[Megathread] DotA 2

[Clozer]

After playing for about 20 games, everything seems back to normal 6.88 dota with some cool new stuff. The shrines are great and the new bounty runes as well. But removing stats and the stuff you get from them is still a really strange change. My mate played wd last game and he had 188 base damage at level 13 with nothing but boots and aghs. That is pretty weird.

[Hotmail]

Shrines are a terrible equalizer in a game that was never about equal playing fields. You can get outplayed to oblivion and still be just fine as long as you remember to run over to that shrine and get your free 50% heal that doesn't get cancelled on damage.

Sorry guys this is now Heroes of the Storm where everyone gets a participation award for breathing.

[PizzaSHARK]

Turns out, calling people 3ks or 3k-trash doesn't make you a DotA god and making a proper analysis is not related with your rating. I am yet to see some spot on analysis of certain people claiming to be really high rating.

You would think this would be obvious. Some of the best commenters and statistics people in professional sports either never played professionally, or did so long ago. Their thoughts aren't doubted, but the thoughts of a 3k or 4k or 5k or "insert arbitrary MMR here" are because they've never played pro or aren't "pro enough"? Might as well say that @Crissi's observations on football aren't valid because she's never played it professionally

You can attack someone's position without resorting to "well you could never know because your MMR isn't high enough." I've seen 5k+ players say some incredibly dumb things and 2k players make very apt observations. It just requires the ability to separate "what my games are like" from "how the game actually is."

[Lysah]

Shrines are a terrible equalizer in a game that was never about equal playing fields. You can get outplayed to oblivion and still be just fine as long as you remember to run over to that shrine and get your free 50% heal that doesn't get cancelled on damage.

Sorry guys this is now Heroes of the Storm where everyone gets a participation award for breathing.

I agree shrines should probably be dispelled on damage.

And if anyone EVER buys vlads on antimage again I will personally find you IRL and throw your PC off a ten story building. Now that the backpack exists there is really no excuse to waste that much gold, if you REALLY need the lifesteal so you can sneak rosh or farm 8 stacks of ancients then buy a casual mask and toss it in your backpack for team fights, you still get your precious lifesteal for pushing and jungling but for half the price.

Also the MMR argument especially doesn't make sense considering most of the professional analysts Valve hires for their million dollar tournaments are 5-6k MMR. A couple are even less.

[Hotmail]

I agree shrines should probably be dispelled on damage.

And if anyone EVER buys vlads on antimage again I will personally find you IRL and throw your PC off a ten story building. Now that the backpack exists there is really no excuse to waste that much gold, if you REALLY need the lifesteal so you can sneak rosh or farm 8 stacks of ancients then buy a casual mask and toss it in your backpack for team fights, you still get your precious lifesteal for pushing and jungling but for half the price.

Also the MMR argument especially doesn't make sense considering most of the professional analysts Valve hires for their million dollar tournaments are 5-6k MMR. A couple are even less.

You are making it sound like dual lane VS dual lane is never a thing for Anti-Mage.

The thing about Vlads is that it builds up from a Headress and Ring of Basi which are two items that will give you a sizeable advantage during the laning phase. Another thing to consider is that the voidstone from Battlefury alone is not going to sustain your Blink spam from neutral camp to neutral camp - not unless you have supports who hit you up with their Arcane Boot cooldowns - so it's not just the lifesteal that comes into play, especially if you want to always have the mana to TP into a team fight and cast Mana Void.

If you have a traditional 3v1 freefarm lane then by all means skip Vlads but in many potato tier games (any game below 5k) an AM that doesn't get an ez lane absolutely should consider Vlads as an option.

About MMR - no you will not see a 2k player make an apt observation about the game. I realize that this is a liberal forum but you guys really need to get over your little guy complex. If you haven't been at a high level you simply lack the necessary data to make an accurate assessment about what is going on. That being said, I do agree that MMR bashing is pretty lame but as long as people react so strongly to it, it is going to keep happening. Just last week I had someone try to sermon me about how MMR doesn't matter but it was painfully obvious that this person was in denial and wished that they were higher.

[StrawberryZebra]

Shrines are a terrible equalizer in a game that was never about equal playing fields. You can get outplayed to oblivion and still be just fine as long as you remember to run over to that shrine and get your free 50% heal that doesn't get cancelled on damage.

Sorry guys this is now Heroes of the Storm where everyone gets a participation award for breathing.

Yeah, I'm really struggling to see why the Shrines were included. They make sense in Heroes of the Storm, since that game lacks recovery items so they fill a valuable niche there. Dota on the other hand has plenty of recovery consumables, as well as lots of relatively inexpensive Regen items. What are they really achiving in Dota ? There wasn't a pressing need for more team regen, it's an area that has been more or less solved for a long time now.

Overall, I get the impression that 7.0 as a whole was focused more at making the game more welcoming for newer players, thats why we've seen a shift towards Shrines, Talents, and faster leveling. On the one hand, looking to remove some of the older mechanics that have accumilated over the years is commendable, done well it would lower the skill floor without lowering the skill ceiling. In usual Valve style however, they've missed the mark spectacularly and instead of simplifing and removing obsolete mechanics, like Stats, they've replaced them with new mechanics which have just as much of a burden of knowledge as what they replaced.

[Lysah]

You are making it sound like dual lane VS dual lane is never a thing for Anti-Mage.

You never need more than a ring of health for laning, even in the absolute hardest of lanes you can simply sit back and not farm for a few minutes, laning phase doesn't last that long and AM being delayed a couple minutes on his bfury isn't the end of the world in pubs where people won't group up and take rax before it's too late. You definitely don't need more than bfury for mana regen, assuming you are tread swapping every blink, I have played a billion games as AM without vlads and have never missed it. The only time I would buy it is if there were other sources of significant right click damage on my team, especially heroes who would rather get deso or some other orb. Vanguard > vlads is definitely a thing for AMs that aren't trying to do the whole 6 slotted in 30 minutes end the game before anyone else has items trick, but if that's your plan, and it will be 99% of the time, going vlads pushes that 6 slot timing back by a very long time. In fact, now that illusions inherit attack speed, the bfury > moon shard build is even more godly.

[theostrichsays]

I'm not sure if people are being more liberal with their commends, or maybe my support play is getting better. But I've gotten roughly 19 more I think since the patch dropped.

[Hotmail]

I just got destroyed in DOTA theory by a lolicon.

...

I need to work on my game.

[NarcissisticInvoker]

Remember me, for I will remember you!

[Hotmail]

I'm not sure if people are being more liberal with their commends, or maybe my support play is getting better. But I've gotten roughly 19 more I think since the patch dropped.

I've been getting a lot more since I started posting here.

Well, my support play is at the point where it can't really improve until I get back to the low 5k bracket so I'm just rolling the dice hoping for good cores at the moment.

[Lysah]

I think supports are a lot more obviously useful to the team now, both because they get a lot more gold and exp and because people are picking carries more than ever. It's not unusual for me to get a game where the enemy team has 4 or 5 pure right click heroes, and a quick winter wyvern pick can do so much work in games like that and people will notice when you save a team fight all on your own. Supports in dota 6.xx were often just lane babysitters and ward bitches and not much else, now they're essentially carries in their own right with the ability to make great plays. Also if you pick VS and swap monkey king out of his ultimate every time people will commend just for putting a stop to that cancer hero.

[PizzaSHARK]

I think supports are a lot more obviously useful to the team now, both because they get a lot more gold and exp and because people are picking carries more than ever. It's not unusual for me to get a game where the enemy team has 4 or 5 pure right click heroes, and a quick winter wyvern pick can do so much work in games like that and people will notice when you save a team fight all on your own. Supports in dota 6.xx were often just lane babysitters and ward bitches and not much else, now they're essentially carries in their own right with the ability to make great plays. Also if you pick VS and swap monkey king out of his ultimate every time people will commend just for putting a stop to that cancer hero.

Sounds like it's almost worth playing Dota 2 again if not for all the reports of bugs and performance issues.

[TheCount]

I end up supporting most games nowadays, with the changes its alot easier to be a support and behind imo. Also how are people liking Monkey King?? I see him mid a lot and he just does not strike me as a mid hero.

[Hotmail]

Monkey King and Shadowfiend are defining the meta right now which has the consequence of steering drafts even further into the territory of physical damage dealers (as if Infused Raindrop hadn't done that enough already).

Once you know that MK does not lose to any hero in the lane phase (due to his catch-all toolkit and 300 attack range) then you know that he can be laned anywhere. Mid might seem to be his weaker lane at first due to the shortage of trees but any player worth his salt knows how to circumvent that:



--

Spellcasting supports are very weak right now while supports that enhance or counter right-clicks are very strong so I plan on pubstomping as Dazzle until the mid-4ks where I will switch to Wyvern, as suggested above. It works great just as long as no one else on the team throws a tantrum because I'm going 10-0 and buying carry items instead of wards, but that's solo queue for ya.

[BellicoseAxe]

Axe is calling it: It’s in the bag!

[PizzaSHARK]

No, I hate it, therefore it is bad

Indeed! Just have to survive one more month, then it's time for RE7...

[Lysah]

It's a good time to be a support or a brainless right click carry now for sure, sad day for many spellcasters though the ones that do pure damage are still fine. Monkey King is definitely by leaps and bounds (lel) the best laner in the game so it makes sense to put him mid, he can dunk on other mids pretty easily, even traditional power mids like Viper. Probably less so now that he got nerfed a little, when patch was first live you basically just had to leave the lane or feed.

[StrawberryZebra]

Monkey King is definitely by leaps and bounds (lel) the best laner in the game so it makes sense to put him mid, he can dunk on other mids pretty easily, even traditional power mids like Viper.

He's a strong laner, no question. I'm not so sure he really is the best though, being brand new he's got the upper hand on people who don't know how to play against him for one. On the other hand, you've also got people who don't know how to play him also picking him so it's also hard to tell if he's too strong right now as well.

I've seen Timbersaw give him a good run for his money however. Being able to chop down the tree he's hiding on nets you a 4 second stun in which to land a solid Chakram, or just to whack him a couple of times, whichever is more appropriate at the time.

[Deleted]

He's a strong laner, no question. I'm not so sure he really is the best though, being brand new he's got the upper hand on people who don't know how to play against him for one

Before the 7.01 nerf, you could destroy someone 3k MMR higher than you with Monkey King in the mid lane as long as you didn't go afk. Playing against someone at the same MMR level was a joke. There was no better hero in the game, in fact you only lost games where the rest of your team fed shamelessly on the other lanes (and sometimes you won even those).