Heroes of Newerth

hotbl 2 stronk

Overall just a failure by FIRE to react to the enemy line up. They went in there with a lineup in mind and virtually ignored the enemy picks, picked Jeraziah too early (he should only be a last pick hero), allowing lion to pick heroes good vs Jeraziah in Electrician to directly counter/semi carry and Zephyr who carries well vs Jeraziah's ultimate.

Zephyr is also not immensely affected by CD's corrupted conduit seeing as his damage is nearly all aoe passive magic damage, so a smart pick up by Lion.

Ideally, the first two picks should have been andro and soulstealer as those picks can fit in any lineup and give away nothing. The next two FIRE picks, seeing that lion already had 3 non-carry intelligence hero's, could have safely gone tempest and CD without much fear of a vindicator pickup, and even with a vindi pick up in lion's 4/5 picks that would render nearly their entire team very squishy and prove to be a difficult game for reasons other than a tempest ultimate.

Had Jeraziah been saved for the 5th pick, we'd have most likely seen different 4/5 picks from Lion and could further evaluate whether Jere either 1) already countered by the lion picks and 2) if Jere is good (counters) their enemy lineup to the degree that merits picking him up.

IF lion were to theoretically keep the same 5 heroes in either scenario and FIRE was on their 5th pick, there are better heroes that come to mind in this scenario, with Jere obviously being out due to electrician countering and the general lack of right click damage from lion.

I feel that Accursed would be perfect for this lineup vs their lineup. He could easily fit in lane as Jere did with much the same role.

He contributes more to offense as well, being able to nuke from range and aoe with shield. More importantly, sear synergizes great with CD as it grants attack and move speed which, combined with conduit, makes for a massive dps gain, not to mention a slow which would be perfect vs a carry like Zephyr who is forced to do most damage at melee range.

Defensively, his shield still breaks grip, and more importantly, there's the prospect of ZERO downtime between shields, meaning you can keep someone shielded at all times by hero level 3 (spell level 2). That is impossible for Jere and in fact, AT BEST, there is a 6 second period with no protective charm, and that's ignoring the obvious problem of Elec ulting the shield to begin with. Accursed could shield someone, which lasts 15 seconds, and 9 seconds later he can re-shield, meaning you can potentially re-shield someone who get's fire shield purged off by elec. He also fits perfectly into the team fight strategy, sitting out front and baiting damage and initiation. Normally, since his ult was nerfed into requiring him to activate it, this would be a bad formation as he could get disabled/silenced enough by Elec/Myrm/Bubbs and die without contributing at all. However, with Andro in the lineup, he can be saved by both a stun or a swap, further opening up methods of initiation and increasing their effectiveness during team fights, which we lacked.

Tempest would still go Shrunken Head as he did this game, before that he would obviously wait for the right time. After that he is literally unstoppable after shrunken with nothing (being casted after it's activation) going through it.

That's not even the only option imo as Empath would have been acceptable here as well. Clearly some MASSIVE synergy between CD and Empath, providing monster bonus to attack damage and speed, heals, blocks and of course move speed boosts, all of which synergize perfectly with CD.

Better lineup aside, the game was still winnable as is.

There was poor choices surrounding multiple moments such as the timing of protective charm by using it prematurely and allowing it to get purged, lack of blink initiations from tempest even when shielded, a pretty blatant fail use of Meteor by tempest which lets electrician escape, careless SS deaths, the use of heal to attempt a last hit instead of saving an ally, etc. Overall I think that CD and Andro played good games, and I am being 100% honest here.

Personally, and as a team, we needed to place more focus on making life tough for the bird on bottom. I needed to start counterwarding our jungle sooner, that's my biggest error in this game. The first of many Kongor kills by Lion could have been at least confronted if we would have gone as 5 to the bottom ward spot at 19:53(game time) when I scout up the hill with the courier but someone sends it back after it's revealed a couple heroes and we do nothing about it, just relinquish any form of map control. Frustrating.

Generally a lack of leadership and communication are the main problems as well. They use some utter shit program (Axom) instead of Vent where push to talk doesn't function in it so you have to listen to Tony's mic repeating everything that is said but twice as loud, freaking annoying.

Best thing about Fire however is their willingness to try stuff that's new to HoN, but even that has inherent problems since that, at least in this series, causes players to play heroes they don't have a lot of experience on, which is obviously a bad trade off.

Anyhow, they're a new team still with plenty of room to improve so the only place to go is up as far as I'm concerned.