The game is free to play, so why not try it out?
Besides, that’s the only real way to figure out whether it’s “HoN or LoL”.
I like League of Legends because it is free. You can download the client and play it free. Of course that doesn’t mean much now, because you can play HoN free if you have a beta key.
But it’s there. League of Legends is much more team oriented than Dota or HoN. Carries are much stronger in those games, and can just end up owning everyone by themselves. That doesn’t happen near as much, and if you been losing all game, it just takes one good push in LoL and a game you are losing 33-3 in kills, you suddenly start winning.
Take from that what you will. Just a fair warning: The meta game of LoL is currently in the shitter. High-level pro LoL play is boring and lame as fuck. The devs are working hard on fixing those problems, but it high level play turns into hiding in the jungle with your team, camping neutral creeps, and AOE stuns when you actually fight the enemy.
Yeah, high level play in LoL is awful. It takes about 4 games to realize this which is pretty much the reason I am going back to HoN.
imo.
The thing i’ve loved most about LOL is that the devs have very much kept in contact everyday and made it known they are listening to the community. I don’t think i’ve ever played a game where the developers are as active in the community as Pendragon and the crew are.
I love that because you don’t have to wait and wait and wait for a post on a blog about an update or wonder about if they are listening at all. They are always posting on the forums and asking our feedback. In that aspect the game always changing and becoming closer to what they want it to is great to see.
As far as gameplay, to me it feels more like an evolution to what dota and the whole MOBA genre is. I don’t like HON myself because when I did play it (I don’t anymore) it was just dota rehash. If i wanted to play Dota I would go reinstall WC3 and play dota. I’m sure there have been several updates to the game that are making it different than that. But thats how HON felt to me.
Don’t get me wrong, people love HON because its Dota put in a much nicer engine. The look of the game is amazing, that was one thing about HON that I could never or will never bash, but the problem with that is that the thing I loved about HON, weren’t the gameplay.
I also always hated that in Hon/Dota intel heroes always plateaued out. That end game unless they went CC, there was always a cap on how much damage they could do. You could never really carry with zues, because his abilities only do so much damage, and then at the end you have to rely on the items you have and what they do as opposed to what zues’ skills did (just using him as an intel example)
I love how LOL doesn’t do that. Because they don’t have str/agi/int and use attack power and ability power which allows the casters and the skills the have to be viable the entire game and even be able to carry.
And I know alot of people don’t agree with me, but dammit if I hated denying. I’ve always thought it was stupid that the first 15 minutes of the game you had to focus on killing your own creeps to deny experience instead of focusing on harassing the opponent in the lane and ganking and playing the game instead of the minigame of denying. Don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying it doesn’t take skill, but its the same thing as last hitting the opponent’s creeps and i’d much rather play that game instead of killing my own units. Which really, is kinda silly that you kill your own allies.
I love lol and the evolution and direction of the MOBA genre its taking. I can’t ever go back to HON or Dota myself. IF you haven’t played LOL yet please do.The game is free which can only make it that more appealing.
And feel free to add me to friends and we can play some matches. The more people on SRK that play LOL the merrier.
Your complaints are legitimate but to be fair the HoN developers are doing a ton more than the DotA creators ever did for DotA, except maybe more recently in response to the developers of HoN. HoN used to be a DotA clone, but it is branching away to becoming much more developed and nuanced compared to DotA.
Furthermore, if you are playing high level games, i.e., not-EM, INT heroes are still really strong because carries are getting ganked and not getting huge and regardless they can still carry if you know what you are doing, e.g., Demented Shaman is a beast always. I do like the Ability Power idea in LoL though, it allows you to focus on buffing up your abilities.
Denying is just something that is in the game that acts as a limit on carries which as a whole is good even if it makes no sense in comparison to the game. Oh well. In conclusion, I see why people like LoL, but its viability for being serious or competitive in its current state is practically nothing.
imo.
You make it sound like LoL isn’t competitive because of those things you mentioned. Not the case. LoL isn’t competitive because the gross imbalance of some heroes and their AoE’s, as well as some of the neutral creeps being too good. Those are the main factors. Denying doesn’t make the game any more or less competitive, IMO.
The focus should be harassing the other hero and pushing your lane. Add skill elements that are logical and support those goals. Denying is counter-intuitive to this, I feel.
LOL’s biggest problem is the imbalance of the default 5v5 map. I feel twisted Treeline is a much more interesting map. Twisting Treeline is a huge gankfest of fun. They need to add it ASAP to the Matchmaking games.
Well, there goes my please “don’t turn this thread into a HoN vs DotA vs LoL” plea in the first post.
Oh well, at least it is civil and not flames. And you guys really bring up some good points too.
However, if it does however turn into back and forth flame war, I’m deleting the thread or asking a mod to close it down. Whichever I can do.
There’s no real reason not to play both if you have an HoN beta key. LoL is Free, so you can create an account and decide if you like it or not.
Personally I prefer LoL because I like LoL’s approach to the item system more. They are very similar, but I feel LoL’s items and the abilities that scale with AP is a great system. Now they just need to balance out the meta-game and roll out some patches (which they say they are doing on their forums.)
Well if they are still going about balance the same way they did during beta, they ‘should’ be releasing a balance patch every 2 weeks. But that might be a little excesive now that it’s gone live
edit:
I love twisted treeline. I think it’s a great 3v3 map
But I have played both. I even made this thread because I play LoL and thought that there should be a LoL matchmaking thread on SRK.
Word around the street is that Mike Ross plays/played LoL.
Yeah. HoN and LoL are only similar at the superficial level. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty, they aren’t very similar at all and anyone who has played both for some amount of time can tell you this.
EDIT: One quick example, you can escape ganks to farm pretty decently in HoN because the bigger map and teleport scrolls while in LoL the whole game is focused on ganks which is dominated by heroes with stuns and other forms of CC.
imo.
Anyone down for some games right now?
add licebeam to your friends, I’ll be on for a few more hours.
Also I added everyone from the first post, so if you see a friend request from me, accept it.
Played it for the first time today. Pretty interesting. I’ve played 1 real game of it so far and got to carry with the chick with the big gun. Went 13-1-8. Not bad, she is kinda crazy strong with her jump-rocket-ulti-shot combo.
I will say this: after playing DotA and HoN for so long, it really is kinda weird not looking to deny creeps. And I dunno if it’s just me but this game seems to take a lot longer to play through than DoTa matches. (Much longer than HoN matches)
Question I have is, how do you drop your items? I was stacked on this chick and I was trying to make a new item but I couldn’t…
I might try it again tomorrow if I have time. Name on LoL is Galactic.
Again, I’ve only played 1 game so I’m not good at it yet. But if it keeps my interest I’m pretty sure I can get good at it.
^_-;
As the items go, you don’t drop them or anything. If you have the money you can just click the highest tier of the item you want to make and it will combine all the items you have into it.
For example, lets say you want to buy frozen mallet, but don’t have enough room for the giant’s belt. You can just double click on the Frozen mallet icon and it will make it for you.
Also if you have all the money for the full item you can just double click on the Frozen mallet icon and it will make the full item for you without having to buy items, then buy the recipe, then drop your potions pick up this item, combine that into that one and so on and so forth.
Also don’t forget to check the main website, they have a an article for people transitioning from dota to LOL.
They also have all the champions as well as items on the game database section too.
Riot actually said they want the games to be quick for competitive play purposes. That is also why denying isn’t in the game
When you get a good team going games take 15-30 min usually
hon feels better.
Then please post on the HoN thread.
My computer’s hard drive got the click of death so I’ll be replacing that this Friday. Then I will be on regularly again.
playing some LOL right now if anyone wants in.
I’m on, add licebeam