How to play your first match

Open the official site and choose Play as Guest or create an account. A guest name looks like Guest plus digits. Every hero is available. From version 0.11 the client saves your hero, talents, settings and rating from the first match. Save Progress, in the lower right of town, asks for an email, a name and a password and keeps that progress. The same device can find the guest again. A guest appears on the ladder only after that save.

Practice lives with the bots. Version 0.2 added bot practice, and later notes mention practice matches in town. Duels, added in 0.13, are a separate 1v1 inside town and do not award rating. Rated and unrated queues never mix, a split that started in 0.9. Each class has its own rating in each bracket, starting at 1500. Bot and practice games do not change that number. The later 0.11 guest rules preserve ratings from the first match; Save Progress is required for leaderboard visibility.

A match gives you 40 seconds to prepare, up from 30 seconds in 0.9. You may change talents and spells in that window. Doing so resets buffs, resources and cooldowns. The map is random among the three live arenas. The queue tries to separate healers when possible. An extra healer waits only while another player can take that place; otherwise the match proceeds. A premade party chooses its own healers and they are excluded from this balancing rule. This is not a one-healer cap.

Version 0.21 binds F1 to yourself and F2 and F3 to teammates, in party-frame order. You can rebind that under Targeting. G is the second utility. N opens spells and talents. Shift-F targets your focus. The mouse wheel can be bound, including with Shift, Ctrl or Alt. Alt+Enter toggles the window. I am not publishing a WASD diagram: no public default movement list was in the changelog.