35 replies to this topic

[Wumpus]

I've got one free invite to the Dota 2 beta if anyone is interested. I'd rather give this to someone who is a fan or has a long term interest in the game, because its not something you just do casually. There's a high learning curve, but its tons of fun. It was easy for me to hop in because I've been playing Heroes of Newerth for about 3 years and its very similar. If you are a League of Legends player its quite different.

I'm posting it here because the beta is Windows only at the moment, but when the game is out properly its supposed to be Steamplay and also free to play. I've put in about 120 hours into the beta so far, and it is really really fun. So If anyone wants the invite, just let me know here and we can connect on Steam.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Must.... Resist... Temptation....


First DOTA, then HON, and now DOTA2... They create temporal disturbances in my life!

On a more serious scale; How is it compared to DOTA and HON?

[uff0]

HoN was originally a clone of the original DoTA. Same heroes, same items, but different names on them. Later S2 added their own heroes into HoN, which according to many where quite imbalanced. DotA 2 is basically DoTA 1 but made by Valve, and they have hired the guy behind the original Dota to develop the game. Dota 2 is IMO far superior to HoN, and it will have a much bigger player base as well when it goes full free to play.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Oh, I played dota for several years prior to the release of hon, and then spent a few years on hon, so i know my way around. What i meant was personal experiences with the subtle differences.

[Sneaky Snake]

For those of who play league of legends are are wondering what the difference is between it and dota 2.

League of Legends is essentially easy mode compared to dota 2. Dota 2 has a way larger, more complicated map, no pooling, multiple shops with different items, no fixed meta game, all heroes available to everyone every game, a better ban system, harder gameplay (denying creep and towers), and a much steeper learning curve.

It is a much more satisfying game the league, but also much harder (that's what makes it more satisfying). Personally I love it, and will never go back to league of legends again.

IMO league of legends is turning into a game very much like COD - hugely popular due to its easy nature, and laid back approach. It's a great game, but for those looking for a much harder challenge and a game with a lot more depth, dota 2 is your game.

[Frigidman]

DOTA, HON, COD, IMO, WTF?

...

<_____<

[Sneaky Snake]

[Wumpus]

uff0, on 11 September 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:

HoN was originally a clone of the original DoTA. Same heroes, same items, but different names on them. Later S2 added their own heroes into HoN, which according to many where quite imbalanced. DotA 2 is basically DoTA 1 but made by Valve, and they have hired the guy behind the original Dota to develop the game. Dota 2 is IMO far superior to HoN, and it will have a much bigger player base as well when it goes full free to play.

I'm well aware of Hon's history. At this moment, there's still several things HoN does better than Dota 2, and since its been out for 3 years, has more finely tuned polish. It also has lots of fun heroes Dota 2 doesn't. And sure, some heroes could be imbalanced, but that's quickly fixed in patches. Right now there's no particular hero that is "overpowered/unstoppable" or can't be countered in some way. I'm sure it will have a bigger player base because its the original DOTA game but #2, and FTP from the start. HoN only went FTP earlier this year or late last year, I forget.

Thain Esh Kelch, on 11 September 2012 - 11:04 AM, said:

Oh, I played dota for several years prior to the release of hon, and then spent a few years on hon, so i know my way around. What i meant was personal experiences with the subtle differences.

The map layout is 99% identical to the one on HoN, so no big difference there. I would say the subtle differences are a few of the items, for example you have Smoke which turns your whole team invisible for 40 seconds and gives a 10% move speed boost. You are revealed within 1000 units of a tower or enemy hero ,but it lets you setup massive ganks since you can't be seen by sight wards.

Sadly there's no Harkons Blade like in HoN, but you have a Rod of Atos, which cripples a targets movement speed. Some of boots also work differently, for example a Mana Ring are mana boots here. The other subtle differences would come from the different heroes, or somewhat different heroes ability. You know a Staff of the Master in HoN boosts some hero ults. In Dota 2 like 80% of hero ultimates can be boosted from that item. Its kind of crazy, but interesting. There's other minor changes, for example Linkens Sphere (Nullstone) blocks ANY spell instance every 20 seconds, not just targeted ones. Sadly, you can't buy a portal key (blink dagger) on Devourer (Pudge) in Dota 2. The item is "simply not allowed on this hero." I think that's also stupid.

Overall Dota 2 seems have a significantly higher emphasis on farming. I don't seem to remember this as much in HoN. Of course the carry or carries need it, but somehow in Dota 2 its an obsession for every team and almost every player. Its kind of slower, and sometimes annoying. HoN can be more vicious and fast paced, which I enjoy, but that's also due to HoN's range of heroes with massive AoE spells like Midas, or super mobile heroes like Silhouette which simply add different dynamics to the battlefield. There's fewer global ultimates, such as Bombadier or Artesia. Really the only two is Thunderbringer's (Zeus) ult and Ophelia's (Chen's) heal.

Lastly, teleport scrolls have an annoying stacking length. If you are the 2nd hero (or 3rd, etc) to teleport to a tower, it adds 3 seconds to the time it takes. The default is 3 seconds, but the next hero will take 6, the 3rd hero 9. This means there's a bigger emphasis on pushing towers, or tower diving, since your whole team often can't get there in time. I think its stupid since it discourages larger team fights until the late game. (generally speaking.) This makes heroes like Lycan (Warbeast) somewhat overpowered as they can easily chase down and kill people in lanes with little to no repercussion from their teammates due to the teleport cool downs. There is also a hero with a global teleport option with a cool down of 20 seconds at level 4. Just think about that and what it can do.

More of a personal preference, I found item names mostly ridiculous and annoying to learn. In HoN the names are a lot easier to remember mostly because they relate in some way to what the item does. In Dota 2 they are obscure and high fantasy. Sheepstick? Nah, lets call it "Scythe of the Vyse" instead. Despite knowing what all the items were and did from HoN, It took me awhile to just remember what they were due to the damn names. Now I've got it, but yeah.

Overall Dota 2 is incredibly fun. I've put some 120 hours into it so far and its great. I don't think its a superior game to HoN, but its worth playing if you like the genre. I like them both equally at this point.

Re: LoL, I tried it once night with a friend since he was so into it. I had been getting him into Dota 2, so I thought, "you're trying my game, I'll try yours."  It feels like a cheap and lame version of Hon or Dota 2. I don't understand its popularity. I played 2 games then uninstalled it and will never touch it again.

[Sneaky Snake]

LoL's popularity is that its much easier to be good at then HoN or DotA. The learning curve is way lower. I jumped into LoL with 0 moba experience and found the meta and overall gameplay very simple. The game is won (or lost) by someone on the other team (or your team) absolutely sucking and feeding hard. It is very very rarely won off of skill.

Find the weak player, commence feed, win. That is league. The map is so simple, the jungling so simple, the player roles so simple, that the game's skill ceiling is much lower then DotA's that the whole game just reaks of being easy.

The general gaming public loves easy though, cuz it makes themselves feel like they're good at the game, and actually accomplishing something when they play. It's the same reason that COD dominates the shooting genre.

[Wumpus]

Just a heads up, the invite is taken as someone messaged me. So the rest of you will have to wait till its out. Or you can signup at dota2.com I think for a chance to get a beta key.

[Tetsuya]

Sneaky Snake, on 13 September 2012 - 11:56 AM, said:

LoL's popularity is that its much easier to be good at then HoN or DotA. The learning curve is way lower. I jumped into LoL with 0 moba experience and found the meta and overall gameplay very simple. The game is won (or lost) by someone on the other team (or your team) absolutely sucking and feeding hard. It is very very rarely won off of skill.

of course you've got a 2600+ solo ranked ELO to back that statement up, right?  Or a ranked team ELO somewhere in the 2200 range?  

Trust me, the game as played by random, sub-30 soloqueuers has almost no relation of any kind to the game played at high ELO.  

If all you ever did was solo or duo que in a non-ranked que, especially sub-30.. of course the game was about finding the bad on the other team and farming him (while hoping that the random PuG bads you were with aren't feeding worse.)

That doesn't happen in organized team play.  LoL is like Othello - easy to learn, absurdly difficult to master.  Watch a stream of a tournament game.  It's nothing like the soloqueue.  

And that's not unique to LoL.  The original DotA (and one assumes, DotA 2) has a MASSIVE skill gap between the average dude playing and truly skilled people.

For the record:  my solo ELO tops out at the 1900 range.  I'm hardly a pro.

[Wobblefoot]

I don't think Snake is trying to say that LoL doesn't require skill to learn or, especially, master. I think it is accurate, though, to say that learning DotA or DotA 2 over LoL has a much larger curve. The following is a list of things (off the top of my head) that both Dota 2 and vanilla DotA have that LoL removed:

- Terrain Levels - attacking uphill will increase your chances to miss your target
- Courier - there is a courier you can use to ferry items back and forth between you and home base; this isn't free and must be purchased by a player - not doing so puts your team at a huge disadvantage, but the player who purchases it loses money he could be spending on items or consumables
- Night vs Daytime - vision is reduced at night, and one enemy (Nightstalker) gets stronger at night
- Creep Blocking - you can position yourself in front of creeps as they traverse the lane to slow them down, thereby making them fight enemy creep waves closer to your tower than the enemy's
- Neutral Creep Stacking - you can stack jungle camps to make it so there are more to kill
- Runes (somewhat mimiced by read and blue buffs in LoL) - runes spawn in one of two locations on the river, randomly, every two minutes
- Denying - you can deny creeps, towers, and even TEAMMATES to lower XP and gold gain for the enemy team
- Side Lane/Secret Shops - there is a shop in each side lane that sells a reduced number of items, as well as a secret shop that carries certain items you can not buy elsewhere
- Long Lane/Short Lane - in LoL, each lane is of equal length between home base and towers; in DotA and Dota 2, they vary in length, giving one team an advantage, and the other team a disadvantage (and vice versa in the opposing lane). This plays a big part in which hero you decide to use in which lane
- Map Inequality - to further expand on the equal lanes in LoL, the overall map is a copy of one side over to the other side. In DotA and Dota 2, the map is quite different depending on which jungle you are in
- Teleport to Base - there are no free TP's to base; in DotA and Dota 2 you must buy scrolls
- Monster Control/Microing - some heroes can summon controllable minions and some can gain control of neutral creeps/monsters; these pets can be micro-controlled and some have spells/abilities of their own
- Item Abilities - there are a few items in LoL that have activated abilities, but in DotA and Dota 2, well over half of the items have activated abilities
- Destructible Terrain - Some items and spells/abilites can remove trees and terrain from the map; they will respawn after a few minutes
- Pulling - neutral jungle creeps can be leashed into a lane to fight enemy or allied creep waves, thereby removing aggro from any of them

Individually, those differences won't make a huge overall impact on the game. Together, though, all of those items greatly change gameplay and learning difficulty.

[Wumpus]

Good list Wobblefoot, I'd say that's a good assessment of differences between LoL and Dota. To each their own, but I still say Dota Dota/2 does have a higher learning curve and deeper gameplay as a result of these details.

[Sneaky Snake]

Tetsuya, on 21 September 2012 - 02:17 AM, said:

of course you've got a 2600+ solo ranked ELO to back that statement up, right?  Or a ranked team ELO somewhere in the 2200 range?  

Trust me, the game as played by random, sub-30 soloqueuers has almost no relation of any kind to the game played at high ELO.  

If all you ever did was solo or duo que in a non-ranked que, especially sub-30.. of course the game was about finding the bad on the other team and farming him (while hoping that the random PuG bads you were with aren't feeding worse.)

That doesn't happen in organized team play.  LoL is like Othello - easy to learn, absurdly difficult to master.  Watch a stream of a tournament game.  It's nothing like the soloqueue.  

And that's not unique to LoL.  The original DotA (and one assumes, DotA 2) has a MASSIVE skill gap between the average dude playing and truly skilled people.

For the record:  my solo ELO tops out at the 1900 range.  I'm hardly a pro.

Obviously, league is hard to master, but as a player of both, it's blatantly obvious the dota has way more game elements then league. It makes the game harder to learn, and much more varied (you will never tri-lane in league).

League has a way that's meant to be played, and that's the way you play it. Dota has like a dozen different ways you can play, and you choose one in the first few minutes of the game that best suits your team (and countering the other team).

It's just the way the game's are designed. A massive part of league's popularity comes from it's relative simplicity. It's relatively easy to understand what you have to do, and how to play your role, and how your hero is meant to be played. Actually mastering that is extremely difficult, but that's not what I'm saying.

Dota is much much deeper then league. And because of that it will probably always be less popular then league, but will appeal for core gamers more, because there's more there.

[Sneaky Snake]

If anyone wants DOTA 2 beta keys I have 6 to give away

[Wumpus]

Damn, how did you get so many? lol

[Sneaky Snake]

Valve just keeps giving them to me. I dunno why

[Wumpus]

I have 6 keys now..just got them in. Anyone here want an invite?

[uff0]

Only 6? I have eleven

[DaveyJJ]

What's DOTA?