By quincy0191
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For better or worse, a team’s fortunes usually rest in their carry player’s hands. It’s usually impossible to put as many resources in the hands of one person and not have their performance make a huge difference in determining the game’s outcome. If your carry fails to farm effectively and dies a lot, guess what, you’re probably not going to do very well when it comes to winning the game, and vice versa. It would be unfair to say the carry player is the most important, but there’s a reason these guys get a lot of attention.
fUzi (BMG)
It’s possible, maybe even likely, that no single player transformed a team more than fUzi. Before they brought him in, LIONS were a promising but flawed team, capable of hanging out with sG but never really able to break through consistently. After they picked him up LIONS/BMG started winning pretty much everything. It’s unfair to say that fUzi was the entire reason behind BMG’s emergence as Stay Green’s primary competition, but the timelines do correlate very nicely, and no doubt he was one of the most skilled and fun to watch carries in the game until his untimely passing.
Flensmeister (SynC)
Here’s the man fUzi was brought in to replace (by way of Pewe), who apparently took that as a personal insult and slowly plotted his revenge. Strictly speaking it isn’t always fair to call Flensmeister a carry player – there are a number of games in which his team has eschewed a traditional 1 role and spread farm, or even given a late-game hero to KheZu and gradually turned him into the carry. But that would serve to strengthen Flensmeister’s case rather than diminish it; not only can he be a powerhouse when put on a traditional AFK farmer, but he allows his team to run different strategies that give them the element of surprise and doesn’t require high maintenance and protection from his teammates.
ImbaBoy (Rea)
Reason Gaming’s gone through a multitude of changes, especially in the last several months, but two constants have been brothers ImbaBoy and Z4NE. He is very much a ricer, with the highest average CK per game of all players in HoN Tour Season 3 at 324, but isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty either, as 7.3 kills per game is the third-highest among all players. Much of Reason Gaming’s strategy understandably rests in the idea that ImbaBoy will get excellent farm and carry them to victory, because he finds ways to keep his GPM and CK scores up that don’t always make sense. There may not be any carry player around right now who does a better job of finding his own farm than ImbaBoy.
Haxxeren (BMG)
Haxxeren can give you the best of both worlds. Not only is he a great sit-back-and farm player, excelling on heroes like Soulstealer, Magebane, and The Dark Lady, he can get straight into the fight on a ganker; pretty much no other carry is going to see multiple games on Bubbles or Kraken, but Haxxeren does. With 19 different heroes played in 46 games in HTS3, and just once more than four times, the guy does everything and does it well.
baltazar` (tree)
With respect to the other nominees, no team focuses harder on its carry player than willowkeeper, and it shows. He’s got the highest average GPM in HoN Tour right now at 512 (min. 15 games), and the carry moniker fits him better than any other player; when baltazar` gets what he needs, tree wins games. They’ve been doing that a lot more since bringing him in as well; it’s probably no coincidence that like fUzi, tree rose quickly upon the addition of baltazar` to their roster.
BeaverBanger (Null)
It’s tempting to just write KURUKURU fifty times and call it a day, but that wouldn’t be doing BeaverBanger justice. Nullstone rose from the ashes of The Last of US, and his emergence as the top US carry player and the most active carry in the game (7.8 kills per game leads HTS3) is probably the best thing to come from the demise of the old American squad. Of course, BeaverBanger can play other heroes, but when you’re leading all player-hero combos with a ridiculous 13.1 kills per game on Oogie, winning fights 1 vs. 5, why would we want to see anything else? KURUKURU!
And here we have the most thankless job of all. It’s pretty astonishing how many support players actually have an impact given the difficulty of playing support in Heroes of Newerth; with a multitude of jungle lineups, hard support players are often the only ones warding, and it isn’t uncommon to see even a late-game support player sitting on just boots, a teleport, some regen, and a utility item. Those are the lucky ones. These aren’t the lucky ones, though, because they’ve done too much over too many games to just chalk things up to happenstance. No, they’re the players who are willing to stand up to a massively farmed carry, holding on to their tablet, and try to get something done.
Zfreek (sG)
Zfreek is the author of one of the best plays of all time, using excellent positioning to block a pathway through the jungle to keep his carry safe, then eating a Keeper root and still somehow juking his Aluna to safety. It made no sense, and his incredible impact on supports was a big reason why Stay Green did what they did; he almost never had help, with swindlemelonzz constantly drafting junglers, yet there was always a perfectly timed Rhapsody ultimate or Glacius freeze or Torturer stun.
Sealkid (BMG)
The hits just keep coming for Bad Monkey Gaming, and it is awfully difficult to tease out which of their players was the best. Sealkid has yet another fantastic argument as someone who was always, always in the fight. 10.6 assists per game in Carnage trailed just Handsken, m`ICKe, Xibbe, and Limmp, and then he’d do crazy things like go 17-1 on Rhapsody, or play Myrmidon. Twice. Not every support makes stuff happen, but Sealkid absolutely did
iNsania (SynC)
Since he played jungle for KNX as AZUREREXXAR, we unfortunately can’t consider him taking a relatively unknown team to third place in CiC. But there’s been a curious turnaround in SynC eSports since iNsania joined the team. First, they beat BMG, which they hadn’t done before. Then they did it again. And now they’re beating everyone, looking like they’ve figured out HoN. Oh, and iNsania’s drafting now, because duh, just as they’re hitting their peak. If you’ve watched any of HoN Tour Season 3, you don’t need to be told how much of an impact iNsania has, whether it’s his addition of Pyromancer to the scene, or having fifteen of the 25 300+ GPM support games, or being just one of three players to have over 10 assists per game in HTS3.
Support (SynC/BMG)
AKA the guy iNsania replaced and BMG promptly picked up (though he has since moved on), Support is well known for playing Empath perhaps better than anyone else plays any hero, and pretty much singlehandedly adding what is now one of the top support picks to the game. But that ignores the fact that he’s been even better with heroes like Engineer, Torturer, and Rhapsody; when Support first showed up, he was kind of a one-trick pony. Ban Empath and he suffered. Now there aren’t enough bans to shut him out.
RootOf_z (tree)
Speaking of the best plays of all time, that Riftwalker hat trick is up there. Low on health, but with amazing use of fog and combining his abilities perfectly he manages to pull off a triple kill that won’t be soon forgotten. More important is his consistent play and impressive ability to learn and implement new strategies that willowkeeper keeps coming up with. First it was the jungle pulling, which few have managed to successfully emulate. Now it seems to be a shortlane trilane with the carry transitioning to a stacked jungle. Not to mention the continued use of extremely uncommon heroes; RootOf_z does more weird stuff with weird heroes than anyone we’ve seen all year, but still makes it work incredibly well.
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quincy0191 is a HoN veteran with a focus on the numbers. Fascinated by quantifying and valuing human beings, he shunned the world of finance in favor of sports and competition. When not on Honcast you can find quincy playing games like Civilization and Pokemon, or watching movies, writing, pondering, or catching a game of baseball.
