Warhead Junction


 * "Once a testing facility for nuclear weapons, Warhead Junction has since fallen into ruin. However, the site's abandonment hasn't stopped its glitchy Adjutant from continuing to produce and hand out nuclear weapons. Join the arms race of Warhead Junction, build up your stockpile, and rain hell on your enemies!"

The Warhead Junction is a three-lane battleground. Collect Warheads as they periodically spawn in order to activate a Nuke. Launch the Nukes to destroy the enemy team's Structures.

The first Battleground objective event will activate 3 minutes into the match, following a 30-second warning.

Map layout
The "Warhead Junction" battleground has three lanes with all of the objectives located near the middle of each lane on the map.



Mercenary Camps
There are five Mercenary camps to be recruited in this battleground. Mercenaries are enabled during the Battleground Mechanic (Warhead spawns).

Primary Objectives
Warheads spawn across the map. The players have to go out and capture them. Once they do, they get an activated nuke ability on their command card. The Warheads do a huge amount of damage in a large area of structures, it will do percent-amount of damage to heroes. Multiple heroes can have nukes at the same time so that they can coordinate and cast them together, or they can do individual strikes with them. If you are killed, though, you drop the nuke and your enemies can pick it up, and use the nuke as well.

Warhead Deployment
2 or 4 Warheads will spawn periodically across the battleground in 3 possible lanes: top, mid, and bot. The number of nukes is fixed, and cycles. Objective spawn #1 has 2 nukes. Spawn #2 has 4 nukes. Spawn #3 has 2 nukes, and so on.

The location of the first Warheads will appear on the Minimap 30 seconds after the game begins, as well as 30 seconds after the final Warhead in an event has been collected. The first Warheads will spawn 3:00 minutes into the match, following a 30-second warning.

Each objective spawn picks one lane from the 3 possible lanes. This lane must differ from 2 spawns ago. On odd cycles, this lane has 0 nukes (2 nukes total). On even cycles, this lane has 2 nukes (4 nukes total). Example: Spawn #3 can have bot lane empty of nukes, and spawn #4 can have bot lane have two nukes. However, because'spawn #3 picked bot lane, spawn #5 cannot also pick bot lane.

Collect Warheads
To pick up a Warhead a Hero has to channel it for 5 seconds. Each hero can only hold 1 nuke at a time (For The Lost Vikings, each Viking can hold one). Use it or you will drop it when you die! For 5 seconds after picking up, you cannot use your nuke. Nukes have a 1.5-second cast-time and, once cast, take 4 seconds before exploding. If you channel a nuke and are interrupted via stuns or displacement, the nuke will go on a 10 second cooldown.

Call Down the Thunder
Launch Nukes to devastate the enemy team's structures. Nukes deal 2,300 (+70 every minute, up to 4,050 damage) damage across the entire area of impact. For example, at minute 20, they deal 3,700 damage. The exception is heroes. Nukes hit heroes for 30% of their max health.

Core Ability: Nukes
Every 18 seconds, the Core launches a Nuke at a nearby enemy Hero, dealing 30% maximum health to enemy Heroes hit.

Strategy

 * You should use early Nukes to destroy the walls, well, and towers of each Fort and Keep to maximize your XP and the destruction.
 * If you are going to die and you have a nuke, use it before you die so that enemies cannot pick it up and use it against you.
 * Nukes can be used against Merc camps, including bosses. If you are defending alone against a big push, you can nuke the entire enemy wave, merc camps, and incoming boss. You can also nuke a boss to capture it faster (but this is very niche).
 * Nuke damage versus Heroes cannot be reduced via Resistance or Spell Shield, but it can be shielded with Heroes like Abathur.
 * You'll almost never want to use a nuke on a fort if all towers and gates are already dead, it's better to just attack it and save the nuke for difficult-to-break sieges.

Trivia

 * On release, Warhead Junction had two Junk Swarm Host bosses, no Sewage Tunnels and only one Watchtower. Since the release of the Battleground, there were two resounding pieces of feedback: the map was too large and teams found it difficult to engage with each other due to the amount of ground needed to cover while picking up Warheads, and very often the game either ended up being a base-race as each team takes a Junk Swarm Host and tries to push opposite lanes to end fastest. To address this, on November 4 (2020), the developers added a couple of Sewage Tunnels to the map, one of which replaced the bottom Junk Swarm Host, and added an additional Sight Tower to allow teams to keep an eye on the bottom tunnel.
 * In the art of the loading screen of this battleground, there are the following heroes: Alarak, Kerrigan, Nova, and Prisoner Tychus.
 * The fantasy of Warhead Junction was about trying to capture what it is like to be a ghost in StarCraft II, and specificly a ghost who is nuking things.
 * While the planet Warhead Junction is on is never stated, the battleground has graffiti showing it may be in Port Zion. Port Zion was described as the planet Braxis Holdout orbits, and as of yet hasn't appeared in any SC story outside of Heroes of the Storm. Gamedata refers to this map also as "Port Zion".
 * If the player clicks on a floating eye in a toxic waste pool on the top right part of the map (below the top right fort), an eyestalk similar to the dianoga (trash compactor monster) from Star Wars: A New Hope will pop up.
 * Various map details are from StarCraft:
 * All structures are terran buildings from StarCraft: Towers are, Forts and Keeps are s.
 * All minions are terran units from StarCraft: Melee Minions are s, Ranged Minions are s, the Wizard Minions are s, and the Catapult Minions are.
 * The symbols on the Forts, the Hall of Storms, and some of the walls is that of Mira's Mercs, the mercenary group of Mira Han who runs Dead Man's Rock. A picture of Mira Han is on the Hall of Storms.
 * The skull symbol on the core and on the gates when they're unopened is called DMW (usually translates to Dead Man Walking), the symbol on Jim Raynor's visor, and the decal reward for winning 1v1 1000 games as terran in Starcraft II.
 * Some of the marine graffiti is taken from the StarCraft 1 terran victory screen, and is the outline of the marine standing in front with the flag. Some tapestries also shows the outline of a StarCraft II hydralisk.
 * The skulls on pikes, on walls and in the scrap around the map are that of zerglings, the small swarming zerg that show up on Braxis Holdout as part the zerg waves. There are other large snake-like zerg skeletons on the map but they're fairly indistinguishable.
 * Some of the graffiti says "Amort Mengsk!", which roughly translated from French to "To death Mengsk!" This is about Arcturus Mengsk, dictator of the Terran Dominion, who many mercenary and bandit groups opposed due to his hard crackdown on all criminal and anti-Dominion activity.
 * On a balcony near the top boss area, there's a blue marine that if you scroll over it says "Papa Cosplay". This is a callback to the BlizzCon 2015 cosplay contest winner Papa Cosplay, who won with a leather "Medieval Marine" suit of armor.
 * Like on Braxis Holdout, there's a bunch of the number 54 scattered around the map, the calling card of the art team who did a lot of the structures in StarCraft II.
 * The area where nukes launch from near spawn is a structure called the ghost academy, where nukes are constructed and launched from in StarCraft II. The pod-like structure where each team's core pops out of is also similar to the nuclear silo from StarCraft 1.
 * Whenever a nuke is launched, the adjutant will say "nuclear launch detected". This is a famous quote from both StarCrafts, and is the global warning sounded when a player launches a nuke.
 * The watchtower on this map operates two xel'naga watchtowers, structures left around the sector by the universe's progenitor species the xel'naga. In Starcraft II multiplayer, these watchtowers give a large area of vision around them as long as a unit is next to them. The watchtowers will raise and lower themselves depending on whether they're activated or not, just like in StarCraft II.