The Most Significant Generalized Criticism of Dota 2

What game companies need to do these days is take in a variety of generalized criticisms of their games and then take a vote from their first degree of higher experienced players of which criticisms holds the most weight.

At the moment, my highest criticism of Dota 2 revolves around a combination of 3 factors.

-Melee/Missile
-Movement Speed
-Missing skills to address role weakness (At least 1 skill)

If you are a melee hero that is average to lower speed, then your skills obviously need to function in such a way that addresses focus fire harassment from missile heroes especially ones that are of average and higher speed and ultimately ones who have skills that effect movement speed, (This ends up narrowing down to Drow as the best example)

I pick apart the Centuaur Warrunner to make my case....

-He's not a Carry, yet, He's not a Support
-He's not a Jungler
-He has 300 run/walk speed (strictly average)
-Melee

All of these factors scream that this character needs a skill that balances out and addresses team missile focus fire harassment, yet, the two skills that would do this either have a long cooldown(being his ultimate, stampede) and both stampede and his skill return not being good until late game as both of their damage is based on a percentage of this strength.

Take note that Stampede relates to movement speed, while return would potentially address focus fire from multiple heroes if he had some kind of passive life recovery, perhaps even better would be a low mana costing life recover, but he has none of these.

His stun is short range which fortifies the point that he would need speed just to get in range to stun most opponents. Using stampede to get in range and then stomping is not exactly fun when you are doing it as a means of tactical harassment... wait for your cooldown and... oh yeah, the enemy has full life again.... where's is this concept on the harassment level?

Blink Dagger? that's a high costing item that has no perks aside from blink.

It is realized that he is meant for farming with a combination of stomp and double edge, which is why many times I will start with soul ring and boots of tranquility... Soul ring allowing for continual stomps and having life regen/mana regen to support more stomps and double edges, and boots of tranq to support double edge and getting some kind of speed out of the deal.

With soul ring, boots of tranq and mask of madness you can start jungling, but you haven't done anything with strength which is, again, what is suppose to help him combat the whole team missile focus fire harassment.

There only leaves one truth for this character when it comes to combating many of the missile characters out there, and especially ones like drow....

You have to figure out what character works best with him and get with that character in order to have a chance against the team focus fire harassment....

And I don't think people really want to rely so heavily on pairing up with the right ally in order to have a viable chance.

And finally, it isn't just about identifying issues which could be fixed with some general design rules...

It's about fleshing out, as best as possible, the hopeless situations which should more then be acknowledged in competitive games which pride themselves enough to give people the label of "professional"

Please have some accountability for the love of God....

I can't understand anything from your argument.You are comparing Drow to Centaur,both different in role and in the way they are played.

Centaur's stun is meant to be set-up or just getting closer to someone else with Stampede(that also slows).So you either going to need a set-up stun or you just need to flank opponents,or just use blink dagger.

I think he's trying to say that it's not that easy laning Centaur against Drow, and that somehow the game should be radically redesigned so it fits his expectations. Not sure I really get it either - heroes NEED weaknesses to help make this into a team game.

Laning melee heroes against ranged isn't always easy, but melee heroes do have distinct advantages too. A hero like Centaur is so tanky he's very difficult to bring down. Items like Stout Shield and Tranquil Boots make it very easy for Centaur to absorb harassment. And contary to your argument, Return is actually most effective early game - it has a minimum damage amount plus a % of strength to give it some scaling. Late game it's not brilliant, early game it's pretty strong.

Hood of Defiance is one of the best items on him, big HP regeneration and magic damage reduction allows you to spam Double Edge. Soul Ring is really unnecessary.

Most people's general criticisms of DOTA would be:

- The attitude of some of the community
- The length of time you commit to a game (no drop in/out)
- Difficult early learning curve

This had me laughing so hard.

Based on what I can make of what he was saying, apparently he thinks that melee and missile (I think missile means "ranged"), movement speed differences, and specific skills that cover up the weaknesses of each character specific to their role are somehow... wrong? Imbalanced? Needs changing? And because of that, people need to find the most appropriate lane partner and he's disturbed because they don't in his opinion.

You really shouldn't generalize heroes like that. All heroes are good, but different - you can't just say you should address focused fire by being tanky just because a hero is melee.

If all heroes could counter everything, it would defy the purpose of having a team game. From previous posts by you I feel that most of your considerations are for solo-pub-stomping. So you always consider how to build up the hero the best to be able to get kills, mostly ignoring the fact that you have allies or roles. In fact, if all heroes are all-round, that would almost defy the purpose of having roles at all.

Centaur is a very useful tank. Even without his old Ultimate, he is still exceptionally tanky, and if you build the right items on him (as already mentioned, ex. Hood of Defiance), you have a great tank-initiator (which I consider his main roll). No he doesn't have a direct counter for focus fire, but that is what his stun-support ally is for. And the carry will have taken out half of his life before he even really started focusing you, which is anyway a bad thing to do.

I find that Centaur's main farming is ganks on other heroes. With his ultimate and stun he can really effectively charge in (with TEAMMATES), and perform excellent ganking and burst damage.

And Blink is a huge perk, it doesn't need stats to be useful on many heroes.


Centaur isn't known for his harass save from throwing a Double Edge in every now and then or his Return.


A much more accurate assessment of current community criticism about Dota.

...Sorry for the long post.

Not taking this post too seriously, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a mid Centaur Warrunner if some competitive team wanted to try him out. I mean, he's like the weaker version of the common mid initiators ( Puck, Magnus or even Warlock) that only needs a Blink Dagger and some experience in order to do his job. Plus, the Bottle helps him stay alive after the damage return from his skill. Otherwise he could be laned as a carry in an offensive trilane like Slardar, provided you have a free farming solo laner.

Long story short, you just have to lane him according to your team: not taking the carry's place but not forgetting about the experience he needs either.

So is Magnus. So is Timbersaw. So is Clockwerk. So is Beastmaster, Sand King, Brewmaster and Undying.

Doesn't make them bad heroes, they fill a different niche. Some of the heroes I listed can support, in face about all of them can, but so can Centaur. Just try out a hero a lot of different ways (or look up a guide for him/her) before you go so far to criticize them when you lose to Drow. And I'm just going to ignore your remark about Blink Dagger, it's easily one of the best items in the game.

I think this is ridiculous. Centaur cant harass like a range because he is not made to. If he could he would be broken.

Centaur fits his role of initiation, and if he doesn't at any stage he will be balanced when it actually becomes a problem. You cant expect any 1 hero to be exactly as good in a 1v1 situation or team fights every single time otherwise there's no point to team compositions. Might as well just play all random for The International 3 then?

Characters are balanced and made to counter certain things or to achieve certain goals with your team. Yes blink "only gives you blink" But having blink is great initiation/counter-initiation guarantees stuns and kills etc. Especially on AoE heroes.

You have to remember, its a team game which revolves around the 5 heroes interacting as one, each filling roles that the others don't have or enhancing skills and capabilities of their allies. So yes, if your playing in a high skill bracket, you kind of do need to rely on team mates choices. Like i said earlier otherwise they would just random in TI3 and captains mode would be pretty well useless.

Like my chief complaint when I used to post here long ago...

The concept of "Torn Designs" in games these days is ridiculously obvious....

He is a completely torn character as you have 2 choices, go all strength Return and Stampede being your key skills

Or go all life regen with stomp and double edge being your key skills


Factor that neither of those extreme approaches takes in to account any sort of benefit for your stomp as it is a mana costing skill.

Completely. Torn.



At the end of the day, it's not a matter of making sure that characters have a weakness so that it can be a team game...

It's an issue of putting opposing, and completely conflicting functions/design right in to the character in a perfectly balanced fashion, which is perfectly stupid.