Posts Tagged ‘beta’

Another new hero joins the pool

With today’s patch we see another new hero ported from DotA.
The new hero is called Flint Beastwood , an infamous replica of Sniper from DotA.

My first thoughts on this hero were, Oh great another Scout-esque hero we beg those nubs on our team not to pick. But then i got reassured from a friend of mine that Sniper is actually played competitively in the Asian DotA scene. He went on to tell me that he is used as a defensive hero to stop/delay enemy pushes, this information in itself gave me  a little bit of hope that this hero would actually be useful in HoN.

So i fire up a practise game to check his skills out, and i notice his hero model. I think to myself …? This supposed long ranged assassin has had his two arms replaced with shotguns, the most inaccurate and short range weapon as all first person shooter fans and gun enthusiasts ( love Americans? ) will know.
Secondly, his model is an ORC….. Orcs are renowned for being melee units with high armor. Sniper is neither of these.  Despite these minor nuisances i still think, used correctly he can be an awesome hero.

Stats Reset because HoN Retail arrives

That’s right folks after almost a year of beta and free play, Heroes of Newerth has been released! If you didn’t already work it out you will now have to pay to play, if you hadn’t already pre-ordered that is.

For those of you that have paid you will notice your stats have been reset and that your PSR has been averaged.
Personally I don’t see this as a good or bad thing, OK some of us worked hard in the beta’s to get our PSR rank high, but it’s also a chance to start from fresh, one that i welcome.

Gauntlet has been added to the already fast rising pool of heroes. Once again to play him you will need to select dev heroes from the game options when you create a game.
This hero has some fairly interesting spell mechanics, im sure there are alot of possible hero combinations that this hero synchronises well with.
Also his ultimate is a well needed counter to the current flavour of the month. Purging all heroes in a line up to 850 units away, those pesky Jeraziah and demented shaman lineups will be running away like little girls.

Tip: Try his second spell in combination with Portal Key

Balphagore is here

Along with the new patch 3.6.0 Balphagore has been added! In order to play him you must select the ‘dev’ box when starting a game.

Balphagore is a new melee strength hero- his first skill is an AoE damaging slow, that also spews corpses for Balphagore to eat. His second skill targets a unit and silences and damages- then spreads to all nearby units. His third skill allows Balphagore to eat corpses to  heal himself and build charges, then use these charges to spawn minions that damage and slow. His ultimate is a shiva like ability that damages in a wave, and is charged up to be more powerful and slow when enemy heroes cast spells near him.

A new game mode ‘Hardcore Mode’ has been added.
In this mode no passive gold will be gained, all denies will results in 0 xp for the enemy hero within range and  tower denies results in 0 gold for the enemy team.
Great for practising team play and deny mechanics!

Two new advanced game options have been added: Tournament rules and Item drop.
The first lets you decide in the lobby which team gets first ban, only effects BP/BD mode.
The second will make heroes drop all their items when they die. These items cannot be destroyed and can only be picked up by other heroes.

Full change log here: Heroes of Newerth Changelog

Beta late than never

So it’s been a few days since open beta  and even less since the new hero chipper was released. What we’ve seen is a huge rise in player numbers, so much so that last weekend the servers were overloaded to the extent it was impossible to find to start a game.
What does this mean ? Well S2 games have said that they underestimated the amount of players signing up through open beta, at the moment their servers seem to be under control, however the true test will be next weekend when the majority of players log on.

Another issue has been effecting a lot of players, this is the issue with updating to the latest patch. Some players will find their clients crashing halfway through this process. There are currently two solutions to this, the first being un-installing HoN and then reinstalling the latest client from their website, the second is renaming the log.txt in the Heroes of Newerth folder to tos.txt. If log.txt does not exist simply create a blank text file called tos.txt, then proceed to run the hon updater from the same folder.

So if you’ve managed to sort out your crashing problems and you’ve also managed to find a server to play on or you just updated, you will notice a new hero has been added to the pool. Heroes-Newerth.com did a short post about this hero the other day, but if you didn’t check it out or fancy seeing some more ‘Chipper’ action here is a video a friend of mine made. Be sure to watch it in HD, enjoy!