Video Game / Dota 2

"What does a hero truly need?"

Dota 2 is Valve's remake of the insanely popular Warcraft III custom map Defense of the Ancients. Valve had hired Icefrog (one of the game's original developers) and have been working on a commercial sequel/remake of a sort. It was recreated on the Source engine with all-new graphics and UI. It was released in July 2013 after a lengthy closed beta.

Dota 2 is known for its relatively high barrier of entry due to its deep, complex, and challenging gameplay on both the mechanical and strategic levels. The game codifies several Multiplayer Online Battle Arena tropes (as it IS a remake of the game that invented the genre) and has attempted to recreate the intricacies and facets of Defense of the Ancients as much as it can.

A Card Battle Game Spin-Off titled Artifact released on November 28, 2018 on Steam, with Android, and iOS ports planned for sometime in 2019, but it appears to have been put on an indefinite hiatus.

Another spin-off, Dota Underlords, based on the popular "Dota Auto Chess" custom game, was initially released into closed beta as a Battle pass reward for Dota 2 on June 15, 2019, with the game entering Steam early access with an Open Beta on the 20th. An Android and iOS port was also released a few hours earlier on the same day.

An adult animated series for Netflix called DOTA: Dragon's Blood was released on Netflix in 2021. Its teaser trailer can be watched here.

Recent updates about Dota 2 can be seen here. For information on professional teams and their members, look under the multiplayer online battle arena folder in Professional Gaming.

---

Dota 2 provides examples of the following tropes:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Level 30 is the highest possible level a hero can reach in a game. Due to the very steep XP requirements for levels over 25 (it takes almost as much XP to level from 25 to 30 compared to from 1 to 25), even a mid hero who is doing well would have a hard time reaching level 30 before the 50 minute mark, before which most games would have already ended. If you do manage to reach this point, however, you get all your talents, not just the ones you chose on the way up.
• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: An unintentional example with the Double Down MMR option available to owners of the International 2017 Battle Pass. Activating this option at the beginning of a ranked match is supposed to double the MMR gain/loss of the match if you win or lose. However, a bug caused anyone who doubled down and lost to be brought down all the way to 1 MMR instead. Now that is painful.
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The crossover with the narrator from The Stanley Parable invokes this during one of this "game has started" lines.
  Stanley Parable Narrator: GL, HF, L2P, VD, MP3, OBGYN, 3DPDB1D9G
• Acronym Confusion: Games journalist Austin Walker got a good joke out of putting DOTA in the title of a PAX panel he was hosting when it was actually about Death of the Author.
• Adaptation Name Change: Since the game turned from a Warcraft III custom map to a standalone game published by Valve, many proper names were replaced, either for simplicity or because they were named after things in Warcraft or other Blizzard Entertainment games^note Iron Branch (formerly Ironwood Branch), Gauntlets of Strength (Gauntlets of Ogre Strength), Circlet (Circlet of Nobility), Belt of Strength (Belt of Giant Strength), Band of Elvenskin (Boots of Elvenskin), Cloak (Planeswalker's Cloak), Blink Dagger (Kelen's Dagger), Tango (Ancient Tango of Essifation), Eaglesong (Eaglehorn), Reaver (Messerschmidt's Reaver), Headdress (Headdress of Rejuvenation), Buckler (Nathrezim Buckler), Drum of Endurance (Ancient Janggo of Endurance), Skull Basher (Cranium Basher), Shadow Blade (Lothar's Edge), Desolator (Stygian Desolator), Pipe of Insight (Khadgar's Pipe of Insight), Daedalus (Buriza-Do Kyanon) and Scythe of Vyse (Guinsoo's Scythe of Vyse). The various buildings used to have their own names, but are now simply referred to by their role (Radiant's/Dire's Ancient^note formerly the World Tree and the Frozen Throne, Tower^note formerly Ancient Protectors and Spirit Towers and Building).
• Aerith and Bob: Most heroes and other characters in the game have fancy names that you will never see in real life, except for Sven, Lina, Magnus, Chen, Ember Spirit (Xin), Gyrocopter (Aurel), Snapfire (Beatrix), Invoker (whose 'true name of power' is Carl) and Roshan.
• Always Accurate Attack: No matter how fast you move, you can't dodge auto-attacks and unit-targeted projectiles with moving alone, you need evasion or abilities that can disjoint the projectile. And even then, evasion can be mitigated by accuracy (provided by Monkey King Bar) or entirely nullified by True Strike (like Witch Blade and Bloodthorn); and there are some spells that cannot be disjointed and can only be avoided by turning invulnerable or debuff immune when the projectile hits.
• Ambition Is Evil: Both Mirana and Luna are driven by their ambitions to be the most favored servant of Selemene. Given that Mirana's very haughty and stuck-up and Luna is violent and Ax-Crazy, the two of them would be at each other's throats if they weren't forced to fight for the same cause.
• Anchored Teleportation: By default, a Town Portal Scroll can only teleport the user next to a friendly building (the base, towers and outposts), making it somewhat less effective in the mid-late game when towers start falling. Boots of Travel allows it to teleport to non-hero units (at level 1) and heroes (at level 2) as well.
• Announcer Chatter: You can buy different announcers from the ingame store, including a Pirate, Dr. Kleiner, GLaDOS, and Rucks.
• Anti-Debuff: Status resistance (most commonly provided by Sange and its upgrades, Titan Sliver, Aeon Disk and Ascetic's Cap) is an attribute that reduces the duration of most status debuffs and the slow values of slows.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Wraith King's Reincarnation, whose active component lets him manually trigger it (by killing himself and coming back to life), requires that you target the ground to prevent players from accidentally using it to kill themselves at the wrong time.
  • Wards have a 1-second cooldown to prevent accidentally planting another ward in the same spot. Furthermore, they cannot be planted close to the fountain to prevent you from accidentally planting them at the start of the game when you want to give the ward to another player.
  • Vengeful Spirit's Netherswap can be used twice in one succession. To prevent accidentally re-swapping to the same position again, a brief cooldown is added which momentarily prevents the player from using it again.
  • Like Vengeful Spirit's Netherswap, Io's Tether has a brief cooldown to prevent players from accidentally disconnecting themselves from an allied unit/hero right after using it.
  • Items can be sold back to the shop at full price and when the owner is dead within 10 seconds after buying them, allowing the player to correct accidental purchases. Selling items at all other times only refunds half the item's gold cost, and cannot be done when you're dead.
• Anti-Magic:
  • Each Infused Raindrop charge will be automatically consumed to block 120 magic damage from damage instances over 50 damage.
  • The cheap Cloak provides a 20% magic resistance bonus to the wearer. It can be upgraded either into a Glimmer Cape (which can be used to turn an ally invisible and grants them a 300 magic-damage shield), Pipe of Insight (which can create a temporary barrier that blocks magical damage taken by friendly units and buildings), Eternal Shroud (which can absorb magical damage and convert it to mana), or Mage Slayer (which reduces magic damage done by anyone you attack). Which one you build into depends on what you or the team needs; e.g., the cape is good for supports against direct-target damage and escapes, the Pipe is good against lots of spread-out magic damage that affects the whole team, the Shroud is good for tanks that have mana issues, and the Slayer is good for right-click attackers going up against nukers.
  • Debuff immunity (most commonly provided by Black King Bar) prevents most status effects from affecting the affected unit.
  • Silences (notably Orchid Malevolence and its upgraded form Bloodthorn) prevent the target from casting active abilities for their duration.
  • A Linken's Sphere blocks most spells targeted on the wearer or an ally once every 13 seconds.
• Anti-Rage Quitting: If you abandon a match outside of a co-op bot game or practice lobby (either by deliberately doing so or by being disconnected/AFK for too long), your account will be assessed with an abandon. One single abandon tanks your behaviour score, and if you abandon 2 matches within a span of 20 matches, enjoy your stay in Low Priority queue. To make things even worse, in order to get out of the Low Priority queue, you are required to win the game.
• Anti-Regeneration:
  • Spirit Vessel reduces the effectiveness of regeneration and healing on the target by a large amount if used on an enemy, making it a good counter to healing heroes (particularly those without a dispel) or those that build Satanic.
  • Orb of Corrosion and Eye of Skadi cause the holder's attacks to reduce the healing and regeneration received by the target.
  • Heroes like Necrophos and Ancient Apparition have abilities or talents that can affect regeneration.
• Anti-Structure: Since buildings are immune to the vast majority of abilities and have to be relatively slowly worn down with right-click attacks, in general abilities that can either damage buildings directly (like Dragon Scale and Meteor Hammer), provide minions (like Helm of the Dominator and Book of the Dead) or reduce armor (like Desolator and Assault Cuirass) count as this, allowing enemy structures to be brought down much faster.
• Apple for Teacher: Alluded to by the Pupil's Gift neutral item, whose icon shows an apple.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Only one creep can be dominated at a time by a hero who buys Helm of the Dominator and/or Helm of the Overlord.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Zigzagged with Pure Damage, which ignores armor and magic resistance. However, Pure damage is completely stopped by debuff immunity (unless the damage source is flagged to ignore debuff immunity), whereas physical and magical damage are not.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The description for the item Proof of Courage.
  In the Red Mist army, cowards were made to cut their hair in shame. Axe has known neither fear, nor shame. Nor a barber.
• The Artifact: Not to be confused with the card game.
  • The original DotA mod had two factions of heroes to choose from, plus a neutral side, and normally defaults to allowing the Sentinel (Radiant) and Scourge (Dire) to only pick from their hero pools and the neutrals. However, in practice the standard mode was All Pick, not Normal (which was only activated if the host somehow forgot to choose the game mode, and usually caused the other players to immediately quit the game), so the formerly neutral pool has been integrated into the Sentinel and Scourge sides. Thus there are neutral characters like Sand King on the Dire, and mercenaries like Bounty Hunter on the Radiant. With the release of Dota 2 Reborn, heroes are no longer affiliated with the Radiant nor the Dire, and are currently only sorted by their primary attribute.
  • The Town Portal Scroll originated from Warcraft III, and retained its name and function into DotA even if there aren't any towns (though the base is kind of one).
  • The Double Damage rune was renamed to Amplify Damage in Version 7.35, where it was changed to no longer strictly double the user's attack damage. Characters still refer to it as "double damage" in the voice lines, since those were recorded long before the change was made.
• Artifact Name:
  • Runes originated from Warcraft III as power-up items that resemble floating glyphs and provide a temporary bonus to the hero that picks them up and nearby friendly units, and retained their name, function and appearance (with minor changes) in the original DotA. In the remake, runes are still called such even though they have received a substantial Art Evolution and now resemble gemstones instead of glyphs.
  • Book of the Dead's active ability is called Greater Demonic Summoning and summons three Necronomicon Warriors and Archers, a reference to how when initially introduced, it was a more powerful version of Necronomicon (whose active ability, called Demonic Summoning, summons one Warrior and Archer). Even though Necronomicon has since been removed from the game (and Demonic Summoning is now the name of Enigma's second skill), Book of the Dead's ability and minions have kept their names.
• Artificial Brilliance: Zigzagged by the AI, which combine superhuman reflexes and perfect coordination (particularly when stunlocking a human player) with absolutely braindead game sense, tactics and strategy.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Just like that Pudge in your pub games, the bots on your side play like idiots, while the enemy bots move and gank together seamlessly. Your bots are more likely to feed the enemy countless kills and making the game impossible for the player to come back from. Bloodseeker bot on the enemy team? Finds you perfectly when you're alone and forces you to TP out. Bloodseeker bot on your team? Runs in 1v5, uses ultimate on one person and gets beaten to death. You can go 30-2 or something with Storm Spirit and the team score at the end of the game will still be like half the enemy's because your bot allies all have 20+ deaths. It's basically impossible to play any hero that doesn't have carry potential because no matter how big of an early game advantage you give your team they'll never be able to carry you unless they're playing one of the rigged heroes like Viper or Chaos Knight (at which point the enemy bots fall apart and will throw themselves at them to die).
  • One of the more frequent examples of this is their tendency to respond to a human initiation by running away. You and your team are approaching a tower. There are three enemies behind it. You have your big ultimate up. You know you can blink in, ult, kill at least two of them, and the tower. Everyone is full health. You blink in. You land a perfect ult. You can win this fight. Your team has run away because there's an enemy siege creep. You get stunlocked. The fourth and fifth enemies teleport in. With your last breath you curse your bot allies as they betray you and leave you to die. And then they run in anyway and get massacred themselves trying to fight 4v5.
  • The game allows you command friendly bots to a degree by pinging the map. Sounds good on paper, but in practice, it tends to just confuse them more as they often interpret the ping as "stand here and do nothing". Even if the ping is on Roshan or the enemy team. Sometimes they might also stand just outside the AoE of a Shrine currently used by a human player.
  • For any given hero, bots will always stick to the same skill and item build, and play in the same role every game (no exceptions):
    • Bot supposedly know that they should not send two carries into the same lane, which doesn't stop them from sending, say, Drow Ranger and Sven to the safe lane and Witch Doctor and Lion to the hard lane... because they consider Sven a support. Indeed, if you play Sven, Windranger, Necrophos, Dark Seer, Pugna,... in a bot match you'll be treated as a support and will have to battle with your other bot for last hits. Of course it doesn't stop the supposedly 'support' Sven bot from building carry items. Sometimes, the bots might even have the brilliant idea to send three heroes to a side lane and two to the other (leaving the mid lane empty), or even four heroes to the same lane.
    • Mekansm is considered to be an item that should only be built once or at most twice by a team. If a bot team ends up with Lion, Windranger, Death Prophet, Dazzle and Jakiro, expect to see 5 Mekansms in the same team - and built by heroes on whom Mekansm isn't a good item at all.
    • Since they have only received token attention for years, bot roles and builds are often horribly outdated. For instance, supports like Lion, Witch Doctor, Skywrath Mage, Bane and Oracle are often sent to the mid lane; Tiny considers himself a Strength nuker, doesn't build any carry items, never uses Tree Grab (an active ability which replaced the old passive Craggy Exterior) and rushes Scythe of Vyse; Viper never uses Nethertoxin (which was converted from a passive to an active ability); Bounty Hunter (a roaming support) is treated as a carry and builds items like Desolator and Black King Bar; Witch Doctor and Warlock still build Aghanim's Scepter even if a player-controlled Alchemist has given them one; Bristleback has no idea of how his Scepter upgrade works and will never use Viscous Nasal Goo again if Alchemist gives him Scepter; Bloodseeker always goes mid even if something like Shadow Fiend or Zeus is in the same team; Windranger considers herself a hard position 5 support; Drow Ranger tries to build Ring of Aquila even after the item was removed from the shop; and so on.
  • Bots are prone to becoming stuck on the pathable cliff north of the rune spot. They go up there to ward but they don't come back down; even if you try to use something like a Force Staff to move them down they'll just walk straight back up. This particular instance was fixed in the Spring Cleaning update.
  • The bots' idea of 'supporting' involves buying wards, but not necessarily planting the wards themselves. The designated support bot is very diligent and will buy nearly all wards that are in stock, but only ever knows to ward certain designated spots, and most of the wards will then proceed to sit unused in that bot's inventory for the rest of the game, which is especially annoying if you need some wards for yourselves only to find that the bots have 8+ in their inventory without placing them.
  • On the topic of wards, bots aren't quite aware that Sentry Wards exist, and by extension don't grasp the concept of de-warding. This can get somewhat ridiculous when a bot uses their entire supply of Observer Wards on a hill guarded by a player's Sentry Ward, seemingly oblivious to said wards lasting about half a minute each before being destroyed.
  • Sand King bot has gained a certain amount of infamy for occasionally getting stuck in trees with Burrowstrike and staying there for the rest of the game (or until a path is cleared through the trees).
  • Witch Doctor has a tendency to repeatedly toggle Voodoo Restoration on and off repeatedly, wasting most of his mana in the process.
  • Bots will almost always insist on maintaining a channeling spell for the full duration, even when doing so would make them easy targets for the opposing team's disables.
  • When bots have their entire team together, they tend to become a bit... overconfident. It's not uncommon for a bot team to dive several towers for one kill and then reason that the safest escape route is under the towers they were just diving (and predictably getting killed for it). This also makes it almost insultingly easy to get a Total Party Kill by luring them into a minefield laid by Techies or just throwing a Chain Frost at them as Lich, or simply being Sven. This reached hilarious new heights when the bots were updated to contest the initial rune spawn, which means having all five of them in one place. It's all too easy for a player to throw a spell in their general direction and then bait the entire bot team into the Tier 3 tower, with predictably messy results that more than compensate for giving up the rune.
  • Certain abilities in the game, such as Bane's Fiend's Grip, can disable enemies through spell immunity. Bots don't seem to realize this.
  • When attempting to escape, bots will prioritize disabling the opponent over booking it out of there. As a result, scenarios ensue where, for instance, a Chaos Knight bot with only a sliver of health will stop, turn around, and throw a Chaos Bolt at the nearest pursuing enemy... which buys enough time for the other three to catch up and finish him off, whereas he would probably have gotten away if he simply kept running. Made even more glaring by the fact that bots treat all disables the same, meaning that Tidehunter is more likely to waste Ravage running away from a gank than he is to use it to initiate a teamfight.
  • Bots caught out solo seem to get caught in a run/fight dilemma half the time and neither properly escape nor trade hits with you until it's too late.
  • Bots don't seem to be able to dodge Kunkka's Ghostship - he's guaranteed a 4 man boat if he's on the opposing team.
  • Bots don't know how to prioritise which items to put in the inventory and which to stuff in the backpack, and can often be seen putting a crucial item like Blink Dagger in the backpack to make room for a lowly Iron Branch. This even extends to the Aegis of the Immortal, which can't be placed in the backpack, resulting in a bot standing there staring at it followed by the easiest Aegis snatch of all time.
  • Early in the laning stage, bots seem to be utterly terrified of things like Sniper's Shrapnel or even Lion's Mana Drain, even if they are level 5, and the ability is still only level 1. They place a priority on keeping clear of the field, or running away until the Drain breaks, utterly destroying their ability to farm (although if they have a stun and are being Mana Drained, they will drop everything to stun you).
  • Bots are smart enough to teleport to a tower that's being attacked in order to defend it. However, they are not smart enough to defend their Tier 4 towers or the Ancient, even though defending the Ancient is literally the name of the game. As such, split-pushing is disproportionately effective against bots, because once you take out the barracks in a lane, the bots will get a massive, glaring blind spot for you to push at your leisure.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Downplayed with Mirana, averted with Abaddon. Mirana's lines emphasis her privilege and demeans her enemies as whelps and curs, while Abaddon emphasis more on the nobility and devotion to the font of Avernus with only slight references to any entitlement. Mirana, however, isn't outright evil, just more of a haughty high class princess that looks down on anyone who dares trespass her domain and Selemene's.
• Ascended Fanboy: Pyrion Flax, a popular YouTube Dota 2 satirist, managed to get his very own announcer pack added to the game and is now a frequent analyst at international tournaments.
• Ascended Glitch: Several quirks of the Warcraft III engine were intentionally replicated, and several quirks of the early beta have been left intact as well:
  • Though integral to the game for years, "denying" allied creeps (killing them to deny the enemy the cash and experience reward) was originally an unintended feature. Similarly, being body-blocked by your own creeps was an artifact from Warcraft III, but was kept in because clever players figured out they could continually get in the way of their own creeps, inhibiting their movement and making the line of skirmish closer to their own tower.
  • Since neutral creep camps check if there are any units within the camp (instead of checking if the creeps of the camp are dead) to determine whether the camp spawns or not, it is possible to stack neutrals by drawing the existing creeps out of the camp at a minute mark, or to prevent a camp from respawning by standing within it or putting a ward inside it. Though originally glitches, creep stacking and blocking are such an integral part of DotA that removing them was unthinkable.
  • Although since removed, Valve at one point stated that the technique known as "fountain hooking" would be left in the game. Fountain hooking refers to aggressively teleporting or dragging an enemy into their opponent's fountain, where the high damage will likely assure an Instant Kill. While it's most well known with Pudge and Chen, it was possible with a small handful of other heroes as well, such as second-runners, Magnus and Io, who, on one hand, are even harder to pull it off with, but on the other, are potentially capable of grabbing multiple people and returning to the fight afterwards respectively.
• Ascended Meme:
  • From the "selecting" responses of Techies^note one hero composed of three characters, similar to Ogre Magi, or Alchemist: Who said we couldn't count to three, huh?
  • Zeus has been compared to Mario for having a mustache and a similar body shape. Come TI5, Zeus's Heavenly Jump taunt makes him jump Mario style, complete with a coin popping out of nowhere.
  • The Faceless Rex was originally a joke in Valve's blog about the Faceless Void remodel. People liked the idea so much that one enterprising modeler created a Faceless Rex courier, and Valve decided to include it in the game.
  • Outworld Devourer has often been called various names, as a joke about how he has been renamed many times. Valve made a nod to it in the Reborn beta◊.
  • Many joke patch notes are coming from community's memes. Such as Dark Seer's infamous nerf to Vacuum every patch^note "Vacuum cooldown rescaled from 28.0 seconds to 28 seconds", the "happy little tree," and Puck's Illusory Orb speed from 6.88 patch^note "Increased Illusory Orb projectile speed from 650 to 651". The change to Earthshaker's Aghanim's Scepter upgrade is a case of a minor meme having a major impact on gameplay.^note Earthshaker and Axe both have ultimates that look a lot like delivering slam dunks, something the community has definitely taken note of. Earthshaker's upgrade allows him to take mid-range jumps through the air, looking like he's just about to slam one in. His Arcana cosmetic set makes its animation look like something out of NBA Jam.
  • The Nether Lord's Regalia Set, also known as the BZZ set, became infamous among the community for being an extremely common drop in older versions, to the point that fans would start joking about the prospect of a golden BZZ set dropping. After TI6, 25 lucky players received a Golden Nether Lord's Regalia Set from the Trust of the Benefactor, making it one of the rarest items in the game.
• Attack Reflector: Blade Mail causes any damage inflicted to the user to be taken by the source of the damage as well when activated, and Lotus Orb forces any enemy that uses a targeted ability on the target to be hit by said ability as well. In both cases, both sides are equally affected by the damage or the ability. Anti-Mage's Counterspell and Mirror Shield have a stronger version of the latter effect, which only benefits Anti-Mage or the Mirror Shield's carrier but also blocks the targeted ability in addition to reflecting it.
• Attack Speed Buff: Activating Mask of Madness massively boosts attack speed in exchange for silencing and reducing the armor of the user. It is the most cost-effective attack speed and DPS item in the game and is usually built early by heroes who especially benefit from attack speed like Slardar and Faceless Void.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Sometimes the Aghanim's Scepter upgrade sounds so awesome that it makes people forget that it is an item that costs 4200 gold and gives subpar stats for its price. The truth is that, 'awesomeness' aside, there are only a handful of heroes on which Scepter is a must-buy item, and like any other item its usefulness runs the gamut all the way from absolute core to late-game luxury (which should be gotten at some point but there are more important items)^note Shadow Shaman, Earthshaker, Timbersaw,... to situational or straight-up impractical (most right-click carries can't dedicate a whole slot for an item with weak stats unless if the upgrade itself improves right-click power, while in some cases the upgrade only sounds awesome on paper but is weak in practice) to almost useless and, on occasion, even detrimental (although IceFrog tries to rework the useless upgrades to make them better, this usually takes time and useless upgrades undeniably continue to persist). Alchemist can defy this trope due to his ability to quickly farm Scepters and give them to his teammates without consuming a slot, which especially helps slot-starved carries like Sven, Luna or Storm Spirit, and poor supports who can't afford Scepter like Lich or Lion. You can consume the Scepter, granting its upgrade without taking up an item slot, but doing so requires you to purchase a 1800 gold recipe on top of the 4200 you already sank into the Scepter, and the upgrade may or may not be worth the gold you could've spent on better items (even worse, you actually lose the stats from the item, and only keep the upgrade effect - admittedly, an empty slot at this stage of the game can be pretty valuable in and of itself, but still...). Roshan also has a chance to drop a consumable Scepter, but you'll have to kill him at least three times to get one.
  • Dagon 5 is the single most expensive item in the game and deals a massive 800 damage, but it's simply not efficient to spend a whopping 7720 gold on an item of limited value as the game progresses. As a result, it's much more popular in low-level games than in pro games, where Dagon is only built (over utility items) if your team really needs burst magical damage.
  • Divine Rapier. 6200 gold, +350 Attack Damage^notemost heroes will barely hit 300 damage even in long games... but if you die, it drops to the ground and an enemy can pick it up and use it against you. When your team is ahead, building a Divine Rapier is most of the time synonymous with throwing the game. It's all fun and games to troll the enemy team with your 'carry' Crystal Maiden until they focus you down and nick it, then make an amazing comeback and spend the next 20 minutes hanging around your fountain looking for easy kills. Who's laughing now?
  • Daedalus gives a hefty raw damage bonus along with a chance to crit on your attacks, making it the second most powerful damage booster in the game for most heroes next to Divine Rapier (and if you already have a Rapier it becomes vastly more deadly). On the other hand, raw damage is all it gives; considering that a carry's item slots are often surprisingly tight (usually with one slot permanently occupied by Black King Bar and another by boots, along with whatever other core items they need), they often have only one or two slots for luxury items. Given the number of late-game item choices, Daedalus often finds itself passed up in favor of items with more versatile bonuses or active abilities that combine damage output and utility in a single inventory slot (of particular note is Silver Edge, which grants both Critical Strike and the ability to turn invisible and apply Break), unless they really just need attack damage that badly.
  • The Boots of Travel item gives you an unlimited supply of Town Portal Scrolls and reduces its cooldown, and can also teleport to creeps; once upgraded, you can even teleport to allied heroes. And that's all it really does. While it sounds great on paper, it's horribly overpriced for the effect (the recipe is worth the same as twenty Town Portal Scrolls and you need to buy a second if you want to target heroes), meaning that you're better off just getting regular TP Scrolls and spending your money on items that actually give stats or other effects. As such, Boots of Travel are only picked up in the late game, where gold is more plentiful, towers start falling, and the stats from the other boot types become less relevant, or by heroes that can actually take advantage of unlimited teleportations (like Arc Warden and Ember Spirit). That said, being able to TP to creeps instead of just the closest friendly structure can be really helpful (especially to get to a fight quickly to help out), and they also give you a much higher move speed than other boots^note 110 vs 45 for other boots, though Tranquil boots can get you to 70 if you're not being attacked; being able to simply outrun a pursuer who has no "catch up" ability can be valuable in itself.
  • The Tier 5 neutral items are some of the most powerful items in the game with several of them being fully capable of turning the game around depending on which items are available (such as Pirate Hat giving ludicrous GPM through free Bounty runes, Ex Machina refreshing all item cooldowns including Black King Bar with only a 25 second cooldown of its own, and Giant's Ring letting you bypass all terrain and trample enemies underfoot). However, since they're dropped really late in the game (at least 60 minutes where very few matches last past 55 minutes), it isn't feasible at all to build a strategy around them.
  • The Block of Cheese creates a shield that blocks 500 damage (either magical or physical), and regenerates 100 shield health per second after only 5 seconds of no hero damage. Sounds great, but in order to get it, you have to collect a total of 18 healing lotuses from the lotus pools at the sides of the map, to combine with the cheese from Roshan. A full pool has only 6, so even if no one touches them, it takes a while to get everything (and they are almost never left untouched, especially in the early game). By the time lotuses aren't worth it to most players, and you can actually start collecting them, you won't have much time to spend on the collecting. And even if you get them, the cheese is usually worth a lot more for itself, healing 2500 health and 1500 mana, than as a component for this item. And even if you do go through all that and create it, 500 hp at that late stage of the game isn't actually all that much; most carries will quickly burn through that amount anyways. The only heroes it works well on are those whose playstyle is already oriented towards rapidly moving in and out of combat (giving the shield a chance to regenerate), such as Weaver, Storm Spirit, Queen of Pain or Anti-Mage.
• Beginner's Luck: Beginner's Luck in Dota is much attributed to how new players think. Dendi, a living legend since the original Dota, mention this in his interview
  Dendi: I can better think about what they (competitive players) will do and predict where they are going. Pub players, on the other hand, always end up just doing some #Yolo move and I’m like: “Where are you going? What are you doing?”
• Big "NO!": Every single hero has a chance to let one out when killed or when their team loses. Except for Io, Primal Beast, and Phoenix.
• Big "YES!": By contrast, they shout one out upon victory. Again, except for Io, Primal Beast, and Phoenix.
• Bladder of Steel: If you are not ready to sit for at least 40 minutes non-stop on the computer, then don't press the Find Match button, because the game does not end until an Ancient goes down. Matches that last for under 20 minutes (even in Turbo mode) are almost non-existent, and the record length for a match is 4 hours. Need a bathroom break? Tough luck, in a pub game nobody will wait for you; even if your hero is dead you still need to pay attention to stuff like scans, fortification, controlling minions or buying back. And if you need to go AFK for an extended period (around 5 minutes or more), then be prepared to look at the defeat screen and receive four reports from angry teammates.
• Bond One-Liner: Every single hero (including The Voiceless ones such as Io and Phoenix through their screeches) gives out a snark, comment or even an Evil Laugh whenever they successfully kill an opposing hero.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Black King Bar gives awful stats for an item that costs 4050 gold (10 Strength and 24 attack damage can be purchased much more cheaply), and all its active ability does is turn you debuff immune and provide magic resistance for a few seconds. Sure, 1k+ damage crits, stat items, and effects like bash and attack modifiers are so appealing because they look flashy, scale well with carry abilities and make your hero so much better, but without the Boring King Bar the enemy team can and will make you useless by chain-disabling/kiting/silencing/disarming/whatever-ing you to oblivion. If you're a carry player, you need to get used to building BKB as a first or second item in 90% of your games. At least it has a cool visual effect.
  • Wards. Perhaps the least flashy items in the game, all they do is grant vision over an area and have to be replaced periodically. However, vision is extremely important for making good tactical decisions and knowing which fights to pick, and catching a glimpse of an incoming gank squad often spells the difference between life and death. There is a reason why entire guides have been written about how to place and remove wards, and in higher level games, you'll rarely see them in stock in the shop for more than a minute.
  • Tangos and Healing Salves aren't especially flashy or abnormal, but are a necessity for almost all lanes due to early harassment. In most cases, if you don't buy neither Tangos nor Salves, you can and will be bullied out of lane (unless if you are a bottle-rushing mid), granting an enormous advantage to your lane opponent.
  • Clarities are simple, cheap, and a must-have starting item for any spellcasting hero; when your effectiveness depends almost entirely on your mana pool, being able to top up without returning to base means you can be that much better at helping your team out. The Enchanted Mango gives less mana than a Clarity, but it gives a burst of mana rather than restoring it over time, allowing you to squeeze out one more spell on the fly, making it essential for heroes with powerful spells and low mana pools (like Sven and Wraith King) even well into the mid-game.
  • The humble Iron Branch is extremely cheap and gives very low stats, but it's also the most cost-efficient stat item in the game (compare an Ultimate Orb, which gives 15 times the bonuses for 560 times the cost). As a result, it's the best way to give heroes more stats in the early game for a low cost, and most heroes (except for bottle-rushing mids) will spend their leftover starting gold on Iron Branches until they run out of slots. Some new players often think that the Iron Branch is useless and their money should be saved for bigger items... without realising that the exceptional advantage granted by the cheap stats will help them win fights and snowball the game in their favour. It can also be consumed to plant a happy little tree, which can be consumed by Tango for double the healing, freeing up an inventory slot and keeping you in lane that much longer. Needless to say, nearly every player worth their salt begins the game with a handful of these.
  • Force Staff has a simple ability which only pushes a single unit. While it is one of the least flashy items in the game, the importance of good positioning in Dota grants Force Staff enormous utility from escaping, chasing, getting into position, saving a teammate, to even pushing a single enemy hero into the middle of your team and letting him get picked off, or into something like Techies' mine stack. Unless if (s)he needs an important core item first or has to transition into a semi-carry, it's never a bad idea for a support to build a Force Staff.
  • The Town Portal Scroll, a cheap consumable item that simply lets you teleport to an allied building after channeling for a few seconds. It's worth much more than its weight in gold by minimizing your downtime when heading back to base for healing, letting you respond more quickly to enemy dives or pushes, and getting out of a bad situation. As such, you'll almost never see a hero leaving home without one or two. It's such a key item, in fact, that it was eventually given its own dedicated inventory slot.
  • Boots of Speed simply increase the wearer's movement speed. Given how important mobility is in this game, they're a core item for every single hero (barring maybe Broodmother). In a similar vein is the Wind Lace, which gives roughly half the movement speed of Boots of Speed for about half the cost and are invaluable for supports, who spend much of their early game roaming the map and often can't afford early Boots. Wind Lace also builds into a number of useful support items, giving supports even more incentive to grab one early on.
  • An upgrade to Boots of Speed is Boots of Travel, which are initially the inverse of this trope due to their cost and limited benefits (unlimited TP's, when scrolls are cheaper and often just as good). One element of them, however, definitely counts - they give the fastest permanent movespeed in the game ^note other boots give 45 move speed, one is 70 if you're not being attacked, but the Travel boots give 110, 130 with a second upgrade. Simply being able to run really quickly can be incredibly useful, from arriving a few seconds earlier to a fight and making a bigger difference, to chasing down an enemy, or escaping from one. They also are a legitimate replacement for scrolls late in the game, when most towers are down, giving you much fewer targets for TP'ing to with a scroll^note if you don't have the enemy jungle spot captured, and all your regular towers are down, many attempts to TP out of your base will only end with you just outside your own gates. At this point, scrolls are only useful for returning to base, not getting back into the fight. The BoT allows you to target friendly creeps, giving you a much larger potential range of targets (the second upgrade to them allows you to target friendly heroes as well).
  • Glimmer Cape is a simple item whose ability briefly grants invisibility and a shield that blocks magical damage to a single target. It's nothing particularly special, but it is the cheapest escape item in the game, making it a staple for support heroes to get themselves or an ally out of a sticky situation. Even if you or your teammate is revealed by truesight, you/they still might survive a couple of nukes thrown their way.
  • Pavise is essentially the physical counterpart to Glimmer Cape, granting mana regen, health, armor, and an active ability to grant an ally a barrier that blocks physical damage. It's understandably a very common pickup for supports to keep them up and roaming longer with the extra mana, and for potentially saving a life or two from right-clickers, and when carries are trading blows, being able to sponge a hit or two on your own carry can make all the difference.
  • The Magic Wand. Its stat bonuses and ability aren't very spectacular, but it's also dirt cheap for an item that's surprisingly good at both saving lives and squeezing out an extra spell or two's worth of mana, since its charges are very easy to accumulate in ganks and skirmishes and can give you up to 300 burst healing/mana when topped up, which can be huge in the early-game and useful well into the mid-game.
  • Aeon Disk doesn't really provide any raw stats besides health & mana and its ability to break stuns & grant immunity to all damage for 2.5 seconds from both sides as well as shrugging off incoming debuffs doesn't exactly sound like an interesting passive to have but the ability to briefly protect yourself from being bursted down by the enemy can give you the opportunity to escape from being ganked or buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive and it can mean the difference between your death or the enemy's. Notably, due to the item not really providing much in terms of stats as well the larger cooldown timer every time it's used, players will often lock the recipe in their inventory and only unlocks it to combine them once they're actually being ganked in order to prevent the enemy from baiting the item and pointlessly increase the cooldown by harassing them down to the HP threshold.
  • Falcon Blade doesn't have any interesting abilities beyond the stats it gives nor does it build up into anything bigger but at the mere cost of 1025 Gold, the item gives HP, Mana Regen and attack damage all of which are useful for carries to reliably flash farm without much in the way of self-sustaining as well as potentially being able to survive long enough to either escape from ganks or for help to arrive.
  • Any ability that gives sight of a unit, such as Slardar's Corrosive Haze or Disruptor's Thunder Strike. Though the better ones give True Sight, even the ones that don't are incredibly useful, as among other things, it prevents juking (dodging through trees to break line-of-sight, so that other players have to constantly re-attack the target). Simply being able to see your enemy as they try to run away can be the difference between them just barely escaping and being finished off.
  • Range. Abilities, talents, and items that increase your attack or spellcasting range may not sound like much, but they can mean the difference between winning and losing a team fight, because positioning is incredibly important for supports and the ranged carries, and being just a little further away at the very least makes it take more time for the enemy to close the distance, and at best puts them on the other side of a cliff, where they can't be reached at all.
  • Bracer, Null Talisman, and Wraith Band are little more than cheap, early-game Stat Sticks that give minor Attribute bonuses and some other numbers on the side, but they're also very efficient stat boosts for their cost and can give a real boost in the laning phase. They also double their stat bonuses at the 25-minute mark, making them good to keep around and fill out spare inventory slots in the mid-game.
• Brains Evil, Brawn Good: The most evil and outright Jerkassish ones in general tend towards being Intelligence ones such as Lion, Invoker, Zeus, Shadow Demon, and Oracle while the majority of the truly "heroic" figures are strength heroes such as Sven, Omniknight, Abaddon, Magnus, and Elder Titan. Back when the game's heroes were still classified as either Radiant or Dire, the Radiant had more Strength Heroes, while the Dire had more Intelligence ones, further playing into this.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Any two of Sange, Yasha, and Kaya can be combined into a single item slot, forming Sange and Yasha, Yasha and Kaya, or Kaya and Sange.
• Breakable Power-Up: A Clarity, Healing Salve, the healing from the Bottle, Royal Jelly, Urn of Shadows or Spirit Vessel, or the Aegis expiration heal will instantly be cancelled, a Regeneration rune will be greatly weakened, and Tumbler's Toy, Blink Dagger, its upgrades and Fallen Sky will be muted for 3 seconds, if the recipient takes damage from an enemy hero or Roshan.
• Breakable Weapons: Downplayed. Every time they're activated, Black King Bar and Aeon Disk grow weaker (the former's duration is reduced by one second and the latter's cooldown is extended by 20 seconds), although this will only happen up to four times, capping at a 6-second duration and 165-second cooldown, respectively.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Averted by items buyable from the store for real money, as all of them are purely cosmetic (and sometimes inverted, for example, by Mirana's Crescent Bow which changes her Sacred Arrow from an unscrupulous grey to a bright blue that makes it easier to spot and dodge).
• Brick Joke: The original trailer ended on the shopkeeper asking "What does a hero truly need? That is for you to decide." In 7.00, "What a hero truly needs" was added as Flavor Text to the Town Portal Scroll.
• "Bringer of War" Music: Used with Mars' ultimate ability, Arena of Blood, which summons a ring of spears that serve as an arena for Mars and any entrapped enemies. Whenever the ability is active, a snippet of Holst's "Mars" would play to remind players to fight or die or die when he's on you. Even Mars hums to the song whenever move clicked or he kills an enemy while the ability is active.
• Bubble Shield: The Safety Bubble neutral item gives the holder a permanent damage barrier that replenishes after not taking damage for a few seconds.
• The Bus Came Back: The Poor Man's Shield, Iron Talon, and Ring of Aquila items were all removed from the game at different points. Patch 7.23 brought them back as items that can drop from neutral creeps.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Quite a few characters, mostly with Sniper and the archers; Sniper refers to arrows as "feather bullets" and Windranger refers to Sniper's bullets in turn as "tiny featherless arrows"
• Calling Your Attacks: Most Heroes (some of them more than others) often either say the name, effect of, or a slang term for their spells during/immediately after casting them, especially for spells that are used specifically against enemies, so long as they don't just outright taunt the other guy (or make an Incredibly Lame Pun at them) instead.
  • Earthshaker is a fairly notable one.
  "Fissure!"
  "Enchant!"
  "SLAMMIN'!" / "ECHO SLAM!" or "CHAOS DUNK!"
  • Tusk will say some variation on Walrus PUNCH! ("x Punch!") accompanied by large red text reading "Walrus Punch!" next to his target every time it's used on a hero. On a creep, he'll say something like "Disappointing punch!" or "Moderately painful punch!" accompanied by small blue text reading "Penguin Punch!" next to it.
  • Doom, upon casting his ultimate "Doom", will almost always say something along the lines of "YOU'RE DOOMED!"
  • Skywrath Mage often says the exact name of his abilities upon using them.
  • Surprisingly not used for the loveably hammy Storm Spirit, despite saying something literally every time he uses his no-cooldown ultimate. Same thing goes for his other low-cooldown abilities.
  • Rubick can do this, since he potentially has access to just about every single spell in the game, and it could possibly be taken up a notch depending both on the speed of any given person playing Rubick, and how extensively Valve has recorded/will record additional lines for his stolen spells in the future (as it is already fairly extensive).
  • Invoker, being a Vancian Mage, has flowery eponymous names for all ten of his invoked abilities - and referential ones for Chaos Meteor.
  "Gaster's Mandate of Impetuous Strife!" (Alacrity)
  "Culween's Most Cunning Fabrications!" (Forge Spirit)
  "Tarak's Descent of Fire!"/"Gallaron's Abyssal Carnesphere!" (Chaos Meteor)
• Candlelit Ritual: In the tie-in comic "The Summoning", Cedric summons the godlike entity Enigma into a Geometric Magic circle that incorporates several lit candles. The scene is illuminated by the candles, the glow of the magic, and Enigma's Phosphor-Essence.
• Captain Ersatz: Due to certain heroes from the original mod being named directly after Blizzard-trademarked characters or races, some heroes had to be renamed.
• Cast from Hit Points: Items such as Blood Grenade, Soul Ring and Armlet of Mordiggian have a health cost (denoted in red numbers) to activate instead of a mana cost. Blood Grenade costs health to throw, Soul Ring converts health to mana (which can go over their normal mana pool, but goes away after a short duration), while Armlet can be toggled to give extra damage, strength, and armor while constantly draining HP.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Every character has unique appearances, abilities, backstories, and extensive responses to certain events. All of them are fill in very different niches in gameplay and team composition, to the point where several heroes' schtick cannot be replicated by another.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Most heroes' abilities are colored in a single color, usually the same one as the background of their abilities.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Split-pushing, or "Rat Doto", involves forcing the enemy team to one location on the map, and then going to the opposite end to destroy their towers and barracks unchallenged. Many heroes (particularly Pushers) such as Nature's Prophet and Broodmother are notable for this. The best counter would simply be to Gank the Split-pushing hero, and repeat as necessary, taking advantage of them being separated from their team to gain gold.
  • The "4-Protect-1" strategy relies on your hard carry so much, other members of the team is likely just fight to draw out games for their carry to farm. Or throw their bodies to protect the carry in a teamfight. The result is a super-farmed carry and 4 poor but dedicated teammates, which doesn't matter too much since said carry can demolish the opponent's team by himself.
• Combo Breaker: Strong dispels, such as Abaddon's Aphotic Shield and Borrowed Time and Tidehunter's Kraken Shell, are capable of removing almost every debuff in the game, up to and including most stuns. This makes them invaluable for interrupting enemy chain stuns, giving the recipient a chance to fight back or escape. This is also word-for-word the name of the Aeon Disk's passive ability, which applies a strong dispel on the carrier and makes them immune to damage, at the cost of making them unable to deal damage; it is especially valuable on squishy supports that are prone to getting instagibbed at the beginning of a fight, or initiators who really need to get their important ultimate out without much concern for damage.
• Complete Immortality: Four characters (Keeper of the Light, Enigma, Chaos Knight, and Wisp) are "Fundamentals": beings from the beginning of reality that are ageless and impossible to truly kill. The Radiant and the Dire are also Fundamentals, ones that were cast out by the others for constantly feuding.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The AI does not play fair with mana. This means that the Sven you got down to single-digit mana not two seconds ago can suddenly turn around and throw a Storm Hammer at your face even if he doesn't have the means to get the mana needed. That being said, the AI is subtle about cheating, as it's generally not noticeable unless you're playing a hero with some form of Mana Drain and are checking the bots' mana pools, and even then only some of the time.
  • The aptly named "Unfair" bots gain XP and gold 25% faster than human players.
  • Zigzagged with the AI's handling of illusions. If the real hero is present along with an illusion(s) of itself, bots will immediately single out the real one even if they had no logical way of telling (for instance, if the hero just used Manta Style). On the other hand, if the real hero isn't present, Artificial Stupidity takes over as they wail on the illusion as if it were the real thing.
  • Bots have been known to "speed-hack" when being pursued by a player, making themselves just fast enough that the player can't catch up. However, they at least try to be sneaky about it, in that they generally won't try to pull this on the player if the movement speed difference is large enough to be noticeable.
  • If you play Pudge, Mirana or Invoker, try hitting your Meat Hook, Sacred Arrow or Sun Strike on a bot that is not stunned, rooted or slowed. Hint: it is harder to hit these skills on bots than on real players. Even if you shoot an arrow from fog that is visible only for the last second, they'll dodge it - they're that good. Even if you use Sun Strike from the fountain (where there's no way for them to register the spell), the bots still know to stop dead in their tracks right in front of the AoE till it pops and then continue on, or to skirt a perfect circle around the AoE as if trying to troll you.
• Computers Are Fast:
  • Whenever you try to blink into the enemy heroes and initiate on them, they will immediately counter your attempt with an insane reaction time that even the most skilled players will envy. For example, when you blink in with Axe to use Berserker's Call, Lion will instantly turn you into a frog and cue chain stuns after chain stuns from the other bots until you die pointlessly. Dragon Knight and the aforementioned Lion are particularly blatant offenders, as their disables have zero cast time; if they feel like stunning you, there's nothing you can do about it.
  • If you are both invisible and carrying an aura like Radiance or Assault Cuirass, good luck; the bots will ALWAYS pop dust immediately, with 0ms delay in usage. Most people can't notice AC that fast, if at all.
• Concentration-Bound Magic: A channelled ability (like Meteor Hammer or Town Portal Scroll) only works as long as the caster doesn't do anything else for the duration of the ability. If the caster performs another action or is interrupted, the mana (and item in case of Town Portal Scroll) will be wasted, the ability still goes on cooldown and ends prematurely, has a weaker effect or does nothing at all (if the effect is only applied after the channelling is finished).
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Potentially played straight. When a player abandons a game, the gold-per-second they earn is split between their teammates, and so is the gold their hero possesses. Certain heroes who rely on items to carry benefit massively from this (for example Faceless Void, Phantom Assassin and Phantom Lancer), especially if three or four teammates abandon, and can within a few minutes acquire powerful late-game items, allowing them to effectively take on entire teams solo, where otherwise they could only do so after an hour of farming.
• Conlang: Ozkavosh, a rudimentary language used by demons, which is spoken in-game by Doom, Shadow Demon, Shadow Fiend, and Terrorblade. Legion Commander will also speak the language while wielding the Blades of Voth Domosh Arcana item (which itself was made by a demon and is heavily implied to be possessing/corrupting Legion Commander when she wields it).
• Continuity Reboot: The original DotA never had much of a story past minor hero and items descriptions, and for the most of it used lore already established in Warcraft as a base. With the remake being developed by Valve, they couldn't obviously use anything relating to Blizzard products. This gave them the chance to completely clean the slate and create their own fantasy world, giving all the heroes completely new backstories, though still using the original DotA heroes as a base.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Some abilities are stronger when used on creeps than when used on heroes (Frostbite lasts 10 seconds on creeps opposed to 3 seconds maximum on heroes; Enchant takes control of creeps and illusions but only slows heroes,...) and some others outright don't work on heroes at all (for example Devour, Holy Persuasion or Hand of Midas). The strongest neutral creeps are flagged as "Ancients", making them immune to all abilities that don't work on heroes (with a few exceptions), as well as numerous others. Certain powerful summoned units, like Lone Druid's Spirit Bear and Warlock's Golem, are likewise flagged as "creep-heroes", which causes certain abilities to treat them as heroes and giving unique interactions with other abilities.
  • Certain powerful illusions (such as the ones spawned by Vengeful Spirit and Chaos Knight's abilities) are flagged as "Strong Illusions", which makes them unable to be instantly killed by abilities (such as Life Drain and Hex) that otherwise destroy illusions on cast.
• Cooldown Manipulation: Comes in two main flavours:
  • Refresher Orb completely refreshes the cooldowns of all your spells and items (except that of other Refresher Orbs), but is a very expensive item, costs a lot of mana and has a long cooldown itself. Refresher Shard, an item dropped by Roshan from his third death onwards, works similarly but can only be used once and can't stack with other Refresher Shards in the same inventory slot. Ex Machina, a tier 5 neutral item, has a shorter cooldown but only works on item active abilities except Refresher Orb and neutral items. Tinker's Rearm can refresh its own cooldown (which is very short at the first place), but requires channelling (unlike the aforementioned items, which work instantly) and cannot reset the cooldowns of a few select items, while Phoenix's Supernova, if pulled off successfully, will reset the cooldown of all of Phoenix's non-ultimate abilities.
  • Quickening Charm, Spell Prism and Octarine Core reduce the cooldown of all your spells and items by 13%, 18% and 25% (respectively), the Ancient Frostbitten Golem's Time Warp Aura reduces friendly units' cooldowns by 10%, and the Arcane rune gives you 30% cooldown reduction on top of that. All of these bonuses stack additively with each other (except Octarine Core, which stacks multiplicatively with everything else), and only apply to spells that are cast while they are active.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: Enforced. Since a player has absolutely no choice in whether they will be part of the Radiant or Dire in a match, the two sides' non-hero units and towers must be functionally identical, and their respective halves of the map must be mirrored, so as to ensure that no side has an unfair advantage against the other.
• Counter-Attack:
  • When you're attacked by a hero within 300 range while Blast Rig is off cooldown, it will explode, dealing damage to all enemies within a 300 radius.
  • When a hero equipped with Defiant Shell is struck by an enemy attack, they will immediately attack an enemy within range.
• Crapsaccharine World: Takes place in a bright and colorful world... which is currently engulfed in a seemingly endless war between the titular Ancients. On top of that, nearly every single hero is either straight up evil or has some tragic event in their backstory. Even the out-of-game lore is very much darker than the game's appearance would suggest.
• Critical Existence Failure: Heroes fight as they still do when they are at full health, and Huskar actually gets stronger when he loses health. The only things that gets affected are the limping or weakened animations of certain heroes that play when they reach low hit points.
• Critical Hit: A critical strike deals damage equal to the hero's attack damage multiplied by the given multiplier of the source of the critical strike. Critical strikes can have a chance of triggering on every attack (like Crystalys and Daedalus) or be guaranteed to proc when conditions are met (usually when certain active abilities are activated).
• Crossover:
  • Among the announcers you can pick are Dr. Kleiner, Rucks, General Fletcher, GLaDOS, the Narrator, Rick and Morty, Mr. Handy, Adam Jensen, and the Ancestor.
  • Released as part of a promotion with Total War: Warhammer, the Warhammer: Treasure of the Old World contains cosmetic sets inspired by the Warhammer universe.
• Crutch Character: Certain support heroes like Earth Spirit and Chen. They are especially powerful early game when enemy heroes haven't yet acquired many items, but their lack of scaling means that they'll fall off rapidly late game when the enemy can catch up.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The game does at least try to match you with players of roughly equal skill,^note e.g., the matchmaker algorithm will aim to give each team one really good player, three competents, and one barely mediocre, depending on who's in the queue but you often end up in games where one of the teams gets absolutely slaughtered. There are a lot of factors that make creating even teams difficult-to-impossible to do consistently, especially in the lower or unranked brackets:
  • Some players may be deadly with some heroes (carries), but not so good with others (supports), and are unable to help the team as well, especially if their favorite gets banned or picked by the enemy team.
  • Even if both teams have a player who is still learning, if one of them ends up being protected by their teammates or paired against an aggressive, experienced killer, the balance can quickly get thrown off.
  • No amount of balancing will ever fully take away the fact that some heroes are just plain going to match poorly against some opponents, or synergize very well with some teammates. A balanced team that works well together has an advantage over one that isn't balanced—in high-level games, outdrafting the enemy team can all but guarantee victory before the game even properly begins.
  • "Smurf" accounts (no, not that one). A smurf in Dota is a really good player who plays on an account whose MMR is far lower than their true skill, allowing them to go up against poorly-experienced players. While there are a few decent reasons for this (all professional players have smurf accounts in order to test new strategies and practice, without being scrutinized by fans or spied on by future opponents), a lot of them are there because they don't want an even playing field, and are just there to stomp on newbies who aren't really able to fight back yet.
• Cycle of Hurting: Comboing disables for extended periods of time is so common that there are three whole items with the purpose of avoiding this: Black King Bar, Linken's Sphere, and Aeon Disk. If playing a carry, get used to buying one of the former two every game to avoid getting chain-stunned into oblivion before you can actually do anything.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff:
  • Blight Stone, Orb of Corrosion, Desolator, Orb of Destruction and Stygian Desolator cause the wielder's attacks to reduce the target's armor, causing them to take more physical damage; and Assault Cuirass carries an aura that reduces the armor of all enemies nearby. Certain heroes, like Slardar and Tidehunter, also have abilities to reduce enemy armor.
  • On the magical side of things, Veil of Discord reduces enemies' magic resistance when used; Grove Bow and Parasma reduce the magic resistance of attacked enemies; Ceremonial Robe reduces nearby enemies' magic resistance; Ghost Scepter and Ethereal Blade turn the target ethereal, immune to physical damage but much weaker to magic damage.
  • Nemesis Curse temporarily amplifies all damage taken by an enemy attacked by the user, at the cost of causing the user to take extra damage from all sources as well.
  • Orchid Malevolence and Bloodthorn have a unique take on the usual damage amplification effects. Instead of simply increasing damage dealt by a percentage, their debuff records the amount of damage dealt to its victim, and then further damages them for a percentage of that at the end of its duration.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Developer's Foresight has that covered. If you come from Defense of the Ancients, you can enable an option to use the old Warcraft III hotkeys; if you come from League of Legends, you can enable Instacast (LOL's Smartcast), bind your TP Scroll item slot to D and your Blink Dagger item slot to F (both common hotkey bindings for LOL's Teleport and Flash), and place the minimap on the right side.
  • The 6.85 patch introduced one: prior to this patch, Healing Salve, Enchanted Mango, and Clarity were used by clicking the item (or pressing the hotkey) and then clicking on the hero you wanted to use it on, or double-tapping the hotkey to use it on yourself. After the patch, hitting the hotkey automatically uses the item on yourself, while using it on an ally requires you to hold down the Ctrl key before hitting the hotkey. Cue players accidentally using Salves on themselves at full health instead of the almost-dead hero standing next to them. That particular change was reverted about two weeks after the patch's release, probably because of this.
  • It's easy to end up doing this in the middle of a fight or gank, if you have abilites that are disruptive to the rest of your team, but normal for you. Though others can do this, a good example is one of the all-time kings of this kind of accident, Pugna, who normally hits an enemy with Decrepify, and then follows up with Life Drain, now amplified. However, Decrepify will completely throw off anyone who depends on physical attacks, potentially allowing the target to escape, all because the player is so used to hitting that sequence of keys.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Some creepy-looking heroes, such as Abaddon and Clinkz, are almost purely heroic, and others such as Sand King or Spectre are closer to neutral than evil.
• Day-Old Legend: Applies to most of the items that can be crafted, especially those that cost at least 1,000 gold to obtain. Apparently, the Shadow Blade was used by a former king, and the Silver Edge that the Shadow Blade can be crafted into was used to assassinate a corrupt king, only for the kingdom to descend into civil war. This makes even less sense if multiple heroes in a game get a Shadow Blade or Silver Edge of their own.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Many heroes have area-of-effect spells that don't do very much damage to single targets at all, or have auras that don't do a lot by themselves. The difference comes when you stack those spells and auras with those of the other four players on your team, which can quickly grind down even the hardest carries in the game under the right situation. That makes tactics very important to players.
• Death or Glory Attack: The right time to build Divine Rapier is when your team is behind, outcarried and with hope fading that you can make a comeback. Buying a Rapier is basically a massive gamble that throws all the cards up into the air to land where they will. If you can win that one vital fight where they're not expecting you to wield 330 extra damage, it might just be enough to turn things around. A heroic victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Either that or they beat you up, put your head down to toilet for a few flushes, steal it, and then stomp you... but hey, that was going to happen anyway, right?
• Death Ray: The Dagon's active ability Energy Burst, which fires a beam that deals instant magical damage to the target.
• Defog of War: An Observer Ward provides vision in a large area around itself.
• Dem Bones: Clinkz the Bone Fletcher is the most notable example of a skeletal character, though Wraith King used to be one back in the day (and can become one again with the One True King Arcana item).
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Valve had every voice actor do a line for purchasing an Aghanim's Scepter, even heroes without an upgrade. Loads of heroes have had ultimate upgrades added since the lines were recorded, and since 7.20, the only heroes that don't have an upgrade are those that just got added to the game.
  • The shop's search function has a surprising amount of foresight put into it, allowing you to search items using commonly used abbreviations in addition to the item name. For instance, "bf" brings up Battle Fury and Butterfly, "hot" gets Heart of Tarrasque and Helm of the Dominator ("hotd"), "sy" and "sny" both return Sange and Yasha, and "ags" can be used to search up Aghanim's Scepter. It even takes into account certain nicknames, such as "GG branch" for Iron Branch, "sheepstick" for Scythe of Vyse, and spelling Mekansm as "mechanism".
  • Every craftable item in the game has a recipe item attached to it in the game files, even if it doesn't require a recipe to make, so that they can be easily added to the item's crafting formula in future patches if necessary.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Radiance has the single most grueling build-up of any item in the game even though it's nowhere near the most expensive, forcing you to save for a 3400-gold Sacred Relic as quickly as possible to make it worth its cost, forcing you to hoard for the entire early game and basically avoid fights and ganks as much as possible. However, if you manage to save up quickly, you get an extremely powerful Money Multiplier that lets you push like there's no tomorrow while also letting you seriously mess up enemy teams in early teamfights.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Manta Style's activated ability and the Illusion rune create two illusions of the holder that deal a fraction of their base damage. They can also be used as a Doppelgänger Spin as they remove the user from play for a split second, long enough to disjoint incoming projectiles, dispel debuffs, and obfuscate the user's position.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • Activating Craggy Coat provides bonus armor in exchange for slowing down the user's movement.
  • Activating Mask of Madness greatly improves the user's attack speed and increases movement speed, but reduces the user's armor and silences them.
  • Aeon Disk's trigger effect makes the holder immune to damage and grants high status resistance, but also makes them unable to deal damage.
  • Unlike every other source of hexes in the game, Pig Pole can only affect the user (instead of enemies), and also increases movement speed in exchange for being unable to do anything else.
• Dump Stat: Of the three attributes, Agility is generally the least valuable. While Strength gives health to survive more damage and Intelligence grants mana to cast more spells (and both increase the respective health/mana regeneration rate), Agility only gives armor and attack speed in such meager amounts that it's usually more efficient to just invest in items that directly grant those stats (unless you're playing an Agility hero, of course).
• Dynamic Entry: Heroes with short-ranged abilities or position-dependent abilities and low mobility often build a Blink Dagger and/or Force Staff to get into position easier.
• Dysfunction Junction: Over 100 heroes are included in the roster, and the vast majority of them have various issues and interesting backstories. The ones that don't tend to be supernatural beings or Eldritch Abominations.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: As the Trope Codifier of the ARTS genre, it has retained many features which others of its kind do not have, most of them Ascended Glitches or quirks of the old Warcraft III engine, like denying, free heroes, creep pulling, stacking, complicated interactions between spell immunity and certain abilities,...
• Earn Your Fun: Getting into Dota 2 in a nutshell, perhaps of the Trial-and-Error Gameplay variety. The developers have tried to alleviate some of this by introducing a tutorial mode, but it's a long and steep learning curve no matter how the game is played.
  • Dota 2 is extremely complex, and calling the game 'unwelcome' would be an understatement. Simply learning the names or the existence of all heroes and items is important, perhaps even required, and can take a long time. Then there's learning how/when to use any of those things, how they all mesh together, and then actually putting it into practice and getting good at any of it (even one hero can take a while), all the while probably going through a lot of face-crushingly horrible games, to say nothing of learning what the current metagame is at any given point in time and dealing with G.I.F.T. Put all of that together, and you've got yourself a game with one gigantic skill curve on your hands. However, once you can start directly contributing to your team winning games, you can finally find out why Dota 2 is widely regarded as one of the most fun & rewarding games on the planet.
  • And some says that the true reward of playing Dota is to be able to "watch the game". Dota 2's professional matches are highly entertaining, with high-skilled plays, absurd teamfights, funny moments, and many little things that can only be appreciated by understanding the game itself.
• Easter Egg: The 7.33 patch notes made special note of how Healing Lotuses can be combined into Great Healing Lotuses which then combine into Greater Healing Lotuses, teasing that something might be made if you combine those. While having any number of Greater Healing Lotuses on their own won't do anything special, combining three of them with Cheese creates a Block of Cheese, a secret item whose activated ability simply says "Try me!" Eating it grants the hero a permanent barrier that absorbs 500 damage and replenishes itself when not in combat against enemy players.
• Emergency Energy Tank: Eating Cheese instantly restores 2500 health and 1500 mana, which constitutes a significant percentage of the average core hero's health and mana even in the late game. For this reason, it is often compared to a second Aegis of the Immortal, and is especially prized by heroes dependent on a Super Mode that does not persist beyond death like Dragon Knight. It is also only dropped by Roshan from his second death onwards, and only when he's killed on the Radiant side, making it far rarer than any other healing item in the game (most games end before five Roshan kills).
• Emote Animation: Not exactly an "animation" per se, but typing "lol" or "lmao" or some variant thereof in chat will actually prompt your hero to laugh. Similarly, typing "ty", "thanks", or using the "> Thanks!" chat wheel command prompts a "thank you" line from your hero.
• Energy Absorption: Eternal Shroud absorbs a portion of magical damage taken by the holder and converts it to mana. It's extremely useful for heroes like Bristleback or Axe, who have small mana pools, need to cast a lot, and whose playstyle puts them front-and-center, taking the brunt of the enemy's nukes.
• Equipment Upgrade: The Dagon recipe can be purchased up to 5 times in order to increase the item's power.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Most heroes are never called by their name in-game, not even in any voice lines either because it is obscure, the names have changed for copyright reasons or have the misfortunate timing of being unused in their responses. It is easier to list the heroes that downplay this (the hero is known by their title but occasionally their names are mentioned in one of the in-game voice lines)^note Arc Warden, Centaur Warrunner, Earth Spirit, Ember Spirit, Invoker, Keeper of the Light, Legion Commander, Lone Druid, Naga Siren, Outworld Devourer, Sand King, Shadow Fiend, Skywrath Mage, Techies, Templar Assassin, Timbersaw, Troll Warlord, Tusk, Ursa, Winter Wyvern or avert this trope (the hero is called directly by their name most of the time)^note Sven, Tiny, Kunkka, Huskar, Io, Elder Titan, Mirana, Riki, Luna, Puck, Zeus, Lina, Jakiro, Chen, Rubick, Pudge, Slardar, Undying, Magnus, Abaddon, Razor, Viper, Clinkz, Meepo, Slark, Medusa, Terrorblade, Lion, Pugna, Dazzle, Leshrac, Visage, Disruptor, Grimstroke, Mars, Snapfire, Marci, Muerta.
• Evil Laugh: Very prominent. Almost every hero has a response of this sort to killing an enemy hero. Oddly, in this game it doesn't produce any Narm feelings, because whoever just scored a kill will usually feel like a badass, so if you get the laugh response it just makes the experience better.
• Evil Versus Evil: Both Ancients are Evil.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • Bracer, Null Talisman and Wraith Band double their stat bonuses at the 25 minute mark. Since they're early-game items that are not used in any recipes, this allows them to remain useful for a little while longer before you can fill up your inventory with bigger items.
  • Desolator gains 2 damage every time an enemy hero dies while affected by its armor corruption, to a maximum of 20.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Many of the abilities with less imaginative names end up being this. For instance, Silencer's ultimate, Global Silence, simply silences every enemy on the map (and the game sound), and Nature's Prophet's Teleportation ability... lets him teleport.
• Excuse Plot: Literally invoked in some of the supplemental material. The Heroes are mostly seeking their own personal power rather than being strongly for the Radiant or Dire, with the exception of Arc Warden who is actively trying to end the war. There is a surprising amount of lore to the universe and heroes, but none of it comes up in gameplay.
• Experience Booster: Creeps transmuted by Hand of Midas grant increased experience in addition to gold.
• Fake Difficulty: The aptly-named Unfair bots: if on the enemy team, they have a bonus to XP and money gain compared to the human players; if on your team, they play like idiots and will throw themselves at the enemy to die.
• Fantastic Flora: Observer Wards and Sentry Wards are half-sentient magical plants that are covered in eyes, allowing the former to see the surrounding area and the latter to detect invisible enemies in their range (you still need something to provide vision in that area, which is why it's extremely common to place one of each).
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: With the three main attributes being Strength, Agility, and Intelligence, there are some heroes who form a trio with a strong, tanky one, an agile one, and a magic-focused one.
  • The three demons: Doom is a tanky Strength hero (fighter), Shadow Fiend is a ranged Agility carry (thief), and Shadow Demon is a versatile Intelligence support who relies on his abilities (mage).
  • The three spirits (before Void Spirit was added, much later): Storm Spirit can zip around the map at high speeds to deal hit-and-run attacks or ambushes (thief), Ember Spirit is a melee combatant who can increases his defense with Flame Guard (fighter), and Earth Spirit relies on his abilities to disable his enemies and control their positioning (mage). Interestingly, their attributes don't match the roles you'd expect, with Storm being an Intelligence hero, Ember being Agility, and Earth being Strength.
  • The three Slithereen heroes: Slardar is a melee bruiser focused on tanking and stunning enemies (fighter), Naga Siren uses powerful abilities to control the tide of battle (mage), and Slark is a sneaky assassin that focuses on hit-and-run tactics and steals the enemy's stats (thief); however, attribute-wise, Naga Siren and Slark are both Agility heroes.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The three elements which Invoker uses to create spells.
• Fishing Minigame: Added for the Crownfall update. During the event players could play this minigame on the main menu to earn tokens for their event questline progression.
• Flaming Meteor:
  • Invoker's Chaos Meteor deal damage-over-time when a foe touches the meteor. The distance of the meteor and the damage is based on his current power of Wex and Exort, respectively. It takes time for the meteor to land and move, so synergy with his other skills is necessary for maximum damage.
  • The Meteor Hammer summons a meteor burning with blue flames after a few seconds which can stun and deal damage-over-time to units and buildings.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Between Kunkka the Admiral and Tidehunter of all people.
  Kunkka: "Ah, Tidehunter, you cared enough to hate me. You can't buy that sort of love!"
  "Ah, Tidehunter, you were my better half."
  "I never tire of hearing my name on your lips."
  "There went my soul mate."
  • All but one of Tidehunter's "Killing a specific enemy" responses (and then some) are about Kunkka, and Tide will say any of them quite often even if Kunkka is not in the same game.
• Forced Transformation: Heroes affected by Hex are turned into an animal (most commonly a pig) that cannot do anything but moving at minimum movement speed. You can also turn yourself into a pig with Pig Pole, although in this case you'll actually gain 10% movement speed to compensate for not being able to do anything else.
• Friendly Fireproof: The standard in the game is that AoE abilities which are exclusively beneficial only affect friendly units, and AoE abilities which are exclusively harmful only affect enemy units (AoE abilities that are neither might affect either only enemy units like Winter Wyvern's Winter's Curse or both allies and enemies like Brewmaster Storm's Dispel Magic). Faceless Void's ultimate Chronosphere is notable for averting this trope, stunning both friendly and enemy units caught in it (except Void himself and units under his control) - a necessity to avoid the spell being much too overwhelming, though spells and ranged attacks from outside the sphere still work.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Heroes can range wildly from mere Badass Normals with little supernatural abilities (Axe and Bristleback) to ancient and powerful sorcerers (Invoker, Lich, Rubick,...) and massive towering colossi (Magnus, Treant Protector, Tiny...) to even Physical Gods (Elder Titan, Ancient Apparition, the four Fundamentals,...). However, in-game their power levels are all roughly the same.
  • Crystal Maiden can freeze the already frozen Lich, in order to do damage to him with Frostbite. Winter Wyvern can then save Lich... by also freezing him over to heal him, at which point Ancient Apparition can... you guess it, freeze Lich, to stop him from healing. As shown here. Kind of justified as these are magical effects, not strictly "cold".
  • No flying allowed: Wings Do Nothing (compared to normal legs) except if there's an active ability that explicitly allows a hero to fly. That is why winged heroes like Viper and Jakiro can get stuck on cliffs despite flying constantly.
• Gathering Steam: The fountain's attacks inflict a stacking debuff that constantly increases the damage it deals to the target, in order to discourage the practice of fountain farming.
• Gender Flip: Tresdin the Legion Commander. In DotA he was a male, horse-riding, mustached, racist to non-humans, commander of a legion. In Dota 2 he has become a woman with somewhat darker skin who fights on foot. The racism is toned down, but she is still somewhat aggressive towards non-humans, especially demons after Stonehall. Auroth the Winter Wyvern also has a gender flip as she shares the same voice actor as Tresdin.
• Genre Shift: The various holiday events all deviate from the standard 5v5 Ancient-destroying gameplay.
  • The 2012, 2013 and 2020 Diretide events are Capture the Flag competitions that (in case of 2012 and 2013) segues into a 10-on-1 fight against a buffed Roshan.
  • The 2012 Greeviling event was a race between both teams to kill as many Greevils as possible in a set time limit.
  • The 2013 Wraith Night and 2017 Dark Moon events were 5-man Tower Defense games where five heroes defeat waves of monsters and heroes for 13/15 rounds.
  • The 2014 New Bloom event pit the team against the Year Beast. Slay it and you can get loots for cosmetic item crafting. The most damaging players got a VERY rare Jadehoof courier.
  • Siltbreaker, Aghanim's Labyrinth and Aghanim's Continuum Conundrum are PvE role-playing games where teams of four players engage in a mission to complete objectives.
• Geo Effects: High ground has two advantages in this game: units cannot see higher ground (except with flying vision), and any ranged attacks from low ground targeting a unit on high ground has a chance to miss.
• Godzilla Threshold: Most of the circumstances in which Divine Rapier is actually seen as a good item to buy are when your team is so far behind that defeat is almost inevitable, but the absurd damage a Rapier gives might let you win a last stand, especially on heroes like Gyrocopter or Ember Spirit.
• Golden Super Mode: Black King Bar's active ability gives the user a glowing golden Battle Aura while active. All it actually does is make the user immune to debuffs, but that's enough to turn a carry into a nigh-unstoppable One-Man Army.
• Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Some cosmetic items (mostly Immortal-quality items from the Battle Passes) have a rare variant that give them a shiny golden coat.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Neither side is really good, both factions fighting for their own interests.
• Guide Dang It!: In older versions of the game, you pretty much had to remember what spells do what kind of damage, whether certain dispels work on certain effects, and which abilities ignore Spell Immunity, because the spell descriptions don't always tell you. Thankfully, the game now tells you all of this and straightened out some of the more oblique interactions, though knowing the information by heart definitely still helps.
• Healing Herb: The two Lotus Pools located near the top left and bottom right corners of the map periodically produce Healing Lotuses, which can be harvested by heroes and consumed to restore both HP and mana.
• Healing Potion: Drinking a Healing Salve provides a hero with rapid HP regeneration for 10 seconds.
• Healing Spring: The fountains, located beyond each Ancient, automatically and rapidly replenish the HP and mana of nearby heroes.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: Meta-wise, some heroes are very good at countering other heroes like them, or in special cases, themselves.
  • Lifestealer is a tanky, high health hero whose Percent Damage Attack passive added to all his attacks makes him deadly to other tanky high-health heroes.
  • Tidehunter is a durable area-disabling teamfight initiator whose ability to shrug off crowd control lets him shut down other durable area-disabling teamfight initiators.
  • Bounty Hunter is a invisbility-based hero who can reveal and quickly kill other heroes that rely on invisibility.
  • Terrorblade is a high base damage physical Glass Cannon who can summon an Enemy Without, which works best on other high base damage physical Glass Cannon heroes.
  • Naga Siren is an illusion-based hero whose AOE-hitting "Rip Tide" ability makes her good at taking out other illusion-based heroes like Phantom Lancer.
  • Pugna is a squishy, mana-intensive Glass Cannon with a Counter Spell ward that causes other squishy, mana-intensive Glass Cannon heroes to kill themselves.
  • Silencer is a spellcaster hero with abilities that shut down enemy spellcasters.
  • Storm Spirit is a hero with a great escape and lots of burst damage who excels at hunting down and killing heroes with great escapes and burst.
• Hurricane of Puns: Some heroes like Tiny, Lich and Razor have voicesets full of them.
  • There are too many Incredibly Lame ones to count (although, impressively, it almost never diminishes the overall experience):
  Lich (casting Ice Armor): What's a little frost among friends?
  Faceless Void: In the land of time, the no-eyed man is king.
  Chaos Knight: Armageddon out of here.^note Double-pun: Armageddon is also the name of his horse
  Outworld Devourer: Good news travels slowly. Bad news has wings.
  • The blog update for Bristleback says:
  Better watch your back, because Bristleback is back! (kill me).
• Homing Boulders: It's possible for autoattacks and spells to change direction in midair and fly across the map if the targeted hero teleports away or moves away very quickly. This is especially ridiculous with some characters, like Sniper, whose bullets can spin right around in midair to chase their target, or Tiny, whose Toss throws a nearby unit to a target enemy, even if the Toss trajectory makes no sense and bends around in the air. It also gets absolutely ridiculous with skills such as Huskar's Life Break^note he leaps at an enemy for massive damage, where Huskar actually changes direction mid-air if his target blinks away, even if the target blinks behind Huskar. Exaggerated with Io, whose ultimate is a global teleport. However, it doesn't disjoint projectiles, so if a ranged hero throws an autoattack that doesn't connect before Io teleports, the attack could potentially fly all the way across the map, giving the Io player a nasty surprise. Also taken up a notch with Hurricane Pike, which gives a hero four shots against one target with no maximum attack range. Cue heroes dying to cross-map Impetus shots from Enchantress.
• Immunity Disability: It's usually a good thing to pop BKB in the middle of battle to prevent the enemy from stunning you - but this also prevents your allies from casting certain healing spells on you. This can also come into play with Song of the Siren; it does not disable (and give invulnerability to) debuff immune enemies, which can result in a lone enemy having to fight Naga Siren's team 1v5 while his teammates are sleeping.
• Impressive Pyrotechnics: The Ancients' explosions.
• Injured Self-Drag:
  • Certain multi-legged characters like Nyx Assassin, Broodmother or Weaver, when on low-health, have walking animations where they drag themselves with their back pair of legs limp. As the game operates on a Critical Existence Failure system, that disability is just a visual effect that doesn't impair their movespeed or combat effectiveness at all.
  • About half of the zombies spawned through Undying's Tombstone have only their upper half left, so this is their only method of locomotion left.
• Instant 180-Degree Turn: Averted. "Turn time", or the half-second pause that a hero takes to turn to another direction of running, is an important gameplay mechanic to get used to and one of the balancing factors for melee vs. ranged heroes to ensure that the latter can't just kite the former with complete impunity. One of Batrider's skills actually increases the turn time of whoever he uses it on. Good luck kiting at all.
• "Instant Death" Radius:
  • Towers deal tremendous damage to heroes early in the game, making them a safe haven for heroes on their side during the laning phase; as a result, tower-diving is never a good idea unless you have a good plan. However, their damage is static while heroes scale over the course of a game, and their lack of health regeneration means they will get worn down over time; as the game goes late, you'll be more focused on protecting your towers from enemies.
  • The fountains on each side are capable of attacking, and can kill even well-farmed enemy heroes in seconds, in order to discourage spawn-camping. Of course, certain heroes can withstand fountain fire if well-farmed enough, and if you're being fountain-camped by one of these heroes, you've probably lost anyway.
  • Some ultimate abilities, such as Crystal Maiden or Luna, cause massive damage to anyone within range of them. Other heroes, most notoriously Ursa, don't even need an ultimate to deal lethal damage to anyone in their range.
• Instant-Win Condition: Aside from an Ancient exploding, when a team agrees to surrender, typing "gg" or using the 'Good game' chat wheel command in a private lobby or a full team matchmaking after 30 minutes will automatically end the game within 10 seconds if no players change their mind and cancel before it happens.
• Ironic Hell: Getting into Low Priority used to be a slap on the wrist; you're matched with people like you and you just need to play a number of games to get out of it. Now, not only are you forced to play Single Draft mode (which severely limits your hero options), you have to win in order for the game to count. To call it Teeth-Clenched Teamwork would be an understatement, but it's a truly ingenous punishment that fits the crime.
• I Shall Taunt You: Certain characters have specific, mocking lines when killing other heroes. Some even have dedicated taunt animations that can be executed on command if you own the item in your backpack (not to be confused with the status effect named Taunt, which forces targets to attack the caster).
• Item Amplifier: The cooldown of item active abilities can be reduced by many sources of cooldown reduction (the Arcane rune, Quickening Charm, Spell Prism, Octarine Core and the Ancient Frostbitten Golem's Time Warp Aura) or reset by Rearm^note except a few select items, Refresher Orb, Refresher Shard and Ex Machina (in particular, while Refresher Orb and Shard have very long cooldowns by themselves, Ex Machina effectively allows your carry to pop Black King Bar once every 25 seconds).
• Item Caddy: Carries are this in general, especially hard carries. Except for a few fairly item-independent ones (like Wraith King), an average carry needs at least a moderate to huge amount of farm to be able to fight effectively, contrasting with the supports who need very little money. On the flip side, however, carries scale much better with items than supports: for example, Crystal Maiden might only need a pair of Tranquil Boots while Medusa needs a minimum of 2 big items to be effective; on the other hand, a 6-slotted Crystal Maiden, although strong, is still very team-dependent, while a 6-slotted Medusa is absolutely impossible to fight against.
• Just Trying to Help: Some heroes that affect allied units with their abilities (most notably Pudge, Faceless Void and Naga Siren) can cause this if not used right.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Fountain Camping in a nutshell; essentially when the opponent is winning heavily against a losing team that has no chance of coming back, instead of destroying the Barracks and Ancients to finish them off (and subsequently put them out of their misery) the winning sides chooses to humiliate them by killing them right after they respawn in their fountain, shrugging off the damage from the Fountains built to prevent this and artificially lengthen the game up to an hour without end. Valve decided to discourage such practices by causing respawning heroes to be invulnerable and untargetable until they're given an order, allowing fountain-camped players to simply go AFK and wait for the game to end without being repeatedly killed (though of course there's nothing that prevents them from still vainly trying to win and repeatedly feeding in the process).
• Kill Steal: There isn't a lot of difference between a late arrival to a pigpile throwing out a quick hit to get an assist credit and accidentally end up getting the kill, and someone doing it deliberately. Some abilities, like Dagon, Finger of Death or especially Thundergod's Wrath, are notorious for being used to killsteal.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Averted and played straight, depending on the circumstances of the game. If one of the players has left, whether through lagging out, extended AFK, or deliberately leaving the game, anyone else from either side can then leave the game with no penalty (the game text announces when this has happened). If no player has left, however, there is no vote system, surrender option, or anything else you can do to end a match early, aside from sitting in your base to let the other team fight through and kill your Ancient that much quicker. You just have to keep playing, letting the 43-7 team keep killing you at will. General etiquette in ranked matches for a team that knows they've lost is to ask the enemy team to end the game and then have everyone go AFK in the fountain to let the enemy team push down the middle lane without resistance.
  • Strategically, a team needs to know when to let a tower, or even the barracks for a lane, get taken out. Many a game that could have been won has been lost when players try to defend a lane or rax against the entire opposing team by themselves, or with only one partner, while the rest of their teammates are waiting to rez. The defenders end up getting taken out, and then when the rest of the team is up, they have to fight with less than a full roster, and the attackers can take them out as well, turning it from "lose a rax" to "lose the ancient".
• Laser-Guided Karma: Stories abound where one team dominated the whole game, who then proceeded to Trash Talk and utterly humiliate the losing side, only to make one critical mistake which allowed the other team to turn the table and win the game.
• Leeroy Jenkins:
  • A lot less than you'd think, given the game's unforgiving nature. Anyone who really plays like this tends to die early and often, and then either give up on the game or stop it and hang back to learn better.
  • A few characters genuinely have this as part of their playstyle (though used more intelligently than this trope usually implies). Tidehunter, for example, is usually used to initiate a battle, running (or teleporting) into the middle of the enemy team, and using his ultimate to stun as many of the enemy as he can. He often dies afterwards, but the massive disruption is worth it. Other heroes like Bristleback and Earthshaker can perform a similar approach.
  • Spirit Breaker's Charge of Darkness is this trope as an ability, sending him straight toward a target, regardless of what's in his way. What he finds when he actually gets there, on the other hand...
  • Sometimes you just can't get away from an attacker for whatever reason (a root or slow). You might as well just attack headlong, and do what damage you can. Even more justified for anyone with lifesteal-granting abilities or items - running just has you get shot in the back, but if you can close the distance to your attacker, the lifesteal might just keep you alive.
  • Anyone who gets the Aegis of the Immortal from Roshan has to be careful to not get overconfident and turn into this. It's easy to think that since you can resurrect upon death that you're unstoppable until you wander alone into a 4-person ambush. Now you end up stunned and nuked down in seconds, and then have the process repeated when you come back, effectively wasting the Aegis (new players of Wraith King have to be careful for the exact same reason).
• Legacy Character: Due to copyright reasons (like belonging to Blizzard-exclusive races like Tauren or Pandaren) some characters had to be replaced. They are still easy to recognize.
• Life Drain: Represented by lifesteal (most commonly provided by Morbid Mask and its upgrades), which heals the hero for a percentage of their right-click attack damage, and spell lifesteal (from Voodoo Mask and its upgrades), which does the same for spell damage.
• Light Is Not Good: Despite the use of light and bright colours compared to the Dire, both ancients are equally evil and the only thing that the Radiant is 'good' at is environmental friendliness, if the status of Radiant trees compared to Dire trees is anything to go by.
• Limited Loadout: You are limited to six primary item slots, one neutral item slot, three items that confer permanent "buffs" but don't take up a slot, plus three more items which you can carry in the backpack (which will provide no benefits and need six seconds to become active when moved from the backpack to the inventory).
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: On the whole inverted, sometimes to the extreme of logarithmic wizards, quadratic warriors: Many magic-heavy heroes are most powerful in the early and mid game, before becoming heavily outgunned by physical fighters in the late game.
  • Heroes who deal most of their damage through spells tend to be powerful early on when enemy heroes have few items and limited hitpoints; however because the damage of most spells is not greatly increased by items, as the game goes later enemies become more able to shrug off the incoming magical damage. Meanwhile, heroes which either do not have significant offensive spells, or whose offensive spells are tied to enhancing their physical attacks, tend to be fairly weak early on but then gain significant strength later in the game (as physical attack damage is greatly increased by items).
  • The instances in which this trope is played straight are in heroes who combine magical and physical damage together (like Queen of Pain and Void Spirit), heroes whose spell damage scales with their stats and level (like Outworld Destroyer), can use their magic for defense and mobility as much as offense (like Storm Spirit); or in heroes who on paper appear to be big strong warriors (like Sven or Ursa) but in practice are susceptible to enemies dodging around outside their attack range, or who focus their strength on their durability (like Axe or Centaur) and don't bring much to a late-game fight other than being bait or a punching bag. (Although granted, sometimes being a big distraction is exactly what a team needs...)
• Loot Boxes: Treasure chests either give you a random item or set (or more if you get lucky) when opened. A single standard item will be guaranteed to appear when a treasure is opened, but items in higher rarities only have a very small chance to be unboxed. Something with an Extremely or Ultra Rare drop rate (less than 5%) can easily fetch more than 100 dollars on the community market.
• Loot-Making Attack: Hand of Midas' active ability instantly turns a creep into gold, providing much more money and experience than when it's killed normally. When used on a neutral creep, it is also guaranteed to provide a neutral item token, as long as the user's team hasn't obtained all of their eligible tokens (determined by the game time and number of tokens already dropped) yet.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me:
  • The Pavise item is a shield that can provide a barrier to the holder or an ally that blocks physical damage.
  • Vanguard is a shield that improves the user's health and health regeneration, and can block a chunk of damage from most incoming attacks.
• Magikarp Power: Hard carries like Medusa or Anti-Mage start the game very weak, spend most of their early- and mid-game farming incessantly and watching out for ganks or opportunities to kill steal teammates, but are the strongest heroes late game, able to 1v5 whole teams by themselves if properly farmed.
• Make Some Noise: Silence is a Power Nullifier effect which prevents the use of active skills while also disabling any active channeling abilities. It does not, however, disrupt passive effects or any non-channeling skills that are already active. Several heroes have access to Silence in various forms. A rarer status effect, Mute, has a similar effect in that it disables the use of items.
• Make My Monster Grow:
  • The Giant's Ring increases the wielder's model size by 60%, in addition to allowing them to move through terrain and dealing damage to nearby enemies.
  • Activating Black King Bar increases the user's size, though it doesn't affect their actual hitbox.
• Mana Burn: Diffusal Blade causes the wielder's attacks to burn mana from the target and deal damage based on the burnt mana, both minions summoned by Book of the Dead can remove mana from enemies, and several heroes and creeps have abilities (like Anti-Mage's Mana Break, Invoker's EMP, the Satyr Mindstealer's Mana Burn and so on) which can remove an enemy's mana.
• Mana Potion: Drinking Clarity grants 3.2 mana regeneration to the target for 50 seconds.
• Mercy Invincibility: After dying and respawning, a hero is invulnerable and untargetable as long as you don't any issue any commands, discouraging a stomping team from artificially trying to lengthen the game and inflate their scores by repeatedly diving into the fountain and killing enemy heroes as soon as they respawn.
• Mercy Kill: "Denying" low health allied creeps, buildings, even heroes in some situations (with denying being manually assigning an attack that kills the allied target) can be thought as this, especially considering the alternative being death by the enemy's hands, granting them gold and XP (even those of measley creeps matter, especially in early game.) This goes double for heroes, as the only time when you can manually deny an allied hero is when they're affected by certain long-duration damage over time abilities that would likely kill them anyway.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: Meteor Hammer's active ability summons a flaming meteor that stuns and deals damage over time to enemy units and buildings.
• Mighty Glacier: Aside from individual heroes that are very strong or tanky as well as slow, some players may deliberately become this toward the end of a long game with fairly evenly-matched teams. If the game goes long enough, and teams are having trouble gaining enough of an advantage to finish things off, some core heroes may trade in whatever they are using for boots in favor of a damage or protection item of some kind to gain that extra bit of advantage to swing things in their favor. Medusa in particular is known for doing this, but others will do it as well.
• More than Mind Control: According to the first (of very few) Dota comics, non-heroes exposed to Direstone or Radiant ore quickly become warped by it and turned into creeps. This is ultimately reversible, though not without extreme effort.
• Money for Nothing: Games that go late enough (usually around 90 minutes or so) will eventually hit a point where cores stop having any use for gold after they have enough for buyback due to each player having only six item slots (plus Aghanim's Blessing and Moon Shard, which can be consumed to stop taking up a slot) and thus a finite amount of items they can reasonably buy; as such, 90+ minute games often have heroes walking around with thousands of gold in the bank.
• Money Multiplier:
  • Hand of Midas is the most straight example of this trope in the game: an item with relatively weak stats whose active ability simply kills a creep, granting more XP and gold than if the creep was killed normally. It is almost always built early in a game to increase a hero's gold and/or XP income, and its only utility in a fight is the ability to instantly kill a creep minion of Chen, Enchantress or another hero that builds Helm of the Dominator.
  • Philosopher's Stone provides the wielder with a flat bonus to their passive GPM, at the cost of some attack power. It's usually carried by supports who don't need the physical damage, but can really use the extra income.
  • When used, Trusty Shovel can either dig up (among others) a Bounty rune or a Kobold minion, whose Prospecting Aura boosts the GPM of nearby heroes; while digging with Pirate Hat will always produce a Bounty rune.
  • Some other items (namely Battle Fury, Maelstrom and Radiance) can also quickly bolster the owner's income, but they do this by helping the hero clear creeps faster (thus allowing them to clear more creeps in the jungle per respawn cycle) instead of directly providing bonus gold like Hand of Midas.
  • Some heroes like Doom or Alchemist have abilities that increase their income. Others like Sven or Medusa have abilities or talents that provide some kind of cleave or multi-hit that allows them to take out lots of creeps quickly.
• Monster Allies: Chen and Enchantress can turn neutral creeps into their loyal followers. The Helm of the Dominator and its upgrade Helm of the Overlord extend this capability to everyone with its active Dominate.
• Morph Weapon: A statwise version, as you can't actually see equipment on the heroes. The Power Treads, built with boots, gloves of haste, and a small stat item, and the tier 2 neutral item the Vambrace. Once built, you can shift the boots at any time to have any one of the stats be the active one, so you can slightly boost your mana or hp (as well as their regen), and then (if you're an agility hero) shift into agility for the damage. The Vambrace has a "primary" stat (+10), and +5 to the other two, along with a benefit depending on which state is the primary - strength mode gives extra magic resistance, agility gives extra attack speed, and intelligence gives extra spell damage.
• Ms. Fanservice: While some humanoid heroines ARE attractive, they're not overly sexualized and don't provide much fanservice other than being attractive in general. With the exception of someone like Queen of Pain, but that can be excused considering she is a succubus.
• Mythology Gag: Two of the neutral drop items added in 7.23, The Leveller and Arcane Ring, were items removed from the original DotA mod. Another drop item is the Stygian Desolator (a bigger version of Desolator), which was the name of the regular Desolator from the original mod.
• Nerf: DOTA has an interesting philosophy towards nerfing: If a hero is overpowered, unless it's a true Game-Breaker don't nerf the OP ability, nerf something else. This results in heroes that seem overpowered, but who also have rather severe weaknesses to go with the strength.
• Night-Vision Goggles: Moon Shard provides a hero with additional night vision; Seer Stone does this to both day and night vision.
• No Experience Points for Medic: Previously, you only got assist credit if you damage the slain enemy. This is why certain melee supports (like Omniknight - most of whose spells protect his allies or slow enemies, or Treant Protector - whose ultimate stops enemies from moving or attacking but does 0 damage) tend to not have great scores since they lack easy damage spells to pick assists up. However, simply being near a dying enemy nets you gold and experience. The Spring Cleaning 2014 update defies this: placing a buff on an ally that kills an enemy or a debuff on an enemy that dies will also grant you an assist.
• No Item Use for You: Mute is a status effect that prevents the afflicted hero from activating item abilities.
• Non-Action Guy: The two Ancients (the Radiant and the Dire) manifest as defenceless buildings that must rely on the protection of heroes and towers.
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: Most item active abilities (with a few exceptions) and a few hero abilities that inflict status effects deal no damage.
• Non-Indicative Name: The so-called 'Secret Shop' is a secret to no one. In fact, it is one of the first things a new player has to learn when starting Dota, otherwise you're missing out on at least 70% of the items you'll have to get accustomed to building.
• Noodle Incident: Tons in the character bios.
• No-Sell: Debuff immunity (provided by things like Enrage and Black King Bar) prevents most status effects from affecting the target unit, making BKB a very commonly purchased item.
• Not-So-Safe Harbor: Your own Fountain is invulnerable, has True Sight, and deals tremendous damage to any enemy hero that comes in range, making it a safe haven for you and your team to hide if things go south. But heroes with yanking skills and global-range nukes can and will make you feel unsafe in your own Fountain. And if things go really south, an extremely-farmed enemy hero can waltz in and kill you, despite the Fountain's protection (though Valve has taken steps to prevent this).
• Not the Intended Use: When it comes to game mechanics, this trope is averted - if you can do it, then it's a feature, including denying, suicide, creep pulling, stacking and orb walking, among others (except if the unintended use turns out to be a Game-Breaker, in which case it'll get patched out). Played straight with reports: as can be seen on the report screen, reporting and Low Priority are supposed to be a punishment for toxic players, flamers, spammers, ragers, griefers, trolls, intentional feeders, AFK'ers and game ruiners (as well as quitters, who do not need to be reported). In practice, however, people will report others for literally any reason (most often to blame a teammate or enemy for a loss), and the game does not distinguish between a legit report and a rage report - both are equally effective when it comes to sending people to Low Priority. Expect to make frequent visits to LPQ even if you behave well if you do the following things:
  • Play Techies or a Rat Doto hero. Win? Receive five reports from salty enemies for 'picking broken hero'. Lose? Receive four reports from angry teammates for 'trolling and forcing team to play 4v5'.
  • Be a famous streamer. People will report you for kicks. You will be in LPQ all the time, and no one will bat an eye.
  • Pick an 'out-of-meta' hero or go for an unorthodox build. If you lose, teammates will blame you for costing the game, and you will be reported.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Originally in Diretide, the game will not end unless the team gets more candies than the other team before they work together to defeat Roshan. This unfortunately opens to an easy exploit with Pudge where with the other team's compliance, Pudge would repeatedly kill the other player to gain Strength stacks from Flesh Heap before getting enough stacks to one-shot Roshan using an Ethereal Blade to cheat their way of the records. Soon after this exploit is known, Valve issued a patch where the game will end regardless of whether the team's candy counts are the same or not.
  • Frostivus originally counted as a game played for Low Priority (where back then, you simply needed to play a couple of games to get out of it as opposed to needing to win said games). This allowed players to quickly get out of it by suiciding themselves to the towers next to the enemy's spawn area as the game ends when all the heroes died. This is quickly patched by no longer allowing them to count for Low Priority games.
  • Low Priority queue is supposed to be used to punish players who either troll other people or they constantly abandon games that are going on right now. Unfortunately, players still chose to troll other player by either griefing, or trash talking other and after number of games, they got out of it without consequences. So Valve gradually makes the Low Priority punishment harsher and harsher from requiring into a set number of games played, only allowing Single Draft modes, to requiring a set number of wins in order to get out of such queue.
  • One of the changes for 7.07 is that a team can now only own 1 animal courier, and couriers are automatically upgraded after 3 minutes. Unfortunately, griefers quickly found that you can simply buy a courier, drop the item instead of deploying the courier, and then deny it, leaving their team courier-less for the entire game. This was eventually patched out by making couriers automatically deploy on purchase, and for additional fool-proofing, making the item unsellable and indestructible if purchased outside the fountain. Then came 7.23, which made all players now start the game with a personal courier already active for them.
  • One of the rules added during The International is that players are not allowed to swap heroes pregame. This resulted in one case when during a pro game Fly (a support player) accidentally chose Clinkz instead of his intended hero Phoenix, forcing him to switch roles with his carry teammate. Immediately after the game ended, Valve issued a patch by adding a confirmation whether or not you want to pick that hero after the drafting stage ends.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Liberally used for both Roshan's Leitmotif and Dire's victory theme.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: While not outright stated, the Keen (Sniper, Tinker, Clockwerk, Gyrocopter, and the smaller half of Alchemist) share similarities with Dwarves. Most are incredibly smart and sport facial hair, and all are very small in stature.
• Perfect Play A.I.:
  • When playing with/against bots, they will most often perform perfect chain stuns/disables, even better than pro players.
  • Necrophos is a particularly nasty example for the AI's ability to calculate the kill threshold for Reaper's Scythe. As soon as your health drops below that amount, he will Scythe you, and you will die.
  • Windranger bot also has a knack for pulling off bizarre and improbable Shackleshots with a consistency that would make most players jealous.
  • Skywrath Mage is pain incarnate if you don't have a Black King Bar due to his ability to chain together all of his spells within a fraction of a second to nuke you to within an inch of your life.
• Pet the Dog: No matter how bad or narcissistic they are, whenever you heal a hero, they are genuinely grateful for your help. The sole exception to this is Troll Warlord who will threaten the helper even if they healed him.
• Piñata Enemy:
  • The Book of the Dead summons give a tremendous bounty when killed, and the Warrior's Last Will often isn't enough to discourage enemies from getting it. Micromanagement is important to avoid feeding them to the other team.
  • Units controlled by Helm of the Dominator or Helm of the Overlord have their gold bounty set to 100 or 250 gold respectively, which is considerably higher than most normal gold bounties.
• Player-Generated Economy: Players can buy, sell, and trade cosmetic items on the Steam Marketplace. In the past, such items could be obtained via Random Drops after a game, but in later updates, these items were rendered untradeable and unmarketable, so players must now spend some money to participate in the economy. Some extremely rare items, such as Pudge's Dragonclaw Hook and Ursa's Alpine Stalker set, can sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
• Play Every Day:
  • The Battle Pass' Daily Hero Challenge gives you 22 hours to win a game with a randomly selected hero and grants a reward of 100 Battle Points for doing so.
  • The Frostivus 2019 mini-Battle Pass event grants you a bonus 1250 Frostivus Points when you win your first game in a day, in addition to the 200 or 100 normally granted by winning a game.
• Poison Mushroom: Parodied with the gifts given to players in Frostivus (Christmas) 2023. While well-behaved players received standard cosmetic items, smurfs were rewarded with either a Toxic Lump of Coal (a warning that you'll receive a game ban if this behaviour continued) or a Highly Toxic Lump of Coal (a permanent ban for smurfing or violating the Steam Terms of Service), depending on the severity of their infractions.
• Power Creep: This is often a large factor in what determines the meta in competitive gaming. Heroes that don't get nerfs in certain patches (or even actually get buffs) can find themselves retired from the meta simply because a buff elsewhere created a better option in another hero. Icefrog tried to change this in every patch, and finally on the International 2016, most of all heroes are played in the tournament.
• Power Nullifier: Represented by various kinds of disables: stun (disables all actions, usually have short durations), sleep (similar to stuns, but targets can be woken up prematurely), banish (similar to stuns but also turns the target invulnerable), hex (slows movement, disables all other actions), silence (disables active abilities), disarm and ethereal (disable right-click attacks), break (disables passive abilities), mute (disables item abilities), root (disables movement), leash (disables movement outside of a specific area, including with abilities), taunt (forces units to attack a specific target instead of doing anything else), and fear (forces the target to run towards a specific point and prevents them from doing anything else).
• Power-Up: Aside from the standard upgrading of getting all levels of your standard spells and abilities, some heroes have abilities that give you a permanent upgrade in some way whenever you kill someone with it, or they die while under the ability's effects. Legion Commander's ultimate (which gives her extra attack damage when she kills someone while using her Duel ability on them) is probably the best known, but there are a lot of others, such as Axe's ultimate giving him extra armor when he kills someone with it, or Tidehunter gets extra damage resistance for Kraken Shell from anyone who dies while under the effect of his Anchor Smash. Many of these heroes need these extra buffs to be effective as the game goes on; Legion Commander, for example, is almost useless during the late game if she doesn't have enough stacks; if she does have a lot, however, she can quite literally have the equivalent of a Divine Rapier that isn't dropped on death and doesn't take up room in her inventory.
• Practical Taunt: Taunt is an actual status effect, which forces afflicted targets to do nothing other than right-click attacking the caster during its duration (passive effects like critical strike or life drain still work). In effect, most of the time it works the same as a stun, since heroes with Taunt generally want people to attack them (and, for obvious reasons, usually build Blade Mail specifically to pair with it).
• Public Domain Artifact: Gleipnir and Mjölnir (or rather Mjollnir, as it's spelt in the game) show up as an item that you can build; fittingly, both are upgraded from the same item. Sun Wukong's Ruyi Jingu Bang also showed up as a purchasable item long before the Monkey King himself was added as a hero. Gleipnir also used to bind the Fenrir counterpart, Primal Beast, and it being added to the shop heralds the entrance of the Primal Beast to wreak havoc in the battlefield.
• Quad Damage: Picking up a Power Rune grants the hero a powerful effect for a short time. The ones that fit best are Shield (damage-blocking barrier), Haste (maximum movement speed), Arcane (reduced mana costs and cooldowns on spells) and Amplify Damage (guess).
• Race Against the Clock:
  • If both teams go all-in on a push into the enemy base, it usually turns into this. Known as a "base race" in the community.
  • Fighting against some heroes also turns into this. For example, you basically can't win against a Medusa, Arc Warden, Terrorblade, or Phantom Lancer (and maybe Anti-Mage) with 45 minutes worth of farm under their belt. Heck, even Techies qualifies; you can't win against a Techies after 45 or so minutes, prepare to fight for hours as you repeatedly run into minefields in the enemy base. And, of course, savvy players will tend to pair Techies with one of the aforementioned heroes that require a metric ton of farm...
• Race Lift: Tresdin the Legion Commander. Originally a white man in DotA, they are now a darker-skinned woman. Doesn't mean she lost all of the racism towards non-humans or any of the bravado.
• Random Drops:
  • A neutral item token can only be redeemed for one among five randomly-chosen neutral items (specific to the player) of that tier. Which ones are available can make a significant difference (for example, the Philosopher's Stone's extra income is really big for your support, who doesn't get a lot of creep kills, but won't really be affected by the damage decrease).
  • Cosmetic items occasionally "drop" for you after playing a game, similar to Team Fortress 2.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Chaos Knight has Chaos Bolt, which inflicts a random but inversely-related amount of damage and stun. Upgrading the spell increases both the maximum and minimum values of both the damage and stun, but there's still a big difference between a 275 damage skill that stuns for 2 seconds, and one that does 100 and stuns for 4.
• Random Number God: Randoming heroes, which gives you a random hero from the pool of bonus heroes that day. If a regular player of, say, Dragon Knight or Ember Spirit, gets lucky and randoms one of these heroes, the bonus Mango can easily help them stomp mid and by extension snowball out of control. On the other hand, if the randomed hero ends up unfamiliar, hard to play (like Earth Spirit or Io), easily counterable (like Meepo) or not fitting with what your team has picked (the 4th hard carry, the 3rd non-scaling support or the 2nd jungler), good luck - you'll be in for a very hard game. A random can single-handedly decide the result of a game completely by luck.
• Rare Candy: Picking up a Wisdom Rune instantly grants an experience boost to the user and their lowest-level ally, usually enough to gain a level.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • Most treasure chests (except for the earliest ones) come with a drop list, categorised into rarity tiers. A single standard item will be guaranteed to appear when a treasure is opened, but items in higher rarities only have a very small chance to be unboxed. Something with an Extremely or Ultra Rare drop rate (less than 5%) can easily fetch more than 100 dollars on the community market.
  • While Rylai's Battle Blessing and the Dark Moon Reward wheel will almost always grant a common item set, courier, announcer or treasure, a player that is exceptionally lucky, spins a lot of times (by spending money) or sold his soul to the Devil might be rewarded with an Arcana from the former or a super rare Dark Moon Baby Roshan from the latter.
  • A notorious example is the 2016 version of the Trust of the Benefactor treasure, given to owners of the International Battle Pass. Its list of possible drops include valuable items like Immortal treasures, Arcana items, golden Immortals, promotional, China- or Korea-exclusive and other limited edition items from the early days of the game (most of which cost hundreds of dollars each on the Market or are not marketable at all),... as well as any random hero set (any set, including many almost worthless 'trash' sets that look barely different from the base model). Cue many people expecting Immortals, Arcanas and other cool items from the three copies of the treasure... only to receive three trash sets that worth less than half a dollar on the Market. Some even bought more treasures on the Market from savvy players exploiting this trope and most of the time they received nothing but more trash sets. After all, it's no surprise when the total copies of treasures number in the millions and the total copies of rare items that can be unboxed by the community number in the hundreds. Valve addressed this in the 2017 version by removing the random hero sets from the treasure, meaning that at worst you'll get an Immortal treasure.
  • Slark's Riptide Rumble, a pachinko-like minigame in the International 2017 Battle Pass, where most players tend to win from 500 to 4000 Battle Points per week except for the 10 luckiest ones, who will get a Sunken Relic, an item that lasts until The International 2018 and creates a watery Aegis of Champions effect underneath the hero, or can be pawned on the Market for around $2000.
• Rate-Limited Perpetual Resource: With the exception of enemy buildings (which are never rebuilt), all sources of money (passive income, Bounty runes, lane and neutral creeps, and items such as Hand of Midas, Trusty Shovel and Pirate Hat) never deplete until the game ends, though the amount of resources that is present at any given time is fairly limited, especially when your team is losing and can't exert map control over the enemy.
• Real Money Trade: There exists a substantial market of accounts with high (4k+) MMR, as well as "professional" boosters that will boost your MMR in exchange for money, allowing bad players to spend money and get an MMR far higher than they deserve. Usually this is followed by a losing streak as the boosted account user, hopelessly outskilled by opponents in a bracket in which they do not belong, proceeds to feed and become a useless burden that ruins games for people unlucky enough to be their teammate (as well as a free 25 MMR for their opponents).
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Respectively:
  • Lina, the Slayer and Rylai, the Crystal Maiden.
  • Rigwarl, the Bristleback and Ymir, the Tusk.
  • Rubick, the Grand Magus and Carl, the Invoker.
  • Luna, the Moon Rider and Mirana, the Princess of the Moon.
  • Lyralei, the Windranger and Traxex, the Drow Ranger.
• Reduced Mana Cost: Picking up an Arcane rune reduces all mana costs by 30% for 50 seconds. Carrying Fairy's Trinket reduces all of them by 5%.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Even if the game is completely play-for-free from the get-go, and you can play as every hero from the start, the online store still manages to have a ridiculous amount of purchasable-with-real-money content. With the exception of tournament tickets (which allow you to spectate international tournaments from in-game) though, all of these store items are only cosmetic in nature, a vast number of them can be obtained through Random Drop as above (with even some only being available through drop and not through the store), and none of the availability of the game itself is locked away. An exception to the tournament ticket rule goes to the Major and International tournament held by Valve. You can watch the in-game matches for free, and Valve makes money by selling "See it live" tickets and (for the 2013 tourney) the Compendium/Battle Pass which is $10 for at least $35 worth of content and a promise for more as more Compendiums are bought.
• Rivals Team Up: Anybody can be teamed up with anybody else even if the lore says that two characters hate one another's guts. Sometimes when this happens the two rivals will have mean things to say to one another, but will still work together.
• Running Gag:
  • A lot of heroes have some variant of "here's X in your eye" as a response, usually when attacking or casting a spell.
    Brewmaster (casting Cinder Brew): Here's beer in your eye!
    Crystal Maiden (attacking): Here's ice in your eye!
    Viper (attacking): Here's poison in your eye!
  • Frostivus, ostensibly the Christmas equivalent celebrated in-universe, getting cancelled due to some unforeseen disaster.
    Frostivus 2013 Day 1: Nothing can possibly go wrong.
    Frostivus 2013 Day 2: BY DECREE OF THE ONLY KING THAT MATTERS - FROSTIVUS IS CANCELLED
  • All heroes have a taunt voice-set, but all of them will be about "It's in the bag!". Also each heroes have a quote to curse about the "Shitty/Crummy Wizard!". Some heroes can say it straight, some gets Sophisticated as Hell about them.
• Ryu and Ken: As in the original Dota Allstars, players could only pick Sentinel or Scourge (renamed Radiant and Dire for Dota 2) heroes when on that side, a lot of them were largely equal to each other, such as Lina and Lion, Sven and Magnus, Omniknight and Abaddon, and others. Divergent Character Evolution has completely changed most of these heroes (Magnus and Sven don't even fall into any of the same roles anymore).
• Schizo Tech: Several of the Keen (ie, the Gnome analogues) have incredibly advanced technology, Tinker even having lasers, rockets, and automonous robots. They exist alongside and are routinely beaten by people using arrows and swords. However, Gryocopter's backstory mentions finding an "incomplete schematic for a Gyrocopter, the world’s first manned, non-magical flying device". So, while technology, with the help of magic, is incredibly advanced, pure technology is mostly inept.
• See the Invisible:
  • Sentry Wards, towers, Book of the Dead Warriors and the Ancient provide True Sight in a large area around themselves.
  • Popping Dust of Appearance will inflict a debuff on nearby heroes (but not wards) which will prevent them from going invisible and causes them to be slowed by 20% when they would have done so.
  • Carrying a Gem of True Sight grants the constant ability to see invisible units and wards to any allied vision within 900 range of the carrier. However, the Gem is a risky investment in that it will be dropped if the carrier dies, and the enemy can see it in your inventory—expect to be the immediate target of the entire other team, who want to keep their wards and invisible heroes (Bounty Hunter, Riki, anyone with an invisibility item, etc.) effective. It's also an item that grants no stat bonuses, so carrying it usually falls to the supports, who often are high-profile targets to begin with.
  • Some heroes, most notably Bounty Hunter and Slardar, have abilities which can reveal invisible foes.
• Self-Duplication: Illusions are temporary, weaker copies of heroes that usually (but not always) deal less damage, take more damage and have all active and many passive abilities disabled. They also may not pick up or activate items or runes. Illusions yield a little gold and experience based on the hero's level. Illusions are always visually distinguishable to their allies; whether enemies can also do so or not depends on the source ability, and in some cases, illusions will also mimic the hero's animation when they use an ability. The most common sources of illusions are Manta Style and the Illusion rune, which create two illusions of the user when activated or picked up (respectively), and are usually employed by carry heroes since illusions' damage scales with that of the original hero.
• Sexy Dimorphism: Slark, Slardar, and Slithice (Naga Siren) all belong to the same species, the Slithereen. The former two are male, and both have Scary Teeth and a monstrous facial structure. The Naga Siren, meanwhile, has the upper body of a beautiful woman (complete with Non-Mammal Mammaries, and Non-Mammalian Hair with certain cosmetic items) and a human-like face. Subverted by later lore developments that establish Naga Siren as belonging to a separate race from the other two, whose male members also have humanoid features like her.
• Ship Tease: When Crystal Maiden gets her Announcer Pack, her 'Specific hero' quips include on herself, Lina, some ice users (just Tusk, Drow and Lich, she didn't quip against Ancient Apparition and Winter Wyvern)... and Sven. Also if the game goes idle enough, she starts wondering where Sven is. On meeting either Juggernaut or Templar Assassin, Monkey King will hint that the two used to be an item together.
• Shout-Out: Just as with the original, with the sheer number of assets in the game, most anything is a reference to something else:
  • A red headed spellcaster named 'Lina the Slayer' with the skill Dragon Slave, and an ultimate named Laguna Blade?
  • Tinker borrows a lot of Dr. Isaac Kleiner's lines from Half-Life. It helps that he's voiced by the same actor. Same for a lot of others.
  • If you look closely at the icon for item recipes, the icon in the middle is the symbol of the Combine from Half-Life 2. Because you use recipes to COMBINE items.
  • An item for Tidehunter that replaces his fish is named "Squiddles".
  • Many of the AI bots are named after characters of Arrested Development. Additionally, Gob and Lindsay's chicken impressions made it into the game as taunts for Skywrath Mage and Vengeful Spirit respectively.
  • Sniper shares some of his lines with another sniper and his rifle sounds like the AWP from Counter-Strike. And Pudge, of all things, shares his voice.
  • Lich and Pugna are obviously better known as the Heavy Weapons Guy, the former even citing some of the lines.
  • Sand King gives us: "You were expecting... Sandy Claws?"
  • Nature's Prophet speaks for the trees.
  • Upon using his laser skill, Tinker will gleefully declare that he "blinded you, with science!"
  • Meepo also gets his share of recycled voice lines, this time from the Scout.
  • Axe's denied phrase ("YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!") is based on Willy Wonka's infamous meltdown scene from the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
  • When Earthshaker manages to hit 3 or more heroes with his ultimate, Echo Slam, he shouts "Chaos Dunk!"
  • Pudge's attacks, design and exclamation of "fresh meat!" might feel familiar to Blizzard fans. There's also the line "GET OVER HERE!" when he grabs an enemy hero with Meat Hook.
  • Omniknight: You chose poorly.
  • Timbersaw:
    • "I'm not a lumberjack, and no, I'm not okay. I thank you!"
    • He also gives us "Cut cut cutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutCUUUUUT!"
  • The items Sange and Yasha, Black King Bar, and Monkey King Bar are all from the Phantasy Star series.
  • The Monkey King Bar also refers to the weapon of Sun Wukong from Journey to the West, both in its name, and its inability to miss. The Monkey King himself is also a playable hero.
  • The Heart of Tarrasque item's name and concept was clearly inspired by a famous Dungeons & Dragons monster named Tarrasque that, in the first three editions, could literally regenerate from any short of death short of using a reality-warping spell to keep it down.
  • Bounty Hunter bears some resemblance to an older group of rat-man ninjas with shuriken, and Chaos Knight's backstory, colour scheme, armour, and steed appear to draw on some other Chaos Knights. Gyrocopter and Sniper draw on the aesthetic of a certain other group of Schizo Tech-wielding dwarfs, as well.
  • Upon killing Roshan in the Diretide event, he sinks into a pit of lava while giving a thumbs-up.
  • Beating the newly resurrected Wraith King shows the words YOU DEFEATED.
  • Juggernaut's Ultimate ability Omnislash is named after one of the Limit Breaks from Final Fantasy 7.
  • Way, way too many in the heroes' voice lines. It's easier to just consult the individual heroes' pages on the wiki for details, because listing them would take up a very large portion of the page.
  • The 6.86 patch allows the Iron Branch to be consumed to plant "a happy little tree". And yes, that's the wording used in the actual item description.
  • The item Octarine Core is named after a fictional color in Discworld, likely as a tribute to the late Terry Pratchett. The color is described as a "resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple", and fittingly enough, the visual effect of spell lifesteal (which was first used by Octarine Core) is colored purple and fluorescent green.
  • When Dark Seer gets Aghanim's Shard, he unlocks an ability called Normal Punch, which slugs the target with a giant red fist (complete with manga-esque Written Sound Effect).
• Single-Use Shield:
  • The Infused Raindrop is a five-use shield. If the hero takes more than 50 magical damage in a single instance and the Raindrop is off cooldown, one of its charges will be consumed to block 120 damage. Each Raindrop has 5 charges, and cannot stack with other Raindrops in the same inventory slot. The Dandelion Amulet has a similar damage block ability, albeit with a larger trigger threshold and blocking 300 damage, as well as a longer cooldown but infinite uses.
  • Linken's Sphere provides a shield that blocks a single targeted spell which can be transferred to an ally. Once the shield is used, you'll need to wait a while for it to return.
• Sinister Surveillance:
  • A particularly vital concept in the game is warding to gain vision of key areas, and denying enemy vision of key areas.
  • The Scan team ability can be used to detect the presence of enemy heroes (or the lack thereof) in a designated area.
• Skill Gate Characters: Because the game is balanced around competitive play, quite a few heroes are inherently imbalanced in the lower brackets, where people do not communicate and coordinate with each other, like to pick a lineup with 4 or 5 carries, are too greedy to bother with TP scrolls, wards and detection, do not look at the minimap for missing enemy heroes, do not know how to rotate when a lane is lost or when the enemy has an AFK jungler, do not know how to adjust their build or focus down a dangerous Glass Cannon, panic when getting ganked or in a big teamfight with a lot of spells, or give up and start feeding couriers when the smallest thing goes wrong. Whether they are actually Skill Gates or not also depends on the version, since there's nothing that prevents them from being buffed or becoming suitable to the meta so that pros would pick them.^note A fine example of this is Sniper: never seen in competitive prior to 6.82, becoming a top tier hero in 6.83, then fading to obscurity in 6.84 after being nerfed In general, however, the following heroes are usually considered to be particularly effective to stomp noobs (without taking into account their viability in pro games, which fluctuates often) by punishing common mistakes made by new players:
  • Riki, Clinkz and Slark are snowballing solo gankers with good scaling that prey on lone heroes out of position (in other words, everyone in low-level games) and can turn invisible (or always builds Shadow Blade), which is synonymous with invincibility in a bracket where detection doesn't exist except in the form of a Gem of True Sight that is only bought when they have accumulated more than 20 kills, at which point it is likely to fall into the Riki or Clinkz's hands as soon as they see the Gem carrier. However, as soon as you reach the bracket where people actually know how to use Dust of Appearance and Sentry Wards to counter invisible heroes, said heroes will have to play much more carefully in order to snowball, instead of just mindlessly going around killing everyone and simply turning invisible to escape when threatened.
  • Bloodseeker, Viper and Drow Ranger are snowballing solo gankers/carries that make it impossible for their target to run away except with a Town Portal Scroll, which low-level players don't bother to carry but are ubiquitous in higher-level play. In addition, no one knows how Rupture works and still runs away in panic when affected by it, or bothers to check if their HP has fallen below 25% when there's a Bloodseeker on the enemy team; Viper is a very powerful harasser, lane dominator and 1v1 manfighter in the early and mid game; while Drow Ranger frequently builds Shadow Blade in low-level pubs, where no one seems to have the good sense to get up in Drow's face and neuter her damage output.
  • Healing heroes in general (except for Chen, Enchantress and Oracle, whose skill floor is too high for most pubbers). In low-level games, people are too uncoordinated to Shoot the Medic First, preferring to hit whichever enemy hero they feel like, giving the healer free rein to keep his team alive (and, in case of Necrophos, wear down the enemy team as well). Healers are also able to mitigate the damage done by out-of-position heroes that get ganked, or by a rich but Too Dumb to Live carry that considers himself invincible and jumps to solo the entire enemy team (which is a very common reason of comebacks in the lower brackets). In addition, Omniknight (one of the most, if not the most, prominent examples in this category) is also countered by a Nullifier, which can remove his ultimate but is built by no one in the lower brackets.
  • AFK junglers (Legion Commander and Lifestealer are the most popular heroes for this, though others do exist). In high-level games it forces the team to play 4v5 during the laning stage, places the entire burden of warding on a starved support, while the jungler himself farms slower than in the lane and is vulnerable to ganks from enemy roaming supports. But all of this is rendered moot in low-level games: playing 4v5 in the laning stage isn't a big problem since everyone is super passive, neither is the lack of a support (the enemy 'supports' are too busy leeching XP and stealing last hits from cores instead of doing the duty of a proper support like warding, roaming and disrupting the enemy jungler). In addition to that, low-level players miss last hits all the time so the jungler actually ends up the richest of the heroes, despite the relatively low bounty of neutrals, and since they don't know how to close games, games always go late and the team with the greedier draft would win most of the time.
  • Sniper is a Long-Range Fighter that can't manfight anyone at close range, but your carry is too afraid of him to try and get close (especially when being constantly hit by Headshots), no one has a Blink Dagger, and bad players are more likely to blow their skills on whatever enemy hero that they want to instead of trying to focus down the squishy Sniper first. Bonus points for being a very frequent Shadow Blade buyer in low-level games.
  • Axe is a beefy lane dominator whose trade-mark pubstomping tactic is to go into the enemy safelane and kill all of the enemy's creep waves with Counter Helix before they reach the outer tower, making it impossible for the enemy safelaners to stay in lane. While this makes him exceptionally vulnerable to ganks, low-level players generally lack the coordination to pull it off and only know to flame the safelaners for feeding and/or getting no farm; and despite this the safelaners (who are usually two melee carries in low-level pubs) still think it's better to get massacred in the lane instead of leaving to jungle or roam.
  • Pudge and Spirit Breaker are snowballing solo gankers who are terrifying if they get going, but are easily foiled by wards - which are, of course, nonexistent in pub games (and any wards that are planted tend to not do anything since low-level players rarely check the minimap but are all too eager to spam 'We need wards!' after feeding no matter how bad their positioning were or how many wards are on the map) but are almost always picked up as soon as the support can afford them at higher levels.
  • Ursa is a Mighty Glacier with no mobility who can solo Roshan early in the game and deal insane damage at short range, allowing him to terrorize noobs who do not practise good kiting and positioning - which reduce Ursa to an oversized clay pigeon. When it comes to Force Staff, a counter to Ursa and a very useful item in general, bad players usually think it should only be built on Bloodseeker. Additionally, anyone with an ounce of savvy will keep a close eye on the Roshan pit to score easy kills and Aegis snatches on Ursa if he tries to take Roshan.
  • Zeus can dominate the mid lane and snowball with gank gold due to his massive magical damage output, but also gets shut down very hard by the Boring, but Practical items Infused Raindrops, Black King Bar, Cloak, and Pipe of Insight. Needless to say, pubbers tend to skip these items because of the "boring" part of the equation. And good luck trying to convince your teammates to gank the mid lane - you'll be ignored at best and flamed at worst.
  • Lich, a good lane dominator, who can simply use his ultimate Chain Frost to score a wipe against a bad, uncoordinated team who does not know to react to it by splitting from each other. Against good players, however, Chain Frost is less of an automatic death sentence and more of a combo spell, because good players can simply move away from each other, or run into a creep wave and let them eat the bounces.
• Soul Eating: Shadow Fiend take souls to power his attack through Necromastery and release an unholy surge of energy through Requiem of Souls.
  "So, you're curious where I come from? There's one easy way to find out for yourself."
• Stat Sticks: Heroes can hold up to 6 items in their inventory in any combination, even if it makes no logical sense (the only exception is boots). These items (except consumables) sit in the inventory and provide their bonus stats and special abilities from there, even if the heroes are never actually seen using the items themselves.
• Status-Buff Dispel: Dispels are divided into basic dispels, which can purge most basic stats-altering effects (whether positive from an enemy unit or negative from an allied unit) but not hard disables from allies, and strong dispels, which can remove most debuffs from an ally except a specific few. Notably, while basic dispels are somewhat commonplace (Manta Style, Satanic, Guardian Greaves, Black King Bar and Force Boots for use on self only, Lotus Orb and Disperser on allies, Nullifier on enemies, Eul's Scepter of Divinity and Book of Shadows on both allies and enemies), the sole source of strong dispels that isn't specific to a hero is Aeon Disk, which can only affect its owner, not their teammates, and only on a very long cooldown; it also cannot be manually activated, instead automatically triggering when its conditions are met.
• Status Effects: Poison damage, paralysis, stuns, sleeps, slows, and silences are invaluable in teamfights. Several heroes (Venomancer, Viper, Silencer, Bane, Lich, and Spirit Breaker, to name a few) are themed entirely around a specific status effect.
• Stop Poking Me!: In addition to unique lines being stated from clicking on your hero repeatedly ("rare" responses), they'll also get irritated from you trying to cast an ability on cooldown or without enough mana for it repeatedly, or from the game's pause lasting too long. Later heroes also have click responses forming long monologues about their lore and backstory, which can go on for quite a bit (so be careful not to be Caught Monologuing).
• Stuck Items:
  • In the original DotA and earlier versions of Dota 2, certain heroes like Ogre Magi and Meepo cannot drop Aghanim's Scepter due to the way it interacts with their abilities.
  • Divine Rapier becomes undroppable except by death, once it is picked up by an enemy hero after its original owner dies.
  • Aegis of the Immortal cannot be dropped at all, and can only be got rid of when the carrier dies (thus using the Aegis's ability) or the duration of the Aegis expires. It also cannot be put in the backpack.
• Summon Binding: In the tie-in comic "The Summoning", Cedric's ritual to summon Enigma includes spells to suppress his powers and trap him within the summoning circle, in hopes of forcing him into a deal. Enigma overcomes them effortlessly.
  Cedric: Let's see... a summoning invocation from Elze. A Turstarkurian rite of binding, five distinct neutralizing curses, a redundant binding... about seventeen spells in all, I think. You'll forgive me if I erred on the side of caution.
• Summoning Artifact: Book of the Dead's ability summons three Necronomicon Warriors and Necronomicon Archers under the player's control.
• Summon Magic: Certain heroes have the ability to summon minions that range from expendable (Broodmother's spiderlings) to very valuable (Visage's familiars).
• Super-Speed:
  • The Haste rune is one of six Power Runes that completely maxes out the hero's movement speed for 22 seconds initially and for longer as the game goes on.
  • Several items and heroes have abilities that greatly boost their or an ally's movement speed, like Swift Blink.
  • At level 10, couriers gain the Speed Burst ability, which temporarily grants them 50% bonus movement speed. This can help get items quicker or give them an escape from enemy pursuers. In Turbo Mode, Couriers permanently travel at 1100 movement speed as part of the faster-paced gameplay.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The game has three primary damage types (physical, magical, and pure) and three primary defenses against damage (armor, magic resistance, and debuff immunity), each with their own interactions:
  • Physical damage is reduced by armor, but ignores debuff immunity and magic resistance.
  • Magical damage ignores armor, but is reduced by magic resistance, and while debuff immunity itself doesn't stop magical damage, all sources of debuff immunity also provide magic resistance as a side effect. If flagged to pierce debuff immunity, the magic resistance provided by the debuff immunity is ignored.
  • Pure damage ignores armor and magic resistance, but is completely blocked by debuff immunity unless flagged to pierce it.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Characters regularly banter with each other. Heroes will comment on loads of events, including buying a specific item, calling misses, killing certain other heroes, meeting certain allied heroes, getting a cosmetic item at the end of a game, and getting banned during the ban/pick process in Captain's Mode. Taken to ludicrous extremes with Storm Spirit. And while it is entirely possible for a hero to be Killed Mid-Sentence, that just prompts their last words instead.
• Taunt Button: Purchasable taunts are available for certain heroes. While the earlier ones force you to stand still, later ones can be used while moving or teleporting and have a chance to trigger automatically under certain circumstances.
• Team Spirit: Teamwork and communication trumps nearly everything else, a properly co-ordinated team will usually beat one with a higher APM because while their enemies trip over each other and blame each other for any mistakes, they'll be comboing their abilities, and keeping each other updated on possible enemy gank attempts. Knowing how to properly treat a childish, crybaby or raging teammate or tilt an enemy player and cause their team to bicker among themselves can go a long way towards improving your MMR.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Played with in regards to many of the heroes that don't like each other, from Anti-Mage being supported by a mage or Templar Assassin (assassin to the Hidden Temple) getting heals from Omniknight (disciple of the Omniscience). And also prominently on the followers of Selemene, Mirana and Luna. On the outside, they look like getting along formally and respectfully when in the same team... But the respect felt forced and their true colors are more revealed when they're on the opposing side: They'd rather have the other one dead so they can be the sole top servant of Selemene.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks:
  • Town Portal scrolls can teleport heroes to any allied structure. However, this requires them to channel for several seconds (which becomes longer if other allies have also recently teleported to the same structure) and being stunned or muted while channeling cancels the teleportation, using up the scroll and leaving any other one may have in their inventory on cooldown. Boots of Travel are similar, except they also allow the user to teleport to allied creeps (and heroes once upgraded), and aren't consumed when used.
  • Blink Dagger (and its upgrades) and Fallen Sky let any hero instantly teleport a short distance. Taking damage from enemies briefly disables them, making them much more useful for jumping onto enemies than to escape from them.
  • Anti-Mage and Queen of Pain have short distance teleport abilities similar to Blink Dagger, which are not disabled by taking damage; however, they have a short casting time, which can be enough for quick enemies to interrupt them.
  • Io can use Relocate to teleport to any point on the map, and bring an ally with it if they're connected by Io's Tether. This requires Io to channel for a few seconds, and after a delay, Io is warped back to its original location (the ally also comes along with it if they're still tethered).
  • Nature's Prophet can teleport to any spot on the map, but the teleportation spell has a rather long cast time, making him vulnerable to being interrupted by enemies stunning/killing him if he tries to do so under fire.
• Temporary Online Content: Collector's Cache and Prestige items are only obtainable when a Battle Pass is active (the former by unboxing a chest that is only sold during this time, the latter by levelling the Battle Pass to a certain level, which almost always requires spending extravagant amounts of money). They cannot be traded between players, making it absolutely impossible to obtain them once the Battle Pass has expired (with the exception of some Persona items, which come packaged with item sets that use them as the base model).
• Three-Stat System: Strength, which determines max health and HP regeneration; Agility, which determines armor and attack speed; and Intelligence, which determines mana and mana regeneration. Depending on the game's balance patch, each attribute might also affect other related stats.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Blood Grenade is a consumable item that can be thrown to deal damage and slow enemies in an area, at a minor HP cost.
• Thunder Hammer: Maelstrom is a hammer that gives your attacks a Chain Lightning effect. It can be upgraded to Mjollnir, which has the same effect and can also place a lightning shield around an ally.
• Touched by Vorlons: Several characters have abilities conferred by beings greater than themselves.
• Tutorial Failure: Valve's recommended items are infamous for being outdated and sometimes plainly and obviously bad as a result of having been left to completely rot over the years; for example Lion/Visage/Disruptor/Death Prophet/Meepo Mekansm, Bounty Hunter Desolator, Razor Vanguard, Bane Necronomicon, Faceless Void Mask of Madness, Zeus Aghanim's Scepter,... Their recommended roles are barely better, in that they received a large update in 2015, but even after that update they were still slightly out-of-date, and they haven't received any attention since then. Since 7.00, this trope has been downplayed after Valve decided to update the recommended items and integrate a popular items section into it, which includes the items commonly built by high-level players... although those have since also fallen into disrepair (not to mention that the items high-level players buy is not necessarily what lower-level players trying to learn how to play should buy - for example, Shadow Blade is great on Drow Ranger or Sniper in the lower ranks where most players have trouble dealing with invisibility, but becomes mostly useless at the higher levels). Fortunately, you can also use player-made hero guides complete with skill builds, recommended talents, and some useful tips, with the best ones receiving updates regularly.
• Unexplained Accent: A good majority of the heroes have definitive accents despite being from different regions in-world.
  • Anti-Mage, Invoker, and seemingly Axe speak with light English accents. Pudge speaks with a more thick urban English accent, as does Bristleback.
  • Mirana speaks with a light Greek accent.
  • Meepo's accent sounds somewhat like a typical Brooklyn accent.
  • Luna has a very thick Irish accent.
  • Death Prophet has a very thick French accent, while Phantom Assassin has a more subtle one, perhaps French-Canadian.
  • Slark has what sounds like an Australian accent.
  • Through her echoing voice, Medusa sounds like she has a high class English accent, or an older American accent, like one from the 1940's -1950's.
  • Chaos Knight has a deep voice, but he appears to have a German accent.
  • Dazzle has a Mali accent.
  • Magnus has an Ethiopian accent.
  • Witch Doctor has a Jamaican accent.
  • Bloodseeker has a Mexican accent to go with his 'Sacrificial Tribal' Theme.
  • Shadow Shaman has an Indian or Iranian accent.
  • Sven and Tusk have Nordic accents. Sven sounds more like your typical Viking where Tusk sounds more like a modern Norwegian.
  • Brewmaster and Juggernaut have Japanese accents.
  • Lone Druid and Dark Willow have Scottish accents.
  • Skywrath Mage sounds Middle Eastern.
  • Lycan seems to have a Polish accent.
  • Pangolier has a French accent, and sprinkles French phrases into his voice lines.
  • Hoodwink speaks in a New Zealandic accent.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Everyone is equal at the beginning of the game. However, as the game progresses, one player often starts getting a lot of kills, then they run around to help gank other lanes, and before you know it that team is way ahead on kills, which equals money, which equals more and more powerful items, which means more and easier kills, and so on. That's not to say that the "losing" team can't end up mounting a comeback, especially if the "winning" team's high kill count is due to lots of early-game heroes, who will later be out-competed by the "losing" team's late-game heroes (this makes the game a race - can the early-gamers finish things off before the late-gamers fully come online and start beating them back?), but a team with a high kill count compared to the other generally has a big advantage that often can't be overcome.
• Unwanted Assistance: Certain abilities, such as Outworld Devourer's Astral Imprisonment, Bloodseeker's Bloodrage, and Bane's Nightmare, can be cast on both enemies and allies, and as a result can screw allies over if used badly. The scoreboard has a "disable help" function that prevents allies from using these abilities on you, intended to prevent this (and griefing).
• Video Game Remake: Before support for the old map was dropped, there used to be a near-perfect parity between each version of Dota 2 and the original Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars map from Warcraft III, with the majority of differences being graphic, interface or quality-of-life improvements. Several characters work differently because of the new engine, as the old Warcraft III engine put restrictions on certain spells: Rubick can steal transformation skills (most notably Elder Dragon Form and Shapeshift), and Luna's Moon Glaives work differently.
• Virtual Paper Doll: Not unlike another Valve game, heroes have cosmetic "slots" from which the players can customize them; clothes, armor, weapons, etc. The lower rarity ones can merely be described as plain reskins of the defaults, the better ones produce special effects, auditory or visual, while even better ones (especially of Immortal rarity) add another cosmetic layer on the heroes' abilities and attacks themselves. The highest tier, Arcana, often completely overhauls the character's model, animations, ability graphics, and voice (though earlier ones are just flashier Immortals).
  • A certain form of cosmetics known as "Personas" downright defies this: they will completely overhaul the hero's model, ranging from depicting as their younger selves (as in Invoker), their alternate canon selves (as in Mirana), or different people entirely (as in Phantom Assassin or Anti Mage), and they render traditional cosmetics as mentioned above unusable. Regardless, they are played identically to their non-persona selves.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: There are a rather significant amount of humanoid male heroes that do not wear shirts.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The aptly-named Mage Slayer causes its wielder's attacks to inflict a debuff which reduces the target's spell damage, deals damage over time, and grants 20% spell damage reduction, making it particularly useful against enemy mage heroes.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • Attempt repeatedly to use an ability when it's on cooldown or you don't have enough mana, and your hero will sound more and more agitated/annoyed with your rapid clicking. Troll Warlord especially hates it when you do that.
  Troll Warlord: Now I'm ready, to stab you.
  • Heroes with a built-in Blink will also call you out when you buy them a Blink Dagger.
    Anti-Mage: Blink Dagger? Really?
  • Riki, a character whose defining characteristic is being invisible nearly constantly throughout the game, either sounds very confused or gives a snarky reply about redundancy when he picks up an invisibility rune^note Though picking it up simply to deny the enemy from getting it is entirely valid. He'll still snark at you, of course.
  • Slardar and Spirit Breaker are both less than impressed if you buy Skull Basher for them. Not only is it completely unnecessary since they already have passive abilities that do the same thing, Skull Basher is coded to not work when used by those two heroes (and Faceless Void, though he doesn't have a response for it).
• A Wizard Did It: The accepted canon behind any bugs encountered within the game is that a particularly shitty wizard is mucking around with the battlefield.
• World of Badass: This is an ARTS, so of course.
• World of Ham: Every hero, even the most subdued (but not The Speechless), will mock enemies they kill and laugh when they score multi-kills. Also, many heroes will utter a hammy line when using a skill.
  • Generally speaking, heroes can be divided into three categories: Large Hams, Cold Hams, and Wisp. This should speak volumes about the titular Ancients' standards for recruitment.
• World of Pun: Just try finding a hero whose voice responses don't include a number of puns. No, Io, Primal Beast, and Phoenix don't count.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: The Demon Edge, a sword with a hilt made from Direstone and a blade of Radiant Ore.
• You Will Not Evade Me: When a melee hero uses Harpoon, the target enemy hero will be pulled within the user's attack range.

---

"...That is for you to decide."