In my opinion, Smite>HoTS>War III DOTA>DOTA 2>LoL>HoN
In my opinion, Smite>HoTS>War III DOTA>DOTA 2>LoL>HoN
I will admit I did not play Smite so I can't talk about it, but DotA is Leagues above ( hue ) HOTS, LoL and HoN.
Only one of those that I have played and enjoyed was Smite, so I'll guess I'll go along with that.
HotS is only better if you're that guy that plays games on the easy difficulty and you like heroes with approximately 0.0 depth.
OT: I lost interest in MOBAs for the most part but I have played them all and I'm going with Dota(2), I used to like LoL better but IMHO it just goes downhill with each season (since S2/3). Smite is pretty good aswell, I'd play it if it didn't put me off so much aesthetic wise.
HotS heroes have shitloads of mana, a lot of mana regen, one regen globe per wave, 24/7 teleporting to base and the healing well.
It's as casual as mobas get, it relies on shooting spells like a machine gun. DotA's laning is all about tactics. Making sure your creeps don't push too far, denying, only using your spells to push the enemy out of lane or to go for the kill.
Gameplay wise: DOTA 2 would be my pick. I just don't know of many games that are as well designed.
However, I have had far more fun playing Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends than DOTA. And I love League E-sports quite a bit; very exciting.
My main issue with DOATA 2 are the controls. The game feels... floaty and has this swaying quality to it that makes me dizzy at times. It's weird.
Hots is better than Dota 2 and most of the time, I play games on the hardest difficulty. It's just taste. I don't think Dota is a hard game. It's just slow. It's like a long question with a long solving. The amount of the consumed time doesn't make the question harder, because while solving the question, you'll know how to solve it. When you see a real hard question, you'll think on how to solve it and really push your mind. I'm not saying Hots is harder or easier than Dota, but as I said Dota isn't hard, it's just slow.
However, War 3 Dota might be better than Hots IMO, because Dota 2's heroes are not memorable. They're so dull and simple. In both War 3 Dota and Hots, the heroes are individuals. For example, my favorite hero was Shadow Shaman. In Dota 2, it wasn't anymore. SS in War 3 Dota, is a Troll and he was so cool. In Dota 2, he's so retarded.
That makes Dota a PvE game more than PvP. You gotta farm to have nice gear for the end game. If you roam all the time to kill the other team, most of the time, they'll outlevel you, because you can't always kill when you roam. In Hots, you gotta stack, that's all for PvE. However, without map objectives, winning is hard. PvP also happens near those objectives. So, Hots is more like PvP oriented. Of course, it's nothing like Smite's "Arena," mode, but it's better than Dota. Also, maps are smaller, that makes the players close to each other. There are mounts, that makes it even better.
Now, before I played Smite and Hots, I loved Dota. The strats you mentioned made the game hardcore. Then, I figured out that, a game doesn't have to be slow to be hardcore. Vanilla WoW was hardcore, but it was slow. Sure, we could digest the adventure better than now, but all we had to do was grind. In Dota, there is only 1 map.
Dota has deny, everything costs with gold, it has buyback with cd so it's tactical, you gotta pull your creeps to the neutral creeps to give the other team less xp etc. Other mobas don't have this kind of hardcoreness. Although, as I said, Dota is a slow game. Hots has mounts, Smite and Hots have infinite base teleports.
After I played Smite and Hots for a while, I went back to Dota 2 to see how I think about it now. Then I saw the differences I mentioned. Slow gameplay doesn't mean hard gameplay. Averagely 45 mins matches, it gets boring after a while. it get We play games for fun. When I played Smite, I felt like the same when I was playing Unreal Tournament. Is UT a casual game? No way. How about Hots? Maybe.
Anyone who claims that HoTS is better than any other MOBA is clueless. It's like comparing LFR to Mythic. It might be more enjoyable, but it sure as hell aint better.
Dota 2, no question. No other game has such depth, and stays so fresh. Also by having everything free, they can shift the meta without fear of making people's purchases unviable, or messing up fair competition.
Thats not to say other games are bad, they are not. Just that I think that on pretty much every level Dota is better (subjective!) game in terms of design and way its delivered.
Also, the support for custom games is wonderful.
But whilst I think its pretty easy to make a case for Dota being the best design and gameplay. people will like different things, none are wrong. So its kind of pointless to choose! but as I have to in this thread I choose dota2 :P
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HotS is a great game. Yes its more simple than Dota and LoL and Smite, but thats not a bad thing, it just means it aiming for a different part of the market. Its like saying all cars are shite because they are not all high end sports cars, which is insane as not everyone wants a £300,000 car....
HotS aims for a different market, and hits its target square on. (price of heroes notwithstanding, but hey, bliz will be bliz and will gouge as hard as they can, but that does not detract from the gameplay).
Last edited by mmoc3f25629bd0; 2016-01-20 at 12:21 AM.
I prefered HoN, back when it got released. Never jumped ship untill i ws forced to, imo it had the overall best of all the games.
Sounds to me like you're forgetting these are video games, designed and build specifically for others enjoyment. More enjoyable = better.
HotS is better than any other MOBA. For the sole reason of every other MOBA is a boring farm fest filled with assholes who call other people clueless for liking other things. But that's just my opinion so I guess you are free to tell me I'm wrong.
Does Magicka Wizard Wars count as a MOBA or close?
If so, that definitely.
If not, forget I was here
I think Awesomenauts is by far the best designed MOBA purely from a gameplay perspective. It's actually fun just to move and jump and use your abilities in that game, which is something most entries in the genre really struggle with. I've always felt like the majority of MOBAs suffer from being based far too strictly on the gameplay wrinkles (be they good or bad) of a mod for a 15 year old RTS, rather than taking the core concepts of that mod and adapting them into something tailored from the ground up to be its own unique, enjoyable, more evolved gaming experience.
Awesomenauts is fantastic because it does that, taking the basic idea of DotA and adapting it into a completely different beast that has immensely fun, tight, beautifully designed gameplay that challenges the player's skill in controlling their own character moreso than their meta knowledge and ability to coordinate complex tactics with team mates. It's immensely satisfying to me that the huge amount of depth to be found in the game comes from things like knowing when to time a double jump, managing a character's speed and momentum, and being able to juke out or land a key ability mid-air as two characters soar past one another from jump pads, rather than the more tactical meta gameplay of LoL or DotA. Most MOBAs are really good at being updated, expanded, or streamlined DotA clones, but ultimately they're still anchored to the same archetype and have a difficult time escaping it. Awesomenauts feels like an actual branching out of the genre in a way that sweeps out a ton of the clutter and nails all of its divergences in design perfectly.
I'd also give Smite points for doing something a little different too, even if it's still nowhere near as tight as Awesomenauts gameplay-wise.
Considering the entire genre spawned from War3 Dota and that LoL is a progeny from Pendragon's abuse of the Dota1 community. I'd say the original Dota.