Here are my criticisms of Dota 2 after one botgame;

- The GUI is really thick and ugly. This, coupled with the relatively small map area represented on screen, makes it sort of hard to play compared to LoL. This is also a problem I had with HoN.

- I don't like the old-school style where I have to actively select my hero to control them. I understand that a lot of heroes have minions that need to be controlled individually for greatest effect, but there should be a better control solution than basic RTS execution.

- Everything looks really dark on the Dire side. Like, really fucking dark. I can't see anything levels of dark. This might be because of colorblindness for me, but still.

- The shop interface is unintuitive, just like HoN and LoL. This might be because of my lack of experience with the items themselves, but it was still pretty difficult to even find what sort of items I wanted to even start looking for.

- It feels really slow. I initially chalked this up to lag, but nase mentioned that he thinks it feels pretty sluggish too, so I'd like to hear from others what their opinion on this is.

but anyways skeleton king is fucking awesome

It's possible that what you guys perceive as lag are basically the different upswing animations for spells and attacks, combined with turning speed. Certain heroes like Lina or Batrider are balanced around their attack animation being extremely shitty, with their spells making up for it. There are in fact very few spells that have no windup time whatsoever.

Turning speed definitely matters as well; it will take quite a bit longer to cast a spell/attack something directly behind you than in front of you, which is something of a measure to prevent ranged carries with a slowing attack from kiting enemies nonstop.

The shop really is unintuitive, but at this point I'm kind of starting to doubt whether it's even possible to make a good shop interface with that many items. One really nice thing about it is that it's possible to edit your recommended items from ingame (there's an edit button at the top left of the shop), so if you do that for every hero, you won't even need to maneuver through the shop itself anymore.

Also yes, Skeleton King owns, and it surprises me how fun to play a hero with only one active skill can be. Also has the best guide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0YQP4TQdsA

this guy did a plain walking, no turning test. he does make it sound like there's a fixed .11 second delay built into ALL actions. add turning speed etc on top of that.
i'm not sure if his test is legit or if it has been fixed. it sure does feel like it's still the same.

That test WAS legit but that delay got fixed in the October 27th patch, the video is almost 2 months old.

You can test it out for yourself by going into a practice game and casting Sandkings Burrowstrike (one of the rare skills with no cast time) straight ahead of you. The difference with HoN (for me at least) is almost negligible.

E: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news...uide-valve.php

ok my bad. i'm getting used to it anyway...

i've been having a really bad streak with the matchmaking randoms though. need more players badly!

Yeah I probably won't be playing for the next two weeks or so, since I'm in the US now. Then again, maybe MAG will have a LAN set up? :<

Best quote of my night:

Arek: you aren't Zero.
Arek: your voice is lighter
Zero: new mic?
Arek: where's that rape voice I'm used to

Bwahaha. The old fire isn't as hot as it used to be but I still got the touch. After that Tide told me off for going for a gank he didn't want I made sure to KS him every chance I got. I probably should have ended that game say maybe 5-1 cause the rest of those kills were surely stolen. I love Zeus.

6.73 update :DDD

All these changes are great but probably my favorite addition are the LoL-style pixel art minimap hero icons, as seen here.

Can't wait to play again!