[kayaeb]

The hero mechanic is what made WC3 WC3... If you weren't a hero-guy, go with undead, their heros were 50% supplementary and stupidly weak, and you could just focus on your army. Orc was like 90% hero action though, with a single Blademaster being the equivalent of an entire army at the cost of the fact that orc armies were stupid expensive and their air-force was laughably horrible (except the year or so when wyvern poison was massively overpowered)... And this was representative of the racial strengths as a whole, orc grunts were the most expensive, and most powerful of the tier 0 fighters, and undead ghouls were the expendable zerglings. It's one kind of rush to see two 300 apm pros go at it in SC with max-food armies, and entirely another to see a level 10 demon-hunter face off solo against a lv 6 archmage, lv5 mountain king and lv 3 paladin. Additionally adding in terrain hazards of creeps and day/night and manipulable trees made battlefield mechanics so much more interesting than the colonial line-warfare of SC. The decision to drop food limits in WC3 compared to SC (dramatically limiting max army size) was purposely done to enhance this difference. The inclusion of items was less about RPG elements and more about tactical versatility allowing heroes mercurial abilities to shift roles at the drop of a hat.

The addition of heroes made early game harassment, specifically the sub-2 minute fastbuild archmage rush, possible and exciting, much more interesting than zergling-rushes.

It was a new game, WC2 was great but it was chess, all sides exactly equal in all cases (except I think 1-2 ogre-mage vs paladin spells). SC was an incredible feat because each race was distinct yet balanced. WC3 was just as much a feat because they maintained that balance (with notable exceptions, like the year or so when sorc-rushes just dominated all levels of competitive play) with the introduction of super-units.

Also WC3 is definitely RTS more than RPG, I mean one of the first basics one learns is peasant pathing with farms to optimize gold-flow... or fog-of-war manipulation to distract the enemy by popping a single unit in and out of their sightlines while you're busy elsewhere... If you watch pros playing in first-person camera-mode you'll see that 50% of the action during battle is base-management. Battle could conceivably be considered more distraction than main-thrust.