Dota 2

Man, I was turning the forums inside-out trying to find the Dota 2 thread, because I just couldn't believe that no one is talking about it.

Anyway, since I have a habit of living two months in the past, I finally got around to starting to watch the international. So far I've only seen the match between DK and Na'Vi.

Oh, and I guess I need to talk about the heroes, too. Anyone like any of the new heroes introduced? I know there haven't been too many new ones because of the tournament, so I guess "new" isn't the best word... regardless, I like playing Keeper of the Light, that Illuminate skill of his is astounding.

The few times I've played, I've been finding myself sticking to what I know works - the Sniper, Nature's Prophet, Crystal Maiden, and Lina. Any time I've tried to pick up the other heroes, it turned out to be a disaster since I had to idea how to play them and quickly dragged the team down. And it doesn't help much that Nature's Prophet, Crystal Maiden, and Sniper were seriously nerfed from their original Do TA stats.

I took a long break from this game in order to focus on other stuff, but now that I've played a few games recently, I have got to say I love playing as Huskar now.

I don't think there are many dota players here...
I just had a fun game with two friends, went hardlane with jugger/cm. While I failed once and died, the only reason I had "only" 16-1 stats was that they stopped leaving their fountain after 20 minutes. 18 minutes in, aghanims+battlefury. :>

Pfft, I think I missed a christmas event .-.

Anyone wants Dota 2? I got seven copies of beta access to give out, and I don't have any friends to give it to.

I got 13, and all my friends already have a key. So,if Eldrake happens to get rid of all of his keys...

Sad really, that the Dota 2 thread has no posts, while that... other game has thousands of posts. But oh well.

So, I hear Blizzard's suing Valve over a ton of names or something. Is that true?

Yeah, it's true, but they finally figured out how to go about things so it's all cool.

The only reason why I picked up DOTA 2 was to play at a local internet cafe with a long-time friend of mine who's really into MOB As. But since he suddenly up and left around Christmas day without a single word, I've had nobody to play it with. Plus, I've hated the typical behavior and steep learning curves of the MOBA community, so it's really no loss for me.

...Though, the fact that I spent around $25 bucks earlier this year on him to get him early beta access and the Dr. Kleiner announcer feels stupid in retrospect, ESPECIALLY with Steam giving away free DOTA keys like candy these days.

edited 18th Jan '13 8:22:38 AM by SgtRicko

Only started playing DOTA 2(and MOBAS in general) a few months ago, and while some of the games can be reptitive, it's still pretty fun in terms of strategy and teamwork when you're with amicable enough teammates.

It seems that some of my friends prefer DOTA 2 to League of Legends(something along the lines of more skill, and more complex). What's the consensus on the two?

The consensus? Don't bring it up unless you want a flame war.

In my opinion, Dot A's a little harder, takes a bit more skill to keep track of everything, but is more fun to watch. Never played it, though.

Lo L's simpler, as your friends say. Never found it fun to watch, but enjoyed a few games of it of what little I played.

Some differences:

• Dot A has denies. Not so in Lo L.
• Dot A has "secret shops," and not everything is available from the main shop. Lo L as the one shop at base.
• In Lo L it's easier to assign roles to champions than in Dot A.
• In Lo L every champion has four activate-able abilities. In Dot A, some champtions have a mix of abilities and passives.
• In Dot A, you can spend your level-ups on ability/passive level-ups or improvements in your stats (and also has a higher level cap). In Lo L, you can only spend on ability level-ups.

edited 19th Feb '13 8:17:57 AM by MetaSkipper

Also, in DOTA 2, no microtransactions or having to build up virtual money to get to play as certain characters. Everyone's available from the start and all "equipment" is purely cosmetic.

I've played both (league more than DOTA), and the main difference is that everything in DOTA is OP, and is balanced by counters. What that means is that every characters is strong, and you pretty much need a character that can counter the playstyle of the enemy.

In DOTA, if you're caught your pants down, you're pretty much dead. In league you have a way bigger margin of error when dealing with ambushes (also called ganks). This works both way btw, regardless of who's the victim.

Overall, DOTA is a lot less user friendly than league, which is arguably the reason why league is so popular compared to DOTA right now.

So yeah, if you want to impress someone, play DOTA. If you just want to play and have "fun", play either you like most. They're both pretty cool.

No one is "OP". It's a different game so it works differently. You have to learn and study stuff in advance if you want to win later on. It's not so much "picking" good counters so much as knowing how to counter with what you have and what you can buy. I've rarely if ever seen team composition matter, at least outside of tournament matches.

Though ultimately, it all comes down to team coordination. Having a team that works together, wards, reveals invisibles, reports missing, and so on and so forth is almost always guaranteed to win against one that doesn't. Of course, this is rather rare in solo matchmaking but it still happens.

Having seen some Dot A, I'm more inclined to agree with hass.

That's what I meant.

League balance by tweaking the defenses and damage of champions.

DOTA makes strong heroes and balance by making other strong heroes.

That's what I concluded playing it anyway.

And teamwork is always important in team games. It's a given.

I've never played DOTA 2, only Lo L, but from what I've seen Lo L is less all or nothing. It seems much rarer to see people getting bursted down from 100 in League, for instance. Probably one of the things that, along with being easier to grasp and having a cleaner visual style, that makes Lo L more suited as an E-Sport imo. (There's no need to mention DOTA 2 requiring more skill or anything, the money in esports comes from viewers, not players)

I can't say it's clearer to watch. Big team fights turn into messy rainbows in my opinion. In Dot A, it's clearer to watch, but also looks cooler and more viceral.

YMMV I guess. You also need to be familiar with the game to understand what's going on.

When I started League long ago, teamfights were an esoteric events where magic happened and dragons were.

Same thing in DOTA. Since I wasn't familiar with the enemy heroes, I was baffled whenever they used an ability and I had no idea what happened.

Tho I don't watch LOL's E-sport. Never really wanted.

Dota 2 has a better engine as well. You simply can't have things like Spell Steal, Invoke, and summonable units in the Lo L engine.

... Where the hell does that come from.

For starters, there are summonable units. The other stuff you mentionned, I don't know if it's possible or not, but I think it is, I don't see why league couldn't handle it. If it's not included, it's probably because the design team doesn't like the idea.

If you're going to say that DOTA has a better engine, at least make sure you know what the other engine can or cannot do.

Well it's built with the Source engine, and that's pretty well reknowned for it's versatility and ease of use when creating mods or whole new games from scratch, not to mention the fact that Valve keeps it up to date.

So?

I mean, I like both DOTA and league, but comparing the engines sounds petty to me.

Unless someone linked a post by Riot (the company responsible for league btw) that said "Our engine is too terrible for us to release our next champion :(" , it doesn't matter much to me.

Both game's engine works for what it's intended, that's all that matters.

(Beside, Riot always work on it's softwares. The Mac version of League is almost ready to go up, and they re-wrote that from scraps instead of just modifying the original codes.)