Posts Tagged ‘HON’

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!

Patch 0.3.3

The Chipper has been added to the hero pool.
Summoning saws that deal out huge damage in an line, tar tossing, and rocket firing.. these are just some of the cool things this hero can do.
Before Heroes-Newerth.com starts getting hordes of trolls arguing amongst themselves over which hero The Chipper resembles most from DotA,
we would like to say: The most prominent elements come from Bat Rider and Tinker.

Omg it must be Techies!

You can check out his hero page by finding his icon here -> HoN Heroes

Alongside the new hero a few changes have been made to the game dynamics.
Here are the most notable ones:

Stacking Ancients: From now on can only be stacked twice, for a total of 3 stacks. Those of you converting creeps and using them to mass stack ancients are going to be sorely disappointed.

Devourer: Hook cast time has been slightly reduced

Token of life: Can no longer be ninja looted by means of flying courier, sigh.

Heroes of Newerth Patch 0.3.0.2

It has been awhile since Heroes-Newerth.com’s last post, this is mainly because there wasn’t much going on
in terms of updates to the game. But now, the patch that the HoN community has been waiting for is here.

UPDATE: For those of you having problems installing the patch, you need to uninstall heroes of newerth including the
user data and download this version http://dl.heroesofnewerth.com/HoNClient-0.3.0.exe.

So, what can i expect to see when i log in and update to this patch?

The first thing you will notice is a shiny new login screen, a much wanted improvement over the previous.
As you log in you may notice 2 unwinding cogs, any guesses as to where the inspiration came from?
OK , so besides the lack of originality (cough), once logged in you will be greeted by a picturesque backdrop.
The contrast between volcano and the full moon with the flock of birds who seem to fly around pointlessly in a
circle, is actually rather easy on the eyes. We like it.

The bottom half of the screen is now focused on the chat window, which by the way is now open by default.
Above the chat window are several game buttons:

Start Tutorial – Match Making – Public games – Create Game – Player Ladder – Match Stats -  Hero Compendium – Options

If you’ve played HoN before do not click on start tutorial. Upon clicking start tutorial a loading bar will appear which can only be canceled after a certain amount of time. Loading the tutorial can take anything up to a minute depending on the speed of your computer.
If somehow you unfortunately load the tutorial, there is no immediate escape, you will be given a bunch of options to choose from. Unless you are familiar with the console you will have to click on one of them.
Then you’ll endure 2 minutes of an overly exaggerated narrator voice telling you about things you figured out from your first game of HoN/DotA.
Once he has said his piece, dodge message boxes that pop up on your screen, then reach for the disconnect button and end this nightmare.
What i liked about HoN was that it stayed true to the community of DotA players who made HoN what it is today, after witnessing the cheesiness of the tutorial i ponder whether s2 games are selling themselves short to the target market of League of Legends players, or maybe I’m getting too old for this.

Match Making: Unfortunately match making is currently limited to solo play, I’m not sure whether s2 developers intend to implement group play or if they are pushing for a divide between pub stomps and people wanting to play with a bunch of randoms. Either way, match making seems to be functioning well, i’d probably play this myself if none of my homeboys were around.
You can also select the region(s) to match with, game mode is Banning Pick.

Player Ladder: Afraid to say another disappointment. When i first saw this button i thought it would be a ladder system like in Warcraft 3. It just seems to be an integrated version of player statistics, extremely useful if you don’t have a browser… or are motivationaly challenged, that was if it actually worked.

Hero Compendium: In this section you can view pictures of all the heroes with minor details about what they do. Not really useful as of yet.

Options: Finally, players don’t have to log out of the game to change sound or graphical issues, what is surprising is that it took the developers this long to figure out the nuisance involved with doing having to  do that.

From this patch we can see S2 games are gearing up for pre release, the addition of “noob” friendly tutorials and hero compendium are a slight giveaway. The players you now know to be noobs are actually pro’s compared to the onslaught of noobs that will be playing in your games once HoN goes retail.
It will be interesting to see how the community will react to new players.

Alongside the new interface were several updates to ingame mechanics i will list the most notable ones, the full changes can be found here > HoN patch notes.

The recipe for Nullstone is now 2/3 of its original price, additionally its mana regeneration has been
increased by 50% and it now grants a passive +10 Damage.
Much to the knowledge of S2 games this item was definitely under-appreciated, with this buff we can
guess more players will be buying it, so watch out spell casters!

Upon being destroyed, Ward of sight gives 50 gold to the attacker who lays the finishing blow.
We like this, it is a good incentive for players to actively seek out and destroy wards, a crucial part of the game overlooked by many.

Blood Hunter: Now reveals stealthed units with Blood Sense…. this is a huge buff, one that will almost certainly be taken advantage of this season.

Chronos: After many complaints from players Chronos has had the so called nerf stick thrown his way. All four of his spells have been nerfed in some way or another.

The Dark Lady: Her turn rate has been allmost trippled ! This means godlike micro, enough said.

Demented Shaman: Stats nerfed quite hard

Legionnaire: Terrify changed to Terrifying Rage allowing Legionnaire to charge towards his enemies and deal instant
damage Terrifying them in the process.  Good buff,  however hope this doesn’t discourage players from buying Portal Key.

Madman: Snare on Stalk removed, it was obvious the previous patch had hit madman  hard with this snare business. Beserk has also been buffed, mana cost effectively halved at all levels. Very nice!

Valkyrie: Turnrate increased to 960! Javelin of light buffed massively ie makes no sound when cast, hit radius decreased, glow removed, reveals 800 units around targets hit by javelin for 3.34 seconds and shows timer on stun.
I will definitely be giving this vixen a test drive sometime soon.

Zephyr: Ultimate nerfed pretty badly, instead of spawning max cyclones instantly, it now spawns one every second for the duration of the spell.