Heroes of Newerth

Emerald Warden development roughly began in earnest in early April. I scripted and solo-iterated him within a period of 3 days, and he selected to be added to the hero queue on April 18. Testing began in mid May, and he was finalized without further changes June 24.


The Emerald Warden’s roots, as with most of my heroes, go several years back. I’d developed a fascination with summoning heroes early on, and almost all of my hero concepts incorporate one form of summon or another. One facet of the genre–making an appearance most heavily in HoN and DotA–that I strongly dislike is that players are required to master a disparate set of skills for certain heroes that may not apply, or apply in a minor fashion, to the majority of the hero pool. As it applies to the topic of summons, I am talking about multiple-unit-micromanagement, or simply just “micro”. As such, I’ve always tried to design summons to operate independent of player control, all the while maintaining the sense of substance that a true summon commands above simple projectiles or gadgets.

In concepting the Emerald Warden, my goals were quite set from the start. I wanted a hero that would approximate the World of Warcraft Hunter experience such that the player never felt “alone”; to accomplish this, the pet would be required to perform enough a substantial role that the player felt incomplete without it, yet the hero itself had to be self-sufficient and fleshed out. To set a more concrete goal, the hero itself should be considered well-made without a pet, but players who experienced it with the pet should desire it back if it were removed. Based on this criteria, I decided to make the pet an ultimate–as an ultimate, I could accomplish many things. It could be sufficiently powerful, and scale as the game progressed. You would also start the game without it, and thus feeling a longing for it, not just as your companion through the match, but because it significantly boosted your power.

Going back in time, you could say that my “Voodoo Hunter” hero, originally posted on DotA-Allstars.com (now taken down) was the first iteration of the Emerald Warden. A more recent iteration of that hero, the “Wildsman”, can be found on the Heroes of Newerth forums (here). This hero featured a semi-autonomous pet wolf which would be controlled by your abilities, and was very similar to what I originally scripted for the Emerald Warden. Ultimately, I decided to scrap any form of control on the pet in favor of making it act autonomously–a design decision which ultimately drove the concept far from its origins, and was heavily influenced by my re-experiencing of the Arcane Archer from–you guessed it, EotA. The Arcane Archer summoned a Faerie Dragon which, like Emerald Warden’s summon, acted completely autonomously, casting spells like Faerie Fire and Starfall.


This was a huge plus for me, as my disdain for micro in the genre runs deep. Those of you who know I designed the original concept for Meepo may not know that it did not require any micro from the player. Instead, the hero (Puppetmaster) sent commands to the puppets via abilities, and any abilities the puppets cast were done automatically via a passive called “Ventriloquism”. I’ve gone so far as to push for Ophelia be remade such that her abilities allow for both viable jungling and laning, as I strongly disagree with the notion that a hero should be restricted only to the jungle, not just for its the devaluation of available viable tactics to the hero, but also because, as I mentioned earlier, micro-management is a disparate skill that is not endemic to the genre, and only applies to a select few heroes and items. I felt that, for me at least, this implementation of the summon concept was the epitome of what a pet should be in the MOBA genre–useful, iconic, powerful, and independent.

I used BlacRyu’s excellent Ysera mod as the temporary model for Emerald Warden. At the time, the hero had just been Warden, but the green motif on Ysera convinced me to change the name to the Emerald Warden. Many players have noted that name sounds feminine–that’s because it was supposed to be. I’d designed the hero with an elfish, feminine theme and feel, but alas it was not to be. Despite this, I was quite ecstatic with the finalized concept for the hero, as it was a non-humanoid beast hero, of which I am always a fan. I’d like to consider it a unintentional homage to DarnYak, the creator of EotA. Going on the green theme, I decided to name the pet Gawain, a reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight due to my fetish with mythology and folklore.


Unlike most heroes I work on, I started Emerald Warden by first scripting the ultimate, as it was the most challenging to do, yet was only ability set in stone. Because it had three abilities in itself, it effectively drained my creativity for a while as I sat thinking what three abilities on the hero itself could complement the true “star” of the skillet, Gawain. I decided to run with the warden-hunter theme and resurrect the concept of a “heat-seeking summon”, outlined on my old Artemis hero here. As you can see, the original concept for Hunter’s Command did not create two projectile wolves, but two actual uncontrollable summons that attacked. This was eventually changed to an actual damaging projectile shortly after private testing began, as the hero lacked reliable burst damage outside of its Silencing Shot. Though I lament the less of it as a summoning ability, it still retains some of that feeling due to the wolves following pathing. Silencing Shot was originally a filler ability, but with the very high cast range, rounded out the hero’s repertoire so well that I decided to keep it. Meanwhile, Overgrowth provided me the “eureka” moment out of hero development hell that so often plagues me–I’ll have three abilities, need a fourth, and then will be so suddenly inspired by an idea that I’ll ecstatically walk down the hall to MsPudding’s office and give her a kiss. In this case, Overgrowth became the end-all, do-all ability that would round out the Emerald Warden, providing lane control, rune control, vision, and a defensive buffer that suited his glass cannon style. With the skillset and scripting complete, I committed the hero into our CVS build and sat back proud of myself. After a one-and-a-half-month testing process, he’ll finally be released. He’s become my favorite hero to play during internal testing, and though I may be biased, I have no doubt that you guys will enjoy him.

The Emerald Warden will be released this Friday, July 1st. Again, thanks for reading!

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