this is my first MOBA and I know MOBA communities are extremely unfriendly to new players so I want to make sure I know the game before I play with actual people
I played a few games as rayonr and the demon hunter, they were fine. I tried many other heroes and found that I like azmodan a lot. all his abilities and talents match the way I want to play, so I bought him for 10 bucks. was that my first mistake? it seemed to take forever getting gold to unlock him like that.
now I don't want to play rated anytime soon, but apparently I need 10 characters for that? what's the best way to unlock them? they hardly expect me to pay 100 bucks to play rated, do they?
apart from that I liked the game a lot, pushing my lanes and sieging. am I supposed to main 1 character or do I need to change them depending on the map or the enemy classes? can I even change the hero after i have that information?
also, is there some kind of communication I need to learn during team play? how do palyers decide who picks which lane etc?
Well, best bet for your wallet would probably have been to wait for an Azmodan sale, granting 50% off his real money price, but that would of course occur randomly (read: at Blizzards decision) and could take a whole while.
If you are sure to enjoy him after trying him out enough on free week, there's nothing really wrong with going for it. The gold gains at the start are actually still pretty high though. When you click on your protrait and then "Player progression" you can see what rewards you are gonna get for leveling up your account. You can also get 500 gold each for leveling a hero up to level 5, so you should try to do this with the heroes on the free rotation to gather additional gold. Both these kinds of income are finite tho since you won't be getting any more of it once your account became level 40 and you have all the available heroes up to 5. Then most of your income will come from daily quests which you unlock at account level 6 and of which you will get one per day (as long as you don't already have all 3 quest slots occupied because you didn't finish at least one of them last day), ranging from a worth of 200 to 800 gold.
So, you will get a fair bit of gold at the start through leveling stuff, but 10k gold is still quite much and will eat up your refunds soon enough when you keep buying more of the expensive heroes (newly released heroes cost 15k gold by the way for two weeks before they drop to 10k gold, so never buy these during this timeframe with your gold at least, unless you really don't see anything else left in the shop longing for your gold bag). As everyone here will tell you, best way is to try out all heroes in every weeks free rotation to at least level 5, then wait for the next rotation to rince repeat, until you are starting to really miss heroes. That's when you drop your bucks or gold (best for the lower priced heroes as you get a better quote of gold for bucks value out of buying 10k and to an extend also 7k gold heroes with your real world monies). You CAN have a diverse enough time without dropping real money on the game when you play a lot, doing your quests daily. There is also a way to improve gold gain by quests a little bit by the way by keeping (read: not finishing) lower worth quests (200 or 300 gold), so the exact same quest (i.e. "play 2 games as a Diablo hero") can't show up for you again, which of course improves the change of getting one of the other, higher value quests. But as you learn the game and try out roles and heroes and still have gold gain through leveling, you really shouldn't do this as the effects are only minimal and it would be dumb to exclude yourself from playing specific stuff so early. It's more of an option for later, when you realize "well, I'm just fine with playing not Diablo hero right for the time being and don't need that chunk of 200 gold right now".
It's okay to just focus on one single character... until you head into Hero League (ranked), which you unlock by reaching account level 30 and owning 10 heroes, yes. There you will have a pick & draft phase in which you can see the map that is going to be played and both teams will take turns in choosing their heroes, so you have information about yours and the enemy team before picking your hero. You might end up as last to choose, so it would hurt your team composition if you then can't react to what kind of hero / role your team needs. But yeah, you can do whatever you like in Quickmatch, you won't have any information other than what hero you are playing until the game starts, but neither does anybody else.
Lane picking usually goes automatically by the start of a game with people just heading to where they think they should go (and premades often going together obviously), but one can ask nicely if they have suggestions to change things in this phase of the game.
Most important tool for communication in the game are pings, you have to hold G and then you can point your mouse to 4 different sorts of pings and then release the button to inform your team about your intentions. Also there is a "retreat"-ping available if you press... F or V, I'm not sure really, I just know where to put my finger in the game ;D
edited some extra stuff
