Turtle Fest

[VeNuM]

I could be the only one that thinks this, but I want to voice my opinion anyway.

I'm finding certain heroes are kind of ruining the balance of the game in competitive play, most notably Maliken and Puppet Master. When a game goes for 40 minutes and Maliken or Puppet are against you (and you have the old school Dota carrys like Pesti/Soulstealer) even if you manage to take the out a lot and try and pressure there farming, they don't need very many times at all to be superior carrys. I've played quite a bit of top tier play and I've grown frustrated with games that arnt dictated by good play, they are dictated by how well you can turtle and just let the game go on for longer so eventually your Puppet/Maliken has certain items and they only need like 1 or 2 items where as other carrys need plenty more.

It makes for boring play and it makes for boring watching I'm sure when the games go on for 50+ minutes waiting for the carry to go off and eventually end the game for one of the teams.

So it leads me to the question. Why is this game dominated and focused on carry heroes currently?

The conclusion I've come to is this hero needs more a some more pushing power and stuff to stop this game becoming a turtle fest.

Note this is in the Clan & Competitive section and I'm not talking about Publics.

[KARTlK]

Turtling is definitely overpowered at the moment. It's just too easy.

[Cheese]

carry strat != turtle != overpowered

[facers]

bans are good

[HerBz]

Pestielnce and Soul Stealer were never late game carries - they are mid game heros.

[caveviS]

Need more not shitty pushing / ganking heroes ported.

[StRiDaH]

As herbz indicates, you can't possibly expect soulstealer or pest to out carry puppet or maliken.

However, puppet is unique in that he is amazing the ENTIRE game, which is why he is usually banned, and probably could use a touch of the nerf. Pesti is good early to mid, maybe even to mid/late, but not after that. Maliken is good mid to late, soulstealer imo, isn't as fierce 1v1 as puppet or maliken but has more to offer in the form of aoe.

Puppet is pretty gee gee though, I must say.

[dewatempur]

puppet is fine imo. he has very low HP and has no AOE skils. he can be a good disabler thou. in competitive match, people ban more aoe heroes such as tree,enigma,behe . rarely i heard people ban puppet.

[Minty]

puppet is fine imo. he has very low HP and has no AOE skils


...

So those 600 damage aoe crits dont exist?

[tonybus]

pushing strats will be more viable once they port undying, pugna, furion, kotl, tinker, pitlord, invoker etc... Give it time.

[relead]

puppet is fine imo. he has very low HP and has no AOE skils. he can be a good disabler thou. in competitive match, people ban more aoe heroes such as tree,enigma,behe . rarely i heard people ban puppet.

Tempest, yeah sometimes.
Behemoth, usually...
Tree?? I would fall off my chair seeing that...

[ACatInTheHat]

puppet is fine imo. he has very low HP and has no AOE skils. he can be a good disabler thou. in competitive match, people ban more aoe heroes such as tree,enigma,behe . rarely i heard people ban puppet.

Haha, people ban tree in competitive matches? Where are those matches played, on the moon of planet bizarro?

And no AoE skills, right...

[ZyGote]

Ophelia ftw.

[Keitaru]

Yes this is the case for about a week or two. Last month the game was heavily gank orientated, a few weeks before that, it was all about pushing (ophelia, defiler etc). The game is constantly changing, so no doubt this will too.

[ThiaZ]

relax... its allllll beta :b..

well, puppet aint as standard pick as hellbringer, plague rider and magmus & demented.
Same goes for maliken.

So they are not as imba as you make them.
They are good yes, but puppet is a glasslasercannon, and maliken just need an early focus.

you cant whine about a lategame hero having his prime time in the late game.

[KissKiss]

Not helped by the fact both Puppet and Maliken can easily farm Ancient stacks. Buy a Whispering Helm now, get a Shrunken Head free later!

I just finished watching the D55 vs NrB game and it was pretty close though. Gotta say I think Maliken is a huge Hero. Need no items at all, gets a free Shrunken Head with any purchase of Whispering Helm, pretty hard to push against him early on when he has a built in teleport, mass disable and cleave. He really is an early game Hero that also has a great late game imo. Pestilence v2.0.

So yeah, the whine isnt really that the late game heroes have an amazing lategame, its that these lategame heroes have a strong enough early game to be able to turtle for 40 minutes, which is basically what the D55 NrB game was.

[tabako]

The only time I ever see turtle oriented strategies work (or used, really) is when there is a sand wraith on the team.

Maliken and puppet are both strong midgame and don't require excessive defensive play to win.

[VeNuM]

Sorry, this post wasnt specifically orientated around the D55 vs NrB game. Its just something that has happened in the past.

The Push heroes are not going to be coming any time soon as they are going to release with the 60 heroes they have, so two more agility are coming and one strength which I think is the Engineer.

I guess you can say there is some skill in turtling or making the game last longer and allowing the late game you have on your team to win the game but personally I don't see how this is skillful or how the game should be going.

[Gedok]

Sorry, this post wasnt specifically orientated around the D55 vs NrB game. Its just something that has happened in the past.

The Push heroes are not going to be coming any time soon as they are going to release with the 60 heroes they have, so two more agility are coming and one strength which I think is the Engineer.

I guess you can say there is some skill in turtling or making the game last longer and allowing the late game you have on your team to win the game but personally I don't see how this is skillful or how the game should be going.

I agree with you, and even bought this up in the general boards. There will be 60 heroes at launch, and yes we know more will come, but at this rate it would take a good year for all these heroes to be ported. This is assuming they plan on importing those specific "counters". In short, it's a gamble.

There just needs to be more rewards for being more aggressive and being the early pusher. I made some suggestions on my topic here: http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=40830

Basically stuff like you get an XP reward for pushing a tower, better reward for killing heroes (they are barely worth more than a creep wave), and a much higher assist reward system that even rewards you when you died (assuming you are listed as an assist). Right now the game feels like an abridged version of World of Warcraft on who can farm AI creeps the most.

[BigBadManiac]

In my opinion both maliken and puppet have way too good early game skills wich allows for a easy path to a imba late game item build cause they both farm easy even if you are an auto attack noob and that is bad has it takes the skill out of the game wen you compare them to SW its just stupid has SW needs a babysiter or hes screwed and both puppet and maliken can solo easy... so either they both need a nerf of SW and some other carries need a buff has they are making other carries useless why would you play a hard early game carri wen you can play one thats just has good carri and has a easy early game... i remenber SW before the nerfs and guys he wasnt half as powerfull as maliken in many ways soo.. i vote for the nerf has if you buff the other carries early game then we will end up playing an AGI only game......

[Forfeit]

Pick Axe + Nymphora or Axe + Shaman, and push.

But yes, Puppet is too good at all phases of the game. 1 long duration psuedo-root, 1 silence/mandatory auto attack debuff, guaranteed aoe crits, and an ult that scales to an extent with a super long range to break.

[Mellow]

I think the problem with Maliken and Puppet is the fact that they have long ranged area of effect attacks that are brutal. There isn't really a hero like this so it really screws with the balance.

[Llama]

I think there are plenty of good push heroes out there, just not enough decent gankers.

We made a team of nymph+axe, Defiler mid, and HB+swift, against a team with puppet, behe, maliken, slither and pyro. We had pushed down all outer towers and two base towers by the 20min mark, epic stuff

[ma5]

puppet is fine imo. he has very low HP and has no AOE skils. he can be a good disabler thou. in competitive match, people ban more aoe heroes such as tree,enigma,behe . rarely i heard people ban puppet.
Yes people ban tree in competitive games all the time.

[HellFire69]

I've noticed lately that to win scrims you need to pick 2-3 heroes with late game potential to win or severely out play the opposing team. I'm not sure what changed in the "meta-game" but whenever my team asks to me to choose 4 int's I cringe and pick another Shrunken Head packing face smasher.

[fagel]

current DotA meta-game countered and severed turtling and pushing with trilanes and roaming; most notably: lion (witchslayer) + vs (andromeda) is gg. I think this came up from MCity vs. MYM, but trilane + roam > turtle in DotA.

[Pyros]

current DotA meta-game countered and severed turtling and pushing with trilanes and roaming; most notably: lion (witchslayer) + vs (andromeda) is gg. I think this came up from MCity vs. MYM, but trilane + roam > turtle in DotA.

You still see some semi successful turtling, but it usually relies on Spectre/Morphling and actually not losing too bad the teams fights or your barracks. Eventually Morph/Specter outgrow the opposition and rape, but I have only seen like 2 competitive matches in the past 2months where that happened after the team was losing most team fights, most of the time yeah turtling doesn't work too well, just delay the defeat some, mostly because even the ganking teams get a carry.

I don't think the turtling in HoN comes so much from puppet/maliken, but more from the lack of aggressivity of most teams. A lot of fights you see people kill someone, then just fall back and go farm their jungle and push their lane a bit and stuff, overall too much emphasis on getting a certain level of items before pushing further than T1 towers and such, and not looking for kills non stop. It obviously doesn't help that they can creep stack and get free 4k gold 20-25mins into the game, but then again, how often do you see people going to that creep stack and killing it like a tower push, as a full group. You win a team fight but don't think you can push a tower? Why not go to the creep stack and try to kill at least half of it?

Gonna take the example of that D55 game that was VoDed, you had a ganking lineup(pharaoh/wretched hag/ophelia/witch slayer/pestilence are all excelent solo gankers, even worse when they're moving together) yet you spent most of your time playing a normal game, with normal lanes, not much ganking, and a very passive play(early game has its share of ganks, but nothing like a pure roamer, and it kinda stopped after that). You can't blame NrB for playing a turtling game while you were on your own side of the river for most of the game, farming your own jungle after team fights. You didn't try to counter maliken creep stack which should have been obvious since he rushed a whispering helm, you didn't try to gank him when he was farming, you only had the tier1 towers by 30mins even though you had Ophelia in your lineup, etc.

If you look at the FFS games(I think it's FFS at least), they gank all game long, they don't let people farm, and after they gank, they push hard, they don't give their opponents any time to breath which is how you counter turtling, relentless ganking and pushing.

[VeNuM]

As I said in a previous post NrB vs D55 isnt an good example and wasnt the primary focus of the post so I'm unsure why you feel fit to comment on that game.

The reason that we failed as a team to win early/mid game was because I 'had' two Italians in my team (Ophelia/Pesti) that speak little to 0 English and werent responding to my directions and playing really passive on Ophelia ect, I'd ask for something and spend 30 seconds repeating myself for it to happen a minute later or not at all, stuff like that is the reason we kinda failed mid/early so thats issues within the team that Im going to fix.

However on the turtle fest it happens in quite a lot of games on HoN, there isnt enough diversity and if you believe there is you are wrong, the carry heroes are by far the strongest in the game at the moment, especially when they are given such good early game skills (Hi Puppet, Hi Maliken)

[Pyros]

As I said in a previous post NrB vs D55 isnt an good example and wasnt the primary focus of the post so I'm unsure why you feel fit to comment on that game.

The reason that we failed as a team to win early/mid game was because I 'had' two Italians in my team (Ophelia/Pesti) that speak little to 0 English and werent responding to my directions and playing really passive on Ophelia ect, I'd ask for something and spend 30 seconds repeating myself for it to happen a minute later or not at all, stuff like that is the reason we kinda failed mid/early so thats issues within the team that Im going to fix.

However on the turtle fest it happens in quite a lot of games on HoN, there isnt enough diversity and if you believe there is you are wrong, the carry heroes are by far the strongest in the game at the moment, especially when they are given such good early game skills (Hi Puppet, Hi Maliken)

Well because at the end of the game, one of you say GG turtle, and then I see this post by someone in the same clan, so I assume it's somewhat linked. If it's not fine, and yes you do have good points about Maliken and Puppet, but they're not the only hero that have early game potential while being amazing carry. Madman is the same too, his barrel roll does insane dmg and stuns, his stalk is a stupid harassing tool, just huge mana issues but then again Maliken isn't so much better mana wise.

Only those 3 already should give you the possiblity to have one on your team. If you don't get one, then you aim for another type of play, like a hard pushing strat. But having certain carries that are straight up better than others? Same as in dota really. Morphling is basically a 100% pick in almost every competitive game, due to early escape/ganking potential with wave form and insane late game.

That said, I'm not sure these heroes contribute specifically to turtle style. They might have some balancing to do on them(maliken +dmg ability doesn't drain a lot of health and adds a very large amount of dmg very early, puppet has very powerful disables on top of very good damage, at range, and with a very reasonable str gain), but if their ancient creep stack is killed, they're usually not that much better than other good carries. I don't think they're more turtle friendly than say, Sand Wraith, who thrives on long games. Maliken and Puppet being good fast means they fit perfectly in a fast ganking lineup in case it fails, not specifically in a turtling strategy.

[_Archangel_]

I could be the only one that thinks this, but I want to voice my opinion anyway.

I'm finding certain heroes are kind of ruining the balance of the game in competitive play, most notably Maliken and Puppet Master. When a game goes for 40 minutes and Maliken or Puppet are against you (and you have the old school Dota carrys like Pesti/Soulstealer) even if you manage to take the out a lot and try and pressure there farming, they don't need very many times at all to be superior carrys. I've played quite a bit of top tier play and I've grown frustrated with games that arnt dictated by good play, they are dictated by how well you can turtle and just let the game go on for longer so eventually your Puppet/Maliken has certain items and they only need like 1 or 2 items where as other carrys need plenty more.

It makes for boring play and it makes for boring watching I'm sure when the games go on for 50+ minutes waiting for the carry to go off and eventually end the game for one of the teams.

So it leads me to the question. Why is this game dominated and focused on carry heroes currently?

The conclusion I've come to is this hero needs more a some more pushing power and stuff to stop this game becoming a turtle fest.

Note this is in the Clan & Competitive section and I'm not talking about Publics.

Those are not hard carries, so there's your problem. If you have Sand Wraith or Wild Soul you can stand up to that Puppet Master or Maliken just fine.

That said, trilane/roaming and aggressive play would probably work better

[WaRDeN]

Sand wraith is a stronger version of a dota hero that was far and away the best lategame carry in the more diverse hero pool of dota. Puppet master has 10 seconds of disable as well as what is probably the best passive skill in the game. Other than those two heroes, there aren't any really glaring imbalances.

[BigBadManiac]

Sand wraith is a stronger version of a dota hero that was far and away the best lategame carry in the more diverse hero pool of dota. Puppet master has 10 seconds of disable as well as what is probably the best passive skill in the game. Other than those two heroes, there aren't any really glaring imbalances.

M8 you crearly dont know what you are saying has SW was a direct port so its exactly the same that he was in dota and if you think he imba now you should have seen him before he got nerfed like 3 or 4 times in a row to a point that hes early game is completly screwed....

[VeNuM]

When you port to your image the rest of the images disappear so its not the same anymore.

[Ziffy]

In addition, the pathing upgrades in HoN make dagger MUCH more reliable.

[JiggaWugga]

Turtling is not hero dependent. Both Maliken and Puppet can gank like maniacs very early in the game, much more so than say magebane or madman. Turtling is what they do when they lose group fights and fail ganks--try to develop an item advantage to compensate for a skill deficiency. It's the SMART way to play.

And no one gets away turtling forever. Maliken disappears? Time to take a tower--that will bring him out, or force them to fight a man down.

[VeNuM]

WOW thanks for such a good reply JiggaWugga.

[MinishMan]

I think both puppet and maliken need a nerf. Maliken has too much skill synergy and puppet is hugely strong thoughout the game. I also debate his squishyness. He starts at str 20 and gains 2.1 a level, that isn't really squishy considering he has 2 disables for escaping.

I personally hate playing and vsing maliken, I can never seem to play him well and always get trampled by him. In BD if puppet is in the pool I will always strive to fp him or beg the top slot to fp for me. <3 ancient stacking puppet pwnage.

[coley]

Try the game when its not on easy mode I assure you there will be a serious difference.

[fatrend1]

Puppet show someone with a Runed Axe. Puppet AOE.

[Kietharr]

Both new heroes being added are pushers to some extent, though engineer seems like he might be more suited to turtling. His ulti prevents blink initiation though so you can tower without the fear of behemoth blinking in and splattering you.

Might help depending on how good they are.

[dashPROEST]

Turtling is not hero dependent. Both Maliken and Puppet can gank like maniacs very early in the game, much more so than say magebane or madman. Turtling is what they do when they lose group fights and fail ganks--try to develop an item advantage to compensate for a skill deficiency. It's the SMART way to play.

And no one gets away turtling forever. Maliken disappears? Time to take a tower--that will bring him out, or force them to fight a man down.

This guy has got it. Some guy replied earlier that Kaution's team was not roaming and ganking. That guy is dummmmb. If anything, you concentrated too much on it. You had those guys so easily on the ropes, especially with how bad Archna and Pebbles were. You needed to use your Ophelia advantage and destroy everything on the map. For some reason, you guys turtled in their bushes, hoping and waiting, while they turtled in their base.

[KARTlK]

Sand wraith is a stronger version of a dota hero that was far and away the best lategame carry in the more diverse hero pool of dota. Puppet master has 10 seconds of disable as well as what is probably the best passive skill in the game. Other than those two heroes, there aren't any really glaring imbalances.

I'mma let you finish, but morphling was one of the best lategame carries of all time.

[crappular]

I'mma let you finish, but morphling was one of the best lategame carries of all time.
No, he isn't. He's a semi-carry with the ability to farm monstrously. Replicate someone, send it to one lane, farm the one you are in, BOT to another lane, farm that, morph into replicate clone at the last lane and farm that. He's also notable for being able to do respectable damage without many items. He has no real "steroid" spell for upping his damage. He can also contribute a fair larger amount early-mid game than most hard carries and does not need excessive babysitting. He also has two escapes, one of which can teleport him clear across the map if he set up a clone beforehand, which most good Morph players will do as much as possible as soon as they are able.
Also, can someone explain to me how puppet is fragile? 20 + 2.1/level strength doesn't exactly scream that to me.

[lumino`]

What people do not understand here, is that turtle-strategies are and always have been double-edged swords.

In competive play, especially in tournaments or group phases, if you are certain that your team outskills your opponent turtling can be a safety.
Simply because countering turtle strategies involve more skill.

Any proper team however that faces a turtle strategy will use their mapadvantage to the fullest.
Farming 75% of the map continuously, pressuring the other team at all times, and waiting for the right moment to engage. Including mutiple lane pushes.

5 heroes with proper farm > 1 strong carry with decent farm. If your entire team is equipped with disable/behemoths heart/sheepstick. Good luck to any carry to get away with victory.

Turtling certainly is not without its risks, but it certainly can be boring to play and play against.

[Darkshine1]

The only time I ever see turtle oriented strategies work (or used, really) is when there is a sand wraith on the team.

Maliken and puppet are both strong midgame and don't require excessive defensive play to win.

Ain't gonna be no viable turtle strats until Tidehunter's ported, IMO.

[Chamie]

rewind 6.52 gogo -_-.

[ko]

Ain't gonna be no viable turtle strats until Tidehunter's ported, IMO.
agreed

[zhatan]

Turtling when its going bad = king. Can turn around almost any game, altho it is boring as hell for everyone involved.

And no, Tidehunder isnt the only thing that can turtle.