Design Update: State of the Game

[Fielding]

This is a comprehensive update aimed to fill you guys, our awesome player base, in on the current state of the game as we see it, and possibly clue you in on some of the types of changes you could expect our design team to produce in the near future. This post is somewhat intentionally vague, I'm avoiding giving the specifics until our design team is ready to unveil them, but I do want to open communication with you guys and make you aware of what our design staff are currently focusing on.

Keep in mind this is a design update - not a general development update, so there is no update on Match Making and our various other projects in here.


General Direction
To start, I want to give you guys a very basic outline of the core goals we want to achieve with HoN's direction.

Faster game pace, shorter games

We want to maximize your fun-per-minute! This goal originated with the intent of increasing HoN's competitive viability (HoN tournaments take a LONG time to complete), but we also believe that more casuals games will benefit greatly from less time being wasted. Long, epic games will still be possible, we just want to make sure that if a game is long, it's due to intense battles the whole way through from evenly matched teams, not because each team decided to play it safe and turtle/farm for 60 minutes.

(By "faster game pace" we're referring to the pace at which action occurs, not changing how quickly you die or increasing lethality)

More action oriented play

We want to encourage player vs player engagements over an excess of farming/PvE engagements. You've likely already seen some of the first steps toward this goal with the introduction of Striders and Blood Chalice. Ultimately, farming will always have its place in HoN, however we want to encourage a healthy amount of team fights, ganks, and pushes.

Deep, strategic options in the gameplay

This is a constant goal that is being worked on every time we balance patch. There's always improvements to make and as the meta game shifts with player decision making, so do our focuses and goals with the game's balance. Ultimately, this goal simply means we want to see multiple different strategies remain viable, not only in terms of the line up of heroes on each team, but the roles those heroes play. Whether you enjoy roaming and ganking, playing a carry, or playing support, all of those roles should be rewarding and fun to play.

More content!

Heroes! Lots of heroes! Heroes and items and maps and other content will be coming soon, in future patches. We've especially ramped up our hero creation process to produce more balanced, well designed heroes at a faster rate.




Issues On Our Radar
This section is intended to make you guys aware of some of the issues our design team is looking into - some of these issues are ones we are addressing in the interest of achieving the above goals. Note that we're constantly working on a LOT of stuff - so just because something isn't listed here, doesn't mean we're not aware of it. These are just some of the more note-worthy items.


Prohibitive Gold Mechanics

For the most part we're happy with how the gold mechanics work in HoN, however there are a few issues that directly damage the pace and enjoyment of the game, regardless of if you are winning or losing.

For example, in an evenly matched game, if a team fight occurs and 4 people from each team die, more gold is lost in player deaths than is gained in player kills (assuming no players were on a kill streak and therefore worth bonus gold). The net result is that team fights are, quite often, taking more gold out of the game than they introduce. This is the type of thing that does nothing other than slow the game pace down and indirectly discourages team fights and engagements.

Another issue we're observing relates to how gold distribution is handled. There is currently not much of a distinction between a player who is actively engaged in helping get kills, resulting in a lot of assists, and a player who does not aim to help by assisting. In the interest of encouraging more team vs team engagements, this is something we're looking into. There's a big difference between a 1-8-20 Demented Shaman, for example, and a 1-8-5. We want to take steps to make sure that the player who is actively attempting to help out the team and participate in fights is being rewarded above players that play too passively.

Lack of Caster & Support hero options for progression

Another issue we have relates to how support-oriented heroes currently progress in the game. They naturally should be supporting their team - but often this support comes at high personal sacrifice, and the result is that there are very few options left to support players in terms of how to progress their character and stay relative past the early-mid game. This concern isn't one of balance - it's clear from competitive games that support heroes are both necessary and effective, it's a question of how rewarding the role is and what we can do to keep the skill ceiling high and allow other progression options for support players. As a carry scales in his ability to deal damage to the enemy team, so should a support player scale in their ability to support their team. This issue relates closely to the last point in the prohibitive gold mechanics section above.

We also are very sensitive to the subject of how early-game caster-oriented heroes fit into the game. There is a point in every game in which these heroes start to lose relevance, and the physical DPS heroes (carries) gain relevance. As we increase the pace of the game and induce more team fights, a side effect of increased gold, experience, and level gain will result. This may mean that caster oriented heroes lose relevance even more quickly, perhaps before they can make a meaningful contribution to the outcome of the game. Currently casters usually remain viable in the late game due to disables (or buying items like Sheep Stick if they don't have any built in disables), and while that will likely always be true to a degree, we do want to make sure there's a bit more depth to playing these characters, by providing other options for them. These heroes are very important to the feel, fun, and pace of HoN - they bring a lot of the excitement and we want want to make sure they remain viable and interesting to play.

Viability of early-game pushing & tower mechanics

A trend we commonly see in the early-mid game is, after winning a team fight or ganking a few heroes, players will retreat to farm rather than push. This can especially be observed in many competitive matches. It's the safe route, due to the risk-reward ratio of continuing a push simply being too risky. We also find that the tower AI is somewhat punishing to push attempts and could behave a little more consistently.

As we push HoN in a direction that encourages more aggression, ganking, and team fights, we want to make sure we don't over-do it. We could easily make ganking worth it by having hero kill gold be a very high value, but that undermines other mechanics in the game and makes the progression very one-dimensional. We prefer to allow for successful ganks and team fights to yield opportunity for the winning team to press the advantage, rather than directly giving them too big of an advantage in terms of gold reward. With that in mind, we're taking a close look at the viability of pushing towers after winning an early game fight or gank.
Legion vs Hellbourne Map Balance & Map Layout

Yes, we are aware of issues with the map! The issues we plan on addressing with the map extend beyond Kongor's placement - that's probably the most identifiable issue with the map that players notice, but there are a number of inconsistencies that lead to some rather specific advantages/disadvantages. Our changes are focused on not only game balance between Legion & Hellbourne, but also ways to make the map more enjoyable and more rewarding for skilled and coordinated teams to use it. We'll reveal more on this as we get closer to releasing our changes.


The bottom line with any changes we make, our mission statement so-to-speak, is that we always aim to reward and encourage player skill and decision making. The above observations and declared direction for HoN come as the result of observing you guys, the community, and taking what you want out of HoN and working our vision into it. We want to take the best, most fun parts of HoN and promote that type of play.

Even though we're pushing hard in a certain direction for the game, we do want a variety of strategies to remain viable. HoN's gameplay should be deep and rich, full of variety and possibility, such that the game never grows stale. We aim to constantly improve HoN - nothing is ever perfect - so as always, we'll continue to monitor the issues, deliver our changes, and observe what you guys like and don't like and keep improving the game the way you guys want it.



Some notes on Easy Mode

I want to take a moment to talk about Easy Mode and our thoughts and observations. Firstly - we understand what it is players like about Easy Mode, and that they have a good reason to want to play it. There are some very specific things EM tries to do, such as shortening game length, and providing a more casual less stressful experience. EM players like to have their cake and eat it too - getting a lot more gold and items in an EM match than normal mode. None of these things should be frowned upon - there's nothing wrong with wanting that experience out of HoN.

That said, since the beginning of HoN's launch we've seen EM play percentages drop from about 50% to 28%. Ultimately we feel this has been good for HoN, as EM presents a lot of poor mechanics and balance issues. It has never been fixed up in a way that we could be proud of it - it largely just contains copied mechanics from DotA's EM mode. We don't want to mess with the reason why people choose to play EM, instead we want to fix the rest.

Our current outlook on EM isn't very positive. It uses a lot of arbitrary mechanics to try to achieve an end result, and it does so poorly, creating many problems in its attempts to solve others. It's no secret to any HoN forum-goer that EM players are treated rather poorly. Ultimately, this is an understandable reaction when you consider the bad habits EM's forced mechanics can cause, and the frustration this creates amongst normal mode players when they play with EM players. One of our goals is to fix up EM in such a way that the types of player choices it promotes is consistent with normal mode, all the while offering the same increased game pace, faster progression and leveling, less stressful/more casual game type that EM players prefer.

Some of goals that are attempted to be achieved in EM games actually coincide with some of the issues we see in normal mode (gold distribution and game length). We fully validate the desire to want a more approachable, less stressful, fun, quicker, more action oriented game. EM has some very poor mechanic decisions to try and force this result. With a few modifications we feel we can provide a much more balanced experience while still achieving some of these underlying goals and making a game mode that won't be sacrilege to play by all HoN players. It should be a mode that keeps all the balance of normal mode but just makes for a less stressful environment.

[Muxas]

first

liked that u focus more on support players and their progression and role ability to scale through out the game

[Derezzed`]

So you're saying you can safely remove em mode now? ;)

I only read(or retained), faster hero production.. so I hope that is true.

[_Phoenix_]

Awesome stuff :)

[Becajin]

Please just seperate EM stats and normal stats...
Please do not make the game even more fast paced, its too gank heavy already
Please dont make casters scale, there is a reason why they dont.
Rest sounds fine/good.
Edit: will we see some ports with the new heroes?

[C`Sooyoung]

I dislike these changes. If you're going to change the pace of the game i might aswell spend my money on Leagues of Legend.

[Phopis]

I'm looking forward to the EM changes. I'm tired of all the games having a bunch 50% EM players, and knowing that I'm in for a long, drawn out, carry farm fest.

[Nidhogg]

If you want support to remain viable, offer discounts for multiple ward purchases.
Offer passive gold increases for enemies in range of your ward of sight, so the wards pay for themselves if they are placed in a good spot where enemies frequent.
For support heroes or heroes early game that rely on babysitting a carry - offer gold incentives for total hero damage done in the first 10 minutes of gameplay. If you deal ~1000 total hero damage in the first 10 minutes of play, you get a bonus 200 or 300 gold. This means babysitters who rely on harassing won't be under-itemed when mid-game rolls around because they did their job and let the carry get last hits. (this also is a good way to segue into achievements)


Just a few ideas. I have more if you want em!

[Cleptomanic]

Any words on the nostats/leave-issue? Would be much appreciated.

[Destro]

Shouldn't Nigma be making this post D:

I see lots of interesting areas for adding fun aspects to some of the specified designs.

Like scaling supports... how about scaling auras then :P

I have more fun idea, maybe I'll write them up later :D

[BobSaggot]

i am really, really against making hon any faster than it already is.

if anything you guys need to slow it down with all this nuke / blow your load instantly garbage.

striders and chalice took a LOT of the skill required out. it isn't a solution to the games balance problem to add items which fill roles.

i hope hon can take its hands out of the burst dmg / burst ganking and put it back into the arena of skilled play and well thought out positioning.

hon, and the entire dota genre, is a game based around playing the best you can in the time you have. so making the game shorter artificially will decrease the level of play.

i know you guys balence based on high level / comp level, but i really hate how there is a gigantic gaping hole in the middle tier range of play.

[BeastmanAIDS]

Less talk, more action.

[Rordarok]

Hmm I think those updates are actually nice. And still, nuking heroes just give the opportunity to win the game early game. All heroes are there for a reason (except for Rampage, ofc...)

[TheRockSays]

Heroes of Legends in 5....4....3...

Seriously, there is a reason support heroes are great early and not late, it's balance....

It's the end of the HoN as we know it.

[Maliken]

Faster paced should probably read more along the lines of more action oriented. The direction of these discussion points & observations should not read into "making the game easier to play" or "lowering the skill cap". It should read more like, non-action oriented farming of PvE while foresaking PvP action or pushing is a play style that should continue to be squeezed out of the game.

[man_guy]

Offer passive gold increases for enemies in range of your ward of sight, so the wards pay for themselves if they are placed in a good spot where enemies frequent.

Supports would be asked not to buy the wards if they more than paid for themselves.

[TheRockSays]

Faster paced should probably read more along the lines of more action oriented. The direction of these discussion points & observations should not read into "making the game easier to play" or "lowering the skill cap". It should read more like, non-action oriented farming of PvE while foresaking PvP action or pushing is a play style that should continue to be squeezed out of the game.

Sounds good in theory until you start having to re-balance heroes around this theory. Then that gets hairy. Then you put player skill into it....I think "increasing action" will ultimately lead to more rage, more people getting absolutely rolled, and more people VERY unhappy with the PSR system. At least you can carry bads right now...some of them....

If you reward ganking even more the pub game will take a HUGE turn for the worse.

Free gold..I'm going to puke..

[Fielding]

Please dont make casters scale, there is a reason why they dont.


I want to clarify that point - we're not making casters scale like other games do - we don't want them carrying. That part of the post was just indicating that we're keeping an eye on what stage of the game they become relevant and, if they lose relevance too soon, we can correct that. Carries are still carries for a reason, don't worry :)

[Mazinkaiser]

S2 owns :)

[TheRockSays]

I really don't see how it's going to make the game better....really it's "okay" the way it is. Biggest problem is that some items are not relevant.

90% of the problems with pubs is that they can't pick heroes or play them, and the PSR system is "broken".

I think all of your data would be a LOT clearer if you had any SMR games to go on, but you don't, because no one can play it.

[Maliken]

This pretty much sums it up. Useless post is useless :/ We were promised a progress update and I'm still waiting.

The update is that we're still working on them and when they are ready to be released for testing, these features will be put in a patch. There is not point in us rushing a match making system or map editor or other large feature if it is going to be junk or unpresentable. These things take time.

This is the last post that will be made in this thread that isn't exactly on topic. Any reply to this will just be removed so we don't conjest this thread with other stuff.

[TooBadItsMe]

Best thing I've read from s2 since... yeah well, since ever. It's always good to know that you "think ahead" (not saying I didn't think you did, just saying that some players always believe the worst of all companies); take for example the goldchange and how it could possibly effect casters in a negative way. As long as you're not trying to make HoN into Lol, as some comments suggests (I don't really understand that opinion since a faster, more pushoritend mid/lategame can be done in many ways, without ruining the concept of Normal Mode HoN).

Imo you should start threads in the balance- or clan/compforum where these topics can be more thoroughly discussed.

[Anaklu]

A lot of people miss the intentional separation of caster and carry - but then again, I feel their pain when i play against heroes like madman or MQ who have ridiculous burst damage earlygame and ridiculous auto-attack damage lategame, and extra-ordinary mobility throughout.

How do you rationalize giving some heroes a constant advantage and other heroes a tiny margin of usefulness?

sure, they're squishy. but they're only marginally more squishy than everyone else at that level.

[BobSaggot]

I'm not very good at making my point about this... as i'm very confused on a lot of the wording / ideas presented on this topic.

I just want to make sure that you guys know the mid-tier pub games are suffering.. the quality of games is diminishing hard. i know "match making" and all that other noise sounds good on paper, but in reality the game itself has such a high focus on the ganking action that its near impossible to play a public game without running around ganking / counter ganking as a squad

essentially mid-tier pub games break down into a few combos and don't diverge much from there

all and all i think hon needs to SLOW DOWN instead of speed up. it needs to be more focused on executing things the RIGHT way instead of just using overpowering force

im a bit unrested right now so a lot of this sounds like garbage. mah b

[Skyve]

Please do not make the game even more fast paced, its too gank heavy already

How is it too gank heavy? Also, the game isn't really very fast paced, when games, on average take ~40 minutes to complete.


Please dont make casters scale, there is a reason why they dont.

Nobody said anything about making casters scale. What was mentioned was that there might be an issue with viability for caster, but that doesn't mean they will scale (too much, I mean Thunderbringer for instance scales).

[SadPanda]

I want to know. Are you guys going to bring any more ports in or just S2 heroes from now on?

And, it all soudns good. I strongly agree with the support progression. Sucks to be a D sham 4 levels lower than everyone and only having striders due to having 21 asissts and constantly counter warding / warding. Make assists have some value.

[TheRockSays]

I'm not very good at making my point about this... as i'm very confused on a lot of the wording / ideas presented on this topic.

I just want to make sure that you guys know the mid-tier pub games are suffering.. the quality of games is diminishing hard. i know "match making" and all that other noise sounds good on paper, but in reality the game itself has such a high focus on the ganking action that its near impossible to play a public game without running around ganking / counter ganking as a squad

essentially mid-tier pub games break down into a few combos and don't diverge much from there

all and all i think hon needs to SLOW DOWN instead of speed up. it needs to be more focused on executing things the RIGHT way instead of just using overpowering force

im a bit unrested right now so a lot of this sounds like garbage. mah b


This...and pretty much the fact that lowering the pick time in pubs crippled the game...boy that was a VERY bad decision. Now you can't even get a team of randoms/bads to pick a decent composition of heroes...it's just bad..and further degenerates pub games.

[Yasai]

I dislike these changes. If you're going to change the pace of the game i might aswell spend my money on Leagues of Legend.

They said make it faster, not a slow, boring crawl.

I'm interested in where this will lead. HoN of all games has aimed to keep the essence of the original DotA intact, but that doesn't mean it's sacred. If something is terrible, I'm sure this player base is more than willing to spam the forums with whining... -_-


This...and pretty much the fact that lowering the pick time in pubs crippled the game...boy that was a VERY bad decision. Now you can't even get a team of randoms/bads to pick a decent composition of heroes...it's just bad..and further degenerates pub games.
Nothing is going to stop random bads from picking the crappiest hero at your team's disposal, and you'll usually hear things like "w/e" or "I can't play the other heroes". The shorter time has only had a positive effect on the game for most decent players, and you still have a ton of time in modes like BP. In SD, most of the picks are decided after 15 seconds, then people just wait around after they right-click their hero.

[Skyve]

A problem I see with a faster game: Melee carries will most likely be obsolete, since ranged carries (/semi-carries) tend to get stronger faster, since they usually don't need to spend (16-)20 minutes farming for an item that will improve their farming. If you want to get the average game length down to ~30 minutes, a majority of carry items will be (sort of) obsolete.

[Latigular]

Faster game pace, shorter games
what will happen with heroes like Keeper of the Forest, Mage Bane etc? They need decent farm to be viable. You will ruin some hereos which wont be ever picked imo.

[Ayevee]

Can't wait to see what their gonna do with EM.

[Becajin]

How is it too gank heavy? Also, the game isn't really very fast paced, when games, on average take ~40 minutes to complete.
Nobody said anything about making casters scale. What was mentioned was that there might be an issue with viability for caster, but that doesn't mean they will scale (too much, I mean Thunderbringer for instance scales).
Every lineup consits of almost only burst heroes. every game has more kills than minutes. Its fine if there is a choice. but try to do something else and get squashed. and a game like this SHOULD take 40 mins minimum. otherwise it is just a slaughterfest and all tactic unnecessary.
If you make a character useful all game it is also some kind of scaling. There are heroes that have a distinct advantage early but are useless late. Make them useful late and they are far more powerful than they were before. what will happen is what we see happening already. pick early mid nukers and a semicarry. no place for hard carries, no place for real lategame.

[Sheapy]

Tablet of Command = Fun for support all game

[Angel]

Sounds like S2 wants to turn normal mode into easy mode.

[Techies]

More action...

Lets see, what is the number1 cause for conflict in the world other than religion?
Limited resources!

Take a look at the spawn time of neutral camps and the reward gained from killing them. Also do you really need to re-spawn the entire camp each minute? Maybe 2 small neutralsfirst minute, boss neutral the second minute.

[TheRockSays]

TBH I'm already sick of burst aoe oriented play.

[Skyve]

Every lineup consits of almost only burst heroes. every game has more kills than minutes.

I really doubt that every game has more kills than minutes. And no, not every line-up consists of almost only burst heroes. It is true that heroes like Witchslayer and Hag are picked often, but on the other hand, non-bursty heroes, like Hellbringer, Glacius, Voodoo Jester are picked just as often.



and a game like this SHOULD take 40 mins minimum. otherwise it is just a slaughterfest and all tactic unnecessary.

How can you say that? It's not like you know anything. It's also wrong to assume this game miraculously takes more skill to play after 40 minutes have passed, and is just brainless slaughtering the 40 minutes beforehand. Why would you even say something like that? It doesn't make any sense.
Any why "SHOULD" this game take 40 minutes minimum? Especially for a game that wants to be an e-sport, that's just bad. And if you think about it: Do you really want to towerhug and farm all game and then get some small pieces of action at the end of the game, or do you think it's more interesting to plan ganks with your teams, counterward so the enemy team won't see your gank coming, and then have roughly equal amounts of action all game, which should increase the fun/minute?
Which just reminds me: Roaming should be made more viable and probably be less punished, so that sort of strategy will finally trickle down into pub play.


If you make a character useful all game it is also some kind of scaling. There are heroes that have a distinct advantage early but are useless late.

No, if you make a character useful all game it doesn't mean he scales, it just means he doesn't lose viability late game. What S2 wants to do is to make support heroes have more than roughly 1.5k worth of items lategame, so they progress from early game, since currently if you play an Andromeda and have Striders + Powersupply, you are pretty much geared out for the whole game, which means you are almost completely useless lategame if you just used your abilites, which kind of diminishes the fun of playing these types of heroes. S2 doesn't want to turn every hero in someone with carry potential.
But yes, I'm also a bit worried about the viability of hardcarries, those will eventually suffer from shorter gamelengths, but at the same time, their shouldn't be heroes who can take over games alone.

[Yoekix]

If you want that support is more rewarding then let healing be a part of the assist system
for example by healing the killer you get an assist but only if you did a heal that matters like your carry was dropping under 20% .

Even other spells should count as assits, like accursed his shield

[Hsssh]

Not much optimism in me about this.

I always thought that farming and turtling should be viable strategies because otherwise games will be decided by first 10 minutes even more often.

[BobSaggot]

thinking about it more - i think striders have effected the game a lot more than most people realize

many people dismiss it because once they're on cooldown you're stuck with red boots

but the part that really changes the game is heroes that shouldnt be viable roaming around can easily make their way around the map with no problems.

in dota you would see teams half push a tower, draw attention away from their farming carry... it would be mind games to see where you would be on the map, and you could be certain how long it takes for a hero to get to you after they leave mid lane

i think heroes overall should move slower

[z3rr0Cdn]

Please just seperate EM stats and normal stats...


best idea ever, make 3 tabs, em stats normal and matchmaking, would be the best thing to do.

[Pylons]

Just give me my damn achievements and hats!!!!!!!!!!!!

[EvilRebel]

When you talk about map balance and layout are you then only talking about Caldavar? Because the map that really needs some work is Watchtower.

[Kmomentum]

S2 Im dissapoint , this game doesnt need a change.You made the game alot more interesting by adding chalice and striders , but i dont see a reason to make it any faster.Why do you need to buff casters more ?They realy shouldnt scale late game.I would agree on one and only thing ,bring back push strats.

[Santa]

I like this post and I trust S2 but please ... do not make it into EM and do A LOT of testing and consulting with competetive players before releasing anything.

[Addxor]

Sounds good, but I would like to hear some official thoughts about the exessive leaving in nostats-games and if some possible solutions to the problem have been debated?

[CryingGod]

Prohibitive Gold Mechanics

You guys ever going to fix last hits so legion/hellbourne stops getting them?
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?p=937177#post937177
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showpost.php?p=12165562&postcount=14

[Transfat]

Less talk, more action.

Rofl, and suddenly we forget about all of the people on the forums whining about how they want some form of update posts even if its just a small one.

[OMGWTF]

glad to see you've take the time to put together a nice little design update, very interesting read and i hope you provide these types of informational updates more often in the future

[pablofsi]

Right on the target.

Good work S2, good work.

[Skyve]

S2 Im dissapoint , this game doesnt need a change.You made the game alot more interesting by adding chalice and striders , but i dont see a reason to make it any faster.Why do you need to buff casters more ?They realy shouldnt scale late game.I would agree on one and only thing ,bring back push strats.

They don't want to make casters scale, S2 wants support heroes to be able to buy items, that are not wards. That's a big difference.

[Robb57]

I don't like moving toward faster gameplay.

To any console gamer out there: remember what happened to Call of Duty MW2? That game focused a lot more on fast paced, run-and-gun type play, and that's what made it suck. Cod4 was way better because it was slower and simpler. Rather than winning by running around holding down the trigger, or hiding in corners using kill streak rewards, in CoD4 you had to think about positioning, which guns should be used when, etc.

Conclusion:
More hectic, faster gameplay = less need for strategy and thinking
Slower, simpler gameplay = greater need for strategy and thinking

[Liska]

While I think most games are already going at a decent enough pace, I love the idea of good supports getting a little bit more love in the future.

[Sleepy_Toad]

I don't like moving toward faster gameplay.

To any console gamer out there: remember what happened to Call of Duty MW2? That game focused a lot more on fast paced, run-and-gun type play, and that's what made it suck. Cod4 was way better because it was slower and simpler. Rather than winning by running around holding down the trigger, or hiding in corners using kill streak rewards, in CoD4 you had to think about positioning, which guns should be used when, etc.

Conclusion:
More hectic, faster gameplay = less need for strategy and thinking
Slower, simpler gameplay = greater need for strategy and thinking

I really disagree beacuse; firstly CoD and HoN are way different (Captain Obvious to the rescue!), secondly, RTS games like HoN benefits from a fast pace (StarCraft, WarCraft etc.) especially since this game requires the whole team to coordinate and judge situations correctly. Thats just my two cents

I welcome these changes, if it doesn't work out at all there's still DOTA2 and DefenseCraft of the StarAncients. S2 hasn't let me down to a "GAME IS RUINED NAOW" degree ever... except maybe the first iteration of Engineer :engi:
Luckily no changes are irreversible or the last one

[Fuga]

Could've at least given examples. Literally learned nothing new from this except that you guys are doing what you should be doing.

[Sagit]

I like the post but the vagueness of it implies these changes are still in the early stages of development (aka tentative/undecided). Could you maybe be a little more specific? Other than that though, I like the direction you are going in. Good Job!!!

[Django]

Sounds like S2 wants to turn normal mode into easy mode.

thats exactly what came to my mind when reading the update

[pewpewstar]

I like it. I always have to cringe in a comp match @ the support hero that only has boots and a minor totem at the 30 min mark - as much as I like supporting I don't want to be that guy :)

[JohnnyDrama]

Too much of that reminded my of LoL , yet i have the faith guys , faith in u <3<£<£<3<3

you complete me S2 , more concept art please art department , lav u kingktulu <£3<3

[xank]

EM should not even exist. Period.

So...you copied it straight from DoTA, like you said, and its absolute garbage for a reason. It changes the mechanics, balance, strategies, game pace, and tries to achieve something that, like you said, is done very poorly.

You must be asking yourselves, "Why are we implementing game modes that undermine all our work?" Aren't you ?? Because you believe it to be "less stressful" ? Really? This is really your reasoning ?

Btw, the reason you had a much higher percentage of people playing this mode in beta was due to the fact that you had so many new people playing the new genre/game and trying it out.... a game mode called EASY MODE. How is this simple logic hard to see ? They chose the mode that the game itself calls EASY, yet in reality, has nothing to do with level of difficulty. Isn't this GLARINGLY obvious?

Finally, if you are going to change things around yet continue to keep EM, you MUST separate the stats. Simple fix. A player will just have 2 separate stats recorded for games played in either NM or in EM. If players want to mess around from time to time and play different modes, it will not be any issue like you have now. The simple fact that they are merged, creates the taboo and hatred of even thinking about playing in this "stress-free"(wtf?) mode.



TLDR: first line or separate the stats

[Ezzik]

TBH I'm already sick of burst aoe oriented play.

this...even tho it is making games fast paced, it requires little skill to get 2 heroes with heavy aoe damage like :fors: and :zeph: (just to name afew) and then have all your other 3 heroes hit/nuke everyone else out of the fight.

[Jager]

T-up to the direction you're heading. :)

[DrRepuIsor]

Some notes on Easy Mode

You know you'll eventually remove -em right?
I see it going that way and that is a good thing.

[SolarFlare22]

The easiest solution to the whole EM games debate is to separate normal and EM stats and PSR.

BAM, problem solved.

I had played about 50% EM in beta until it started being tracked, and it took me a month to get that number under 25%. Now I have 0% EM in retail, because I refuse to play a mode that will hinder my ability to play in other games or cause unnecessary ridicule since I'm unable to show that my NM stats are satisfactory, even if it's just for fun or to screw around.

If EM stats were separate, I might consider playing it, since I've already got a good grasp of the game from playing normal mode.

Other than that, I think it's great to get these types of forum updates about the game's progression. You mentioned something about making casters more effective into the late game. I hate to say it (I REALLY do), but LoL was intuitive when it came to that issue by allowing heroes to build items that increased magic damage output. That and their leaver system are the only things I can say LoL did somewhat right.

Please don't kill me for suggesting LoL stuff..

[RockCrock]

Fantastic.

[Kenjiwing]

This all seems like a really bad idea.. it seems like you're trying to separate yourself from your fan base..

[SaberTape]

I like this idea, to bring more heroes to change the metagame but also balancing.

[Blaky039]

GOGO supports! great work s2

[Token]

I liked what I read, and the stigma will always remain with em players, because the simple fact is playing em, IS NOT playing hon, as the mechanics are too different; as you mentioned.

I do/always will dislike Em/em players and never have/will play em

Edit: you should inform new account purchasers to avoid em games, and decide whether if they want to play em or no em once they are Atleast decent.

If you learn through em you will NEVER get good...

[sheff]

Encouraging read. I hope patches in the near future reflect what S2 is hinting at here.

[knowitall]

This sounds bad already.

[Cesious]

Increase to pushing, early ganking and team fights? Give Ophelia back her 1/2/2/3, required less farming and time to do just that which effectively fixes all the problems going on right now in the game. You heard it here first! Ophelia buff is required for HoN to get a strong game balance!

[r1g0]

I dislike these changes. If you're going to change the pace of the game i might aswell spend my money on Leagues of Legend.
you dont even know the actual changes yet! cmon! troll

[ObiTuarY]

nice work.

[GrizmoBlust]

Wow, amazing read. It does indeed makes a lot of valid points. I have nothing to say about this problem as I do see the same way as you, s2 games do.

+1 to S2 games for knowing how to make a game while keeping the customers satisfy.

Btw, I love how you guys put philosophy thoughts into words on problems that HoN has. I would love to work with you guys since I'm very philosophy on many things plus, I'm a artist. :p

[polynom]

Hope you don't add Ability Power for Support Heroes.

[IMMvp]

I remember once where i was super flamed by this forum for suggesting that supports were allowed items too.

Finally it seems S2 agree with this gameplay problem too.

Gj S2. Looking forward forward to see what you got in store for us.

[Jeroz]

As long as S2 encourages a huge variety of strategies in the gameplay I welcome those changes. If only pushing strat is popular again~ :P

[MarZBarZ]

Looks interesting, it's a shame that so many people see DotA mechanics as sacrosanct else the response may have been slightly more positive. The fact is that DotA is not a flawless product (it's constantly being fixed), and the red points basically highlight the old problems ported over from the map. In a world with DotA 2, I think It has become important for S2 to differentiate themselves from the next DotA clone to stay competitive.

I'll be objective about the changes and see where they take us.

[Onkelffs]

Good that you're taking some huge design steps away from DoTA. Since when DOTA2 is out I want two options of gameplay and not two options of game engine.

[iMbaQ]

What they are saying in terms of casters scaling is - as you seen in competitive games, they can be left with only a strider and chalice after 30 minutes, because there is just no gold for them, they die first in team battles - and all the assisting doesn't help them.

Now, we don't want them to suddenly get a sheepstick - but surely, a tablet at least, some bracers etc - which I think is good.

[whatisawhat]

Sounds like a few of the bad ideas from LOL are being added, yay?!

Also wasnt casters being good the whole game a prob during beta. Seems alot of casters have been nerfed to the ground cause they are too good for too long. (ds hb big stand outs). Seems after the nerfs to carrys that were too good early (aka the one with stuns) and the support that was good late (see above) s2 is going to undo it.

And on messing around with given exp, has the new dota one worked at all? Seems trying to stop tri lanes and making team fights better doesnt work.

[Ozram]

I support these changes, they will help for funnier matches

[Becajin]

I try to explain why giving supports items late is not a good idea. Lets imagine you play a meelee hard carry. you lane against a witchslayer support, he harresses the **** out of you, sets up kills on you, whatever. you keep calm because you know: in 30 minutes ill rape your ass and there is nothing you can do about it. but now support witchslayer does not only have boots and a bracer, he has a sheepstick, and his other supporterfriend has a frostfieldplate. you pop your shrunken and start attacking and Bam you get a frostfield in the face. as soon as shrunken wears of you are hexed. not only once but twice. you are now permadisabled because everybody has items. gratz you are useless, not only early but also late. Insert trollface.jpg on witchslayer.
Supports should not be able to buy items other then wards and the occasional lowprice support item (like tablet). otherwise they are TOO useful, and they carry over their early dominace to the lategame.

[TOOL`]

nice!

<3 s2

[Son]

I try to explain why giving supports items late is not a good idea. Lets imagine you play a meelee hard carry. you lane against a witchslayer support, he harresses the **** out of you, sets up kills on you, whatever. you keep calm because you know: in 30 minutes ill rape your ass and there is nothing you can do about it. but now support witchslayer does not only have boots and a bracer, he has a sheepstick, and his other supporterfriend has a frostfieldplate. you pop your shrunken and start attacking and Bam you get a frostfield in the face. as soon as shrunken wears of you are hexed. not only once but twice. you are now permadisabled because everybody has items. gratz you are useless, not only early but also late. Insert trollface.jpg on witchslayer.
Supports should not be able to buy items other then wards and the occasional lowprice support item (like tablet). otherwise they are TOO useful, and they carry over their early dominace to the lategame.

I suspect that you misunderstand S2's intentions. They're not looking to give support heroes massive farm and access to all of their ideal items; they're just looking to put them in a position where they're able to purchase items beyond wards and boots. A carry will still ultimately outfarm them. It's about striking a balance where support heroes get at least some reward for supporting their team.

The possibility of getting balanced heroes at a faster pace has also piqued my interest.

[ShakeNBake]

*NEWSFLASH*

HoN forced to take a leaf out of LoL's book in order to stay competitive in the DotA-genre market!

/discuss

[iaznaB]

I try to explain why giving supports items late is not a good idea. Lets imagine you play a meelee hard carry. you lane against a witchslayer support, he harresses the **** out of you, sets up kills on you, whatever. you keep calm because you know: in 30 minutes ill rape your ass and there is nothing you can do about it. but now support witchslayer does not only have boots and a bracer, he has a sheepstick, and his other supporterfriend has a frostfieldplate. you pop your shrunken and start attacking and Bam you get a frostfield in the face. as soon as shrunken wears of you are hexed. not only once but twice. you are now permadisabled because everybody has items. gratz you are useless, not only early but also late. Insert trollface.jpg on witchslayer.
Supports should not be able to buy items other then wards and the occasional lowprice support item (like tablet). otherwise they are TOO useful, and they carry over their early dominace to the lategame.


^this

[MarZBarZ]

Wild speculation is wild

[Ch1cken]

I really don't understand what s2 is thinking wanting to make games faster.

Using the chalice as an example for "faster game pace" we see that it has caused several very popular heroes to be imbalanced. Chalice has made heroes like zues/behe/voodoo/hammer/20 other heroes completely rigged, and other heroes who don't benefit from this item completely underpowered(tree/magebane/plague/etc). And dont forget that chalice has completely destroyed silencer(AND HE IS STILL BEING NERFED). The item has completely destroyed the metagame and I DON'T want to see hereoes being balanced off it.

I think striders are fine they need to be just a little bit more expensive(500 recipe).

Another issue that bob saggot has mentioned is that because you've introduced so many gankers into the game to shorten game lengths, half of my games I HAVE to run around with a gank squad/counter gank squad, PROLONGING THE GAME.

"We also find that the tower AI is somewhat punishing to push attempts and could behave a little more consistently." I'm very happy that you guys will admit that the tower mechanics are not consistent.

As for the map section, I find this kind of unsettling.

The biggest issue I think that s2 has when balancing ANYTHING is that instead of changing 1 thing(thus having a control) they change MULTIPLE things and then gauge the "balance", try having a control it helps.

Just listen to me s2, I play with the guy that had the banana idea.

[MeVe]

My post has been removed, I think they don't want to admit that HoN is becoming League of Legends 2

You have yet some summoner spell:
Ghost = Strider
Clarity = Chalice

Go implement AOE circle mod, remove deny, add AP and make EM normal game.

Welcome to LoL 2.

I tryed to do some suggestion even on upcoming content, but now I lost hope.. fortunatly DOTA 2 next year :)

[Dordanov]

Very nice post Fielding, I like the fact you took some time to update us on your long term vision/plans now that we are bit falling behind on the new features until TMM and the Editor are ready (and ofcourse it's totally logical these things take a long time).

I like the fact that support is being looked at. Maybe there could be a system that gives discount on some items depending on your farm? For example looking at creep kills, gold earned and gold spent on support items (wards, potions, things like that) while factoring in the current game time, and then determining the amount of discount that will be given on items like boots, bracers, tablet, maybe even astrolabe and such.
Items like Sheepstick, Frostfield etc I'd consider too powerful to get a discount, but some items could be given a discount without giving the support too much of a boost.

Ofcourse those discounts should only be handed out to people struggling in the game, not a (Semi)support which has good farm.

[Devigaz]

High five S2, fresh ideas is what will make this game live for a long time.

People, especially gamers are afraid of change since it forces them to rethink their strategies, the way they play. The few unhappy with game pace changes will probably leave, whine HoN becomes LoL etc.

Don't bother though, the majority will love the changes after a while. Action paced games are the ones best remembered, not farmfests and turtle-strats.
There simply should be an equal reason-ability in different strategies.

Good luck with these plans, looking forward to what you come up with to change game pace especially.

[Manical]

I support these changes, they will help for funnier matches
Im just talking from personal experience here... But since all this focus on ganking started my games have become alot longer in general. All these ganking heroes do is delay the other team's carrys farm, resulting in even longer turtle games as no team will be able to push untill their carry has decent farm. Another side effect is that there's too high risk for a carry to even join midgame teamfights as its currently suicide walking into all the nukers without shrunken head+dps item. This in turn turns the midgame into a 4v4 while each team's carry solo farm. Atleast this sums up my last 50 serious games.

[BadaBing]

Such a huge change will require not only unbelievable skilled guys in the balance section, but also a huge amount of luck and timing.

I do find it weird that it took you about 8 years of DotA and 3 years of developing HoN, before you realized that you needed to make such huge changes to the recipe in order to make it successful. You must have been in love with DotA in the first place (which "suffers" from the same issues as pointed out in the OP), and yet you suddenly want to change a lot of the basics drastically? At least it didn't take Demigod and LoL 3 years of development, before they realized that changes needed to be made.

Another note is that when I think of S2, "balancing gosus" isn't really the first thing that comes to mind. In the OP both Blood Chalice and Striders are given as examples, and they are IMO some of the most flawed items in the game. I also remember the "XP change" on the beta-beta, and I can't believe such a brainfart even made it into the beta-beta!?!

Guess its do-or-die time now for HoN/S2, and tbh it isn't looking too good. This is - sadly - the first time I've been happy that DotA2 is announced, as us freaks will be able to play the game/genre that we have grown to love.

[Shadow_Snow]

I like to rice farm .. gank oriented ruins everything every two seconds a gank cba -.-

[Jeroz]

You have yet some summoner spell:
Ghost = Strider
Clarity = Chalice


dude what are you talking about?

ghost = :EnhancedMarchers:
Clarity = :RingOfSorcery:

both were dota ports. not to mention the ridiculously long cd time for those spells.

At the moment I would love to see a push strat that's less affected by the usual gank squad. Gank has become too much of a trend now that you see less of other strategies going around

[DarkAgonizer]

The Game is fast pace action orientated already
Loosing gold in team fights benefits the casters
If the carry don`t lose gold it will dis-balance the game
and games last 40 min average witch is fine
new items new heroes is great....

[Ch1cken]

You know whats really funny...

s2 made all these new ganker heroes and all we see in competitive play are :devo::andr::slit::pebb::vood::witc::phar::behe::g lac:. I find that funny.

[Gwydion]

Faster paced should probably read more along the lines of more action oriented. The direction of these discussion points & observations should not read into "making the game easier to play" or "lowering the skill cap". It should read more like, non-action oriented farming of PvE while foresaking PvP action or pushing is a play style that should continue to be squeezed out of the game.

This seems like a pretty gigantic undertaking. DoTA took years and years to achieve game play and game mechanics that flowed well. I think the development team needs to focus on delivering the things that were promised before release, before undertaking a possibly impossible task of tweaking core game mechanics.

Maybe that's just me, I don't know. But this thread makes me worry that S2 games will try and make HoN cater to the masses of casual players. As a short term financial decision, this is great, but it might cost you the loyalty of a lot of players.

[Gwydion]

Such a huge change will require not only unbelievable skilled guys in the balance section, but also a huge amount of luck and timing.

I do find it weird that it took you about 8 years of DotA and 3 years of developing HoN, before you realized that you needed to make such huge changes to the recipe in order to make it successful. You must have been in love with DotA in the first place (which "suffers" from the same issues as pointed out in the OP), and yet you suddenly want to change a lot of the basics drastically? At least it didn't take Demigod and LoL 3 years of development, before they realized that changes needed to be made.

Another note is that when I think of S2, "balancing gosus" isn't really the first thing that comes to mind. In the OP both Blood Chalice and Striders are given as examples, and they are IMO some of the most flawed items in the game. I also remember the "XP change" on the beta-beta, and I can't believe such a brainfart even made it into the beta-beta!?!

Guess its do-or-die time now for HoN/S2, and tbh it isn't looking too good. This is - sadly - the first time I've been happy that DotA2 is announced, as us freaks will be able to play the game/genre that we have grown to love.

I share some of the same worries.

[DutchFlame]

Holy ****. Nice news update.

I actually like this assist thing you guys are focusing on. It's finally worth assisting and not getting the kill. This would also solve the Killsteal issue.

I like they way hon is moving, but words do not do much.

So I hope this will all be done, and in a short time if possible. The more balance the more fun!

[Tzaa]

Thanks for giving the support a hand, thumbs up!

[Jeroz]

Maybe they are just pointing out their design philosophy behind those new content and balances so people won't go "wtf S2!?" as much

Fingers crossed that those changes will be implemented slowly to allow the general tone and strategy to develop by itself without feeling too forced. Both Strider and Chalice got introduced really close to each other and both produced a significant alteration to the way the game's being played.

HoN is gradually breaking away from the "rofl dota-clone" false image it had. While I welcome changes, I still hope it retains the unique skillful dota gameplay that it was adapted from.

[Puff]

Lack of Caster & Support hero options for progression
Another issue we have relates to how support-oriented heroes currently progress in the game. They naturally should be supporting their team - but often this support comes at high personal sacrifice, and the result is that there are very few options left to support players in terms of how to progress their character and stay relative past the early-mid game. This concern isn't one of balance - it's clear from competitive games that support heroes are both necessary and effective, it's a question of how rewarding the role is and what we can do to keep the skill ceiling high and allow other progression options for support players. As a carry scales in his ability to deal damage to the enemy team, so should a support player scale in their ability to support their team. This issue relates closely to the last point in the prohibitive gold mechanics section above.

We also are very sensitive to the subject of how early-game caster-oriented heroes fit into the game. There is a point in every game in which these heroes start to lose relevance, and the physical DPS heroes (carries) gain relevance. As we increase the pace of the game and induce more team fights, a side effect of increased gold, experience, and level gain will result. This may mean that caster oriented heroes lose relevance even more quickly, perhaps before they can make a meaningful contribution to the outcome of the game. Currently casters usually remain viable in the late game due to disables (or buying items like Sheep Stick if they don't have any built in disables), and while that will likely always be true to a degree, we do want to make sure there's a bit more depth to playing these characters, by providing other options for them. These heroes are very important to the feel, fun, and pace of HoN - they bring a lot of the excitement and we want want to make sure they remain viable and interesting to play.


Are you concidering Item mechanics that work similar to Sacrificial stone :SacrificialStone: ? I.e. items that scale if you participated in team fights/get assists but scale down if you are unsuccesfull. I think that such a development direction would be very interesting.

[Xtra]

More Heros, Less crashes. Thats all I want/need :D

[AltF4]

Top notch text. Achive 50% of that u discussed and u got the game!

[Emptronic]

Thanks for the update Fielding.

[Kolapz]

A lot of people assuming a lot of stuff that is not even hinted in the OP as a case in point for their argument.
A lot of people assuming a lot of stuff about other people and making it seem like their personal opinion is the opinion of everyone else.

What the OP says is more action, more team-fights, make supporting fun, make all strategies viable (turtle, push, gank, whatever).
What the OP does NOT say is 15 minute insta-gibbing slaughterfests with support heroes with insane farm and the only viable strategy is ganking.

People need to get some reading comprehension and common sense, instead of jumping on the "S2 wtf u sux gimme my dota back" bandwagon.

[Kmomentum]

Its ok , dota 2 will fix it.

[Toolz]

I think the development team needs to focus on delivering the things that were promised before release, before undertaking a possibly impossible task of tweaking core game mechanics.


I think you're missing the separation of job responsibilities here, the designers don't do the actual engine code work that is required for match making and the map editor so working on balance changes really doesn't delay delivery of those things.

[AychAychAych]

Lo and behold, as large number of people misinterpret what Fielding said.

[Andrioid]

The only thing wrong with the metagame in terms of casters is the instant "female-dog" status they get. It's a classic public syndrome to pick carry, just so you're not the game's btch.

Which usually leaves teams without support or one guy who must buy courier, upgrade the courier, buy all the wards, etc... Then eventually that player becomes lacking in levels and gear. Then of course, he's a "noob", should "l2p"... that same old chestnut.

Some sort of "team" bonus could work. Like awarding extra xp or gold to players that place good wards, let support players reclaim some of their early courier money in "monkey rent", etc.

In any case - nobody wants to play support any more, not even the players who like the support heroes (like me). (cracks at my stats welcome, i'm not going pro)

[Fielding]

I wanted to add a note that we do have some of the best players in the game testing and giving feedback. Nothing is going to go live into retail HoN without going through that filter of feedback and MUCH testing.

[vocab]

Its ok , dota 2 will fix it.

Source engine downgrades legacy games. See 1.6/TFC/DOD. Dota 2 will most likely be ****.

It's all good though Cloth Physics are wayyyy more important than actual game play.

One of the things I want to see is more heroes that introduce new game play mechanics, and force current team line ups to pick other heroes to deal with them.

[Ch1cken]

Source engine downgrades legacy games. See 1.6/TFC/DOD. Dota 2 will most likely be ****.

It's all good though Cloth Physics are wayyyy more important than actual game play.

One of the things I want to see is more heroes that introduce new game play mechanics, and force current team line ups to pick other heroes to deal with them.

Youd base the source engine off those... really?

Whats wrong with CSS(great game with around the same amount of people playing it than 1.6). TF2 was better than tf1. DODS was terrible. How bout hl2 though? l4d? portal?

[Nubb3r]

i am afraid i will have to go to dota 2
i dont want s2 to change anything in this direction
i just want my match making and some/a lot of new heroes
thats all i want
if you give me achievements and other stuff, then i say ok cool
but i dont want shorter games and this bs
its just fine right now except for the striders and blood chalice which are
favoring a ganking and burst hero play ...
im afraid this will get so noobish like LoL
thats all i have to say about that.

[Santa]

I wanted to add a note that we do have some of the best players in the game testing and giving feedback. Nothing is going to go live into retail HoN without going through that filter of feedback and MUCH testing.

Couldn't you have quoted my post so I would feel more important? :( :( :(

:blac:

[I_sawYOU]

More usefull heros with combination spells like chief tain in dota and usefull items. every game the carry the same items. :)

[Steffen]

hmm, I like farming, but I also like action and teamfights.

well, I would like to see where this ship is heading....

on a sidenote though, dont spend (waste harhar) too much time on easy mode :/

[DevilDante]

The thing is doing things like that you need to be careful as it will just become like LoL where it does not matter who gets the farm and the game just becomes dull and with less strat. Also champs like hag will become gods.

[MeVe]

dude what are you talking about?

ghost = :EnhancedMarchers:
Clarity = :RingOfSorcery:

both were dota ports. not to mention the ridiculously long cd time for those spells.

At the moment I would love to see a push strat that's less affected by the usual gank squad. Gank has become too much of a trend now that you see less of other strategies going around

ghost in LoL make you faster than ghost marcher and it last more seconds, strider are endless haste to engage a battle.

Ring of Sorcery cost 1675 gold, no need other to explain.

[OH`HAI]

From what I have seen, I think the current meta game is either fine the way it is, or just a few tweaks need to be made with the kinks of the game. Honestly like there is no need to "MAKE" the game go by faster, if people want to play a game to go by faster, that's why there is EASY mode and such, for people to get in, kill 4-5 people and get fed and end the game fast, have their fun there. Of course normal/non-em is fine the way it is for people who want to run games with their set five/team and run out the strategies they want to do or just plain out play for fun, whatever they want. People bought this game because well honestly, coming from me who never played DOTA, I watched my cousins and friends play DOTA and thought to myself, looks fun but, WC3 graphics engine sucks and just doesn't look very appealing to me. Then when I was told about HON I was appealed by the graphics, although not insanely stunning and stuff, I figured it would be enough for others to play as well and it looked pretty good.

I stopped playing for a bit just to take a bit of a break from it and I come back to these items called Striders and Chalice, they are alright, they definitely change the game by a huge margin, everyone knows the current meta game is gank gank gank heavy and the new "tri-lanes" are being played out; I can agree on alter some things to maybe change up the scene a bit or make it more viable to use other strategies; but I do not see a point in almost changing the entire gameplay and layout of the game, people bought this game for a reason, because it was a remake of DOTA that was prettier and although not 100% the same, it was damn near enough to make them buy it for 30 bucks, not to have it change into an entirely different game.

[MeVe]

I bought this game because was DotA, HoN is no more DotA, I'll buy DOTA 2 because is DotA.

[Jeroz]

ghost in LoL make you faster than ghost marcher and it last more seconds, strider are endless haste to engage a battle.

Ring of Sorcery cost 1675 gold, no need other to explain.

Ghost: "Your Champion ignores unit collision and moves 27% faster for 14 seconds."
:EnhancedMarchers: :+12% Movement Speed, Unitwalking
Strider:When out of combat for 6 seconds, increases movespeed by 100 over the next 2 seconds. No unit walking

Strider is more similar to another boot from LoL than to Ghost. Revise the fact first please. Yes the stats will be twitched, but it's natural given the basic stats are different from both games.
Also, the reason why LoL has those spells is so people DON'T have to spend money on the items. Are you seriously using the fact that you have to spend money RoC as a counter argument? well guess what Blood Chalice costs you 650 gold as well.

[MeVe]

Blood Chalice cost 350 gold after in lane and you can buy it on outpost.

Ring cost 1500 after in lane and you need the recipe.

That's how all has been ruined.

[pablofsi]

Yeah, and ring has an aoe mana healing which heals 675 mana to the whole team. Compare it with the 150 mana healing that provides chalice to one person.

[OH`HAI]

Yeah, and ring has an aoe mana healing which heals 675 mana to the whole team. Compare it with the 150 mana healing that provides chalice to one person.

He makes a pretty good point... :blac:

[MeVe]

Yeah, and ring has an aoe mana healing which heals 675 mana to the whole team. Compare it with the 150 mana healing that provides chalice to one person.

Im talking about lane, no big problem of chalice outside of lane phase..

Like strider outside of ganking phase ( in 5vs5 are not so powerfull )

[Mendo]

TL;DR
lots of awsome ****

[Maliken]

There is no itention of "making" or forcing games to go faster. If teams are incentivized to push more and to engage in PvP action more, games will shorten across the 10's of 1000's of matches played daily on average. We currently see ~38 min games. We would like to see that shorten by 10-15%

There are no new huge changes to be had here. HoN is not taking a drastic step in one direction or another. As Fielding always says, don't underestimate the power of small tweaks.

[OH`HAI]

Well even with that said, I was wondering why even after you pushed out your new hero there were no post or like anything on your main website as like the ones for Flint, Doctor, and Tundra. You guys just kinda made him and threw him into a new patch without much word on the matter, at least I didn't see much promo for him.

[Natial]

I am very glad you guys post this information here. LIKE!

[Cyferion]

Looking forward to a game where Pyro is actually picked..
:witc: has always been a better pick than :pyro:

http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/images/heroes/94/ability1_128.jpg:
Phoenix Wave

Now deals additional 10/20/30/40 damage for ever charge of Fervor (burn) on target.


http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/images/heroes/94/ability4_128.jpg
Blazing Strike


Grants Pyromancer with 4 charges of Fervor if fervor is leveled.

How will this change pyro? First, Fervor making Phoenix Wave deal more damage depending on stacks of Fervor on the target, will allow Pyromancer to scale better late-game as he will be able to stack more Fervor with more attack speed.
Secondly, Pyromancer will now use Blazing Strike as an Opener to maximize the use of the instant 4 stacks on Fervor granting him huge attackspeed to stack fervor (burn) on the target, then finish him off with a highly-fervor-stacked Phoenix Wave

http://www.playdota.com/forums/assault_fps/smilies/heroes/lina.gifLina Inverse
- Laguna Blade (Aghanim's version) damage increased from 600/875/1150 to 600/925/1250

[RaiN`]

i'm looking forward to these changes! for people who play hon not that frequently like me, its always frustrating to play your one single game per day, spending nearly an hour of your time and ending with a score of 1-6-15 bcuz playing support and maybe losing the game too...

after such games i think everytime why i wasted this hour of lifetime which was meant to make me happy and distract me from serious working stuff but just mad me angry and frustrated.

[burntchomsky]

I posted an item in [Suggested] for supports which attempted to address most of what was mentioned about the "support problem" in Fielding's post.

http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=175445

The other thing the item does is give a small amount of "assist gold" to supports in the area of a carry when he is last hitting. The idea being that this would support good babysitting early in the game. Might not be at all viable, but I have thought for awhile that there needs to be more incentive for playing supports in this game than there is currently.

[Fieri]

For example, in an evenly matched game, if a team fight occurs and 4 people from each team die, more gold is lost in player deaths than is gained in player kills (assuming no players were on a kill streak and therefore worth bonus gold). The net result is that team fights are, quite often, taking more gold out of the game than they introduce. This is the type of thing that does nothing other than slow the game pace down and indirectly discourages team fights and engagements.

Another issue we're observing relates to how gold distribution is handled. There is currently not much of a distinction between a player who is actively engaged in helping get kills, resulting in a lot of assists, and a player who does not aim to help by assisting. In the interest of encouraging more team vs team engagements, this is something we're looking into. There's a big difference between a 1-8-20 Demented Shaman, for example, and a 1-8-5. We want to take steps to make sure that the player who is actively attempting to help out the team and participate in fights is being rewarded above players that play too passively.



The problem of hon being a nonzero sum game (at least, when it comes to gold) is not one that I see as easily fixable or maybe even a problem. Lessening the gold penalty for dying buffs carries; increasing the gold earned when you kill someone encourages pubstomping, punishes inexperienced players even more, and could result in swingy games. Additionally, I am not sure that this actually slows down the game that much. Opponents deprived of gold are more likely to lose, shortening the game. Opponents who do not lose as much gold are more likely to be able to keep fighting you for longer, prolonging the game. Only if you reward players more for kills do you potentially shorten games because a single early team fight might decide an entire game. But this last option seems undesirable as well.

I am not sure if players need more in-game incentive to help assisting. The difference between 1-8-20 and an 1-8-5 Demented Shaman is that the first one's team wins, and the other one's team may not. Good players do not need further incentive. Some tweaks could be done (lessen the gold for a kill slightly, increase the gold for an assist slightly) but the implications could be pretty big.

More generally, I see games with blood chalice and striders as already fast paced. Turtling is still possible and viable, but even in competitive games, I do not see turtle fests all that often. Additionally, making trade offs such as letting their carry farm for getting your own carry farmed are tactically interesting, even if they aren't mindblowingly exciting. Rewarding pushing might be the only thing you need to do to encourage team fights and pushing as a strategy more generally.

I think some interesting tweaks could be made to give heroes in general more variety and support heroes more specifically. This could happen at an item level, or at an ability level (for example, I am surprised we still have the +2 to stats option in hon after level 16, when at least some heroes could be designed / redesigned to scale a little differently). As has been said, these tweaks could be made without making supports into carry-like heroes.

[vocab]

Youd base the source engine off those... really?

Whats wrong with CSS(great game with around the same amount of people playing it than 1.6). TF2 was better than tf1. DODS was terrible. How bout hl2 though? l4d? portal?

CSS is a horrible port job. Made the game slower, less competitive, completely random, bigger hitboxes, ****ed up recoil, inconsistent net code (1.6 is guilty of this as well), and a huge amount of bugs that will never get fixed. It feels very unfinished, and the lack of polish is a huge turn off.
TF2 being better than TFC is debatable. The games achievement farming, and item whoring, and random crits should stay out of fps. I know the appeal, but the game play isn't all that balanced. Every class has broken ****. Both games pale in comparison to the original Team fortress in Quake.
DODS is terrible.

Those other games were built for that engine, so they get a pass since they weren't port jobs (ala Half Life source, which is crappy). Dota2 is essentially going to be a 1:1 port right? It will meet the same fate as CSS. People will play it, but the audience it's for won't accept it. People take the competitive features hon have for granted, and will soon realize this when Dota2 comes out with poor stat tracking, and the bad replay system the source engine is capable of.

[Xuconnie]

Don't underestimate the power of small tweaks means remake every hero and not do small tweaks :]

[EGNesTea420]

and the bad replay system the source engine is capable of.

There's a good chance it'll be able to support something like HLTV if you think about it.

Also the thing about TF2 is that comp is generally played with no crits on and mostly default weapons. The rest of the stuff are for pub games. TFC was a great game but the nade spam was really annoying.

[TRYTROUSERS]

the game is already ridiculously dull. it is a rarity that you dont see ws, voodoo, valk, flint, archer, glacius, slither in a game. usually games are decided by which team got a ranged semi-carry (if you picked scout you lost) and who got more of the item-independant support heros. rarely do we ever see interesting strategies anymore. making the games into 30 minute brosquad vs brosquad competitions is just going push the game even further in this direction, towards low-risk ranged heros with nukes/disables. the again considering how s2 won't change a permabanned stale hero like valk but will nerf a melee carry like DL at the drop of the hat, are we really surprised?

also if you change em around so that we're forced to trilane and ward ***** on heros like witch slayer and glacius, i am giving my account away. i don't care what chu or kuroky thinks about it, i dont find this part of the game fun and i dont want to be forced to do it.

[Hsssh]

There is no itention of "making" or forcing games to go faster. If teams are incentivized to push more and to engage in PvP action more, games will shorten across the 10's of 1000's of matches played daily on average. We currently see ~38 min games. We would like to see that shorten by 10-15%On what statistics this 38min game is based? If it includes all pubs, ems and competitive games then i think it`s rather skewed. Or can you somehow select only "high psr" when counting average?

Anyway, as i understand, if match isn`t epic wtf close you`d like it to end somewhere around 30min mark, right?

[Assassine]

sounds good. Keep it up :)

[Ind1goFloW]

S2 simply isnt experienced enough to grasp that the way the game is going right now we are getting further and further away from a balanced game. Which should be the #1 aim to achieve tbfh.
Stop with the forced metagame changes. Players find new tactics by themselves that change the metagame, see dota. Balance the heroes instead, especially melee ones. Fix creep aggro btw, has been said for months. If you want this game to be like dota at least make sure the creep aggro mechanic is the same, its essential.

What I saw so far:

Dota: Famous team finds a new tactic with certain heroes. Tactic gets copied by other team and gets imba due to more experience using it. --> metagame shift. Icefrog releases a patch that buffs/nerfs certain heroes and mechanics to stop the abuse of that tactic --> metagame shifts again.

HoN: S2 randomly changes game mechanics. Famous team finds new tactic/loophole thanks to the changes and abuses it -->metagame shift.

Youre doing it wrong S2. The metagame has to be formed by the players, not by you. Then its your job to fix imbalances that reoccur. I repeat: DONT force metagame shifts. You were going in the wrong direction in the last few patches already which can be seen by the reoccuring same lineups and trilanes. Theres a reason the game has carries, melee and support heroes. Stop forcing the game to be ranged int-agi with stun only. Boring.

[onaprayer]

the rewarding for assists sounds nice to me. Might actually see ppl want to play support. As it stand you play it knowing that there is a 90% chance you are going to die every team fight. Between letting your carry farm and get kills + getting wards and courier you have no gold left for survivability. However it also means there will be no squishy support hero to take out in fights.
Also you plan on increasing the overall gold earned from teambattles which would reduce the need for farming thus increasing the pace of the game.
Sounds good in theory but I wouldn't call these changes "minor tweaks".

[Hotashi]

TF2 being better than TFC is debatable. The games achievement farming, and item whoring, and random crits should stay out of fps. I know the appeal, but the game play isn't all that balanced. Every class has broken ****.

you know nobody with a brain does this right :warb::warb:

you're a cute tryhard

[WindRaven]

I'm cautiously optimistic about this post. More exciting games are good, but as with all attempts to change an established game's play, it can backfire very easily in the most unexpected of places.

Tread carefully, S2.

[Gorb]

HoN: S2 randomly changes game mechanics. Famous team finds new tactic/loophole thanks to the changes and abuses it -->metagame shift.
I think you got a spelling error there. I didn't think "randomly" was how you spelled "with a lot of forethought".

[Hsssh]

S2 simply isnt experienced enough to grasp that the way the game is going right now we are getting further and further away from a balanced game.

And you obviously are experienced enough to know everything.

[ImIceIce]

faster game = higher exp and gold lead = GG 15min oh yea you should lower concede vote time. :)

[Kmomentum]

Source engine downgrades legacy games. See 1.6/TFC/DOD. Dota 2 will most likely be ****.

It's all good though Cloth Physics are wayyyy more important than actual game play.

One of the things I want to see is more heroes that introduce new game play mechanics, and force current team line ups to pick other heroes to deal with them.
Wrong game , dota isnt anything like those games.Check Starcraft-Starcraft2.

[Anborn]

Just make the gold bonus from killing a tower scaleable baesd on when you kill it. That way that if you take down a tower before the "normal" time (whatever time period the devs decide a L1/L2/L3 should normally be pushed), you get incentivized greatly for doing so. That will keep pushes pushing.

auto-retreat problem solved. would also probably encourage more HomecomingStone usage to defend pushes.

[Juuto]

I'm so glad Support may be getting attention so it's a lot more fun in item choice :D

[Cesious]

For an honest concern to start with:
Give healing heroes assists for healing.

That would help supports a LOT. Ophelia, Nymphora, etc. That would give them a lot more gold than otherwise. Apply it to mana recovery, healing and support items used within the last X seconds to buff whoever was killing.

Compare Ophelia's ult to Sand Wraith's ult for example. Both are global, but Ophelia can score 0 assists while Sand Wraith can score 5 assists, though Ophelia's can spell the difference between life and death while Sand Wraith's in a team fight doesn't add up a lot of damage(Due to lack of deserted and whether it's crowded if you have mock).

[obi]

Please give us a casual (preferably with stats un-viewable) lobby for gaming separate from ranked matchmaking and PSR rated games. As it is, PSR can make a casual game with friends very difficult to start because it encourages leaving the lobby unless the % is very close to even or in your favor.

There are some people who thrive on the competitive aspect and will always self select themselves towards more difficult competition. For dota this was generally the guys who played on the US East server because that's where someone setup a whole third party leaver tracking system (TDA, IIRC) and that's where the 'clan matches' went down. PSR does a very good job of catering to these people; team matchmaking will be better when it arrives. The flip side to that coin is that there will also always be people (or sometimes the competitive types will want a break) who self select themselves towards more casual play, who would rather try out stupid new builds than work on perfecting their ability to play the optimal one, and who would rather be matched up against completely random people for a much faster lobby, knowing that whichever way the game goes it won't have any long term affect on them; these people don't really have an outlet in HoN.

The usual argument against free form lobbies is that they disadvantage sub-par players who can only expect to get stomped. As a counter to this I would offer the argument that if both systems were available they'd be free to self-select towards whichever they enjoyed more, I would also argue that 'good' players would be more willing to play with and help 'bad' players in an environment where the bad players weren't likely to have a permanent negative affect on the 'good' players stats (and in this way, HoN took an already horrible community and made it worse). I'd also offer up the anecdote that my pubstomps with friends in dota, to my recollection, tended to have an even lower win rate than my HoN pubstomps, because we spent more time screwing around with each other, hosts would let 'bad' friends play, and we operated under the assumption that our opposition would always be horrible enough to let us pull back for a victory. To me this was far more enjoyable and a large part of the reason my HoN gametime has significantly scaled back in recent weeks.

No-stats is a completely unacceptable alternative for casual/gimmick play because not only does it come with the rampant game leaving of dota, but having PSR and stats viewable in game means it comes with almost all the drawbacks to starting games that PSR brings.

Also please please please add Deathmatch/OMG/WTF modes asap, ARDM always had it's own following in dota and was far and away my own personal favorite, I beseech you from the bottom of my heart to add it to HoN.

P.S. also Techies

[vocab]

Wrong game , dota isnt anything like those games.Check Starcraft-Starcraft2.

Starcraft 2 has the same game play as SC1 though. The fundamentals haven't changed at all, and that's why people accept the game. Bnet2.0 aside.

Besides I'm talking about the source engine, and the limitations that come with it.

Anyway, I'm not derailing anymore. I look forward to the S2 improvements.

[Dae]

How the **** is HoN going to be fun for half the heroes if you wanna turn it into hero arena rather than DotA on an improved engine?

Timmy McCasual isn't gonna want to play support even if wards ejaculate gold because at the end of the day you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. You cannot change player mentality to play support which you obviously are trying to do since anyone who has even any interest in improving their game sucks it up as support and it has been fine forever. Your excuses are basically that HoN tournaments take too long which is ****ing retarded and casuals can go **** themselves if they want shorter games, not everything has to be 10 minute death matches and if that's what they want I think Black Ops is out soon where they can inevitable flail around in their own feces. If you don't want teams to play it safe, remove wards, keeper eyes, scout wards, tundra bird etc because hey safe is for idiots and how dare people not play the game S2 wants it to be played. People should be making their own tactics, not your terribad design choices which are obviously full of Nome and you should know that if you wanna pull the competitive line that they take the path of least resistance to winning. Tri lanes now, before it was push, and before it was turtle. Remember when 5 had a hard on for puppet master and probably played the same puppet strategy for months. Yea.

If you going to implement this abortion of design choices, make it optional like easy mode and call it Nome mode or Nome arena. Maybe I speak for a minority but you have a sick net code, dedicated servers, reconnect, map hack free and stat tracking and in my opinion, you want to **** on it all with ideas Ray Charles can see are bad. Valve will bound to **** DotA 2 up with something as I imagine a map hack will be out soon enough and be full of hats and achievements which will affect game play, or it will just be badly implemented like that excuse of a game L4D2.

[Kenpachi1337]

dont waste your time on trying to make the comunity more lenient towards EM players... its a waste of time.
Sure you could try and balance it more and this is ofcourse what we want you to do as S2, as the same thing goes for every mode there is... the more balanced it is the more it will be enjoyed by the comunity.
Fact reamains however that there is a difference in gameplay between EM and non EM this change is meant, and therefore you will never remove it and people will thus continue to treat both styles different. I mean, i too like to play some EM games now and then especially if im playing with certain real life friends who in my opinion dont understand the depth of the normal mode games... This game simply requires alot of knowledge that comes with time, and ofcourse can be gained by reading up on alot of information on these forums, but heck... not every person is like that and some will never even bother looking here...

IMO you should make it more like the name suggests, make it easier... less information dependent... for example, before you learn how to stack and / or pull neutral creep camps takes an ammount of playing experience, thus turn it off...? OR make it less benificial.

Another way to deal with this problem is to inform your comunity better, make a more detailed learning system for the game, i know you guys are trying to work on this otherwise we wouldnt have seen Nigma taking its rightfull place...
but come on, you guys know the current tutorial is just crap...
Yes it tell you about SOME of the basics but it comes down to this:
in the tutorial you currently just get some (almost random) facts about the game as it is and get to push to the shrine against a completely retarded AI darklady...
you could fix this by making the tutorial more like... you can choose whether you like to spent HOURS practicing before starting real games or just want a quick walkthrough... i mean, you say there are items in the game and sort of what they do... but you dont go over hero roles in a 5v5 setup or the different ways you can take with the item builds on different heroes.

so... there are alot of routes to take into increasing gameplay... IMO you should let more people from the comunity help you who already know alot about the game such as competitive HoN players with alot of DotA background...

[Zygfrix]

I wont ever play with em fools , full stop. Pro players like me have 0%EM so I always remember to kick them

[E_Honda`]

I'm overall pleased with these design ideas. All us dota players fear change, but you gotta step back and think. Who doesn't want more action in their game? Who doesn't want to be rewarded more for winning a fight, or playing a good support role?

I remember when the talks of the gank metagame was their focus and then they delivered us Chipper and Fayde. Ahhhhh good times. Heroes like that are action action action! Bring on the exciting play!

[Brishen]

how about giving gold for denies?

[T0x]

So what would happen if the NM vs EM argument was the other way around?

What if the EM players outnumbered the NM players and constantly berated them for their mode preference.
Would you then take the time to masticate normal mode, pick it apart because of an elitist argument perpetuated by immature trolls?

People should be welcomed to play on either mode... not told that their personal preference is wrong by people who don't even play EM.
You say you understand why the EM community likes EM... but if you truly understood why we liked it you wouldn't change it based on banter from the NM elitist crowd.

As far as changing it actually goes... I really don't give a toss what you do to it. But the way you're putting a smile and a flower on,
"Dev team and associated bum-buddies hate em, everyone who doesn't has to suffer now"
is just another example of how incredibly biased the dev team can be.

Above all else: Easy mode mechanics have been fine since DotA, the only problem EM mechanics cause is some sort of pole up the anus for NM players.
Why change it at all?
Why is it now suddenly negative mechanics?(oh hai dota2 incoming)

If you're changing said mechanics with best intentions to the EM players and not to appease the NM elitists. Why has the EM community not been approached about this prior to springing it upon us that EM is being raped?

Will there be a discussion thread for us to say what we would want changed(IF ANYTHING)?

[you_suck]

your ****ing off the game hopefully dota 2 wont sell out to idiots who think speeding up the game will make it better, in actual fact it will be far LESS skill orientated, you say farming or "turtling it" is a bad thing but it's a part of the game's strategy, you take that away it'll just be the better caster team carries wont even exist

[Alienbrain]

TBH I'm already sick of burst aoe oriented play.

Totally agree...

It feels like HoN's variety is shrinking with each patch... :/

[WarKirby]

To fix EM:

Make dying cause no gold loss.
Remove night time
Give players some defense against being focused, like repeated attacks on the same target doing less damage.
Make towers STRONGER, not weaker. So they can be used as a safe harbour.
Reduce all creeps' damage and HP by 25% to make last hitting easier/

These things will make it easier.

[DeathCult]

Seperate EM stats and normal stats...
Casters sure can scale for team support...
We need a better K/D ratio system, or some additional system that will show the potential of each player rather than the simple kill death ratio...

[Amgoz1STGS]

I agree with just about everything here, but a ganker that isn't 100% burst would be cool.
I mean we already got the likes of Deadwood and Gauntlet for that.

[Serenikill]

The main problem with pushing early is respawn times. You can genocide an entire lvl 5 team and not get a push because they are back so fast. I would like to see the death times normalized a bit. Not so short at first but not so long towards the end.

[daggius]

fix matchmaking already (???????????????)

[OH`HAI]

Well I don't really think there should be too many complaints about dying and being out for so long after youre high leveled, that's just your fault and part of the game 8D Everything as of now is part of the game and how the higher tier players have run out their strats, we had the turtle carry, push game, and now its hardcore gank. No need to change the game to a gigantic volume to change it entirely. Sounds like a really really stupid/bad idea S2 ;)

[PashaB]

I have to agree with S2 on this, if they keep this game as just another DotA-clone then DotA 2 will beat it, easily. If they can change this game to make it more fair, balanced, competitive and action packed, they have a chance for us to stay with HoN. Plus it makes a more fun game for us. I love competition!

[BLACKNWHITE]

Why are you guys trying to remove the laning phase of the game? Is that not equally as important?! Seperate the game into phases. Early laning phase, midgame ganking phase, late-game team fights carry phase. The early laning phase gets dominated and terminated way too quickly in this game ( mid lane picks up striders and runs around the map). This is what encourages turtling, the fact that the game is so skewed towards the mid carry and not the sidelanes. I would even suggest that the lanes spawn different numbers of creeps ( short lane will have more but long lane has less or maybe prior to spawning creeps, the lane will sense where the lane is pushed and will adjust number of creeps sent in that wave). This would encourage the push backwards, making the lane slightly more even. This COMPLETELY changes the mechanics of the game, which is what you're trying to do right? PS: competitive and pub games are boring as **** because you have a side that dominates and decides the game within 10 minutes and the other team has no chance to come back. Now you want the game to proceed faster, so the game will be decided in around 8 minutes

[Beelzejow]

So Melee carries will be even less useful and any idiot can tower dive without risk? In addition, gankers will be even more OP and this game will require much less skill?

Good job, S2 faggots. Can't wait for this game to die off when SC 2 Dota/Dota 2 comes out.

[Ch1cken]

So Melee carries will be even less useful and any idiot can tower dive without risk? In addition, gankers will be even more OP and this game will require much less skill?

Good job, S2 faggots. Can't wait for this game to die off when SC 2 Dota/Dota 2 comes out.


You can already tower dive pretty easily imo. The comment about gankers is def true and its sad to see s2 continue to think that this is ok.

[sillent]

not to be a *****.. but a lot of big things are up in teh air.. major thigns coming as we keep hearing.. and i know you dont really know how long these things take.. they take as long as they need to.. you need to get em tested and stuff...

but if you had a timeline.. or a rough estimate.. how long do we have to wait before we get a big patch update.. that means not just heroes/items/tweaks/bug fixes/balance stuff..

[Hsssh]

Why do you think that there will be some major patch where everything is changed?

[WorstPlayer]

Faster game pace, shorter games

Halle-****ing-lujah!


More action oriented play

**** yes! Be careful though. Semi-carries are already ridiculously powerful and you may make hard carries entirely futile.


Deep, strategic options in the gameplay

Brilliant.


More content!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
can we has more game modes too?

Everything else = good.

Am very excited for future patches

[Pellikan]

I'm ok with this if they don't make too big changes.

[Allnighte]

Totally agree...

It feels like HoN's variety is shrinking with each patch... :/
yeah single heroes right-clicking their way through teams after 70 mins of pve is definitely the way this game should be played.

[tvdang7]

need heroes now!

[DarkAgonizer]

Here is an idea for more ganging - decrease the money from farm by 20 % increase money from kills by 20% = less farming more fighting

[Viking`]

Currently a few heroes require too much farm that offer next to nothing early (wildsoul, Sand Wraith, War Beast) to encourage less games being farmfests where the carry sits in the jungle these few heroes need to have a change of style to have the opportunity to offer something earlier in the game. Perhaps tweaking their companions skills or mechanics, or their nukes being made more viable, offering either more damage or stronger utility.

[Raskalnikov]

If you want that support is more rewarding then let healing be a part of the assist system
for example by healing the killer you get an assist but only if you did a heal that matters like your carry was dropping under 20% .

Even other spells should count as assits, like accursed his shield

This^

Football analogy (soccer)

strikers are judged by the number of goals they score/ assist

midfielders and defenders are judged by how many passes/ tackles they complete

goalkeepers are judged by how many saves they make


If support heroes are goalkeepers you need to include their key stat in the game or you are selling them short. I'd like the game to be able to detect when I'm playing DS/ Jera/ Acc/ Nymph/ SR/ Andro (or any hero with tabcom, astrolabe or barrier idol) and I "save" a teammate from certain death and reward it with gold/ xp.

If i a kill is a 'goal' then a heal/ disjoint is a 'save' and should be recognised in the game as such.

Also they count blocks in basketball.

[Hsssh]

Problem is how do you calculate that? With kill assists it`s easy, if he was attacking the target he gets assist. But how do you award something like Andromeda`s swap? If we assume that it`s enough that swap was done while your ally was under attack then what about Astrolabe? Support hero will active it in every gank and scrimish just to get multiple "saves". As far as i see S2 would have to, in essence, code conditions for every support item and skill for this system and it still would hardly be perfect.

[Josefin96]

what bullshit. let me afk farm.

[LikeABoss]

This is relevant to my interests.

I guess we won't know how it really will be until this is finally presentable.

[Atticah]

Add invoker from dota

[Atticah]

HOW ABOUT DO THIS S2


MAKE IT SO YOU DON'T LOSE GOLD WHEN YOU DIE....

MAKE IT SO YOU GET HALF CREEP GOLD FOR (X) minutes after respawn.
Cut Dead time in Half

But when respawned hero is at 50% max of what he currently is

Kinda like wow...when u revive from the ghost
wait (x) minutes/secs till u regain 100%

[Atticah]

So if a lvl 25 dies.... dead time is cut in half!!!!!
no more 80 secs!?!?!? WTF 80 secs!?!?

40 is more like it.... :)

but hero is 50% max hp/mana for 40 secs... = 40 secs dead time and another 40 but at 50% max

[vainster]

Currently a few heroes require too much farm that offer next to nothing early (wildsoul, Sand Wraith, War Beast) to encourage less games being farmfests where the carry sits in the jungle these few heroes need to have a change of style to have the opportunity to offer something earlier in the game. Perhaps tweaking their companions skills or mechanics, or their nukes being made more viable, offering either more damage or stronger utility.

If your "TEAM ( note: no me in team)" cannot control the map for you without feeding, then your team should not take a farm reliant hero. SW can literally kill 3+ people on a balanced team with her ulti alone when farmed. war beast and wildsoul are also VERY hard carries when farmed.

[Pudgeinabowl]

Viability of early-game pushing & tower mechanics
A trend we commonly see in the early-mid game is, after winning a team fight or ganking a few heroes, players will retreat to farm rather than push. This can especially be observed in many competitive matches. It's the safe route, due to the risk-reward ratio of continuing a push simply being too risky. We also find that the tower AI is somewhat punishing to push attempts and could behave a little more consistently.

As we push HoN in a direction that encourages more aggression, ganking, and team fights, we want to make sure we don't over-do it. We could easily make ganking worth it by having hero kill gold be a very high value, but that undermines other mechanics in the game and makes the progression very one-dimensional. We prefer to allow for successful ganks and team fights to yield opportunity for the winning team to press the advantage, rather than directly giving them too big of an advantage in terms of gold reward. With that in mind, we're taking a close look at the viability of pushing towers after winning an early game fight or gank.

What about giving towers +armour for every hero still alive (or just -armour for every hero killed in the last 30s (so at lower lvls even if they respawn and tp back you still have a bonus for wiping out their team.)), personally i think the +armour would cause people to focus on taking down some players before pushing, rather than letting the tower get raped faster.

[PeonMaster]

You know whats really funny...

s2 made all these new ganker heroes and all we see in competitive play are :devo::andr::slit::pebb::vood::witc::phar::behe::g lac:. I find that funny.

I totally agree. What's the point of having MORE heroes when it's a 5v5 game? And most of the time, we see the usual dozen or so heroes being played.

People like to have more heroes so they can try them out, but after a while, they go back to the main staple of heroes.

Please, just focus on the game play, game dynamics, MM, map balancing, user abuse, etc. Thanks.

[HoNnooblet]

Assist should have value: maybe lowering gold gain per kill as well.
Increasing the amount of people ganking and roaming in pairs/groups rather than 1v1 kills

This will also mean people who save high damage nukes just to ks kills well decrease.

[eNTi]

don't make it faster... don't promote emphasize on ganks. you need to recognize pubs as the main game environment and many pubs just don't team up well together. rather lessen the impact of farming and make towers stronger and decrease their worth over time.

if casters are going to scale... this will be madness. then caster type heroes will even be more carry oriented as some of them already are. your problem is, that you actually adapted the BROKEN int, agi, str mechanics from wc3.

[twizzR]

S ****ing 2 <3

Not to whine or anything, I was thinking of pre-ordering the game but I didn't know if u were going retail or not (have been part of other games that did preorder from beta, and had a hard time getting my money back) I didn't. Gief taunt naow s2?:)

[Valy]

don't make it faster... don't promote emphasize on ganks. you need to recognize pubs as the main game environment and many pubs just don't team up well together. rather lessen the impact of farming and make towers stronger and decrease their worth over time.

if casters are going to scale... this will be madness. then caster type heroes will even be more carry oriented as some of them already are. your problem is, that you actually adapted the BROKEN int, agi, str mechanics from wc3.

Omfg...since i've been playing HoN , they are trying to get items and heroes with skills with greater reward if assisted by an ally.They've been focusing on ganks for the last n+1 patches, and now you're saying that they should stop that.This is a team game, where coordonation is vital.Of course they are lessening the impact of farming and getting in more ganking heroes.I agree that casters shouldn't scale, although noone really said that they will.It was just a lil' hint that could have been misunderstood.And i don't think that there is a problem with WC3 mechanics...everything's been fine before, in DotA, and everything's fine in HoN now.If you're adapting the game for yourself,you lose a lot of fun ... let urself adapt to the game, it's much better that way.(Blood Chalice FTW).

[Shaddox]

Yay, more shitty half-assed heroes that no one will use after the curiosity factor dies out. Also why aren't you saying directly you guys want to make HoN more like LoL? Why do you want people to care so much about towers? It's only 350g/500g, cash you can make just as easily from 2-3 waves of creeps.

[Ch1cken]

What were saying is that this fast pace metagame that s2 has made by throwing a million gankers + chalice/striders is destroying the skill in said team fights. I/we don't want chalice/THE IDEA BEHIND CHALICE in our dota style game. It takes away the skill of playing heroes like behe/devo/30 other heroes because instead of using mana conservatively they are allowed to spam it and not worry because in 35 seconds their mana will be almost completely restored, at little to NO cost(usually no cost).


If s2 wants to speed up the game and have more action why not just give everyone more starting gold. This will insure more action and lower game lengths.

[Imperator]

Excellent news, very happy to have some perspective on the changes you're planning.
Besides all the good points you brought up, I have some critique on 2.3 (Viability of early-game pushing & tower mechanics);
If you study pro replays, you'll see that if a top team gets an early advantage (and it snowballs) they can easily have a 20-25 minute rax (MSI seems to be particularly good at this). I believe the lack of early pushing is simply a matter of experience/mindset rather than mechanics.

Regardless, I'm very happy with the direction you want to take HoN. It is too bad that a lot of people are afraid of change because I'm sure you guys will make the game even better.

[laserburn]

Guys, stop trying to fix EM, it is unfixable. Just separate the stats and psr from NM and EM and leave it like that. You might also want to bump the camera higher in EM, so it could be considered a newbe introduction to more serious NM. As it is right now, name "Easy mode" is misleading, it's not easier at all.

Second, be very careful about trying to make games shorter, there were games whose multiplayer was devastated by trying to intoduce similar change. HoN is already all about ganking, further straightening this strat will make pushing and farming even more useless. Remember how long it took you to balance chalice, don't rush into another balancing horror. It's a very complicated game, change one thing and many others will need changing because of that.

Finally, helping out assistants is a good idea. Maybe give a player 1000 gold when he buys 3 sets of yellow wards and reaches 10 assists. When a first guy it the game completes that, announcer could praise him saying: "John Stockton".

[laserblade]

Finally, helping out assistants is a good idea. Maybe give a player 1000 gold when he buys 3 sets of yellow wards and reaches 10 assists. When a first guy it the game completes that, announcer could praise him saying: "John Stockton".

WTF? 1000 gold?

Alternatively, assists should provide discounts on wards and support items. =D

[Mellow]

Hey S2, please don't listen to any of the posts in this thread, from what I've read all of them are made by people who have no clue about game design or balance.

[CKMo]

What about casters that scale into carries lategame?

Example: Doctor Repulsor

[Laela]

sounds great specially for support hero players like myself - in the process of assessing this could you look at support players benefiting in relation to psr as we tend to take more deaths

[Pimp_Panther]

Promoting early game 5v5 fights is gonna ruin the game i think. Hero setup will be the deciding factor, and the game result will be obvius ofter 2-3 team fights if the gold reward is increased for hero kills... its just gonna blow

[Quackstar]

Some things in here are good..

.. some will destroy HoN.

[LilDiddly]

How about stop nerfing support items, such as Tablet of Command?
Stop making new agility carries. We don't want any more heroes where Geometers is the only solid item choice and farming is boring as hell.

[Jiub]

I don't understand the public outcry for BUFFING MAPHACK. Wards are MAPHACK for what, like 6 minutes? There is absolutely no reason for someone to recieve bonus gold for placing a lot of wards.

[Sentura]

i love these people coming in and saying "how about fix x or stop nerfing y". the guy posts direction and you give him examples.

OT: it's nice to see the direction the game will be taking, and how you plan to work it out.

[PinkFloyd]

I have an idea with would help with this.

im not sure on specifics on how i would implement it because there are alot of flaws but here it is.

Gambles: When pushing a tower and the tower is above 50%, you can initiate a 'pushing state' on that tower by spending money(maybe around 200-300 gold). this announcer will announce a Push so the defending team gets notified. if the push is successful on that tower, more money will be given to the team as a reward. if the defending team is successful then the money spent initiating the push will not be recovered.

i think that this will create more organised team fights, and will give more power to the early game pushing heroes.

this may be a stupid idea but it is a thought :)

[Bhelogan]

Viability of early-game pushing & tower mechanics
A trend we commonly see in the early-mid game is, after winning a team fight or ganking a few heroes, players will retreat to farm rather than push.


Want to fix this? Try making tower damage scale down by % of enemy team players that are currently dead. Example 3 /5 enemy players are down, their towers will only do 70% base damage.

[Tamachan]

in b4 you copy L.o.L tower mechanics.

Which actually would push the game further in the direction you want.

[Nero0]

[/INDENT]
[/LIST]
Want to fix this? Try making tower damage scale down by % of enemy team players that are currently dead. Example 3 /5 enemy players are down, their towers will only do 70% base damage.

The problem with this is if 3 heroes are left and they are heroes like these. :poll::balp::defi: Balf can tank a tower that is hitting for 70% all day while polly uses his ulti to kill it (with or without creeps) They can then go to the next tower and have def use her ulti while balf tanks tower. That is 2 towers down for the side that just had a successful team fight. Kinda makes the gold lead a little steep.

[Kurce]

Do it, S2! If this game can somehow be shrunk down to ~30 or even ~25 minute games, I would love it. I really hate getting stuck with some bads on my team and having to agonize for ~45 minutes while the fail Arachna just keeps feeding. And don't listen to the naysayers and whiners in this thread. RESISTANCE TO CHANGE IS HIGH. People will whine and complain and ***** and moan if you change any little thing about the game. If you guys got some ideas that will speed up the game and fix some of the issues you talked about, I say go for it.

[Balance]

Although I don't really post in these forums, as someone who has played Dota off and on since it was an improved version of Aeon of Strife, I have a couple comments/observations/suggestions.


Tower mechanics
The towers in "normal" mode are just too tough. This is a HUGE part of why turtling, creep pulling, and in general avoiding encounters with other players are viable, and why early pushes are near impossible. This is the single most important reason games last so long.

Suggestions:
1. Make the towers weaker in normal mode.
2. This is perhaps more "game-altering", but have the towers gain armor based on how many allied heroes are nearby. The total effective hps should have diminishing returns in the number of nearbly players, similar to how armor gains are already. This directly encourages teamwork to defend against pushes etc, discourages excessive neutral farming and early game creep pulling, and moreoever encourages pushes after succesful ganks. To counteract "backdooring" that could result, the towers should gain substantial armor if no enemy creeps are nearby. I think a change like this could single-handedly have a very positive and profound impact on the way the game is played.



Statistics
The number two thing affecting gameplay and teamwork in an extremely negative way is the statistics that are tracked and displayed for each player and the resulting "stat-whoring". For many people, having a high exp/min, gold/min, KDR, deny count, etc are seen as being a "good" player. To improve all of these numbers, you necessarily need to prolong the game, and to a lesser extent avoid encounters with the other team and just farm farm farm. Ending a game early actually makes many of your "per game" and "per minute" stats worse, so it is advantageous to prolong the game and farm some more kills, gold, etc when you have the early game advantage.

An aside: the PsR system is, in my view, fine. People complain about it, but by and large it is a good way to assign a number to what really matters in the game -- wins and losses.

Suggestions

1. Other than PSR, do not display lifetime stats. The stats displayed should be rolling statistics, i.e. average of the last x games. Showing lifetime stats does not allow for the fact that players can improve (or get worse) -- for example, someone learning the game is forever penalized in the eyes of allies because of "poor" performance a long time ago.

2a. Eliminate straight "per minute" stats. If you really really want to display such stats, they should be normalized somehow to account for the fact that the longer the game goes, the more income that is available since more creeps spawn. But I think the game is better served if they are not at all displayed, since they are also more relevant for some hero "classes" than others.

2b. Perhaps this is a little "provocative", but eliminate many of the stats you display. While it is great that you have the ability to track all of these stats, related to the above they are more or less relevant for each of the different hero classes/roles. As a result, they can skew what role players want to play. (The classic example is no one wanting to support -- many of their "stats" that you display will suffer as a result. Almost all of those stats are "carry-centric".) What really matters most is a win or a loss, and while the other stats are interesting I think displaying them actually has a negative impact on things.
An aside: I don't feel there is a way to track stats based on hero roles since there are so many ways to play each of the heroes in the game. (This is what makes the game great!) Even doing something based on str/int/agi wouldn't be fair.

3. I'm sure many people will say this, but separate the "normal" and "easy" mode statistics tracking.



Incorporate a "feedback rating" system, similar to Ebay, as part of each player's stats.
At present, there are zero consequences/accountability for being a jerk or poor team player but not crossing the line into things that are "reportable". At its simplest, this rating system could be broken down into one or two pieces: a "teamwork karma" (was this person a good team player?) and "good player" (was this person a good player?) rating.

How it could work is this: after each game, you have the option to anonymously thumbs up, thumbs down, or rate as neutral each player on your team. Duplicate ratings would not count (only the most recent one would), and you must have actually just played a game with the player to rate them, so there couldn't be "feedback padding". This, more than anything, is a very simple thing that could go a very very long way to improving the "community" of the game -- especially coupled with things such as those mentioned above that do not penalize players for playing support roles. Imagine rather than just the PSR number, you could also see that everyone rated a player as being a jerk, or as a really good player and a team player.



Change the name "easy mode".
There is a huge stigma associated with EM, in large part because of its name. The reality is that it is a totally different game to play than "normal" mode. One is not necessarily easier than the other in my opinion. (I have another account that I play EM games in because of the stigma associated with having an EM%). If anything I personally think there is MORE teamwork in EM and it is more "tactical" because there is less of a focus on farming, the towers die more easily so you can push earlier etc.

Suggestion: rename easy mode to something like "turbo mode" to identify it as a different but not necessarily easier and to remove the stigma from it, and keep separate stats for it.



Neutral creep "abuse"
While some my argue that they are "features" for skilled players, things like creep stacking and creep pulling are in my view in a grey area that ultimately has a negative impact on teamplay and player vs player interactions.

Suggestions:
1. Make creep stacking impossible, and make creep pulling possible only in one location for each faction (to pull a lane back that has been pushed too far).
2. Perhaps more aggressively, sound an in-game alert and ping (similar to the "structure under attack" notifications) if the neutral faction engages another faction's creeps: "The neutral faction has engaged the enemy". In this way, you know if and when the other team is creep pulling, which then encourages you to go find them (player vs player interactions), but it doesn't remove this useful mechanic from the game.



As a final comment, the game is won/lost by tearing down the opposing team's buildings, not by accumulating the most hero kills, but that fact is often lost on or considered secondary by most players. Perhaps this is a bit of the culture of the people who play the game, especially in light of the way the stats are tracked, but I think it is also a by-product of the game mechanics and a few easy things such as those mentioned above could change this focus, if you would want to.

And if you really just want a "hero arena" game where all that really matters is hero kills, all you have to do is make a game mode in which the game lasts for xx minutes. If when time runs out neither team has destroyed the opposing team's main building, the team with most hero kills wins. Simple as that.

[salil]

Although I don't really post in these forums, as someone who has played Dota off and on since it was an improved version of Aeon of Strife, I have a couple comments/observations/suggestions.


Tower mechanics
The towers in "normal" mode are just too tough. This is a HUGE part of why turtling, creep pulling, and in general avoiding encounters with other players are viable, and why early pushes are near impossible. This is the single most important reason games last so long.

Suggestions:
1. Make the towers weaker in normal mode.
2. This is perhaps more "game-altering", but have the towers gain armor based on how many allied heroes are nearby. The total effective hps should have diminishing returns in the number of nearbly players, similar to how armor gains are already. This directly encourages teamwork to defend against pushes etc, discourages excessive neutral farming and early game creep pulling, and moreoever encourages pushes after succesful ganks. To counteract "backdooring" that could result, the towers should gain substantial armor if no enemy creeps are nearby. I think a change like this could single-handedly have a very positive and profound impact on the way the game is played.



Statistics
The number two thing affecting gameplay and teamwork in an extremely negative way is the statistics that are tracked and displayed for each player and the resulting "stat-whoring". For many people, having a high exp/min, gold/min, KDR, deny count, etc are seen as being a "good" player. To improve all of these numbers, you necessarily need to prolong the game, and to a lesser extent avoid encounters with the other team and just farm farm farm. Ending a game early actually makes many of your "per game" and "per minute" stats worse, so it is advantageous to prolong the game and farm some more kills, gold, etc when you have the early game advantage.

An aside: the PsR system is, in my view, fine. People complain about it, but by and large it is a good way to assign a number to what really matters in the game -- wins and losses.

Suggestions

1. Other than PSR, do not display lifetime stats. The stats displayed should be rolling statistics, i.e. average of the last x games. Showing lifetime stats does not allow for the fact that players can improve (or get worse) -- for example, someone learning the game is forever penalized in the eyes of allies because of "poor" performance a long time ago.

2a. Eliminate straight "per minute" stats. If you really really want to display such stats, they should be normalized somehow to account for the fact that the longer the game goes, the more income that is available since more creeps spawn. But I think the game is better served if they are not at all displayed, since they are also more relevant for some hero "classes" than others.

2b. Perhaps this is a little "provocative", but eliminate many of the stats you display. While it is great that you have the ability to track all of these stats, related to the above they are more or less relevant for each of the different hero classes/roles. As a result, they can skew what role players want to play. (The classic example is no one wanting to support -- many of their "stats" that you display will suffer as a result. Almost all of those stats are "carry-centric".) What really matters most is a win or a loss, and while the other stats are interesting I think displaying them actually has a negative impact on things.
An aside: I don't feel there is a way to track stats based on hero roles since there are so many ways to play each of the heroes in the game. (This is what makes the game great!) Even doing something based on str/int/agi wouldn't be fair.

3. I'm sure many people will say this, but separate the "normal" and "easy" mode statistics tracking.



Incorporate a "feedback rating" system, similar to Ebay, as part of each player's stats.
At present, there are zero consequences/accountability for being a jerk or poor team player but not crossing the line into things that are "reportable". At its simplest, this rating system could be broken down into one or two pieces: a "teamwork karma" (was this person a good team player?) and "good player" (was this person a good player?) rating.

How it could work is this: after each game, you have the option to anonymously thumbs up, thumbs down, or rate as neutral each player on your team. Duplicate ratings would not count (only the most recent one would), and you must have actually just played a game with the player to rate them, so there couldn't be "feedback padding". This, more than anything, is a very simple thing that could go a very very long way to improving the "community" of the game -- especially coupled with things such as those mentioned above that do not penalize players for playing support roles. Imagine rather than just the PSR number, you could also see that everyone rated a player as being a jerk, or as a really good player and a team player.



Change the name "easy mode".
There is a huge stigma associated with EM, in large part because of its name. The reality is that it is a totally different game to play than "normal" mode. One is not necessarily easier than the other in my opinion. (I have another account that I play EM games in because of the stigma associated with having an EM%). If anything I personally think there is MORE teamwork in EM and it is more "tactical" because there is less of a focus on farming, the towers die more easily so you can push earlier etc.

Suggestion: rename easy mode to something like "turbo mode" to identify it as a different but not necessarily easier and to remove the stigma from it, and keep separate stats for it.



Neutral creep "abuse"
While some my argue that they are "features" for skilled players, things like creep stacking and creep pulling are in my view in a grey area that ultimately has a negative impact on teamplay and player vs player interactions.

Suggestions:
1. Make creep stacking impossible, and make creep pulling possible only in one location for each faction (to pull a lane back that has been pushed too far).
2. Perhaps more aggressively, sound an in-game alert and ping (similar to the "structure under attack" notifications) if the neutral faction engages another faction's creeps: "The neutral faction has engaged the enemy". In this way, you know if and when the other team is creep pulling, which then encourages you to go find them (player vs player interactions), but it doesn't remove this useful mechanic from the game.



As a final comment, the game is won/lost by tearing down the opposing team's buildings, not by accumulating the most hero kills, but that fact is often lost on or considered secondary by most players. Perhaps this is a bit of the culture of the people who play the game, especially in light of the way the stats are tracked, but I think it is also a by-product of the game mechanics and a few easy things such as those mentioned above could change this focus, if you would want to.

And if you really just want a "hero arena" game where all that really matters is hero kills, all you have to do is make a game mode in which the game lasts for xx minutes. If when time runs out neither team has destroyed the opposing team's main building, the team with most hero kills wins. Simple as that.

seconded, except for the creep pulling\stacking part. this guy knows what he's talking about. If you guys can somehow incorporate the upsides of easy mode like faster gold and level up, this actually promotes ganking.

[Pherium]

Good Job S2! Look forward to seeing the implementation of all those.

[`BRITAIN]

Add tomes and then a hero siege section of the map that you go to when you want to farm to get more tomes.

[Allnighte]

see sig

[Angel]

For example, in an evenly matched game, if a team fight occurs and 4 people from each team die, more gold is lost in player deaths than is gained in player kills (assuming no players were on a kill streak and therefore worth bonus gold). The net result is that team fights are, quite often, taking more gold out of the game than they introduce. This is the type of thing that does nothing other than slow the game pace down and indirectly discourages team fights and engagements.

This game is meant to be long to a certain degree, if you detract away from the length of the game you skew the entire balance of the game. Making the game shorter while making gold more plentiful is a huge mistake, allowing the already powerful heroes in the game to become far more powerful. Team fights and engagements will happen regardless, because one team REGARDLESS of the heroes will always have a better lategame in relation to the other team. This forces the team with the weaker lategame(and as such, stronger early game) to force team fights.

But oh hey, look, now people get vastly rewarded for team fighting and as such there is never a reason to ever run any sort of hard carry. Why the **** would you even both with one when you get massive amounts of team gold through pushing and team fights.


Another issue we have relates to how support-oriented heroes currently progress in the game. They naturally should be supporting their team - but often this support comes at high personal sacrifice, and the result is that there are very few options left to support players in terms of how to progress their character and stay relative past the early-mid game. This concern isn't one of balance - it's clear from competitive games that support heroes are both necessary and effective, it's a question of how rewarding the role is and what we can do to keep the skill ceiling high and allow other progression options for support players. As a carry scales in his ability to deal damage to the enemy team, so should a support player scale in their ability to support their team. This issue relates closely to the last point in the prohibitive gold mechanics section above.

We also are very sensitive to the subject of how early-game caster-oriented heroes fit into the game. There is a point in every game in which these heroes start to lose relevance, and the physical DPS heroes (carries) gain relevance. As we increase the pace of the game and induce more team fights, a side effect of increased gold, experience, and level gain will result. This may mean that caster oriented heroes lose relevance even more quickly, perhaps before they can make a meaningful contribution to the outcome of the game. Currently casters usually remain viable in the late game due to disables (or buying items like Sheep Stick if they don't have any built in disables), and while that will likely always be true to a degree, we do want to make sure there's a bit more depth to playing these characters, by providing other options for them. These heroes are very important to the feel, fun, and pace of HoN - they bring a lot of the excitement and we want want to make sure they remain viable and interesting to play.

Casters usually remain viable in the late game? The **** does that mean, usually. A witch slayer, barring him getting insta gibbed through stun lock or something like a pyro ult, is always going to be useful. You mean actually having good positioning and a brain is something you want to cycle out of the game? Fragility on a hero with huge burst and disables is something that just isn't suiting the game now is it? You actually want to allow supports, and from the read not only just supports, but ward *****es to have viable options for items? Reality check, you've already given them a slew of imbalanced options and now you want to give them more gold to buy them?


Striders, literally the most imbalanced bullshit you could of ever introduced into the game. I'm actually surprised you didn't add some sort of stats or health onto it, since that seems to be what you do with every item you try to tweak.
Chalice, still imbalanced as ever since after weeks of *****ing you still don't realize that adding stats and mana on it makes it extremely imbalanced. Why would you ever buy a bracer or null with this item in the game?
Push staff, another S2 blunder, brought into fruition when they forced their new shiny major totem item into about 15 recipes. Interrupts channeling, amazing escape mechanism for yourself or allies, can be chained with more of them on your team, gives you mana and health.

But no, I definitely agree there needs to be more options for supports, perhaps a blink dagger that costs 500 gold but can only be used on heroes flagged as support.


A trend we commonly see in the early-mid game is, after winning a team fight or ganking a few heroes, players will retreat to farm rather than push. This can especially be observed in many competitive matches. It's the safe route, due to the risk-reward ratio of continuing a push simply being too risky. We also find that the tower AI is somewhat punishing to push attempts and could behave a little more consistently.

As we push HoN in a direction that encourages more aggression, ganking, and team fights, we want to make sure we don't over-do it. We could easily make ganking worth it by having hero kill gold be a very high value, but that undermines other mechanics in the game and makes the progression very one-dimensional. We prefer to allow for successful ganks and team fights to yield opportunity for the winning team to press the advantage, rather than directly giving them too big of an advantage in terms of gold reward. With that in mind, we're taking a close look at the viability of pushing towers after winning an early game fight or gank.

You want to make sure you don't overdo it? Like it hasn't been overdone with your blatant push to bring ganking into the metagame? Towers actually give a HUGE ****ing swing of gold and a team that would normally lose can easily win with like 3 or 4 towers down and holding that advantage for a few minutes. Besides, what games are you watching, EM pubs? If a team feels they are able to take a tower they will do so if they kill someone and have advantage. Why? Because a tower is a huge sum of gold over the other team, plus it lowers their map control, what more incentive could you possibly want to give to the team that wants to push? The risk-reward you describe is completely dependent on what's happening at the time, but the 'risk' of pushing is almost always minimal when the scenario is 4v5. The tower AI could be better, the tricks you could use in DotA to take the agro off of you need to be added.


I wanted to add a note that we do have some of the best players in the game testing and giving feedback. Nothing is going to go live into retail HoN without going through that filter of feedback and MUCH testing.

They've done a spectacular job thus far, this game is in such a sorry state right now I think it's literally the worst I've ever seen it in. Though, in their defense, you be just not listening to them.

[fjksQjw]

stop *****ing around with such tarded updates,keep it as it is and just work on more dota/new heroes... and yeah u already ****ed it up with that chalice and striders...
and i think u should rlly rmk some reccomended items... like only striders on slither/ws wtf??
thx... SADO... :D

and again as lotta players before me i have to say dont **** it up or ill play another game :D peace

[Vor]

^ liked the pollywog picture better bro.

[Connect]

Always hated this being Carries of Newerth. Such a shame. The fact that casters can't scale is the biggest issue with this game imo. **** new heroes and so on. Start working on changing the mechanic of the game.

Items which improve spells, or spell damage, could possibly make caster heroes viable longer in the game.

Cause imo this game is about having 4 supports and 1 carry atm. The most fed and best supported carry wins.

Let int buff your spell damage. Int is a basicly useless stat atm. Or let int lower your cooldowns by a small amount for each int.

Or let agi scale less well. Making it less useful to wait 60 for any sort of push.

Change the recipe of Sheepstick. Supports can't farm all that gold. Another reason why they totally drop of the map, and could might aswell stand in base and look upon both sides carries fight at the 40min mark.

Never played much WoW, but you can't but admire the engine, where casters scale. I know it's a bad thing to compared it with, but it's just a system where casters scale.

I know this is based upon the STR, INT and AGI from Wc3, but let's face it. That system isn't perfect.

Even LoL has some sort of scaling power for casters.


Edit% Shrunken also ****s up the scaling badly. :S If you want casters who are actually useful, nerf the thing, or get rid of it all together.

Or make items which lower your targets magic armor, not make your attack be magic, no just lower people's magic armor. Would basicly be a buff to all casters.

And finally. Yes, i do know this will take a freaking year to balance, all over again, but it's worth it imo. Will gladly pre purchase HoN 2, with scaling casters right away. You can sign me up right now!

Edit; Again.. :S Oh well. Let spells be based upon BASE int x something for damage. I made a DREAM hero suggestion, with just that you can take a look at. I know. A scaling INT hero. Scary!

[inDe_eD]

Reading these stated goals, only thing passing through my mind is that HoN is becoming more and more like LoL.

[Jiub]

The fact that casters can't scale is the biggest issue with this game imo.

Items which improve spells, or spell damage, could possibly make caster heroes viable longer in the game.

Let int buff your spell damage. Int is a basicly useless stat atm. Or let int lower your cooldowns by a small amount for each int.

Or let agi scale less well. Making it less useful to wait 60 for any sort of push.

Change the recipe of Sheepstick. Supports can't farm all that gold. Another reason why they totally drop of the map, and could might aswell stand in base and look upon both sides carries fight at the 40min mark.

Edit% Shrunken also ****s up the scaling badly. :S If you want casters who are actually useful, nerf the thing, or get rid of it all together [really?].


There is a definite reason you are 1400 PSR.
Support do not need buffs like this. Heroes with stuns or other CC (pretty much every non-carry hero and several carries) stay relevant all game due to their CC alone, not to mention items like harkons blade that allow int hero damage to be VERY relevant late game.

[Connect]

Shrunken, and that caster, which is completly useless at this point in the game, other then his 3 second stun, is now completly useless again. Thank you Shrunken.

[Angel]

Shrunken, and that caster, which is completly useless at this point in the game, other then his 3 second stun, is now completly useless again. Thank you Shrunken.

Blink, hex, oh my god what's a bkb do now?

[Hsssh]

It`s not like whole 5 people on enemy team will get Shrunken.

[E_Honda`]

Always hated this being Carries of Newerth. Such a shame. The fact that casters can't scale is the biggest issue with this game imo. **** new heroes and so on. Start working on changing the mechanic of the game.

Items which improve spells, or spell damage, could possibly make caster heroes viable longer in the game.

Cause imo this game is about having 4 supports and 1 carry atm. The most fed and best supported carry wins.

Let int buff your spell damage. Int is a basicly useless stat atm. Or let int lower your cooldowns by a small amount for each int.

Or let agi scale less well. Making it less useful to wait 60 for any sort of push.

Change the recipe of Sheepstick. Supports can't farm all that gold. Another reason why they totally drop of the map, and could might aswell stand in base and look upon both sides carries fight at the 40min mark.

Never played much WoW, but you can't but admire the engine, where casters scale. I know it's a bad thing to compared it with, but it's just a system where casters scale.

I know this is based upon the STR, INT and AGI from Wc3, but let's face it. That system isn't perfect.

Even LoL has some sort of scaling power for casters.


Edit% Shrunken also ****s up the scaling badly. :S If you want casters who are actually useful, nerf the thing, or get rid of it all together.

Or make items which lower your targets magic armor, not make your attack be magic, no just lower people's magic armor. Would basicly be a buff to all casters.

And finally. Yes, i do know this will take a freaking year to balance, all over again, but it's worth it imo. Will gladly pre purchase HoN 2, with scaling casters right away. You can sign me up right now!

Edit; Again.. :S Oh well. Let spells be based upon BASE int x something for damage. I made a DREAM hero suggestion, with just that you can take a look at. I know. A scaling INT hero. Scary!

Funny you call it "carries of newerth" but want casters to scale, literally making it just that.

Casters are not meant to scale with damage. A witch slayer graveyard is just as devastating at the 2 minute mark as it is the 50 minute mark.

Their is a reason the most picked heroes in competitive play are vj ws andro glac etc...

[Connect]

You do have a point. A 2 second stun is a 2 second stun, 2min mark or 50 min mark. Only difference is that at the 50 min mark, the shrunken will make this 2 second stun useless. Meaning the only single reason why you have witch slayer in the fight, at this point, is gone. And he will only stun other meaningless supports, meanwhile each teams carries has shrunken on, killing all the supports stunning each other.

And no, they aren't meant to scale in damage with this outdated Wc3 mechanic.

Yes, they are picked cause they can disable. Now get shrunken, and they are all useless. And carry fodder.

[E_Honda`]

I just think you are getting out played by shrunken to much. It isn't as good as you think.

When it comes time for carries to be farmed and have items like shrunken what's very important is initiation. PK stunning with your support will beat that shrunken head. So will starting a fight off with something like a temp ult or a HB ult.

Their is also superior magic spells that will lock them down. It isn't as bad as you think.

[Matoumass]

I think Lalaa is right to a certain point: in public, where everyone plays for himself and games last more than it should. Also, he can only be right when we judge heroes as individuals and not a team as a sum of heores with skills.

I think the INT should remain as they are, because they are there to provide the disables, while AGI are there to provide the biggest output damage and STR are there to endure and take the damage.

That is basically what which category is focused on. If you change this logic, then you might as well ask for AGI heroes to get more disables, or STR to get more damage output.

I think shrunken is clearly abusive if the whole team has it, but if you get 5 casters, then you should not be surprised. Basic rule of HoN is play as a team, and in that perspective, a team getting shrunkens should not ruin your game but make it more difficult, just like a sheep stick team against you will be a hard time.

[Santaclauz]

things are mostly fine the way they are if you know what your doing.. inexperience is what causes all these ppl to rage about to much ganking and whatnot.. lets be honest.. ppl gank and play gank oriented heroes becuz every1 wants to pwn sum1.. and fast.. id say just add more heroes with magic/physical defense/offense buffs to increase survivability of ganks.. this will make games go faster as well imo becuz most ppl wont be afraid to go into the jungle or roam if they kno they might not die instantly... there should always be a counter to a ganking team.. not just gank or be ganked..

sumd up.. ppl are dumb make them smart and add more heroes b4 dota 2 comes out and every1 forgets about this game.

[Kurce]

there should always be a counter to a ganking team.. not just gank or be ganked..:WardOfSight::HomecomingStone:

just sayin'...

[HonStinks]

It'd be great if there would be abilities that are somewhat creative like TDL ult and Krakens old ult instead of this current design where every 9 out 10 heroes have either a stun or a slow or both.

Just bringing this up now that we are discussing the designs of this game.

[esT_aLKA]

Oh my God what the heck is going on with this tread, S2 said they would make it so supports wont end the game with a boot and a ward in hand, and people start whining about...

Caster heroes being bad?

Do you watch honcast? do you play any 1650+ games?
cant you see how well those nukers work on a TEAM during any game of any duration?

If not, let me tell you something... get better in the game, you know nothing, stop playing EM, dont post on balance or game design discussions, since you will always suggest that the hero becomes stronger AS ONE, and be able to take other heroes down BY HIMSELF with more efficiency, because as for now, you DONT KNOW HOW to play as a team.

[Seroth]

You do have a point. A 2 second stun is a 2 second stun, 2min mark or 50 min mark. Only difference is that at the 50 min mark, the shrunken will make this 2 second stun useless. Meaning the only single reason why you have witch slayer in the fight, at this point, is gone. And he will only stun other meaningless supports, meanwhile each teams carries has shrunken on, killing all the supports stunning each other.

And no, they aren't meant to scale in damage with this outdated Wc3 mechanic.

Yes, they are picked cause they can disable. Now get shrunken, and they are all useless. And carry fodder.

A good counter to shrunken as a support hero is :Stormspirit: Stormspirit :Stormspirit: , use it on their focus target(Try timing it with his shrunken buff timer, so that your carry/randomhero comes out of the :Stormspirit: right when he can be useful again). I use it all the time when I play Support heroes, its well worth it. Saved a lot of games that way.

(I'll see if I can find that match which it got used the most to save people from a Madman using shrunken. That was one hell of a game btw lol)
EDIT: Found it: http://replays.heroesofnewerth.com/match_replay.php?mid=18782401 , Might not be the best example video, but you get the idea. Long ass video is long btw lol.

[Saekki]

Can't wait to see what their gonna do with EM.

They should throw it in the trashbin and think up something like "Fastmode" or even better "Deathmatch". Unlike the DotAs DM it could be something similar to FPS TMDs. Now that's extremenly gank oriented and build around PvP. Imagine a timelimit/killcount as a score to deside the winner. (Oh forget about it - this is a horribad idea. "First Blood!" "Every1 quick retreat to fountain!!" "Yay we won... now just camp fountain untill the timer runs out.")

btw. gief DotA's DM (and import Techies).

[Uncle_Ruckuz]

I just hate it how they trying to fix things that aren´t broken while other important issues are simply overlooked. The game is basically fine as it is. It does not need more action. I dont like playing games while beeing under constant pressure, you got to have some time to just sit back.

[Flafy95]

s2 games can u give me taunt please

[polloLALA]

Cant u lower the mm status... when someone dc we have to wait a long to time to get :( is annoyin

[fjksQjw]

omg guys,so u tell shrunken and its over? panda 4 sec stun through shrunken,tundra same,hb lil stun too,shroud to hide till shrunken ends,dont be dumb and initiate first with hex or something and kill him before he use shrunken..
or ****ing void talisman! i really dont understand why some supports arent buying it ..especialy vs swift i have fun with getting followed by swiftblade to forest waiting on his ulti ,use void and laughting at him :D
Now casters, check items like harkons,frostwolf,charged hammer... make u able to carry even with pyro...u have to think about different builds on each game and not just sotm ....

[Nubb3r]

OP QFT
!!
really
stormspirit, tablet of command, and stuff
not striders->sotm->sacrificialstone
shrunken is not imba, it is situational resulting in sometimes being very good and sometimes being bad/not useful!

[KnightDavion]

Ok so S2 has finally realized that the Dota model has a lot of BAGGAGE that should not be in their game?

FINALLY!

If they want their game to be more gank and team fight oriented they are now FINALLY looking at the right mechanics to change. You cant add heroes to fix this problem you have to:

1. Decrease / remove gold loss on death
2. Increase gold bounty for assists, by a lot
3. Remove / decrease last hit bounty for a tower and make it a team bonus only
*4. Lower the gold per creep, and make more creeps per wave

4 may or may not work in HoN.

1-3 are very BASIC game play mechanics that were changed when LoL was designed. It works for them, and now S2 is looking at the exact same things, albeit 2 years later, to make their game better. Finally some good work and open thinking from S2. Some of them must play LoL.


EDIT: They are also looking at scaling of support heroes into the late game, hey guess what LoL solved that problem too, via Ability Power. AP is a concept not possible in hon because hon still uses the archaic int/str/agi system.

[Gorb]

THE MASTER TROLL RETURNS.

* Gorb applauds KnightDavion, the best LoL troll since the start of closed beta *

[KnightDavion]

Why is it trolling to state true, relevant facts? You know the definition of a fanatic is a person who outright REFUSES to hear any information that runs contrary to their object of affection?

[Gorb]

A fanatic is not a troll, and vice versa.

You do, however, have a history of ignoring paragraphs and statements that you would otherwise have to concede to.

[ReliveDakka]

so at last u want this game become LoL

[Pebbles]

Oh no not KnightDavion

[tobbe628]

Faster Game pace?

No..
Its too fast already, or atleast the Battles..
make them last for atleast a few sec more please..

its not fun when you get killed in 3 sec nor kill them in 3 sec..

>: