With HoN going retail internationally, S2 games has already released two new heroes to bolster the Hellbourne's ranks with an additional Legion hero being announced.

The original lineup was truly impressive in itself, sporting 62 heroes some largely identical to their DotA counterparts, numerous hybrids as well as a number of entirely new heroes.

For the Hellbourne, we have the addition of :

Balphagore

&

Gauntlet

Hero Highlights

Gauntlet is still currently stuck in development due to number of issues concerning his second skill, Grapple.

Conceptualised as another addition to the plethora of skill-shot abilities present in HoN as well as its predecessor DotA, Grapple was largely similar to Devourer's and Pudge's respective hooks. The main difference was that unlike utilising the mono-directional flight pathing that characterised abilities like hooks, Priestess of the Moon and Valkyrie's arrows, Chipper's rockets and Clockwerk and Pharoah style hooks. The Grapple was to allow Gauntlet to select 2 location points. The first being the initial trajectory of the grapple, the second being a totally different trajectory. This would allow the Grapple to hit units hiding behind creeps or heroes, hooking them from behind or around obstacles.

As amazingly cool as it sounds however, due to the debate of its effectiveness by various HoN players, due to its cast time, relatively low damage as well as slower projectile speed, Grapple will probably have to be reworked before Gaunlet can be released.

Balphagore on the other hand has proven to be a viable hero for team fights and has been chosen for a number of scrims. Balphagore's silence ability and his ability to spawn minions from corpses he has consumed gives him good pushing and ganking abilities.  His silence skill, known as demonic pathogen, is a 2.5 second silence with a 100dps damage over time(dot) that chains to nearby heroes upon the end of its duration. This effectively gives Balphagore an aoe silence and 250dmg dot that scales well to the late game.

 Demonic pathogen is in my opinion one of the most useful spells in Balphagore's arsenal.

While Demonic Pathogen is undoubtably one of his strongest skills, my favourite skill would be Corpse Conversion

This skill works in two stages. First, it allows Balphagore to regenerate hp by consuming any corpse he walks over. Each corpse heals him for a maximum of 25 hp and adds 1 charge to this skill (maximum of 16 charges). Second, Balphagore can use these charges to spawn minions 3 charges per minion. These cute little buggers slow for a stacking 2% movespeed. They are fully controllable and can be thought of as little Meepos.

 They give Balphagore great laning and pushing potential and along with this skill's healing property it allows Balphy to jungle rather effectively as well.

All in All Balphagore appears to be an extremely fun hero to play and i look forward to playing him upon HoN's SEA release.

For the Legion faction its latest upcoming hero is

Bubbles - A port of Puck from DotA

Already available in pub play, i have not had the chance of seeing him in action yet. But it should seem that he would work as well as Puck does in team clashes in DotA.

With the continuing updates available to HoN players, Heroes of Newerth seems a viable challenge to DotA's enviable player base.

More updates available on http://heroesofnewerth.com

UPDATES

Gauntlet has indeed been reworked. One of the most notable changes is the rescripting of his Grapple (hook based skill-shot). A clear demonstration can be seen in the following video.

Watch live video from this is where i make stuff on Justin.tv

http://www.justin.tv/stealthtrousers/b/263905832

I sought out a first hand review of the skills provides some insightful views of Gauntlet's new mechanics and the following is Player hellfire15's account of this hero's testing.

"My personal feel about him: (mostly on his skills)

> His 1st skill is a lot better now since you don't have to rely on the perfect timing because of the previous long cooldown of the spell; now you can use it as an opener with max stacks, then empower your attacks/spells even with just 1 or 2 stacks on 1st skill; all in all, I'm loving this skill a lot now.
> New Grapple works similar to Chuck, Video explains it all) but with dual mechanics; you can either push both you and your target to a target point, or just pull your target and you in midway; although the vector target was nice on paper, I'm glad they removed it since it's very hard to pull off ingame against decent opponents who played against him before.
> New Cripple is a lot better as it synergizes greatly with a max stacked 1st skill as an opening move, nothing much to say here
> New ultimate is somehow better than before due to the fact its quite a lackluster for an ultimate, now it clears a path for your new grapple although i haven't tried opening with blast first though.

All in all, he's in a very good state, although it still needs a few adjustments pertaining to 3rd skill still giving some weird bugs about the slow.

I'll be focusing on his new grapple since it just opened a lot of new strategy possibilities when working with allies."

For those unfamiliar with the various skills of Gauntlet, this information can be found at

http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/heroview.php?hid=128