HONicle : Pushing, Not Just for Bullies Anymore

 Devourer by magicantmilty

Pushing: Not Just for Bullies Anymore by Thomas Draper

At its most basic, pushing in HoN is the simple act of assaulting a tower. Of course there is a lot more to it than just attacking towers. There are significant advantages and disadvantages to pushing a tower, some of which are obvious and some of which are more subtle. The obvious advantage of taking a tower is that your team splits well over one-thousand gold pieces. The obvious disadvantage is that your lane is pushed and farming that lane is nigh impossible for the next few minutes, in addition to potentially granting the enemy carry some free farm if lane control is not maintained after the push.

One of the most important, yet somewhat unnoticed aspects of pushing is in the aftermath of a partial push, or a push in which the tower doesn’t die but significant damage is done to it. If the tower hits that magical mark where it can be denied but your team doesn’t kill it, you did something wrong. In many cases discretion would be the wisest choice, but, in pubs especially, the concept of a defensive retreat is generally lost on the group and many near-kill pushes result in a rout and a denied tower, hurting the team’s potential gold advantage from the tower kill and pushing the lane into a good defensive position for the other team to farm your lane creeps. If the tower doesn’t hit the deny range and you can pull your creep wave back before the enemy heroes come in to counterpush, congratulations. Of course, the beauty is in the details. If the other team can establish lane control around a weak but not-yet-deniable tower, it’s quite possible that they can pull the lane back enough that one of your catapults will bring it within deny range and they can still get a free deny.

There are two major decision making aspects of pushing that are important and that we will also look at soon. The first is based in immediate analysis of the current situation and the second is in the selection of characters that are good for pushing or for anti-pushing (sometimes called turtling). I am going to discuss both, mostly separate, although there is really only a very fine line between the two.



Who Should I Pick?


Currently there are almost 80 heroes in Heroes of Newerth. Of course they can all push towers, but some of them can do it extraordinarily well. So who do you pick for a pushing lineup? First, we need to look at the three different types of pushers. There are the Assaulters, heroes that excel at doing damage directly to the tower, there are Accelerators, heroes that excel at getting your creep wave up to the tower, and there are Targets, heroes that can hold the aggro of a tower on themselves or their pet(s) without incurring much harm. Heroes that can assault a tower effectively generally have skills that are specifically designed to be able to damage towers (like Torturer’s Impalement or Defiler’s Unholy Expulsion) or have a passive benefit that increases damage dealt to towers (like Booboo’s Demolish and the old Engineer ability Tinker).

Heroes that accelerate waves to the towers generally have area-of-effect skills that can literally melt creep waves (like Pyromancer’s Dragonfire/Phoenix Wave combo or Soulstealer’s Demon Hands) or are able to stop the enemy creep wave before it reaches the tower (like Armadon’s ability to tank damage or Behemoth’s Fissure). Generally it is pet classes that are best at simply tanking the tower when there is no creep wave present (like Hellbringer’s Summon Malphas or Tempest’s Summon Elementals), although heroes that can simply shrug off the damage (like Armadon) or can benefit from being damaged (like Amun-Ra) are also candidates for the Target category. It’s worth mentioning that Amun-Ra and Armadon are both powerful accelerators when they are tanking tower damage, although Amun-Ra does it better. A good pushing strategy should have someone from each category, as well as having as much secondary overlap as possible. It’s easy to see Tempest as a part of all three categories, since Elementals can do a lot of damage to creeps and towers (plus a free creep kill when summoned) as well as tanking about three tower hits each, as well as having strong disables to clear the heroes out of your path of destruction, so he is a very good pick in a pushing lineup. It is also true that he’s a great anti-pusher too, which is true of many good pushing heroes. Behemoth is great at stopping the enemy creeps before they can interfere with your creeps at the tower, but he is also good at stopping enemy creeps and heroes from advancing on your own towers.

So, with some basics, how do you build a pushing team? Then once it’s built, how do you play it? First, if you pick all pushers, you’re probably not going to do well. You will still need to fill the core roles of ganker and supporter before you can consider an endgame strategy. In this case you will likely be without a carry if the push doesn’t go well and are forced to play in to the late game. There are a few heroes that overlap as pushers and semi-carries, most notably Torturer and Slither, especially since Toxicity has been removed from the attack modifier list, which can benefit you quite well. Unfortunately these two heroes are considered top tier in the current metagame and generally one or both of them will be banned. A good push team should ultimately include a balance of heroes that are good at pushing but can still fulfill other roles. Here are some examples of lineups that could work with a push strategy in mind:

The pre-Ultimate tower killers:

     Solo mid: Hellbringer
     Solo side: Torturer
     Trilane: Slither, Balphagore, Flint Beastwood

The Multilane Slow Push:

     Solo mid: Pollywog Priest
     Solo side: Pyromancer
     Trilane: Behemoth, Myrmidon, Torturer

The Push Hero and his Friends:

     Solo mid: Pollywog Priest or Defiler
     Solo side: Pharaoh or Wildsoul
     Trilane: Behemoth, Engineer, Valkyrie

Try them out in pubs (they should all work out similarly with a 2-1-2 setup) and post in the comments what you think.

Here are some push lineups that have worked recently in professional level games:
Dreamhack Grand Finals Game 2 - Wildsoul, Pollywog Priest, Myrmidon, Tempest, and Pebbles
GosuCup Main Event Group Stage unZ vs xFin game 1 - Torturer, Behemoth, Pollywog Priest, Aluna, Myrmidon

Why You No Push!?!

So when do you push and when do you retreat? There are so many variables that decide when a push is good, when it’s better to take Kongor, or when you should retreat, stack up your jungle, and let your carry farm while the rest of the team looks for an easy pick off gank, that the decision can be quite daunting.
The biggest factor is the number of heroes currently alive on each team, as well as the remaining duration on respawn counters for the heroes that are waiting to get back to the fight. If you just wiped all of them out and didn’t lose anyone, you push, duh. But what if you have three heroes left, they only have one up now, one up in 10 seconds, and the rest up in a minute, and your two remaining heroes are up in 25 and 45 seconds? How do you make that decision? Start with the phase of the game.

Early game, your enemies won’t have long respawn timers and you’ll probably want to back off unless the tower is already significantly low. This can also be a good time to try to sneak in an early Kongor kill, as the other team will expect you to push or farm, but will generally think it’s much too early to take Kongor down. If they don’t have wards up on the pit, then you can easily snag a Token of Life in lieu of a weak early game push. You also want to make sure that your early game tower assaults focus on the mid lane and the enemy short lane. Taking down the tier 1 tower in the enemy short lane will allow your warders to be more aggressive and place wards in the enemy jungle, compounding the farm issues that a push strategy is ultimately trying to force. This may be the only condition under which the Legion has a Kongor advantage, as a pushed Hellbourne mid and top lane will occupy their team for long enough for Legion to have some free time with the big monkey.

Mid game is usually the time to push, especially if you are still working on a tier 1 tower. On the other hand, if you can take out all three tier 1 towers during early game, you can accelerate the pace of the match and force the other team into midgame play style, giving you a distinct advantage in both momentum and gold. This is a key moment in an effective push strategy. If you are working with a powerful enough gold advantage to end the early game before the other team is ready, then you have officially taken control of the game.

This is where push strategies get tricky. There are a limited number of towers to take, making them an expendable resource, unlike creeps. Striking a balance between the rapid farm advantage of early tower kills and the consistent income from strong farming can be very difficult and can lose a game for you very quickly, even if you were able to power through early game and force midgame on the other team. If your push momentum dies off early in the mid game and you haven’t been stacking and farming the jungle with one or two of your heroes, you essentially just lost a lot of gold and experience, and probably the game. During midgame you want to finish off the tier 1 and tier 2 towers, but there is a golden moment when this should happen. If you have a carry or semi-carry on your team, they should finish their first luxury item with the gold from the final outer tower kill at the very worst. Ideally they should already be finished with one luxury item and starting on another. At the same time, the enemy carry should not have more than two-thousand gold pieces invested in their first luxury item yet. This essentially puts you in the late game and denies their carry a large amount of time that a more ‘traditional’ lineup would be able to use to farm.

Late game, pushing will start a team fight, so you had better be ready. With a dedicated push strategy, if you are pushing late game, you are pushing the barracks. When you are pushing in to the base and trying for barracks, there are certain heroes that can stop you dead in your tracks. Primarily, farm independent heroes with strong AoE presence are going to destroy you. One goal of running a push strategy is that you are trying to make your farm (which you are not relying on) outclass the enemy farm (which they are relying on). With an advantage like that, you should be able to win most team fights handily. Heroes that do not rely on farm, especially heroes like Witch Slayer, Behemoth and Plague Rider, will ruin even the most concerted push without some preparation. A good team spread and good communication about what to do when that Graveyard or Plague Carrier come out are key at this point. Multilane pushing can be your best friend when these heroes are around, but you (almost) never want to push both side lanes. Your heroes need to be close enough to support each other in case of an epic failure as well as being able to follow up on the push if one lane group is able to enter the base more quickly than the other, so a dual push at mid and one side will generally be more advantageous. The other side of this theory is that the other team is also grouped up together and more able to support each other. Baiting a triple push with a high mobility hero like Wretched Hag or Pharaoh can help spread the enemy team out in their base, as can timing your pushes so that they begin with a delay of about 30 seconds. If you push the middle with three heroes, it’s less likely that the other team will notice the two heroes that started pushing top about 30 seconds in to the fight.

If you don’t have a significant lane advantage late game, what can you do? When do you push, when do you turtle, when do you Kongor, and how do you compensate for the brakes being slammed on the farm train? A good push strategy with good play can be an unstoppable force and give you a very quick win, but it is a high-risk high-reward gamble. A push strategy that gets slowed down during early or mid game is almost always going to result in a loss. The one thing that you can do to combat this eventuality comes, once again, during picking. Some of the best pushing heroes are also the best turtle heroes. Tempest, Pollywog Priest, Slither and Balphagore are all significant forces when it comes time to defend your barracks, mostly for obvious reasons, and can all do some serious counter-pushing if you manage to throw back the assault. Behemoth, while not the greatest pusher, can definitely help a lagging push strategy to stay alive, and can singlehandedly break up a counterpush if he lands a solid ultimate at the bottom of your base ramp.

Did We Win?

Thanks for your time reading my ramblings on push strategy in the current Heroes of Newerth metagame. Try out some of the strategies in the article and let me know how you do in the comments.