Tensei

Rampage IS god tier. So are Kraken, Tree, Rhapsody and Silhouette. I think it has a lot to do with how crazy good Sol's Bulwark is nowadays.

Having played a bunch of Silhouette and Tremble recently, I realized that another thing I really miss in LoL is genuinely controllable minion micro. Farming two different lanes with Tremble/Shudder is just so cool. That said, Silhouette and Rhapsody are probably the most OP heroes at the moment.

Midas Spotlight is up. He looks awesome, and it's great seeing another ranged STR hero.

Are we going to do birthday threads for every game now?

Reached 1750 PSR (Public Skill Rating) in Heroes of Newerth. This was before matchmaking was implemented so nowadays PSR doesn't really count anymore. Aside from that I've become a lot worse at the game and haven't really been playing enough to get back up to my previous skill level.

For everyone who missed that WHP5 vs xFin game yesterday.

Btw, if you like the idea of Dominion, you should totally pick up Dawn of War 2: Retribution off of Steam whenever it's on sale because it's literally LoL Dominion (hero units with active skills, control points) with a bit less emphasis on the hero and a bit more on being able to build controllable units.

I'm sure he was being at least partially facetious. That said, there is supposedly an exploit with the Monkey King alt skin that allows you to Vault three times.

I get that you dislike the snowballing effect from gold loss on death, but I still don't see the difference between being CC'd and waiting to respawn. In both cases you are not playing the game. If you look at the hypothetical Dotalike example without a CC mechanic I gave, you still deny your opponent the ability to play the game for 30-60 seconds every time you kill them, and I don't think that at that point it really matters whether that happened because of chain stuns or because of pure burst damage. I'm pretty sure that zircon refers to HoN champions having better design in terms of original skills and concepts (i.e. not a blinkstrike and a your-next-attack-does-something-extra skill on every new hero) I like LoLs champion design more on a visual level actually, and there are some cool concepts skillwise as well (Orianna).

I still don't understand this notion. If you die, you aren't playing for 40~ seconds. This isn't exclusive to the Dotalike genre but exists in most FPSes. Does this mean that the entire concept of getting punished for death in videogames through a respawn timer is poor design? In that sense, even a dotalike with NO crowd control at all would still be based about 'denying your opponents the ability to play the game' by making sure you kill them more than they kill you.

Why? The existence of hard carries in Dota is balanced by the fact that they are way weaker earlygame, and that gankers and supports can dominate early and midgame almost as hard as carries do lategame. There aren't any hard carries that have such a ridiculously easy earlygame as a champion like Caitlyn in LoL.

E: those tiers say nothing about 1500~ mmr range though. Gladiator, Dampeer and Flux are all awesome. E2: Female scout says this: "If you want to play me as designers intended, only lvl up my 1st, 3rd and 4th skill. Leftover points go to stats" E3: The Nyan Cat courier is amazing. The song doesn't play unfortunately.

That's my point. It doesn't really matter which champion it is, because as long as they're farmed they can all carry to a degree, which in turn kinda makes the whole idea of a distinct 'carry' type champion obsolete. I'm not saying that literally every champion scales equally well, but the differences are so much less pronounced than in Dota/HoN.

The cast time on Torturers stun got lowered, which is apparently pretty significant.

http://www.gamereplays.org/heroesofnewerth/portals.php?show=page&name=Heroes-of-Newerth-Hero-Tier-List-August-2011 This tier list is pretty accurate as far as I can tell. Flux and Dampeer are a lot of fun though, even if they get outclassed by alternatives.

Yeah, exactly. I have never really had that feeling of "Okay, we better win this early, because their lategame is way better." in LoL.

Yeah, but the cooldowns are such that you'll generally be doing nothing for ten seconds after blowing all your spells (which won't be doing a lot of damage by that point). Polly and Behemoth are useful through most of the game because they can consistently put out disables, but heroes like Pyromancer and Thunderbringer will bring very little to the table even in terms of utility later on, as Bardic pointed out, unless they're having a good game and managed to get a fast sheepstick. Shrunken Head and Nullstone are still staple carry items btw. My point is that with a maxed out Brand you could probably still bring the enemy carry down in a single spell rotation, BV aside, but you do actually need to have farmed that Rabaddon's/Mejai's first, and that's where the difference with HoN lies. While TB and Pyro don't do much lategame, they can just dominate early/mid by keeping the enemy carry from farming, and secure the win for their team like that without even taking their shitty lategame into consideration.

I have played most of the Champions in the game and the linear scaling is one of the reasons that really turned me off from it, so yeah. We'll agree to disagree I guess.

The differences in carry viability between all those champs you listed are negligible as they all scale very well with farm. A farmed Garen is still a huge threat, same with Vlad and Caitlyn. So are Soraka, Janna, Rammus, Alistar etc etc. for that matter.

I really dislike their design policy concerning that, because again: what is the purpose of having a carry archetype if every other champion scales more or less equally well with farm? This isn't the case at all though, and that quote Dhsu posted completely misrepresents the way Dota plays out, most likely in order to make LoL seem more appealing. They also mention how LoL is supposedly 'less defensive' when typical high level LoL games have <5 kills in the first 30 minutes, whereas in the Dota 2 games shown in the international it wasn't uncommon for there to be like one kill per minute. 'Solo farming' an agility carry is something that only happens with a huge skill gap. Given equal skill for all players, getting your carry farmed is very much a team goal (Babysitting, Warding, Ganking/Counterganking, pushing towers to draw attention away from your carry, etc.) and it can't be pulled off by one guy just being good at lasthitting, not to mention that playing a carry-centric turtle strategy is only one out of a lot of options for overall team strategies. E: 4v5s in HoN play out strangely, and it mostly depends on the point at which a player dropped out, as well as what heroes were picked. Overall, a good team can make use of the extra XP and gold they get and there is a window of time where they can win while they're outleveling the enemy team by 2-3 levels, but as the game drags on their chances get slimmer.

Oh god... E: Not a mod, it's an official courier skin.

^^ Pretty much the reason I've stopped playing soloqueue. The game is just way more fun with a team of people you know, even if they aren't the best at it.

There's a 625 gold item that basically all but fixes your mana problems, especially if you're a STR hero, and with a free courier there's never really a reason to go back to base from lane unless you're close to death and without money for potions. You also have a Power Supply, and a bottle if you're solo mid. I'd say the games are roughly equal when it comes to sustainability but LoL has a lot more 'freebies' like speccing for mana regen, alternate resources (HP, Energy, Rage, Heat), Clarity and various mana regen passives. It's also a balancing issue. Behemoth and Hammerstorm have stuns that cost like 60% of their mana pool at level 1, but they're SO powerful that you have a very good chance of getting a kill when you do use them. The laning phase in LoL is more passive in the sense that you have to slowly chip away at your enemy, hopefully waste their flash, and then maybe get a kill (as long as you're out of tower range).

Even the most aggressive support in LoL atm (Soraka) has only a fraction of the inlane man-up potential of HoN supports like Glacius. So yes, on a relative scale, it's passive. Also, AD Manamune Sona (my favorite build for her) isn't really a support build imo. There's a difference in what is considered a support in both games; In LoL a Champ needs to have a shield or a heal to be considered a support, and is expected to go bot with an AD carry to keep them topped off so they can farm, and having more than one support is a complete waste of a slot. In HoN a support simply needs to be a hero that requires a minimum of farm and/or levels to be effective and you typically want at least two on your team. This generally means that supports in HoN have a crapton of powerful nukes and stuns so they can destroy enemy carries early, but lack scaling skills. A support in LoL (like Soraka) can't reliably 1v1 a carry (like Caitlyn) at ANY point in the game, not even early on. A well-played Slither or Glacius in HoN will completely shit on carries early on.