Collect Seeds[ | ]

Loadscreen gardenofterror icon2 new
  • Once the Shamblers are killed or distracted, a Hero must channel the seed for 6 seconds to capture it.
  • Once a seed is captured, a random time between 50-80 seconds passes until the next Shamblers and their seed spawn.
  • Seeds will continue to spawn until either team gathers three in total, closing out the objective.

Garden Terrors[ | ]

Loadscreen gardenofterror icon3 new
  • When the third seed is gathered, three Garden Terrors will immediately spawn and burrow to the front line of the winning team's lanes, bolstering their pushing efforts.
  • The Garden Terrors have a large AoE stomp attack, splash damage and the Overgrowth ability.
    • The Garden Terrors Overgrowth ability spawn a plant in a pot that disables all attacking Structures (Towers, Forts and Keeps), in a large area as long as the pot is alive. The pot has 1,800 HP (does not scale) and loses 108 HP per second.
  • While an unchecked Terror can place the Overgrowth and not take damage from Structures, any defending team can easily kill the Overgrowth to enable the Structure to defend itself.
  • The Garden Terrors will push until defeated, at which point the objective cycle starts again (the next seed spawning after a 90-120 second delay).

Battleground history[ | ]

Flowering Shambler

Collecting Seeds from a Flowering Shambler

On the original version of this map, players had to wait for periodic nightfall that awakened neutral Shamblers throughout the map's jungle that they had to defeat to collect seeds. Once 100 seeds were gathered, a plant bloomed near the team's Core for a limited time. When channeled, the plant transformed the channeler into a monstrous vehicle called Garden Terror that exceled at destroying enemy structures, but only lasted for a limited duration. The Terror could place a Queen's Curse, transforming enemies who walked over it into small plants, cause an Overgrowth by planting a destroyable flower that prevented structures from firing, and Sprint for a boost in speed.

Early on in development for Garden of Terror, the night cycle actually reduced player vision range significantly – this is a mechanic that the developers felt was interesting in Warcraft 3 and wanted to explore it. Ultimately, they didn't end up doing this for a couple of reasons. First off, it tended to result in more passive play, players were scared to move around the map without their team. It also set a more dreary and dark tone for the match. The development team felt that this could psychologically take a toll on the player.[2]

When Garden of Terror went live on July 23, 2014, the Vehicles Overgrowth ability not only disabled all enemy Structures, but also damaged all enemy buildings and Minions around the casted area over time. Overgrowth essentially killed everything that is non-heroic. An unattended Overgrowth could nearly take down towers alone and took about one third of the health of a fort. This led to a common (and, usually, optimal) gameplay tactic of playing hit-and-run with the Garden Terror.

On March 29, 2016 it was changed and Overgrowth no longer dealt damage, as chasing the Garden Terror as it ran between lanes dropping Overgrowths wasn’t enjoyable for the defending team, and didn’t fit the spirit of what the Garden Terror was intended to do. Instead, the Garden Terror dealt 100% bonus damage to Structures disabled by Overgrowth. The Garden Terrors Pilot was now incentivized to choose a lane, put down an Overgrowth and wail on buildings himself. This new functionality attempted to create a larger “moment” when Overgrowth was placed.[3]

Despite those changes Garden of Terror was reworked again in response to years of consistent player feedback (in community discussion and in the developers own user experience research) saying Garden of Terror was among the least-loved maps in the game. The goals for the rework were to preserve the map's thematic elements (Seeds, Shamblers, Terrors, weather effects) while removing the elements that made so many players sigh when they saw the loading screen (chasing a vehicle around, eternal night phase, zero sum double vehicle phases, vehicle time-out).

The developers iterated on the Garden rework several times internally. First they tried small changes like repositioning/renumbering Shambler camps, changing timers, and changing the vehicle's abilities and spawn point, but none of those changes made the map notably more fun or interesting. The map still had the same problems it did on live servers. Then they went wild for a bit with experimentation - at one point they had a completely new layout and a "siege vehicle" objective reward that could dig in, spawn bushes around it, spawn Shamblers to push in a direction, and shoot out burrowing seed bombs that detonated for AOE damage. They tried a "gauntlet" type design where they spawned a series of seeds, one at a time, all over the map, and the first team to gather three won the objective. Those were interesting experiments, but they each had their own fatal problems.[4]

On September 25, 2018, Garden of Terror was finally re-released with heavy changes: The map no longer has a day/night cycle accompanying its objective, players no longer control the Garden Terror themselves, and the method of gaining the Garden Terror has changed completely. After a team gathers 3 seeds, three NPC Garden Terrors spawn in the lanes. Those Garden Terrors can use Overgrowth to disables buildings and use an AoE stomp.

Trivia[ | ]

  • Queen Nightshade's line "what a joyous night to have a curse" is an homage to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest where a text box saying "what a horrible night to have a curse" marked the transition from day to night.
  • The Dragon Knight statue from the Dragon Shire map could be seen on the north part of the map overgrown by plants. However, the statue was removed with the Fall of King's Crest storyline and the rework of the battleground.

Gallery[ | ]

Gameplay[ | ]

Artwork[ | ]

Videos[ | ]

References[ | ]

  1. Garden of Terror - Official site. Retrieved on 2014-09-16.
  2. BlizzCooper on Reddit
  3. Heroes of the Storm Patch Notes — March 29, 2016
  4. Steve Holmes: Game Design & Balance AMA with Heroes Developers – September 19, 2018

External links[ | ]

Battlegrounds
 
In Rotation_ Alterac PassBattlefield of EternityBlackheart's BayBraxis HoldoutCursed HollowDragon ShireGarden of TerrorHanamura TempleInfernal ShrinesSky TempleTomb of the Spider QueenTowers of DoomVolskaya FoundryWarhead Junction
Custom Mode Only_ Haunted MinesLost Cavern
Removed_ Hanamura
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