Heroes of Newerth Hero Guide: Slither

Slither is a very strong early game damage dealer that can steam roll with money from kills into a late game death machine.

Poison Spray:
Action
Target Position
Type
Enemy Units
Type: Magic
Range: 600 / 725 / 850 / 1,000
Radius: 125
Cast Time: 1.0 Seconds
Mana Cost: 90 / 105 / 120 / 130
Cooldown: 22.0 Seconds
Required Level: 1 / 3 / 5 / 7
Activation
Deals 50 / 70 / 70 / 100 Magic Damage and applies Poison Spray to target for 15 seconds.
Poison Spray Effect(s)
5 ticks of 10 / 20 / 40 / 50 Magic Damage
Reduces Movement Speed by 50% initially, recovering to full speed over 6 seconds.

Toxicity:
Action
Passive
Required Level: 1 / 3 / 5 / 7
This ability contains an Attack Modifier. Attack modifiers are exclusive and do not stack with other attack modifiers.
Toxicity Effect(s)
5 / 10 / 15 / 20 Magic Damage per second

Toxin Ward:
Action
Target Position
Type: Physical
Range: 850
Cast Time: 1.0 Seconds
Mana Cost: 20
Required Level: 1 / 3 / 5 / 7
Activation
Uses a charge to spawn a Toxin Ward at target position. One charge is gained every 5 seconds with a maximum of 1 / 1 / 2 / 2 charges.

Toxin Wards have 60 / 110 / 160 / 210 Health, 40 second lifetime, deal {9-11,17-21,26-32, 34-42} damage, and apply a -25 Movement Speed slow for 5 seconds.

Poison Burst:
Type: Magic
Cast Time: 1.0 Seconds
Mana Cost: 200 / 300 / 400
Cooldown: 140.0 / 120.0 / 100.0 Seconds
Required Level: 6 / 11 / 16
Activation
Applies Acidic Poison to targets in a 950 radius for 12 seconds. Grants 800 day and night clearvision around Slither for 3 seconds.
This ability can be boosted by Staff of the Master.

Staff Effect: Increases damage per second from {36,58,81} to {58,81,108}. Reduces cooldown of level 3 Poison Burst to 60 seconds.
Acidic Poison Effect(s)
36 / 58 / 81 Non-lethal Magic Damage per second

At the start of the game with the poison and health regeneration debuff of toxicity, Slither is one of the best, if not the best harassing heroes in the game. When put in combination with his Poison Spray, for increased damage over time and a movement speed debuff Slither can easily assure very early kills allowing him to get much needed gold. Once Slither hits level 6 and has his ultimate he can deal large amounts of damage to entire teams. Although his ultimate damage is non-lethal, in combination with toxicity and poison spray kills are quite guaranteed even if you do die before hand.

Starting with 2 pretender's crowns, 2 sets of runes of blight, and a mana pot allow you to last hit well, while having the health and mana regeneration to continuously harass with toxicity and poison spray despite his low attack range. Picking up a quick boots, and making those pretender's crowns into soul scream rings gives him the damage and move speed to get level 3-5 kills in a lane with another burst damage dealer or stunner. After that, a null stone grants the health and mana regeneration needed to stay in the fight constantly, and be able to use poison spray freely. Frostburn is the next recommended pick up, granting both damage, increased move speed, and the slow that was taken away from toxicity many patches ago. After these items you are fairly set to take on anything, however if the game continues after this point Wingbow provides good damage and survivability against heroes without Savage mace. From there continue stacking damage with items like your own savage mace, or rift shards and auto attack through entire teams.

As with all guides posted here, these are meant for skilled players with teammates that know this different style of play and are capable of playing with you in a hyper aggressive fashion, please do not attempt with random Public teams. If you would like for me to make these video guides instead please leave a comment below.

~ The Lurker

Heroes of Newerth Patch 2.5.8

Well we got a special patch mid week today, containing a massive amount of balance changes and I have had a chance to play through a few games to get a good idea on my opinions of them.

Here is a full list, be warned it is long:

Version 2.5.8
------------
- Free Hero Pool will be updated on Friday the 27th. The list is as follows:
* Valkyrie
* Sand Wraith
* Shadowblade
* Master of Arms
* Soulstealer

* Defiler
* Pollywog Priest
* Thunderbringer
* Plague Rider
* Hellbringer

* Armadon
* Drunken Master
* Keeper Of the Forest
* Pebbles
* Accursed


- In celebration of the Lunar New Year we will be adding special limited edition Pharaoh Alt Avatar - Golden Emperor!
* He will only be available from 12:00 AM EST 1/27/2012 through 8:00 02/03/2012!
- Also in celebration of the Year of the Dragon you will find a new Year of the Dragon Icon available for purchase!

- Fixed an issue causing some users in large clans to suffer periodic hitches.
- Creeps sounds tweaked and generally lowered in volume
- host_timescale gets reset when disconnecting from a practice game
- You can no longer spectate or mentor someone who is already spectating or mentoring

Kongor
- Gold received for getting the last hit on Kongor normalized from 300-400 to 350

Towers
- Gold received for getting the last hit on Towers normalized from 452-470,502-520,552-570,602-620 to 460,510,560,610

Structure Gold (Meatball/Huts)
- Gold received for getting the last hit on a Structure normalized from 102-120 to 110


== Items ==

Abyssal Skull
- Minor tooltip fix

Charged Hammer
- Fixed a wonky effect

Couriers
- Fixed death animation so it sinks in the ground correctly

Daemonic Breastplate
- Scaled the effects under player's feet better

Energizer
- Recipe cost reduced from 700 to 600

Genjuro
- Slow no longer goes through Magic Immunity

Helm of the Black Legion
- Now charge based. 20 charges max, loses 5 per Hero, Tower, or Boss attack and 1 per creep attack
- Gains a charge every 400 MS
- Won't block unless there are enough charges

Nullstone
- Fixed a wonky effect

Ring of Sorcery
- Increased manacost from 25 to 40

Savage Mace
- No longer stacks with itself

Shieldbreaker
- Increased recipe cost from 900 to 1000
- Removed Deflection pierce

Sol's Bulwark
- Armor auras lowered from +/- 5 to +/- 4

Stormspirit
- Now lasts 2 seconds, after landing the target is Perplexed (Can't use items) for another 0.5 second


== Heroes ==

Aluna
- Base Attack cooldown lowered from 1700 to 1550
- Increased starting Intelligence from 21 to 22

Arachna
- Increased starting Strength from 17 to 18
- Increased starting Agility from 22 to 23

Corrupted Disciple
- Corrupted Conduit Mana cost from 20/30/40/50 to 50

Defiler
- Starting Agility from 14 to 16
- Base Armor from 0.96 to 1.74 (After Agility)
- Grave Silence radius from 200/275/350/350 to 250/300/350/350
- Fixed interaction of Unholy Expulsion with Geometer's Bane

Devourer
- Devour unbinds the target on impact (prevents Valkyrie's Courageous Leap cancels for instance)

Electrician
- Can no longer use Energy Shield with less than 5 mana
- Energy Absorption no longer has the first target mechanic (you no longer get 5 charges for 1 hero or 3 for a creep on first hit)

Engineer
- Spider Mines trigger(chasing) radius from 200 to 250

Flux
- Can now target allies with Magnetic Surge
- Magnetic Surge is now Physical
- Can now change between the Push or Pull without a hitch if you are running

Forsaken Archer
- Fixed interaction between Geometer's Bane & Call of the Damned

Gauntlet
- Death sound touched up

Gemini
- Fixed Twin Fangs playing through fog
- Fire and Ice now gain 80/90/100% of stats from Gemini
- The wolves from Fire and Ice now have their movespeed set to Gemini's
- Fixed a rare anomaly where Gemini would go in a random direction when recombining from split form
- Fixed Gemini's split form Fire Fang & Ice Fang so they get stunned properly while bound to the projectile
- Removed invulnerability from Fire Fang and Ice Fang while bound to the projectile
- Fixed Fire and Ice assist mechanic to function properly

Geomancer
- Dig no longer usable while Immobilized
- Can use Items while in Dig
- Crystal Field decreased time till explosion from 3 to 3/2.75/2.5

Hammerstorm
- Increased Movespeed from 295 to 300
- Increased Intelligence gain from 1.3 to 1.6 per level

Jeraziah
- Protective Charm and Sol's Blessing no longer gives assists

Kraken
- Strength gain lowered from 3.0 to 2.8 per level
- Release the Kraken damage per second lowered from 40/50/70 to 40/50/60

Lord Salforis
- Cast Time of Life Tap removed

Magebane
- Starting Strength from 18 to 16
- Flash cast range from 1000/1075/1150/1150 to 850/950/1050/1150

Magmus
- Lava Surge no longer usable while Immobilized

Martyr
- Sacrificial Lamb reworked. Now gives allies increased movespeed and attack speed based on how low Martyr is
* 0.2/0.4/0.6/0.8 Movespeed per 1% missing and 0.2/0.4/0.6/0.8 attack speed per 1% missing. Radius of 500

Midas
- Lion’s Pride and Golden Salvo cooldowns swapped
* Lion’s Pride is now 18 starting and Golden Salvo is 13
- Lion’s Pride heal reduced from 75/120/165/210 to 30/60/90/120

Monarch
- Starting Armor reduced from 2.1 to 1.1
- Starting Movespeed from 300 to 295
- Crippling Pollen reduced cast range from 600 to 550
* This is listed as 500 in the in-game client. It should be 550.
- Fixed the last second of Crippling Pollen so that the slow doesn't go through magic immunity

Moon Queen
- Increased attack range from 330 to 350
- Lunar Glow increased from 6/13/20/27 to 7/14/21/28

Pandamonium
- Face Smash unbinds the target on impact (prevents Valkyrie's Courageous Leap cancels for instance)

Pharaoh
- Made his Wall of Mummies suck in enemy player-controlled non-hero units

Predator
- Venomous Leap cooldown from 20/17/14/11 to 16/14/12/10

Puppet Master
- Base Damage from 40-51 to 46-55

Revenant
- Essence Shroud cooldown from 30 to 25
- Essence Shroud duration from 10/15/20/25 to 12/15/18/21

Soul Reaper
- Increased starting armor from 1.10 to 1.75
- Judgment manacost reduced from 125/145/165/185 to 120/140/160/180
- Withering Presence radius increased from 700/800/900/1000 to 800/900/1000/1100

Succubus
- Smitten reworked. Now decreases all damage dealt from the target by 10/20/30/40%, 15 second duration
- Succubus' Hold unbinds the target on use (prevents Valkyrie's Courageous Leap cancels for instance)

Tremble
- Starting Armor reduced from 4.92 to 3.92
- Terrorform manacost from 110 to 150/140/130/120

Zephyr
- Cyclones heal reduced from 30 to 25
- Fixed interaction between Geometer's Bane & Cyclones
- Typhoon no longer gives an extra tornado (from 7/9/11 to 6/8/10)
- Typhoon no longer gives Zephyr a tornado unless he stays in it's radius


== Bugfixes ==

Aluna: Fixed Deja Vu's 3rd activation from playing through fog
Arachna: Scripting optimized
Artesia: Made her Arcane Missile slow transferable via Parasite
Balphagore: Optimized Corpse Conversion corpse detection slightly
Behemoth: Fixed Fissure so you can't tab to the invisible gadgets
Bombardier: Scripting optimized
Bubbles: Shell Surf now spawns 50 units closer to him so it hits units right in front of him
Bubbles: Fixed Kelp Field from playing in fog
Chipper: Rockets Barrage touch changed from Physical to Magic
Chipper: Scripting optimized
Corrupted Disciple: Scripting optimized
The Dark Lady: Touched up a few animations
Devourer: Made Devour give assists properly if it did no damage
Drunken Master: Scripting optimized
Empath: Fixed As One from playing in fog
Engineer: Scripting optimized
Gravekeeper: Minor fix to Illusions
Kraken: Fixed a bug where the target's corpse stands up after death if they died while bound to Tsunami Charge
Lord Salforis: Fixed Life Tap playing through fog
Martyr: Fixed up the Alt Avatar's sounds when casting abilities
Master of Arms: Shrunk blue attack projectile effects slightly on towers
Parasite: Fixed up some weird interactions when he is inside a creep
Parasite: Fixed him so he is correctly disarmed when inside a creep
Pyromancer: Burning! now capped at 127 charges
Rhapsody: Fixed up her model and the weird animations going on
Scout: Fixed Detonate ability (for both Scout & Electric Eyes) so they can be used while stunned as well
Shadowblade: Soul's Sight bonus damage no longer propogates to Illusions
Succubus: Made Succubus' Hold give assists properly if it did no damage
Torturer: Minor fix to Torment's interaction when multiple items used on him at once
Wretched Hag: Animation smoothing on Wretched Hottie
Zephyr: Scripting optimized

In the way of items there were only a few major things, first was the change to Helm of the Black Legion, which was in my view entirely necessary as it was becoming a go to item for way too many heroes. The other was a nerf to Sol's Bulwark, I am more on the fence of this one as Sol's was meant to be a stepping stone to Daemonic however some players were getting one of both negative and positive. I guess I would have to agree on that notion although it is more of a "fix unintended consequence" sort of thing I believe.

There was a huge number of hero changes and I will only touch on those that I think are most important here. First the change to Flux's magnetic surge, which was accidentally temporarily in game a few patches ago but was hot fixed out, is definitely a great buff allowing you to pull unobservant allies out of things like Valkyrie's arrows. Geomancer received some much needed love for his ulti, which late game when all enemies had high movespeed was very trying to land. Gemini got his first change, in what I believe will be a long line of changes to come, with his ultimate form wolves not getting automatic ghost marcher move speed so he actually needs to get boots. Lord Salforis got the cast time removed on life tap which makes it much better for use on non-slowed targets early game for kills. Martyr's new Sacrificial Lamb is very interesting, I have only got to play with one Martyr since the patch, but it definitely cements his character concept of playing with low health and is incredibly strong maybe too strong. Monarch received a series of nerfs, she was indeed strong and needed some toning down, but I am fairly sure they took it too far, all she needed was the removal of sight and the decrease to pollen distance. That is all the major changes, however there were a lot more cooldown/manacost/small number changes to a lot of heroes so it is worth perusing through. Next hero guide will be coming out Saturday on Slither.

~ The Lurker

Heroes of Newerth Hero Guide: Gravekeeper

First, I am going to make the excuse that every person has at one point, between family matters and college courses I was unable to update for a very long time. However, those two semesters are now over and I am done with family drama so I come back and will update far more often. I plan on doing two hero guides a week and a video game review along with some other updates for games I am playing from now on. I also have accepted Day[9]'s new years resolution of playing three games of Starcraft 2 a day and will be recording and uploading them to my youtube, mostly to help myself learn and also if wanted I can try commentating while I play.

Gravekeeper:

Corpse Toss:
Type: Magic
Range: 500
Cast Time: 0.2 Seconds
Mana Cost: 75
Cooldown: 0.1 Seconds
Activation
Target an enemy to throw a corpse at him. Deals 60 / 100 / 100 / 140 Magic Damage^ and applys a 1 second Stun.
May be cast 1 / 1 / 2 / 2 times in succession. Charges refresh every 9 seconds.
Leaves a corpse at target's feet.

Corpse Explosion
Range: 600
Radius: 225
Cast Time: 0.3 Seconds
Mana Cost: 100 / 110 / 120 / 130
Cooldown: 15.0 Seconds
Required Level: 1 / 3 / 5 / 7
Activation
Target an area to detonate corpses in the area. 30 / 50 / 70 / 90 Magic Damage is dealt per corpse in a 300 unit radius around the corpse.
Maximum of 6 corpses may be detonated at once.

Defiling Touch
Activation
Walking over a corpse picks it up and allows you to throw it as your next attack. This attack deals a bonus 15 / 30 / 45 / 60 Physical Damage and slows the target by 20 / 25 / 30 / 35% for 1 second.
Attack leaves 1 corpse at target's feet.

Zombie Apocalypse
Type: Magic
Range: 500
Radius: 600
Mana Cost: 200 / 300 / 400
Cooldown: 140.0 / 120.0 / 100.0 Seconds
Required Level: 6 / 11 / 16
Activation
Target an area to summon 10 / 16 / 24 Zombies at the location. Zombies either explode, dealing 50 Magic Damage, or attack for 30 / 35 / 40 Physical Damage per attack (Attacks ignore deflection).
Zombies are uncontrollable and last for 8 seconds, 5 seconds if they are exploding. Zombies have 350 / 500 / 650 Health.

Gravekeeper is an intelligence hero with strong early game ganking that works well in either a solo mid or even better laned with a stun or disable for quick kills. He requires some farm to be effective and can be a powerful hero all game long. My starting items of preference are two pretender's crowns, 6 tangos, and a mana potion, then work towards Ghost Marchers, Arcana, Health tube, and 2 fortified bracers.

These items will allow you to go very long periods of time without being forced to return to the well and give decent damage and mana regeneration for spamming abilities. With these items your primary goal should be to gank whoever and whenever you can, while building up money for purchasing a hellflower and eventually null stone. Defiling touch allows you to chase heroes very effectively along with making last hitting creeps far easier and corpse toss should be leveled to 3 at level 5 in order to give both charges. Zombie Apocalypse is a great team fighting and pushing tool, either giving you a substantial increase in damage and cannon fodder when at a tower or creating madness in a fight. However, while the zombies summoned are very effective against heroes such as Swiftblade, his ultimate, or Voodoo Jester improper use can result is a quick defeat against other heroes like Behemoth or Keeper of the Forest.

Due to the strength of your abilities and the silence awarded by hellflower it is often that you are a first target in team fights for disables so that you can be killed before casting, null stone gives you the chance to get off your key abilities and silence and then auto attack away. It is very important to level your corpse toss and defiling touch early as they are your main abilities for chasing and killing enemy heroes, along with easy harassment in the laning phase. Good partner heroes I can recommend are monarch or Andromeda. While in the early game you deal a lot of your damage in magic, if you get null stone and hellflower I recommand following it up with shield breaker, the minus armor is very useful for you, your team, and all of your zombies. After that I am honestly not sure what the best luxury items are, of course since they can be very situational, but I recommend items such as Frostfield Plate, Sheep Stick, Restoration Stone, and possibly Genjuro although I have not been able to test that in an actual game.

As with all guides posted here, these are meant for skilled players with teammates that know this different style of play and are capable of playing with you in a hyper aggressive fashion, please do not attempt with random Public teams. If you would like for me to make these video guides instead please leave a comment below.

~ The Lurker

Dragon Age 2 and Technorati

First and foremost, Technorati here is the claim verification: 93N9XFNJCMWA. So now my blog will be visible in a proper blog directory website. Now on to business.

Dragon Age 2, a review.

Now at the start of this I will begin to say that I have not completed the game, so far I have only been able to devote about 15 hours to it and I am very much so a completionist so am only partway through act 2. Now the very first impressions I got when playing the game were something along these lines, "Oooo its nice and shiny, and wow it has this mass effect dialogue system I really liked." However, I noticed that excitement started to dwindle quickly. Don't get me wrong they did a lot of things right, but since they still changed even more they made quite a few mistakes also. The game-play, at least from what I heard since I only played a mage, is incredibly different from 1 starting class to another. Thats good, it gives the game replay value, or at least some as that replay value gets destroyed by other "features." The quick paced battles were actually quite fun as a mage, bombarding people with fist of the maker, pulling them in and then launching a fireball into their faces. There was one incredibly glaring problem with the game-play though and that was the quests, there were more than enough quests, the game was actually overflowing with them which is good because it gives more play time right? Wrong, the actual size of the game world was so small that stuffing so many quests inside is just bad, they never really change anything about the game world and the few places that exist for only one quest are just copy-pasted other dungeons and in the end felt like they were just trying to stuff in everything they could.

The story, this here was where I felt the major let down. The story in a sense just meanders about for most of the game. At the beginning you were going for a deep roads expedition, and I am like "Wooo that should be awesome, slaughtering endless waves of dark spawn while I hunt for treasure for the main story line." Well, that did not exactly go the way I had hoped. Then in Act 2 the story is about an uprising, which still is not the main plot point, and finally Act 3 is a battle between Templar and Mages. This was the major weakness of the game, mostly due to its sequel status. It just did not have its own defined story. The first game had a great one, last the Grey Warden, and a Blight all your own. Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, had just going about doing nothing major and finishing the first games story of the Chantry against the Mages, although on a completely different continent so I don't see the connection there.

Overall, I see no proper replay value in the game. At first I thought it would have some, because people commented to me before I got it on how different the classes played, but it was completely overshadowed by the lacking story and over packed quests. I still enjoyed it though, it was a nice hack and slash, good graphics, and I personally liked the interface better than the first along with the ability trees. Even the armor system I found better, not having to really worry about your companions armor as they can't switch their main clothes and just concentrating on yourself freed up plenty of space in your backpack for carrying junk to sell. So in the end it was fun, but I most definitely won't be playing it a second time.

~ The Lurker

A Question

Now, I am sure at least some of you guys that read this are programmers, and since it was asked of me in an interview I would like to hear what you guys would respond with. The question was, "What is the most innovative or creative idea you have ever programmed?" Now let me explain my answer and thought process.

In Fallout 3 I did a number of very interesting ideas, I implemented an Oblivion-esque magic system, however this was not terribly innovative since all it called for was a global value for the current mana levels, a slight rework of the wait/fast-travel system for that time to count towards mana regeneration, and spells were basically explosion effects with an invisible projectile.

So I did not use this, my second thought for an answer was my, not working terribly well, RTS system. Due to the limitations of the engine I never got it properly working as it crashed after a certain point due to memeory usage, usually when you had a sizable base. But it did offer the ability to build your own base from scratch, raise an army and use a squad based combat system for fighting larger battles.

The final idea, and the one I answered with was a single weapon I made for Fallout 3 with interesting physics effects, called the Railway Rifle X-treme, something anyone who has played my mod is familiar with. Now I presented this with the basis behind its working for its innovation, as it technically fired a projectile that moved 4 lightyears in distance every in game second. Since no engine could actually allow that and trying to make it function would make a physics engine programmer cry I used a work-around. I built a make-shift hitscan function, and when this function started the entire game froze at its time giving a temporal distortion effect for realism and allowing all processor usage in computing. Now this function created the projectile technically already inside whatever it hit, so before the gun had fired the projectile had already hit its target, and when the game restarted the projectile left the weapon and moved to the already in place hit. However, it also had its faults in that you had to hit something. If you missed everything (firing into the sky) then the hitscan function could never find where to place the projectile, so the game restarted and the firing scripts couldn't find the ending location causing the game to use the built-in bullet functions which could not handle the projectile speed causing the game to crash.

Now my question is two part, first is whether or not you think I made the right choice of the three and the second is to include what you would have answered with, I am curious.

~The Lurker

Heroes of Newerth 2.0.21

First of all, Sorry for not updating very much this week I was really looking forward to hear you guys responses on what I have going for the classes, but alas I have spent most of my time job searching. Don't worry though, hopefully I should be back on track with posting soon, I may squeeze out a bunch of updates this weekend. On to more fun news, another Heroes of Newerth patch and a new hero to boot.

The majority of the patch was bug fixes so I will not go over them, here is a link though http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=237418. But who cares about any of that stuff, we got ourselves a new hero.

His name be Tremble and by god if it isn't a new and improved Broodmother from DotA. Hellbourne Agility hero Tremble with an amazing 310 base movespeed.
Hon Hero Spotlight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31x4lb8eYk4&feature=player_embedded

Dark Swarm:
Type: Magic
Radius: 300
Mana Cost: 90 / 100 / 110 / 120
Cooldown: 12.0 Seconds
Required Level: 1 / 3 / 5 / 7
Activation
Summons a swarm of bugs for 5 seconds. Enemies within the swarm take 20 / 40 / 60 / 80 Magic Damage per second, while enemies outside the swarm deal 8 / 16 / 24 / 32% less damage to Tremble.

Terrorform:
Create and tunnel through Terror Mounds. Terror Mounds grant Invisibility with a 2 second Fade Time, {15,20,25,30}% Move Speed, and {2,4,6,8} Health Regeneration. Also gain the ability to Terror Port every {120,100,80,60} seconds between Mounds.\n\nMaximum of {3,5,7,9} Terror Mounds.

Impalers:
On Attack
Applies Impalers to target for 2 seconds.
Impalers grant 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 bonus Magic Damage and 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 HP heal on inflict.
Impalers
10 / 20 / 30 / 40% Movement Slow

Shudder:
Cast Time: 1.0 Seconds
Mana Cost: 140
Cooldown: 90.0 / 75.0 / 60.0 Seconds
Required Level: 6 / 11 / 16
Activation
Summon Shudder at your location. If Shudder is already summoned, kills the previous Shudder and resummons it.

Shudder has 50 / 75 / 100 Attack Damage, 800 / 1100 / 1400 HP, 350 / 375 / 400 Movement Speed, and 1 / 1.5 / 2 second Ensnare. His Razor Carapace grants 10 / 20 / 30 Deflection and {-2,-4,-6} Armor on attack.

He has access to the same level of Terror Form and Impalers as Tremble.

This guy has everything, he can gank well and control runes through just one level of terrorform and with impalers has excellent chasing ability. He is definitely built to have the ability to carry, and comes with some survival and healing from abilities which is nice. Most interesting is his ability to counter pushes by porting back to base. I definitely am interested in how things pan out and how the community uses him. But my recommended carry build as I shall give for every hero, is: Ghost Marchers cause that wonderful no clip - Battlefury to help farm and mana regen - not straight, probably last item to finish Symbol of Rage for the extra lifesteal - Wingbow for some damage and attack speed - Brutalizer for disabling - and Rift shards for the damage. Good luck with 'em everyone. And one last tidbit is some music I stumbled upon, Abney Park http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81jBqYs24A&feature=related try it out.

~The Lurker

A Programming update

Well, it is time that I start to code the player abilities, since most of my time has been spent on the RTS element. Dynamic trading and economy also kept me working for quite a long time, but I feel that those are going along well so I am looking for opinions on the player capabilities within the game. Now there are 4 classes for your hero, the rogue, the archer, the wizard, and the warrior. Later this week I will post about specific abilities and ask for your opinions on that, but right now I want to pitch an idea about just general player management.

The Player Leveling System:

First, the player starts at level 1 and the maximum level is 26, where at each level including the first the player is allowed to choose an ability. However, since there are only 26 abilities for each class you can not choose any at any level. For levels 1-5 there are 5 abilities but by level 5 you will have all, and they continue in 5 level brackets to 25, and at 26 you get the major end all be all ability for your Lord.

Experience is fairly standard, especially since I haven't put much thought into it, you gain experience by doing actions: trading, building, combat.

Skills. The one main point that I wanted to draw attention to and ask about is not the choice of skills system, although feedback is still more than welcome about that. You get 26 skills/abilities and each of these abilities will be scalable. As you use certain abilities like shield slam or fireball you get better, so up to a point of mastery their effectiveness would increase, more damage, less energy to use. So that while your abilities are preset you get the choice in character of which abilities you focus on to define your Lord.

Please, any and all feedback and remember I will go over specific abilities later this week.

~The Lurker