Posts Tagged ‘items’

The Ultimate guide to Winning HoN games

In the following Heroes of Newerth guide I’m going divulge the secrets that high level players use to dominate games.
The reason for this guide is to help and at the same time educate players who are having trouble winning public and ranked games, whether on their own or with friends.

For reasons of simplicity and ease of reading i have split the guide into 4 categories each with their own sub sections:

1. Pre game
1.1 Hero picks
1.2 Counter picking
1.3 Synergy
1.4 Laning

2. Start game
2.1 Starting Items
2.2 Rune control
2.3 Warding
2.4 First blood
2.5 Adjusting lanes

3. Mid game
3.1 Adjusting Wards
3.2 Ganking
3.3 Lane pushing
3.4 Farming

4. Late game
4.1 Importance of Team fights
4.2 Lane control
4.3 Pushing their base towers

1. Pre game

At this point you are sitting in the lobby at the hero selection screen, regardless of the game mode you will have to make decisions on which heroes to pick  that will give your team the advantage.

1.1 Hero picks
Being able to play every hero in the pool to a decent standard is great, but more often than not your strengths will lie in certain heroes.  Let your team mates know which heroes your most accustomed with. Having an epic lineup < Having a lineup of heroes you can actually play.
Now it might come to the point where you are playing with “absolute retards” who haven’t read this guide, then you have two choices:
Try and carry your team or pick whats needed. For example , if you are a skilled player pick Forsaken Archer and farm till your imbalanced, or you can pick that needed ranged disabler to go with those 4 melee carries on your team (fml). It’s just a matter of how confident you are in your team mates.

1.2 Counter Picking
Depending on the game mode you will have the chance to counter pick enemy heroes. There are very few heroes that have no counter, so knowing which heroes counter which can be very handy. You must also bare in mind that having a lineup of all counters will result in lack of synergy. So you either counter their best player or counter their most threatening hero.
With the recent ability to view players most played heroes you can get a good idea of what they might pick and either ban or counter pick them before they get the chance.

omg! ban Wretched Hag!

1.3 Synergy
When picking a hero you must consider the compatibility with other heroes on your team. Try and visualise a team fight with your lineup and ask yourself, who will initiate? Once they’ve initiated, who is going to follow up with that AoE disable ? How will we kill their carry? What happens when they silence our initiator ? etc…
Deciding on the right heroes for your strategy is crucial. A pushing lineup will have heroes like Defiler and Pollywog with heroes to support them, a gank lineup will have heroes like Magmus, Witch slayer, Pyromancer,  who will roam early on stopping the enemy carry from farming, a carry orientated lineup will have a combination of babysitters, support, disablers and a carry.
Just picking lane combos isn’t enough to win games.

1.4 Laning
Decide on the lanes before the game starts. Heroes that require farm should always go to the longest lane, for the legion it’s the bottom lane and for the hellbourne the top lane. The reason for this is that they can pull the creeps from the forest into the lane and farm them, while also being the hardest lane to gank. With that in mind your gankers (heroes like Witch slayer/Magmus) will go to the short lanes to counter the enemy carries.
Mid lane is reserved for heroes that scale well with levels, for example, Pebbles, Wretched hag, Forsaken Archer, Chipper, Deflier. With these kind of heroes once they out level the enemy team they can cause destruction. At level 9 pebbles does insane damage, which means he can pop into a lane and destroy most heroes. A level 11 Deflier is the fastest tower pusher in the game.

2. Start game

Starting items, lane adjustment, first blood,  and rune control all attribute to getting a foothold early game, which in turn leads to winning mid game.

2.1 Starting items
Every team needs to buy a courier and at least one set of wards at the start. The courier is used to maintain lane dominance, having the ability to get regeneration items from base lets you stay in the lane without going back to the fountain. Otherwise you will be loosing a lot of experience and gold.
OK so you’ve sorted out the courier and wards, now you need to buy items that will help you last hit and deny in the lane along with some regen items.

2.2 Rune control
The rune will spawn every 2 minutes, you need to make sure that someone on your team picks it up. The most prevalent runes are Haste, Double damage and Regeneration, these runes will make ganks easier. Most of the time the mid hero is responsible for picking up the rune, but if the rune spawns closest to your short lane have one of your gankers  come and pick it up and use it to take out the enemy hero laning mid. I can’t state enough  the importance of picking up the rune when it spawns.

2.3 Warding
Early game wards are used to block the enemy pull camp on the long lane, and to give sight of one of the rune spots. By doing this you stop the enemy farming lane from pulling creeps hence denying them gold and xp. Also being able to pick up the rune as soon as it spawns.
As a general rule the lesser of the two heroes going to the short lane will buy the wards, while the lesser of the two heroes going to the long lane will buy the courier.
Make sure you ward the rune spot 10 seconds after the first rune spawns, this way you will be able to give sight over the period of 4 runes spawning. When warding the long lane creep pull spot make sure you do it before 30 seconds (first neutral spawn) and inbetween the woods (hard to counter).

2.4 First Blood
There will be engagements around the rune spots as the first rune spawns. Standing up a hill next to the rune spot will give you vision of the rune and anybody going for it, either enabling a first blood or avoiding getting ganked while going for the rune. If you managed to pick up the rune and there are no enemy heroes around use it to gank the closest lane. Remember it’s hard to gank the enemies long lane.
A great way of getting first blood is a Tri lane strategy where you all hide in the secret shop on your long lane, wait for the heroes to come into the lane and own them. You will need at least 1 disabler to pull this off.
If you think the enemy will try to ward your creep camp use it as an opportunity to gank them.
Getting first blood early game will help you and your team mates massively, if your feeling generous upgrade the courier after getting first blood.

2.5 Adjusting lanes
Recently there are new strategies  emerging in higher level games, Tri lane and dual mid are the most popular. If you find yourself laning against one of these strategies unexpectedly or you are laning against a tough lane you will have to swap lanes with your team mates.

Countering a Tri lane is simple, they will most likely lane in a dual lane (top or bot), this means if you send one of your teamates in that lane to another lane it will be 3vs1 . Sounds crazy ? Not really. If your solo hero plays defensively he won’t get killed, while impeding the xp gain of the 3 enemy heroes. This will force them to change their lanes.
The only way to defend against a dual mid strategy is to dual mid yourself.

3. Mid game
Mid game is where the action starts. Ganking and tier 1 tower pushes will start happening. The aim of this stage is to out level  and outfarm while defending and pushing.
If your team has done well early game, mid game will be alot easier. Doing well mid game will carry you into late game.

3.1 Adjusting Wards
In order to do well mid game you will need sight of choke points used to gank. These locations will change when towers die.
The first picture shows the choke points that need to be warded when all towers are alive:

The next picture shows the choke points when the mid and top towers are down as hellbourne.

Obviously there are alot of rune spots that you can abuse, but you must place the wards where you predict the enemy will come from and to take into consideration towers that have been destroyed.
Counter warding is just as important, it is very hard to gank a lane that has it’s choke points warded. The only way to gank them is to tp to the lane directly or to destroy their wards.

3.2 Ganking
If you have warded properly and are confident that the enemy won’t see you coming, you can start to gank the lanes. If you fail to destroy the enemy wards at the choke points you will waste xp walking around the map trying to fail gank, as they will see you coming from a mile away.
When your ganking heroes reach level 5/6 they should start roaming the map for kills, once you  successfully gank a lane you can either push the lane or look for more ganks.
Depending on the hero you have laning mid he should stay in the lane a little longer then start ganking or farming.

3.3 Lane pushing
Getting those tier 1 towers down mid game will give your team  gold and open up area’s for ganks. The most important towers to push mid game are the mid and enemy long lane towers.
By destroying these two towers you increase accessibility into their forest area, which means you can gank anybody farming there.
If the enemy is pushing one of your towers you have 3 choices: Full on defence and hope to win the team fight. Full on counter push, or Defend and counter push. Once again this depends on your hero line up and team strategy. If you have the kind of heroes that excel in team fights you will want to full on defend. If you can’t defend at all, you will want to counter push another lane or two. If you can fend them off long enough you will want to have 1 or 2 heroes push another lane while the rest defend.
The goal is to maximize gold and xp while keeping your tier 1 towers as long as possible.

3.4 Farming
If your lineup consists of heroes that require farm to be effective you must ensure that they get the room to farm. The best way to do this is to ward the choke points surrounding your carrys farming area, and to defend his lane. Letting him get last hits and hero kills also helps. Meanwhile your gankers should be roaming for heroes caught off guard and killing them.

4. Late game

The goal of the game is to destroy the enemies throne, you didn’t know ? Well the amount of players that run around the map like headless chickens with no direction is a testament to this.
Late game is all about winning the important team fights and pushing base towers/barracks.

4.1 The importance of team fights
At this stage in the game your level will be fairly high, if you die its a long wait to re-spawn, that’s why you have to make every team fight count. Loosing a team fight at this stage could mean loosing a Rax.
That’s why you have to ward anywhere you farm including Kongor. If the enemy tries to kill kongor you should be ready to pounce on them, and if your going for kongor make sure youve warded and counter warded the surrounding area to prevent getting killed yourself.
When finding yourself in a team fight situation try to initiate on them first, or get them to initiate on your tankiest hero. Make sure to kill the damage dealers first then the support and finally the tank.

4.2 Lane control
Defending one lane isn’t hard, defending 3 lanes that are being pushed at once is alot harder. This can be used against your enemy also. Knowing when to nuke a lane is essential, nuke it too hard and it will push it into their enemy base, don’t defend it and it will be prime for an enemy push. A great strategy is to synchonize 3 lanes being pushed at the same time, this will force the enemy to split into 3 lanes of defence, at this point you can regroup into one lane and push hard. If they all rush to that lane to defend you can switch to another lane etc…

4.3 Pushing the base towers
So your inside the enemy base, and wondering what to do. The priority here is to destroy the enemy barracks, namely the melee one. By killing this rax you will force them to defend that lane consistently letting you push the other lanes and stopping them from pushing with 5 heroes. The amount of times ive seen high level players mess around trying to kill enemy heroes when they should be attacking the barracks is ridiculous. There is no point pushing their base if your not going to kill the barracks, remember it regens at 50 hp a second, so just damaging it to come back later and finish it off isn’t going to work.
If you see the enemy are pushing your base without tp scrolls, you can counter push their base with another hero while they are forced to walk back or push , essentialy turning it into a race. If you have better pushing heroes then this is the option for you.
The Turtle strategy is a great way of turning around the game if you are underleveled and can’t push. This strategy relies on staying in your base and farming the creeps until you make up your level  and farm difference to the point you can kill the enemy and push.

Summary

Pick heroes you are comfortable with while keeping synergy with your team mates. Buy wards and courier at the start and make sure your in the right lane. Rune control is imperative, watchout for ganks by warding and counter ward to setup your own ganks.
Support your carry, don’t let him get ganked. Push while defending and win teamfights.
Most importantly of all , destroy the enemy throne.
Good luck!

Whats hot and whats not this month

Tundra the Rexxar port was added today.
He can deal alot of melee, and magic damage at range, he can scout with his bird, and he has a GREAT ulti for team fights.

Whats hot this month

Accursed – His ultimate no longer auto casts. Some might see this as a nerf but used at the right time makes it extremely effective.
Behemoth – Ultimate now deals superior magic damage, initial damage now going through magic immunity.
Chipper – The last hit burst damage monster is a smoking hot pick right now.
Glacius – Making a come back from the early beta days with the fairly recent patch changes, Glacius is a strong support pick.
Fayde – Played with either a Puzzlebox or Codex, this hero has one of the highest burst damage combinations in HoN right now.
Nypmhora – Teleport skill now teleports one extra ally.
Pollywog – Along with the flavour of the month being pushing strats, his wards and long disabling skills are hot right now. Try playing him with Puzzlebox.
Succubus – Cooldown on her ultimate has been reduced, only 100 seconds at level 3.
Tundra – Like most dev heroes, a little bit overpowered when they are first added. Definitely a good addition to any team.

Whats not hot this month

Hellbringer – Base armor has been reduced to an abysmal 1.4, Life void cooldown increased.
Zephyr – Huge nerf, cyclones now deal HALF damage to non hero units. No longer the epic ricer.

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.

Banning pick is here

Patch 0.1.66 came out today. The patch includes various hero buffs/nerfs, bug fixes and a new mode!

The long awaited “Banning Pick” mode is here. Similar to Captains mode from dota, each captain will get  3 bans per team then each player has 60 seconds to pick a hero from the pool , taking turns alternately.

It might sound similar to banning draft, however, you can pick from the full list of heroes.

With this new mode aimed at competitive play, there have been a few hero changes:
Zephyr has largely been remade (for the umpteenth  time). His ultimate now a Typhoon that reaps destruction to enemies the closer they are to the epicentre. This definitely synergies well with Tempest’s ultimate, making zephyr a useful hero now.

Electrician has been buffed, his ultimate having its cool-down reduced and the ability to jump to multiple targets if in possession of Staff of the Master. Other changes are viewable in the change-log on this site.

Personally, as a dedicated Valkyrie player i was glad to see that her ultimate has been improved(cool-down and mana cost reduced), enabling me to skill prism earlier without concerns about mana consumption.
The sound that Valkyrie’s arrow makes has been quietened, making it harder for enemies to hear that distinctive sound. Although minor, this can mean the difference between winning/loosing a gank/battle.

These are just a few hero changes, other heroes including Pyromancer (new DoT effect on fervor), Jeriziah(repel nerf), devourer, Madman and more have been updated.

Lastly, most heroes with aura’s now gain the ability to toggle them on or off. We think this is a nice idea especially when some aura’s effect lane control, namely pushing the creeps too far into enemy towers making it difficult to farm or gank.