Review: Heroes of Newerth

Did you play DotA? Were you any good at it? If the answer to either of these questions is no, or you had to actually ask what “DotA” means (Defense of the Ancients - an incredibly popular Warcraft 3 add-on that gets more play today than Warcraft 3 itself), then Heroes of Newerth might not be the best fitting game for you. It certainly wasn’t for me.

Here’s the basic idea: each team has a well where they first spawn, and return after they die. At this well is an item shop, a giant tree/altar (depending on if you’re the good guys or the bad), a series of unit-producing structures that the players do not control in any way, and a few towers guarding everything. Outside of the bases, there are three “lanes.” Computer-controlled trees and demons will walk down these lanes, and then fight each other, and this is where the player comes in - by killing enemy monsters, they gain experience and gold, leading to more power and cashmoney. I see no reason to explain the need for cashmoney as, well, money is a goal unto itself, isn’t it? The ultimate goal here is to cross the lanes, kill enemy monsters, destroy the towers guarding the entryways into the enemy base, and then destroy their well. Each team, at default, gets five heroes, or players. Avatar control is exclusively through a point-to-move setup, more or less the same as Diablo-like games. It’s all very simple and makes a great deal of sense on the first playthrough - but that didn’t stop me from dying constantly.

Although I was familiar with DotA, I hadn’t played it much; the staggering quantity of characters and items, lack of a leaderboard system, and the lure of tower defense maps kept me far away from the game. It didn’t help that when I did try to play it, I failed miserably - just as I did repeatedly with Heroes of Newerth. Regardless of what character I chose, what items I selected, or how I went about fighting, I still died constantly and lost every game. After about 50 games, my kill-to-death ratio was an abysmal 0.1:1. But then, something happened: I picked the Scout, a character able to immediately exit combat and fade into an almost unattackable state, and the game changed for me.

For the first time since I began playing, my kill-to-death ratio (or ktd, as it’s referred to in-game) went up. Not to 0.2:1, not to 0.5:1, not even 1:1 - for each time I died in that game, I killed ten players. It wasn’t that I’d actually gotten any better at the game or had really even begun to understand it - it was that I had an escape move that I could use almost constantly, and I abused the hell out of it.

The moment that I first vanished and escaped a sure death was like an epiphany from God: I didn’t have to die everytime an enemy player came upon me. This lead, predictably, to several games of overwhelming cowardice - but it let me actually /watch/ the game, figure out how people survived and killed each other, understand how to win the game. It actually let me play the game for the first time.

What I’m trying to get at is that the single most important thing to understand about Heroes of Newerth is the difficulty curve. It’s painful and terrible, especially if you’re like me and never played much DotA. You know that rollercoaster in Cedar Point that actually curves inwards on its first descent? Learning to play the game is sort of like scaling that descent backwards, and is almost as foolish as thinking the tug of gravity will leave you alone as you ascend.

All of this sounds as though it would make for a ludicrously complicated ruleset, but it really doesn’t. There’s only one rule in Heroes of Newerth: do not die. It would seem that not dying would be a fairly straightforward matter; avoid big, muscular-looking things with sharp bits, don’t let wizard-y sorts see you with their bastard magic, and run like hell whenever something appears from the shadows to hit you with sticks. Avoiding death, however, is an incredible trial.

Avoiding death is so difficult initially due to the enormous volume of characters. As of today, there are 53, and new heroes are being implemented on an almost weekly basis (presumably until they hit 60). These heroes are split into three archetype categories, in addition to the binary choice of good and evil (titled Legion and Hellbourne). Strength, Intelligence, and Agility. Unsurprisingly, Strength heroes tend to have excellent health, armor, and physical attack. Generally, they also get some of the most useful crowd control-type abilities, like Pandamonium’s ability to grab an enemy in front of him and throw him over the back of his head, snaring him. Before I forget: it’s worth pointing out that Pandamonium is a karate panda that fights with a bamboo cane. Awesome. Okay so, moving along: Intelligence heroes are the spellcasty-sorts; low health and mediocre attack damage, but a host of highly-damaging spells or other utility-based mechanisms. Thunderbringer, for example, has the ability to cast a lightning bolt spell quite frequently. He also has a passive ability that causes damage to enemies nearby him whenever he casts a spell - which can be a pretty lethal combination, especially considering that his ultimate ability hits every enemy on the screen at once. Finally, agility heroes are the ninja-sorts; crappy health pools, generally bad crowd control options, but incredible damage output potential.

Each of the 53 heroes have entirely individualized skills, although there are some conceptual overlaps. Magebane can blink all over the screen, instantly teleporting from one location to another leaving no trail behind; Chronos, also an Agility character, can leap forward almost as far as Magebane can blink, but he leaves a trail behind him that slows enemy pursuers. To be truthful, most of the abilities are spins on tried-and-true action-RPG skills; there are whirlwind skills (via Swiftblade), hit-you-really-hard-from-afar spells (via Thunderbringer, Pyromancer, and several others); there are healy skills (via Jareziah and Nymhphora). Each hero receives a total of four skills; generally, two of them are passive, and two of them are activated abilities. One of these is the ‘ultimate’ of the character, an ability more powerful than most others, and also tending to have very long cooldown times. (Although not all of them are activate-skills; Nighthound receives permanent stealth when not attacking for his ultimate, and Armadon’s increases his stats every time he casts a spell.)

Part of the difficulty of learning how to avoid dying is learning what each of the characters do, and a tactical approach almost guaranteed to destroy the Dark Lady will falter and lead to a quick death against a character like Legionnaire. Further compounding the issue is the item shop, and not just because the organization of the shop leaves a lot to be desired. Counting just the “assembled” items - those items that require multiple other items to create - there are 59 items. 59! All of these add certain things to the heroes; a manadrain attack, an ability to create mirror-images of your character to fool the enemy, a giant mace to ignore enemy armor with, and so on. This, on its own, is enough to cause headaches - knowing what item will complement what hero is rather difficult.

Some items can dramatically change some characters. Indeed, some characters don’t really feel complete without certain items. One of my favorite strength heroes, Magmus, is one of these heroes. He has a slow attack speed, mediocre attack damage, and terrible health for a strength hero. Although he has a dash-type ability that stuns things and a stealth ability that causes area-effect damage, he still dies pretty quick; until he gets ahold of a Portal Key. The Key gives no bonuses of any kind except for the ability to teleport every 15 seconds. None of this is terribly important until looking at Magmus’ ultimate; he channels (or prepared the skill) for three seconds, and then tears the ground apart in a series of highly-damage waves. Now, Magmus cannot move while he channels this spell (although he can move while it is actually tearing the ground apart), so it’s pretty easy for the enemy to run away; why not skip a step and start channeling while hidden in some trees, teleporting in as the ground is ripped asunder?

Each character tends to have an item or two that can dramatically change not only the way that you play them, but also how they must be fought against; a spell-caster acquiring the Assassin’s Shroud, for example, can vanish into stealth at will. But there’s a counter to that; buy an Electric Eye, which reveals all stealth units in a large radius. But there’s a counter to that: kill the carrier of the eye, and they drop it on the ground. And so on - everything here has a counter, and to be perfectly honest, the game is no fun until you learn at least a number of these.

This is because of how quickly and easily one can die when unaware of what in the hell is going on; encounters of 2-4 players rarely last more than 15 seconds, and it can be tremendously difficult to understand why or how you died.

However, playing the Scout allowed me to begin to understand the clockwork mechanisms of Heroes of Newerth, and to see what it was that was killing people. On first glance, the melee and chaos of battle seems like indiscernible madness with random colors and swords being thrown all over the place. As I played more and more games, I began to be able to identiify /who/ threw that sword and from what mouth that orange beam came from. When I play Heroes of Newerth now, I can get a half-second glimpse at a battle and know not only which enemy heroes are involved, but also what skills they’ve used.

While this is a testament to the volumes of time I’ve put into the game, it is much more a testament to the design of Heroes of Newerth - although the interface needs work yet, the actual gameplay is quickly-identifiable and easily-read to the experienced player. Valkyrie’s winged-leap and javelin-throwing skills look radically different from anything Wildsoul or Pebbles or any other character could conjure. Although there are a couple skills that look similar (like almost all of the spells of Pyromancer and the Blacksmith), the sweeping majority of spells are differentiated enough that discerning them is no problem - but again, this holds true only with heavy time investment.

Character design is similarly and awesomely varied; considering that there are almost 60 characters and that none of them look the same, I’d say the dev team over at S2 Games have really outdone themselves. It’s reminiscent of the way that Valve handled the classes of Team Fortress 2; you can, at any given time, see only a silhouette of a player on either team for a split-second, and still be able to identify them. This isn’t to say that none of them are generic fantasy tropes; there are several of those. But they’re unique enough in the context of the other characters that it is a non-issue.

Finally compounding the problem is the player base at large. Although the matchmaking system is designed to keep players in approximate skill brackets, almost all of the players in any of the brackets tend to be giant assholes. The bewildering aspect of this comes in how games are titled and divided; I spend the vast majority of my time in the “Newbies Only” designation, and tend to play games catered towards mediocre players. Astonishingly, players get called “newbs” among other choice expletives for messing up and dying - even though it is a “Newbies Only” game! This really shouldn’t surprise me, but it does every time.

Although it sucks to die a lot when you first begin the game, it sucks a lot worse for your team; almost every time an enemy player gets a player kill, they gain a level and money - and the loser of the encounter loses money, and has to sit in a respawn queue for a period of time depending on their level. What this means is what several deaths early-on in a game will cause enemy heroes to become bloated with experience and gold, while the weaker player grows ever-weaker in comparison; being a new player in Heroes of Newerth is a vicious feedback cycle.

Underneath the absurdly complicated choices and variances in playstyle lie a wonderfully nuanced and tactical game. Certain character choices complement each other in such a fashion that, when skills are executed correctly and at the right time, they can wipe out an entire enemy team. Conversely, pretty much every character has a few characters that are a direct counter to them - Jareziah, the defensive-Paladin sort, laughs at Nighthound, a stealthy agility character, but the Nighthound is fully capable of annihilating many of the Intelligent-based heroes. Feinting, juking, hiding in trees, backdooring the enemy base in times of need, flanking, and simply executing a blitzkrieg all are viable and even required options at times. Playing sitting next to my room mate conferred an enormous advantage to the two of us, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee wins - as really, Heroes of Newerth is one of the most finely balanced games I’ve ever played, and defeat is never more than a few moments away.

Note that none of this speaks to the difficulty of actually managing to /kill/ someone ,and given the huge quantity of escape moves and tricky tactics of enemy players, this can be far more difficult than merely surviving. But I’m not going to detail that - you don’t expect me to give up the only edge I have in Heroes of Newerth, do you?