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Dota 2 Discussion (~Boston Majors & Road to TI7~)

What modes should we play?


  • Total voters
    67

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Dota isnt becoming LoL, it has a bunch of unique features

if anything, with every patch its becoming more and more different from LoL

Dota 2 is the best moba ever made, LoL is more popular cause its easier and looks infantile
I don't give a fuck about your butthurt or DotA fanboyism. Shit like "talents", neutral items, removal of random gold, fucking over early-game items, increasing GPM so the game resembles the EM mode that we all used to shit on, as well as new hero designs were all steps in the wrong direction. IIRC many of the item reworks also served to pigeonhole roles more severely. You no longer get bonus damage on Perseverance or Ring of Basilius, for instance.

But why would techies need to gank and teamfight when there are multiple heroes that do that already, and better at that?

because more versatile heroes is better than useless heroes

you can go mid with techies now, why is that bad?
They deliberately fucked up Techies and then replaced him with generic shit that no one wanted to see. Old Techies could cause crazy kills with his Land Mines and was still a force to be reckoned with in teamfights thanks to Stasis Wards and Remote Mines, plus he pushed and towered well since his Land Mines would clear waves and damage towers. The occasional Suicide kill was fun too (which is why they made sure to nerf the shit out of its damage and AoE and Techies movespeed and when that wasn't enough, double the cooldown, and then when that wasn't enough, replace it altogether). Then they fucked up his Land Mines because it was actually being used to kill people, which was too much for them. And they fucked up his Stasis Ward because it turns out the mass AoE stun was actually good and made Techies desirable at times, and they couldn't have that.

All in all they progressively fucked up all of Techies' abilities then they "fixed Techies" by deleting everything that made it Techies and replacing him with another hero, like they wanted. Techies didn't need to be a mid either, but even before this shit rework it was possible to mid as Techies depending on the circumstances, since he at least had very high attack range and could plant mines and stasis on ledges and runes and shit.

New Techies is honestly far worse than old Techies.

The game itself has been pushed into a 2-1-2 lane setup, with constant teamfighting since min 15.
2-1-2 is way more dynamic than trilane where the carry just farms and offlane is trying to survive/leech and nothing is happening

u can still trilane ofc but 2-1-2 feels more natural and intended
Yeah, you clearly forgot about shit like double mid and early junglers and roamers. And trilanes have their own counters and weaknesses that don't require you to trilane them right back. For instance, you can counter a 3-1-1 with a 1-2-2 if you feel like it. Or you can exploit their weak solo lane. Or you can put two heroes with strong long-range harass to put the squeeze on their trilane and try to wreck their pulls into the jungle, which done right will leave the 3 with poor gold and exp compared to your 2. And then there's global harass, like Invoker and Clockwerk, or global support, like Treant Protector and Crystal Maiden, to help out against the trilane. Anyhow, DotA has been moving more and more in the direction of enforcing playstyles and metas. That's a bad thing. Maybe if you fucking suck it feels good because at least the skill floor got raised a little, so to you it looks like the game has improved, but the skill ceiling was also brought down a lot, which means that to those of us who didn't fucking suck at the game, we could see it was dumbing down the game, kneecapping our options, and making it considerably less fun to play.

faster yes. Dota has always been the fastest moba. HoN was also pretty fast. LoL is a slow motion java game
First, stop calling the genre MOBA. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena sounds like something that ought to describe Quake 3 Arena, not the likes of DotA or LoL. I'm oldschool, so I prefer to go with AoS. Second, lol no. DotA usually runs 30 to 60 minutes. I have had matches that run over 60 minutes as well. Meanwhile LoL matches are decided much, much faster, by design. DotA has typically been one of the slowest games of its genre. Heroes of the Storm, Paragon, Overwatch, Demigod, whatever the fuck. They all have quicker matches than DotA does. If you are referring to gameplay speed, HoN has always been a bit quicker than DotA. DotA feels like it has input lag compared to HoN.

more teamfight oriented also yes. No one wants to watch people farm for 30 minutes, people want dynamic matches with crazy shit happening and crazy teamfights and comebacks
Okay, great. Good to know. You played at trash skill brackets. Retards who pursue 30 minute farming strategies more often than not cost their team the game, because if the rest of the team is playing 4v5 for 30 minutes while you're farming your ass off, the game is frequently already lost by the time you leave the woods and rejoin the rest of society as the enemy team has gotten fat on towers and kills while your own team has low gold and exp from dying and needing to move in big groups. Farming has its place, but dedicated farming has always been a retarded strategy. Force massive teamfights, gank the farmer while he's off in the jungle, just put the squeeze wherever the enemy team is outnumbered and try to get players on the enemy team to feed since they're down a guy (who is off farming in the woods) and then snowball that into bigger advantages, etc. There are plenty of ways to win a match when an idiot is trying to farm 30 minutes in the hopes that he will be able to totally dominate once he has all his god items. Hell, since these idiots are usually following extremely predictable builds with zero regard to the game's development or enemy lineup, you can often just proactively counterbuild their hero and items with the right items of your own, let their farmed carry emerge with his lategame items, and immediately flatten him. To put it simply, all you really need to do when the enemy team has a 30 minute farmer is be constantly aggressive and push deeper and deeper as a team. They're 4v5ing without their carry, so just do that and you win an irreversible advantage by the time their carry leaves woods.

easier to play no. Tell me which hero is easier to play now than before? you have more of everything now and every hero has effectively gotten 1-3 new skills via talents or shards
Look, dumbass. DotA used to have a -EM game option. The EM stood for Easy Mode and what it did was boost up gold and exp and make the game faster. Noobs loved it, but the rest of the playerbase hated it, with good reason. EM players were legit looked down upon, the majority of the playerbase avoided it, the competitive scene rejected it, DotA 2 didn't even implement it. Now everything is -EM. Now everyone has regen up the ass to make harass more of a non-factor than a place where lanes get decided. Now everyone gets free shit, and everyone is pushed deeper into playing specific ways and building specific items for their heroes. All of this serves to make the game easier and worse.
 
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The_Mask

Just like Yves, I chase tales.
Patron
Joined
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
luj1 - your ratings betray low MMR. Or, are your opinions on other games are just as shit as they are on RPGs.

Either way, we're expecting a full defense, otherwise, I'm thinking you're the cuck. Absinthe made very salient points.
 

KVVRR

Learned
Joined
Apr 28, 2020
Messages
652
Regardless of what others say blowing an entire team off the face of the earth in one giant explosion, actively making the game play like minesweeper more than dota and getting to buy time for your garbage carrys to actually play the game instead of being steamrolled 25 minutes in was FUN. It's not like there wasn't any counterplay, just buy wards/gem/bkb and have 1 (ONE) range hero. That's it, realistically that's all you'd need to counterplay Techies.
Now he's just another brool hero. Whoope. Can't wait until they start lobotomizing other heroes the community deem toxic. Who will be next? Puck? Invoker? PUDGE?
 

The_Mask

Just like Yves, I chase tales.
Patron
Joined
May 3, 2018
Messages
5,931
Location
The land of ice and snow.
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Pudge's OP right now, because it seems IceFrog is in a panic, and is trying to bring those TI 1/2/3 nostalgia crowd back. Dendi streaming Pudge mid almost non-stop. Even people like Miracle- have been forced to play Pudge carry. It's nuts.

My 2 cents? Orb effects not stacking in DotA 1, were the best mechanic that ever happened to the game. You had to choose. There was an unique gameplay element there. Now you can deal damage through the roof, and lifesteal at the same time. Fucking Anti-Mage Diffusal can shave off all your mana in less than 5s.

Not much to add to what Absinthe typed out. This is just what happens when you don't understand your own creation, I guess.
 

Nathir

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 3, 2017
Messages
1,203
Oh, I forgot to mention in my previous post. Tinker gets free BoTs at level 6 nowadays, lmao. March is removed so you don't even have to think about farming. Just hit 6 and start Tping around and nuking people. Like Absinthe said, the main mode is what EM used to be.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,904
I agree with most of Absinthe's points, I played dota for over a decade but haven't touched it since 2020. However, the real problem with the game - beyond all of the shoehorning of playstyles, "directed teamfight" feel, are the players themselves. The experience of playing dota is just fucking awful, in fact it might be worse than the old bnet days. No matter what bracket you're in, the proportion of quality games to complete waste of time is just depressingly low - 1 in 20 would be an optimistic estimate. More than anything, that's what made me quit. It just wasn't worth the time or aggravation.
 

Riddler

Arcane
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Joined
Jan 5, 2009
Messages
2,388
Bubbles In Memoria
Can't wait until they start lobotomizing other heroes the community deem toxic
Begin? This has been going on non-stop since after TI4 and the wild over correction to push strats.
 
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Lucumo

Educated
Joined
May 9, 2021
Messages
910

easier to play no. Tell me which hero is easier to play now than before? you have more of everything now and every hero has effectively gotten 1-3 new skills via talents or shards
Look, dumbass. DotA used to have a -EM game option. The EM stood for Easy Mode and what it did was boost up gold and exp and make the game faster. Noobs loved it, but the rest of the playerbase hated it, with good reason. EM players were legit looked down upon, the majority of the playerbase avoided it, the competitive scene rejected it, DotA 2 didn't even implement it. Now everything is -EM. Now everyone has regen up the ass to make harass more of a non-factor than a place where lanes get decided. Now everyone gets free shit, and everyone is pushed deeper into playing specific ways and building specific items for their heroes. All of this serves to make the game easier and worse.
Played and watched DotA for years starting in 2005 and yeah, -em was generally looked down upon. Most popular (and best) mode was -ar (at least in the EU), followed by -ap and then -apem. As years went by, -em became less and less common even. As for DotA 2, I only tried it out near the beginning and it was a step down. Hero design was shit and they got rid of things like orb priority. So I sticked to watching it only and I mostly noped out of that when they introduced the 7.00 patch with the talents and other crap. Absinthe is also right in that the game has been tremendously sped up and is easier to play in general. More gold, more exp, free couriers, easier movement around the map, more slots, not all damage cancelling potions etc etc. The only thing that has increased in difficulty is that the heroes have generally more active skills now. So you need to press more buttons...but all the regeneration has made mana and HP management a lot easier. What has also always annoyed me (and was introduced in the very beginning I think) was the inclusion of the comeback mechanic. If your team is behind, you get more for kills which is artificial and stupid. If anything, that increased the game length. However, even in the later DotA time line, it already got easier with the introduction of that axe that made last-hitting trivial and smokes which made killing someone easier.
And somewhat aside: DotA is a MOBA game but he is definitely wrong in saying that it's "the fastest" because those Warcraft III RPG maps and stuff like One Piece vs Bleach were MOBAs too and they are rather far removed from DotA or AoS or Battleships.

I agree with most of Absinthe's points, I played dota for over a decade but haven't touched it since 2020. However, the real problem with the game - beyond all of the shoehorning of playstyles, "directed teamfight" feel, are the players themselves. The experience of playing dota is just fucking awful, in fact it might be worse than the old bnet days. No matter what bracket you're in, the proportion of quality games to complete waste of time is just depressingly low - 1 in 20 would be an optimistic estimate. More than anything, that's what made me quit. It just wasn't worth the time or aggravation.
Tough to say since I can't really compare. Back in the day, most of the time you would have leavers. Of those, most would leave when it was starting to look bleak for their team, so the game would continue 5v4 and it was generally considered playable. When I started hosting my own games, I, too, would start using banlists which helped somewhat. Needless to say, if you won a game 4v5 it felt pretty good. 5v4 was just about closing it. The main issue was that players loved to farm and thus would take forever to end the game. Another thing which happened too often was whining about (alleged) ksing. Some players would get upset about it for some reason. Though, all in all, I think players abusing other players happened rather infrequently (again, in the EU). And this is about Bnet. I've never played on other servers that had ladders and whatnot and I guess it was a lot better there since players were more serious and competitive.

Techies always was hilarious back in the day. The hero could do nothing or everything, if it was in the hands of a competent player. I remember some player dropping an item somewhere and some bob (from my team) would move there to pick it up, only to get blown to smithereens. It was hilarious. I also once made a techie player quit immediately when my first purchase was a gem (after the standard chicken which I always bought) as a ranged int hero and destroyed all his mines which he had so carefully placed in and near my lane. Poor guy.
 
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Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Techies was not any more useless before the rework than he is now. You still don't see him in pro games, and his winrate hasn't significantly increased. According to dotabuff he has 46% wr in divine+immortal. Sniper has 47%, and this hero has been very bad for years now. You can go mid with techies now, but you can go mid with many other heroes. In return you lose a hero that offers a much more unique playstyle. Now don't get me wrong, I hated old techies. But he was a unique addition to the game and offered a playstyle you couldn't get anywhere else. Now you can go mid and spam Q to farm and harrass? Amazing. Never been done before.
Yep, it was strictly done to remove old Techies.

Sniper has 47%, and this hero has been very bad for years now.
The main problem with Sniper is that most of his builds are slow to take off and he needs early-game items to style on enemies and snowball his way to victory, which has been negatively impacted by the current itemization shift towards building lategame items. You can still do Sniper with Boots+Wind Lace+Blades of Attack+MoM (fast MoM is good) with a Headshot-focused build (Get 1 rank of Q and max Headshot then Take Aim) and pulverize your opposition then build your way into perhaps Treads and definitely Diffusal Blade (2.5k gp for +55 dmg, +15% attack speed, a good slow, and a smidge of armor and mana is good value). After that you're looking at TP Boots (you need MS and these boots pay for themselves by letting you farm/roam and still TP in position whenever you want while saving you gold on scrolls - btw getting both TP boots and Treads is also decent value for the gold), Deso, BKB, Crystalis, or whatever (Skadi? Butterfly? Nullifier? Divine Rapier?). For ambushing enemies just drop Q (usually you want to hit them at the very edge of the AoE, with the AoE extending in the direction they need to flee in), hit MoM, and pulverize them with auto. If they are still alive when MoM runs out, immediately Q again for vision and ult. One of the important parts of this build is that this is not a farming build. The goal is to go in hard and heavy and start ganking people fast to get hero kill gold and keep them from accumulating too much gold. I often used a Quelling Blade just to perform treecut ambushes. It was my 225 gp shadowblade. When ganking people, it is best to gank people from the direction they normally need to flee in so they have a hard time escaping. Sealing escape routes is really big, but if you're fast enough and your damage is good enough you can just run at them, put up that shrapnel, and fire away. MoM can let you farm nicely in-between openings but you should not start lazy farming when there are perfectly good victims to gank. Many times you should specifically gank their carry before he's remotely farmed (This is the benefit of the early MoM.) in order to wreck his exp and put him behind on items. That's how you start out-carrying with Sniper.

Dota always was fast paced, that is true. When I said they are making the heroes faster I literally meant that. Mostly having in mind movespeed increases across the board, or giving mobility to heroes that usually did not have it, like Zeus jump or Nightstalker flight, and new heroes generally having crazy mobility. Like MK, Marci, Pango. As a result the map gets smaller, split pushing is less effective and you get constant 4v4s while the carry tries to farm.
They also nerfed Phase Boots (especially for ranged), massively nerfed the movespeed on Mask of Madness (from +30% to flat 20) in addition to making it silence the user, nerfed Sange & Yasha in several ways (much lower movespeed, no more bonus flat damage, no more attack slow proc, lower attack speed bonus), and pushed Drum of Endurance into more of a hard support item. As a result TP boots and Boots of Bearing are the premier movespeed items, but hey, at least there's naked wind lace now. They did make ridiculous blink daggers though, and the new emphasis on gap-closing moves is part of what fucks up Sniper. Honestly, raising movespeed for all heroes mostly has the effect of slightly raising convenience while slightly reducing the impact of distance and positioning. It also adversely affects those heroes who did not get movespeed bonuses.

Even in the era of "farming for 30 minutes" matches were dynamic with crazy shit happening all the time. It's just your opinion that was boring. Carry was always the most popular role besides mid. So it's not like people hate farming. And the other 4 players weren't literally sitting in fountain waiting for the carry to farm up, they were doing their own thing. Besides, Dota always had crazy teamfights. But it also had more variety and strategy in how you approach the game.
Actually, what people liked was dominating people with farmed items. The actual process of farming was suffered as a necessary evil and it always made them buttmad that if they tried to farm for 30 minutes (which has always been a shit strategy) the game could already be lost by the time they finished farming. The problem was just that the 30 minute farm playstyle was shit and only worked because the enemy team was too retarded to capitalize on your team's weakness or gank farmers (ie. a low skill bracket strategy) and once you had your super items you were probably going to dominate (because the enemy team was too retarded to counter your hero either), but it really only took 1 guy who understands how to put the squeeze and snowball when the enemy team has a farmer to make 30 minute farm strategies implode.

Zeus gets a jump, to remove his only weakness.
Zeus's bigger weaknesses were BKB and Khadgar's Pipe of Insight, but the jump is indeed dumb. It removes positioning considerations from Zeus by letting him easily correct his position with a jump and it conveniently debuffs the nearest hero with massive movespeed and attack speed slows to make it even easier for him to gank or escape someone. That's just wrong. Makes me feel like I'd need to burn a BKB charge or a Lotus Orb to effectively gank Zeus if I don't have a silence or disable. They also raised Zeus's base MS from 295 to 315 and he has another +20 ms awaiting him as his level 10 talent. That's also messed up. The addition of invis-revealing to his lightning bolt is also something I'm not really on board with. It diminishes the point of invis wards and makes him a very effective de-warder without any real investment.

Windrunner can move and attack during her ult.
She could always do that. The only difference was that it was very easy to break ult if you weren't paying attention. Now you can switch targets and shit while retaining ult if you go back to your original target. Honestly, this wasn't a bad change.

Razor can also move and attack during his link.
Pretty sure he could always do that, ever since he got static link.

Slark ult is not invisibility anymore, you become completely untargetable.
Yeah that was disgusting. He's largely uninteractible during ult. All you have are AoE damage (which is less helpful because Slark regens up a storm while invis also) and AoE stuns (which are defeated by a timely Dark Pact, let alone BKB), so doing something about Slark during ult is mostly a question of whether you have a non-dispellable, BKB-piercing AoE ult.

The patch logs during the years are full of reduced cast points and turn rates.
True. That actually fucks a lot of the appeal of ganking someone from behind. The combination of Turn Rate + Cast Point made it very troublesome for someone to do a 180 turn and fire an ability at a ganker, and if they did they'd often have to do another 180 turn to flee.

Drow ult got changed from bonus agility to procs of bonus damage that ignore armor and evasion. You don't even need items, you will melt anyone with your ult.
Eh, old ult was more of a "lol I don't need items" thing. Between Precision aura and Marksmanship Drow was a pretty hard hitter with good attack speed with zero investment. The new Marksmanship giving bonus agi as a percentage of DR's current agi is pretty odd though, but the big convenience is the new Multishot giving Drow a free AoE ability when previously she had none.

Templar assassin gets stun at lvl 25, removing her only weakness (no CC).
I honestly don't give a fuck about that. A 1 second stun off of Meld at 25 is quite useful but level 25 is pretty late and nothing was stopping TA from building Orchid or whatever if she needs a CC, especially now that it's not even an int item. I'd sooner take issue with the level 15 talent that gives bigger psi blades or free 20% evasion as something that makes Templar easier to play.

You can't deny changes during the years are just giving heroes stuff they don't need, free damage, and making them more straightforward and easier to play. Coupled with the gold inflation and regen being a non-issue the game lost a lot of tactical/strategic depth.
Yeah this is all true. They also made Ethereal Blade stop being an agi item and shifted it over to an int item with spell damage amplification. That was a really bad call done primarily to make it even more convenient for int heroes to use it as a nuking item when old EBlade was more interesting, and they made Orchid stop being an int item to make it even more convenient for agi and str heroes to pick up. As for boosted base hero regen, that is not only a neat convenience in general, it also reduces the effect of harass, saves a good amount of gold on regen items, and makes the game more forgiving to people who carelessly waste mana and health. The downside to the boosted regen is that it makes it less effective to try to push enemies into a position of weakness, harass them out of lane, or adversely impact their gold with pressure on their health and mana bars.

Regardless of what others say blowing an entire team off the face of the earth in one giant explosion, actively making the game play like minesweeper more than dota and getting to buy time for your garbage carrys to actually play the game instead of being steamrolled 25 minutes in was FUN. It's not like there wasn't any counterplay, just buy wards/gem/bkb and have 1 (ONE) range hero. That's it, realistically that's all you'd need to counterplay Techies.
Now he's just another brool hero. Whoope. Can't wait until they start lobotomizing other heroes the community deem toxic. Who will be next? Puck? Invoker? PUDGE?
Yeah, range + gem was pretty much the bane of Techies' existence. If you had summons you could also use them to just trigger any land mines. BKB would still take damage from Land Mines and Suicide iirc (the one perk of mixed damage) until later patches where they removed the mixed damage (but Land Mines became physical). If you had aghs you could plant mines right at the land mine sign though, which would give unbreakable invisibility, and if you plant mines on ledges you won't have vision until it's too late, but people usually get wise to those stunts. And you could still use aghs to toss remote mines from a distance and Eul's with a Blink Dagger to set up stasis and other things. You weren't totally useless, but a simple gem did wreck a lot of the Land Mines playstyle. And that was before they did shit like give Zeus the ability to spot the invisible with his lightning bolts.

Deleting Techies is one of those signs that the developers really object to heroes that don't abide the meta. I don't think they'll go for Pudge next, he's too well-liked. I think they're mostly going to try to tune heroes deeper into certain intended metas, build patterns, and playstyles.

Pudge's OP right now, because it seems IceFrog is in a panic, and is trying to bring those TI 1/2/3 nostalgia crowd back. Dendi streaming Pudge mid almost non-stop. Even people like Miracle- have been forced to play Pudge carry. It's nuts.
People like to see Pudge hooks. It makes the stream-watching, esports-loving crowd happy. Trouble is, it doesn't make the game more fun to play.

My 2 cents? Orb effects not stacking in DotA 1, were the best mechanic that ever happened to the game. You had to choose. There was an unique gameplay element there. Now you can deal damage through the roof, and lifesteal at the same time.
Eh, I guess there's an argument to be had on the subject of lifesteal, but there was Skeleton King (Wraith King now) and later Vladimir's Offering to give heroes lifesteal without the orb effect, and then you had the likes of Naix and Brood with their own non-orb lifesteal. For the most part I'm not really convinced that the exclusivity of orbs was really necessary out of some form of balance consideration. It just limited item build combinations. At the end of the day orbs like Skadi and Deso weren't that necessary. S&Y (or just Sange) used to give you an attack slow anyway, deso was nice but there were plenty of ways to get your damage multipliers in, like Burize (now called Daedalus) or Butterfly, and Diffusal was probably the most mandatory orb for certain heroes, but the people using Diffusal probably used a Vlads alongside it anyway. Before vlads it was probably a bit uglier for them though, yeah.

Fucking Anti-Mage Diffusal can shave off all your mana in less than 5s.
Anti-Mage was always the kind of hero to shave off all your mana in 5 or so seconds, unless you had a massive pool, evasion, or ethereal. That's what he does. Manta Style + AM used to give 100% of his Mana Break passive. They only changed that in 7.23 (halved effect on illus now), when they also increased the size of AM's Mana Break. For a long time Phantom Lancer or Naga Siren with Diffusal+Manta would also obliterate mana pools in very short order, until they nerfed Diffusal. And before that there was a time when Manta flat-out included Diffusal Blade's effect (and used it as an ingredient) and gave 40 mana break to the hero and all illus at 100%.

Not much to add to what Absinthe typed out. This is just what happens when you don't understand your own creation, I guess.
I have my doubts that IceFrog is still at the helm of this. Seems like other people have been taking over game design a bit. Maybe IceFrog is still involved, but nowhere near as actively as before, maybe he's left to other projects, or maybe he's gone full retard, I don't know, but I suspect the 7.00 was when IceFrog stopped really leading it, because typically in DotA version history a new major version means a new person leading the design and that's when the design started getting wild and looking more like what pleases marketing (more active competitive e-sports matches, casualized mechanics, copycatting LoL shit, free talent shit, random item drops to make the game more interesting for morons who can only repeat the same cookiecutter build, playstyle, and strategy each match) than the way it was previously designed. With that said, I know for a fact IceFrog hates Techies and it's not like IceFrog hasn't done gay enforced meta shit in the 6.XX days, like the implementation of BD protection, but as you noted, the current DotA design looks like it was designed by people who do not actually understand DotA.

Played and watched DotA for years starting in 2005 and yeah, -em was generally looked down upon. Most popular (and best) mode was -ar (at least in the EU), followed by -ap and then -apem. As years went by, -em became less and less common even.
Personally I favored -SH mode (Everyone on both teams plays the exact same hero.) which DotA 2 didn't even bother to implement, but man did that mode lead to a lot of fun and interesting item builds. -AR was good at making sure people knew how to adapt and improvise though, but DotA 2 nuked random gold and then removed the random option because I think they hated randomers in AP ranked. You can still have it manually spin to a random hero and select it if you want, but they basically killed randoming because they were the kind of player who would get anally devastated if they had a randomer on team.

I agree with most of Absinthe's points, I played dota for over a decade but haven't touched it since 2020. However, the real problem with the game - beyond all of the shoehorning of playstyles, "directed teamfight" feel, are the players themselves. The experience of playing dota is just fucking awful, in fact it might be worse than the old bnet days. No matter what bracket you're in, the proportion of quality games to complete waste of time is just depressingly low - 1 in 20 would be an optimistic estimate. More than anything, that's what made me quit. It just wasn't worth the time or aggravation.
Tough to say since I can't really compare. Back in the day, most of the time you would have leavers. Of those, most would leave when it was starting to look bleak for their team, so the game would continue 5v4 and it was generally considered playable. When I started hosting my own games, I, too, would start using banlists which helped somewhat. Needless to say, if you won a game 4v5 it felt pretty good. 5v4 was just about closing it. The main issue was that players loved to farm and thus would take forever to end the game. Another thing which happened too often was whining about (alleged) ksing. Some players would get upset about it for some reason. Though, all in all, I think players abusing other players happened rather infrequently (again, in the EU). And this is about Bnet. I've never played on other servers that had ladders and whatnot and I guess it was a lot better there since players were more serious and competitive.
Honestly, the BNET DotA crowd was often lower skill than DotA 2's, I recall. There was a good length of time when you could play both and it was obvious. BNET DotA was much more likely to plague you with the occasional dumbass who built naked boots or did really stupid shit. DotA 2 crowd was a lot more into flavor of the month and cookiecutter shit though. In BNET DotA double mid was fairly normal and people tolerated unorthodox builds better compared to DotA 2 players. In DotA 2 if you tried double mid often enough someone would flip out and possibly even start feeding. DotA 2 players were way, way more into bandwagon metas and not deviating out of it in the slightest. Many of them approached heroes as if the question of how to build and play them was a solved problem and all you had to do was follow the standard path to win, and if you did anything else you were bad. I still remember so many retards shitting on me for playing TP Boots Ember Spirit when he first came out (Meta was Phase Boots.) then apparently some pro did it and suddenly not playing TP Boots Ember Spirit was the shit build. The new position system also pushes for certain hero role lineups, which is fun for bads maybe, but worse for good players. DotA 2 players are a bit worse at accepting lane swaps too, even though it's often a smart call when a lane is not working out for you. But at least with lane swaps you just insert yourself in the new lane and leave them to take your old lane or deal with the new trilane where you take farm, and usually they'll take it. But I've had DotA 2 players tell me to stfu just for telling them that Orb of Venom is a good pickup on Riki. Hey, it wasn't meta.

BNET DotA also had a lot of leavers, yes. It's part of the reason why people on BNET switched to hosting bots with banlists. If you ragequit, you were banned, and some banlists were shared between different hosting groups. 4v5 was never that hard though. Splitting that extra hero's gold between the rest of your team usually did a lot to get people caught up or suddenly rich enough to build that item to counter the enemy team's heroes, and often enough you could use the leaver to farm more gold and push the occasional lane for team, not to mention your leaver was often a feeder so you were better off without them. I've won plenty of 4v5s without trouble. The worst was the people who would deliberately feed the enemy team or who sold all their items and bought wards to waste all their gold before disconnecting, but that was less common than your regular DC. Now, winning with a dedicated feeder on team was a good feeling alright, and I've done it a number of times too. Not easy though.

Techies always was hilarious back in the day. The hero could do nothing or everything, if it was in the hands of a competent player. I remember some player dropping an item somewhere and some bob (from my team) would move there to pick it up, only to get blown to smithereens. It was hilarious. I also once made a techie player quit immediately when my first purchase was a gem (after the standard chicken which I always bought) as a ranged int hero and destroyed all his mines which he had so carefully placed in and near my lane. Poor guy.
Yeah gem counters Techies pretty hard, but there are some hilarious games against all those idiots who do not understand how to deviate from their build for a single item that they obviously need, and I've had a lot of fun playing Suicide Techies also, but man was setting up Suicide kills a pain in the ass with the aggressively nerfed AoE radius (It was bad enough that you were better off manually moving into enemies before blowing up than targeting with Suicide because he would blow up at a melee range that was far enough that it was too easy for enemies to walk out of the full damage AoE before your cast animation finished.) and 270 ms, iirc. IceFrog really, really, really fucking hated Suicide and made sure to nerf it into the ground, compared to the original Techies with the Suicide ult that did 1500/2500/3500 damage in a giant AoE. He also made sure it was never ported to Heroes of Newerth (HoN team also hated Techies) back when he was lead there. The mining playstyle he was somewhat more okay with, but it all still got nerfed and ultimately removed also. Ultimately HoN added some Techies mines to Engineer iirc.
 
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Cromwell

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Actually, what people liked was dominating people with farmed items. The actual process of farming was suffered as a necessary evil and it always made them buttmad that if they tried to farm for 30 minutes (which has always been a shit strategy) the game could already be lost by the time they finished farming.

I think in shit brackets like mine it was also done not only because they didnt know better but it was a convenient excuse. if it worked you were the big bad hero, if it didnt your team did not protect you enough or tok stupid fights. It was üretty much pve until you were powerful enough to just steamroll through the pvp part.

Many of them approached heroes as if the question of how to build and play them was a solved problem and all you had to do was follow the standard path to win, and if you did anything else you were bad.

another thing were its easier to just tehorycraft and do what better players do instead of getting better at playing the game. You could always shit on the people that have build not ideal items when that didnt mean much especially in the low brackets
 

Nathir

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I agree with most of what you said Absinthe, and that's a good breakdown of sniper. But on some things I disagree:

Zeus gets a jump, to remove his only weakness.
Zeus's bigger weaknesses were BKB and Khadgar's Pipe of Insight, but the jump is indeed dumb. It removes positioning considerations from Zeus by letting him jump in and out of position and it conveniently debuffs the nearest hero with massive movespeed and attack speed slows. That's just wrong. Makes me feel like I'd need to burn a BKB charge or a Lotus Orb to effectively gank Zeus if I don't have a silence or disable.They also raised Zeus's base MS from 295 to 315 and he has another +20 ms awaiting him as his level 10 talent. That's also messed up. The addition of invis-revealing to his lightning bolt is also something I'm not really on board with. It diminishes the point of invis wards and makes him a very effective de-warder without any real investment.

Pipe has been an underwhelming item for a while now. I don't think I've seen a lot of pipes built at the last major (if any?) despite Zeus being a semi-popular pick and magic damage being high in general. It's too expensive and doesn't do enough for the price. And the offlaner has mostly become another core anyway, so it's cheaper to just buy another bkb. Another thing was that Zeus used to have mana issues throughout the whole game. Nowadays mana is not a problem. So you can go Zeus support and if he forces a bkb, he did his job already.

Windrunner can move and attack during her ult. She could always do that. The only difference was that it was very easy to break ult if you weren't paying attention. Now you can switch targets and shit while retaining ult if you go back to your original target. Honestly, this wasn't a bad change.Razor can also move and attack during his link.Pretty sure he could always do that, ever since he got static link.

No, Razor definitely couldn't attack and move in the past. Windranger aswell. You had to stop to attack.
Eh, old ult was more of a "lol I don't need items" thing. Between Precision aura and Marksmanship Drow was a pretty hard hitter with good attack speed with zero investment. The new Marksmanship giving bonus agi as a percentage of DR's current agi is pretty odd though, but the big convenience is the new Multishot giving Drow a free AoE ability when previously she had none.

Disagree. The armor ignore is way stronger as a "lol i don't need items thing" than + flat agility. And she still gets bonus agi anyway.
 

The_Mask

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Pipe's an issue, because it costs too much. And pretty much all of its components are more gold/EHP worth.

It *can* be good if the enemy line-up is ALL magic damage. But those kinds of line-ups are extremely rare on a professional level.
 

ferratilis

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I stopped following Dota when this guy was fired 8 years ago, and now he's back. Gaben probably put him through one of those Chinese reeducation camps, so humor won't be as good as 10 years ago when he and incontrol could talk shit for hours, but still it's good to see him back. Hosts are a huge part of any e-sport, Dota and Starcraft especially.
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
I like Slacks and Purge as a duo. I know, I am retarded. There's just something about the "toxic but funny gamerman" + "unfeeling unsmiling autist" dynamic I like.
 

whocares

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I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.
 
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Nathir

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Maybe you had to be there, but together I find them very funny. It's all about watching Purge (not) react to his antics and crack a tiny hint of a grin 1 in 100 games...

Also the video where Purge coaches him and discovers his keybinds is an absolute joy. "...your... your one item is bound to '$'." - "Yeah, for Midas!"
You can see the man die inside, it's great.

It's fine, you don't have to justify anything. I don't hate Slacks, he's alright. I just don't like his antics and style of humor, and usually have to resort to muting the stream if he is on. I just posted my immediate gut reaction there.
I like Slacks and Purge as a duo. I know, I am retarded. There's just something about the "toxic but funny gamerman" + "unfeeling unsmiling autist" dynamic I like.

The problem is that Slacks isn't funny.
There must be something very wrong with you to not find this shit hilarious:


I haven't played dota for close to 10 years now, and still occasionally get a chuckle from it.


Sorry, I had to mute the video after 25 seconds. I'm sure something funny is in it somewhere.
 

Lucumo

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Messages
910
I generally prefer serious casters with a proper voice. The only "unprofessional" ones I liked were the likes of MadMortigan, Mandurang, Synderen, Blitz and Black^ back in 2009. Although Black^ was basically only a stand-in and Synderen started out as one but became more active over time. Clowns are an absolute no-no.
 
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Slacks isn't a caster though, clowny casters would be something like SUNSfan.

I like a little bit of both really. Casts can be too dry and "serious business", but also too clowny and relaxed.
 

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