Heroes of Newerth
by Aethyna
Apr 26, 2015 |
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S2 Games Started out as a mod for the mother of all MOBAs, Warcraft 3, Heroes of Newerth (HoN) has blossomed into a pretty decent MOBA over the past few years especially with its revamp 2 years ago. If you're a fan of hardcore MOBAs, this is a game that you should try! Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Started out as a mod for the mother of all MOBAs, Warcraft 3, Heroes of Newerth has blossomed into a MOBA in its own right over the past few years, though its growth is severely impacted by its very toxic community. With its revamp 2 years ago, this game seems to be doing quite well for itself. The gameplay in this game is pretty much similar as to League of Legends or Defense of the Ancient 2. In this game, you’ll need to push lanes, destroy towers in order to eliminate the shrine. There are in-game shops that offer a variety of items to help boost up your game, a huge range of heroes for you to choose from as well as 2 different modes to separate the learning and the experienced players, namely the co-op and the PvP modes! If you’re a fan of MOBAs, well, being a part of the old “big 3”, Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is one MOBA game that you simply should try!
Gameplay
In terms of gameplay, Heroes of Newerth (HoN) has very similar gameplay as League of Legends (LoL) or Defense of the Ancient 2 (DotA 2) since they are essentially based off the original Warcraft 3 mod.
After the tutorial, there are 2 different game modes in HoN, namely Co-op and PvP, that you can enjoy. Co-op is the mode where you team up with other human players against intelligent bots while PvP is well... player versus player – you’ll be playing against a team of human players.
Since you’re new to HoN, you might want to start with multiple games of Co-op before even considering going for PvP as the community in this game can be very harsh if you, as the newbie, underperform and let down the team. Even if you’re an experienced LoL or DotA 2 player, you may want to start slow for a bit... even you have the basics learned, you still have to learn how to play your hero, right? You could also do some quick reading up on the heroes before jumping into a game as well!
However, the queue for Co-op tends to be a bit longer than usual as not many players are playing here. If you are patient, you may get to enjoy a few games! Needless to say, due to the game’s competitiveness, HoN is not very newbie friendly, especially if you are playing MOBA for the very first time. You may be better off in some of the other more casual MOBAs, like Prime World or maybe Strife.
In this game, players are separated into 2 teams – the Legion, who is basically the good guys, and the Hellbourne, the bad guys. The heroes are separated as such as well, but you are able to play a Hellbourne character in a Legion team and vice versa. Lore doesn’t come into play in character selection in HoN and the same goes to any other MOBA games, usually.
HoN provides a huge range of 120 heroes for you to choose from and these ranged or melee heroes are niftily separated into 3 categories, namely strength, agility and intelligence, for you in order to make things easier. There are 39 agility heroes, who rely on well, the stat “agility”. They are usually the gankers in the game. The game also has 42 heroes in the intelligence class – they are mainly casters and most of them are ranged characters, while there are 39 strength-based heroes, who mainly play the role of tanker or initiator and is the first to rush right in the middle of the group of enemies to hopefully “catch” one or more enemy heroes for his teammates to pick off.
The best part is that all these heroes are available for you to play, much like DotA 2, and you don’t need to “unlock” new heroes. Instead, you can spend real money to purchase skins for your favorite heroes, if you want. One thing of note is the filter system in the heroes selection screen. The game allows you to randomly choose a hero based on which role you would like to play for that match, such as carry, jungle, initiator, ganker and pusher, as well as whether you would like to play as a ranged character or a melee.
Each hero will has his or her respective set of 4 skills and abilities, including 1 ultimate skill. These skills can be learned at certain hero levels while playing and will gradually get supplemented to become stronger as the hero increases in level. Heroes in HoN can reach up to a maximum level of 25, which is a pretty high level cap as most level cap in MOBA is less than 20. In every game, you’ll be given the choice to choose 1 skill out of the 3 non-ultimate skills to start off with.
Now that you’re in the game, you’ll notice that the layout of the map is the standard MOBA fare. There are 3 lanes for you and your team to push, namely the top, mid and bottom. Each lane is dotted with towers, both yours and the enemies, though the towers will stay on each faction’s side of the map. There are many team strategies that can be used in this game and they are basically the same as in any MOBA game. Mostly, you’ll have 2 at top and 2 at the bottom with 1 holding the mid. The bottom lane is considered the easiest lane for Legion and the top for Hellbourne due to their length.
In HoN, experience points can be earned rather easily. They can be earned by having your hero within a fair distance of creep or hero kills. You won’t even need to get too close. However, in order to earn gold, you’ll need to actually do something and deal the last blow. Thankfully, the game also provide a way to help out players by having a passive gold-earning system – every player will gain 69 gold per min even if they are not killing anything. You can deny the enemy hero creep kills if you like. The gameplay can also feel a bit more fast-paced than in other MOBAs as well!
It’s nice to see that tries to help players to learn more about their opponents. Whenever you are killed by an enemy player, a pop-up will appear, which you can later disable if you think you’re pro enough to ignore them, teaching you about the skill he/she used to kill your hero as well as giving you tips on how to avoid dying the next time you go up against the same hero in the battlefield again.
Although HoN does not provide couriers to help get items to you while you’re out in the field killing creeps or enemy heroes, the in-game shop has plenty of excellent features that is very convenient for both experienced player and newbies alike! Like any other MOBA, HoN provides a nice list of starting items, laning items, core items and luxury items to help new or old players playing a new hero to figure out which is the best items for them without going through all the items available. Even if you accidentally bought the wrong stuff, you can sell it back for the full price within 15 seconds after you bought the item.
The best part of the in-game shop is the very discrete hero build guides provided on the drop down menu at the top of the shop interface. These guides are written by experienced HoN players and they come with very detailed descriptions on how to use their build most effectively. For example, there are tips in the guide on the best time to buy which the item as well as which lane is most suitable for the build. These guides are also voted on by players who tested out the build themselves and the percentage of the votes can be seen on the side of each guide as you browse through them. There is also a nice mentor feature, which a fellow teammate can recommend to you if he/she feels that you’re underperforming with your selected hero. The mentor will guide you through the game via private voice chat.
Due to, mainly, excessive raging, the toxic behaviors in MOBA communities have been on an exponential rise! This is particularly evident in S2 Games’ first MOBA game, Heroes of Newerth (HoN). HoN has a taunting feature that propagated and heightened the degree of toxicity in its community, causing its well-known fall from grace among MOBA players. In an attempt to prevent creating another ‘HoN’, the developers have included several features, such as personal carriers that cannot be killed or that you cannot deny an enemy a creep-kill. Hopefully, these features will be able to reduce and control the level of toxicity in Strife.
Community
Although Heroes of Newerth has dropped from the “big 3” and in popularity, the game still has an almost 1.2 million likes, which is a pretty sizeable number, considering that the up-and-coming MOBA, SMITE has around 1.4 million. HoN is a rather popular game in eSport tournaments due to the competitive nature of MOBAs. However, the community in HoN can be very harsh and unforgiving, particularly if you play in PvP as a newbie. With co-op’s very long queue time, the game’s kind of forcing the more impatient newbies to try the game out via PvP only to get brutally harassed by their teammates. Besides that though, the game has changed quite a lot since its release and has removed plenty of the other toxicity-inducing features like taunting and vote-kicking non-AFK/bad players.
Graphics/ Sound
The graphics is somewhat similar, in some way, to LoL, though a tad bit more muted in terms of their colors, but the graphics are certainly not as great as DotA 2. The hero models are awesome though and look pretty unique! The music in HoN is pretty good as well! In fact, the music sounds like some Christmas tunes with its soft jingly bells. Perhaps it is part of S2 Games attempt to lower the toxicity of its players by playing some calming tunes in the background. Furthermore, the heroes in this game have nice voice overs and each of them sound rather unique.
Conclusion
All in all, Heroes of Newerth is a rather decent MOBA game that caters to a group of moderately hardcore to the hardcore elite players, though it doesn’t exactly have anything that truly sets it apart from other MOBAs. The skill ceiling in this game is rather high, making it not exactly a casual or newbie-friendly game. That being said, the game has an amazing pool of 120 different heroes that are all available for you to enjoy! The game also has 2 game modes, Co-op and PvP, whereby Co-op is for the newer and trainee players while PvP are where all the experienced players go to when they play HoN. The experience point system is a nice touch and is particularly helpful for players, who love to play roles that only excel at higher levels or after getting their ultimate skills. The very useful feature of adding a player’s hero build guide in the in-game shops is pretty well-done as well! However, do be warned that players can get a bit rough with their language if you mess up a game in PvP. If you are looking for intense MOBA matches with the likes of LoL or DotA 2, Heroes of Newerth is definitely a game that you can try!
Heroes of Newerth Blog
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Dec 14, 2021
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