I was hoping to start doing some blog or something where you guys give me an issue and I talk about it to the best of my abilities but here's just some generalities
So here it goes:
Well there's a lot of new things up and coming in HoN as we all know heroes like Kunkka and now maybe Storm Spirit or Morphling and some of you are thinking why not heroes like Medusa or something. Well to be honest I feel like S2 or even just the meta-game itself is a lot more geared towards ganking and away from the old school turtle strategies, which personally I feel is good. For those of you who don't remember, there was a time in HoN when LOAD (WHP) and 5 dominated the scene but they always played 60 minute games and was very rare but it was based around a hard carry with ganks in the early game but nothing major.
The next thing that seemed to arise was the Push Strategy which was a mass hit because you could have a hero like FA on the team and Polly or Slither or other heroes that are designed more towards pushing rather than ganking or farming and that was a huge deal because your team could drop towers every time Defiler or Polly's ultimate was off cool-down and then FA would just sit in the safe lane and free farm while the other team attempted to fend off the push in mid or top (from a legion perspective) and then there was a time when anything worked I feel, and now we are where we are now with the Ganking taking over with a side of Turtle.
Let's look at the heroes that are almost always banned: Engi, Chipper and Fayde. Engineer is a different story but he's banned because he is a great pusher and can carry so it slightly contradicts the current strategy but nothing really major.
Fayde is a hero who, when put in the mid lane disappears on the map entirely for 30 seconds and the next thing you know bottom lane just got ganked and your Sand Wrath couldn't escape the damage because there was 75 true damage dot on his sandy ass.
The next one is Chipper which is really self explanatory. His slow in itself has the capacity to slow a hero almost to a complete stand still if it hits the max and then eat 900 damage from rockets and he can't do anything about it. On top of that his ult is ALWAYS off cool-down and can be used as a farming technique and a ganking one especially when you see him with Staff of the Master.
So that brings me to the next topic the competitive scene as far as teams go. Right now you have the top teams being European and you will see them dominate a lot more as time goes on KDe, iLx and MSI and the reason for this is because throughout DotA the European strategy has always been ganking and that will never change and now we have those players here. Loda, Levent, h4nni, Kebap, Mania and others like them. They will mostly always run a gank lineup and aggressive lanes and the structure is that when played against a US team they can easily push them out of lanes but if they fail to lose, then they lose in the case where Turtle > Gank.
Lets look at a player for example Trixi, one of the best if not the best Valk player in the world, and probably maintains a 90%+ arrow accuracy in competitive games and look who he plays for, MSI a European team and that's a hero almost ALWAYS seen in their lineup.
It also makes for an interesting game to watch whereas if we go back to Asian DotA we see games lasting 60+ minutes and then watching a Medusa farm a Doombringer and smash. Then look at Loaded's lineup, and I am not stereotyping, but if you look at their pictures on their site they have Asian Backgrounds, so they will stick to the turtle strat. They are adapting as I have seen in their latest matches, but the question is why?
Well it's because of patches to be honest and we can go through a lot of the major changes in one of the patches we saw massive nerfs on pushers like Slither for instance his wards are very... useless, except for their usual properties and then the release of heroes like Gladiator (Kunkka) who is a Ganker/Semi-Carry and the same goes for Bubbles (Ganker/support), Gauntlet (Ganker), Fayde (Ganker), so there you go it's directly based on who is imported and who is nerfed. So in reality we could potentially say that S2 carries the weight of the meta-game on their shoulders, but it is the same way in DotA at the moment from what I can tell, but I might be wrong here because I am not hugely involved in DotA, but it seems the three new heroes are gankers maybe someone can shed some light here and I will quote them but I am just guessing here.
The most interesting games though at the moment are the games with Mag, WS, Valk, Fayde, Tundra, Kunkka because they are always kill intensive and always are trying to get those kills for their advantage. But when you get a good gank team vs a good gank team then you truly have a match where there will be a semi-carry who they rely on in the later game, or even a hard carry who is kept safe by the constant ganks on his lane from the rest of the lineup, but most of the time the game outcome is decided in the first 10 minutes and then from there it strays from side to side based upon mistakes which is something I am learning makes a huge difference in a game.
There can be the simplest thing of placing a ward too far to the right and lone and behold guess what tempest still gets to keep his farm and your mid hero is designed to go ganking. Then what should have been 6 minutes of lost farm turns into 6 minutes of ck and even smaller things lets say Glacius not stunning the right person allows for a carry to DPS or a tank to soak damage and then the hold ends and your team ultimately has nothing to show for it. Which is why this quote should always be in the back of your mind when you play if you want to get to the next level "If I miss x here, then y and z happen so I have to make sure I hit the mark". A team is defined by their weakest player and their mistakes.
If a team makes so many mistakes, then guess what they add up to a big one and that big one is the reason Arachna will have a 15 minute Thunderclaw and then its really fighting uphill from there. I am more or less just ranting here but I just wanted to express my thoughts and get some feedback on them.
