Surviving health stacking teams?

Sounds like the actual problem is that your team mates are dying constantly, not health stacking (that would be a problem killing enemy DGs, not a problem getting killed by them) 

Sadly damage items do not escalate as well as HP items. The only advice I can give you is to do that yourself since everyone can. Then focus fire on one demigod at a time, using stuns and slows.

The key is crits.  You either need high hp/regen yourself, or high dps with criticals.  you can easily get 1.5 and 2x crits, and with the 18k artifact you can get 4x crits.  Stack those and you will signifigantly increase your dps.

Crits increase your DPS by like 10% (or with Ashkandor, 30%, I think.) It's really not a huge amount, but it is easier to spike somebody wth huge crits.

I don't know how this applies to other players, but when I stack defensive items I usually skimp on speed items. As Rook for instance I know I can't expect to outrun anyone, so I grab Blood of the Fallen rather than Swift Anklet. A demigod with low speed can't score kills as easily and has more trouble getting out of a bad situation.

If your opponents have mana regen, hitpoints and mobility all covered early on and you don't, the problem isn't with HP stacking at all.

It's all of 2250 to stack boots of speed and wand of speed, and that lets you outspeed anybody with an active wand of speed, boots of speed, and a swift anklet (and if you are playing as UB, even that won't be enough as long as the debuffs from diseased claw are active and they don't have slowing skills themselves).

Stacking up to a good speed is cheap. Wasting a favor item on Swift Anklet, which only lets you get out of early game overextensions faster is not.

hmmm

Health items stacking? Well, I have several ideas:

- Teamwork (focus fire, works wonders even against very powerful demigods)

- +attack speed

- +damage

- +crit ! you have 2 relatively cheap crit items in the 3300-3500 gold mark

- Mix into your team some support demigods, such as QoT or Sedna. Have your generals buy priests.

No offense, but if somebody is having problems killing the other team, the solution isnt to get an 18k item.  That takes forever and then some if you arent killing the other team a lot.  Even if you wait for cheaper crit items, you are still going to be several levels behind on war rank before you can start to do much at all.  Thats still a huge problem.

Thats the real issue: you can probably even things out eventually with smart items, but you cant do much early on and will thus always be behind on war score at least.

If the other team is smart enough to all stack HP, chances are they are smart enough to use teamwork also.  As people have pointed out, the problem is that its much easier to stack HP than attack speed and damage early on.  You just cant get enough DPS out early on to match a HP stacker.  By the time you get several crit items in the 3000+ range, you are several levels of war rank behind.  If you mix in many support DGs, then good luck doing enough damage to do much against several HP stackers.

Beating HP stackers doesnt really have any easy or obvious solution.  Its probably the most powerful strategy in all honesty, and the only way to beat them might be to join them.

Because you are going to lose every early game fight, be pushed out of the lane, and the enemy will get EXP and gold while you heal? I think that's a pretty valid reason; whenever I see Swift Anklet on my opponents, and they aren't Tower Rooks, I immediately think "I'll be at level 5 while they are at level 3." It's just that much of a detriment to have 800 health and 5 less health regen than your opponent early game when the difference in DPS between two people is like 30 or 40 DPS.

The only reason it is useful is to get away. If you have to get away, you are losing the lane. If you are losing the lane, you are going to be outlevelled, outcashed, and eventually all that speed won't matter when the opponent can just break your towers.

EDIT: Also, the swift Anklet is even worse against UB/anybody who gets slowing effects, because then you are still going to be caught and killed (UB can beat most other Swift Anklet + Wand + boots characters with just the wand, boots, and inner beast, honestly. Diseased claw just crushes them.) It's not even a useful favor item once people start getting slowing effects, and it only allows you to lose less than you would otherwise early game; it's not going to help you get any kills against smart opponents (if you have swift anklets and are outkilling somebody who doesn't early game, something is wrong, honestly, but it's not hard to realize that you are dying and run to the safety of towers; with your HP at less than 2000, towers would easily keep you at bay early on when the swift anklet might make a difference in chasing down enemies.)

I'm suprised there were so many responses to this. I was afraid the health stacking was just the most efficent use of items. Kinda defeats the purpose of choosing equipment.

Milskidasith:

Those are exactly my thoughts, I just keep getting pushed out of lanes, loose the level gold and warscore advantage and its downhill from there.

Truthfully the only balancing act I could see is if GPG removed health regen from health items. So that items only had one or the other on them. And I don't see that happening, so... *stacks health* wooho I'm a health whore now weee!

not to derail too much, milskidasith, but there are other favor items that are excellent that don't give any real buff to combat: amulet of teleportation. On a large map, as Sedna, I can cap two flags before any other DGs even get to the front lines, then after waiting a few more seconds I can port to capture another 2, all while creeping. Amulet of teleportation is basically the ultimate quick xp tool, quick getaway tool, and quick reinforcing-a-friendly-DG-who-needs-help tool.

"

Beating HP stackers doesnt really have any easy or obvious solution.  Its probably the most powerful strategy in all honesty, and the only way to beat them might be to join them."

Im beginning to think this as well.  I find myself in games, around lvl 6-7 when ppl start making their real gear choices, saying "oh shit" once their beast starts pushing the 5k mark.  Its just a very hard strat to counter at the moment with current thought up strategies. 

True; blade of the serpant is also good because it allows you to health stack while running a mana heavy build, and Heaven's Wrath is good for allowing Regulus to see for a quick second (for sniping), sniping foes, and getting free EXP. However, Blood of the Fallen is the only way to get lane staying potential early (besides a mana increasing favor item and being a QoT chainshielder/Sedna chain healer), and an amulet of teleportation really doesn't help you get away when you consider it can be interrupted past level 5 (or earlier, for some characters!) and on smaller maps like Cataract the bonus is decreased (considering your only real option is to teleport back to the health crystal, because there will be enemies in both lanes and you get less time saved, whereas on something like Zikarut or... Mandala?[health crystal in the middle map] where there are possibly open lanes to farm, a health crystal in the middle you can teleport, capture (if necessary), and heal at.

Basically, an amulet of teleportation is good for big maps with a lot of lanes that could be open, and bad for small maps where all the lanes will be covered and you don't save as much time teleporting.

One question for everyone here. Sometimes I get a HUGE HP buff, where does that come from?

HP flag?

A 15% hp flag

I pretty much agree with what you said

15% health flag?

Huh? Early game, speed is only useful to get away. You can't *get* a kill with a speed anklet on against any smart opponent with a blood vial unless you are somebody that is really hard to kill early on (QoT with a bunch of mana.). Later on... how do they get faster? All speed items can be bought by other people, and slows negate Speed Anklet. It's useful for map control, yes, but not more useful than being able to fight off other demigods. You sacrafice health for a bit of utility that is destroyed by the enemy havimg more natural speed than you, passive speed buffs, or slow/stun kills.

Alot of people have realised this fact, and thats why there are mostly HP-stack builds now, alot of them.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Life Stealing items. Maybe my view is distorted because I'm mostly playing UB, and UB with decent life steal and melee focus (e.g. stat increases, inner beast) has frightening staying power at high levels. And you can incluce life-stealing with a decent damage-focused build. All I know is that when I'm in the upper levels and have Mageslayer and Namoth's ring, it takes some real focus to take me down.

A separate point worth making here, is that a lot of discussion in this thead has turned to whether or not the enemy DG manages to get away. Of course it's better if you kill them, but lets not forget that driving them off (especially early game if they have to hit the crystal), is still a useful victory in and of itself.

I think health stacking is too powerful and more and more everyone is doing it.  I'm not sure the best course of action but its pretty easy to see that adding 25 damage per second would take 16 seconds of extra auto attacks (at 1 per second which isn't the case early game) plus have to negate the 5 health per second on the starting armor.  And most the damage items that are lower level don't even have 25 damage, its more like 15.  I would really like to see more damage based builds viable but at the moment there is only a few if any that work when your enemies health stack.

That being said in a normal custom game with teams (usually 3v3 at least) I found the anklet to be quite powerful in terms of getting extra early kills.  True in a game of all skilled, all good aware players maybe you wouldn't get that kill, but in a normal 3v3 or more I seem to get a ton more kills from being able to get those last few shots on players who over extend, even those who bought blood of the fallen.  Just because they have 800 extra health doesn't mean that some creeps wont hit them, or a teamate, then they think they are going to get away and dont run early enough only to get caught.  Again, just saying that in the team setting I sometimes find I get more money and kills by picking up the anklet, later on in the game it becomes a nice boost but not as needed.  Still its worth mentioning.

How bout some damage item love?

There are far too many bad and entirely useless gloves and damage items compared to all the cheap and highly effective armor/health items, they really should either reduce the sheer amount of cheap armor/health items, or up the amount of cheap damage items by 2 or 3.

I'd also like to see some more mana drain items too so people can't just fill their slots with armors/unbreakable boots and still have enough mana for all the skills they'll use in an engagement most of the time.

And on the subject of Anklet, the only Demigod I use it on anymore is Regulus (although initially I used it on everyone because I thought OMG IT MAKES ME FAST IT MUST BE GOOD), mainly because it really helps to kite enemies, which is something only he can really do effectively and it helps a lot when the enemy can't catch you but you can just turn around and auto-attack them as they retreat. Most other Demigods can benefit much much more from another favor item than a bit of extra movement speed.