Coming from other MOBA, what do you need to know to enjoy DOTA? Golden Baby Roshan Dota 2

A lot of other MOBAs (well, just really talking about LoL here) have pretty...limited creativity of spells and skills, IMO. Coming into the game, you slowly start learning all of the heroes and what they do. It's what keeps a lot of new people around, just how unique each hero can be.

In DoTA, you have a guy who stops time in a huge dome and he begets free reign there; you have a guy with 3 basic spells which he uses to form other, more powerful spells; a guy who damages all enemy heroes on the map; a guy who disables the enemy for 7 seconds! etc.


Spells



Spells are way more powerful (both utility and damage-wise) and complex but also cost more mana. You also can't see you opponent's manabar and EVERYBODY has mana. This leads to a really dinamic environment when it comes to strategizing, wombo-combos are almost endless and you'll learn to react to your opponent's cooldowns way faster than in Lol. The downside is that, since you don't know jack about what is happening and who does what your first games, you'll find yourself exploding a lot leaving you clueless. It only gets better by playing a lot.


Stats


Basically Strength gives you life, Int gives you mana and Agility gives you attack speed (it's more complex but let's leave it at that). If said stat is the same as your hero's primary stat you get also some autoattack damage. So yeah, agility heroes are carries while mages will still be able to right click you to death. There are no APs in the game, so mages will rely on spamming and auto damage more than burst later in the game.


Items



Items are incredibly peculiar on their purpose when it comes to high tier items, while the cheaper ones are quite versatile. The majority of them comes with a really powerful active (most of the time that's what you bought the item for in the first place) that you NEED to learn to use. Item builds depend HARD on the game you are playing, a set-in-stone build will only get you to the 20 minutes mark, after that you need something to counter your opponents or abuse their weakness. Item system is complex, but being item savvy is incredibly rewarding.


Pro scene



Meta is extremely volatile, and you always can find a counter. Multiple heroes can cover multiple roles, making dota's draft way more difficult (and entertaining) than Lol's (that also due to the captain's system ban). Smart plays are usually more impactful and more spectacular than high mechanical plays. Good pros don't simply have fast fingers, they're just next level.


Game Client



Game events (like diretide, greeviling and new bloom) introduce time limited game modes once in a while, and they are fresh and entertaining. Every hero is unlocked from the get go. You can earn hero's skins by just playing so you never end up playing to grind, there's just no point in that. you get pieces from whole sets that you can arrange to your taste on your hero, sick customization. Graphics is nice, client is stable, UI is snappy.

Mechanics


skill floor is high, skill ceiling even higher. There is no putting it other ways: dota is insanely difficult. Using your abilities AND your items AND using them effectively will get you ages to learn, no shortcuts. Last hitting will look impossible, let alone denying your own creeps. Some heroes require you to move 2 or 3 units at a time (your hero included) and yes, it's difficult to pull them off decently. Also there's a lot of game knowledge you need to absorb in order to do most stuff (you can't jungle even remotely efficiently if you don't know how to kite and stack creeps, for example). It's a pain to learn, and also counter-intuitive sometimes. This is what sets dota apart from Lol in my opinion: Lol is just way more casual.


Subtleties


In dota you can destroy/eat trees to build paths in the forest, deny creeps, deny allied poisoned heroes, you have a courier that ships your items from base to you (yeah even potions), you can't recall for free, teleports are in form of cheap scrolls with 60s cooldown, when you die you lose money, there are items available only at secret shops in the jungle, runes spawn in the river every 2 minutes giving you powerful buffs,

Conclusion



If you have spare time and really like the moba genre, try dota as (in my opinion, always) it's the best by a LONG shot. If you usually play a few games a week with some friends just not really skilled at playing videogames, you'll have much more fun playing Lol as Dota will get you only frustration.

Post a Comment

Powered by Blogger.