Ok so I got in for DOTA 2 a few weeks back, and I have not touched this series since old Warcraft 3 days, so I'm gonna need some help playing this. Any tips for someone who hasn't played this in a long time?
So if anyone want's to add me it's Unstable Hamster, and Tensei I'll set up my DOTA to automatically join that channel.

Yeah there are a couple of heroes that are really straightforward to play (Lich, Lion, Tidehunter) so it's probably best to start with them first. The main thing is that both Lich and Lion have ways of easily replenishing their mana, while Tidehunter is just hard to kill.

None of them really require a lot of items to be effective either.

E: Oh, and definitely go for some bot games first to get used to the interface and stuff.

bleck: got too late yesterday. just accept the friend request and i can send the invite to you later.


i dunno about lion, tensei. there's the free mana replenish, yeah. his spells are easy to land, too, but deciding on how and when to use them isn't that easy for noobs. it takes a while to get the most effect out off the CC spells and use the burst dmg in non-embarassing and helpful ways.
ofc i'd play him as a noob, just because he's worthwhile to learn and still one of the easier heroes out there.
lich is definitely the ultimate noob hero. just dish out your slow and dmg, spam denies and shield, wait for a good clusterfuck to ult.

Sven, Slardar, Viper, and Zeus are pretty straightforward too I feel.

if you've got another to give away i'll take it. long time dota player.

relyanCe (derp)

New guy here trying to jump straight into the subject.

See, I played Dota back in the days before HoN came out so say about 2 years ago or something. And what I saw happening quite quickly with HoN was how many of the fancy Dota spell mechanics were replaced with more simple solutions ( plain stuns and slows for example ) to go better with the competitive scene.

So what I've been kinda wondering is if the Dota 2 team has been making the same adjustments. I guess it could come of as a stupid question seeing as they probably wouldn't go far without these adjustments. It's just that I've seen some of/most of the heroes they're going to include in the game and let's just say that some choices are quite surprising and, at least at first thought, a bit hard to imagine on the competitive scene.

I dunno, do you have a concrete example of a skill where this happened?

I feel like in both HoN and Dota, most skills have become increasingly complex. Ancient Apparition is a pretty recent addition to DotA, and the skill description for his ult is absolutely massive because of all the mechanics behind it.

Aside from that, a lot of the 'classic' skills that were basically just single-target stuns + damage like Sven's Storm Bolt, or Skeleton King's Hellfire Blast, have gotten some new effects (like adding a small AoE effect or a Slow)

It's definitely true that both games appear to be moving away from RNG-based effects like changing a % crit chance to a guaranteed crit that procs every 5 seconds or so.

Had to go back and take a look at the Dota rooster for the first time in a long while and after doing so I got to admit that it might have been wrong in my previous post.

As I previously mentioned I did the transition from Dota to HoN like 2 years ago and since then all the game changes has grown on to me.
But looking back at the Dota rooster I now remember that it was the selection of heroes that they chose to port to HoN rather than the spell adjustments ( of which, I realised there hasn't been that many after all ) that first struck me as a bit dull and backwards striving.

At that time Dota seemed to be at a point where the developers were constantly trying to come up with new cool hero concepts that was just getting more and more advanced.
You had interesting heroes like morphling, geomancer, phantomlancer and, to take an extreme example, invoker.
And HoN, while it still for many reasons was the next natural step, kinda put an end to that neat development by not only porting relatively simple heroes but also creating their own heroes by a similar formula.

Today when one's a little bit more familiar with the competitive scene it doesn't take much to realise that many of those old Dota heroes wouldn't work in real tournaments etc.
Still one can't help but getting a tad bit nostalgic while thinking back at the inovativity behind some of those old Dota heroes and therefore wonder to what extent we can expect Dota 2 to deliver innovative yet competively viable solutions and take the genre to new levels.

Current Invoker actually happens to be one of the strongest competitive picks in the game for the sheer versatility he gets with 10 spells, and Morphling was THE go-to carry for quite a long time. I don't think that unique concepts and competitive viability are necessarily mutually exclusive.

I suppose it's true that recent heroes in both Dota and HoN haven't had playstyles that were completely off the wall unique like Meepo, but there is still quite a lot of room for crazy innovation.

The most recent example I can think of is Tresdin, whose ult forces him and an enemy to autoattack each other for something like 5 seconds. If either of them dies, the winner of the duel will permanently gain 10 bonus damage, which is pretty much unlike any other hero in Dota.

E: Also, they're basically making a 1:1 port of WC3 DotA in the first place, so even heroes like Techies and Meepo will eventually make it in, competitively viable or not.

anyone wanna play sometime soon? i do

add me people i'm The Derrit or thederrit