Dota 2

[Unstable Hamster]

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.

[Tensei]

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.

Edited December 30, 2011 by Tensei

[Nase]

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.

[Dhsu]

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

[relyanCe]

my 2nd invite is up for grabs if anyone wants it. i got mine here so i figured i should give something back.

i'd prefer to give the key to someone who knows and likes the genre. otherwise there's always the danger of the player not touching the game after 2 depressing matches.

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

relyanCe (derp)

[Mojaquin]

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.

[Tensei]

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.

[Mojaquin]

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.

[Tensei]

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.

Edited December 31, 2011 by Tensei

[The Derrit]

anyone wanna play sometime soon? i do

add me people i'm The Derrit or thederrit

[Bleck]

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.

[Bleck]

but anyways skeleton king is fucking awesome

[Tensei]

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.

Edited January 1, 2012 by Tensei

[Nase]

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.

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.

[Tensei]

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/dota-guide-valve.php

Edited December 31, 2011 by Tensei

[Nase]

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!

[Tensei]

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?

[eternal Zero]

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.

[Dhsu]

6.73 update :DDD

[Tensei]

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!

[Bleck]

silencer looks pretty coolHOLY SHIT SKELETON KING BUFFS

[Capa Langley]

What's the ultimate spell against women? Silencer's ultimate.

[Tensei]

Tidehunters new ult animation that plays when he's on low health.

Goddamn I love this patch though. Sick buffs to STR carries like Dragon Knight, Skelly King and Kunkka, Rod of Atos and cheaper Orchid indirectly help out INT carries, and Axe is manlier than ever.

[Bleck]

What's the ultimate spell against women? Silencer's ultimate.

sexism is awesome and totally cool am I right guys

[The Derrit]

i haven't played in forever but played a game this morning with sniper. i was all like 'this is awesome i can deny and lasthitting has depth again' and then i was all like 'oh cool after i picked first everyone else on my team picked a melee carry oh cool look they all died oh look cool ragequit at 8 minutes in'

and then i remembered why i hadn't played in two weeks