Tensei

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.

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.

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.

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).

Oh, yeah. Supposedly post-rework Eve and Twitch will lose stealth once they get within a certain range of enemy champions, but they will be buffed in other aspects to make up for it.

To effectively counter stealth champs you need to buy an Oracles Elixir (unreliable because you lose it on death) or use Vision Wards (very dependent on positioning). This means that you're always at a disadvantage against stealth champs because while they don't have to buy those items, you do. I dunno though. Technically you're always buying certain items because they counter specific champs (armor/magic resist comes to mind), but stealth champs ramp down much quicker once you start countering them. I think it's also dependent on the level of play since lower level players probably won't even buy standard wards, much less stealth detection, which is probably why you can shit all over lower level games with Twitch/Eve/Akali. Stealth is basically problematic to balance because its effectiveness varies hugely between different levels of play.

The NDA has been lifted so there are plenty of people streaming now. I just want a key though. Also, from the sounds of it, they initially wanted to run a year long beta (!) so they could add all 105 heroes before release, but now they decided to push the release out a lot sooner so I suppose it will be more like HoN/TF2 with them progressively adding new content.

That's a fair point, I'm sorry if I was out of line, but I didn't intend to troll. I do still feel that picking up new Champions (especially roles you're not comfortable with) and just playing a few games in the knowledge that you'll probably suck it up is ultimately more helpful than sticking with your comfort zone. Like, if you play Annie a bunch you will have a better knowledge of how much burst damage she can put out at various phases of the game, so you can use that to your advantage when you're playing against her the next time. Your experience with Rammus/Amumu won't disappear from playing a few games as different champions.

And you don't think that a team that runs both Shen and Eve is gimping itself severely enough that it will make a noticeable difference? My suggestion was actually to switch out Eve for Twisted Fate/Pantheon/Nocturne to achieve the same gimmick with less of a loss in team utility. I'm amused that you call it 'shitting on somebody's choice of characters', because that implies I can't call a champion bad, just because somebody happens to 'play' them. This harkens back to what I touched upon earlier, which is that a lot of people, for some reason, seem to pick only a handful of champions to play and apparently are close enough to their picks that they get insulted if someone says their particular champion is shitty. Again, I think Yi is a bad champion, and the Dunk Yi build is even worse. That's why I have trouble relating to people who get upset when I call one of their precious babies 'bad'.

Yeah but maybe some people do... you can't really speak for everyone in the thread, and even then, discussing whether Shen is or isn't a bad champion is perfectly fine to post about in this thread. I got some decent counterarguments, which is what I was looking for. Also, You wrote that in response to me talking about how certain champions are plain worse than others. In this context I'm having a very hard time not interpreting that as "You don't play for fun."

Are you arguing against discussion related to LoL in the LoL thread? Or are you implying that I somehow don't play for fun? Because this is pretty much the only build I've been doing the last few games: And I'm still willing to admit that Yi is a shitty champion. Shitty does not equal no fun, just like how overpowered doesn't equal fun. I also don't think HoN is necessarily a better game, I just often have more fun playing it. Also, Caitlyn is a fine carry to learn. She has a much easier earlygame than a lot of other carries *cough*ashe*cough* and can still do a shitton of damage later on. Again though, a lot of the AD carries just play very similarly so if you learn how to play Caitlyn, a lot of those skills will carry over to Corki, Miss Fortune, Ashe, etc.

Which relates to Shen being a bad champion how?

That's kinda the point though. When I call a Champion bad, I don't mean that he's completely terrible on paper, but given the other options you have to fill that particular role, he just gets completely outperformed. Amumu is one of the fastest junglers, has scaling damage that doesnt require you to build AP, and has an ult that wins teamfights. Alistar has wonderful lane control, can isolate enemies from their team with proper initiation and has huge innate tankiness which gives you the freedom to spec for AP or auras. Shen is mediocre in lane, has limited utility in teamfights and is uhhh decent at counterganking? My point is, if you have like 20 Champions to consider for the role of tank, some of them will inevitably be inferior in almost every way.

Whoa, coming in hot here. I didn't mean to 'passive troll', whatever that means, I just have trouble relating to the idea of playing only a handful of different Champions, especially if they don't cover every single role in a team. That's how you end up with Xin, Ashe, Garen, Twitch and Akali-teams in pub games, because people are hesitant to come out of their comfort zone when it comes to champion picks, for some reason. I don't see how that counts as mental masturbation but whatever. For the record I started july of this summer as well, so I don't see how that relates. And Shen really is that bad because he does no damage/CC compared to other tanks like Amumu and Alistar.

As neat as that sounds, that means you end up having two shitty champions on your team (Eve and Shen), while you could technically achieve the same thing with Nocturne/Pantheon/Twisted Fate. Also, what does 'one of you plays eve' mean? I mean, I own Eve but I don't exactly play her often and I actually try to play almost every single Champion (except for my Dunk Yi streak but that's more of a gimmick ). I never really got why people restrict themselves to playing only 5-10 characters out of a cast of 50+, though I guess that in LoL there is a lot of overlap in roles.

Chimera should be pronounced something like khee-my-rah, as per the original Greek Χίμαιρα.

Zeal Blades are only good for Dunk builds. That's not to say Dunk builds aren't good in their own right, but yeah. Typically not something you want to be doing on a srs bzns AD carry.

Build Ashe and every other AD carry like this: boots + 3x health pots if youre mid, Dorans Blade in a side. Rush a BF Sword if you're doing well, otherwise get 2-3 Dorans Blades and Zerker Greaves First. From there just build crap like Bloodthirster/Infinity Edge, Phantom Dancer and Banshees Veil. Almost every single AD carry plays the same so you can have that one build for each of them, there's not nearly as much variation in builds as in HoN.

Tanky DPS are the champions Bardic listed as well as Irelia, Jarvan and Wukong I guess. Olaf/Warwick/Udyr/Nocturne fall in that category as well if you don't count junglers as a seperate category. By AD carry people usually mean ranged champions like Vayne, Caitlyn, Ashe, Corki, etc. Also, Dexie, play HoN if you want your 16/5/20 score to matter. Any carry hero with that kind of farm should be able to handle 3-4 enemy heroes at once.

gg tenchar

Yeah wow, how did I miss that. The combat in PT really wasn't all that, because that game is all about the dialogue, but BGII is still really solid gameplaywise. Some of the encounters, especially those with certain mages are just brutal if you don't know what you're doing because with all the protective spells they have up its sometimes almost like a puzzle. Don't even get me started on Vampires whose standard attacks literally reduce your character levels, which means your main tank suddenly has like 10 max HP. The level draining isn't even a debuff or anything so it lasts indefinitely and can only be removed by visiting a temple or using a rare restoration spell. Dragon Age might be more streamlined overall but it's combat system is literally My First Baldurs Gate by Fisher Price. Another thing the Baldur's Gate series was great at was capturing your progression from useless idiot that dies to cockroaches and can cast magic missile maybe once before he needs to rest like a sissy to godslaying badass mofo that shoots meteors out of his eyes and farts instant death spells.

Jon St. John did E: as well, supposedly.I think might be my favorite one so far, he just has so many interactions with other heroes, and the way he says "I *am* a can of whoopass!" is just awesome.Oh, and the leaked spell icons have some absolutely wonderful placeholders:

I think Heavy Rain is a bad example because not only are both the story and the characters shitty, but it isn't nearly as nonlinear and player-driven as PT. Like Bleck said, it feels more like an assortment of vaguely interactive cutscenes. PT on the other hand had wonderful dialogue writing and talking to people in that game was always a pleasure, not to mention a great setting and interesting characters. These elements are something that modern RPGs often skimp on.

It's a joke. Lothars is the DotA equivalent of Assassins Shroud and I'm pretty sure the hero in question is Clinkz. Clinkz has a windwalk ability similar to Madman, so Lothars is completely redundant on him. I have to say though, the voice acting work is mindblowingly detailed. Heroes not only announce the type of rune they pick up to their team or taunt certain rival heroes after killing them, but they actually have item-specific lines (Slardar saying "This...would seem redundant" after picking up a Basher) as well as lines that comment on whether an ability was succesful or not (Faceless Void goes "An eternity of embarassment" after messing up Chronofield). Sniper even has an entire category of TF2 references ("Thanks for standing still, Wanker/Ganker.") Oh, and Pudge literally has the same voice actor as the TF2 sniper, faux-accent and all. It somehow fits perfectly. There's a guy uploading them here if you want to check them out.

New hero icons got leaked (though supposedly this is from an alpha build, which explains why some of them look not so great) http://i.imgur.com/3vD0t.jpg Also, someone with access to the client leaked a lot of the voices, and most of them are awesome. Here's Juggernaut.