Dota 2

[BardicKnowledge]

I think the strongest stun that's simply point and click would be Sven/Hammerstorm's Storm Bolt, which lasts for 2 seconds.

True unless you count channeled stuff like Electrician or Polly's binding.

[Tensei]

Those technically don't stun, but cause silenced/perplexed/immobilized/disarmed status, all at the same time. Which is pretty much the same effect as a stun, but yeah.

Stuns are when a swirly thing appears above someones head.

[Jamphibious]

Personally I think a 5 second stun sounds ridiculous. I never really DID play the original DOTA though (tried to get into it but I was too late and all the games were PROZ ONLEE NUBZ GTFO). Stuns are great, CC is a pretty important aspect of the game, but 5 seconds just seems INCREDIBLY long to me. Leona is a tank and her Q stuns for like, 1 second. Its quick, but it serves its purpose as you can easily interrupt any ability quickly with it, or combo it with Zenith blade to stun an enemy that is raping your team from afar. The longest CC I can think of off the top of my head is Rammus' taunt. It almost seems too long already, but its definitely not 5 seconds.

I'll still try DotA 2 though, as it looks really cool. I'm not sure how I'll manage with denying and long CC like that but I guess I'll see. Different strokes for different folks, I do enjoy LoL so I can't see myself completely abandoning it regardless.

[Tensei]

5 seconds is incredibly long, but like I said, the ability

. Not to mention that mana costs and mana management on a whole is balanced entirely differently in HoN/DotA. In LoL you can get a meki pendant, mana regen runes, and you'll be able to spam your abilities pretty liberally in lane right away.

In HoN, any ability that counts as a significant nuke/CC will cost you a third of your mana pool, if not more. Earthshaker/Behemoth has a skill that can best be described as an Anivia wall on steroids that also stuns and damages, and covers an entire screen length. He can cast it exactly once at level one before he's out of mana.

On the whole, using abilities in DotA/HoN is much higher risk/reward than LoL, so everything is appropriately powerful.

E: You can now sign up for the open beta here

Edited August 16, 2011 by Tensei

[prophetik music]

The longest CC I can think of off the top of my head is Rammus' taunt. It almost seems too long already, but its definitely not 5 seconds.

ashe's arrow is a 3.5s stun if it's from more than a screen away with no cc reduction. afaik, that's as long as it gets.

[Bleck]

The 5 second Valkyrie stun you're talking about

I was never talking about this - I don't even know who Valkyrie is.

I was mostly talking about this guy http://honwiki.net/wiki/Chronos

[eternal Zero]

Except he's paper and generally a bad hero. Also it stuns your own team as well.

[Tensei]

It isn't a stun, that's why I was confused. The only 5 second stun in the game is Valkyries arrow.

Wanna know why Chronos isn't the most overpowered hero in the game despite having an on-demand 5 second mass disable?

First, because he's a squishy, low damage hero for the first 20-30 minutes of the game. Second, because ganking actually works in this game on account of almost every hero having at least 3 seconds worth of disables, not to mention that dying means gold loss, so it's very possible to completely shut down a carry by ganking him repeatedly.

If you want to win in HoN soloqueue you don't play a carry, but you play a ganker that's powerful throughout all stages of the game, and can keep the enemy carries from getting fed.

If you try to gank early on in LoL, you're basically an idiot for leaving your lane.

Edited August 16, 2011 by Tensei

[Bleck]

It isn't a stun, that's why I was confused.

yeaaah it says right there that it is a stun

Wanna know why Chronos isn't the most overpowered hero

Okay, see, we're already getting into the DotA fan discussion bias where everyone assumes that everyone is just bitching about being bad at the game and everything is an invitation to try and prove you're better at the game than people.

Who is good and bad is irrelevant, as is how easy it is to 'counter' somebody or play as whoever or whatever other stupid bullshit. The point was that taking the controls out of your opponents hands for five seconds is bad design. It doesn't matter if it works in the context of the game, it doesn't matter if the metagame is based around it, it doesn't matter if you think it's easy to counter, it doesn't matter if you prefer it being in the game, it doesn't matter if Generic Pro Asshole prefers it to be in the game, none of that matters.

Making a game where the objective is to generally make it so your opponent cannot play the game is bad design, period.

[zircon]

Now that I've played LoL, I don't like the snowballing in HoN (and DotA by extension.) If the enemy team is 9 kills to your 3, you're probably going to lose. In LoL, that's not bad at all. You can easily come back from it. Add in respawning barracks and, IMO, you have closer games and not so many pure stomps. In HoN just giving up one or two kills early can irrevocably alter the entire game, especially if you're the carry. It makes the game very frustrating for ANYONE, even skilled players.

[Tensei]

Okay, see, we're already getting into the DotA fan discussion bias where everyone assumes that everyone is just bitching about being bad at the game and everything is an invitation to try and prove you're better at the game than people.

Who is good and bad is irrelevant, as is how easy it is to 'counter' somebody or play as whoever or whatever other stupid bullshit. The point was that taking the controls out of your opponents hands for five seconds is bad design. It doesn't matter if it works in the context of the game, it doesn't matter if the metagame is based around it, it doesn't matter if you think it's easy to counter, it doesn't matter if you prefer it being in the game, it doesn't matter if Generic Pro Asshole prefers it to be in the game, none of that matters.

You're reading way too much into what I'm saying. I'm explaining why according to me, in the context of HoN, a five second AoE disable isn't imbalanced or overpowered. I like theorycrafting.

I apologize if you read what I said as condescending in any way but it wasn't intended. I wrote it as such because, yes, on paper, 5 seconds is a lot. If you look at one skill in a vacuum, it might seem over or underpowered, but it's the combination with a number of other factors that ultimately decides how it plays out.

You keep going on about how taking control away from the player is irrevocably bad design, but you haven't offered an alternative to it either, and completely taking away the entire concept of CC would basically remove all depth from the game.

Also, @zircon: LoL is also incredibly passive, with an endless laning phase, and far fewer chances to set up kills. I much prefer an intense game that I end up losing than an endless farmfest with Teemo where I can't ever get ganked anyway because of my infinite amount of free wards and my instant escape button. If through some miracle of divine intervention I end up dying after all, it's not much more than a slap on the wrist because I get to keep all my gold anyway.

HoN: Oh no, I got ganked by three people and they CCd me down in a few seconds. I couldn't even do anything. Guess I shouldn't be pushing out that far without wards up.

LoL: Oh, I'm getting ganked. 1 second stuns? Get out of here, I'll just flash over this wall here and continue farming.

LoL has a lot of good ideas, but its current metagame is just so insanely boring (farming always yields more gold than ganking), and a lot of their hero designs just feel very bland and samey.

I'm curious about the actual amount of LoL champions that have a "Makes your next auto-attack do stuff, like extra damage!"-skill because I estimate it has to be at least a dozen of them.

Edited August 16, 2011 by Tensei

[Rambo]

Now that I've played LoL, I don't like the snowballing in HoN (and DotA by extension.) If the enemy team is 9 kills to your 3, you're probably going to lose. In LoL, that's not bad at all. You can easily come back from it. Add in respawning barracks and, IMO, you have closer games and not so many pure stomps. In HoN just giving up one or two kills early can irrevocably alter the entire game, especially if you're the carry. It makes the game very frustrating for ANYONE, even skilled players.

I used to think this too. Eventually I learned that being down 9 kills to 3 (for example) is meaningless in itself. It's only relevant if youre down because your team is much less skilled (and the ratio will always be 9:3) or if you concede (and/or) throw the game beCAUSE you're down 9 to 3. I've been part of 15 kill deficits and come back. I've also been down 6 or 7 towers and come back. If you're on a team that wants to win rather than improve their precious K:DR, its not that unusual to see big turnarounds.

Easily the biggest problem with snowballing in HoN is that people give up instead of playing smarter. In the 1000+ games Ive played, I've noticed that its a problem with the community, not an game mechanic flaw. The community is generally shit.

On occasion there are still games where I honestly don't believe it's even possible to win, but a higher rated carry will ask us not to pass the concede vote, and eventually we pull ahead.

On the topic of DotA2, I love the looks of the graphics. Its incredible. I like the visuals in HoN but in direct comparison, HoN looks way too busy. And the color pallet in DotA 2 is phenomenally better than LoL. I'm pretty stoked to see gameplay footage.

Edited August 16, 2011 by Rambo

[zircon]

But the game is tied to the community. Even playing with OCR folks, getting ganked early usually means the game is over. And I think we all know the level of frustration gets extraordinarily high. That just doesn't happen to me with LoL and so I find it more enjoyable as a result.

I don't really care about the current LoL 'metagame' because the meta doesn't dictate how the average player is actually playing. In most of the games I've played lately, there's a lot of action happening and I find it MORE exciting than HoN because I can actually move my skills and be more aggressive. When you scale life up and/or scale damage down what you're actually doing is promoting more aggressive gameplay (hence why Capcom did it with SF4 -> SSF4.) The things promoting passivity in LoL are not inherent to the game's design IMO whereas with HoN, it kind of is. Also dominion.

[Capa Langley]

Gameplay footage is live TOMORROW

[Tensei]

But the game is tied to the community. Even playing with OCR folks, getting ganked early usually means the game is over. And I think we all know the level of frustration gets extraordinarily high. That just doesn't happen to me with LoL and so I find it more enjoyable as a result.

I don't really care about the current LoL 'metagame' because the meta doesn't dictate how the average player is actually playing. In most of the games I've played lately, there's a lot of action happening and I find it MORE exciting than HoN because I can actually move my skills and be more aggressive. When you scale life up and/or scale damage down what you're actually doing is promoting more aggressive gameplay (hence why Capcom did it with SF4 -> SSF4.) The things promoting passivity in LoL are not inherent to the game's design IMO whereas with HoN, it kind of is. Also dominion.

I think this (the highlighted stuff) is pretty much flat-out wrong. Gold for a kill on a champion, especially if you're ganking a different lane, is always inferior to staying in your own lane and farming in LoL. And then I'm even leaving the high chance at failure (due to Flash/lack of CC) out of the equation. No gold loss on death is tangentially related, but it also means that if you do land a kill, the difference won't be as noticeable.

Similarly, something like a TP countergank barely exists in LoL, because teleport isn't a staple summoner spell, will often be on cooldown, and due to the range on most skills, enemies will probably be way out of reach by the time you TP in.

These two mechanics very much DO promote passive play, and basically isolate lanes to a 2v2 or 1v1 situation that's mostly focused on PvE for getting farm.

On the other hand, S2 has made a conscious and succesful effort to move away from a carry-centric game with tweaks like increasing the amount of gold for assists, and generally nerfing hard carries all over the place. LoL would MASSIVELY benefit from some old DotA mechanics like river runes and TP scrolls.

Edited August 16, 2011 by Tensei

[Bleck]

I don't really think the strength of laning lies in how much gold you get so much as it leads to pushed down towers which leads to a pushed down nexus which leads to victory

maybe I'm just playing with a lot of stupid people recently but it seems that a lot of DotA players seem to forget how inconsequential getting a lot of kills is in comparison to actually winning the game

[Rambo]

TP scrolls.

#1 reason I would rather play HoN.

[Tensei]

I don't really think the strength of laning lies in how much gold you get so much as it leads to pushed down towers which leads to a pushed down nexus which leads to victory

maybe I'm just playing with a lot of stupid people recently but it seems that a lot of DotA players seem to forget how inconsequential getting a lot of kills is in comparison to actually winning the game

Kills lead to tower push opportunities so it's not like it's completely irrelevant. Of course when you get a few kills and run off to farm neutrals, then yeah, you're doing it wrong.

[Admiral_C]

Easily the biggest problem with snowballing in HoN is that people give up instead of playing smarter.

So much truth. This has been my exp too. a lot of times people want to concede at 15, even when there's a clear chance of victory a little farther down the road.

I assume a lot of ppl just don't want their stats to get messed up. But if were up to me, I'd take a negative K/D and win the game versus quit a game early and never find out if we could have turned it around.

[eternal Zero]

It's definitely stats that keep people from trying to win losing games in HoN. I was definitely someone that did this back when I was competitive in HoN. I couldn't tell you how many games I played where I went 6/1/X but still lost cause I was being very selfish and making sure I got kills but wouldn't commit to a fight we could have won as a team even if I died as a result. You couldn't get into the inhouses hosted by the pros unless you had a solid PSR as well as good KDR for the kind of heroes you played. If you played carries and didn't have around 2.5 KDR you'd be autokicked. Granted that number isn't exact but still you get the point. I honestly believe it's a detriment to have such stat tracking be so easily visible. Also other things like average creep score, denies, and wards placed were big factors were ways to evaluate a player and then be elitist and decide whether or not he was worthy of being in your game.

[Tensei]

Typing as I'm watching:

- Really cool hero select/ban UI. When you pick a hero, a big moving CG video appears with that heroes face.

- Absolutely awesome hero designs. It's a very stylized look without being all ~anime~. Valve pulls it off beautifully. Both Mirana and Anti-Mage are now kinda human looking (rather than Night Elves), but they look really awesome. More importantly, Mirana still has her tiger mount. The only hero redesign I dislike more than the original or HoN equivalent has to be Earthshaker who looks like some kind of muppet gorilla.

- Game pacing is much closer to HoN than LoL, especially with how smooth the animations are, but stylistically the graphics feels closer to LoL. It's quite easy to tell what's going on at all times.

- Lots of awesome little touches. Tinys (Pebbles) model actually changes as he levels up his ult, rather than just getting scaled up, Heroes respond to picking up runes in their own voices rather than the announcer doing it, the courier is a flying donkey, Clockwerks rockets actually come out of the hero and fly in an arc, etc.

- The servers are crazy laggy, to the point that the stream cut out at several points, but that will hopefully be fixed during open beta.

- They arguably picked the two worst teams to show off in the first game. Both teams are favorites for winning the whole thing, so they were playing incredibly carefully and the result was a 90 minute Weaver vs Spectre farmfest.

- Lich Ult and Beastmaster axes feel MUCH faster than their HoN counterparts.

- Hero selection is very limited (I estimate there's about 50 heroes) so I'm seeing what would be pretty unusual picks in HoN like Void/Antimage/Spectre. Oddly enough Ancient Apparition (one of the more recent DotA heroes) is in as well, and gets picked in almost every game. Hoping to see some Tinker and Pudge action later on.

E: I didn't hear it myself, but people say that when Pugna killed Lich, he said something like "Ahahaha...defrosted." This is awesome.

Edited August 17, 2011 by Tensei

[eternal Zero]

While I'm sad to see MYM lose I absolutely LOVE global gank teams. Great to see Balanar and AA. Also my absolute favorite carry, Spectre, was in perfect form. I didn't catch any Mirana games yet though. I'm still waiting and hoping on that.

[The Derrit]

Gold for a kill on a champion, especially if you're ganking a different lane, is always inferior to staying in your own lane and farming in LoL.

Similarly, something like a TP countergank barely exists in LoL, because teleport isn't a staple summoner spell, will often be on cooldown, and due to the range on most skills, enemies will probably be way out of reach by the time you TP in.

really? maybe if you play ubercarries like yi all the time. rest of the time no.

also no

[Tensei]

What? It's simple math.

Minions give about ~25 gold. There's 6 minions in a wave (leaving siege minions out of the equation), which amounts to a potential 150 gold per wave. Waves spawn once every thirty seconds. Given the extremely generous assumption that walking over to another lane, waiting for the right time, and succesfully ganking an enemy hero takes 1 minute, that still amounts to only about 200~ gold per minute (minus gold ticks), vs. a potential 300~ gold per minute from staying in lane.

Note that I'm making huge assumptions on how the gank will be quick and succesful, and you will get the last hit instead of an assist, so feel free to adjust that generous 200 GPM from ganking downwards if you want to be more realistic.

Contrast to HoN where you can get 250 gold per creep wave, but enemies can deny creeps, hero kills yield about 300 gold, and the deficit enemy heroes get from gold loss by dying makes laning and ganking more or less equally attractive. Not to mention that HoN doesn't have a free panic escape button built-in on every hero and CC lasts about twice as long, which all contributes to making ganking a lot more powerful and reliable.

E: in DotA 2 related news, good to see that Chen (Ophelia) is ridiculous in this game as well.

Edited August 17, 2011 by Tensei

[The Derrit]

What? It's simple math.

Minions give about ~25 gold. There's 6 minions in a wave (leaving siege minions out of the equation), which amounts to a potential 150 gold per wave. Waves spawn once every thirty seconds. Given the extremely generous assumption that walking over to another lane, waiting for the right time, and succesfully ganking an enemy hero takes 1 minute, that still amounts to only about 200~ gold per minute (minus gold ticks), vs. a potential 300~ gold per minute from staying in lane.

Note that I'm making huge assumptions on how the gank will be quick and succesful, and you will get the last hit instead of an assist, so feel free to adjust that generous 200 GPM from ganking downwards if you want to be more realistic.

Contrast to HoN where you can get 250 gold per creep wave, but enemies can deny creeps, hero kills yield about 300 gold, and the deficit enemy heroes get from gold loss by dying makes laning and ganking more or less equally attractive. Not to mention that HoN doesn't have a free panic escape button built-in on every hero and CC lasts about twice as long, which all contributes to making ganking a lot more powerful and reliable.

you're also making the assumption that in a 2v2 lane you're getting the last hit on every creep every time which is retarded. you're also assuming that ganking an opponent doesn't do something like i don't know push forward towards a tower which gives everyone *on the team* 150 gold and allows for more efficient farming in lane for a period of time

what you're also forgetting is that this is a team game and when one of the opponents gets killed early on (from ganking) a level discrepancy as well as a gold discrepancy *because they're not getting any while they're dead* comes into play which makes two or three early kills incredibly worth it

also counterganks are very possible they're just not as simple as 'oh noes my teammate died lets all teleport over to where it happened so we can kill them' you actually just have to react fast and position yourself well enough to do it