Tensei

If this is the main reason, I think you would like Casual Mode in HoN (a rework of EM). It doesn't remove gold on death, denies don't reduce experience gain, and gold earned for hero kills is higher. No double gold ticks or anything silly like that. Also, LoL seems almost entirely geared towards making it impossible for any single person to carry a team (thus kinda defeating the idea of a carry-type hero who has a weak earlygame and a strong lategame). You can't ruin the enemy mid, control the river runes, destroy the sidelanes, and almost singlehandedly win like you can in HoN. There's also the issue with every champion scaling linearly which means that even supports are expected to sit passively in their lane and wait until they get their Rabaddons. If at any point a champion seems 'unreasonably' strong in earlygame, you can quickly expect them to get hit with the nerfstick (Rumble). Contrast to HoN where you have supports that can take over their lane right from level 1 (Vindicator, Myrmidon) or nukers that peak in effectiveness between levels 7 - 14 (Pyro, Witch Slayer, Fayde, etc.) but very quickly become a mere stun dispenser after that.

Obviously you have never seen a good jungle Eve wreck face yet. Seriously, though, I hope she'll be better after the stealth rework.

Don't you think Zero would have wrecked face even if he played Eve? I think you're confusing individual player skill with how viable a champion is. If a player can dominate with Twitch, I'm pretty sure they can dominate even more with 'top-tier' champions that fulfill a similar role. In a vaccuum, no Champion is outright bad, but there's just a shitton of overlap in roles, and some Champions completely outperform others (like Annie/Orianna vs. LeBlanc)

single core + integrated graphics = gg.

Don't forget that with a bit of practice you can frog them, then cast your wards on them, and they'll be trapped inside. But yeah, Pollywog is a great hero.

The main similarity with other Dotalikes is that you have two teams of heroes (or whatever theyre called in this game) that fulfill different roles, with different strengths and weaknessess going at each other, but that's pretty much it. The controls are WASD to move and mouse to aim, which is a pretty radical departure from typical Dotalike control schemes. I guess you could say it controls similarly to Bastion and other games like that. The only ingame progression is that after doing or taking enough damage (I think?) you get the ability to cast your ultimate, you don't level up or buy items. AFAIK there are no targeted attacks, but everything including your main attack is a skillshot. The main goal of the game is to kill all enemy heroes in a relatively small arena, and it's actually much more like online FPS deathmatches in that respect. 3rd person TF2 in a fantasy setting is a pretty accurate description. A single round shouldn't last much longer than a few minutes.

The OTHER community hero finally making it into the game. I dunno, I like the design but it overlaps a bit too much with Tremble I think. Looks fun to play though. Guess I'll be spending more coins on that Nyan Cat courier though.

Hearing HotshotGG rant/cry about the Nidalee nerfs on his stream is some funny shit.

Bloodline Champions is actually a great game and I'm curious to see what it'll be like when it gets out of beta.

Well the best flat armor runes are yellows and the best flat MR runes are blues, so you can get both really. I just find flat MR Blues more useful overall than scaling MP/5 Regen because some champions don't even have Mana.

Chronos is 250 Silver Coins, which I estimate to be about 10-20 games, depending on how much you win. He is kinda underwhelming though. Had some good games with Luke, Vilecat and a few shizzies today (even though we lost everything) I'm just having a ball playing all these new heroes.

Pets very much are a Broodmother thing though, and Mounds are pretty much like Broodmother Webs.

Broodmother is pretty much Tremble yeah.

Flat MR Blues are actually some of the best runes because contrary to what Zircon is saying, spells are cheap and spammable and the majority of harassment and kills in a lane is caused by magic damage.

Gotta say, I'm really liking some of the newer heroes (with the notable exception of Emerald Warden). Bombardeer, Dampeer and Monkey King are all a lot of fun to play and I'll probably miss those in Dota 2. :[ At least heroes like Aluna, Tremble and Fayde will have superior counterparts there.

So, I did some number crunching on Denying in HoN vs. XP bonuses in LoL. Fortunately, experience gain from creeps in both games is roughly the same (60 for melee, 40 for ranged). In a game of HoN, 10 denies is about the average per hero during the laning phase (i.e. the phase where denying directly affects your enemies XP gain). 10 creeps in HoN are worth ~500 XP. Denying 10 creeps reduces your enemies XP gain to 33% of 500 if they're ranged heroes, and 66% of 500 if they're melee. This means that the difference in XP will be 333.33 XP or 166.66 XP respectively, and that's if your opponent doesn't deny at all. In LoL, the laning phase lasts about 20 minutes. Minion waves (containing 6 minions) start spawning at 1:30 and will continue to spawn every 30 seconds after that, so 37 x 6 = 222 Minions will spawn in 20 minutes. Let's adjust that downwards to 150 minions to accomodate for dying/getting zoned/being out of lane, so you'll be getting the experience from 150 Minion deaths in 20 minutes. An average of 50 experience per minion means that you'll get about 7500 xp during that time. 5% of 7500 is 375. That is the XP advantage you will have over your opponent by speccing Awareness in the utility mastery tree. This actually means that speccing Awareness in LoL is about as useful as denying in HoN (not very), and gets completely negated if you actually deny/spec Awareness as well. This is all calculated for a solo lane, so if you're in a dual lane the difference become even less noticeable because everything gets halved. Considering all of this, hating on denying seems pretty pedantic. As for 5 second stuns. In this thread Zileas, the champion designer for LoL, talks about the concept of anti-fun, and how taking away control from your opponent might be fun for you, but isn't fun for them. However, according to him, giving them the opportunity to do a clutch dodge on a skillshot Dark Binding suddenly makes it fun for them too. And I agree with that. And HoNs/DotAs game design seems to be in line with that, because the longer the CC duration on a skill is, the more caveats it will have, to the point that even the Chronos ult you mentioned can be dodged.

Okay, so... I don't play this game but I have a bunch of preorder exclusive items that are just sitting in my backpack doing nothing. I know that Bill's Hat is pretty rare, but I don't really know the value on the rest, so I'll just assume that I won't get scammed or anything. I'd be okay trading them for Steam games or even paypal cash. Backpack is here. Even if you don't want any of it, I'd really appreciate it if you could at least take a look and appraise it so I know which items are rare. Thanks in advance!

MOTHERFUCKER. The ONE game I couldn't watch live (the finals) and Na'Vi picks Pudge. He looks like a fucking zombie sumo wrestler and I'm going to play the shit out of him when the game finally comes out. Also, Doombringer farming up Radiance, Vanguard and Phaseboots before 20 minutes pretty much puts the entire HoN competitive scene to shame.

The first Best of 3 game is pretty damn entertaining. First game was a complete stomp in favor of Na'Vi (22 min concede), but Scythe is looking pretty good in this second game so far. Also, keep in mind that Smoke of Deceit dispells within 1k range of a hero or tower, so its main function is for quick movement across the map and to avoid wards.

I just hope the 400 games I have on Steam will increase my chances of getting in on the invite-only beta, as well as the fact that I signed up almost as soon as it became possible to do so.

Let's not pretend we didn't see this coming: http://i.imgur.com/UHSbb.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gxEUk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0MdAz.jpg

The next patch will make couriers free for both teams.

Some of the models really are wonderful. I like how they all have a seperate animation for getting stunned as well. The only hero rework that really doesn't do it for me is Earthshaker, they should at least scale his model up a bit. Blue Mexican Stormspirit is awesome though.

HoN has been out for a year, and their current spectator UI is only a few weeks old. This game isn't even in beta yet.

Dude I don't hate you. I've just been bored with LoL lately so I'm not exactly enthousiastic even when we're winning.