[Megathread] DotA 2

[Deleted]

Why would you waste money on SnY instead of Skadi?

Because Skadi both costs like 2k more and has a harder buildup?

[PizzaSHARK]

Something not being used in the professional scene does not neccesarily equate to being up/op or even in need of a change, as the game isn't balanced solely around the professional scene.

What is it balanced around, then? Shouldn't a game designed for competition be balanced around the highest levels of play, using trickle-down for everything below that level?

---------- Post added 2013-03-31 at 07:38 AM ----------

Because Skadi both costs like 2k more and has a harder buildup?

And Skadi is more useful than SnY, Sange, Yasha, Manta Style, and Heaven's Halberd on Slark.

It doesn't have to be your first item (and probably shouldn't), but a simple Orb of Venom does everything Sange does without making you waste gold. Move speed and attack speed are similarly more or less pointless on Slark because he can cross the map in 5 seconds and he gets buckets of agility from his passive.

[Deleted]

And Skadi is more useful than SnY, Sange, Yasha, Manta Style, and Heaven's Halberd on Slark.

Manta can break silence and Halberd is an excellent CC.
SnY I could see your issue with but really come on.

attack speed more or less pointless

he gets buckets of agility from his passive.

You what mate.

[PizzaSHARK]

Manta can break silence and Halberd is an excellent CC.

Yeah, Manta is always useful but I'm not really a fan of it on Slark since you can already break disables and silences with pact. Halberd is better now that it got buffed but I still think you might as well just go for a sheepstick if you need a disable on a stick.

You what mate.

Drums and treads give you plenty of attack speed to get the train rolling, and by time you need to do more than pounce and pact to wipe out 80% of a support's health, you're getting heaps of stats from items like skadi anyway.

EDIT: Love it when people throw games because they're too busy farming and ganking instead of pushing. Could've won at 25 minutes, kept telling them to help me push, but nope let's go for dagon 5 on nyx instead of using that 14/0/8 lead to make a fast sheepstick for their Russian drow that isn't buying BKB.

[Morally Grey Storm]

Manta can break silence and Halberd is an excellent CC.
SnY I could see your issue with but really come on.


You what mate.

building specifically IAS items on Slark is pointless due to his passive from which he gains loads of agility, and , therefore IAS.

[Charge me Doctor]

building specifically IAS items on Slark is pointless due to his passive from which he gains loads of agility, and , therefore IAS.

You can steal a lot of stats with MoM

[PizzaSHARK]

You can steal a lot of stats with MoM

Yeah, but most of the time I prefer consistency. My main issue with MoM is that it makes you super squishy, but Slark can get away with it due to his regen and being able to shed stuns with his pact. I'd probably get it if I was already ahead and wanted to snowball.

IAS isn't bad on Slark, but you generally don't want to specifically build it on him. He just likes raw stats.

[OscaR]

How can you say waste gold on SnY instead of Skadi then says Orb of Venom does everything Sange does? Those are both wrong statements.
With Yasha then Sange you're able to contribute much more than hold an orb of venom then a single ultimate orb. Getting 1k items are much easier than having to save up 2.1k, twice.

[Lysah]

Sange/Yasha is core on Bristleback.

[Deleted]

building specifically IAS items on Slark is pointless due to his passive from which he gains loads of agility, and , therefore IAS.

That he needs IAS to stack properly unless people are just letting themselves get hit.

Yeah, Manta is always useful but I'm not really a fan of it on Slark since you can already break disables and silences with pact. Halberd is better now that it got buffed but I still think you might as well just go for a sheepstick if you need a disable on a stick.

I'm pretty sure the point of silencing Slark in the first place is making sure he can't Pact.

Drums and treads give you plenty of attack speed to get the train rolling, and by time you need to do more than pounce and pact to wipe out 80% of a support's health, you're getting heaps of stats from items like skadi anyway.

Drums and treads puts you at just barely an attack per second, something which I'd say is hardly enough.

[Longview]

What is it balanced around, then? Shouldn't a game designed for competition be balanced around the highest levels of play, using trickle-down for everything below that level?

Q: Is your goal to make everything picked the same amount of times? (from j.walsh)
A: I don't think about it that way exactly. Sure it's good if there is a nice distribution and that is something to work towards, but really the goal in DotA's development is, first and foremost, to make the gameplay quality the best it can be. It is the combination of all the heroes, items and mechanics together that makes DotA what it is and not the individual elements alone. Sometimes that means certain things are carefully adjusted to be more frequent than others, sometimes it doesn't, but ultimately the main judge of a game's quality is not in some artificial balance metric, but in the overall gameplay quality and depth that it has.

Source

The game is obviously balanced around higher tiers of gameplay, anything else would be deranged. What I'm saying is that just because it isn't used frequently (or is even viable) at the professional level does not necessarily mean that it warrants a buff. Or so say IceFrog.

Vanguard used to be a fairly good pickup back when it was introduced, around the era of 6.37, where the early days of AoE compositions were changed for fast pushing lineups where summons were common.

[Hermanni]

Q: Is your goal to make everything picked the same amount of times? (from j.walsh)
A: I don't think about it that way exactly. Sure it's good if there is a nice distribution and that is something to work towards, but really the goal in DotA's development is, first and foremost, to make the gameplay quality the best it can be. It is the combination of all the heroes, items and mechanics together that makes DotA what it is and not the individual elements alone. Sometimes that means certain things are carefully adjusted to be more frequent than others, sometimes it doesn't, but ultimately the main judge of a game's quality is not in some artificial balance metric, but in the overall gameplay quality and depth that it has.

Source

The game is obviously balanced around higher tiers of gameplay, anything else would be deranged. What I'm saying is that just because it isn't used frequently) or even viable) at the professional level does not necessarily mean that it warrants a buff. Or so say IceFrog.

Vanguard used to be a fairly good pickup back when it was introduced, around the era of 6.37, where the early days of AoE compositions were changed for fast pushing lineups where summons were common.

Team Liquid miles ahead of your Icefrog knowledge http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...opic_id=405620, fucking Korean time zone got me bad.

Also you gotta be kidding me with your Slark stuff, his passive isn't even close to being a reliable source of agility until it's rank 4, and even then it's only if you're constantly fighting to keep it up. IAS is pretty much the best combat stat for Slark early on, which is why MoM is so popular. And Vanguard Viper pro only build plz no diss.

The only good change they made to items in HoN was Sange being part of Skadi, if it were so in DotA I would actually play nothing but Mirana and go full AngryTestie every game, Linkens > SnY > Manta > Skadi. Still, SnY into Manta HH is a nice build for CK.

[Longview]

One of my flatmates plays in a sponsored HoN team (I think they play in the highest HoNTour tier) and I've seen him play a few games. I've seen games where six heroes had Linkens and Silence appears to be core on every single hero. Strange how two relatively similar games can have such drastic differences in item choices.

[potis]

Meh, been trying really hard to re-like Dota 2 considering how much time i spent and how many lan games of Dota i had for years and years after HoN and LoL, simply not possible, the players are horrendous.

LoL and HoN have as terrible players but they understand English and those games have a surrender option which means the waste of time game can end sooner than later.

Everyone keeps saying how awesome the community is.

Yeah no, the community is "awesome" because no one ever listens, no one ever speaks, and when you try to coordinate them even a bit you get ignored therefor of course the community is awesome when no one ever speaks, no one is swearing at you.

Every week its the same thing..Join a game-->Leaver-->Wait 5mins and leave-->Enter second game-->Russians only or a whole game without a single word. Havent had anything else ever since i decided to buy the game in early summer and play since i couldnt be bothered waiting for a key.

Compared to that, i prefer getting banned in LoL for no reason when i yell at people for not listening when you try to coordinate them, and arguing with other people in HoN, at least they listen now and then, in Dota 2 its seriously 0 responses from anyone.

[Longview]

The difference is that Dota 2 doesn't use wins/losses to determine your rating. At least that isn't the only thing to determine your MMR (hi hermanni). If you're playing with awful players one or both of the following are true:

• You haven't played that many games yet, and the matchmaking algorithm hasn't accurately placed you
• You're awful and are being queued with and against people at your level

Leavers are incredibly scarce at the level I'm playing at. So are flamers, people refusing to speak English (you'll be a lot more likely to encounter people who don't speak at all) and people afking in fountain. Most of your issues are commonly attributed to the two bulletpoints above. I'm not sure how you figured buying the game was a good idea, if you spent a full sixty seconds researching it you'd find most people are drowning in invites (I've 30 something currently).

With that said, I don't want to convert people into playing this game over anything else. Whatever attracts you, dude. All I can really confirm is that I have fun.

[Lysah]

I don't think the system takes very many games to place you. Isn't that the advantage of trueskill, that it only requires like 10 games to get reasonably close? I find it quite annoying, I make alternate accounts so can play with newer players and still have fun and within a dozen games we're already back to playing people who do LoL-meta lineups and ward/counter ward constantly and TP gank every 30 seconds when my friend doesn't know what black hole even IS.

[Longview]

It's kind of a slippery slope. The current system makes smurfing difficult, which is crucial to the growth of the game (new players won't quit as easily if they're queued against new players). I doubt they want to add -em anytime soon, at least not as a queueable mode in matchmaking. I also doubt that they want to give higher-rated people a handicap when playing (exp/gold/damage/vision/itemcost/whatever). Barring Valve developing something unexpected (wouldn't surprise me), the only real solution I see is adding an unrated mode. This has the drawback of giving people with ladder anxiety an option (given that these unrated modes would truly be unrated instead of just pairing ten random people), reducing the pool of matchmaking queuers and effectively turning the rated queue into tryhard-only-mode. They might be waiting to tap into the Chinese market further, as most everyone there plays at internet cafés which would make an unrated mode warranted as the computers would have a lot of different people playing.

I suppose they could add an unrated queue to their cybercafé accounts, even if Dota 2 currently isn't on the list of games for such accounts.

[Kuntantee]

• You haven't played that many games yet, and the matchmaking algorithm hasn't accurately placed you
• You're awful and are being queued with and against people at your level

Both assumes MMR algorithm works perfectly which is not even remotely the case. The algorithm can never be perfect. Even with it's current form, it can't produce the best match up because there is a trade of between quality of match up and time spent on queue which favors the time spent on queue.

[shimerra]

Every week its the same thing..Join a game-->Leaver-->Wait 5mins and leave-->Enter second game-->Russians only or a whole game without a single word. Havent had anything else ever since i decided to buy the game in early summer and play since i couldnt be bothered waiting for a key.

Compared to that, i prefer getting banned in LoL for no reason when i yell at people for not listening when you try to coordinate them, and arguing with other people in HoN, at least they listen now and then, in Dota 2 its seriously 0 responses from anyone.

I literally haven't had an abandonment other than legit DC in a long time on dota 2. I get a fair amount of Brazillians from time to time and the odd Chinese but that's about it. And the last game I played after not playing for a month 4 of us had mikes and were communicating like bosses. Your issues aren't unique to any particular game, I've been playing all three to some extent or the other since the start of their betas. It's the same shit in all three, 90% of the time people only communicate when saying the lane they're going to and when things are going poorly. The only serious difference is I would say you're much more likely to get matched up against or with foreign people in dota 2.

[Longview]

Both assumes MMR algorithm works perfectly which is not even remotely the case.

Why would either assume such a thing? I am intrigued, please explain this a bit more if you would be so kind.

The algorithm can never be perfect. Even with it's current form, it can't produce the best match up because there is a trade of between quality of match up and time spent on queue which favors the time spent on queue.

The guy I addressed in my post obviously has not been pouring hours into the game, and players at low-mid skill are plentiful. With a large enough pool of people, the system would be able to accurately match virtually everyone up. That's up until you start to account for the players being humans, of course. In reality, a true 50/50 matchup will be rare, regardless of how large the player pool or how perfect the algorithm.

I do still think it is fair to assume that the issues he was facing with only being queued with and against terrible players is not a fault of the system, and I am also still of the opinion that matchmaking will put you up against players of your skill (given that you aren't in the far end of the spectrum). Once again, I find myself slightly confused with your reasoning, Kuntantee.

edit:

fucking Korean time zone got me bad

haha i just understood this

the chinese reply was pretty good