The goal is the same as in Dota or LoL, get the ancient/core and you win. A lot of people think of LoL as Dota for retards. Well, imo, this is LoL for retards. In addition to no denying, there is no last hitting whatsoever. You kill creeps yet you gain nothing aside from xp. I guess the only reason creep exists is to push the lanes. Speaking of xp, apparently you level up at the same speed as your team. My team went like 30-6 in kills and barely got a level ahead of enemy team so I'm not totally sure how it works but I'm quite sure it's a crap system.

There are no game phases, aside from random skirmishes across the map from the start. There's these mini "events" during the game, such as load up the pirate ship with money and significantly increase your chances of victory thanks to npcs. Same goes for that golem event, even tho it's not as big of a boost as the pirate ship is since each team gets a golem while the ship is only one and basically a team who gets the gold to the chest first gets the control of it for 12 shots.

There are no items you could use like in Dota or LoL. There's basically just you and 4 of the active skills you have leveled up along with a number of passives. There's nothing to do in the game aside from right click the shit out of your mouse. Skills do seem fun, but the combat is quite stale and boring. You just click to no effect until someone of your team fucks up and that turns the tide of the fight. I had the feeling that we could scrim 5x5 for 20 minutes at same spot and still be at a stalemate.

As id software implemented map rotation, Blizzard's HotS has heroes rotation. Basically there's 5-6 free heroes you can play at any time per week. Rest of the heroes you have to buy either with in game gold or real money. Apparently that's the same approach LoL has which speaks for itself and the target audience of retard kids with big allowances. As far as the gold goes, you get some miserable amount of gold per game. You also get a lump sum of gold for reaching certain levels. E.g. you get 1k for levels 2 and 4, and 2k for levels 6 and 8 (level numbers not necessarily correct), which does help you get the heroes, but it's a time consuming investment. There's also daily quests which give out some amount of gold.

Even if you have all the heroes unlocked, it's still a MISERABLE amount of choice on what to play since there's currently really not much of them. Well, it's still a closed beta so hopefully blizz adds a ton more. The more you play a certain hero the more xp he gains after game and subsequently levels up along with you. Hero level ups unlock some skins etc, but what's more important - they unlock skills you can use. So basically, you're not on the same playing field as rest of the pack and can only get there by investing some significant amount of time in the game to level everything up again. Shouldn't be a problem right now with a sad choice of heroes to pick from, but when blizz adds more it sure will be one. TL;DR PAIN IN THE ASS.

Might've forgot to add something, but seeing how I'm overly negative about this game it wouldn't be no positive impressions for sure. Go play Dota instead.