Heroes of the Storm II: Thread. Augmented. Logical Decision

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Question: how do you feel about Dragon Shire?
It's my favorite map, and probably the least shepherd-y, since the three points are literally on the lanes.
Also, there's always a lot of fighting, counterplay, rotations. Sometimes noone gets the first Dragon until after level 10, it feels really great to have this super prolonged teamfight all over the map.

Dragon Shire is actually my least favorite map. (Pretend Haunted Mines doesn't exist because that is objectively the worst map)

idk, I just find it a chore to play, because you kind of have to be winning everywhere at once to get the objective and the constant fighting with little downtime is stressful.

For me, I think the Heroes map that most closely matches the strategic feel of Summoner's Rift is Cursed Hollow, because it gives you the most freedom to play across the map and make tradeoffs on objectives. Since you need three relics to trigger a curse, it can be worth it to trade it away for something else - you need to focus on the objective eventually, but you can give up, say, first or second relic in order to stack up in a lane and make a good push on a fort, the way on Rift teams will often swap towers on opposite sides of the map (especially teams like Fnatic, who would prefer the more open map to to set up ganks in to necessarily needing to keep all their towers) or trade Dragon for tower or something (killing Drakes in League give your team a minor permanent buff that stacks, so much like relics, giving away one for a tower push is quite safe, but allowing your enemy to accumulate multiple stacking buffs from repeated Drake kills is eventually quite dangerous - but not if you kill so many towers that you actually just win before the buff stacking becomes an issue).

Even Baron Nashor, which is an objective roughly equivalent in strength to the third relic (killing it gives your heroes a temporary buff that massively empowers nearby minions, allowing you to push and break towers more easily), can sometimes be traded away for an inhibitor (keep) if you're confident enough that you can limit the amount of damage they'll do with the Hand of Baron buff well enough to make your fully breaking a lane worth it.

Warhead Junction is almost similar, but I think the map is TOO BIG and the nukes aren't as dynamic as the relics, making it feel like just a less interesting version of Cursed Hollow.

My favorite maps to play in HotS specifically though are probably Braxis Holdout, Infernal Shrines, and Battlefield of Eternity. I really didn't like Towers of Doom at first, but it's slowly grown on me.