I hate you.

SOJ U GIEV

Get me a key and I'll play with you and explain everything!

As a general rule, just try to die as little as possible. Even 1 for 1 exchanges are only good in very specific circumstances. Oh, and try to stick with easy heroes (Lich, Lion, Tidehunter, Slardar).

I was playing veno because I can just sit on a lane and push quietly. The spawns also work as good scouting on alternate lane paths so I can see a gank coming and gtfo. I'll try one of those heroes though.

Generally you shouldn't be pushing a lane unless all the other heroes are elsewhere and accounted for -- if you get too far from your tower you have a much greater chance of being ganked. That's why you need to constantly be denying your own creeps to pull the line back to your own tower.

Also you can't rely on the other creeps to scout for you...they can only see so far and it's too easy to get distracted and not notice another lane's heroes missing. Have wards up at all times.

Venomancer is pretty decent as well because he's straightforward, but he's also really squishy and lacking in escapes so you tend to die quickly when you get focused.

Tide is a Strength hero so he can take a lot of punishment, and his ultimate really wins teamfights. Lich and Lion are pretty squishy as well, but they both have basically infinite mana so you don't have to really worry about spamming your spells.

I'm pretty on the fence about this game - everything about it seems to have some excellent Valve touches, but the core gameplay sounds like the same archaic bullshit. I guess I'll give it a try if it's free?

It's been stated several times that they've specifically made sure the core gameplay is exactly the same, so denying, gold loss, 5-second stuns - all in there.

They added in SOME conveniences (segmented health bars, 10 second grace period for selling back items, more intuitive shops, etc.) but overall they're playing it completely straight. Whether the core gameplay is archaic or not is something that's completely subjective.

I'll be playing it because of the Valve polish, to play some of the heroes that never got ported to HoN properly (Doombringer, Tinker, Pugna, Meepo), and most importantly because I feel that the core gameplay is actually more interesting than HoN and it's just being held back by an archaic engine.

the one thing i'm hoping is improvement in the shop from dota, both lol and hon improved...tbh this is a dealbreaker for me.

The shops are way better than in DotA. From what I've seen the recommended items are much more relevant than HoN/LoL as well, and overall the layout is very similar to HoNs new shop.

image here.