Be unconventional. Defeat noobs using Ring of Sorcery | Panda and Hammer Storm Discussion

What kind of Sorcery is this? LOL ARE YOU DAMN SERIOUS NOOB! WHAT A BUILD NOOB! - these are some of the reactions when I use this build.

Well to be honest, I'm no longer playing in a very competitive manner but I'm a bit challenged to raise my MMR. I started to play public games again without mates. It was fun. My new favorite item is Ring of Sorcery.

It's a noob build but it was effective when I played Panda and Hammer Storm. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. Goodbye mana problems! The main problem with Panda and Hammer is that both of these heroes don't have much mana. Buying Ring of Sorcery eliminates that because it will greatly improve your mana pool. Hammer can now use his stun 2x-3x in a clash while panda can do most of his combos without fret. 
2. More Experience for you! Because you can buy health potions in the secret shop and you have unlimited mana, you won't go to the fountain most of the time. You will gain more xp when you stay at the lane but just make sure that you have wards. :)
3. Gank more. Unlimited mana means continuous ganking. If your team have three support heroes, you can supply them with mana and you can roam and kill anyone you can encounter.
4. Farm more. You can stack creeps and use your spells on them without thinking that you won't have mana for stunning if you will gank later. You can also use your spells in creeps at the lanes for faster pushing.
5. Ring of Sorcery vs Blood Chalice. Well, you may say that why go for the ring where you can save when you buy blood chalice. The answer gentle men is that chalice gets a portion of your life. The main objective here is to gain more xp while not being prone at being ganked. You will think twice to use chalice because it drains health for mana, therefore, you still won't spam your spells etc. A hammer or a Panda with half health early game would be normally around less than 800 health and can be killed by 2 heroes easily.

Cons:

We can say that ring of sorcery is a luxury item to begin with. Since Hammer and Panda are both semi tanky heroes, you can't tank that early because your item is for your mana. But through teamwork, it can win you a public game.

Again, this is effective against noobs but not for pros unless you played it very well. What do you think? Let me know if you used this unconventional build for other heroes.

Cheers!

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Posted in: HoN strategy,HoN Tips

Need help? Check out Prodex

Click the image to view the site

Nigma and Cawk did a very good job in creating a very useful website - prodex. It's graphically beautiful. It's flash based but is very fast to load.

It doesn't have too much information though to become a pro but it's a good start for newbies. I'm highly recommending for you guys to check out this project.

The site has a basic grasp of the heroes, item builds and their roles. What I love the most there is the warding guide. It's really really helpful.

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Posted in: hon guides,HoN Tips,nigma,prodex

Get out of 1500 PSR/MMR! | How to increase your MMR/PSR to 1600-1700 level

I hate playing 1500 games that's why I decided to write this post. This post is just a rough guide to get out of the so called black hole. Why black hole? There are a lot of noobs around in 1500 that are dragging you down baby! Hopefully, this article would help you get out of the black hole and play with better players in 1600 and 1700 psr.

Let's get started.

1. Check your ping. Typing the command '/ping' will show your ping. Why does this matter? Because your ping affects your game. If it's laggy, and you still insist to play the game, try picking heroes that are just support and not carries. Typing the command '/pa' will show everyone's ping. Make sure that you check this in every game especially in Match Making to ensure that you have a playable ping and of course so that you will enjoy playing the game smoothly.

2. Choose Wisely. Victory starts in picking your heroes right. In tournaments, even if the better team has a higher skill rating than the other team but if they were out picked by the opposing team, the outpicked team has a lower chance to win. It's the same in MMR and Public games, choose heroes wisely.

Some combo heroes/heroes that are really effective that has a high win rate:

Electrician + Swiftblade

Magmus + Pyromancer

Sandwraith + Thunderbringer

Devourer + Jereziah

Kraken + Soulstealer

Kraken + Flux + Bubbles + Dark Lady + Plague Rider

Anyway, these are just some examples that I've encountered. Feel free to comment below if you have better/greater ideas.

3. Warding and couriers. I know I've stressed out the importance of wards and couriers in my previous post.

4. Know your role. HoN for me is a role playing real time strategy game. Everyone has roles to play that they need to focus on while playing the game. Their items should also match the current need of the team complementing their roles. Here are some of the roles of the game. You may find yourself in one or two of these roles at the same time depending on the situation.

Pure support
Classic examples - Glacius, Demented Shaman

• Don’t compete with the Carry you are babysitting for creep and hero kills. The gold many carries lose to their support can often mean the difference between losing and winning games. There is nothing wrong with taking a creep kill here and there but you should absolutely not be “farming” during lane phase under any circumstances.
• Ward! I can’t stress enough how incredibly important this is. Your team needs map awareness to win. The earlier in your HoN career you can figure this out the better your win ratio is going to be, and in turn the better your MMR. No one else should be buying wards. It is your job. If the river isn’t warded nearly the entire game, most importantly after laning phase (when people start roaming) then chances are you will lose, assuming the other team is buying wards.
• Counter-ward! If you notice the other team escaping ganks often, you should probably consider counter warding. All you have to do is buy a Reveal Ward and place it in the typical warding locations, then place a normal ward (if one isn’t there already) to give you site. Then kill the enemy wards.
• Buy the courier and upgrade it! At the start of the game you should always be the one buying the courier as support. The alternative is to have a ganker or another support buy the courier and you buy wards, but you should be getting one of the two.
• To add up, warding is not just for map awareness. It also has a timing. It's mostly crucial in early game so that you will have control with the runes and avoid ganks in mid.
• Learn how to Creep Stack. If you don’t have a jungler you should be constantly stacking creeps for the Carry you are supporting. This means that at around the 40 or 45 second mark of every minute you should be attempting to go into the jungle and finding a creep spawn. Once you find the one you will stack you should throw an auto attack at one creep, between the 51 and 53 second mark, and pull the creeps out of their spawn until the fog of war covers their spawn. Drag the creeps behind you until the next creeps have spawned, and if you were successful you will now have two groups of creeps in that spawn. You can do this up to 3 times.
• Pull! When the creeps in your lane are pushed far away from your tower you should be pulling. This is pretty simple, all you have to do is as you see your own creep wave approaching the last tower in your lane, you should go to the closest creep spawn to your tower (you’ll be able to tell which one) and attack a creep to pull it into your lane. This will cause your creeps to attack the neutral creeps in the jungle and pull them out of your lane. As a result the enemy creeps will be pushed closer to your tower where you can soak up easy XP and last hits, plus benefit from tower protection.
• Stack and Pull! Trust me this is not a redundant bullet. The most successful way to pull is to first stack the pull creep spawn, then pull it into the lane. The reason for this is that many times with a single neutral spawn your creeps will simply kill the neutral creeps and then continue back into your lane severely diminishing the time you can spend under the protection of your tower. If you stack then pull the neutral creeps should be able to kill your entire creep wave, which will “reset” your lane so to speak. This will push the enemy creeps closer to your tower for a much longer period.
• Did I mention how important it was to buy wards?

Hard Carry
Hard Carries are super useless early game. Classic examples would be Magebane and Sandwraith.

• Learn how to Farm! This is the most important thing for a carry to do. Farm and don't get killed. Focus on getting last hits on creeps and heroes. Get a Loggers Hatchet to start out if you have trouble with last hits, or even consider installing a Creep Bar mod that will show you when you can last hit a creep.
• Get the kill for extra gold. Ignore other players complaining about kill stealing, because you are the carry, not them. You need the extra gold from kill shots and 99% of the time the hero that would have got the kill instead of you simply doesn’t.
• Stay alive no matter the cost! Don’t go off trying to save your support early game because it puts you in a very vulnerable situation. In Filipinos we say ikaw ang alay! The support will be the sacrifice for you. Unless you know for a fact that you can do so safely of course, but remember that one of the biggest reasons for having a low KDR as a carry is because of misjudging when you can and cannot win a fight.
• Avoid ganking as much as possible. If you want to kill the person in your lane, ask a support hero to help you out. You can start controling the map more once you have your core items.
• Encourage your support to pull and stack. Don’t scream or rage at them if they are not doing this or sound that you're just trolling. Just ask them nicely and in a very positive manner. Most of the time they will as long as you don’t tell them they suck at HoN 2 minutes into the game.

Semi-Carry
Semi carries are carries that can be gankers as well. Classic examples would be valkyrie and Wretched Hag

• Here simply combine what carries and gankers do. 
• If you're a tanky semi-carry. Let's say pestilence or hammer storm, you still need to farm and gank at the same time. The question is when! well you need more coordination with your support with that.

Ganker

• Dont kill-steal (ks) the carry! For example, if Chronos is one hit away from killing an enemy hero don't use Witch Slayers' Silver Bullet to kill it. This is a surefire way to lose games. The carry needs the gold to be successful, you don’t. You just need experience not gold.
• Always carry a Teleport Stone. This applies to every role, but is extremely important for a ganker.
• Shadow your carry. Sometimes witch slayer or glacius will just stick not far behind a carry who is farming. That's an antigank play. You keep your carry alive.
• Feed your carry if you can. Lets use the Witch slayer example again. If instead it was you who was close to killing the enemy hero and Chronos comes in and starts attacking that hero and will surely be able to kill them, then let Chronos have the kill, don’t use your ult to take it before he can. It doesn’t matter if you were the one who did all the work to kill the hero, the carry simply needs the gold to win.
• Don’t tower dive. Most cases of feeding on a team are due to either support, which is understandable because they need to protect their carry, or by gankers. If you can’t safely pull off your gank then abort the gank. Simple. It's all about wise judgement based on the burst damage that you can give.
• Map awareness. You should be helping the support ward and counter ward if possible to have better map awareness. This will greatly increase your chances of having a successful gank without dying.

Initiator

• Stay in the battle. With exception of the INT initiators like Tempest you should be staying in the battle always the reason for this is you should be the hardest hero on your team to kill. As the initiator the other team will target you first, so you need to be there to suck up some damage for your team while they focus down the other teams carry and win the battle. I hate it when a tree just farms in the neutrals and won't join team battles even if his ulti is up.
• Stay out of battle as an INT Initiator. If you are playing Tempest you should place your Ult just right to initiate, use your other spells, then get out of the middle of the battle.

Tanker

• Tankers are hereos that are meant to take damage while hitters are killing most of the team.
• Don't be afraid to die in the battle if it means winning the clash.
• Farm for early tanking items. Don't be ashamed to farm because you also need some cash.

5. Communication


HoN is a real time strategy game. Everyone needs to communicate with one another to reach the common goal - to win the game. Some ganks fail because of miscommunication. Some carries feed because no one advises if someone is missing. You might want to buy a headset for optimum game play. I've posted an article about it here.

6. Map Awareness

Most of the best carries that I know have this trait. They have some sort of 'spider sense' because they know where the enemies are. I think this is more of an experience thing. They already know the pattern on how most people play. But for very inexperienced players, you should simply ward to do this and become successful.

7. Jungling Strategy - I know I mentioned this in one of the roles of support heroes but I will write a more extensive post about this. Jungling strategy is all about:
-creep pulling
-creep stacking
-creep pulling and stacking
-picking jungling heroes

I think this is about it. If you have any suggestions or would want to contribute, feel free to do so.

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Posted in: hon guides,HoN Tips

Is it OK to lose? hell yeah!

I was on a losing streak this week. Looks like I'm kinda stuck in the 1650++ psr Level again. sigh

*Let me just share with you how my psr went down. My psr used to be 1800++ then my friends kinda borrowed my account because I stopped playing for a year. Then Garena made a major reset on the stats so everything went to 1500.

You can easily get to 1600 in just around 10 games. But the thing is you will be playing with a lot of noobs so you need to step up. If you lose, it's more than OK. At least you learned something. We learn from our own mistakes. You can ask the same question to great players like AngryTestie, Yoda, H4nn1, Chu etc. They also experienced big losses in the past.

So why am I promoting losing games? LOL Everyone wants to win!

Well here are some of my points:

We lose sometimes becase we experiment. I also tried experimenting on builds in some heroes. The best way to learn is to try something and try to mess it up. If you won, then you try it again. If you win by doing the same thing, you can say that it's a 'core' build. When I say core, you can do it in every game. Like in pebbles, it's tried and tested that you need a Portal Key. Something like that. Or for casters in general, I would go Bottle + Blood Chalice. I understand that this game demands adaptation all the time. There is no constant item/skill build that would work in every game.

We lose because we value our stats that much. Everyone is afraid to lose because they care about their psrs and kdrs. Some would just play one or two games. If they win, they will stop playing. Some people would just concede because they're feeding because they chose all carry heroes. Some players when playing support don't want to sacrifice themselves for the team, thus not fulfilling their roles in the game. There is no downside if you will lose today but win more tomorrow. It doesn't really matter. You will find that if you're less worried about your stats, you will enjoy more, have fun and end up learning more.

I can site a lot of examples but there's one funny experience that I really want to write about. Here it is:

There's one game where we have an all carry lineup - Scout, Aluna, War beast, Gladiator and Emerald Warden. I was playing Gladiator that time. Everyone was feeding because our enemy is kinda balanced their heroes were - Fayde, Pyromancer, Zephyr, Dampeer, Flint beastwood.

It has been 30 minutes and Aluna still doesn't have items. Scout has a runed axe while our WB only has shrunken and abyssal skull. We're still losing in clashes, everyone wants to concede. I tried explaining to them how big our chances are when we are playing defensive. Good thing they believed me. Started warding and playing defensively. The other team is very cocky so by the 50th minute of the game, we were able to win two clashes. Two genocides. Got kong and won the game. :)

We lose because we don't wanna be blamed by others. All of us don't wanna be called noobs or to be blamed because we didn't do what was expected from us. But sometimes, it's ok to be blamed (just think that it takes 5 to lose). At least you know what to do next time. Some players don't want to be blamed so they just take it to the exteremes. E.g. you're playing carry and you will just farm for 40 minutes before hunting. Or you're playing support. E.g. Tempest. You will blink in if you can only get 4 in your ulti. But by the time you got in, your team mates already fell. LOL I guess, the moment you see the opportunity to help your team mates, just go for it.

So! I guess after reading this post, just go out and play and have fun. You may lose tons of games but the more you lose, the more you learn. By the time you lost a lot you've gotten better!

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Posted in: HoN strategy,HoN Tips,tips on playing HoN

Wards and Couriers... Do we really need them early game?

The answer is obvious. It's important noob!

Support players who don't play support really annoys me so I decided to repost this. A lot of people are still not doing this even in pubs. I mean a public game is supposed to be just to have fun. Well define fun in HoN. If you're losing, it's not much fun right? Even if you're killing everyone like hell, getting an immortal and all that but still lose feels bad.

So let me just say please read on to S2Nigma's reminder to the community about the importance of early warding + courier. This should be done in pubs to improve the level of game especially in SEA.

Here's the tip from S2Nigma:

Dear Heroes of Newerth community,
It has come to my attention that a lot of you think a courier does not need to be purchased at level one. Whether this lack of a courier may be due to a lack of support on your team or just general apathy does not really make a difference. I wish to make my opinion on the subject abundantly clear:
If you don't get a courier at level one, you will lose the game.
How does not having a courier guarantee you to lose the game? Well, technically it doesn't, but practically it does. The thing about not having a courier is that if you don't get a courier, the problems start as early as your mid failing hard.
"But Mr. Nigma, a good mid can win even without a courier!"
No he can't. Not if he's up against an enemy of the same skill level.
"But why? What's the big deal?"
If your mid does not have a courier, he does not have a bottle. If he does not have a bottle, he cannot bottle runes. If he cannot bottle runes, he cannot refill his bottle. If he cannot refill his bottle, his enemy will refill his bottle every time. If his enemy refills his bottle every time, his enemy has unlimited health and mana- and I think you can agree that having unlimited health and mana to be a significant advantage.
"If Middle wants a courier that badly, he should just buy it himself. Also, why doesn't he just get a bottle at level 1? Problem solved."
No. Please stop using this logic. Unlike the other lanes, a the solo player middle needs all +damage and stats he can muster at early levels else he cant compete with last hitting. It's completely unviable to go bottle at level 1. Nobody should ever have to do this.
If your team has no courier and no wards at level one, and your enemy does, you will lose middle lane against same skilled players that do. Guaranteed.
"But our team really doesn't have any Support and I really don't want to buy a courier"
Too bad. Bite the bullet. If you aren't soloing, and nobody bought a courier, you have to buy a courier. Yes, it's going to suck not having those +stats items or that buckler you should have, and yes, it's probably your team's fault, and yes, they probably screwed you over by picking those four melee heroes that you didn't need- but let's face it: buying that courier is going to significantly increase your chance of winning. So just do it.
PS: And if nobody bought wards: Buy one. You don't even need to buy two. One Ward provides your mid with the knowledge of 3 tablet spawns for the first 6 minutes of the game.

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Posted in: Heroes of Newerth,HoN Tips

How to get the old interface of shop back | Heroes of Newerth

I really hate the how S2 games made shopping items really complicated. I still love the old UI (User Interface) of the shop. It's a lot faster to buy items and I'm used to it. I looked for the best and easy way to do it and found one in the internet. Since it helped me, I really wanna share it to everyone in the gaming community.

Here are the easy four steps to do it:

1. Copy: this line: cg_usenewshop2 fake
2. Open the game
3. Press ctrl+f8 (this will open the console)
4. Paste it in the console.

Congrats! It's all done!





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Posted in: Heroes of Newerth,HoN Tips