TsunamiWombat said:
Comic Sans said:
SteelStallion said:
Diablini said:
SteelStallion said:
i'll stick to HoN until then
League of Legends is better AND free.
no, it's imbalanced and free. want some advantages over the others? you'll be forking over a lot of cash.
you get what you paid for.
You want to PAY for your heroes?
TOO BAD IT'S ME BLACKSMITH.
Wrong trolls are wrong. Game performance cannot be bought. Characters and Cosmetic items can. Characters can also be bought with Influence, gainable only by playing the game.
Influence is also the ONLY resource one can use to buy Runes, which do give in game bonuses, but automatch, as the name would suggest, automatches you with enemies of comperable levels and rune books.
Um, game performance IS bought, in the sense that people with more heroes have the advantage. Your team needs a tanky character? If the only tanky character you have is Garen, he's practically permabanned in pubs. Looks like you can't tank, unless there is a free one that's halfway decent that hasn't been picked or banned that you can use well. Yes, you CAN grind it out and get new heroes. It takes quite some time though, especially for the 6300 IP ones. And grinding for heroes means you are NOT grinding for runes, and runes are a huge advantage. One of my mains is Pantheon, and thanks to my physical carry rune page (armor pen reds and quints, MP/5 blues and yellows), I can spear harass endlessly in a lane without needing to buy mana regen, allowing me to get a Long Sword as my first item and make my lane harass even more powerful. Without that mana regen from runes, my laning presence would be nothing. So yes, you CAN buy power because it gives you more options, and in a game like this having all the necessary possible picks at your disposal is a big deal.
TsunamiWombat said:
Comic Sans said:
Diablini said:
SteelStallion said:
i'll stick to HoN until then
League of Legends is better AND free.
LoL is a mess. The matchmaker is bad, the balance is borked, they care more about pushing content than stabilizing the game, the game eats system resources for lunch, and their client is awful (adobe air ftl). And you don't even get all the heroes. To buy them all would cost well over $100. And then you still need runes to be competitive. In HoN you pay $30 for everything. It has better balance, better UI, voice chat, great replays that work with any version (unlike WC3, where you can't watch replays of older versions), and the heroes actually take skill, so while it's harder to learn, once you do it's way more fun. LoL is fun, yes, but it has too much baggage weighing it down, and HoN is way more polished.
In my experience the ones who bash HoN hardest are the ones who either never played it or suck at it.
Let me address the first half of your statement first.
LoL has some balancing issues, mostly with new champions, but with any growing competetive game balancing and rebalancing will always be an ongoing process, not a finalized target. Adobe Air can be annoying but I have noticed No performance issues with it, and they push content because players WANT new content. They're creating a dynamic community, not a game that will sell once and then vanish in 6 months.
Yes, HoN is far better balanced. Because it's the same game, and same hero's, and same items, as DoTA, which had years of development and consistant testing.
I noticed no VoIP when I played HoN. Maybe this has changed.
The UI and graphics are not better- the art and shop system are an eyesore. LoL has it's store seperated into convenient and easy to understand tabs by item properties and role, characters are given "reconmended items" to help ease new players in. The Art style of LoL provides distinction and immediate recognition, similar to TF2's highly distinctive "recognize at a glance" art. HoN lacks this, and it was difficult for me to seperate characters and creeps and maintain visual track of my character and their momentum due to the art style. LoL does this far better - oh, and it has range icons to indicate skill effect radii.
Now I shall address the second half.
I played HoN. I didn't like it. "if you don't like you your not good at it" is part of the reason I didn't like it - the egomaniacle, ratings obsessed culture HoN gathered for itself with the DoTA community as well as it's "gameplay rating" culture where people are booted from games for having too low a score.
HoN is old news.
EDIT: As for runes and in game buffs, these can only be bought by gaining levels (mastery points) or influence (or buying new champs or runes) which is only earned by playing the game. Matchmaking matches you with players of a similar summoner level and runebook kitout, and I find runes don't make that big of a difference.
1. See, the problem with Riot is that their model of making money encourages them to push out champs asap, with little regard to balance. Let's look at the heroes that have been released lately:
Urgot: HORRIBLE champion. Good early game, but can't capitalize on it. Waste of a slot.
Miss Fortune: Insanely good laning, heavy utility, great farmer, hard carry. Outclasses almost every ranged DPS in the game.
Sona: I'd say she's fairly balanced, but could use some tweaking. Riot took the chickenshit way out of adding yet another aoe ult on a hero rather than something more creative. Requires no skill to play, since you just stand in the back and run your fingers over QWE.
Swain: Better than Urgot, but that's it. Outclassed completely as a nuker and support. Only good skill is his snare, and that's easy to avoid.
So out of the last 4 heroes released, I'd only call one balanced is Sona. And I didn't even get into how bad heroes like Ezreal and Xin Zhao were when released. It took MONTHS to balance out Ezreal. Riot needs to stop releasing heroes and stabilize their game. When there are clear better champs and clear horrible waste of slot champs, there is something wrong. There will always be heroes that excel, but junk heroes that drag a team down when picked are inexcusable.
2. HoN has added several new heroes, tweaked some mechanics, and changed some of the old heroes around. Even with their changes, the game is pretty balanced. I love that there are no heroes where I groan as soon as they are picked because they suck so bad (see: Teemo, Eve, Urgot).
3. Hon has ALWAYS had voice chat. Even in closed beta. Saying it doesn't makes me question how much you actually played it.
4. The LoL shop takes ages thanks to those damn tabs. Click, click scroll, click click. HoN's REALLY isn't that hard. Once you learn the organization, you can get any item in like 3 seconds. Yes, the LoL shop is easier for beginners. However, HoN's really isn't that hard. If you need to check out the items, there's a practice mode for a reason. As for art style, that's preference. I had no trouble at all figuring out what was what in either HoN or LoL. it's just a matter of playing the game and learning, much like most other games. The heroes all look totally different in both games. If you don't know what the heroes are to begin with, or course you will puzzle over them a bit.
5. See, I have little problem with the community. If someone bothers you, ignore them. I have a lot more fun with the people there than in LoL. People are usually much better at the game. I am shocked at how bad even level 30s are in LoL. They have no game sense, play horribly, use heroes they never used before in ranked games, and rage as hard as any HoN player. When you play a team game, it's expected that everyone carries their own weight. When someone doesn't, especially in such a team oriented game, people get mad. If you play like you have a brain cell, and talk to your team, you will be fine. It's the initial hump that's hard.I've had 3 friends, all of them LoL players, try the game, and they all love it, one of them having bought it already and the others are going to soon.
6. I play LoL quite a bit. I am well aware of how matchmaking works. it is flawed because individual skill means little in LoL. In HoN a good player with a carry can make a huge difference in the outcome. Individual skill shines more in HoN. In LoL it's all team, so it's easy to get dragged down by a bad team. And saying runes are not important is just silly. Armor pen runes make you do almost true damage in the beginning of the page if you run the right masteries as well. I start with 35 armor pen. Huge on anyone who relies on physical damage. The right rune setup makes a huge difference, especially the overpowered ones (armor pen and MP/5 in particular).
How much did you play HoN? If you SERIOUSLY couldn't tell everything apart, I chalk it up to inexperience or being too stubborn to learn the game and expecting to dive straight into a in-depth game.
