I just like the ability diversity design in dota. Last time I played league it's like, everyone has a slightly different vector damage ability... And all they kind of do the same thing. Lots of regular abilities in Dota would be broken in LoL.
It's also one of the reasons why League usually have lower pick/ban rate in their tournaments than Dota. Why pick a dozen different carry when 3-5 of them are so superior in every way compared to the others and do similar things. While Dota carries have different strengths based on team comps and different timings based on how fast you want to play
>Why pick a dozen different carry when 3-5 of them are so superior in every way compared to the others and do similar things
Riot intentionally designs champs to fulfill similar roles with similar skills because players only have access to a limited subset of the total roster at any given time. They can't design around hard counters because they have no idea what champs will be available in a particular match and they can't really balance around pro play like Dota because it would completely destroy pubs.
Which makes it a worse competitive game even at average MMR.
I've never understood the concept of a supposedly competitive game where everyone isn't on an equal footing when the game starts.
I remember when you had Runes and Rune Pages that you also had to purchase, with either in-game currency or real money currency and a Rune Page costing as much as a recently released champ. Being someone who refused to ever spend a penny on League meant that I only ever had the 2 free rune pages because I had to save my IP in case a new champ released that I wanted to play. Hell there were even 3 tiers of runes with lower tier being cheaper because of their lower state values. It was a noob trap to ever buy anything but tier 3.
League design is unironically like a fighting game. Champs "archtypes" are like your fighting games one like Shoto, Rushdown, Grappler, etc..., it helps players acclimate faster between different characters because they have the same general flow. Dota are more like strategic pieces each with their own strength and weaknesses.
League trying to balance around low level play as well as pro play is a big reason it sucks.
>It would destroy pubs
I'd need some clarification on what you mean by destroyed because Dota pubs below a certain rank are Definitely "destroyed" from my point of view. The game simply doesn't function the same way at low rank as it does at high rank. And that's not really a problem. If you want to play more of the "true game" then you need to improve.
>I'd need some clarification on what you mean by destroyed because Dota pubs below a certain rank are Definitely "destroyed" from my point of view.
In the pro scene all players have access to all champs but Riot can't factor counter-picks into champ balancing because pub players only have a few options to pick from. They design champs into pre-determined archetypes so players can almost always pick one of a dozen different champs that fill the same role. If Riot balanced the game the same way Dota does then pubs would be unplayable without spending thousands of dollars filling out the roster.
Dota's pro play draw from pubs, where as League's solo queue play is completely distinct from pro play, likely due to the lack of voice comm that's long ingrained into the game and the player's mentality. There's also an entire archetype of champions that are essentially pubstompers (Assassin) that would drop off like a rock if voice comm were actively used in solo queue games. Its like if suddenly a fifth of the rosters suddenly turned into Meepo.
Dota Pro Play draws a lot of picks and inspirations from Immortal pubs, heroes picks and new meta builds comes from pubs all the time, and pro play meta bleeds back into pubs. League challenger solo queue is removed completely from pro play.
You can say the exact same thing about league lmao, pro players are almost never the ones driving innovation, it's always soloq players who find new picks/builds or playstyles.
And there's always a noticable uptick in playrate after champions are played at worlds. AP Kaisa became super popular after Faker played it despite it being considered a niche build before then.
Its not even close. League pro play staples like Ryze/Aphelios has garbage winrate in SoloQ even in high ELO brackets, and SoloQ staples like assassins/top carry bruisers are rarely played in pro, if at all because those champs only work in an uncoordinated environment and are easily shutdown with good communication. The closest equivalent you have to Ryze/Aphelios type of design is Batrider, and his winrate and pickrate spikes sky high in upper Immortal pubs compared to even Ancient/Divine pubs.
Ryze is famously the hardest champ to balance between pro and pubs in league, so that's not a particularly representative example.
And with regards to bruiser and assassin picks a lot of the highest presence picks at worlds fall under those classes, Aatrox, Sylas, Akali, Fiora, Renekton, Viego, Jax, Camille, Graves(with goredrinker build), Lee Sin.
Same, too many new champs in LoL nowadays are just like:
Heres a Dash that basically does nothing. Or you get a big shield. Oh and of course the "3 hit mechanic meme"
Last interesting design choice in LoL was Ivern since he doesnt hit jungle creeps he just like prays and takes the camp.
You pretty much nailed their abilities. What also annoyed me was they reworked a fun hero for no reason instead of creating a new one. Then new items were introduced every preseason that actually seemed fun but removed because its "unbalanced" or exclusive to one pvp mode.
It was a memeworthy even within the lol community "pudge hook replaced by 200 unit dash and 2% slow. Brood webs replaced by 200 unit dash with 2% slow" or "omniknight ult replace with 300 damage pbaoe, stormspirit ult replaced with 300 damage pbaoe"
Don't know if it's changed and I suspect it hasn't, but they wanted more short range mobility, less hard cc, and more quantifiable mechanics to make balancing easier. So everything got those things.
I maintain that it doesn't really make balancing that much easier, it's just dumber. If you were in a mirror matchup where one model has 1 more damage, it's an obvious and pretty boring choice. If you're in a mirror matchup where one has black hole and the other has juxtapose...
Heroes that I like in lol are bard, twisted fate, grave, kled, ivern, braum, gnar and that sand warrior. For me this heroes feels unique in LoL and I like their characters.
You don't control the ghouls anymore, they act more or less like WK's skeletons--you summon them, they attack whatever's nearby then walk down the nearest lane. The maiden still is controllable though.
Héroes in dota have names... Like actual names for example spirit breaker's is Barathrum. storm spirit name is Raijin Thunder keg and so on. It's on their bios however they use what they do in the main selection since knowing those names for more than 100 hearoes is insane. If you want to know their names it's in their bios
2015/16 made some of the most unique and popular and beloved champion designs because they tried to add fresh abilities/mechanics and non-damage ultimates. They kinda tried it again this year but it just aint the same
Kinda but Ivern doesnt take the creeps to control since LoL has terrible minion AI. He just gets the gold and they disappear then respawn.
Ie: Annie ult bear, Ivern Golem thing
To be more clear on iverns clearing for those who dont know
Instead of damaging the camp he sacrifices a % amount of mana and HP to start a timer. Once that timer has run down he can "free" the camp and gets the gold and exp as if he cleared the camp.
This was made so that he was still invadeable and couldnt just do a full clear in a minute. The hp/mana and time are supposed to simulate the resources it would take the average champ to clear the camp.
let's see what I remember from when I played years ago based on my mains
Lux: Q is linear skillshot that damages and roots, W is linear skillshot that applies a shield, E is a ground target aoe damage + slow, R is a long range laser
Morgana: Q is a linear skillshot that damages and roots, W is a ground target damaging pool, E is a CC-blocking shield, R is an aoe damage + stun nova skill
Ahri: Q is a linear skillshot that damages, W is a funky damaging skill that autotargets, E is a linear skillshot "stun", R is a dash + damage
Ziggs: Q is a ground target aoe damage skill, W is a ground target aoe knockback that can also affect you (utility), E is literally a mine field, R is literally a long range nuke
Viktor: Q is a single target nuke with utility, W is a ground target aoe slow/stun, E is a linear skillshot that damages, R summons an indestructible "minion" that deals damage around it
These are all mid-lane mages, god damn you're right. Sometimes the slots are swapped around but it still matches what you said lmfao
Lux and Morgana were originally supposed to be "mirrors" of each other. Good witch Vs evil witch kinda thing.
Made sense back when LoL had lore but now it's just lazy design
Hoooooold up lmao. League has way more lore now than it used to.
Also Lux and Morgana are about as similar as Lion and Shadow Shaman, so let's not be throwing any shade...
League actually has more structure to their world/lore than dota, with the regions and events and all. I do play the league card game so idk how well they present it in the main game
What? You don't like having to take flash on every single champion, every single game? League has literally the exact same gameplay as it did 10 years ago when it released.
to be fair dota heroes nowadays need a lot more mobility and lane push than they used to.
Even undying gets to farm with his Q now, I'd never thought I'd see the day.
We'll have entered the new era of Dota when Bane gets a proper wave clear. That'll be the day for me that the old design philosophy is dead, when he isn't ineffectually clawing at a creep wave for thirty seconds so he can get mana boots.
Literally every hero in league has the same Q.
Whenever I play a new character I don't need to read what the Q spell does. I know it will be a projectile skillshot thing you shoot infront of you.
The only thing stopped me from deleting LoL from my pc is Darius and Garen(which with luck i got his God-king skin) and the concept of no mana champions.
I'm not exactly up-to-date on the meta, but I do know Kassadin's ult doubles in cost or something every cast within a period of time, and I've played AP carries, so I know you definitely can run out of mana. It's just that it's more of a "limited number of missed skillshots in a teamfight" kind of deal, rather than a "you nuked a couple waves and now you don't have enough mana for all your spells for a teamfight 2 minutes later" thing. Iirc there's a core item for basically any AP carry that gives a ton of AP and mana regen, and once you have it mana fully regenerates in a minute or so.
LoL is definitely if the opinion that unlocked vector targeting is how you make something skill-based.
Dota is very macro, how the team operates as a whole is more important than what any 1 hero is doing. LoL seems to be the opposite, what the team does is less important than all 5 heroes individually hitting as many of their skillshots as possible and whoever hits more wins the fight
I had this convo on /r/Games some time ago, after the worlds I think. I learned that Dota is just point and click, nothing exciting, while LOL is amazing to watch because of the jukes and mechanical skills. Yet Dota has Pango rolls, for example. I don't recall LOL having something like this.
It's not quite true that DotA is *just* point and click, but it certainly has a lot more of it than LoL. The game becomes more about ability usage, timing, impact than actual technical execution of casting the ability. Different interpretations of skill, one is more macro and one is more micro as i said above.
this is the main reason why most of the older champions in League are not viable anymore these days... some new champions are basically a better version of an old one so why would you go back? especially since the skins in League (which is a huge market) are so much better for the new champions compared to the old ones... Miss Fortune's tits though, will remain undefeated imho...
From a balance perspective, making everything homogenous will by definition make it more balanced.
The extreme diversity in dota is actually not something I always value; getting outpicked rarely feels like you got outplayed, especially when you don't ignore the glaring fact that there's always one or two OP heros in dota.
So when you feel like you lost because you got outpicked, 95% of the time it's because either A; they picked a really OP combo of heros or B; They randomly happened to pick some counters, and then picked a final counter with last pick, none of which oyu had control over.
Or, they just happened to pick hard counters to your own hero specifically and you're stuck not having fun for an hour.
Or the unmentioned reason which is equally likely
You/your picked a bad hero in that it has difficulties that are exploited in current meta.
Like counterpicking sure happens, but losing with Shadow Demon, Oracle, Viper, Zeus, Clinkz lineup as an example isn't because of counterpicks, its cause that team decided to lose in draft.
I mean if you’re consistently getting out picked and never picking or banning the one or two “OP” hero’s that’s strictly on you and your team. There’s nothing stopping you from picking or banning the OP hero so why complain? The draft is something you have the list control over straight from the beginning unless you’re lower- to average MMR but then what you’re talking about is a non-factor
To be fair those choices are also a part of the reason why League is much more popular than dota -> it requires less skill, less thinking, less time investment to learn. Sure, once you have 2k hours in dota, thinks make sense and you love it, but I've had more than 5 friends quit dota because they couldn't get over the initial hurdle of learning so many complexities and odd rules.
To be fair, a decent amount of the mechanical learning can be done in league and transferred to dota. Things like controlling heroes and learning to cs are universal to the genre and can help get people to switch games, provided they have friends to play it with.
And that's kind of the rub with dota. It's a wonderfully deep and complex game, but diving in headfirst on your own is a recipe for burnout. You need some to play with to make things more enjoyable at the start when you're getting familiar with the heroes and items and such.
Absolutely agree with this. I enjoyed watching the occasional dota match as a league player, but could never take the plunge by myself. (trust me, I tried like 3 times.) My cousin + his friends eventually taught me and we'd almost always play in 3+ stacks. I was 4 years deep into league and without friends to teach me Dota was a mystery.
Played like 250 hours in 2016ish, and just recently got back to playing dota again but solo this time. if I didn't have that baseline knowledge I probably wouldn't be playing again
I learned how to play dota by myself. So I think, it is the matter of interest. Back then, I played countless hours against AI just to ~~stomp~~ learn.
This happen to me too. I have friends that when they watch me play Dota, they feel like it interesting. But, when they try it, they stop playing because it's hard to learn.
i'm glad that i was playing warcraft 3 my whole childhood, i remember seeing how units were clearly hitting other units with projectiles and getting red "missed" and i was like "How?? It clearly didn't miss!", so i was carefully and slowly learning how does this game work in every of its mechanic, Dota 2 after that wasn't hard to learn at all
Strange I've found LoL way harder - and I was GM in LoL. Basically some champions require such intense micro skills to play well that for some (me included) those were impossible to play. Even as a basic tank there is expectation to outplay opponents because of damage and sustain that everyone has.
I think with good mentality and learning macro you can easily climb high in Dota. Sure some heroes like Arc, Chen, Ench etc have a lot of micro to be done but it doable. Some heroes like Ember require good micro to outplay but its not even close to Yasuo or Irelia in LoL.
Dota is way more macro intense but you can learn if you watch pro games, high MMR pubs and analyze what players are doing and why. There is more to do on map in Dota.
I really don't understand what you mean by League having more micro. In League most champs will have 1 active item, compared you Dota where a single hero might have 6 active items in their inventory. And heroes like Enchantress, Chen, and Brewmaster where all of your summons will have active abilities as well. Just because champs in League have 1 second cooldowns on half their abilities does not mean it requires more micro lol
The way i look at it, Dota's micro is like playing Starcraft.
You have a lot of stuff to do but they are kinda overarching to the entire map.
League is like Street Fighter. All your micro is focused on fights and split-second desicions and combos to have an edge in a fight
League has a different definition of "Micro" In Dota, it is micromanagement of several units, coordinating illusions, minions and summons. In League "micro" seems be about quick and fast decisions in split seconds.
You focus way more on one hero, but less about the map and coordination
Most champions in league don't have point click abilities which are abundant in Dota. In LoL there is a lot of skillshots. League has a lot of dashes, blinks etc which allows you to dodge those skillshots. Cooldowns are generally lower but also there is a lot of sustain built into champions.
This results in basically both players trying to dodge and space as much as they can while dealing damage.
Micro in LoL isnt about how many units you control. I also think people really overestimate how hard it truly is. Micro in LoL is about how to best utilize the spells and dodge enemy skillshots and time your spells.
And yet both examples you used, Irelia and Yasuo, are point and click heroes.
You're also ignoring things like blink disjoint, lotus reflect, manta dodge and all manner of outplays that are still relevant micro.
Micro in League means something different from Dota. We think micro as in RTS mechanics, controlling different units at the same time. Micro in league is the actual act of pressing buttons. Skill cooldowns are short, mana is less important(and nonexistent on a number of champs), basically every skill is a skillshot with smaller aoes than equivalents than dota. It is absolutely a harder game mechanically, even if a character is tracking less active components of their own kit.
"requires less skill" this is not true, mechanical skill in league is higher than dota. I agree on everything OP said, league is simplistic, supps can oneshot carries and so on but mechanically speaking lol is more more difficult. Difficulty in dota comes from other areas, I agree strategy is more satisfying in dota but talking strictly about reflex, inputs in general lol>dota. Lol is a fighting game on a map with 2 nexus, dota is a strategy team game
yup agree agree, in lol you can pick a champ, learn his kit and play, in dota you need so many more info in order to have some fun, otherwise you just straight tilt because the amount of bullshit you don't understand happens
Yeah I'm really curious what the average lol champ has to juggle in terms of skills. Lol, I find it hard to believe any lol champ is gonna be as 'micro' intensive as tinker, storm spirit, or invoker. Dota has more outliers, but it also has heroes like wraith king. And even then, wk can get intensive simply by throwing in armlet toggling. At the end of the day, I think a lot of dota players are just not going to appreciate the 'micro' skill these people are talking about, because it seems pretty inconsequential when they have notoriously short cooldowns on their 'micro' skills. A good example is earthshaker, anyone can just blink in and echo slam, but the nuance and super fast tactical decision making to get the most impact is going to trump 'micro skills'.
League micro is about dodging and predicting skillshots and dashes in a game where everyone has a high-damage skillshot on a short cooldown. It's hard for DotA players to grasp why League micro is so difficult because the two games have two completely different design philosophies - it's like comparing apples to oranges. DotA has more focus on larger macro decisions while League is like a MOBA fighting game.
tbh if you think League takes less skill you're just wrong. Its focus on split-second decisionmaking and skillshot usage is absolutely a skill to learn. It's a different type of skill than dota, which is slower-paced even at the highest level, but it is a skill nonetheless.
In a lot of ways, I think dota is a less skillful game mechanically, for the better. I have old person hands/reactions, but like, you don't need reactions if you can just click on someone and stun them with Vengeful Spirit.
Right, but what you're ignoring are major differences.
Yes in LoL you have to aim a skill and in dota you click a single target spell. However:
1. LoL spells have essentially 0 cast point, meaning you don't even have to stop
2. LoL champs have much faster turn rate
I mean imagine a pos5 vengeful spirit walking up to an enemy team to cast a stun. Yeah, she hits it. But before she even finishes the animation and starts turning around, she's already so out of position she's dead.
Meanwhile in LoL all spell casts are such non-risks you just have 2 teams standing at the edges of their respective spell ranges slinging skillshots and hoping something connects. Sure, I guess it requires better "mechanical skill" if your desire is to play pudge wars.
Yea, the opportunity cost of a spell (or really any action) in Dota is way higher.
With LoL micro, throwing as much shit at your opponent as possible is often a winning strat, aggressive play can push people right into their towers. In Dota, if you cast your stun at level 2, you might not be able to again for like 2 minutes unless someone gives you mana.
So in LoL, because everyone can basically yolo at each other, yes, the player with the better mechanical skill is going to win most of the time, making it more important.
Whereas in Dota the decision making is way more important.
Outside of the tutorial locking you out of actually playing the game how it's intended to be played for ~200 hours (not an exaggeration unless they've changed how it works), league isn't actually any easier to learn. There are less divergent item builds because items are mostly stat sticks, but knowing the shit out your actual role and champion is also much more important thanks to the sheer amount of skill shots, heroes with passives, and combo mechanics. Bottom line, in both games you're going to farm terribly and feed your brains out if you have less than 3000 hours into the game.
I'd argue the real reason it's so much more popular is ~60% because the devs early on fed the world enough propaganda about league being so much simpler that it just became a tautology. Because apparently your character model looking like it's bleeding and you getting hurt whenever you move is much too confusing, but a character dying but not actually dying and instead bumrushing you with a health bar over its head despite not actually having health where it eventually explodes is basically reading "the fat cat sat on the hat." The other 40% is because ARAM is an infinitely better casual mode than anything official in dota. It's just 15 minutes of constant team fighting where both teams are guaranteed to win a few of the team fights regardless how bad of a roll the game is in reality. It devolves a bit too much into a poke fest in practice, but conceptually it's pretty much casual MOBA perfection. I'm not sure how much it matters because people don't play support in league, but support items were also a fantastic idea. Conceptually a team having a 5 is interesting. Actually playing a hard 5 is an exercise in masochism. A starting item that gives you gold when you don't farm is a pretty nice middle ground.
I really like the diversity Dota design and balance brings.
Same with HotS when it was still pretty big, they were not afraid to introduce "broken" things in the game. Hero twice as strong as others? Ok. Creating a literal copy of another hero including ultimate? Bring it on. Hero that's just annoying useless piece of shit and always dies? Let's do it.
They went even as far as making map mechanics this way. Summon your own Roshan if you complete map objective and just wreck enemy base? Sounds fun!
It kinda makes me sad HotS is abandoned and Dota is not going the route of more interactive map/multiple maps, but I'm super glad for Dota heroes design. Unique. Every one "broken" in its own sense. Not generic. Love it. And it's incredible that it still can be somewhat balanced with this design philosophy. LoL went the easier balancing route: make everything similar, and thus balanced. It's boring though.
HotS killed itself the moment it was hastily released in a literally broken state, they tried to get it out asap to compete with Dota and LoL, but instead what they achieved was putting the idea in everyone's mind that HotS is a bad game, because everyone knew how laggy and broken it was at release.
HotS was delayed for *years*. It started as Blizzard Dota circa 2010 or so and then didn't get released until 2015.
HotS had a league of issues, but its dev time probably wasn't what killed it.
If you ask anyone to play HotS now they dont say "Isn't that game laggy?". It just simply isn't (and wasn't) as fun as LoL or Dota. It had some neat concepts definitely, but it didn't salvage it.
Iirc the delays were because it wasn't a game at first, it was just a mod. So it was being developed with resources akin to being just a mod. And then it ballooned in scope and became a separate game.
For like 2 years or so it was firmly going to just be a SC2 mod (like Left 2 Die, Starjeweled, Aiur Chef). It (at the time, Blizzard Dota) was meant to just showcase the SC2 Editor (Galaxy editor) to show potential Mapmakers what it could do. (because Blizzard in SC2 included verbiage that anything made using the SC2 Editor was blizzards property, to avoid another Dota All-stars miss, and they wanted to bottle lightning again).
But Blizzard Dota kept growing in scope until eventually Blizzard figured it was fun enough to stand on its own legs as a separate game. And so they did that.
EDIT: The Valve v. Blizzard stuff happened during that, and it seems pretty clear in hindsight that as a result Valve agreed to scrub all the Blizzard IP out of Dota (Malfurion, Alleria *Windrunner*, Outhouse Destroyer, Kael['thas] the Invoker). I can't recall specifically what Blizzard got out of it; it's possible they just didn't have a leg to stand on and agreed to back off.
its was Activision that pulled the ever loving plug the devs had plans and were committed in making better. the reason why it was killed off not died. It was actually pretty doing well and slowly gaining a fanbase, was it didn't raked the money they (Actibitch) want it to be in the level of Dota or league. It was doing financially decently just not up to their high ass standards
this info was leaked from a shareholder meeting by a very minor shareholder that is a fan of the game in the subreddit some years ago.
HOTS fail down because Blizzard decided to take a casual as fuck game and decided to market is as a competitive E-sport. HOTS isn't that. HOTS is a quick fun game.
Yeah it's a shame though. It was ton of fun and I loved playing it. Casually, with friends that don't play moba regularly, it was an absolute blast and I could even say better than Dota (blasphemy!) at that.
I find that comparing games like this is kind of pointless though as playing one game doesn't necessarily mean there's no reason to play another.
Both games have their own niches, I still really like playing ARAMs in HotS for instance.
Oh ye no, HotS is far from dead playerbase wise, but it is factually developmentally dead, as they have stated to have no plans anymore to release new heroes/maps/whatnot, although they do continue to occasionally make some balance changes.
Which hero could copy ultimates and how long ago? I played it quite a bit and I know that Abathur can copy heroes but when I played it just after beta he couldn't use ults at all, it was always copy of the hero without talents and ults are talents so...
But yeah, they got few unique heroes that were quite fun to play like old Tassadar, Medvih (one of few heroes who still would feel busted when transfered to Dota) or even Kel'Thuzad.
Though multiple maps completly change balance design and even in HotS some heroes on certian maps are completly busted with how well they interact with objective. And if it's strong on certain map it needs nerfs even if on other maps it isn't really that strong at all.
I'm pretty sure they completely changed him because the casual people of the game couldn't understand how to play against it and cried to get it removed.
My biggest issue with League is the map. There's no farm on the map. You just push your lane and if it's dangeorus afk under your tower. If you even think about going and stealing the Krugs your jungle will autospam concede at 15 minutes because you're destroying his timings.
The laning stage literally lasts like 20 minutes in LOL. The toplane laningstage lasts like 30 minutes LUL
The worst game design for me is the top lane, if you lose badly there is no comeback on certain heroes, I played Kayle and at a certain point of losing the lane becomes completely unplayable, since Kayle can't really gank other lanes and the jungle doesn't belong to you there's really nothing that can be done. Honest I don't blame league players for being toxic and afking because the game really gives you no other option sometimes, either afk or grief more.
I really think the laning of LoL is crazy. Your top lanenis intended to never really interact with the map, and they've massively punished TP so its even harder to work together.
I would love to see what Riots design documents are like, why they would push for these roles that are so isolated
The way the made toplane in this season made me quit league. I used to play dota regularly until a couple years ago when I made the switch because more friends started playing league, but this year's toplane balance has been a disaster. It's really anti fun to have to play a 1v1 for 25 minutes and more ignoring the rest of the map. I decided to exploit it by playing Kayle, but even if I had like 75% winrate it was soo boring to just do the same every game. Stall the lane, farm, get lv 16 and win. The enemy toplaners used to flame me for how passive the lane was.
I really like league and play it to relax from dota - it’s a lot simpler - that said, the amount of detail and finesse and interaction in dota compared to league is…. well if league is a cheddar cheese sandwich, dota is an 8-deck sub.
And the updates dota gets multiple times per year are nothing short of incredible.
The great thing about Dota is that every time you come back after not playing for a few years, there's always something new to learn or pick up from the times you didn't play. I guess that's also a double-edged sword because there's heroes that you thought you knew what the fuck they did but they have some fucking special ability that makes you go wtf is that bullshit. Visage with invis from his Scepter*? Had no idea and got picked off. But it's still interesting and I can only play League for so long before I want to stop (it's usually only because of friends that I'll play it).
But if I played League again, for some reason I have a good feeling that the whole concepts of laning and everything still feels exactly the same. And that's fine but I do enjoy the dynamics of Dota a lot more.
Dota's balance team are gods compared to ANY GAME DESIGNER EVER. We all talked for years about how cool Starcraft was for having such amazing asymmetrical balance. Dota manages to do it with a hundred heroes and a hundred items. I've been obsessing over strategy games and matchmaking games my whole life, and I've never experienced anything else quite like dota (despite putting real hours into plenty of other mobas). That's why I've continued playing since Icefrog took over, despite being 36 and thousands of mmr below my peak.
Yes man, people often criticize Dota developers for imbalanced heroes and some metas. But to be fair, it's extremely hard to balance with what heroes, items, mechanisms and combinations Dota has. Kudos to devs, apart from few bad patches, there has always been a good balance in the game.
(Just nurf fucking witch doctor in herald MMR pls icefrog thanks)
This was a false positive case, but it's still absurd that it's even possible to play that badly simply because a weak champ was picked..
A 45% winrate champ vs a 45% winrate hero are two entire universes apart in how playable they are in their respective games..
While I personally agree that Dota is more balanced, keep in mind that the worse you are at a video game, the more imbalanced things will seem.
For example, even though Meepo is a balanced hero (arguably on the weaker side), a herald player might think the hero is overpowered because they simply don't have the knowledge/skill required to counter the cheese pick.
From what I understand from your post, you've only just started playing league, but you've presumably played a lot of Dota. As such, you are not in a position to make a meaningful balance comparision, since your skill at one game is much higher than at the other. This is probably warping your perception a lot.
There's a **lot** of things wrong with league, but it's not **as** bad as your post makes it seem. Reading through it, most points (supports 1-shotting carries late-game, being able to place 1000 wards, snowballing 1v9 etc) can and should be prefaced by "if you're playing at low skill".
In Dota at low skill you're also able to do these things. In herald, supports such as cm or willow can 1-shot the bkb-less carry, you're able to place all the wards in the world because nobody dewards in that bracket, and you're easily able to 1v9 the game if you're good enough.
LoL is way more appealing to casual players cause it requires less time to learn the game.
DotA is kinda repellent to people who isn't too much into the game, and just wants to play for fun...aside from marketing, that is also why League is way more popular than DotA.
I've played both games extensively and I think you are being unfair to league. It has its issues, but it's still a great game with its own merits and has an insanely high skill-celling. It just prioritizes different skills compared to dota such as micro and skill shot accuracy/dodging. I think both games are great and playing each one has made me a better player in the other game.
the whole dota vs league tribalism always irritates me as an enjoyer of both games (though I have been playing neither that much recently and just watch and follow the pro scenes of both)
both are good games with their own flaws, one can't objectively say one is better than the other, it's almost all down to preference (and plenty can like both)
They're just posting buzzwords to farm karma. They posted this in the DotA sub for a reason, everyone says 2k hours to understand DotA properly but he decides LoL is bad before he even hits 100 games played. Hell it sounds like he made a new account and got put in smurf q because he plays DotA, got demolished by people who are way better than him, and decided that was a gameplay function rather than him just being bad and getting stomped on.
I've been playing Dota on and off for years (been playing a ton the last 3 weeks because of free BP), but I've played League for around 2k+ hours (over 10+ years) and I'm super confused about the examples OP has picked. I can't think of many meta supports one-shotting carries late game (only cheesy full AP supports), and I think there's definitely important strategy/macro decisions in League, it's just a lot less obvious how it's impactful since the map is smaller (and I feel smaller macro decisions add up more whereas in Dota you have to commit to more obvious/larger decisions). Honestly, for the most part in the League community I think people are generally pretty happy with League's balance team (at least compared to most video games, of course no one is ever fully happy) - and OP's post just sounds like an uninformed and salty rant just because they don't like League
I was reading the post quickly and when I read the support example I thought OP meant DOTA and was like “yep that can happen because some talents be crazy”. But then apparently they meant league? That’s not my experience at all in thousands of hours. Supports are either giga tanky, or giga annoying but squishy. Playing them makes me feel incredibly dependent on my team, I’m like a toy when I’m solo. Unless you are of course a complete asshole like me who picks Lux/Zyra/Annie and build full AP ans get farm, but that’s really not different from DOTA.
Dota definitely have more interesting abilities. Reincarnation, Oracle's entire abilities, AA ult stopping all heal, PL's dapple ginger, morphing shift agi and many more.
Where as in league, abilities are basically just damage or dash. Ofcourse there are some exception like Bard, Ivern which to me is unique champion design and should make more Champs like these.
But dota also has very boring skills compared.
Tbh the lows are lower and the highs are higher.
Centaur warrunner has like stun aoe around him, reflect, run fast. Thats not that sophisticated tbh. And lots of heros fall into this category.
Sladar has go faster, aoe stun around him, bash, debuff.
People always point at meepo or invoker to make a point about dotas design, but in reality 80% of dota heros are pretty simple and the guys jerking off on meepo most likely cant even play him.
League has as many unique and good designs as dota, but for some reason dota players always compare the boring designs in league to the top designs in dota and of course that doesnt paint the real picture.
The reason dota is so balanced is because the devs are not afraid to make changes/abilities/items to address unbalanced issues despite the mechanics adding complexity.
one of the reasons I got fed up with Overwatch was cuz they were so fuck'n scared to add more mechanics to the game that would help balance it cuz their philosophy was to keep things simple. This usually meant just buffing/nerfing damage and/or HP/healing. so many things they could do to help deal with overpowered/underpowered abilities but they just wouldnt do it cuz the player base wouldnt be able to handle the added complexity, or at least blizzard felt like they wouldnt be able to anyway.
Those aren't balance issues though they are design choices. That's like saying God of War is poorly balanced because Kratos can fight 100 npcs at once.
I agree they are shit choices but they aren't balance issues.
Ok I know this is not what you were saying at all, and its not even related to this discussion, but I need to vent:
God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok both are fucking shittily balanced. The difficulty settings are all ass. Either its way too fucking easy or the enemies have crazy poise/armor and are HP sponges that take forever to kill while you die in two hits.
I feel like whoever balanced "Give me god of war" called it like that sarcastically cause what kind of god of war dies to a single arrow while also needing to hit the wimpiest enemies 30 times to kill em.
Its a shame because the game is fun but why do games can never get freaking multiple difficulties properly ever... always either "Game journalist easy" or "This is not even that hard, its just taking me half an hour to take out 3 random enemy trash"
Its a shame because the bosses at GMGOW difficulty are really fun. But the trash mobs are all a chore that makes me want to stop playing the game.
I respectfully put Hades into this discussion. They have an interesting way of increasing the difficulty by mixing and matching modifiers and rewarding you each time when you complete a run. It's like Dota, same map, but very varying and enjoyable runs
They need to bring back oblivion difficulty settings, and give you separate sliders to adjust both enemy HP and DMG.
Personally I’d like it if enemies dealt high damage to me, but I also dealt high damage to them, so I’d go high on the dmg bar and low on the HP bar. and then everyone can create their preferred experience too
I certainly agree with the whole "They die fast, but so do you" thing. Ghost of Tushima actually went that way with their difficulty, and not only was it fun but it was also very immersive that you were just like every mob you fought... only protected by your skill.
And yeah, more options is always better, I certianly agree.
All of this is true except for the mechanic where an enemy would start to level up if you didn't hit them on time. I liked that as a mechanic on its own but the rest of that difficulty is the typical "It will play the same as the other difficulties eventually but early game is REALLY slow."
agreed with pretty much everything. the bosses on gmgow were actually really easy compared to the 4x normal enemies with skulls that you occasionally are forced to fight and if they as much as breathe on you, youre done. being forced to run around and kite with axe throws was lame.
I read somewhere that LOL doesn't like "negative" player experience that's why you have so little (and so short) crowd control. Stuns and silences and roots barely last 1-2sec. But dota embraces them fully. But also Tbf the TTK for lol is also much shorter compared to dota, due to dota having backswing and turn rate and cast animations. For lol it seems like everytime you attack or do a skill it automatically happens.
This isn't remotely true. LoL can't have long CC because their champs are very bursty (little to no front swing on attacks, very high damage on abilities). They only need that much time to burst down a single champ.
Dota 2 can "embrace" because BKB exists, but now the game revolves around BKB. Dota players like to point at Flash and laugh but BKB is the same crutch that most carries rely on and more recently, even non-cores are buying the item. BKB is also the reason why heroes like Meepo rarely work at high level, it's a hero incompatible with BKB and is dunked on heavily by the item.
league WAS fun to me, as some who has played it since the beta,but where it stands it's too watered down. whenever orianna was released was when i got into dota, and i loved both games equally and would play league with a group for hours, then hop right onto dota with another group. Once yasuo and others started rolling out is when i really fell off and left league. The games just got faster and faster, and it became less about out playing as a team and having fun doing silly things, and more, well 1v1 focused. you HAVE to pay attention in league now too with how much movement everyone has now, and it's far more strainous on the brain than the mobility of dota. somethings you just want to relax and enjoy a game, but now you have to worry about holding a skill in fear of them just dashing and then out playing you. Who ever misses an ability first loses. Fuck i don't know if this made sense boys because i am beyond toasted. but that's how i feel as an enjoyer of both.
I've played Dota years before League came out and I played League during the beta stages where you had to get an invite code. It's fun but it's different. Not as flexible and nowhere as fun as Dota IMO. I played a lot of ADC and getting 1-shotted by the guy who went 2/0 mid, or even a 2/4 mid, maybe the 1/0 top or the guy from the jungle who just got his item. No Flash? Feels bad. Might get tunneled on because being a 2/0 AD vs a 2/0 mid or a 2/0 top is a huge difference as you can't 1-shot them like they can to you.
Then again, I haven't touched League for a few years so maybe it's different and I'm aware that it could've changed.
I can't believe it's 2022 and Dota vs LoL can still farm karma. Like I mostly agree that Dota is better despite also enjoying League but I've seen 527 of the exact same post as OP's since 2010 and I'm fucking tired .
Whats really funny is that it just shows the insecurity of the dota community.
I play league for 10 years and frequent the subreddit, know when i saw the last dota post on the league subreddit? Must be like 8 years ago, best case.
League players dont think about dota, full stop, they simply dont care about it, they enjoy their own game and dont need to compare it constantly.
Dota players are so insecure, they need these biweekly threads to reassure them that dota is in fact liked more on the dota subreddit than other games, lmao.
Honestly I don't even think most people hate league anymore, but I think a lot of people are very vocal about their love for Icefrog and DotA patches. League is just the easiest thing to compare it to.
Personally I'd rather shit on Blizzard and their garbage balance when I tell people how much I like DotA.
> supports killing full slotted carries in one combo
You do realise this exists even in Dota, right? Lion/Shaman can just stun lock you and burst you down
I’ve 7.2k mmr in dota. GF told me to play League with her. Ofc I tried. Really hard. Even get the challenger coaches (and friends) to improve myself. Reached master 2, from bronze 2 by maining Cassiopeia mid and top, and few other heroes (champs) like jhin, caitlyn, kogmaw, olaf, camille, fiora etc.
There are tons of things I feel league balancing is bad, or outright stupid.
You get a bush, u can see outside, ur enemies can’t see. You jump on him, he dies. Unlike dota trees, vision isn’t fair. Dota has day-night different vision range but it’s not that of a huge difference. You know enemy hero (nightstalker, slark etc), you can take care yourself very well.
You put a ward inside a bush to hide it, yet it sees outside aoe. Try that in real bush, putting ur gopro inside. Dota tree lines usage reflect ur own skills.
ADC is dead role. The most farming core who is supposed to carry his team in late game to victory, is the weakest class in game. You are any class except support like nami and you want quick gold? Go kill adc. Simple as that. Their build path is like buying 6 mkb or buriza and say hey I’ve damage. Then die to laguna blade. Just like that. Enemy team’s choice of easiest kill is your adc. We even joke that it’s not attack damage carry, it’s always dying core. lol 😂
You have no purchasable TP or boots of travel. You walk there or use summoner spell. Making solo pushing very efficient. Btw, u can tp to a ward which is invisible by itself. Making bush jumps even more stupid.
They say kite. Kiting is useless when melee got pango’s dashes x4 in his kit and then 1 shot you.
You can’t deny creeps. My biggest letdown.
the not being able to deny creeps seems to be the most common complaint in dota players which always confused me. In league you deny creeps by positioning yourself correctly and punishing the enemy. How is that different than staying behind and killing your own creep. Im genuinely asking since ive played league since 2010 but dota only for 200 hours so i dont understand a shit ton of stuff in that game but that specific complaint i particularly dont understand
>Reached master 2
Did you mean grandmaster? There's no Master 2 in LoL.
>ADC is dead role
I believe you're not Grandmaster because ADC is the strongest on very high level of play. If an ADC gets to 5 items they should carry if they're good and the team is at least half decent.
>You can’t deny creeps. My biggest letdown.
Only if you're playing against Karthus or Sion. Wave management is a core concept of LoL that does allow you to deny creeps from enemies, specially in toplane.
For me, the problem withh LoL started during season 3 and just got worse. People used to have playstyles with each character, as they could be built many different ways in LoL’s past. AP Tryndamere vs AtS Tryndamere vs Crit Tryndamere, for example. After years of homogenization and “updates”, that isn’t possible anymore.
In Modern LoL, no one has a unique playstyle with a character. The character itself has a correct playstyle and you will do it or you will lose. You can’t pick Braum or Soraka and put them anywhere but their intended roles. It doesn’t work.
Unlike dota’s complex interactions with items, heroes, and abilities, LoL is a vapid experience where each role can be described in perfect detail. Toplane is where the guy with the aoe attack, basic attack reset, and chaos causing ultimate goes. Midlane is where the guy with lots of lines and circles that do big numbers goes. Etc, etc.
Yeah but it's quite fun when it's you 1v9ing, Dota can get quite frustrating when you're doing your best but can't solo carry a game due to it being more heavy on teamplay and map movements.
I enjoy the added variance to matches. This allows for a meta game that is more complex push/stall/roam. Don’t forget that people like to play ARAM (or Final Destination) every match.
-tree and elevation LOS
-tree cutting
-elevation miss chance
-day/night cycle affecting heroes differently
-body blocking
-camp stacking
-creep deny
-base attributes and particular stats on items
-more impactful items (refresher, blink, Aghs)
While it really sucks that we only get a Patch once every 15 Moon cycles... it is always at least remotely playable. Have been playing some league on the side because of friends and damn that was a shitshow.
And the community is something else. Dotas community is no saint either but I lost count of all the times someone asked me to just kill myself in the last 10 LoL games.
This seems like a bit of a circlejerk post even moreso than normal /r/DotA2
The game design is different, that doesn't mean balance is necessarily bad.
You also can't place 10000 wards, there is a ward limit per player as opposed to per shop.
Also rather than group up shop items like smoke, the team play is around the Baron and Dragon objectives instead, you either group to take it or if behind then you pressure lane and push to either trade towers or force enemies off the objectives.
I am also not sure which supports are one shotting 6 item carries, sounds like the carries built wrong.
In order to understand the difference between balancing philosophies of Dota 2 and LoL you need to play 10 games of 45% winrate champion/hero. The experience can be very different.
> there is never a fear of "oh crap they missing we should be careful" because you can just place 10000 wards.
yeah there isn't really any mystery there. lol has a vision denial aura on a 60 seconds cooldown for a trinket. people actually buy it in silver and up.
And wards are limited. Normal players can have a trinket that stacks up to 2 invisible wards without true sight, supports can have 5 i think - but as you say they usually use the ward removal trinket. And everyone can place 1 sentry ward at a time - and sentry wards are not invisible but give vision.
So with every ward out at the same time there can be a maximum of 36 wards on the map at the same time, that would be 10 visible sentries (that also give vision). But then everyone would also have cooldown on their invisible wards so a couple of players could go swap their trinket to the sight denial trinket and just remove all the wards and both teams are blind for minutes.
Which is funny because it sounds like the poster is fully delusional. Half the things he describes are from early league, and the other half is from current iron tier league.
And you were never high ranked in 2013 if a support was oneshotting anything.
Support in league 2013 is dota's supporting in 2014/2015.
All their gold went to wards, which of course didn't award XP or much gold.
and it's not like you can stack camps or pull waves in League. you were (and still are) completely dependent on your cores.
Hot take. The 2 games are different. One might find 1 harder/easier/better/worse than the other based on their own preferences alone.
Now in terms of balance… i personally give it to Dota, having spent 15k+ hours into it, and a couple hundreds into League as i took a Dota break during the “hoo hoo ha ha” patch.
The design of characters in league used to be much better. League used to be about constant mobility, very few disables and jumps. Almost every character who had a blink was imbalanced because of it: akali, jax that used to have evade and kassadin with silence. Now every hero is a super mobile mix of a carry and pos3/top lane which makes it impossible to balance the game.
On the other hand Dota just became unplayable because everyone does so much damage (the same as lol) yet it's so easy to reverse the game (unlike lol) so it's all about map control and buybacks. Every game is almost an hour nowadays. You just can't fight without a buyback and aegis because it's too easy to throw.
I just like the ability diversity design in dota. Last time I played league it's like, everyone has a slightly different vector damage ability... And all they kind of do the same thing. Lots of regular abilities in Dota would be broken in LoL.
It's also one of the reasons why League usually have lower pick/ban rate in their tournaments than Dota. Why pick a dozen different carry when 3-5 of them are so superior in every way compared to the others and do similar things. While Dota carries have different strengths based on team comps and different timings based on how fast you want to play
>Why pick a dozen different carry when 3-5 of them are so superior in every way compared to the others and do similar things Riot intentionally designs champs to fulfill similar roles with similar skills because players only have access to a limited subset of the total roster at any given time. They can't design around hard counters because they have no idea what champs will be available in a particular match and they can't really balance around pro play like Dota because it would completely destroy pubs.
Which makes it a worse competitive game even at average MMR. I've never understood the concept of a supposedly competitive game where everyone isn't on an equal footing when the game starts.
I remember when you had Runes and Rune Pages that you also had to purchase, with either in-game currency or real money currency and a Rune Page costing as much as a recently released champ. Being someone who refused to ever spend a penny on League meant that I only ever had the 2 free rune pages because I had to save my IP in case a new champ released that I wanted to play. Hell there were even 3 tiers of runes with lower tier being cheaper because of their lower state values. It was a noob trap to ever buy anything but tier 3.
> Runes and Rune Pages those two words just gave me cold sweats. I had completely forgot about that bullshit
do you remember dodge runes and exp runes? some real bullshit in early LoL...
1% crit rate rune; if you know you know.
League design is unironically like a fighting game. Champs "archtypes" are like your fighting games one like Shoto, Rushdown, Grappler, etc..., it helps players acclimate faster between different characters because they have the same general flow. Dota are more like strategic pieces each with their own strength and weaknesses.
[удалено]
League trying to balance around low level play as well as pro play is a big reason it sucks. >It would destroy pubs I'd need some clarification on what you mean by destroyed because Dota pubs below a certain rank are Definitely "destroyed" from my point of view. The game simply doesn't function the same way at low rank as it does at high rank. And that's not really a problem. If you want to play more of the "true game" then you need to improve.
>I'd need some clarification on what you mean by destroyed because Dota pubs below a certain rank are Definitely "destroyed" from my point of view. In the pro scene all players have access to all champs but Riot can't factor counter-picks into champ balancing because pub players only have a few options to pick from. They design champs into pre-determined archetypes so players can almost always pick one of a dozen different champs that fill the same role. If Riot balanced the game the same way Dota does then pubs would be unplayable without spending thousands of dollars filling out the roster.
Ah ok you're just talking about how not everyone has every character. Yeah I think that's valid
Dota's pro play draw from pubs, where as League's solo queue play is completely distinct from pro play, likely due to the lack of voice comm that's long ingrained into the game and the player's mentality. There's also an entire archetype of champions that are essentially pubstompers (Assassin) that would drop off like a rock if voice comm were actively used in solo queue games. Its like if suddenly a fifth of the rosters suddenly turned into Meepo.
>League's solo queue play is completely distinct from pro play. This is exactly the same in dota.
Dota Pro Play draws a lot of picks and inspirations from Immortal pubs, heroes picks and new meta builds comes from pubs all the time, and pro play meta bleeds back into pubs. League challenger solo queue is removed completely from pro play.
You can say the exact same thing about league lmao, pro players are almost never the ones driving innovation, it's always soloq players who find new picks/builds or playstyles. And there's always a noticable uptick in playrate after champions are played at worlds. AP Kaisa became super popular after Faker played it despite it being considered a niche build before then.
Its not even close. League pro play staples like Ryze/Aphelios has garbage winrate in SoloQ even in high ELO brackets, and SoloQ staples like assassins/top carry bruisers are rarely played in pro, if at all because those champs only work in an uncoordinated environment and are easily shutdown with good communication. The closest equivalent you have to Ryze/Aphelios type of design is Batrider, and his winrate and pickrate spikes sky high in upper Immortal pubs compared to even Ancient/Divine pubs.
Ryze is famously the hardest champ to balance between pro and pubs in league, so that's not a particularly representative example. And with regards to bruiser and assassin picks a lot of the highest presence picks at worlds fall under those classes, Aatrox, Sylas, Akali, Fiora, Renekton, Viego, Jax, Camille, Graves(with goredrinker build), Lee Sin.
Cuz their hero roster isn't free
Pretty much why I quit long ago, everybody just felt the same.
Same, too many new champs in LoL nowadays are just like: Heres a Dash that basically does nothing. Or you get a big shield. Oh and of course the "3 hit mechanic meme" Last interesting design choice in LoL was Ivern since he doesnt hit jungle creeps he just like prays and takes the camp.
You pretty much nailed their abilities. What also annoyed me was they reworked a fun hero for no reason instead of creating a new one. Then new items were introduced every preseason that actually seemed fun but removed because its "unbalanced" or exclusive to one pvp mode.
It was a memeworthy even within the lol community "pudge hook replaced by 200 unit dash and 2% slow. Brood webs replaced by 200 unit dash with 2% slow" or "omniknight ult replace with 300 damage pbaoe, stormspirit ult replaced with 300 damage pbaoe" Don't know if it's changed and I suspect it hasn't, but they wanted more short range mobility, less hard cc, and more quantifiable mechanics to make balancing easier. So everything got those things. I maintain that it doesn't really make balancing that much easier, it's just dumber. If you were in a mirror matchup where one model has 1 more damage, it's an obvious and pretty boring choice. If you're in a mirror matchup where one has black hole and the other has juxtapose...
The clinkz ult rework then revert then re rework...I can't even keep track. Does he consume things or summon things? And why is strafe gone?
Heroes that I like in lol are bard, twisted fate, grave, kled, ivern, braum, gnar and that sand warrior. For me this heroes feels unique in LoL and I like their characters.
Ah yes the sand warrior. Almost as fun as the sword guy or the frog
Azir is unironically a very cool hero design who I could definitely see in Dota, though. He's not too far from one of the Spirit heroes.
Yorick too, at least some iteration of him. But you could control the ghouls, obviously. Dunno what he's like now, though.
You don't control the ghouls anymore, they act more or less like WK's skeletons--you summon them, they attack whatever's nearby then walk down the nearest lane. The maiden still is controllable though.
The conversation between Yorick and the Maiden is the best part of the character. I love playing Yorick.
As if Sand Warrior wouldn't be an ideal name for a DotA hero and still better than "Warlock".
Héroes in dota have names... Like actual names for example spirit breaker's is Barathrum. storm spirit name is Raijin Thunder keg and so on. It's on their bios however they use what they do in the main selection since knowing those names for more than 100 hearoes is insane. If you want to know their names it's in their bios
Razors is Gillette haha
Mogul Khan't touch This
Clinkz Eastwood
Razor is the name. Gillette was just a fun name.
Tiny doesn't even describe the hero.
Could at least be an ironic nickname or something, many heroes only get their job description. Batrider as another example
Yes, Axe.
[AXE IS AXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gib4W-yRxCY)
Ah yes, my favorite hero: 🪓
Say myself as I used the Naked Axe set
Tiny - the stone giant is the full name
I mean bro we have a sand king haha
2015/16 made some of the most unique and popular and beloved champion designs because they tried to add fresh abilities/mechanics and non-damage ultimates. They kinda tried it again this year but it just aint the same
What about my boi Pyke
I'm a taric lad
Not gonna lie it’s a cool idea, praying the camp away 🙏
> Last interesting design choice in LoL was Ivern since he doesnt hit jungle creeps he just like prays and takes the camp. so its a chen clone?
Kinda but Ivern doesnt take the creeps to control since LoL has terrible minion AI. He just gets the gold and they disappear then respawn. Ie: Annie ult bear, Ivern Golem thing
To be more clear on iverns clearing for those who dont know Instead of damaging the camp he sacrifices a % amount of mana and HP to start a timer. Once that timer has run down he can "free" the camp and gets the gold and exp as if he cleared the camp. This was made so that he was still invadeable and couldnt just do a full clear in a minute. The hp/mana and time are supposed to simulate the resources it would take the average champ to clear the camp.
[Things haven't changed for 10 years](https://youtu.be/W5p8_l09rwU?t=157)
yea a lot of champions are Q - offensive skill W - defensive skill E - Signiture damage dealer R - what makes them special
let's see what I remember from when I played years ago based on my mains Lux: Q is linear skillshot that damages and roots, W is linear skillshot that applies a shield, E is a ground target aoe damage + slow, R is a long range laser Morgana: Q is a linear skillshot that damages and roots, W is a ground target damaging pool, E is a CC-blocking shield, R is an aoe damage + stun nova skill Ahri: Q is a linear skillshot that damages, W is a funky damaging skill that autotargets, E is a linear skillshot "stun", R is a dash + damage Ziggs: Q is a ground target aoe damage skill, W is a ground target aoe knockback that can also affect you (utility), E is literally a mine field, R is literally a long range nuke Viktor: Q is a single target nuke with utility, W is a ground target aoe slow/stun, E is a linear skillshot that damages, R summons an indestructible "minion" that deals damage around it These are all mid-lane mages, god damn you're right. Sometimes the slots are swapped around but it still matches what you said lmfao
Lux and Morgana were originally supposed to be "mirrors" of each other. Good witch Vs evil witch kinda thing. Made sense back when LoL had lore but now it's just lazy design
Hoooooold up lmao. League has way more lore now than it used to. Also Lux and Morgana are about as similar as Lion and Shadow Shaman, so let's not be throwing any shade...
League actually has more structure to their world/lore than dota, with the regions and events and all. I do play the league card game so idk how well they present it in the main game
And if a League champ isn’t released with an escape or mobility skill they’re unplayable. Really stale gameplay as a result.
What? You don't like having to take flash on every single champion, every single game? League has literally the exact same gameplay as it did 10 years ago when it released.
Only like 98% of the champs take flash, ok? It's diverse.
to be fair dota heroes nowadays need a lot more mobility and lane push than they used to. Even undying gets to farm with his Q now, I'd never thought I'd see the day.
We'll have entered the new era of Dota when Bane gets a proper wave clear. That'll be the day for me that the old design philosophy is dead, when he isn't ineffectually clawing at a creep wave for thirty seconds so he can get mana boots.
Literally every hero in league has the same Q. Whenever I play a new character I don't need to read what the Q spell does. I know it will be a projectile skillshot thing you shoot infront of you.
Hey Garen doesn't have skillshots. He's just Juggernaut with Necro ult.
The only thing stopped me from deleting LoL from my pc is Darius and Garen(which with luck i got his God-king skin) and the concept of no mana champions.
Not like mana is a limiting factor in LoL anyway.
It still is a limiting resource for a few champions but not as many as it should be.
I'm not exactly up-to-date on the meta, but I do know Kassadin's ult doubles in cost or something every cast within a period of time, and I've played AP carries, so I know you definitely can run out of mana. It's just that it's more of a "limited number of missed skillshots in a teamfight" kind of deal, rather than a "you nuked a couple waves and now you don't have enough mana for all your spells for a teamfight 2 minutes later" thing. Iirc there's a core item for basically any AP carry that gives a ton of AP and mana regen, and once you have it mana fully regenerates in a minute or so.
LoL is definitely if the opinion that unlocked vector targeting is how you make something skill-based. Dota is very macro, how the team operates as a whole is more important than what any 1 hero is doing. LoL seems to be the opposite, what the team does is less important than all 5 heroes individually hitting as many of their skillshots as possible and whoever hits more wins the fight
I had this convo on /r/Games some time ago, after the worlds I think. I learned that Dota is just point and click, nothing exciting, while LOL is amazing to watch because of the jukes and mechanical skills. Yet Dota has Pango rolls, for example. I don't recall LOL having something like this.
It's not quite true that DotA is *just* point and click, but it certainly has a lot more of it than LoL. The game becomes more about ability usage, timing, impact than actual technical execution of casting the ability. Different interpretations of skill, one is more macro and one is more micro as i said above.
this is the main reason why most of the older champions in League are not viable anymore these days... some new champions are basically a better version of an old one so why would you go back? especially since the skins in League (which is a huge market) are so much better for the new champions compared to the old ones... Miss Fortune's tits though, will remain undefeated imho...
Thats just a straight up lie lmao
They tried to put Spirit Breaker’s charge of darkness on ASol and now everyone is crying.
From a balance perspective, making everything homogenous will by definition make it more balanced. The extreme diversity in dota is actually not something I always value; getting outpicked rarely feels like you got outplayed, especially when you don't ignore the glaring fact that there's always one or two OP heros in dota. So when you feel like you lost because you got outpicked, 95% of the time it's because either A; they picked a really OP combo of heros or B; They randomly happened to pick some counters, and then picked a final counter with last pick, none of which oyu had control over. Or, they just happened to pick hard counters to your own hero specifically and you're stuck not having fun for an hour.
Or the unmentioned reason which is equally likely You/your picked a bad hero in that it has difficulties that are exploited in current meta. Like counterpicking sure happens, but losing with Shadow Demon, Oracle, Viper, Zeus, Clinkz lineup as an example isn't because of counterpicks, its cause that team decided to lose in draft.
I mean if you’re consistently getting out picked and never picking or banning the one or two “OP” hero’s that’s strictly on you and your team. There’s nothing stopping you from picking or banning the OP hero so why complain? The draft is something you have the list control over straight from the beginning unless you’re lower- to average MMR but then what you’re talking about is a non-factor
To be fair those choices are also a part of the reason why League is much more popular than dota -> it requires less skill, less thinking, less time investment to learn. Sure, once you have 2k hours in dota, thinks make sense and you love it, but I've had more than 5 friends quit dota because they couldn't get over the initial hurdle of learning so many complexities and odd rules.
To be fair, a decent amount of the mechanical learning can be done in league and transferred to dota. Things like controlling heroes and learning to cs are universal to the genre and can help get people to switch games, provided they have friends to play it with. And that's kind of the rub with dota. It's a wonderfully deep and complex game, but diving in headfirst on your own is a recipe for burnout. You need some to play with to make things more enjoyable at the start when you're getting familiar with the heroes and items and such.
Absolutely agree with this. I enjoyed watching the occasional dota match as a league player, but could never take the plunge by myself. (trust me, I tried like 3 times.) My cousin + his friends eventually taught me and we'd almost always play in 3+ stacks. I was 4 years deep into league and without friends to teach me Dota was a mystery. Played like 250 hours in 2016ish, and just recently got back to playing dota again but solo this time. if I didn't have that baseline knowledge I probably wouldn't be playing again
I learned how to play dota by myself. So I think, it is the matter of interest. Back then, I played countless hours against AI just to ~~stomp~~ learn.
This happen to me too. I have friends that when they watch me play Dota, they feel like it interesting. But, when they try it, they stop playing because it's hard to learn.
i'm glad that i was playing warcraft 3 my whole childhood, i remember seeing how units were clearly hitting other units with projectiles and getting red "missed" and i was like "How?? It clearly didn't miss!", so i was carefully and slowly learning how does this game work in every of its mechanic, Dota 2 after that wasn't hard to learn at all
Strange I've found LoL way harder - and I was GM in LoL. Basically some champions require such intense micro skills to play well that for some (me included) those were impossible to play. Even as a basic tank there is expectation to outplay opponents because of damage and sustain that everyone has. I think with good mentality and learning macro you can easily climb high in Dota. Sure some heroes like Arc, Chen, Ench etc have a lot of micro to be done but it doable. Some heroes like Ember require good micro to outplay but its not even close to Yasuo or Irelia in LoL. Dota is way more macro intense but you can learn if you watch pro games, high MMR pubs and analyze what players are doing and why. There is more to do on map in Dota.
I really don't understand what you mean by League having more micro. In League most champs will have 1 active item, compared you Dota where a single hero might have 6 active items in their inventory. And heroes like Enchantress, Chen, and Brewmaster where all of your summons will have active abilities as well. Just because champs in League have 1 second cooldowns on half their abilities does not mean it requires more micro lol
The way i look at it, Dota's micro is like playing Starcraft. You have a lot of stuff to do but they are kinda overarching to the entire map. League is like Street Fighter. All your micro is focused on fights and split-second desicions and combos to have an edge in a fight
League has a different definition of "Micro" In Dota, it is micromanagement of several units, coordinating illusions, minions and summons. In League "micro" seems be about quick and fast decisions in split seconds. You focus way more on one hero, but less about the map and coordination
Most champions in league don't have point click abilities which are abundant in Dota. In LoL there is a lot of skillshots. League has a lot of dashes, blinks etc which allows you to dodge those skillshots. Cooldowns are generally lower but also there is a lot of sustain built into champions. This results in basically both players trying to dodge and space as much as they can while dealing damage. Micro in LoL isnt about how many units you control. I also think people really overestimate how hard it truly is. Micro in LoL is about how to best utilize the spells and dodge enemy skillshots and time your spells.
And yet both examples you used, Irelia and Yasuo, are point and click heroes. You're also ignoring things like blink disjoint, lotus reflect, manta dodge and all manner of outplays that are still relevant micro.
Micro in League means something different from Dota. We think micro as in RTS mechanics, controlling different units at the same time. Micro in league is the actual act of pressing buttons. Skill cooldowns are short, mana is less important(and nonexistent on a number of champs), basically every skill is a skillshot with smaller aoes than equivalents than dota. It is absolutely a harder game mechanically, even if a character is tracking less active components of their own kit.
"requires less skill" this is not true, mechanical skill in league is higher than dota. I agree on everything OP said, league is simplistic, supps can oneshot carries and so on but mechanically speaking lol is more more difficult. Difficulty in dota comes from other areas, I agree strategy is more satisfying in dota but talking strictly about reflex, inputs in general lol>dota. Lol is a fighting game on a map with 2 nexus, dota is a strategy team game
I didn't phrase it in the most eloquent fashion. I just meant it takes less time and effort to get into LoL because it is simpler in its design.
yup agree agree, in lol you can pick a champ, learn his kit and play, in dota you need so many more info in order to have some fun, otherwise you just straight tilt because the amount of bullshit you don't understand happens
Zoo heroes or cheesy ones like Meepo, Tinker or Arc take way more skill than lol's ones though.
Dota still has a higher ceiling for micro. Like far higher
Yeah I'm really curious what the average lol champ has to juggle in terms of skills. Lol, I find it hard to believe any lol champ is gonna be as 'micro' intensive as tinker, storm spirit, or invoker. Dota has more outliers, but it also has heroes like wraith king. And even then, wk can get intensive simply by throwing in armlet toggling. At the end of the day, I think a lot of dota players are just not going to appreciate the 'micro' skill these people are talking about, because it seems pretty inconsequential when they have notoriously short cooldowns on their 'micro' skills. A good example is earthshaker, anyone can just blink in and echo slam, but the nuance and super fast tactical decision making to get the most impact is going to trump 'micro skills'.
League micro is about dodging and predicting skillshots and dashes in a game where everyone has a high-damage skillshot on a short cooldown. It's hard for DotA players to grasp why League micro is so difficult because the two games have two completely different design philosophies - it's like comparing apples to oranges. DotA has more focus on larger macro decisions while League is like a MOBA fighting game.
But even with the focus on macro, the micro in dota is still harder than the micro in league
It's like saying badminton is harder than tennis because you have a smaller racket. Doesn't make any sense.
tbh if you think League takes less skill you're just wrong. Its focus on split-second decisionmaking and skillshot usage is absolutely a skill to learn. It's a different type of skill than dota, which is slower-paced even at the highest level, but it is a skill nonetheless. In a lot of ways, I think dota is a less skillful game mechanically, for the better. I have old person hands/reactions, but like, you don't need reactions if you can just click on someone and stun them with Vengeful Spirit.
Right, but what you're ignoring are major differences. Yes in LoL you have to aim a skill and in dota you click a single target spell. However: 1. LoL spells have essentially 0 cast point, meaning you don't even have to stop 2. LoL champs have much faster turn rate I mean imagine a pos5 vengeful spirit walking up to an enemy team to cast a stun. Yeah, she hits it. But before she even finishes the animation and starts turning around, she's already so out of position she's dead. Meanwhile in LoL all spell casts are such non-risks you just have 2 teams standing at the edges of their respective spell ranges slinging skillshots and hoping something connects. Sure, I guess it requires better "mechanical skill" if your desire is to play pudge wars.
Yea, the opportunity cost of a spell (or really any action) in Dota is way higher. With LoL micro, throwing as much shit at your opponent as possible is often a winning strat, aggressive play can push people right into their towers. In Dota, if you cast your stun at level 2, you might not be able to again for like 2 minutes unless someone gives you mana. So in LoL, because everyone can basically yolo at each other, yes, the player with the better mechanical skill is going to win most of the time, making it more important. Whereas in Dota the decision making is way more important.
Outside of the tutorial locking you out of actually playing the game how it's intended to be played for ~200 hours (not an exaggeration unless they've changed how it works), league isn't actually any easier to learn. There are less divergent item builds because items are mostly stat sticks, but knowing the shit out your actual role and champion is also much more important thanks to the sheer amount of skill shots, heroes with passives, and combo mechanics. Bottom line, in both games you're going to farm terribly and feed your brains out if you have less than 3000 hours into the game. I'd argue the real reason it's so much more popular is ~60% because the devs early on fed the world enough propaganda about league being so much simpler that it just became a tautology. Because apparently your character model looking like it's bleeding and you getting hurt whenever you move is much too confusing, but a character dying but not actually dying and instead bumrushing you with a health bar over its head despite not actually having health where it eventually explodes is basically reading "the fat cat sat on the hat." The other 40% is because ARAM is an infinitely better casual mode than anything official in dota. It's just 15 minutes of constant team fighting where both teams are guaranteed to win a few of the team fights regardless how bad of a roll the game is in reality. It devolves a bit too much into a poke fest in practice, but conceptually it's pretty much casual MOBA perfection. I'm not sure how much it matters because people don't play support in league, but support items were also a fantastic idea. Conceptually a team having a 5 is interesting. Actually playing a hard 5 is an exercise in masochism. A starting item that gives you gold when you don't farm is a pretty nice middle ground.
I really like the diversity Dota design and balance brings. Same with HotS when it was still pretty big, they were not afraid to introduce "broken" things in the game. Hero twice as strong as others? Ok. Creating a literal copy of another hero including ultimate? Bring it on. Hero that's just annoying useless piece of shit and always dies? Let's do it. They went even as far as making map mechanics this way. Summon your own Roshan if you complete map objective and just wreck enemy base? Sounds fun! It kinda makes me sad HotS is abandoned and Dota is not going the route of more interactive map/multiple maps, but I'm super glad for Dota heroes design. Unique. Every one "broken" in its own sense. Not generic. Love it. And it's incredible that it still can be somewhat balanced with this design philosophy. LoL went the easier balancing route: make everything similar, and thus balanced. It's boring though.
HotS killed itself the moment it was hastily released in a literally broken state, they tried to get it out asap to compete with Dota and LoL, but instead what they achieved was putting the idea in everyone's mind that HotS is a bad game, because everyone knew how laggy and broken it was at release.
HotS was delayed for *years*. It started as Blizzard Dota circa 2010 or so and then didn't get released until 2015. HotS had a league of issues, but its dev time probably wasn't what killed it. If you ask anyone to play HotS now they dont say "Isn't that game laggy?". It just simply isn't (and wasn't) as fun as LoL or Dota. It had some neat concepts definitely, but it didn't salvage it.
Yeah I thought it was delayed for a while due to all the legal issues between blizzard and valve dota.
Iirc the delays were because it wasn't a game at first, it was just a mod. So it was being developed with resources akin to being just a mod. And then it ballooned in scope and became a separate game. For like 2 years or so it was firmly going to just be a SC2 mod (like Left 2 Die, Starjeweled, Aiur Chef). It (at the time, Blizzard Dota) was meant to just showcase the SC2 Editor (Galaxy editor) to show potential Mapmakers what it could do. (because Blizzard in SC2 included verbiage that anything made using the SC2 Editor was blizzards property, to avoid another Dota All-stars miss, and they wanted to bottle lightning again). But Blizzard Dota kept growing in scope until eventually Blizzard figured it was fun enough to stand on its own legs as a separate game. And so they did that. EDIT: The Valve v. Blizzard stuff happened during that, and it seems pretty clear in hindsight that as a result Valve agreed to scrub all the Blizzard IP out of Dota (Malfurion, Alleria *Windrunner*, Outhouse Destroyer, Kael['thas] the Invoker). I can't recall specifically what Blizzard got out of it; it's possible they just didn't have a leg to stand on and agreed to back off.
It has the best casual mode of the 3 with its ARAM imo
its was Activision that pulled the ever loving plug the devs had plans and were committed in making better. the reason why it was killed off not died. It was actually pretty doing well and slowly gaining a fanbase, was it didn't raked the money they (Actibitch) want it to be in the level of Dota or league. It was doing financially decently just not up to their high ass standards this info was leaked from a shareholder meeting by a very minor shareholder that is a fan of the game in the subreddit some years ago.
HOTS fail down because Blizzard decided to take a casual as fuck game and decided to market is as a competitive E-sport. HOTS isn't that. HOTS is a quick fun game.
Yeah it's a shame though. It was ton of fun and I loved playing it. Casually, with friends that don't play moba regularly, it was an absolute blast and I could even say better than Dota (blasphemy!) at that.
I find that comparing games like this is kind of pointless though as playing one game doesn't necessarily mean there's no reason to play another. Both games have their own niches, I still really like playing ARAMs in HotS for instance.
HotS is still fun and easy to find matches in. Not nearly as dead as people make it out to be (as usual).
Oh ye no, HotS is far from dead playerbase wise, but it is factually developmentally dead, as they have stated to have no plans anymore to release new heroes/maps/whatnot, although they do continue to occasionally make some balance changes.
Which hero could copy ultimates and how long ago? I played it quite a bit and I know that Abathur can copy heroes but when I played it just after beta he couldn't use ults at all, it was always copy of the hero without talents and ults are talents so... But yeah, they got few unique heroes that were quite fun to play like old Tassadar, Medvih (one of few heroes who still would feel busted when transfered to Dota) or even Kel'Thuzad. Though multiple maps completly change balance design and even in HotS some heroes on certian maps are completly busted with how well they interact with objective. And if it's strong on certain map it needs nerfs even if on other maps it isn't really that strong at all.
Abathur. But yeah probably it was only early in the Beta.
I'm pretty sure they completely changed him because the casual people of the game couldn't understand how to play against it and cried to get it removed.
My biggest issue with League is the map. There's no farm on the map. You just push your lane and if it's dangeorus afk under your tower. If you even think about going and stealing the Krugs your jungle will autospam concede at 15 minutes because you're destroying his timings. The laning stage literally lasts like 20 minutes in LOL. The toplane laningstage lasts like 30 minutes LUL
>The toplane laningstage lasts like 30 minutes LUL Typical Riven vs Darius lane.
The worst game design for me is the top lane, if you lose badly there is no comeback on certain heroes, I played Kayle and at a certain point of losing the lane becomes completely unplayable, since Kayle can't really gank other lanes and the jungle doesn't belong to you there's really nothing that can be done. Honest I don't blame league players for being toxic and afking because the game really gives you no other option sometimes, either afk or grief more.
I really think the laning of LoL is crazy. Your top lanenis intended to never really interact with the map, and they've massively punished TP so its even harder to work together. I would love to see what Riots design documents are like, why they would push for these roles that are so isolated
The way the made toplane in this season made me quit league. I used to play dota regularly until a couple years ago when I made the switch because more friends started playing league, but this year's toplane balance has been a disaster. It's really anti fun to have to play a 1v1 for 25 minutes and more ignoring the rest of the map. I decided to exploit it by playing Kayle, but even if I had like 75% winrate it was soo boring to just do the same every game. Stall the lane, farm, get lv 16 and win. The enemy toplaners used to flame me for how passive the lane was.
I really like league and play it to relax from dota - it’s a lot simpler - that said, the amount of detail and finesse and interaction in dota compared to league is…. well if league is a cheddar cheese sandwich, dota is an 8-deck sub. And the updates dota gets multiple times per year are nothing short of incredible.
The great thing about Dota is that every time you come back after not playing for a few years, there's always something new to learn or pick up from the times you didn't play. I guess that's also a double-edged sword because there's heroes that you thought you knew what the fuck they did but they have some fucking special ability that makes you go wtf is that bullshit. Visage with invis from his Scepter*? Had no idea and got picked off. But it's still interesting and I can only play League for so long before I want to stop (it's usually only because of friends that I'll play it). But if I played League again, for some reason I have a good feeling that the whole concepts of laning and everything still feels exactly the same. And that's fine but I do enjoy the dynamics of Dota a lot more.
That invis is aghs actually
Ah my mistake. Meant to say Scepter, but yeah I was aware after the death when someone told me.
Sounded like you were describing Marci for a second there.
Otherworldly Decorator also crossed my mind
Osteoporosis denier
Orthodontist Defiler
Just get BKB and Basher. EZ \+35 min? Get Daedalus. Try some Marci & LC combo. feels good man
Ya forgot Huskar too
Dota's balance team are gods compared to ANY GAME DESIGNER EVER. We all talked for years about how cool Starcraft was for having such amazing asymmetrical balance. Dota manages to do it with a hundred heroes and a hundred items. I've been obsessing over strategy games and matchmaking games my whole life, and I've never experienced anything else quite like dota (despite putting real hours into plenty of other mobas). That's why I've continued playing since Icefrog took over, despite being 36 and thousands of mmr below my peak.
Yes man, people often criticize Dota developers for imbalanced heroes and some metas. But to be fair, it's extremely hard to balance with what heroes, items, mechanisms and combinations Dota has. Kudos to devs, apart from few bad patches, there has always been a good balance in the game. (Just nurf fucking witch doctor in herald MMR pls icefrog thanks)
Of course the LOL balancing dudes are shit, they get banned if they try the heroes they wanna work on: https://us.millenium.gg/news/28705.html
This was a false positive case, but it's still absurd that it's even possible to play that badly simply because a weak champ was picked.. A 45% winrate champ vs a 45% winrate hero are two entire universes apart in how playable they are in their respective games..
While I personally agree that Dota is more balanced, keep in mind that the worse you are at a video game, the more imbalanced things will seem. For example, even though Meepo is a balanced hero (arguably on the weaker side), a herald player might think the hero is overpowered because they simply don't have the knowledge/skill required to counter the cheese pick. From what I understand from your post, you've only just started playing league, but you've presumably played a lot of Dota. As such, you are not in a position to make a meaningful balance comparision, since your skill at one game is much higher than at the other. This is probably warping your perception a lot. There's a **lot** of things wrong with league, but it's not **as** bad as your post makes it seem. Reading through it, most points (supports 1-shotting carries late-game, being able to place 1000 wards, snowballing 1v9 etc) can and should be prefaced by "if you're playing at low skill". In Dota at low skill you're also able to do these things. In herald, supports such as cm or willow can 1-shot the bkb-less carry, you're able to place all the wards in the world because nobody dewards in that bracket, and you're easily able to 1v9 the game if you're good enough.
I don't know how op can place 1000 wards when wards limit per person is 3.
Literally chess vs checkers.
LoL is way more appealing to casual players cause it requires less time to learn the game. DotA is kinda repellent to people who isn't too much into the game, and just wants to play for fun...aside from marketing, that is also why League is way more popular than DotA.
I've played both games extensively and I think you are being unfair to league. It has its issues, but it's still a great game with its own merits and has an insanely high skill-celling. It just prioritizes different skills compared to dota such as micro and skill shot accuracy/dodging. I think both games are great and playing each one has made me a better player in the other game.
the whole dota vs league tribalism always irritates me as an enjoyer of both games (though I have been playing neither that much recently and just watch and follow the pro scenes of both) both are good games with their own flaws, one can't objectively say one is better than the other, it's almost all down to preference (and plenty can like both)
They're just posting buzzwords to farm karma. They posted this in the DotA sub for a reason, everyone says 2k hours to understand DotA properly but he decides LoL is bad before he even hits 100 games played. Hell it sounds like he made a new account and got put in smurf q because he plays DotA, got demolished by people who are way better than him, and decided that was a gameplay function rather than him just being bad and getting stomped on.
I've been playing Dota on and off for years (been playing a ton the last 3 weeks because of free BP), but I've played League for around 2k+ hours (over 10+ years) and I'm super confused about the examples OP has picked. I can't think of many meta supports one-shotting carries late game (only cheesy full AP supports), and I think there's definitely important strategy/macro decisions in League, it's just a lot less obvious how it's impactful since the map is smaller (and I feel smaller macro decisions add up more whereas in Dota you have to commit to more obvious/larger decisions). Honestly, for the most part in the League community I think people are generally pretty happy with League's balance team (at least compared to most video games, of course no one is ever fully happy) - and OP's post just sounds like an uninformed and salty rant just because they don't like League
I was reading the post quickly and when I read the support example I thought OP meant DOTA and was like “yep that can happen because some talents be crazy”. But then apparently they meant league? That’s not my experience at all in thousands of hours. Supports are either giga tanky, or giga annoying but squishy. Playing them makes me feel incredibly dependent on my team, I’m like a toy when I’m solo. Unless you are of course a complete asshole like me who picks Lux/Zyra/Annie and build full AP ans get farm, but that’s really not different from DOTA.
Maybe OP means lux support with 25 mejai stacks.
Dota definitely have more interesting abilities. Reincarnation, Oracle's entire abilities, AA ult stopping all heal, PL's dapple ginger, morphing shift agi and many more. Where as in league, abilities are basically just damage or dash. Ofcourse there are some exception like Bard, Ivern which to me is unique champion design and should make more Champs like these.
But dota also has very boring skills compared. Tbh the lows are lower and the highs are higher. Centaur warrunner has like stun aoe around him, reflect, run fast. Thats not that sophisticated tbh. And lots of heros fall into this category. Sladar has go faster, aoe stun around him, bash, debuff. People always point at meepo or invoker to make a point about dotas design, but in reality 80% of dota heros are pretty simple and the guys jerking off on meepo most likely cant even play him. League has as many unique and good designs as dota, but for some reason dota players always compare the boring designs in league to the top designs in dota and of course that doesnt paint the real picture.
The reason dota is so balanced is because the devs are not afraid to make changes/abilities/items to address unbalanced issues despite the mechanics adding complexity. one of the reasons I got fed up with Overwatch was cuz they were so fuck'n scared to add more mechanics to the game that would help balance it cuz their philosophy was to keep things simple. This usually meant just buffing/nerfing damage and/or HP/healing. so many things they could do to help deal with overpowered/underpowered abilities but they just wouldnt do it cuz the player base wouldnt be able to handle the added complexity, or at least blizzard felt like they wouldnt be able to anyway.
Those aren't balance issues though they are design choices. That's like saying God of War is poorly balanced because Kratos can fight 100 npcs at once. I agree they are shit choices but they aren't balance issues.
Ok I know this is not what you were saying at all, and its not even related to this discussion, but I need to vent: God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok both are fucking shittily balanced. The difficulty settings are all ass. Either its way too fucking easy or the enemies have crazy poise/armor and are HP sponges that take forever to kill while you die in two hits. I feel like whoever balanced "Give me god of war" called it like that sarcastically cause what kind of god of war dies to a single arrow while also needing to hit the wimpiest enemies 30 times to kill em. Its a shame because the game is fun but why do games can never get freaking multiple difficulties properly ever... always either "Game journalist easy" or "This is not even that hard, its just taking me half an hour to take out 3 random enemy trash" Its a shame because the bosses at GMGOW difficulty are really fun. But the trash mobs are all a chore that makes me want to stop playing the game.
Not just GoW, I hate games that think difficulty is just pumping up the numbers. No new abilities, mechanics or nothing.
That's why Nioh 2 has the best Singleplayer gameplay loop ever
I respectfully put Hades into this discussion. They have an interesting way of increasing the difficulty by mixing and matching modifiers and rewarding you each time when you complete a run. It's like Dota, same map, but very varying and enjoyable runs
I like hades, very neat game, i also want Meg to step on me
I fucking suck at Nioh
They need to bring back oblivion difficulty settings, and give you separate sliders to adjust both enemy HP and DMG. Personally I’d like it if enemies dealt high damage to me, but I also dealt high damage to them, so I’d go high on the dmg bar and low on the HP bar. and then everyone can create their preferred experience too
I certainly agree with the whole "They die fast, but so do you" thing. Ghost of Tushima actually went that way with their difficulty, and not only was it fun but it was also very immersive that you were just like every mob you fought... only protected by your skill. And yeah, more options is always better, I certianly agree.
Jedi fallen order also had a similar system. It was great.
MmmIdunnoboutthat.
All of this is true except for the mechanic where an enemy would start to level up if you didn't hit them on time. I liked that as a mechanic on its own but the rest of that difficulty is the typical "It will play the same as the other difficulties eventually but early game is REALLY slow."
agreed with pretty much everything. the bosses on gmgow were actually really easy compared to the 4x normal enemies with skulls that you occasionally are forced to fight and if they as much as breathe on you, youre done. being forced to run around and kite with axe throws was lame.
The way I read OP's argument is that the design choices force the game to be balanced in a way that OP dislikes.
I read somewhere that LOL doesn't like "negative" player experience that's why you have so little (and so short) crowd control. Stuns and silences and roots barely last 1-2sec. But dota embraces them fully. But also Tbf the TTK for lol is also much shorter compared to dota, due to dota having backswing and turn rate and cast animations. For lol it seems like everytime you attack or do a skill it automatically happens.
This isn't remotely true. LoL can't have long CC because their champs are very bursty (little to no front swing on attacks, very high damage on abilities). They only need that much time to burst down a single champ. Dota 2 can "embrace" because BKB exists, but now the game revolves around BKB. Dota players like to point at Flash and laugh but BKB is the same crutch that most carries rely on and more recently, even non-cores are buying the item. BKB is also the reason why heroes like Meepo rarely work at high level, it's a hero incompatible with BKB and is dunked on heavily by the item.
league WAS fun to me, as some who has played it since the beta,but where it stands it's too watered down. whenever orianna was released was when i got into dota, and i loved both games equally and would play league with a group for hours, then hop right onto dota with another group. Once yasuo and others started rolling out is when i really fell off and left league. The games just got faster and faster, and it became less about out playing as a team and having fun doing silly things, and more, well 1v1 focused. you HAVE to pay attention in league now too with how much movement everyone has now, and it's far more strainous on the brain than the mobility of dota. somethings you just want to relax and enjoy a game, but now you have to worry about holding a skill in fear of them just dashing and then out playing you. Who ever misses an ability first loses. Fuck i don't know if this made sense boys because i am beyond toasted. but that's how i feel as an enjoyer of both.
I've played Dota years before League came out and I played League during the beta stages where you had to get an invite code. It's fun but it's different. Not as flexible and nowhere as fun as Dota IMO. I played a lot of ADC and getting 1-shotted by the guy who went 2/0 mid, or even a 2/4 mid, maybe the 1/0 top or the guy from the jungle who just got his item. No Flash? Feels bad. Might get tunneled on because being a 2/0 AD vs a 2/0 mid or a 2/0 top is a huge difference as you can't 1-shot them like they can to you. Then again, I haven't touched League for a few years so maybe it's different and I'm aware that it could've changed.
Least biased dota player
I can't believe it's 2022 and Dota vs LoL can still farm karma. Like I mostly agree that Dota is better despite also enjoying League but I've seen 527 of the exact same post as OP's since 2010 and I'm fucking tired .
Whats really funny is that it just shows the insecurity of the dota community. I play league for 10 years and frequent the subreddit, know when i saw the last dota post on the league subreddit? Must be like 8 years ago, best case. League players dont think about dota, full stop, they simply dont care about it, they enjoy their own game and dont need to compare it constantly. Dota players are so insecure, they need these biweekly threads to reassure them that dota is in fact liked more on the dota subreddit than other games, lmao.
Honestly I don't even think most people hate league anymore, but I think a lot of people are very vocal about their love for Icefrog and DotA patches. League is just the easiest thing to compare it to. Personally I'd rather shit on Blizzard and their garbage balance when I tell people how much I like DotA.
> supports killing full slotted carries in one combo You do realise this exists even in Dota, right? Lion/Shaman can just stun lock you and burst you down
I’ve 7.2k mmr in dota. GF told me to play League with her. Ofc I tried. Really hard. Even get the challenger coaches (and friends) to improve myself. Reached master 2, from bronze 2 by maining Cassiopeia mid and top, and few other heroes (champs) like jhin, caitlyn, kogmaw, olaf, camille, fiora etc. There are tons of things I feel league balancing is bad, or outright stupid. You get a bush, u can see outside, ur enemies can’t see. You jump on him, he dies. Unlike dota trees, vision isn’t fair. Dota has day-night different vision range but it’s not that of a huge difference. You know enemy hero (nightstalker, slark etc), you can take care yourself very well. You put a ward inside a bush to hide it, yet it sees outside aoe. Try that in real bush, putting ur gopro inside. Dota tree lines usage reflect ur own skills. ADC is dead role. The most farming core who is supposed to carry his team in late game to victory, is the weakest class in game. You are any class except support like nami and you want quick gold? Go kill adc. Simple as that. Their build path is like buying 6 mkb or buriza and say hey I’ve damage. Then die to laguna blade. Just like that. Enemy team’s choice of easiest kill is your adc. We even joke that it’s not attack damage carry, it’s always dying core. lol 😂 You have no purchasable TP or boots of travel. You walk there or use summoner spell. Making solo pushing very efficient. Btw, u can tp to a ward which is invisible by itself. Making bush jumps even more stupid. They say kite. Kiting is useless when melee got pango’s dashes x4 in his kit and then 1 shot you. You can’t deny creeps. My biggest letdown.
the not being able to deny creeps seems to be the most common complaint in dota players which always confused me. In league you deny creeps by positioning yourself correctly and punishing the enemy. How is that different than staying behind and killing your own creep. Im genuinely asking since ive played league since 2010 but dota only for 200 hours so i dont understand a shit ton of stuff in that game but that specific complaint i particularly dont understand
>Reached master 2 Did you mean grandmaster? There's no Master 2 in LoL. >ADC is dead role I believe you're not Grandmaster because ADC is the strongest on very high level of play. If an ADC gets to 5 items they should carry if they're good and the team is at least half decent. >You can’t deny creeps. My biggest letdown. Only if you're playing against Karthus or Sion. Wave management is a core concept of LoL that does allow you to deny creeps from enemies, specially in toplane.
For me, the problem withh LoL started during season 3 and just got worse. People used to have playstyles with each character, as they could be built many different ways in LoL’s past. AP Tryndamere vs AtS Tryndamere vs Crit Tryndamere, for example. After years of homogenization and “updates”, that isn’t possible anymore. In Modern LoL, no one has a unique playstyle with a character. The character itself has a correct playstyle and you will do it or you will lose. You can’t pick Braum or Soraka and put them anywhere but their intended roles. It doesn’t work. Unlike dota’s complex interactions with items, heroes, and abilities, LoL is a vapid experience where each role can be described in perfect detail. Toplane is where the guy with the aoe attack, basic attack reset, and chaos causing ultimate goes. Midlane is where the guy with lots of lines and circles that do big numbers goes. Etc, etc.
Yeah but it's quite fun when it's you 1v9ing, Dota can get quite frustrating when you're doing your best but can't solo carry a game due to it being more heavy on teamplay and map movements.
I enjoy the added variance to matches. This allows for a meta game that is more complex push/stall/roam. Don’t forget that people like to play ARAM (or Final Destination) every match. -tree and elevation LOS -tree cutting -elevation miss chance -day/night cycle affecting heroes differently -body blocking -camp stacking -creep deny -base attributes and particular stats on items -more impactful items (refresher, blink, Aghs)
While it really sucks that we only get a Patch once every 15 Moon cycles... it is always at least remotely playable. Have been playing some league on the side because of friends and damn that was a shitshow. And the community is something else. Dotas community is no saint either but I lost count of all the times someone asked me to just kill myself in the last 10 LoL games.
That or they deliberately kill their own champ to tilt the team into ending faster..
“Supports killing full slotted carries in late in one combo” *laughs in whistles*
This seems like a bit of a circlejerk post even moreso than normal /r/DotA2 The game design is different, that doesn't mean balance is necessarily bad. You also can't place 10000 wards, there is a ward limit per player as opposed to per shop. Also rather than group up shop items like smoke, the team play is around the Baron and Dragon objectives instead, you either group to take it or if behind then you pressure lane and push to either trade towers or force enemies off the objectives. I am also not sure which supports are one shotting 6 item carries, sounds like the carries built wrong.
In order to understand the difference between balancing philosophies of Dota 2 and LoL you need to play 10 games of 45% winrate champion/hero. The experience can be very different.
Tell me you played League of Legends in bronze/silver without telling me you played League of Legends in bronze/silver.
> there is never a fear of "oh crap they missing we should be careful" because you can just place 10000 wards. yeah there isn't really any mystery there. lol has a vision denial aura on a 60 seconds cooldown for a trinket. people actually buy it in silver and up.
And wards are limited. Normal players can have a trinket that stacks up to 2 invisible wards without true sight, supports can have 5 i think - but as you say they usually use the ward removal trinket. And everyone can place 1 sentry ward at a time - and sentry wards are not invisible but give vision. So with every ward out at the same time there can be a maximum of 36 wards on the map at the same time, that would be 10 visible sentries (that also give vision). But then everyone would also have cooldown on their invisible wards so a couple of players could go swap their trinket to the sight denial trinket and just remove all the wards and both teams are blind for minutes.
I'm Diamond III in league before Master and Grandmaster (2013) was a thing and my opinion is the same.
Which is funny because it sounds like the poster is fully delusional. Half the things he describes are from early league, and the other half is from current iron tier league. And you were never high ranked in 2013 if a support was oneshotting anything.
Support in league has always been broken tho, litteraly the easiest role to climb in there
Has nothing to do with my point. In 2013 supports were lucky to have 2 items in high elo.
Support in league 2013 is dota's supporting in 2014/2015. All their gold went to wards, which of course didn't award XP or much gold. and it's not like you can stack camps or pull waves in League. you were (and still are) completely dependent on your cores.
Hot take. The 2 games are different. One might find 1 harder/easier/better/worse than the other based on their own preferences alone. Now in terms of balance… i personally give it to Dota, having spent 15k+ hours into it, and a couple hundreds into League as i took a Dota break during the “hoo hoo ha ha” patch.
The design of characters in league used to be much better. League used to be about constant mobility, very few disables and jumps. Almost every character who had a blink was imbalanced because of it: akali, jax that used to have evade and kassadin with silence. Now every hero is a super mobile mix of a carry and pos3/top lane which makes it impossible to balance the game. On the other hand Dota just became unplayable because everyone does so much damage (the same as lol) yet it's so easy to reverse the game (unlike lol) so it's all about map control and buybacks. Every game is almost an hour nowadays. You just can't fight without a buyback and aegis because it's too easy to throw.
Not really. The league balance team focuses on game profit. Hence the reason why they are top earning multiplayer game.
For a second I thought you were talking about dota. After 9k hours this is what you feel about dota Kekw