[Megathread] DotA 2

[Jester Joe]

We can't dismiss them, but... what do you want? Mind-reading? That we should just innately know in what way people are most retarded? We cannot argue about balance outside of the pro-scene because we'd need to trudge through massive pools of games to get even the vaguest sense of reliable data out of it. This is simply dumb to think is going to happen.

If we discuss balance, discuss the way the balance is for pros. For anything else there is literally no data and you are in no uncertain terms talking out of your ass.

The only party who might have a very good inkling of what is and isn't balanced is Valve, whom can automate the process of discovering anomalies in the statistics.

That's all fine and dandy if the topic was about balancing heroes and not what one player thought was a decent counter, that was my point. There wasn't a discussion of "this should be nerfed" or "this is too strong" about that topic, it was just a general statement of "Silencer is a pretty decent counter in my experience" which should of clued in that it wasn't about pro matches, it was about the general public of Dota players. Then it suddenly got brought up "If he's a decent counter, then he would be used in pro games!" which I thought we all agreed was pointless to apply pro logic to pub games?

[PizzaSHARK]

Melee supports themselves aren't bad, far from it in fact. The problem is most people tend to play them quite poorly and end up doing nothing more than leeching XP from someone else. You need to be teamed up with someone who's prepared to play aggressively to get the most out of them usually, otherwise you end up with the situation where you're having some fisticuffs with Mirana and your Spineless Void is running back to the tower as fast as he can leaving you to die alone. You need a much higher level of coordination to make them work than you do a ranged support, and you might not have that coordination if you're solo queuing.

Which isn't an issue at the competitive level of play. But are we talking about supports or farming heroes here? You make references to taking hits when walking up to CS, but that's not something supports are going to concern themselves about, and lanes using a melee farming will usually combine supports to make it risky to harass them when they move into CS range (or they'll just accept the lane being "lost" and focus on winning their other lanes.) And even though they'll take some damage to do it, a melee farmer will nearly always have an edge against a ranged farmer if we're assuming everything else is even in the lanes; higher base damage, able to make better use of a quelling blade, no travel time on their attack, etc.

You can look at it this way: if it's ranged hero vs melee hero for farming, the ranged hero must have their lane setup to harass the melee hero, or the melee hero will almost certainly dominate on CS. The difference in base damage for melee heroes and ranged heroes can be 10 damage or more, which is a huge difference even before you consider adding a QB to the mix. If, for example, you had a ranged farmer with their supports and their supports rotated out to do something else, the ranged farmer is going to quickly lose the CS war to the melee farmer unless they have a substantial gold/XP lead or some method of rapidly farming/damaging creeps. Or if they're Luna and thus have insane damage, I guess.

That's why I don't feel melee/ranged are necessarily stronger than one another. Melee heroes are likely to take damage or put themselves at risk when walking up to CS, and melee supports specifically are very unlikely to be able to trade harass with ranged supports or farmers. But on the other hand, melee heroes have more powerful tools for avoiding or reducing incoming damage, and also tend to have much higher right-click damage and much higher effective HP compared to ranged heroes, and they also don't have to contend with things like uphill miss rate, projectile travel time, etc. Additionally, mobility tools and escape mechanisms tend to be more common on melee heroes than ranged heroes, and the ranged heroes with these mechanics tend to be extremely vulnerable without them (silenced, it's on cooldown, etc; see what happens to a QoP that blinks incorrectly.)

They don't always have more powerful abilities either. Fissure is great for setting up easy kills without a doubt, but Lion and Shadow Shaman can serve up kills on a silver platter too without the risk of messing it up catastrophically with bad Fissure placements. Venomous Gale is massively powerful at every stage of the game, Dazzle has plenty of power in all of his abilities etc etc.

That's true, but Earthshaker, Sand King, etc are all generally much tougher to bring down than those ranged heroes. Higher armor, higher HP, higher move speed, escape mechansims, etc. They're relatively common for melee heroes, and less common for ranged ones. Heroes like Lion, Veno, etc tend to be "glass cannons", where they have a lot of potential to cause chaos, but if they're caught out... they're gonna die really fast. Melee heroes, on the other hand, tend to be a lot tankier and even if they'll die while caught out, they'll survive longer, which could possibly mean they bring down their target first.

Most of us have come to the conclusion that PizzaSHARK just take facts from his ass and presents them as truth. There is no point replying to him or bothering with reasonable arguments because he either ignores them or switches subject. Look at the quote Sorcereia quoted from him about PRD. He literally said that on the first hit Stout has a 60% chance to block and that the number 60% on Stout Shield wasn't incorrect. And he didn't write something like "I think Stout has a 60% chance on the first hit", he types like this "you don't understand PRD if you think it's 53% overall.". How can you take that seriously? He is literally a monkey.

I didn't say it has 60% chance on the first hit, I don't know where you got that from. I did say it has 60% chance overall, which is correct.

The amount of bullshit I've seen him say and the amount of times I've called him out on it and explained why he is wrong are quite a few but what's the point? It's not like he will change his stance or anything. Also, a large part of his knowledge and ideas about the game comes from a 3k MMR bracket perspective where I can play with one hand and still win games. If a 3k MMR player tells me Huskar is OP as fuck as if it's a fact just because he is losing to the hero then I'm just going to call him stupid or tell him it's because he sucks.

No, what I do is I witness things in my games, compare them to things I see at very high level MMR and competitive games, and contrast the two. A lot of the times it's clearly just a L2P issue, and you hear nothing from me about it. Other times it's incredibly obvious that it's a significant balance issue with the game, and I bring it up. And guess what? Most of the time, the heroes or items I mention get nerfed within a patch or two. It's also not based on games I lose; I also notice when something's hinky in games I win. Any time I feel like the outcome of a game was affected too heavily by a hero or item combination being too strong, I'll make a note of it and see if I see the same results at the competitive/very high MMR level.

Also most mele carries will handily dispose of ranged carries if they can get to them.

Ranged carries need the other members of the team to create some space for them during fights so they can sit further back and nuke the hell out of the meles before they can get to them, I think this is one of the reason PA is so popular, she can easily get ontop of the less tanky ranged heroes and there isn't much you can do to stop it.

Yes. But specific to PA, it's not even that, it's that her dagger guarantees her a minimum amount of farm no matter what lane she's sent, or sent against, and as a very momentum-based hero, it means she's extremely difficult to deal with if she's drafted and played properly (i.e. not wasting 4400 gold on battlefury.)

Like, you compare a lot of other scary momentum heroes (Slark is a good example), and there are ways of dealing with them... by slowing or stopping their momentum so they never get that XP/gold lead they need to be really scary. Usually this happens by bullying them in lane and limiting how much farm and XP they can get in their lane... have supports rotate to gank if it's mid, maybe consider aggro tri if they're safelaning, ward and roam through their jungle if it's after laning phase and they're trying to use stacked camps to get some quick gold, etc.

But because her dagger costs virtually no MP, has an extremely short cooldown, and a crazy 1200 range, PA is almost entirely immune to most of this. Especially a well-played PA, because even if she's in a position where you can even execute a gank on her, she can just blink 1000 units to her creeps that are walking down the lane (or a teammate, if they happen to be in the area.)

If you nerfed her dagger, even if it was just rescaling the range (like 750/900/1050/1200 or 600/800/1000/1200), I think PA would be in a pretty good place, because suddenly she can no longer guarantee a won lane.

Oh, and get rid of dagger crits, because those are fucking dumb.

If we discuss balance, discuss the way the balance is for pros. For anything else there is literally no data and you are in no uncertain terms talking out of your ass.

The only party who might have a very good inkling of what is and isn't balanced is Valve, whom can automate the process of discovering anomalies in the statistics.

Balancing around competitive games is definitely what should be done, but the issue is that the pros tend to be very cyclical with their drafting strategies. Heroes will be picked up and dropped for seemingly arbitrary reasons, so it ends up that only a relatively small portion of heroes are ever seeing frequent, consistent use, while there's always an at least equally large portion of the hero pool that almost never sees play. To Valve's credit, the proportion of "overplayed versus underplayed" is improving every year, but it still presents a problem.

And the problem is made worse by Valve throwing buffs to underplayed heroes, even if those heroes don't even really need them. Beyond causing power creep, which itself will cause major balance issues over time (see: Windrunner, Queen of Pain), it can result in heroes that were already in a pretty good place becoming overpowered. Sometimes those heroes will then be "discovered" and played obsessively... but sometimes not, which means they may get buffed again, and it's just messy.

It seems like it'd be a lot simpler to just issue small, incremental nerfs to heroes whose popularity is considered too high, and then be very selective about handing out small, incremental buffs to heroes that are considered extremely underplayed. I've always wondered why Valve seems to take so long with balance patches, combining them with big content pushes into a cycle that almost feels like an MMO. I'd rather see monthly or even bi-weekly balance patches with small, incremental changes instead of huge, sweeping "Reduced Naga Siren's base damage by 12" patches two or three times a year. Seems like it'd make balancing a lot easier.

[Drunkenvalley]

You are right, PizzaSHARK, pros are very cyclical in drafting. However, it is what we should be talking about in terms of balance, because this is the only data that isn't completely out of the ass. The only ones who have meaningful data beyond that is Valve.

[Sorcereria]

Still not be able to recover a game save, seriously. Not even a way for admins to remake the game under same gold/exp/map. SHAME, and they call this engine so friendly for modding and adjusting etc.

Ye I lost a lot, so would secret loose that game likely if there was no redraft.
Almost bought BTS Ticket, not gonna happen after this fail.

[minteK917]

Unless you want to think of heroes like luna, morphling or TA as ranged, which imo they really dont count has. Very little hard farming carry are real ranged to begin with.

Weaver, sniper, gryo, drow, sf, clinkz(i guess could count). Now think about this list, beside weaver and clinkz, none of these are even close to dominating a lane. Hell you can right off ignore sniper and drow as many melee carry. Hell you can dominate SF as multiple melee carry (he would never be in your lane anyway since he needs perfect solo farm in the safest spot.) Gyro can apply pressure with the right lane, but he has one of the worst last hitting in the entire game.

Now think of it as a perspective of farm... beside gyro and sf, they all suck at flash farm. Drow is ok because of her ult. Everyone else is absolutely mediocre, even if you lose a lane as most melee carry against these, youll catch up quickly, youll eat the jungle and the lanes quicker then they ever could.


Melee support is a trade off. You cant expect them to be baby sitting supports. Most of them arent, if you notice melee supports are mostly the play makers. They are harder to kill and have more important roles overall, have to manage their mana. A sand king is a nice support, but hes a mediocre baby sitter. On the other hand he can farm quickly, get the items he needs and win the game for you, while doing the rest of the support job. Just that one part of it he cant do, baby sit. Its a good trade off, it just means you gotta balance your team, its not about melee or ranged supports being better. Its about balancing your supports line up.

[PizzaSHARK]

You are right, PizzaSHARK, pros are very cyclical in drafting. However, it is what we should be talking about in terms of balance, because this is the only data that isn't completely out of the ass. The only ones who have meaningful data beyond that is Valve.

I agree. You can use examples from non-competitive to see if the same issues are present in competitive, but that's all going to be very subjective at best, and if I were Valve, competitive games would be the only place I'd draw hard data from to use for balancing purposes. But the problem is how cyclical competitive is...

/shrug

[EqualWin]

does any1 else have 1-2 sec randoms freezes? holy shit (they're like once every 10 min) but with my luck I die most of the time because of that. I've been having problems with it since 1-2 weeks oracle patch i think.

[Deleted]

I agree. You can use examples from non-competitive to see if the same issues are present in competitive, but that's all going to be very subjective at best, and if I were Valve, competitive games would be the only place I'd draw hard data from to use for balancing purposes. But the problem is how cyclical competitive is...

/shrug

Competative games are a different thing to general games though. and a game from Valve's point of view needs players, it should not be built around competitive play at the expense of normal play.

Its not hard to pull numbers out of general stats to work out which heroes have more impact than others for general gaming.

[minteK917]

Competative games are a different thing to general games though. and a game from Valve's point of view needs players, it should not be built around competitive play at the expense of normal play.

Its not hard to pull numbers out of general stats to work out which heroes have more impact than others for general gaming.

Stats of the general public means dick. Abaddon is like the #1 win rate.... yes lets listen to pubs. As much as i think pro stats should be taken with a grain of salts sometimes, pub stats should literally mean nothing, ever.

[Sorcereria]

#EE.notenough322 #Terror EG vs C9

/Zyori cut his dreads LOL

[PizzaSHARK]

Stats of the general public means dick. Abaddon is like the #1 win rate.... yes lets listen to pubs. As much as i think pro stats should be taken with a grain of salts sometimes, pub stats should literally mean nothing, ever.

Win rate in general doesn't mean a whole lot by itself. Faceless Void had a terrible win rate but was nerfed anyway, because Chronosphere was broken. Sometimes a hero has a low win rate (or a high win rate) because players aren't playing them properly/aren't playing against them properly.

OD had a very high win rate and got nerfed, but he was never in need of nerfs to begin with (well, he didn't need any nerfs after they changed it so items can't proc his aura) - people just needed to L2P against him. But he got nerfed anyway, and as a result he's a little weak now.

[minteK917]

Win rate in general doesn't mean a whole lot by itself. Faceless Void had a terrible win rate but was nerfed anyway, because Chronosphere was broken. Sometimes a hero has a low win rate (or a high win rate) because players aren't playing them properly/aren't playing against them properly.

OD had a very high win rate and got nerfed, but he was never in need of nerfs to begin with (well, he didn't need any nerfs after they changed it so items can't proc his aura) - people just needed to L2P against him. But he got nerfed anyway, and as a result he's a little weak now.

Lets be real though, the void nerfs did nothing, im still off laning with him and destroying all the Arcana PA instant lock eye closed lol. Chrono could be 3 second and still make it possible to out carry anything. I dont want him changed anyway, just saying for anyone that play void regularly this changed next to nothing in pubs, only against teams with perfect positioning the range nerf can make it so its less likely to catch people on the edges. Even against the best players, you are still bound to sometime find them in odd positions. But in general the potential is not changed in any way. The cooldown nerf is nothing, because of the huge buff aghs had previously. Passive now working in is the only real nerf and its still not that big, chrono is a team fight ability, who cares if PA has 30-40% dodge early game before your quick mkb, she has no hp in a chrono shes meat for the supports.

His win rate is never gona be high in pubs, the masses just fuck up their team with him. They all think hes weak early game, yet hes one of the most ridiculous early game carry. Obscene right click damage making his farm super easy. Super tanky with backtrack and a poorman shield. People max his blink early like they think hes anti mage or someshit, when its all about timelock early game. 1/4 chance to stun and almost double your melee damage early game, go for it noobs. I can count on my hands how many void beside myself making a BKB when its needed in all the games i played. People just rush maelstorm and deadalus like drones, which in turns fucks them over now that chrono doesent disable passives. They instead rely on landing perfect chronos, which pub players dont anyway, thats where the bkb comes in when you are against certain teams.

The masses just dont get how to void, win rates low. End of story.

[PizzaSHARK]

The masses just dont get how to void, win rates low. End of story.

Was referring to his winrate in TI4, though I'd still agree that plenty of players/teams don't seem to know how to play certain heroes correctly

I'm still waiting for the day they realize how fucking broken Drunken Haze is and realize that in most cases it's more valuable than additional points in Drunken Brawler. Even when they're against a team that's running an early/mid game right-click hero (I think there was a recent game in DotA Pit where there was a Panda and the other team had an OD), they still completely skip one of the game's most broken skills until level 10. Took them forever to realize how strong aura-whore Panda was compared to Agh's rush Panda after they buffed his ult to have Agh's cooldown as baseline; now AC+Vlad's outnumbers Agh's games like two to one.

Void will probably always be broken at some level as long as he has Chronosphere. The potential for Chronosphere to instantly end a game at 65+ minutes is just too good. If you have Faceless Void on your team, the game is never lost until your ancient dies.

[PizzaSHARK]

Why do people flip their shit over C9? They're just a normal mid-tier team with a really mouthy carry player. Every time they go up against a top-tier team they get smacked.

[Deleted]

Why do people flip their shit over C9? They're just a normal mid-tier team with a really mouthy carry player. Every time they go up against a top-tier team they get smacked.

They're a top tier team and a fan favorite. While its unfortunate how they keep flopping in the finals, they got to the finals 9 times in 2014 alone, which shows a high amount of skill.

[PizzaSHARK]

They're a top tier team and a fan favorite. While its unfortunate how they keep flopping in the finals, they got to the finals 9 times in 2014 alone, which shows a high amount of skill.

Top tier teams actually win tournaments. EE makes so many mistakes and does so much stupid shit you'd think you're watching XBOCT, but unlike XBOCT, he doesn't have players like Puppey there to carry him through his occasional moments of derp.

C9's a mid-tier team until they can actually start winning.

[Sorcereria]

For once Pizza I strongly disagree.
How would you call all those teams that score 3rd or worse. Scrubs? The consistency of speed gaming, stfu C9 is there.

Envy does makes a shit ton of mistakes, while some win him the games (divEEs), some don't.

To me Envy is too young and under too much pressure. Give him time, though I tihnk its about time they relieve some pressure from him and play a bit less 4 protect line ups.

You can easily see on how much pressure he is, was it game 1 or 2 on PA, dont remember vs VG or secret, he died with blink off CD for good 2 sec where he could have escaped easily to fountain with blink to teammate.

The divEEs though, I think he gets too excited and he needs a person to bitchslap him from behind sometimes like a little kid to start behaving correctly.

Than another topic is playing on LAN. Big LANs are never easy. Discussing the difference what makes LAN so special is hard, unless you did it yourself - at least few times on world level, though even local levels lans are stressfull but you tend to be less stressed about the overall outcome since you might not win or lose so much.

[veiledy0]

does any1 else have 1-2 sec randoms freezes? holy shit (they're like once every 10 min) but with my luck I die most of the time because of that. I've been having problems with it since 1-2 weeks oracle patch i think.

I get these whenever someone buys an item, upgrades courier etc.

[minteK917]

I get these whenever someone buys an item, upgrades courier etc.

What video cards are you guys using. Personally my games been running flawlessly. But my brother showed me something similar constantly happening to him.

[Longview]

Why do people flip their shit over C9? They're just a normal mid-tier team with a really mouthy carry player. Every time they go up against a top-tier team they get smacked.

there are at most 3 or 4 teams that consistently place better in tournaments

whats your tier list look like if they're not a top tier team