zircon

You're just not making any sense. You can't take random items and say "well, with THIS item you could match these abilities of another hero." If we're talking about being more farmed, then Witch would have a Totem as well, giving him 3 disables to Pyro's two.

http://honleague.com/tournaments.php?do=view&id=5 Anyone want to try joining some tournaments? Seems like it could be fun. At least 5 of us I think could put up a good fight in a really competitive match. Also I'm just not afraid of Pyro. His stun is harder to land and hits fewer people. Witch can initiate just as well but can spam more freely in lanes. Matches Witch with a Sheepstick? What? That's like saying Magebane matches Madman's crit.. all he needs is Riftshards!

That's true, but Panda and Succ have overwhelmingly dominant ults for a small matchup, and they're really easy to use. Arachna is also OP for 3v3.

Man, you're a pretty awesome producer! I want to hear more of your original electronic stuff now

Yes, Panda/Succ in 3v3 are very unfair.

TDL can boost her ASPD nearly as much as Madman can, except with a nonult skill. She can also buff her own damage to incredible levels again without her ult. Her AOE silence lasts longer than MM's stun and her skills require less mana. She's on par. Witch being worse than Pyro? That's funny because most of the people on the HON forums (ex-dota players) said that Lina was typically considered a watered-down Lion. Witch has the disabling versatility of someone like Pollywog but can do way more damage and has incredible lane presence, plus a superior attack animation.

I just want to say that Legionnaire is the manliest hero in the entire game. In a match earlier tonight, I was running up to a teamfight and noticed Magmus off to the side charging his ult. I immediately portkeyed in and Taunted him, eating the full brunt of every single ult wave, then executed him on the spot. I've never quite had that kind of adrenaline rush with any other hero. There's something about Lego's style of play that is just... so satisfying!

Don't even think about cold calling game studios until you have some sort of real portfolio to show! My advice is to start doing indie and student game projects to build up your chops and get a reel going. Once you have something to show, hit up conventions like the GDC where you can network with more game developers.

Tiers time! REVISED DEFINITIONS - God tier - Always pick these heroes if given the opportunity. Always ban them if the opposing team could have access. S tier - Powerful, versatile characters that have significant utility. Try to fill your team with these. A tier - Good heroes that can do one thing very well (perhaps on an S-tier level) but don't quite have as much overall utility as S-tiers. For example, Pollywog Priest is a great disabler. However, Succubus is an even better disabler, plus she has more lane staying power. Pandamonium and Rampage are solid STR carries with good stunning capabilities, but Pestilence offers more power overall. B tier - Average picks. These may be competitive with the above tiers under circumstances, but cannot be thrown into any lineup. Generally these guys are mixed bags. For example, Swiftblade is a pretty good carry, but pales in comparison to Madman or the Dark Lady. Nymphora has some good potential but needs to be with the right heroes. Electrician counters Jeraziah, but doesn't offer a great deal to teamfights. C tier - Below-average picks. Certainly capable of filling specific roles, but they have 1-2 "deadweight" or underpowered abilities, or are very easily countered. For example, Night Hound's Ult makes him invisible, but wards, dust, eyes and Pestilence's ult will reveal him. Keeper's ult is comparable to Tempest's, but not quite as good, his eyes are easily countered, and his self-damage buff is a waste. D tier - Severely underpowered heroes. These guys require significant farm to be effective or are simply extremely hard to play properly. There is little reason to pick them over higher tier heroes. God: Tempest, Jeraziah, Demented Shaman, Behemoth S: Madman, The Dark Lady, Sand Wraith, Pestilence, Witch Slayer, Valkyrie, Thunderbringer, Hellbringer, Succubus, Plague Rider, Soul Reaper, Kraken, Pharaoh, Maliken A: Legionnaire, Scout, Pandamonium, Rampage, Magebane, Soulstealer, Voodoo Jester, Puppet Master, Pollywog Priest, Defiler, Torturer, Accursed, Glacius, Magmus, Hammerstorm, Pyromancer, Corrupted Disciple B: Swiftblade, Slither, Wretched Hag, Vindicator, Nymphora, Pebbles, Blood Hunter, Electrician, Wildsoul, Andromeda C: Night Hound, Predator, Devourer, Forsaken Archer, Armadon, Keeper of the Forest, Moon Queen, Blacksmith D: Zephyr, War Beast, Chronos, Ophelia Unranked: Engineer

As opposed to the way you type now, which is infinitely more annoying. You're too cool to use punctuation or capitalization and make your posts readable? It's the same thing with prophet of mephisto. You're not trendy or hip because you don't type properly.

Finally, this will shut all the people up who kept saying "LOL ITS JUST A RUMOR." Anyone who heard the chord comparison between Strangers and the Sonic3 credits theme had to have known he was involved!

Yet in every game I've played with Nymphora, including those where Antigrav played her, she always seems underleveled because she's so ridiculously easy to kill. Platemail gives no stats though. It's only 60% EHP vs. physical whereas Void gives +infinite EHP vs. physical when you're being focus fired, plus +140 HP, mana, damage, ASPD and additional armor. +7 to all stats is certainly nice. I think it's a very powerful item, just situational. Really for support heroes, your goal is to get off your one or two clutch spells and then just try to stay alive so you can do it again in 10 seconds or so. You spend a lot of the time just trying not to die, in a way being your team's tank. This principle is actually why in World of Warcraft PVP, at least when I played, "armor priests" were really effective. The best supporter in the game was the Priest class, which I played. You would ALWAYS get focus fired first due to your incredibly team healing and shield abilities. So, rather than build him to really enhance his heals (which are already pretty good), the armor build means you would get items potentially crappy for almost anything EXCEPT defense and staying alive. The enemy team would waste resources trying to kill you while your team tore them up.

Yeah, the speed problems in FFT for PSP made it unplayable. It should not take 8 seconds for "Throw Stone" to execute. Part of what made FFT awesome was the fluidity of the animations.

OK, after a brief hiatus, here's my attempt at the ballad style. http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/wips/HH%20Track%206.mp3 Try imagining the "Down" melody over it... since that was the big inspiration

Nah, not at all. First let's look at her stats. 1.7 Str - She's going to be extremely squishy. 15 base str? Even more so. 1.6 Agi - Carrying is out of the question and she will have poor ASPD/armor. 2.7 Int - Not bad, but not amazing for an Int hero. 2.08 Armor - Squishy. 295 Movement - Slow. 550 Attack Range - Not as good as other ranged heroes/babysitters. Attack animation - Bad. Damage range - Bad. So statistically, she is inferior. How about abilities? Healnuke - Long cooldown means it's gonna be used maybe once per teamfight or gank. Good otherwise, but it's non-scaling, so by mid to lategame it starts to lose utility, especially since as characters get faster it is much more easily dodged. Still, not terrible. Grace of the Nymph - Good for earlygame, but by mid nobody is really going to be running out of mana. Leveling this takes points away from your other abilities. While it might make you a "portable fountain" your healnuke will be less effective as a result, your stun won't be as good, etc. Plus, it's situational. If your team is not mana reliant, this ability is mostly useless. Stun - One of the slower and less reliable stuns in the game. It HAS to get higher leveled before it can really be effective, and even then, it is pretty easy to dodge compared to many other INT and STR stuns. The self-buff is just tacked on. Nymph's damage and ASPD are so poor that she won't really be able to do much with the buffs. Not practical for ganking. Teleport - Before level 11 it's a glorified homecoming stone. Nymphora can't do much by herself so she won't really be teleporting alone that often. A solid ability otherwise, but by the time it starts to ramp up (TPing multiple people), what's the point? People won't be soloing much, and besides, they can hear you coming. Compare this to Accursed. Accursed can take far more damage, and has arguably stronger lane presence (can towerdive/harass constantly, way more HP, better damage.) He also adds far more to teamfights overall than Nymphora and while he doesn't scale to lategame much either, is a more solid pick in any lineup than Nymphora. His Sear benefits the whole team, meaning he is doing up to three things in a teamfight (attacking, healing/nuking, shielding.) Definitely more presence. As a babysitter, Demented Shaman is far superior. Better stats, better animation, way more utility, way more scaling. This is practically self-explanatory. Jeraziah is also better for obvious reasons. Even Voodoo Jester is more reliable. Voodoo can AOE heal or AOE nuke, stun more effectively, and do far more damage overall with Cursed Ground and his ult, not to mention his stats are better. Even if you can't get any of these healers/babysitters, it's STILL better to have someone like Hellbringer or Glacius who are both more reliable and have more utility throughout the game.

Sure, but it's much more short-lived. It doesn't spill out into the thread and IRC channel every day. I've spent tons of time in both subcommunities of OCR and TF2 just has way more drama (and it shouldn't.) Nah, not even close. 99% of the discussion in the HoN thread is actually discussion of game mechanics, strategies, etc.

I'd play a lot more TF2 if I weren't playing HoN. I know the same can be said of many OCR guys. To be honest it's a little tiresome to hear so much bitching and drama over this game. It seems like every time I check this thread or the IRC channel there is just drama drama drama, usually involving bleck and atmuh. I don't want that. Can't you guys maybe just play the game?

This may be of small comfort, but it's only $300 for a new 32gb iPod Touch, at least.

Except Expose doesn't sound anything like MJ... at all. Dave: I agree that it resembles other 80s songs, but the particular choice of synth timbres is extremely similar to Lava Reef, as is the chord progression and especially the arpeggios. I've heard a lot of 80s music but this song in particular sounds a LOT like Sonic.

I'm not sure if anyone has pointed out this before, but the song "Point of No Return" by 80s band "Expose" sounds an awful lot like the music from the Sonic series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_VpZVDjitQ The percussion groove of course is very much similar to the style of Sonic. But listen to the bass, the synth stabs and the arpeggio pattern at the very beginning. If I told you these things were from a Sonic track you would never question it. Compare to Lava Reef Zone Act 1 from Sonic 3: Right off the bat, the bass sound is basically identical. The arpeggios are extremely similar. The key is the same. The tempo is within 10bpm. The lead bell synth sounds quite similar to a bell synth in the Expose track. Even the chord progression is pretty similar, albeit slower. I'm not saying the Sonic composers ripped off Expose - at all - but much like house music was a known inspiration for Yuzo Koshiro and Streets of Rage, I think this specific song HAS to have had a big influence on, at the very least, Lava Reef.

This mix is friggin addicting. I listened to it for hours a few nights ago while coding. Awesome job! One thing though - having listened to all of the original songs, I heard a lot of elements in your mix (particularly heavy drums, saw basslines and some assorted synth stabs) that weren't in the originals. Did you add your own stuff too? For example, around 1:50, as well as 2:02. I don't recognize those elements.

Well, again, the difference is that Behe has his hugely mana-intensive ults that are somewhat situational, and has limited farming or carrying ability otherwise. FA is a strong carry, very strong farmer, and a generally non-mana reliant hero. So the comparison isn't very good. In the game I played last night with Jade, Luke and Zealousy, a FA who got Frostwolf's skull and Geo Bane was an enormous threat. Even before she got those items, she could safely do massive damage to all of us from a LONG distance with her ult. If we were pushing, she could sit safely at her tower, forcing US to come to her, which is never what you want.

Got misty-eyed at the Crisis Core ending.

I think FA has potential to be a good hero, she just needs tweaks. Her ult is, as Dhsu pointed out, pretty strong, and I believe the range ie superior to Hag's. What would make it even better is if it got orbs from attacks (minus Lifesteal), and/or if they weakened it slightly, but made it more like Swiftblade's ult, where it sort of just happens without being channeling. Engineer definitely seems cool. He has amazing ganker potential, as well as pushing and defense. His auto-attack is pretty bad aside from the awesome animation though, since he has no abilities to help him carry on his own. He NEEDS the turret to scale, and to maximize the turret he should be using Tinker. The turret itself though is balanced by the fact that *it* doesn't scale, which means a high-ASPD carry like Scout or Magebane can rip it up very quickly by themselves, or certainly if the whole team focus fires them. However, even if nothing else is true, the energy field alone is amazing. It's a massive-AOE DOT that forces opponents to either take a ton of damage within it (and waste time trying to destroy it, which might be hard due to the chaos), or escape and be silenced/damaged further. Obviously it has huge synergy with any other AOE stunner like Tempest, Keeper, or even Pestilence/Panda.

Panda isn't OP. With four active abilities, he's mana intensive. He's also slow, but requires more position control than almost any other hero to be effective with his abilities. He has no forms of magic damage, meaning Void Talisman or simply stacking armor is quite effective to negate his damage. It's also not terribly hard to avoid his stun, since you can see it coming MUCH more obviously than stuns like Pyro, Tort or Hammerstorm, and a poor stun can set yourself up to be killed. He's a solid hero, but if Panda is OP than Madman is beyond broken. Hemo, why would you not get Split Shot for FA? It basically increases her effective killing power by a factor of 3 (4 targets x 75% damage = 300% damage.) It's more effective than MQ's glaive, which is a solid ability. FA has no steroid skills otherwise, and steroid skills are what give good carries (Madman, Dark Lady) the ability to farm properly. Also your split attacks get attack modifiers such as Shieldbreaker which is godly.