[Megathread] DotA 2

[Drunkenvalley]

I can see where Lysah is coming from for once in that illusions and summoned units are pretty boring. At least with Meepo there's always a risk to all of them.

[Hotmail]

Peruvian teenagers tick everything they can, and particularly English, because they're queuing US servers (because of the fucked up nature of the Peru server not actually being in Peru) and don't want longer queue times.

Who would not want shorter queue times when given the choice? That is not to say that there aren't educational issues in some of those regions, I simply don't consider this a good enough reason to segregate.

The chat wheel is garbage. Players abuse it and use it incorrectly to the point that if you used >Well played! people actually think you're mocking them or insulting them, not actually congratulating them on a good play. It's also extremely limited, because you only have one wheel with a small number of choices (8?) out of a large list. You can bind things to individual keys, but now you need like 20 or 30 keybinds just to communicate with teammates

If all five players on the team follow the same train of thought, we are headed for an interesting car crash =/

The ping system IS somewhat basic but that's likely because it is meant to be complemented by the chat wheel. I like to bind responses to what I notice tends to be a problem and what I feel contributes the most to my team:

Affirmative > Lets them know that I am paying attention to what they are trying to say/do.
On My Way > Lets them know that I will be there as fast as I physically can (also serves as a reminder that they may be outnumbered and should wait)
Go! > Helps clear up any individual doubts that team members might have about engaging a fight or push.
Pulling Creeps> Similar to "on my way" but during lane phase; also communicates a desire to play 'properly'.
Get Back! > Along with one (just one) ping, this is a great way to help prevent throws, overextends and ganks. An amazing way, even.
Be Right Back> This signals to the team they should expect to be shortmanned for a little bit and shoudn't push since I have to buy/fountain heal.
Help! > People are surprisingly responsive to this, it's one of the more polite ways to signal that I may have goofed and need a hand ASAP.
Well Played! > Positive reinforcement. Everyone loves (and deserves) being congratulated on First Blood, a successful gank, a successful push, etc. It's all about context.

One of the best ways to solve a community problem is to lead by example, there isn't much else to it.

[RobertoCarlos]

Yeah dota 2/LoL/HoN/every other moba is more about nursing ego's and hoping your team doesn't turn on each other after a silly death, or someone picks a 2nd mid and then says "gg" every time the current mid does something not perfect.

This game is so easy to come back into with comeback gold and high ground pushing etc that if your team doesn't give up in the first 15mins you have a good chance at winning because its likely the other team will melt down and start fighting each other and feeding couriors/afking.

I love the internet. Where people are helpful and supportive and don't wish you cancer or aids or claim to have raped my mother when you have a bad game.

[Lysah]

Yeah, that sniper game I linked we were behind massively the entire game, the enemy had three six slotted cores and we had team support and had no chance in hell of winning a team fight. 40 minutes later of just persistent defending the base and they actually gave up, when we pushed mid after team wiping them at the end none of them bought back even though they had gold for it. Public DotA is just 99% mentality and that's all there is to it.

[StrawberryZebra]

Sure, but most EU countries also teach English, giving you all a common language to work with. I'm sure the French, German, Italian, etc players who either can't speak English well, or don't feel like worrying about it, don't select English when they queue.

Most countries tend to have English somewhere on their teaching curriculum but they might not even be comfortable enough with English to use it outside of a classroom, and the text book phrases for asking where the train station is probably isn't going to be all that helpful. Given the diverse nature of European Languages, theres also a real chance the one you're fluent in just isn't on the list so you'd queue for English by default. The only ones I see listed there are Spanish, Russian and Portugese, but thats only for a second choice I can't seem to find the option for primary language in the reborn client.

That being said, just because I'm in a game with a premade from France doesn't mean they're going to use English to talk amongst themselves even if they're completely fluent in it. Honestly I think expecting them to is just a little bit out of order, I know that if the situations were reversed I'd be talking in English to my premade. Its a case of put up and shut up.

The chat wheel is garbage. Players abuse it and use it incorrectly to the point that if you used >Well played! people actually think you're mocking them or insulting them, not actually congratulating them on a good play. It's also extremely limited, because you only have one wheel with a small number of choices (8?) out of a large list. You can bind things to individual keys, but now you need like 20 or 30 keybinds just to communicate with teammates that told the game they spoke a language they don't actually speak.

And yes, the ping system is very ineffective. League has an excellent ping system that Valve should really just copy.

While I think the Chat Wheel is good in theory, in practice its got a number of flaws. Its great for giving voice sound bites for missing lanes (for the Heroes that have the diolog recorded, anyway), which is a nice audio sound for those who aren't reading chat. You can also give far more detailed info than you ever could with pings, things like you team needs dust or that you're going to smoke gank and such.
The biggest and most obvious flaw is that you've only got a limited number of phrases you can easilly use with it. If you need one thats not on there you either need to reconfigure it mid game or type it out. It also fails at giving actionable followup to that information without also having to ping. I can say something like "Get Back!" in text chat, but I could be saying it to anyone of the other 4 people on the team. Without other context like also letting you know that Pudge is missing and that he's going top its hard to know that I'm directing it at you.
It also falls short for signaling your intent too. Its very hard to indicate that I'm coming bot and I'm planning to gank Bane without a multitude of phrases and pings thrown into the equation. And thats the problem with the Chat Wheel as a whole really, it falls short on its own without other tools to help.

I agree that Dota should just blatanty copy Leagues Pings. I can let my team know that a laner is missing and they're going mid for a gank so they should probably be on the look out with just one ping. Done. Its also super easy for said mid laner to signal to me that they're going to go find that guy as he walks down the river and need a hand killing him, also with just one ping. When I'm going for a gank I can let my team know in advance that I'm on the way and it'll even show them the route I'm taking on the mini map so they know roughly how long they have to prepare. It has all the information they need to know in just one click. Its absolutely fantastic, Riot really nailed it here.

But its yet another one of those nice things that LoL has that Dota will obtusely refuse to ever adopt simply because LoL has it.

[Longview]

reminder

Venting
Everyone has bad games every once in a while, but this is not the place to let out your frustration. Do not create topics and posts just for the sake of venting about how everyone but you was bad in that one game. If you want to create discussion about a recent game of yours, do so in a constructive manner, such as: "What could I have done differently to win this game?" or "How do I manage teammates that don't communicate?"

nobody cares about shitty pubs you had or where the people were from

go blog about it

[Drunkenvalley]

Yeah, the whole "but they teach English in Europe" is garbage. The average person is not very comfortable speaking English, even if they're okay at it, and like Strawberry says there are far too many languages. I mean, you can quite casually meet people speaking:
Polish, German, Dutch, Turkish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian, Icelandish...

[PizzaSHARK]

Yeah dota 2/LoL/HoN/every other moba is more about nursing ego's and hoping your team doesn't turn on each other after a silly death, or someone picks a 2nd mid and then says "gg" every time the current mid does something not perfect.

This game is so easy to come back into with comeback gold and high ground pushing etc that if your team doesn't give up in the first 15mins you have a good chance at winning because its likely the other team will melt down and start fighting each other and feeding couriors/afking.

I love the internet. Where people are helpful and supportive and don't wish you cancer or aids or claim to have raped my mother when you have a bad game.

I end up muting half my team in nearly every game because all they do is bitch and whine, and asking them to cut it out because it's not helping anyone just makes them do it more. Bunch of spoiled fucking children.

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reminder



nobody cares about shitty pubs you had or where the people were from

go blog about it

lol pretending we have moderators

[Lysah]

Yeah one thing I've taken away from watching MMR grinders on twitch while I work is that 90% of them mute everyone on their team the second the game starts. It seems like there's something to that.

[PizzaSHARK]

Can't wait til Naix gets nerfed. Infesting ancients without requiring Agh's is insane and probably the most overpowered thing in DotA right now.

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I also love that Dispersion is more flat damage reduction than BB's side reduction and yet requires no positioning or action on the player's part at all. I seriously can't believe something as broken as 22% permanent damage reduction is still in the game after all this time, especially after all of the buffs Spectre's received to other areas.

[Crackleslap]

OSfrog removed from twitch chat. #rip much sadness.

[Kralljin]

Been wondering if Mid lane Jakiro might actually work.

Most of his skills start to only start to get really good with some points in it, but as Support you're usually xp starved and his skills just suck without any point investment.

The first point when i play support Jakiro is always like "choose your poison", Liquid fire does shit damage on lvl 1 and has a huge CD, Dual Breath isn't a great harassment tool and the slow is rather pitiful on lvl 1, Ice Path sucks as well on lvl 1.

But once some points went into those skills, they become quite awesome, Dual Breath deals really nice damage and has a 5seconds 40% slow, that's a AoE Rod of Atos /w Shiva attack slow on a 10 seconds CD.

Ice Path becomes really annoying once it's 2.2 Stun with a huge effect, coupled with the 9 seconds, it's really powerful.

Liquid Fire with 4/4 is just awesome for pushing towers.

And Macropyre just roasts enemies if they're forced to stay in for some time.

If you acquire an early Euls, you can easily gank around the map, just Euls -> Macropyre -> Ice Path -> Dual Breath, going to hurt a lot if you actually have a level advantage.

Aether lens boost all of his skills (well except liquid fire) considerably, turning Dual Breath into a massive AoE Cone.

Aside from that, he's great for pushing towers as well defending towers & Highground, with Dual Breath he can damage large groups of enemies on a low CD and if you really need it badly, just macropyre under the tower to fend off a lot of creeps / minions / summons.

And he has great base stats, nice str gain and Euls sufficies to fix most mana issues.

Too bad i suck as mid laner and expirements like this are not something i want to try in regular pubs, because your own team starts to behave like monkeys for trying something unorthodox.

[Deleted]

Mid Jakiro is definitely viable in certain matchups and has seen pro play before. The terrible attack animation is problematic, but the hero is relatively difficult to lane against and forces the opposing mid player to stay glued to their T1 or lose it at 5-6 minutes.

It is very vulnerable to rotations, however, and hard-countered by heroes such as Razor with whom the hero cannot really trade.

[Lysah]

Too bad dual breath doesn't do instant damage anymore, then he could just nuke waves down like Lina does. I would think he would be fine against razor, but I guess he probably wouldn't get a single last hit, which is the operative problem he will face against most popular mids. He might be able to harass TA, but how is he going to get a single last hit against her? I like Bane mid for the same reasons - hero is good with levels trash without, pretty good at ganking with an early blink (or lens now), can farm into necro 3 and aghs and easily solo most heroes. Best of all, he can reduce the enemy mid's attack damage to 0 so he can actually take last hits, something Jakiro would probably struggle with.

[Deleted]

Too bad dual breath doesn't do instant damage anymore, then he could just nuke waves down like Lina does. I would think he would be fine against razor, but I guess he probably wouldn't get a single last hit, which is the operative problem he will face against most popular mids. He might be able to harass TA, but how is he going to get a single last hit against her? I like Bane mid for the same reasons - hero is good with levels trash without, pretty good at ganking with an early blink (or lens now), can farm into necro 3 and aghs and easily solo most heroes. Best of all, he can reduce the enemy mid's attack damage to 0 so he can actually take last hits, something Jakiro would probably struggle with.

The issue with playing against Razor is that you can't effectively harass him with Liquid Fire since it procs his passive. A good Razor player will just get a point in it at lvl 2 or 3 and you're just incapable of contending with him, basically.

[Lysah]

I don't think level 1 razor passive is that big of a deal, liquid fire hurts a lot more assuming you level it.

[Deleted]

I don't think level 1 razor passive is that big of a deal, liquid fire hurts a lot more assuming you level it.

It's more about basically giving him a free Static Link drain. The slow allows him to close the distance unless you're uphill.

[Sorcereria]

If DP wont get nerfed by major it will be first pick / ban material. Icefrog plz... Speechless.

[Deleted]

If DP wont get nerfed by major it will be first pick / ban material. Icefrog plz... Speechless.

People will first-pick it and it'll still be an awful hero in pro DotA. I genuinely don't know when they'll learn their lesson. I honestly think you have to offlane it or something because it's just completely awful.

You can be a 40k net worth DP and still be more or less completely fucking useless when your ulti is down, which is the majority of the time. All a team has to do is be able to disengage when you ulti and capitalize on the time windows where ulti is down, because in those time windows a DP team is basically playing 4v5 - whether Life Siphon exists or not.

IMHO with the current design it'll simply never seriously be worthy of 1st pick/ban unless 15-minute deathball strats become the one and only played strat. She's just too much of an increasingly large liability as games draw out.

[Lysah]

Hard to disengage when those ghosts are ripping your base to shreds, all she and her team have to do is not get into fights outside the enemy base and she's overpowered.