[S2]XanderK comments on the Balance Patch

With the addition of XanderK as the S2Games community manager, S2 has been trying to further reach out to the community to give insight on what they do. XanderK has recently started up a 'Heroes of Newerth' tumblr of which he uses to post niche content on what happens in the S2 office as well as various opinion pieces.

The focus on community events and involvement is ever growing in the world of HoN and it is important to give coverage where warranted. With the implementation of XanderK as the S2Games community manager I think it can be safe to say that S2 is doing more than they ever have in this regard.

The following is a quote taken from the "Around the Office: 1/25" article in the Heroes of newerth blog linked here.

“

The big balance patch came out today and people seem pretty pleased about it. There’s changes to 31 heroes and 13 items in this one and some of them are really interesting. Obviously I’ve wanted to talk about a lot of this stuff for a while but now I finally can.

The Helm of the Black Legion “nerf” is extremely interesting because, when you do the math, it’s actually better in some situations

The Stormspirit change seeks to prevent allies from saving a carry from a chain stun setup and then the carry using Shrunken Head when they come down. It trivializes positioning in some cases and this change nerfs it defensively but BUFFS it offensively.

Gemini is nerfed! Yay! But stop trying to play him with his previous stats build. Instead, play him normally and you’ll see how he was originally meant to play. :-D
The changes to Magmus and Geomancer were for the sake of consistency. No other heroes with similar abilities could use them out of immobilize.

I think we got most of the heroes that people were having issues with. The changes are not that major for those heroes either, so they should still be viable.

Underrated changes in my opinion: Flux changes to Magnetic Surge, Predator Leap change, Soul Reaper changes and Hammerstorm changes. All of these can potentially make these heroes much stronger than before.

We’re really excited to get this patch out the door. There’s a lot of other awesome stuff in it, including two AMAZING alt avatars, one of which is a community suggestion! So, just to say again, we really ARE looking at the Suggestions forum! Go post your ideas there!

In other awesome news, we have a fix for the Mac sound bug coming out! Our programmers have worked many many late nights on this and Lion users should be seeing a patch pretty soon to apply this fix.

And finally, make sure you watch Milkfat’s Guinness World Record attempt this weekend. Honcast and some S2 members are on site in California at Howie’s Game Shack as Milkfat tries to play HoN for 76 hours STRAIGHT. Tune in to Honcast and Milkfat himself for coverage of this epic event.”