Tried Dota 2, what do you think of it?

[Tanakh]

I don't quite understand why the game has to control exactly like its Warcraft 3 predecessor, rather than streamlining it and making it intuitive. Little bits and pieces like being able to hold down right click and have your hero follow your cursor, or having your pathing shown on the minimap, so you can see the route you'll take. It's strange how much you take little things like that for granted.

There's also the mass stunlocking, which is endlessly frustrating. I suppose a Dota fan might argue that i've just been softened up by LoL's relative lack of hard CC.

It doesn't, there was actually a well know turning bug on WC3 that never got solved and made heroes like batrider much better than intended. About streamlining, fortunately it wont happen, those subtle details like some of the ones you mention or not having locked cameras add more depth; though they might take time getting used to.

And I really don't understand the complains about "mass stunlocking". In most cases you got stunlocked killed because you were out of position, because you failed to evade the stun or because you failed to buy a Black King Bar at the right moment. If you are being stunlock to death by a tiny, a lesh, a lina... then it's just that the player with that hero is much better than you, nothing to do but more GG more skillz.

He buffs more than he nerfs, and if he ever nerfs he just makes the hero weaker in an area that's different from what made them strong (i.e. Lycan is a crazy pusher, but IceFrog only nerfed his jungle.)

Unless of course the other team is not retarded and know they can 2 shot the wolves... ohh, you mean empty lanes? As syndereN said, with this change he passes from being a top pick to being gone, beacuse at the new mana cost you can't really lane with the wolves.

And that "situational" sounds good on paper, but on reality no sane team at the last international would have picked a Jakiro or a Sniper over a Morphling or an Enigma.

 

[The Wykydtron]

snip

About the towers:
1.They give vision.
2.At start of the game they do a lot of damage.
3.Dota have teleport scrolls,with them you can teleport to allied buildings,so if yours tower up you can tp support or save time.

About the heroes for me its backwards I find the LoL campions lacking in impact.For example Leona's Solar Flare has less impact then Invoker's Sun strike or Gyrocpter's Call down.
Did you judge the heroes in game or by videos?
And if you ever wish to try dota 2 again , soon Valve will optimize the game for lower computers .

Sorry it was more of a rhetorical question, I know the vision towers give is damn important. In fact i've lost/won games of LoL just because the team that was ahead on kills took basically no towers and other team had quite a few.

Personally I feel if a tower doesn't do damage then there's something wrong with the game. I've seen a game of DOTA 2 where an entire team was having a prolonged tower dive against the other team and they came off pretty even. It wasn't even a case where the diving team was particularly fed either. In LoL you would get your ass handed to you if you tried a 5v5 or even a 4v5 under one or even two towers for any serious length of time.

I would like to try DOTA 2 for realsies so i'll have to keep an eye on whenever Valve decides to get their optimising hats on (no TF2 pun intended) Still I have no faith in my laptop at all.

Oh and when I say "try" DOTA 2 I do not mean "move on to" DOTA 2. Christ it's like some people don't realise you can play two MOBAs at a time.

I'm usually good at judging impact from videos most of the time, I do it in LoL as well. I know I don't like Jarvan's Q,E knockup combo having played him only twice ages ago and one shoutcaster plays (or used to play) a lot of Jarvan. His ult needs more impact as well.

I know I do like a good Lich ult though, that's cool.

 

[Fappy]

I think playing LoL for as long as I have has ruined any chance of me actually enjoying Dota 2 unfortunately. I just can't get into it whereas I can still play LoL occasionally.

 

[Snowblindblitz]

I'll give it a run today and keep playing around. What are good hero recommendations for learning curves?

I do like some Sniper, but he's a fairly easy to play hero.

 

[Snowblindblitz]

I know I do like a good Lich ult though, that's cool.

Aye, Frost everywhere for everyone. And catching 2 or 3 heroes out alone with it is so much fun.

 

[Atmos Duality]

LoL was DotA1 but with its most intense elements watered down:
i) Last-hitting is stupidly easy in LoL, and no pressure to deny means you can focus entirely on it

ii) "Crowd Control"* effects in LoL have very short times if they aren't persistent or stackable. In DotA2, they can cripple and enemy for a long, LONG time.

iii) Stats are simplified. AP and AD are night and day compared to the three stats DotA2 rips from WC3. There are heroes that prefer Generalized stat-stacking over specialized stat-stacking in DotA2, and some heroes that can ignore the three base stats altogether.
Since Riot remade and nerfed several variables, viable hybrid characters are an extreme rarity; focusing on AD, AP, or tanking.

(*very stupid choice of phrase, as most hindering status effects are SINGLE TARGET. "Crowd" implies plurality)

But does all of this make the game better/worse? Eh...not necessarily.
There are several champs in LoL that are just flat out more fun to play than their DotA2-counterparts, and vice-versa.

The shopping system in DotA2 is far inferior to LoL. It's difficult to make odd plays in casual pub games, since there's an AWFUL lot of presumption about how one MUST play certain heroes, even if the circumstances don't call for it. (I got this in LoL as well, but not nearly to the same degree as in DotA2; not sure what's causing it)

What little I played of HoN last year...I didn't like it, and didn't play enough to comment.

All that said, I still play DotA2 instead of LoL for one reason: The connection quality in LoL kept shitting out on me, while it's pretty reliable for DotA2.

Towards the end, the ratio of Disconnects per week looked like 0.5 for DotA2, to over 10 for LoL, and that had been persistent for about two months. Dunno if my ISP hated LoL's servers or what, but I was fed up with it.

 

[Tanakh]

I'll give it a run today and keep playing around. What are good hero recommendations for learning curves?

I do like some Sniper, but he's a fairly easy to play hero.

Depending on your objective and if it's pvp or pve. If i had to pick one for pvp, Windrunner for sure, easy escape, stun, good damage at the start, very high skill cap but very forgiving at the same time. Sniper is actually a very weak hero if the opponent team knows how to deal with it (ie. focus him because he has no HP nor escape mechanisms), but can be quite effective if the opponents are bad or if you plan to play against bots, if you are looking for an easy PvE carry I would suggest Drow Ranger over him.

Other suggestions for PvP include:
- Venom
- Dark Seer
- Broodmother
- Enchantress
- Keeper of Ligth
- Lich
- Jariko

For items, you can (mostly) go for what the game reccomends, very solid most of the time.

Now, if what you are going is just to stomp pubs, then go and learn how to play Nature's Prophet. If you are good with it, a 75% winning rate in pubs is not hard at all.

Personally I feel if a tower doesn't do damage then there's something wrong with the game. I've seen a game of DOTA 2 where an entire team was having a prolonged tower dive against the other team and they came off pretty even. It wasn't even a case where the diving team was particularly fed either. In LoL you would get your ass handed to you if you tried a 5v5 or even a 4v5 under one or even two towers for any serious length of time.

A tier one tower does around 110 DPS, the rest do around 150. Heroes start with 500-600ish HP, so a single hero will die really fast eary on to a tower. Untill more or less 15 mins a tower does more sustained DPS than the heroes do, and if a 5v5 goes out below a tower and the offending team wins/goes even is either becaue they were way ahead on gold or outplayed the defending team.

And it probably won't change to LoL style towers, because Icefrog does most of the changes to encourage ganking.

(*very stupid choice of phrase, as most hindering status effects are SINGLE TARGET. "Crowd" implies plurality)

Not really, CC effects have historically being mostly single target, if it's called CC is because it reduces the ammount of mobs you had to face at once, not because it affects crowds.

I also disagree on the shop, no couriers = mega fail. Not to mention i am more used and like more the layout of the DotA shops, but that is only due practice.

 

[Myrrinfra]

I have fairly extensively played all 3 games in discussion here....

HoN is/was fairly fantastic, and I'll say animation/spell/art wise is the best of the three. Character design (note not balance, just strictly art) is the best of the three. The balance in items and heroes really went downhill, and the community is frightening.

LoL is super casual, easy to get in/out of, but is very, very monotonous. Every game I played last week was solo top, solo mid, jungler, 2 bottom lane. Every. Game. Still a fun game, still lots of cool things, just a little on the vanilla side for me personally.

Dota 2 is the most complicated, the most difficult to learn, and potentially the most interesting depending on your masochistic desire to learn the genre. Having come from HoN initially when i started playing Dota 2, I was unbelievably underwhelmed by some of the spell effects. A lot of the first heroes added still have some mundane boring effects (everything Slardar does, for example). Things have improved fairly significantly for most of the new heroes added. But hands down, HANDS DOWN, Dota 2's best trait is the audio. The voice acting and audio things going on in the game are incredible. Heroes taunting the opposing hero for denies, kills, etc. are just fantastic to hear.

 

[Sunrider]

I played all four "major" DOTA style games (Allstars, HoN, LoL and DOTA 2, in that order) for many, many hours, and in my opinion, DOTA 2 is by far the best one. Not in every aspect, mind you, but its strengths make it the winner in my book.

 

[Catrixa]

So, at some point during the DotA 2 beta, I played a round of it. To be honest, I'm pretty sure I now know the reason behind a lot of design decisions in LoL now...

Way back in the day, I played Warcraft 3. Then I played Warcraft 3 custom maps. A lot of them. They all had some fairly similar elements: if the custom map was an RPG or a DotA spinoff (and I can recommend some so-bad-it's-fun ones, if you've got a room full of people), you had some pretty standard elements, including item "schematics" and multiple buildings for items to get around the limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine. A lot of these elements were in the original DotA and, while I never played a ton of it (only when my friends wanted to help me, since I'd be damned before I tried playing it on battle.net), it seemed like the mod developers used these limitations to enhance the flavor and challenge of their game.

What I don't understand now is why DotA 2 is still writing these same "features" into their game. If you aren't using the Warcraft 3 engine, a lot of these features don't make a ton of sense to me. Yes, the game is harder if you have to navigate through a menu of items, much like you'd navigate through several buildings (i.e. memorize or die mechanics), with schematics and all, but I don't feel like this is necessary anymore. It will, however, keep new people from becoming interested in the game, which is good if you're trying to prevent noob matchups, but not very good if you're trying to preserve the longevity of your title.

Denying is also one of those things I never really saw the point of. If both teams are denying, don't you just increase the length of the game? It was a feature of Warcraft 3, however (and, in normal play, if you got one of your units stuck, it was pretty useful), so I see why it wound up in DotA.

I guess, in the end, I feel like a lot of the features in DotA 2 are simply artifacts from Warcraft 3 that aren't really necessary anymore, but do make the game feel harder. I think more compelling gameplay, maps, and strategies could be used instead of an overly complicated UI and awkward in-game mechanics, but I think DotA fans would hate to see these things go. They're like a rite of passage: Want to play with the big kids? Well, you've gotta go through what they went through.

 

[DasDestroyer]

So, at some point during the DotA 2 beta, I played a round of it. To be honest, I'm pretty sure I now know the reason behind a lot of design decisions in LoL now...

Way back in the day, I played Warcraft 3. Then I played Warcraft 3 custom maps. A lot of them. They all had some fairly similar elements: if the custom map was an RPG or a DotA spinoff (and I can recommend some so-bad-it's-fun ones, if you've got a room full of people), you had some pretty standard elements, including item "schematics" and multiple buildings for items to get around the limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine. A lot of these elements were in the original DotA and, while I never played a ton of it (only when my friends wanted to help me, since I'd be damned before I tried playing it on battle.net), it seemed like the mod developers used these limitations to enhance the flavor and challenge of their game.

What I don't understand now is why DotA 2 is still writing these same "features" into their game. If you aren't using the Warcraft 3 engine, a lot of these features don't make a ton of sense to me. Yes, the game is harder if you have to navigate through a menu of items, much like you'd navigate through several buildings (i.e. memorize or die mechanics), with schematics and all, but I don't feel like this is necessary anymore. It will, however, keep new people from becoming interested in the game, which is good if you're trying to prevent noob matchups, but not very good if you're trying to preserve the longevity of your title.

Denying is also one of those things I never really saw the point of. If both teams are denying, don't you just increase the length of the game? It was a feature of Warcraft 3, however (and, in normal play, if you got one of your units stuck, it was pretty useful), so I see why it wound up in DotA.

I guess, in the end, I feel like a lot of the features in DotA 2 are simply artifacts from Warcraft 3 that aren't really necessary anymore, but do make the game feel harder. I think more compelling gameplay, maps, and strategies could be used instead of an overly complicated UI and awkward in-game mechanics, but I think DotA fans would hate to see these things go. They're like a rite of passage: Want to play with the big kids? Well, you've gotta go through what they went through.

The shop in Dota 2 is actually very well done. If Valve wanted to keep pointless artifacts from WC3, they would have made multiple shops, instead there are multiple tabs if you can't tell the items apart by picture alone, and when you know which items has which icon, you can simply make it list almost all available items at once. Not to mention that at any point you can search for an item or just have it in your recommended items.

Overall denying may slow down both sides' farm, but the thing is, if you only deny then you don't get last hits and therefore do not get gold. So everyone focuses on last hitting first, denying second, unless you're in a dual lane where the carry goes for last hits, while the support tries to deny the enemy last hits. Also useful if you've just cleared a creep wave and have a few creeps that could be easily picked off by the enemy for free exp and gold. Just deny them and problem solved. It basically gives you something to do while there are no creeps to last hit, and another way to outplay your opponent.

At the same time, Valve decided to keep the core game exactly the same as DoTA. When IceFrog updated DoTA to 6.75 recently, all the same numerical updates were applied to Dota 2. So if they were to remove denying, they'd essentially be taking upon themselves the responsibility of balancing the game, and I'm guessing they trust the creator of the game with that more than themselves.

 

[endtherapture]

In LoL, Towers defend you. In Dota, you defend Towers.

Denying is also one of those things I never really saw the point of. If both teams are denying, don't you just increase the length of the game? It was a feature of Warcraft 3, however (and, in normal play, if you got one of your units stuck, it was pretty useful), so I see why it wound up in DotA.

Well basically as a support you want to help your Carry get last hits and deny farm to the opposing carry, whilst harassing the opposing carry and his support. Denying well let's you out exp and out gold the enemy which makes you win quicker.

It's just another aspect of complexity that adds another level to the game.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Not really, CC effects have historically being mostly single target, if it's called CC is because it reduces the ammount of **mobs** you had to face at once, not because it affects crowds.

That's still plural.
Perhaps I just don't follow, but it certainly does not make the term make any more sense to me.

I also disagree on the shop, no couriers = mega fail. Not to mention i am more used and like more the layout of the DotA shops, but that is only due practice.

LoL lacks couriers because you can port back to base whenever you want.
Furthermore, couriers work better in a game where death carries a gold penalty so you are more inclined to spend money before you lose it.

As for the shop, I find LoL's much easier to read.
Though if you've re-memorized the item placement and icons (which have changed considerably since DotA1 for obvious reasons), I can see how you might prefer DotA2's.

(FYI, I played DotA1 from the original map in RoC, and I still prefer LoL's list.)

 

[Syntax Error]

Played DotA (the mod) for quite some time now (started waaaaaaaay back 2005. You know Void's Time Bubble? That wasn't there before!). I have since moved to HoN and I must say It's gonna take a good rip from DotA 2 to get me back. I haven't played it yet (hence, the good rip part), but I love the faster gameplay of HoN. Now if only I can find people who know the value of finishing games early...

 

[Zyst]

I was talking to my brother the other day about this, I've been playing DotA 2 pretty much since the beta came out on and off, he's more of a LoL player, he has told me he'd really like to transition into DotA but can't really do it because all his real life friends are now playing LoL (in no small measure thanks to him)

In the end LoL felt suffocating to me, I felt like I HAD to log in once a day so my first win of the day bonus wasn't wasted, then if I lost 2 games I Was like "Fuck I didn't even feel like playing today". I played a lot so I could afford Runes, most of the time I thought "Oh that hero is so cool!" But I couldn't really play him because most of the new heroes are now 6300 and fuck, that's a LOT of games.

In the end I've been playing DotA for almost 9 years now, I bought HoN while it was in the closed beta and quit shortly after going back to DotA because I didn't really like the new heroes they were turning out. I played some LoL and I find it really fun, my solo/duo queue ELO was sitting at 1950 before, however I haven't really played at all in 3 months or so.

In the end DotA just feels more interesting to me, the Meta is really flexible and I've had weird cases where for some reason or another we end up with a team that would be considered abysmal or not balanced (3 carries and 2 heavy casters with absolutely no support) and we managed to come above with just superior skills and having fun all the way. The meta is just so much more flexible, diving doesn't feel like a death sentence (which it isn't in LoL but it does do a lot more damage) the map is bigger but feels perfect, there's TP scrolls which are similar to the teleport summoner spell in LoL except you can't tp to creeps, you CAN TP to creeps with Boots of Travel.

Also Summoner Spells bother me extremely after playing any other game, I know that both sides have it so it's theoretically balanced and after playing 10 rounds of LoL I kind of forget it, but if I'm playing LoL after coming back from a long DotA stay I feel like I'm being robbed of kills every time some asshole gets away with flash, and I just feel cheap as hell when I bring someone down to super low hp and basically flash under the tower and just use ignite and run away. That's not even a skill, that's just..

I dunno, it really bothers me. In the end I like DotA 2 heroes more, they feel more unique and dangerous in their own way.