Build flexibility also has a lot to do with how people perceive the "meta" and how everyone rages if you go a nonstandard route.
Meta is almost entirely fucking meaningless except as a way to predict what people doing predictable builds are doing. The only meta that matters is the going-on of the specific game you are in at the moment. The rest is just bandwagon bs.
Although the game has changed significantly - and I agree that there's a lot more pigeonholing, especially now with these shard dispensers at 20 minutes, I don't think it's "built" around certain predetermined builds. However, there's now this expectation that i.e. position 3 should build tanky aura items and teammates often rage when someone doesn't go that route. Or when a support hero goes for a more damage-oriented build.
Position probably does create certain itemization expectations but DotA players always expect specific shit out of how you play your hero regardless of whether or not that's a good idea. Like, the idea that Mjollnir is a higher value pickup when you have an Axe on team or that Diffusal Blade is worth going out of your way for as a str carry against Medusa is something that people have a hard time accepting sometimes. They have all these cookiecutter builds designed in a vacuum that do not respond to the conditions of the current game and consider that the only proper way to play those heroes.
With that said, I have definitely noticed that on some heroes Aghs, for instance, is just intended as a mandatory pickup, which I think is just bad design. There are a number of cases where you know the hero is meant to employ very specific items to be useful and doing otherwise leaves you with a crippled toolkit.
I think this partly due to the fact that the game was stuck in a deathball push style for too long.
The deathball push meta was largely a consequence of inflexible playstyles. The kind of player who does the same shit every game and gives up fast the moment it's not working out for him. So yeah, I never really experienced that deathball push meta because I was familiar with split pushing, roaming, stalling the enemy team while another lane got going, TPing behind the enemy team and clearing out their supporting creepwave so they couldn't push, mindgames, long-range harass, etc. Hitting the enemy team where they weren't was a good way of inflicting a lot of damage and taking unattended towers was a good way to get team gold back on track. I pretty much did that shit since the moment I started playing DotA, as I used to be a Nature's Prophet main and would go carry/split pusher on him. TPing behind the enemy deathball and taking out their creeps was one of my favorite things to do, and there wasn't even "bd protection" back then. Pushes would just lose momentum and give up if they were waiting around without creeps. If you bog down enemy deathballs you can also outfarm them as a team because they have 5 people together and you have 3-4 people slowing them down every time while teammates get gold and exp, maybe even towers.
As always, the biggest problem with Dota are the players. Things were much more fun when you could just do your shit without people having a heart attack over it.
You can just ignore the stupid shit. The bigger problem are the players who won't take advice or work with you. I'd take a bad player who was willing to listen and learn over a mediocre one who couldn't be taught shit. Honestly, making people have apoplectic rage meltdowns because I'd just built four boots on Luna ("one for each foot") was just a great bonus. (The real reason I did this shit was because treads are cost-efficient and doing something like phase boots + treads + treads + treads was actually very strong auto & stats, but trolling was a definite bonus.) Four boots Luna, support Spirit Breaker, support Slardar, support Sven (for a brief while when his aghs made his ult into an aura that gave everyone a weaker version of ult), carry Veno, carry Lion, carry Bane, carry Shadow Shaman (the aforementioned game where I noticed early on that my team's sole carry was a useless sack of shit poised to cost us the entire game), carry Warlock, carry Rubick, carry Disruptor, carry Ogre Magi, carry Treant, carry Shadow Demon, caster Axe (Soul Ring, Urn, and Dagon+ult shenanigans), Necronomicon Slardar, etc. And I've gone ganking with just about every single hero. Everything can gank if you know what you're doing and are willing to get maybe 1 or 2 items to help make it happen.
For a while I built old Ethereal Blade on Drow Ranger, Venge, Luna, Medusa, Riki, and more. That item was fucking underrated. Great stats for agi and a good disable or way to save allies that could also amp your nukes while providing damage and a slow. Sometimes I would build Dagon after I had Ethereal Blade (especially on Riki, since his auto was already massive and it was both a troll move and something that actually worked). When Octarine Core came out there was a while that I was just doing OCore Night Stalker for almost perma-night since it moved from 50 sec duration on 80sec cd to 50 sec duration on 60sec cd. OCore is much more effective on duration-based abilities.
I fucked around doing loads of wild shit and taking heroes out of their "intended" playstyle. It was part of what kept the game fun for me and I think an important part of getting good at the game too. You need to understand how roles function and how you can adapt your hero to different roles even if they aren't the normal way to play them. Paying attention to how the game is developing, adapting to the needs of the current game, and exploiting how your enemy team often
wont adapt are a big part of getting good at DotA. Situational awareness and being able to read the minimap is important too though. Minimap is often more important than the center of your screen in order to figure out wtf is going on.
I looked through old websites via waybackmachine and it seems to be that way. That's weird though because I clearly remember there being changes where creeps would then get some indicator/animation above them when the ultimate proc'ed. Those hero abilities etc apparently really seem to merge together and dates become fuzzy. Like, Smoke of Deceit was introduced in December 2010 and I could have sworn it came out a year or even two earlier. Hm, maybe it's a sign of getting old.
It's been over 17 years since IceFrog took over development. DotA itself is likely over 20 years old, and almost none of us are playing the old versions anymore. 5.84c still sees some play and many of the really old versions don't even work in the post-v1.24 WC3 world. You can still play pre-7.00 DotA on WC3 iirc, but thanks to Warcraft 3 Reforged shitting up the game, I'm not quite as interested.
It's a matter of risk/reward. If a pusher teams fails to win/get a big enough advantage, the other team will have the advantage at some point. With comeback mechanics, unless the pusher team won, it will inevitably lose in the end, unless the advantage is gigantic. There is also the issue of power creep/scaling. It didn't use to be that way that you could get gigantic advantages by confining the enemy team to their base. There were some, sure, but not thousands of gold worth (and exp and shards now too).
That risk factor is what kept the enemy team in the game, and also if you had a few buybacks on team or you managed to avoid having
everyone die on a failed push, you could generally stall out a counterpush long enough for the rest of your team to be back up and have another shot at ending things.
As always, the biggest problem with Dota are the players. Things were much more fun when you could just do your shit without people having a heart attack over it.
In the good old days people would only complain if you basically griefed with your items or did some stupid laning nonsense (like four players wanting to go safe lane -_-). (Playing badly/feeding excluded, of course.) To be fair, players generally sucked. And the worst players you could just always put on your banlist and kick from your hosted games. Just too bad that creating a new Battle.net account was done in less than a minute...
Ah, complaining about kill-stealing happened a lot too for some reason (mostly unjustified even). Some people really didn't understand the concept of a "team".
People complained about all sorts of stupid shit from the start in WC3. I remember because I did carry Nature's Prophet since 2006 and that was definitely not meta back then. But it's true that there were fewer cookiecutter builds and more people doing their own thing. In the WC3 days people don't act like solo mid was some kind of inviolate rule. People did double mid all the time and honestly there are times when double mid is a good call.
the only really awful change was re-designing techies. techies used to be such a cool hero and was totally unique to dota but now it's just another basic nuker
true in that a super unique playstyle was lost
but the hero was mostly for fun and in reality had low winrate and was useless
techies really meant 4v5 back in the day and everyone knew it
Only when played by shitters. Old Techies could
definitely carry a team to victory thanks to shit like Stasis and Remote Mines (esp. with Aghs) and was also a master of pushing and the king of turtling. You could also farm really well with Techies later on.
Bkb change is the wierdest change. Bkb was a must buy because of the insane damage and cc, it wasn't broken... Now it still is a must buy anyway. It's just worse, and imo it was an iconic item, changing it like this feels wrong.
well loads of iconic stuff was changed before like soul ring or hood
problem with bkb was that loads of heroes were useless once a hardcarry gets it
countering 85% abilities in the game with 1 item that costs 3800 g
BKB always felt like somewhat of a necessary evil, since otherwise carries were just properfucked by CC and the game would risk turning into a "CC uber alles" shitshow. The fact that they have BKB-piercing stuns is part of what makes Magnus and Beastmaster into underrated carries (BM is also underrated for vision).
