Heroes of Newerth, RPGRTS fun.

For those of you not in the know, Heroes of Newerth is pretty much a carbon copy of the popular DoTA map/gameplay mode for Warcraft 3, the only difference being that Heroes of Newerth is not restricted by the aging Warcraft 3 engine upon which DoTA is played.

The basic premise for Heroes of Newerth is good vs evil, or in this case the Legion vs the Hellbourne. Each team has 5 players a side, all who pick one out of many heroes at the beginning of a game. Heroes each have 4 skills, one of which is their “Ultimate” skill gained at level six which can do some pretty nifty things. After heroes have been chosen the two teams are pited against each other in a battle, each team has 3 lanes, all which have 2 towers the heroes must defend. The objective is simple: Destroy the enemy teams base.
Sounds easy right? wrong. Heroes of Newerth is a skill based game, heroes must work together if they wish to win, simply picking the wrong hero for your team can end in a loss, as will not listening or cooperating with your teammates in a match.

Hero choice is a crucial for most games you play, after the game lobby is full and the host starts, you are thrust forward into a screen with a large array of heroes, each classed as either Agility Intelligence or Strength. Here is where picking comes into play, each team must pick 5 heroes, a good balance is generally prefered but trying to reach an understanding with some teammates can be frustrating. The majority of agility heroes are termed by the community as “carry” heroes, simply put they aren’t very useful at the beginning of the game but by the end of it they are the ones carrying your team to victory, generally because they scale so well with items and become powerhouses of buttraping fury.
Most strength heroes are classes as tanks barring a few, they intitate fights and usually walk out still alive, whereas intelligence heroes are there primarily to dish out the damage on the opposing team but are squishy (this can change with items.)

Once ingame you have access to a shop which has a mindblowingly large amount of items for sale, ranging from the simple to the absolutely WTF, this is usually the biggest problem for new players getting into HoN, not knowing what items are good for your hero or what to aim for first will attract alot of unwanted attention by migrant DoTA veterans and can make your beginner experience very unpleasant.

Games are played on one map, there are others available but 99% of the community play on one map, the clone of DoTA, a well balanced map with lots of hiding places and good ganking spots, it will always reign supreme over any custom maps that S2 will be adding in or currently have in the game.

Games of HoN usually last from the very short 15 minutes to a long 1 hour, some lasting even longer. The game has serveral “phases” once the game begins heroes are assigned to their lanes by their own choice or by that of an extremely angry danish 12 year old with a mic. lanes are top, middle and bottom, the top lane with 2 heroes, the middle with one hero (usually an intelligence hero, but some strength or agility heroes can lane here too) and the bottom with another 2. As soon as you hear the horn blow to signal the start of the game, waves of “creeps” or monsters start spewing forth from your base, they are mindless zombies who will head straight into the opposing enemies creeps. Your job? kill them. Killing creeps is whatgives your hero experience and gold, and you generally stay in your lane to level 6+ but as with most things, it isn’t that easy. You have two opposing heroes to contend with, and even laning has a few tactics required, like smacking creeps at the right time. This is titled last hitting, and is a tactic used mostly by people playing the game for a while, or old DoTA players. What this is, is hitting a creep just before it dies so you gain full experience and full gold for it, you can do this to your own creeps in a similar fashion, screwing your enemy out of exp and gold making it very useful for both yourself and keeping your enemy down.

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While laning you may have angry heroes smacking on your cute little heroic arsehole, aggressive players tend to constantly keep pressure on you and your lane buddy so you cant kill creeps and farm gold, causing you to slow down your leveling and thus gimping you later on. You can counter this by doing the same, or luring them to your tower (towers do alot of damage to heroes early game, usually giving you extra support to kill them, generally people are stupid enough to try and take you at a tower.) creeps will continue to spawn throughout the game, doing battle with the enemy creeps and running into the enemy towers like lemmings until they destroy them.

As soon as people start roaming about looking to “gank” this is what they call midgame, generally during this time you and your team aim to smash the teeth of enemy heroes down their throat until they shit gold and exp for you (250 gold given for a hero kill, this adds up very quickly), that or they do it to you. Dying in HoN causes you to lose alot of gold, so dying alot is not beneficial as it holds you back from obtaining items needed to help you later in the game, and at the same time it “feeds” enemy heroes with gold, causing them to become very strong very fast, and in turn giving them the ability to gank you and your teammates with ease.

Lategame occurs when one of your agility heroes becomes some pimped out with items that he can asbolutely decimate the enemy team by himself, nevermind with support, this is usually followed by a “push” on the final enemy towers, and lastly their base, then bam, end of game.

Recently added, where post-game stats, this is a very nifty idea implemented by S2 to show alot of misc. information from the games you have played, everyone in the game is documented and this can be very useful to see what heroes purchased and how well they farmed/ganked. Another addition has been PSR, or pub skill rating. This system fluctuates depending on your wins and loses, winning games giving you x points and losing subtracting x points (this is dependant on the PSR of other players in your game, and how the teams are balanced), this has caused alot of debate on the official forums as many believe it does not accurately reflect player skill (bad teammates causing loses for example.) Alongside that is K/D/A, that is your kills/deaths/assists. Prepare to be judged harshly on this, for many new players the KDA stat is a curse, people will judge you on your death amount wether or not you are new to the game, and kick you from lobbies. The upside to these stats is that they give the player something to work toward, a better PSR, better KD ratio and so forth.

All in all HoN is a very fun game, and definitely one worth the hassle of learning, it has a very competitive community and clan ladders/tournaments are frequent. The only gripe that i personally have with HoN is that the DoTA community has taken over, people are extremely ignorant to newer players, and team chat is usually filled with “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooob ffs” “stop feeeeeeed noooooooooooob fuker i fuk ur mom”. This really kills the experience for new players as they will never learn if their team consists of utter arseholes 99% of the time. Usually this is only a small segement of the community but with HoN and as with DoTA it is the majority, the only advice i have for newcomers to HoN is ignore it, and keep learning.