Saturday, February 26, 2011

Aluna - the comic inspired hero

Well the release has come out and with very mixed ideas about how it is and by mixed I mean that the forums seem to have a seething hatred of her for trying to do something knew and the possibility of even a semi maybe hard carry int. I mean really, the QQ present is enormous and all the people not QQ'ing just want to shove her into a support role and be done with her and all the rest want her scrapped and made into windrunner. Personally I am liking her a lot, due to the ulti-power throw similarity to Kaldr I love being able to get kills with a careful shot like that.

Now for the actual hero herself, long ability descriptions so just a link for that I shall provide. http://www.hon-utilities.com/guides/aluna-guide-hon-aluna-items-gameplay-strategy-guide/1410/ - note that when I create this that the Hon-utilities site does not contain any guides or item builds for Aluna.

I would suggest stun - throw - deja vu - throw - throw - ulti then max throw - stun - deja vu in that order all before stats picking up ulti at 6/11/16.

The reason being is that her nuke - ulti combo loses a lot of its effectiveness the later the game goes on, while in the early levels I found it very easy to snipe a retreating enemy or just one sitting in a lane with low health for an easy kill.

Now since I play my heroes of sustainability along with damage I'm going to recommend starting with scarab 2 runes of the blight and 1 mana pot. After that go into a sustainer for early health/mana regen and ghost boots since I love noclip. After that build a Hellflower - Bloodstone - Harkons to really keep the damage up and if your game lasts to the point of getting that which would surprise me afterwards I suggest getting savage mace for the extra damage and sheepstick for some extra control.

Her Release Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eeFcK3Af2Y&feature=player_embedded

Thursday, February 24, 2011

More Heroes of Newerth stuff

Well the last post was about the recent major balance changes they did, but now we also have a new hero Aluna. To my knowledge they haven't released any hard numbers or tool tips for any abilities but it does appear that her ulti is a less rng based but still similar to Blacksmith in that it augments her other abilities rather than giving her another one.

Official Upcoming Hero Thread:

http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=224744

Official Teaser Video:



Now the interesting thing is probably the ending since of course like the others it is perfectly staged. She clearly has her ulti effect her Power Throw ability in an attack against Pebbles all the way across the map in his well. Now my first thought about this is going back to Kaldr the Ancient Apparition hero in DotA and my love of his ulti for sniping retreating heroes all day. Now this is just my thoughts that the hero may end up acting like Kaldr since we don't know anything exactly, but Legion do seem to be getting a lot of love lately and we could really use some more Hellbourne int. Post in the comments your thoughts on how her abilities work, but be quick she is coming out hopefully tomorrow.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

So much to catch up on.

Well the first blog will have to be about the recent mass retuning patch that happened in Heroes of Newerth, patch 2.0.14 and subsequent bug fixes (2.0.14.2, 2.0.15). Due to the extensive nature of this patch I will just include a link to an S2 post containing the information:

http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=222338

Major item changes:

Alchemist bones, definitely a good one for enabling you to build up charges for those instances at which you are busy engaging the enemy and can't run off to the forest to get a creep.

Behemoth's Heart was brought much more in line with the DotA counterpart.

Some more expensive items have had their costs decreased to allow for quicker buying and less farming for hopefully more action.

The Post Haste change is interesting, the increase to move speed is ehhh but the move speed buff after teleport guarantees max move speed after teleporting.

Hero Changes:

A lot of buffs for support heroes along with movement speed increases for a bunch of heroes, the corrupted move speed buff does worry me however as giving him too much.

A ton of bug fixes for different heroes.

Demented Shaman's new spell - Unbreakable: Target allied hero is affected with Unbreakable (state) for 6 seconds. Affected hero gains 15/30/45/60 Attack Damage and if he receives fatal damage while affected by Unbreakable, he does not die and is instead restored to 150/250/350/450 health is clearly making him more like his dota equivalent however this is much stronger than shallow grave.

Legionnaire has a nice counter system on his spin which should help those of us without the luck to get many spins to at least get one once in a while, while jungling.

Magmus now has an open slot for an attack modifier since volcanic touch is no longer one, should be interesting to see what people go for, or if they do, my thoughts would be shielder breaker personally.

Ophelia judgment damage got needed normalization. Charges on command for getting creeps after a team fight late game is easier. And a buff to commanded creeps move speed so they are no longer lagging around and easily kitable.

Painful nerfing to Sand Wraith, when the only reason he has been seen so much lately was the trilane meta-game which is the problem that need be fixed not sand wraith, who people were asking for buffs for before trilaning.

Thats it for major changes with the recent patches, I have 2 more posts planned and hopefully they will be out later today or early tomorrow.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Long time Update

Well it has been a while since I last updated, been busy with the usual junk. Been playing a ton of Dead Space 2, awesome game. No major work updates for now

Heroes of Newerth Update:
- New Monitor game feature
* Right click a friend or clanmate who is ingame to Monitor them, getting basic stats that update every minute

- Casual Mode changes
* Decreased creep bounty to normalized Normal Mode values, down from 1.25x
* Hero bounties to 2x of Normal Mode values, up from 1.5x
* These changes are aimed at addressing the dominance of carries by reducing creep farming rate and increasing the gap between killer and victim so early game power is more significant

- Added a new Alt Avatar for Soul Reaper, the Grim Reaper
- There are now keybinds in the options menu to level up each of your skills
* Default bound to ALT+Z, ALT+X, ALT+C, ALT+V, and ALT+O for abilities and stats
- Fixed a bug where mousing over the minimap would sometimes turn the cursor into a targeting cursor
- Fixed bugs with many of the models in the game. Results in a small performance increase

- Predasaurs no longer have evasion, now have additional Armor (same effective HP against attacks)
- Vagabond Assassins will not longer automatically purge nearby players
- Sporespitters no longer has +15 free damage per attack
- Antlore Healers will no longer heal themselves

- Empath
* Range on Illusory Veil changed to 800

The changes for the next 2 sub patches were just bug fixes so no need to write up on that.  The Predasaur change is nice, no longer will they evade 5 attacks in a row in the most annoying thing ever and the monitor ability is going to be good for those of us that play commonly with friends.

In the world of Starcraft 2 in a last but not least part of the update I did cast that match. Was only able to do one match that wasn't even a very good match and due to my unfamiliarity with the software I was only able to upload to youtube in 360p if someone knows how to get higher when using fraps for the video capture and virtualdub for the compression say so in the comments. I will be casting another as hopefully Protoss since they are my main race but if I get a good Terran match sooner I will do that one, if you guys post that you like the casts on the videos I will continue to do those also.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Some more Starcraft 2

Earlier today, or possibly last night I don't usually pay much attention to the little Starcraft 2 news in the homepage of the game. They released the PTR patch notes and there isn't much there just some bug fixes but I will post none the less.

General
A special sneak peek at new ladder maps is now available!
Matchmaking has been updated to better match players queuing with pre-made teams in 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 brackets.

Bug Fixes

General

Fixed an issue where the title of a conversation window was scaling rather than truncating.

Fixed an issue where the Match History score screen was displaying "Null" for the map info for all games played before Patch 1.2.

Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause players to be improperly disconnected from a game.

(Mac) Fixed an issue that would cause the Control key to become stuck when holding Control and minimizing the game window, then going back to the game window and attempting to use Control+1 to create a control group.

Maps

Fixed an issue with foliage that would die and become visible through the fog of war when a player spawned as zerg.

StarCraft II Editor

Fixed an issue where copied-and-pasted units were not set to the correct height in-game.

Fixed an issue where the table view scroll-bar position was reset when switching objects.

Fixed an issue where secondary sort priorities were not working properly. Model name is now the secondary sort so that models are listed in alphabetical order after being sorted by the mod they are contained in.

These are PTR notes though so they are definitely subject to change. Now the new maps I haven't gotten to try yet but hopefully later I can get into the PTR and try 'em out to tell you guys how they are. I will also since I talk so much about Starcraft and Warcraft being a Blizzard fanboy, cast and post a game of myself sucking so you guys can have a quick laugh.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Work Update

Well I actually have some work done now, Chapter 5 is finished being typed up and saved and what not. Still needs thorough proof readings later but I can just sit down and reread the whole thing once I'm done. I started this book with the November book writing competition motivation thing and really sucked at it. Supposed to have finished some awesome long fiction in one  month and here I am just having finished chapter 5 in February. I would post the chapter along with this, but I am not terribly trusting of Google and its Intellectual Property rules.

On a less writery note and more programmer note, 2 of the only 3 things I do the last being kick ass at video games, I completely failed at making any progress in pathfinding. Surely there are some fellow programmers out there that could maybe point me in the right direction. I am doing this almost entirely in C++, a little java mixed in here and there, with the middleware Irrlicht. So any insight into how one goes about a pathfinding AI or links to guides in the comments would be appreciated.

~The Lurker

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Awesome stuff I am doing instead of working.

Well, nobody likes to actually work right especially when its programming. So I guess I'll update this in a further attempt to waste time.

Awesome Starcraft 2 replay http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ahVp-kKuw casted by none other than H to the usky Husky, over an hour long best of 7 ZvP. Check it out it will be worth the watch.

And of course like always here is the link of the, well can't really say day since I usually update what like twice a week on the old site, so link of the when I feel like it of music. Two different Legend of Zelda music pieces that were redone in reverse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJwtj-nG6Jw&feature=related Ikana Valley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCOBlwJ9GY Song of Healing, yup I shouldn't have done that ARG for the win.

Due to lack of anything else to do I should probably get to work again. Going to get some coding for the pathfinding A.I. in my video game but its being a real pain and then I have to write up chapter 5 of my story.

~ The Lurker

Heroes of Newerth

Well, after moving websites I will have a lot to catch you guys up on. I could no longer pay for the website hosting so alas it is gone for good, hopefully here I will be able to add in an archive all of the old data. On to more, or less, serious business. I will probably update frequently for the first few days to get things back up and running.

As many HoN fans know the new Hero Empath came out this weekend, a hero designed strictly for support and in not anyway meant to carry. Well, for those that know me I made a carry build anyways and will add that later but first we should discuss the hero and normal play. (All Subject to Change as Hero was just released and will probably be nerfed into oblivion)

Empath Ranged Intelligence hero - Support/Initiator

Essence Link: Creates a link between self and target enemy unit, stealing (30/45/60/75) health per second for 5 seconds. If the maximum distance is reached on the link, the life steal stops but the linked enemy is stunned (1/1.5/2/2.5) seconds.

Illusory Veil: Range 1000, Mana Cost 100, Cooldown 18 seconds, 600 Width Wall lasting for 2/3/4/5 seconds and dealing 50 dps to units within 150

 Synergy: Grants all allied heroes (0.75/1.5/2.25/3) + (0.05/0.1/0.15/0.2)% of Max health in Health Regeneration.

As One: Bonds Empath with target allied hero, buffing the host’s Attack Damage and Attack Speed by (40/60/80). While inside, Empath may cast spells and use items as normal. Grants a sub-skill, “Faster!” which grants her host a large but short speed burst.

Great sounding support,  the ability to heal herself and stun depending on what is needed, a placeable wall that unlike behemoths allies can walk through but enemies can't. Synergy is an awesomer version of Glacius' aura which gives scaling health regen, Glacius should get scaling mana, and her Ulti makes her able to sit in the middle of the fight to be able to support fully.

For builds i would suggest: Ghost Marchers - Astrolabe - Nome's Wisdom - Barrier Idol - Sheep Stick - Hellflower - then scrap Astrolabe for Codex because if the game has lasted this long the extra damage will help more than a 250 heal.

For a more Carry oriented build: Ghost Marchers - Hellflower - Sheep Stick - Codex - Spellshards - Frostwulfs skull. Granted in neither case should you expect to actually finish these builds as that is an enormous amount of farming required. Well that brings you guys up to speed on the new Hero Empath so I will post again later on other events.

~ The Lurker.