My Return to Dota ( Also a Comparison to LoL )

DOn't get me started on the Guinsoo incident...

I know I'm a bit late with this (but I only pop in once in a while) But on the hero design part which no one mentioned a lot.

You should go and look at skills a lot of skills are sort of the same or look the same. like Darius (axe wannabe) has like axe an ult that looks like axe ult only the mechanics are a bit different.

However things like that are a general problem as even smite got abilities that feel copied.

Buying Eye of Skadi in dota :
- Wait until you have 2K gold.
- Click skadi icon. Drag it in quickbuy bar
- Press F5 to select courier.
- Press courier hotkey to send it to secret shop.
- Buy Ultimate Orb. Send it to hero.
- Wait until you have 3.5K gold.
- Press F5 to select courier.
- Buy Orb of Venom
- Press courier hotkey to send it to secret shop.
- Buy Ultimate Orb and Point Booster
- Press hotkey to send stuff to hero
- Use courier speed boost and be careful all the time that courier doesn't get sniped

Buying any item in LoL :
- Click the components in the shop as soon as you have the gold
- Recall to base when you want to get it

Clearly the dota version is more practical and optimized. Kappa.

No let's be honest : the very idea of a secret shop in dota is pure nonsense. And completely unnecessary.

And it's even getting worse, because now you can't even buy Ultimate Orbs from side shop, and it's not like it's the basis for, you know, almost every late game item in dota.

Side shops have a function : they're the items you can buy during the laning stage, so that you can buy stuff like Quelling Blade or Poor Man's Shield during laning but not Healing Salves or Tangos because that would be too easy.

But the secret shop? An outdated concept from 10 years ago that for some reason wasn't fixed yet. Just merge it with the base shop, how hard is that :)

I dont hate LoL. In fact, from thsi point on ill probably go like 3 weeks dota 1 week lol. But it bugs me that so many of my league friends just hate Dota for no good reason other than "the graphics are trash (which they arent)". I got one of them to download Dota, and I was coaching him, and he couldnt grasp the idea of a side shop and a courier. He also tried to last hit when the creeps werew at 1/3 HP. It was so funny. I see the appeal of League, but I suppose Dota suits me better.

Nah, the champions rotate weekly and you seriously won't get much of any benefits from buying stuff with real money.



The masteries and runes are there to make the game more versatile. For example, it is far easier to play jungle Fizz when you have different runes, since he is mainly a AP mid champion. Masteries have keystone masteries this season, which means that you have to decide which good mastery you want. Runes are there to make jungling (for example) easier..




It's an alternate take on DotA's juking mechanic. Instead of using the fact that indifidual trees deny vision behind them, you have patches of bushes that make you invisible when you're in them. It allows you to gank without being seen, and juke to escape.
Dota's juking mechanic is almost bug exploiting these days since it abuses the glitches in the *horrendous* pathfinding system. And LoL's juking mechanic doesn't rely on pathfinding in any way, so IMO it's actualy significantly better and less prone to abuse.
To be honest I think that dota's juking mechanic downright sucks. For example the fact that there are unpathable locations in the woods on the edges of the map, so you can't even chase down heroes without a tree-clearing skill. That's horrendous game design and anything is better than this.
Actually I really like the fact that trees in LoL are essentially a "hard" obstacle that you can't juke through and juking is limited to patches of grass, with a specifically designed mechanic for that, and positionned on usual gank paths.
It looks like some thought was actually put into this, unlike the "trees block vision" which is the basic vision mechanic of any RTS and just doesn't fit mobas IMO.

Hamster answer was pretty good for this




The imbalance between Radiant and Dire in dota was highly unfair. Radiant Shadow fiend or Tinker? Dire Anti-mage? Dire Rosh advantage? Stats showing that Dire has a globally higher winrate than Radiant?
That stuff was so rigged that the Dota map was reworked in depth to fix this imbalance and make it more symmetrical. Now both radiant and dire can pull their had camp for example, which is really gamechanging. For me this clearly shows that symmetry wins.

This one too



LoL's 5 minute cooldown blink is so terrible and underpowered that EVERY SINGLE COMPETITIVE PLAYER skills it, no matter his role. There are tons of options instead of this but 100% of pro players take blink, regardless of their position. It's so bad that it's literally core on every hero!

Maybe blink is actualy balanced in LoL and dota's dagger and blink skills are way too good, just saying...

This too

Though I'll add something: Summoner spells are meant to be those things that can either make the play or ruin it. For example bot lane usually has ignite and heal. If you ignite the ADC before he heals, he gets less heal from it and you'll usually end up winning the battle. If you don't ignite before the heal, they'll get more effective health back and you screwed up. These things really can make the game interesting. It also makes certain champions more viable. For example Cleanse (removes most CC) is usually taken by mid lane champions who have poor mobility or when the enemy team has high CC.




The shields are basically a core part of some champions' kits. The shields are usually far weaker than in DotA but the timing of them is very crucial. For example, Lux's well timed W can save you from Ignite's whole damage even on early levels. If you use it to block any damage, you might end up dying because of that behaviour.




LoL was created by Guninsoo who worked on Dota 1. So yes there are similarities.

This and also: DOTA 2 TEAM ALSO "COPIES" DOTA. BOTH GAMES HAVE DEVELOPERS AND PEOPLE FROM ORIGINAL DOTA, SO THEY AREN'T BASICALLY COPYING.

This is literally the worst argument in this whole LoL vs DotA 2 thing. Guinsoo and Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill had both made things for DotA back in the day and many assisting developers who did it for free and fun.

It's not even that LoL is pay to win, it's that it's grind to win. Because you can't actually buy some of the most important things in the game, you have to grind at a stupidly slow pace just to have an even playing field in terms of stats, not heroes.

Power levels are relative, so it makes discussions considering the different mechanics hard. After a certain point it's just a matter of taste. Especially when it comes to items, because Items in DOTA and LoL are very different.Like the games themselves; I understand why people play League because of the mechanical elements to every hero, but I'd never be able to love it because so much feels forced. Forced meta, forced role positions, frequent patching, formulaic hero designs.

The professional scene is better produced than ours, but in terms of game quality it feels a lot worse as a viewer. But again, my subjective opinion since I don't find constant lane swaps that lead to macro games, and eventually stomps with next to no action entertaining.

Hero design is technically the other place you can make non subjective arguments because you known things are way more formulaic as a result of Riot's F2P system, and arguably mobility creep. You don't things as out there as Storm Spirit or Invoker, or Rubick.

In short; Appreciate both games are different, be content with your choice, and accept others have differing opinions. Because there is no right answer.

This is, up to now, the only valid critic of LoL I have ever seen. You can't have a good game experience without paying a single dollar, if you try it'll come down to endless grinding and a very, very restricted pool of heroes you can actually play. That's why I'm not playing LoL.



Agree that it makes more sense in a single player RPG than in a game like this. But IMO it's a side effect of the "pay to play" aspect, and far from being the worst.




It's an alternate take on DotA's juking mechanic. Instead of using the fact that indifidual trees deny vision behind them, you have patches of bushes that make you invisible when you're in them. It allows you to gank without being seen, and juke to escape.
Dota's juking mechanic is almost bug exploiting these days since it abuses the glitches in the *horrendous* pathfinding system. And LoL's juking mechanic doesn't rely on pathfinding in any way, so IMO it's actualy significantly better and less prone to abuse.
To be honest I think that dota's juking mechanic downright sucks. For example the fact that there are unpathable locations in the woods on the edges of the map, so you can't even chase down heroes without a tree-clearing skill. That's horrendous game design and anything is better than this.
Actually I really like the fact that trees in LoL are essentially a "hard" obstacle that you can't juke through and juking is limited to patches of grass, with a specifically designed mechanic for that, and positionned on usual gank paths.
It looks like some thought was actually put into this, unlike the "trees block vision" which is the basic vision mechanic of any RTS and just doesn't fit mobas IMO.




The imbalance between Radiant and Dire in dota was highly unfair. Radiant Shadow fiend or Tinker? Dire Anti-mage? Dire Rosh advantage? Stats showing that Dire has a globally higher winrate than Radiant?
That stuff was so rigged that the Dota map was reworked in depth to fix this imbalance and make it more symmetrical. Now both radiant and dire can pull their hard camp for example, which is really gamechanging. For me this clearly shows that symmetry wins.



LoL's 5 minute cooldown blink is so terrible and underpowered that EVERY SINGLE COMPETITIVE PLAYER skills it, no matter his role. There are tons of options instead of this but 100% of pro players take blink, regardless of their position. It's so bad that it's literally core on every hero!

Maybe blink is actualy balanced in LoL and dota's dagger and blink skills are way too good, just saying...




Aphotic Shield dispels stuns on teammates (the true strength of the skill), and deals AOE damage when it expires. LoL's shields don't have that. LoL's shields are the equivalent of Pipe of Insight, they block a certain amount of damage and then disappear. It's stuff that supports can cast on their carry, kind of like Solar Crest and similar. I see nothing OP about that.




LoL was created by Guninsoo who worked on Dota 1. So yes there are similarities.

However this is nothing close to HoN which is almost a carbon copy of dota and could be called dota 1.5.

LoL is a different game with different gameplay, different heroes and different items. A lot of the stuff is inspired by dota 1 but it's similar, not a copy.



C'mon, graphic-wise, Dota 2 is far better.

Yea I played leauge for a bit cause my friends all play it and my first non bot game I went like 30 2 on some hero named like kha zix or something like that and it was ******ed he's pretty much a copy of slark but a dumber ultimate and I played two more games one as a copy of omniknight and then jinx and it was completely terrible
Tldr league=dota copypasta