Plenty of maps are a no brainer since the best hero to bust the core is Hammer. It's not fun to "speedrun" a level if all you have to do is sit there auto attacking. Since Sgt. Hammer is the only hero than can do this, shouldnt she be banned for the sake of competition? and yeah there's plenty of heroes that aint viable for any kind of speedrun but at least with hammer out of the picture we have some more options like illidan, probius, sylvanas, raynor, vikings, tassadar, zagara.
This is my opinion, what are your thoughts?
Why not if it's a real problem.
I don't know if a hammer category can be good because if people play her just because she is great to burst the core but don't like the boring gameplay, maybe nobody will want to play her on a specific category.
Hope I'm clear.
I'm just saying that in a speedrun her gameplay is boring and only shines on maps where the core is exposed and reachable. Haunted mines, towers of doom, etc. When i try to break a record, and i believe everyone will agree with me, the most important thing is execution; whether you play vikings or any other hero you need to coordinate positioning, cooldown management, mercenaries timers, regen, minion stacking, minion positioning, etc. Hammer just avoids most of the above. I think opening a new category is not probably a good idea either since she's only hogging like 3-4 maps and any other is unviable for her like BHB or braxis. She's more an obstacle than anything else. All the categories are fine but hammer is something that just doesn't fit in for the sake of competition and making the game more appealing for more people. I don't mind if we have to play vikings on 90% of the maps to get WR, at least vikings still needs skill to execute everything perfectly. Hammer doesn't.
There will always be one Hero who is the best for most maps and who will become boring with perfect micro on most maps.
Maps done with Sgt. Hammer have a ton of opportunities for micro refinement and are currently greatly unoptimized, such as better timing of Maelstrom Rounds to squeeze out an extra auto, perfect positioning vs. buildings to use W for damage while being out of range for being hit, and of course just better routing in general.
What's more, in most cases Hammer is not actually the fastest Hero with perfect play. It's faster to use Vikings, Zarya, Sylvanas, or others with better micro.
I don't think Sgt. Hammer is the fastest hero on any map, assuming perfect execution.
Warhead and BoE should be faster with Zarya, but require very precise management of health and energy. The only map I'm not sure about is Towers of Doom. There are multiple strategies that could be faster than Hammer. Vikings with delicate minion micro on every lane should be faster, also Zarya/Zagara could be faster if executed perfectly. And in my opinion, ARAM maps are less important for speedrunning.
If you want to see what good minion micro looks like with Zag (there is still tons of room for improvement, too): You basically want to preserve the ranged minions as much as you can, by manipulating tower shots and freezing the wave.
EDIT: I just watched the ToD run; You kill the 3rd fort at 3:32. I definitely think it's possible to kill 3 forts faster than that with either Zarya or Vikings. And these Heroes would also allow you to reroute the run, possibly getting the camp after you cap all 3 towers.
I would be very surprised if you could kill the third Fort in Towers by 3:32 with someone other than Hammer, even with perfect minion wave manipulation. It took you 1:50 to get one fort in the Zag video above (and she should be one of the fastest without camps due to Infest), and you need 3 (and have to rotate lanes to get to them all). But, I've been wrong before.
Unless doing the Sapper camps to finish buildings actually saves time with some Heroes; it's possible.
Olaf and Erik have no waveclear early, so it would have to be some really impressive wave manipulation.
