Brannigan

DOTA 2

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Yeah from the perspective of a very regular LoL player it sounds like you just don't know the game as well as DotA when you say the balance isn't there.

Those snowball items like Mejai's almost never get bought in serious competitive play because they're terrible. You pay 3x as much for a stat in the hopes that if you never die, you'll get 2x the stat you paid for and maybe a powerful side effect if you are absolutely untouchable. Thing is, for this sequence of events to take place you have to get it fairly early, when you're susceptible to ganks from the other team shutting down your attempt. It's hard to counter only if you're not in the habit looking at enemy items and stats, as somebody throwing their life away to guarantee their loss of stacks becomes quite reasonable.

...That being said, I am also not a huge fan of the design on those particular items and I think the game would totally still be fun if they just removed them, but if you work your way out of the ELO slums you'll mostly stop seeing them, and your team will punish people for buying them when they do see them.

Exactly right on the counter to the likes of temp stealth champs like Akali, Wukong, and Talon being vision wards or oracles, bravo. Once again, less experienced players are likely to end up on teams that don't buy smart counters or place them in the hands of the classes those threats don't have a problem taking down quickly.

I think both LoL and DotA are super deep, super fun, and quite well balanced compared to the other offerings in the genre, (and no doubt the veritable tide of imitators you'll see releasing next year in an attempt to cashe in) and as we were going 'round about earlier, your favorite seems to hinge around what you make of the greater complexity and steeper learning curve DotA offers weighted against whichever one you had a positive experience with first. (We do always seem to hold a special place in our hearts for first loves, whether they be games or whatever, heh.)

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Me and n0b are assholes and just went Dagon Lion plus Dagon Lina. Before that we went Dagon Viper plus Dagon Tidehunter.

Also, last night we were assholes and went a Doombringer Lich lane and I got Phase Boots, Drum of Endurance, and Eul's Scepter on Lich and he got a level 5 Dagon on Doom.

It's kind of surprising how much that added speed on Lich upped my survivability factor. Normally I just go Phase Boots for speed, and then get a Mek if I can, and I die all the time. I wouldn't expect speed to help me survive team fights where I'm the first target, but lo and behold.

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People who can't be bothered to have sound on can diaf. Had a teammate constantly bitch about me not calling mia. Turns out he wasn't listening to voice chat and continued to be a dick about it. Normally I don't let people get to me, but that guy's ignorance just bugged me.

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Oh yes, how IS the built-in VoIP?

It's something I've wanted in LoL for a long time, (given the glacial speed that Riot develops new QoL features I'm not holding my breath) but anytime it gets mentioned people just wave the idea away, saying "Integrated always sounds terrible in every game" etc.

This is Valve though, and I find Steam VoIP quite good in general. Is the DotA2 integration on par with that?

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DotA 2 VOIP is high quality source VOIP. In other words, if you have a decent mic and you're not an asthmatic twelve-year old screaming into it, it's perfectly fine.

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By the by, is there still no other way into the game than just having been signed up for the beta and waiting?

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You can set your region at any time, and pool them if you wish. For example I pool from both west and east coast USA, but you can add EU and asia if you choose. There's a fancy world map showing the regions and number of players in the Find Match menu.

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I just played my first game with other humans! It was super fun. I played dota back in the day, and some HoN (not a lot) and lol (a bit more). After 4-5 hours, I like DOTA2 the best at this point.

Played bounty hunter and had the greatest time. woot!

Is there an idle thumbs channel in-game? It'd be fun to meet you guys to play!

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Finally making that step from n00b learning the basics of the game, to really kicking ass with abilities and item combinations. Just had my best game as Axe, using blink dagger to jump in the middle of two enemy heroes in a team fight, draw their attacks which my boosted armor ability, so the whole team wipes the floor with them

One question. Sometimes when I try to buy an advanced item from the secret shop, it doesn't buy right away? Puts a few items in my stash, sometimes the recipe for it as well? Is this telling me I don't have enough inventory slots for the item, or that I need to go back to the main base to retrieve the recipe before the item will be completed? I think I did that accidently once and it worked, I just want to get some clarification on this system

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Finally making that step from n00b learning the basics of the game, to really kicking ass with abilities and item combinations. Just had my best game as Axe, using blink dagger to jump in the middle of two enemy heroes in a team fight, draw their attacks which my boosted armor ability, so the whole team wipes the floor with them

One question. Sometimes when I try to buy an advanced item from the secret shop, it doesn't buy right away? Puts a few items in my stash, sometimes the recipe for it as well? Is this telling me I don't have enough inventory slots for the item, or that I need to go back to the main base to retrieve the recipe before the item will be completed? I think I did that accidently once and it worked, I just want to get some clarification on this system

recipes usually come from spawn

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my best hero so far is axe, played him 3 times and won all 3 games. I love having a hero that can take so many hits with his massive armor bonuses, high HP. His lack of speed and range is fixed with a nice blink dagger to rage combo

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Does anyone play HoN ever???

:getmecoat

Used to, but they've added so many bullshit toolbox heroes, and Maliken (the head guy at S2) is an incredible racist and homophobe, so I stopped.

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Does anyone play HoN ever???

:getmecoat

I've played it a few times with a kid who was a foreign exchange student when I was in highschool, since he's in Germany and plays both HoN and LoL, but with LoL to play with me one of us would have to make a new account as the servers are region locked. I played in the closed beta for HoN and at the time liked it as I was playing dota a lot, but stopped when the LoL beta came out and haven't touched it since. By the numbers in the lobby there are around 40-50k people online usually, which is about twice that of those in the DotA2 beta, so I don't know how well it will be doing once DotA2 launches. I still enjoy playing it as it's so much much different than LoL in terms of speed and how important things like positioning are, relatively. I imagine if I were to get into the DotA2 beta I would no long feel like playing HoN.

As someone who doesn't follow HoN and didn't know that about the head guy at S2, bleh, disheartening to hear.

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Does anyone play HoN ever???

:getmecoat

I play HoN but have cooled off of it recently. You can only play it so much. Still, HoN has a pretty accurate rating system and many users use voice-chat (for good and bad). I get sad when I play Dota 2 and am the only person with a mic. It comes with attracting players from LoL and WC3 DotA, games without any built-in VoIP, I guess...

The reason I play these games is for the VoIP interactions!!!

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Just had a great game as Slardar, the one hero that has never fully clicked for me. Ursa got an early kill lead and almost tore us apart. We were down two (three?) towers and had a series of incredible teamfights (WD, Slardar, Silencer, Sand King, Lifestealer VS Ursa, Huskar, Faceless Void, Batrider, ES) and everything just came together for a while. We almost lost a couple teamfights but eventually managed to bring it around with only my death and won. Great game, great feeling.

ID: 7152832

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I just picked up an invite, so I'd like to respectfully request the assistance of the patient Dota Thumbs to help me learn the game. I'm Gwardinen on Steam, and already have a few of you in my friends list. I'm in the Idle Thumbs group, too, for easy finding.

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I've played about 30 games in two weeks of having the beta. I'm officially hooked. What I'm working on now is knowing the right time to leave the lane for a gank, when to go in for a last hit without leaving myself vulnerable.

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Played a couple of games against bots. We all got stomped both times. Are the bots weirdly good or was I just likely playing with people just as bad as I was?

Also, is there any kind of key for self-casting a spell?

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I have this horrible tendency to forget that I have life-saving items, such as BKB, on my person. Sure, when I'm getting ready for a big team fight that I know is about to happen, I'm all prepped to pop all my long cooldowns... but when I get jumped by a group of dudes, I completely forget about it and end up dying like a derp.

I'm also trying really hard to expand my repertoire of heroes by playing hero-types normally outside of my comfort zone - in this case, melee carries, with Riki, and I'm really inconsistent.

Although I will say that I had some amazing plays against a dual-divine-rapier Bounty Hunter. We really shouldn't have been able to hold them off as long as we did.

Of course, then I pulled an entirely different kind of derp and let him kill me and get them back and by then he had a THIRD. FFFFFFFFFFFFfffffuuuuccckkk.

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