Music and Ra

There will two topics of this blog post.

Music:

So this weekend I was stuck on a 4 hour bus ride twice, where they lied about it having wifi. Okay not lied but seriously, 5 bps is not really wifi in my humble opinion. Because of this I left my mp3 player at home, and not even I can sleep for 8 hours. Thus I defaulted to this friend's music repository, which unfortunately was all "indie rock" and pop. Granted, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was, and there's a couple that stood out like Airplanes, Grenade, and DJ's Got us Falling in Love. However, The level of sophistication of trance music and DnB is just levels above most indie rock songs and the such. It's 7-12 layers vs the 3-4 layers that presents itself in pop/rock. In addition, they're not that hard to make either, because all you need is a computer and not a expensive mic plus a good guitar. Someone should really tell me, why is pop/rock better than electronic music for you guys? Is it the lyrics or what?



Ra (Heroes of Newerth):

New hero! Perfect, he suits all my playstyles. He can suicide for tons of damage, and he takes guts to play correctly. If you're afraid of dying, you'll be useless. What really limits him is the way people play him. He stays constantly on the edge, dealing damage to everything around him (including himself). I believe him to be a perfectly balanced hero, since his first skill costs a whole 20% of his maximum health, and his third requires him to be damaged to do anything. Played at the hands of an inexperienced player he's just must easier to suicide now, but if you can judge his damage and hit point levels well, he will be scoring huge nukes on a team while always a few hits from dying. He does get countered by chain stuns, since they simply destroy his ability to walk next to people to kill them.
A bit of a mini guide:
Skill build should be 3 1 3 2 3 4 3 2 2 2 1 4 1 1 1 s 4 s...

This gives you enough regen to harass like a madman. Your item build should involve a shield, since you deal enough damage to last hit easily. Start with some regen. This hero actually excels at levels 1-2, and tapers off at 3-5 but comes back strong at 6. The reason is that the heroes you lane against usually manages a lot of harass and you cannot go in at will since they have skills to stun and run away from you. Level one everything's even, and you should just run into a cocky ranged hero wanting to harass you to slice him a few times.

Your core is a HotBL for the health and defense, and then a shamans for the regen. After this you should get a heart if you're doing exceptionally well, bkb for stunner teams, or work towards a frostwolf's if you somehow don't see the need for a ton of regen. By this time you can finally spam skills, and you should be to get some farm up. You regen about 100 hp every 4 seconds so live on about 50-75% hp when farming.

I do have to emphasize though know your damage, and know who to explode on. That's how you win at Ra, and it doesn't come unless you have experience!