What Is HoN?

Well I want to know what it is. Is it like Warcraft 3?

Heroes of Newerth is a game by S2 Games which is heavily based on the Warcraft III scenario Defense of the Ancients (DotA). Heroes of Newerth, or "HoN", is an Action RPG game published and developed by S2 Games.


Players in Heroes of Newerth control a single character from a top-down perspective, in the world of Newerth. HoN focuses on hero control and development, and removes many of the common features of classic real time strategy games, such as base management, resource collection and single-player missions. The goal of the game is to work together in teams of one to five people in order to take over the opposing team's base. Players gain experience over time through the elimination of enemy creeps and obtain gold over time in order to purchase new items for their heroes. Hero characters max out at level twenty-five and are only able to carry six pieces of equipment. Defense towers are set up in the top, middle, and bottom rows of each team on the map. Players must work their way through each tower and eventually take over the base. The team who destroys the opposing team's Tree of Life (Legion) or Sacrificial Shrine (Hellbourne) first wins the match. As of patch 1.0.5, there are currently thirty-four heroes on the Legion side, and thirty-three heroes on the Hellbourne for a total of sixty-seven heroes. S2 Games has stated that they will continue to make heroes beyond release.


Most heroes in Heroes of Newerth have a direct correlation from Defense of the Ancients, with similar abilities and statistics. The additions that differentiate Heroes of Newerth from DotA are non-gameplay features such as tracking of individual statistics, in-game VOIP, GUI-streamlined hero selection (draft mode, etc), match making, and chat features such as player banlists (with reason). Post-game MVP awards are upcoming but not currently implemented.

The game also uses S2 Games' proprietary K2 Engine, and a client-server model similar to that used in many modern multiplayer games.[3]. This differs from the peer-to-peer networking model used for Warcraft 3 which can cause network connectivity issues for all players when one player has issues.[4][5].

Several features added via updates include a Hero Compendium (a list of the heroes in the game with detail statistics about them), the ability to set a "following" trait on a friend which makes you join/leave the games that friend joins (similar to the "party" feature in other games), and an in-game ladder system.