Strategy Guide: Accursed

Mindset

Accursed is primarily a support hero that can also tank when needed, your job will be to help out your team mates with shield's and heal's to keep them farming. You'll want to try and find a good agility carry to lane with and assist him as much as possible. A lot of people like to build accursed as a damage dealer with item's like Runed Axe but he requires a lot of items to output decent damage so it's much better to leave the farming to a proper carry.

Abilities

Cauterize

* Deals damage or heals allies at the cost of his own health.
* 100/150/200/250 damage/heal and 50/75/100/125 health cost
* Always costs 75 mana
* Now has a large range of 750 (up from 600)
* Short cooldown (6 seconds) means you can cast it multiple times during a fight.

Fire Shield

* Removes certain debuffs on cast
* Absorbs damage
* Deals aoe damage when max damage has been absorbed
* 100/140/170/200 damage/absorb 100/105/110/115 mana cost

Sear

* Slows targets movement speed
* People attacking the target gain 10/20/30/40 % increased attack speed and 10% movement speed
* Not an orb

Flame Consumption

* Heals based on damage done during duration of ability (1:1 ratio)
* Will auto activate if below 400 hp

Strategy

Accursed's abilities all have very good synergy with eachother, and it is essential to learn how to combo his spells to be effective. Accursed can be deadly early game by fire shielding himself and casting cauterize on an enemy, as the damage returned from cauterize is absorbed by the shield causing it to explode and deal even more damage. Casting Cauterize whilst flame consumption is active is also a free heal as the damage is absorbed and turned into health.

Remember that fire shield can remove harmful debuff such as many stuns and slow's from it's target when applied so you can save teammates from sticky situations with a well timed shield to negate a stun.

Items

Enhanced Marchers are good as they allow you to chase and catch up to people to apply Sear which can slow them and then allow the rest of your team to catch them. Plated greaves are also very good and fit accursed's support/tank role perfectly if noone else on your team buys them adding damage block and armor for the team.

Ring of Sorcery should be your first aim, and now that you can buy a pickled brain at the outposts (side shops) you can easily rush that for a hefty early game mana pool. This provides you with all the regen that you need to spam shield and cauterize and benefits the team aswell in pushes.

Astrolabe is a great AOE team heal that helps to support your team when cauterize and shields alone cannot handle the amount of damage that is being put out in big team fights.

Skill Build

Fire Shield
Cauterize
Cauterize (keep cauterize ahead of shield because its low mana and will set off shield instantly till later levels because the self damage > shield absorb)
Fire Shield
Cauterize
Flame Consumption
Cauterize
Fire Shield
Fire Shield
Sear
Flame Consumption

Then you can either take stats for more HP and tankability or Sear for more damage if you feel that you don't need the extra HP and mana from stats.

Heroes of Newerth - Basics

Heroes of Newerth is a RTSRPG created by S2 Games in the mold of the popular Warcraft 3 Map "Defense of the Ancients". In this game teams of up to 5 battle it out online with each player being able to pick from a pool of 60 unique hero character's all with there own identity and skills.

Imagine a RTS game like Red Alert where the bases are allready pre-built and basic foot-soldiers ("creeps") leave the base in predictable fashion (creating three "lanes") to meet up and clash at certain spots in the middle of the map, next to fortified towers. Your job as a hero is to assist the creeps to push forward and destroy the enemy team's towers and eventually to destroy the enemy team's base.

As unit's die in this constant clash in the middle of the map the hero character's gain experience and levels which can be spent on improving or gaining skills, and as they get more powerful they can start to have a much bigger impact on the battle. If you land a killing blow on a hero or a creep then you gain gold, which can be used to buy Items from the shop that further increase your stats or give you unique abilities such as invisibility.

Heroes of Newerth is currently in its beta stage and as such Heroes and Items are still evolving and changing very often so it is very difficult to keep track of the changing strategy's and item builds that are used. It is essential to min/max and make sure that your hero is built correctly and hopefully this blog can help to educate you on how to build your favourite heroes.