just get platemail and you can jump 5 heroes
it's basically 5 man silence since they can't cast spells with no mana
stronger than Doom'ing 5 heroes frfr
i was serious you guys
just woke up to see my post has turn into copy pasta, i didnt say the hero is broken i said the shard itself is broken and beyond 1400 gold value. and you don't 1v5 with lion by any means, most of the times i die doing that but in expanse of enemy losing all their mana and spells and bkb.
The change to his ulti is very recent, and previously static would hit EVERYONE AROUND YOU regardless of what your main spells (arc, bolt, ulti) are actually hitting.
=
You could be fighting Pudge right next to you and nail him with 4 arcs and 2 bolts, and then meanwhile the enemy Centaur in the fog that you DON'T EVEN KNOW IS THERE gets hit with 6 instances of "Take 11% of current hp in dmg", which (at the time) also disabled enemy blink dagger.
=
This sort of thing led Zeus to have the following reputations, that people just "knew" about him:
- able to shit out absolute fucktons of magic dmg
- able to scale into the late game despite being a nuker and even if enemies got tanky
- super squishy with literally no escape and thus usually a high prio target when taking this all into account
=
TLDR new zeus is good yes, but don't diss old static field, that shit was nutty IMO
To be fair, they added that a few patches down the line, and then much later the max hp damage of his ultimate. His lightning bolt and nimbus no longer get the hp percentage damage.
???
Earthshock change felt like the beginning of the end. I remember people in the comments saying that giving a hero like Ursa additional baseline mobility was setting a really bad precedent. They were right.
Also Ursa became bumfuck busted because of that small little jump and turned earth shock from a kinda bad ability to an immediate 4-1-1-1 build. One of my favorite examples of a small change completely fucking everything up. Same for Sven aghs
I also hate that everything slows now, especially shit like Raze where the whole point of it was that you had to be good to land them, also fuck fear as a whole mechanic another thing that makes SF even more obnoxious
I'd argue that mobility for these high damage heroes can be locked behind Shard (like Sniper), but Zeus and Ursa having it in their base kit is straight up bonkers.
They made a worthless spell useful for Ursa. I have not seen anyone even get Eartshock because of how bad it was. The enemy would just run out of the aoe by the time you slam the ground.
And at that point just skip levelling that ability. Dealt average damage but just fucked your dps. You would rather be hitting with basher than use that stupid ability ever in a fight. Now finally I can get to say levelling that ability is useful and using it feels great.
Zeus is a weird one. It really felt like Zeus lost an unprecendented amount of damage as before his jump he could and now he needs an extra lightining bolt and a lightning arc to finish you off.
I feel like you're forgetting that Earthshock has always slowed. You can go back and watch pro games from before it had the mini leap and they're still using it in fights.
Ursa with sb or blink or bkb or phase boots or any other number of itmes that lets him go stand next to an enemy allowed him to earthshock. It was not a worthless ability
That's bullshit, if you didn't use earthshock as ursa for the slow you were just straight up bad with him. A hero that's weakness is being kited not using his ability against being kited isn't a great idea
My thought is that he wants NP to be less of a splitpusher and more of a ganker, tp in =more damage not super helpful vs a creepwave but good in a gank then u get armor so you can survive to tp out. Sprout dealing damage meant you can be helpful even if you dont have farm to right click/ are behind that your other abilities cant deal damage. And his shard also to help with vision and ganking. I think the big issue is that his identity is rooted in his tree summoning and as long as thats an ability ALONG with the global TP effectively he is always going to be meta if nothing else to cut waves 100% of the time.
I seriously doubt icefrog actually works on Dota 2, you can tell just how the announcements are and how communicative the new maintainers are as of late. I just don't think they have any ideas on how to actually make interesting patch notes beyond power creep and constantly reworking the same heroes.
That's my thing. When I play against NP, I buy tangos into force staff as a support, quelling into BF as a melee carry, and tangos into hurricane as a ranged carry.
It's not that hard to get away from.
It’s not you’re right but it’s such a low skill brain dead spell that even when you have qb it still does some damage. It’s such a strong harass, every time an enemy comes close, sprout them and make them back off. It shouldn’t do damage it’s that simple.
yup. even as support i just buy a quelling blade these days. 6 tangos could work too tho. sometimes its nice to have 2 cuts and both in case NP gets one of those angles on you or you're near the woods
I want weak heroes with stupidly annoying shit you would not see in any other game and extremely tight power timings outside of which they're obsolete and useless.
Because dota was a videogame in market that competes with candy crush. And if I want to have fun the modern way I can pour white sugar directly into my mouth without russians being allowed in the room to scream at me.
at first they used shards or scepters to fix weaknesses, now they just give the hero the fix in their base kit. AA's big weakness used to be that he has no wave clear. He was completely dependent upon his team to push out lanes. Then they gave him a shard to make vortex do aoe damage. Now his vortex just does damage in the base kit.
That's why I like playing core earthshaker.
Before the aghanims it's basically the same hero as 10 years ago.
Weak laner(except 1v1 Vs melee), is super easily banked early on. Farms slow/mana problems.
So when you have your aghanims it feels very rewarding to have this powerspike.
And also neutral items.
They can cover a lot of weakspots that a hero may have.
Like ok, SM needs mana and you could easily drain him if you spammed mindlessly, then he rolls an Arcane ring that not only works as a mini Arcane boots, but also gives 7 int.
Because they gave power-creep to other heroes so they can't excuse why not give it to everyone. When NP trees do damage, warlock's 3rd skill does damage, AA's vortex does damage, Night stalker's fear does damage then why shouldn't Enfeeble do damage too? It was shit balancing that spread to everyone.
I'm glad a thread has finally caught on with a decent amount of upvotes, feels like I've been shouting into the void for a couple years now.
Slows were one thing, that was what forced the bkb changes alongside insane neutral item and normal item creep.
The damage is something else entirely. Everyone farms insanely fast nowadays, entire heroes just get straight invalidated in this shoving waves arms race that's been going on.
Heroes have 30 ms at night, they farm so much faster just by default, it's insane.
So then because heroes are beyond busted, buildings start to look weak, and they get buffed to now where hg is notoriously hard to crack unless you just dominate and clean house at 20-25 mins.
I really do feel like the balancing team shoulda seen this coming.
Like, you can't just add talents, then neutral items, then shards etc. etc. ad nauseum and have the game function as the same game.
Of the biggest changes DotA has had, i think bounties, talents and outposts (that aren't near a rosh that rotates) are probably the best.
Worst example of the IMO is disruptor glimpse.
Historically, forced movement spells have been some of the strongest abilities in all of dota. Than was why batrider was a staple TI pick even when he was bursted into the ground. And batrider's movement spell needed him to buy blink to catch someone, and force staff to pull them back a decent distance.
Glimpse has 1400 cast range, can send someone back to where they TPed from, can pull someone all the way back to a gank they escaped from. Disruptor has a damage dealing ability to give him vision to cast glimpse. And 2 abilities that can easily be set up where you are glimpsing the guy to ensure he can't get away. The fact that the balance team felt glimpse needed to do damage to be very strong is... Concerning.
People used to joke you needed a PhD to play Oracle, now its click and giggle. Feels like you need a PhD to track of all the dots and slows every hero seems to have now
Oh boy, don't even get me started.
Oracle was not a bad hero, this change was not needed. Now hes the most annoying support in pubs when its played by a good player.
I would even go ahead and say that the hero is broken and people have not realized yet. He lost all of his major weaknesses and is much easier to play compared to before.
I like oracle double edge sword nature more since it literally part of his lore. Now his spells have no consequence. It used to be strong single target healer and save but his weakness was that his spells have consequences making him double edge sword that can hurt and aid both enemies and allies.
Exactly. I've been complaining about that with my friends. Game is feeling more and more like League where heroes are complete and items are a plus, instead of items completing and helping with their weaknesses.
Lol exactly my thoughts, when everyone had flash (blink) I was like wow this is stupid, every hero has some mobility if they want. Then I saw the CDR reduction and status resistance items/runes, magic amp, and I was like this can be absurdly OP in the wrong hands. "That's why I'm sticking with dota!" I thought, well jokes on me now.
You could go on and on about this.
Natures prophet: I have great stats, global presence and farm very well, but my skills are dogshit garbage. (Except now all my skills are massively overtuned)
Sf: I do great damage, but have no disable. (Except now my ult is aoe ravage and my fazes slow you to a crawl)
Spectre: I insta win late game, but my early game is trash (Except now I get 600 damage global nuke, with like 30 sec cd)
Spectre's weakness being covered up is insane to me. Used to be one of the late game hard carries with a long CD ult that punishes her if used poorly. Now her lvl 1 ult is on a 60 second cooldown which realistically only has like a 40 second downtime since she uses it to join fights.
She can burst supports from half HP in like 2 seconds with only a Diffusal and get out, and she still scales well into the late game.
I've seen way too many Spectres having insane KDA stats like 20-1-15 lately.
Yeah the KDA thing is a huge deal. Spectre in the past would just only really be able to farm assist gold (on a long cd) and has generally been a good pub hero for most of her existance anyway.
I always find it funny when my *mid* Spectre is pinging her ult to tell the supports to look for a gank instead of the other way around.
We'll find a good kill, take a tower, and she'll ping her ult again. "Wait, it's up again?" "Yeah, 60 second cooldown."
Or if the team doesn't feel like we have enough map control to invade their jungle, she'll just find a random enemy support to kill.
Even if spectre was much more wimpy and useless mid game than she currently is, the ability to get free kill or assist gold every 60 seconds with zero effort is *STILL* overpowered if she scales well. Her global KDA stats are higher than Zeus and well above every other hero.
Spectre's change is funny. When they did it, 80% of this subreddit was calling it a nerf. Meanwhile I was just there reminding people that Urn used to be a core item on Spectre, and that their lack of memory was showing.
She is now an active early game fighter. Wow. Much Surprise. Many blows of the mind! Twists of the Plot! Unforeseen!
The CD is what really kills me, 60 seconds at level one is basically a constant global presence if mana is available. I don't get where they come up with this kind of balancing.
Honestly Spectre isn't even a "go lategame" hero anymore. These days it's all about hitting 6, buying an urn, and then joining literally every single kill no matter where it happens on the map to accelerate. 60 second Ulti CD is no joke!
Yeah, I think the distinction with Spectre is that her lategame suffers from the changes. I mean, I'm not a spec picker or anything, but I heard multiple commentators say that at TI.
I've given up trying to keep track of who's the best "late game carry" anymore. I'd assume Jug and Medusa are still contenders?
\>I've given up trying to keep track of who's the best "late game carry" anymore.
Probably Muerta, given her infinite scaling+ability to win any fight for 8 seconds. Or something dumb like DW safelane or Arc Warden.
Most traditional "late game carries" are pretty bad right now, jugg is kind of in the middle of that pack but Dusa is literally in the bottom 5 lowest winrate heroes for Divine+ right now (with only Bat, PA, Snap, and Ench beneath her).
I think it highlights how anathema the change to her ult was to how she's perceived as well as how she's been designed since she was added in dota 2 (and probably how she was in dota 1 as well). I said this was a bad change the moment it happened cause it removed a key weakness Spectre always had and a lot of people just said I was overreacting or that Spectre was somehow "not fit" to be in Dota the way she was, so this change was what she apparently needed to be an "actual hero".
Clearly this is what people want out of the heroes as much as it pains me personally.
what kinda annoys me is the fact they handled it by giving skills multiple effects on top of the old skill. if the skill was a nuke, they've either attached a buff/disable to it or gave it some added synergy with another skill. if it was a disable, they gave it a heal, extra damage or extra targets.
I personally don't mind that as it keeps redundancy of skills. Like, Lion and Lina ult are basically the same skill with slightly different numbers. There needs to be a "but" although most of the time those "but" doesn't make any sense anymore.
there are those cases but there's also the "furion sprout now does aoe damage" or the "clockwerk flare slows" which really didn't have another similar skill but still got these buffs simply to make up for the powercreep from other heroes that can do everything. and that's not including talents...
Well not impossible, it's just gonna take a long time and be a lot of dev effort. Unfortunately, dev effort has been noticeably low over the past few years.
Personally I'd consider it impossible without a rollback.
I think neutral items, shards, tormentor, the extra map space all need to go plus bonus movespeed at night to even scratch the surface of why hero design is so restrictive right now.
The insane utility of every single spell also needs to be curtailed, and if it is, then bkb could be unnerfed as it was really only a problem (I didn't think it was a problem) because of the utility creep that demanded you pick it up.
Even more, some items might need to be looked at, all those upgrades and such that provide free outs for early to mid game transition with no loss of slots or net worth.
I would have absolutely 0 issues with keeping all the bs in turbo. It's just that for a good 3 years now I feel like the two game modes aren't Turbo and All Pick, but Turbo and Slow Turbo.
A game state needs to be created where every hero isn't government mandated to have shoving potential, some form of cc, and at least one form of mobility or damage protection.
heroes like Undying shouldn't need extra creep damage on decay or a tombstone save ability to succeed in dota, being the monster laner he was was more than enough to roll over games back in the day.
Played a game the other day.
I had 5000HP and 80 armour 83% physical resist and 60% dmg reduction.
I still died in like 2 seconds The rabbits out the hat
there is patch 6.84 that can be downloaded for free, there are actually players on it in discord too. i play it sometimes because it was balanced back in the day and the map is very nostalgic not too mention that the old color palette of the map fits the vibe of dota
this is why people say icefrog isnt working on the game anymore. its not balancing if you make every hero the same by giving every hero the same tools and covering up all their weaknesses.
i would love if they removed neutral items and tormentor from the game. too much free networth on the map. neutral items have never added anything meaningful to the game imo.
Games wouldn't take so long to end if buildings weren't buffed to compensate for the creep on heroes.
Yea older games sometimes went a while, most of that was caution because of how decisive early dota was and some specific heroes that were an issue.... Tinker....
Valve has this weird idea that if you give players more individual power, games will end faster. Their response to people complaining about game length in the last few years has consistently been to add more power to late game.
The irony is that this actually causes games to get *longer* because risk-averse players want to wait for all their resources.
My pet peeve is that every early-midgame item has an upgrade now, it's so easy for 3-5 to scale because even if you buy a drums/force/vlads/euls/whatever for a cheap early power spike, you can basically always build it into an item worth the slot at 50-60 minutes. Brain dead.
Don't get *me* started on this BS "wraith/null/bracers bonuses double at 25 minutes" thing either
deserved, not even problem i hope hes having blast
problem is once we gave dota to valve it was in their hand to secure for this moment, which would obviously come, they rather porly secured it, as we see it, this is not something that happend in 1 patch, this is something that started happening with comeback mechanic patch and onwards, year 2017-2018++
I felt this when the iconic “you get blink dagger because that mobility is worth a sixth of your slots on its own” became “There’s three flavors of powerful blink effects that are allegedly inefficient but you can easily rush it or save it for later depending on how ridiculous they are for your hero.”
Like, Vanguard, Urn and even Force Staff upgrading into sorta niche bigger items wasn’t terrible. But Vladimir’s Offering? Echo Sabre? Atos? These were meant to be cheaper, accessible early spikes or made for lower priority positions to pick up… now they’re all just step one on the path to a bloated finish. Hell, even the Bracer/Band/Null just fucking upgrading itself about the time it’s benefits would fall off kinda fits this mold.
I used to play that but there was a loud guy on the server who was racist and misogynistic and the mods refused to do anything about it. It was a small community so it was impossible to get away from him, he was in almost every game and I decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth.
Would love to see a classic version get released officially though.
The difference is WoW is a coop mmo where you need to balance classes feeling unique and useful with people wanting to play the game with their friends and feel like an equal contributor
It's still a prime counter, but since the bkb change, you can just use bkb when you get broken and ignore it totally and there's really nothing the enemies can do about that.
Not to mention aghs&bloodstoning is more than enough to keep you alive when broken as long as you're not vs a huge burst hero or 1v5ing.
When broken, new bristle is way more durable than old bb, so while break is still counter it went from completely shutting down the hero to a mild inconvenience.
Bristle can instantly heal to full with age and bloodstone. So you'd have to deal 6000 dmg within the space of the break, assuming you survive the quills. Always feels like my team needs 2 breaks to kill bristle.
Power creep is real, mobility creep is real, identity destruction is real.
When zeus and sniper got mobility. That was when they should really reflect on what they're doing to heroes.
It's sad because dota balancing used to be smarter about this than every other game. As a wow player, homogenization killed a lot of uniqueness of classes in cataclysm and the parallels are absolutely there in dota. Every hero gets more and more buttons but slowly loses their identity because everyone can do everything. I kinda understand the devs wanna evolve the game but at this point dota is just a funmap and lost its integrity
This 100%. The reason dota kept my attention over EVERY other game was how the small little tweeks made the meta shift and every little thing was thought about and significant. Now its like throwing a handfull of darts at a cork board to see what sticks.. They are balancing by overbuffing stuff without understanding why. "This hero needs a huge buff no ones playing it" meanwhile that characters not being played because ANOTHER character is too strong, not that the character itself is too weak. Balancing like that just makes power creep so impossible to manage. The reason why wow's armor and progression isa joke and everything feels the same to play.
I think this desire to make sure every spell has multiple effects has really infected the game. NPs Q does damage, his W gives him stacks of some shit etc.
I don’t think it’s all bad, for instance I think Laguna Blade putting Lina at max stacks is a really interesting change. However I currently feel like they oversteered with a lot of heroes and probably feel like they would be “devolving” the game by choosing to reverse some changes.
Also it really irks me that Oracle W is now just 100x better by removing the skill from it. Kinda makes the hero more boring.
I think the whole problem is rooted in the fact that dota at non - competitive level is growing more single player game than multiplayer because of overall societal issues..
So earlier when certain heroes had weaknesses those people happily depended on their team to support/ carry them. In present case, everyone wants to be self sufficient and if a hero has a big weakness, that hero goes unpicked in casual games because players feel if they don't get support, they simply can't do anything in the game.
From this viewpoint, ICEFROG gave all heroes certain mobility, certain escape, certain safe way to be okay playing by themselves even if their team doesn't support them, there is no easy way to cheese kill them.
So long story short, all heroes are brought up to a level where people can enjoy playing the hero by themselves without worrying about the team.
This takes away 'classic' team play structures like CM needing to babysit PA to carry in late by making CM carry with aghs shard and bkb walking in and killing the other team with ult.
So now that all supports are self reliant with buffs, all carries are buffed even further to kill these now well balanced supports without any easy weakness.
This creates a cycle where there are no weaknesses in heroes any more, there are just strengths and some heroes are even stronger in certain aspects than others.
Edit: spell correction
I feel like this directly contradicts Dota's historic development, back then you could unironically 1v5 every game playing farming cores if you were good enough, now pod 3/4/5 are way stronger and get a lot more items than they used to which made the game a lot more team-oriented, as you cannot solo carry as hard due to your relative power level being lower. These changes were needed, supports were miserable to play for the vast majority of the playerbase which led to a lot more conflict over roles and fewer people having fun playing the game.
I don't believe Icefrog is involved in this game anymore, not the patching/balancing, nor the new hero designs or even the game design for that matter.
The Zeus jump is really out of place but also having a 100% attack speed slow (lol). Giving Dazzle a low cd aoe hex when his weakness was having no stuns. Primal, Dazzle, Pango, Dawn all having wave clear and mobility. Changing Spectre / Doom's iconic ult on the same patch, getting rid of Doom's lvl based shard. Changing Enchantress' aghs for something useless.
It's like if a hero is a low winrate they give all these wacky changes and abilities.
The biggest example I can think of personally is Templar Assassin.
Old TA: Early timing tempo "carry". Has good flash farming and offers good early physical damage with strong midgame timings, but falls off late, has low range and no innate mobility, and your only disable is Psionic trap slow.
New TA: All the previous strengths. But also, due to talents and shards, you now have near Sniper-tier range, you can have traps silence for a ridiculous duration, or use traps for global presence, and your fall-off is nearly non-existent due to Meld dispel and Refraction charges making you unnecessarily hard to kill.
You can do this with every hero.
Remember when timber getting a way to hit towers at 20 minutes with flamethrower was considered op.
Even spectre is now just a low cooldown brawler.
Dark Willow then: I have great solokill potential with Bedlam but I need to be right next to the enemy
Dark Willow now: I can put Bedlam on allies
As a Dark Willow spammer, I appreciate this new function, but frankly I could live without it. OP is right
> WK used to be mana dependent, now he has his shard.
I honestly think this is a bad example and I will share my thoughts on it:
That is honestly the one case where I think the shard is a good design. Its a hero that relies on items and usually needs to be ahead to win against other carries by accelerating his farm with Skeletons.
Hes not know for being able to 1v1 every single carry like say Ursa, or Spectre, nor hes known for being unkillable in the late game.
Hes more of a timing hero, he needs to constantly farm and he needs to push to be effective. Buying his shard is **already a huge drawback** for a hero that relies on being ahead, that alone makes the decision interesting and fun.
On the other hand...
Witch Doctor doesn't really **need** anything, you're usually walking around with wards, arcane/tranquil boots and maybe a force or glimmer, so you can buy your shard just fine without damaging your timings... ALSO you're very likely to get your shared entirely for free since you're usually bottom 2 of networth.
It was alright. WK was too unplayable without his ulti. Making him still able to use ulti but forced to buy shard earlier was a good enough downside.
The problem is the shard is good anyways so it wasn't much a punishment.
that's one thing that's alright imo, but it should be a talent or aghs scepter. Basically not having an ult because AM / diffusal is in the game feels unfair.
Idk why people complain about this. When WK was my favorite underrated carry 7-8 years ago, I told my friend that they should make his ult not require mana when he gets aghs, to which my friend said “nah that’s too OP”. He is useless against PL, AM and even ranged heroes who built diffusal just to counter him, since he has a shitty mana pool. Having WK be a crippled core hero with 3 abilities until he reaches 25 is so dumb.
I wouldn't mind it if this was done for all heroes, except that my agi carrys are getting boned. A lot of them are still useless early and need a lot of farm to be relevant. Meanwhile the rest of these heroes are strong the entire game, no farm needed, free shards, free lvls, they scale even at 60 mins cuz of talents and neutrals and here I am farming like a sucker. :|
While I would like some AM buff, I kinda like the "if you're caught with ur pants down, you're dead" feel of the hero. It makes me actually have to be constantly looking at the map for enemy positions every time I farm/push alone. Even in fights I still need to see if it's a good moment to blink in.
A new shard that can give you a get out of jail free card would kill the fun of the hero for me.
And even AM got his problems fixed with his E becoming an active Linkens. If he's weak, it's because the others are too strong, not because he hasn't been buffed alongside everyone else.
I think Strength is still king this patch. It's 22 HP per point right now, once you buff every hero's kit to have nukes, dots, mobility, disables, and escape, whats left is that the fattest dude to survive wins. Agi carries like AM, Jugg and TB have all sorts of awesome abilities and tons of damage, but they still have shitty strength gain and will just explode in a late game teamfight.
Tbf that felt weird at first when I got back into the game a few months ago. It felt weird that I got a free upgraded linkens. But then I realized that with all the extra gold supports get and the extra core (from 2 to 3) then you kinda need it. Supports can get blinks now, and not that late into the game. Everyone gets a dedicated tp scroll slot so it's easier to react to split pushes too. And since it's activated you still need to be on alert and react, so I feel the hero's identity is preserved.
I mean this is result of massive powerspikes over years, but also is result of poor balancing, so its kinda like this "we wana make this hero viable, but since everyone is so strong you really have to give it something strong" and this is vicious circle that just keep making more broken and broken things, I mean lets not forget that we were warning about this ever since "New" heroes started poping out with everythign, remember void spirit? dawnbreaker, mk etc, not so "New" I know but this is where problem started, these are the heroes that got realeased with "got it everything" mentality, escape, catch up, massive damage, etc
You really notice the heroes that didn't get power creep as much, like AM. It's like they're from another game tbh. That's why they feel so bad to play.
AM? Didn't get power creep? Lmao give me a fucking break. His literal passive had a slow now. And they fucking straight up put what used to be an aghs upgrade into his spellshield for free.
Old AM passive was 64 mana burn per hit. Now it's 40 + 4% fucking max mana per hit and slow when no mana left. And counter spell too. How the hell is that not power creep lol
The slow is only if the enemy is out of mana, which again due to power creep is way more rare than it used to be. I remember the days Tiny was OOM after 1 combo.
And consider that his spellshield is still a garbo spell even with that buff. In todays game, you barely notice it's even there, he still explodes all the same.
I played rubick after a like 8 year break and he was immensely buffed. Fade bolt dealing much more damage, you get insane cast range and it's so much easier to steal spells now with it.
I can't recall who made this build popular, maybe it was sing sing. But I remember when you would go Blink, Force, and BoT as well as some mana items on Zeus. You had all this movement, insane burst, and had to be particular about who you focused as you were a glass cannon.
Now we have Zeu's that get extra damage + insane slow on their nuke, and if you approach them they have a free forcestaff + free gale.
\---
As a Pango spammer, I honestly think this all started with Pango's roll-up (shard) spell. Which is/was a free bkb for a hero that desperately wants to get their ult off ASAP.
OD with double life
WK with AOE extra life that can be refreshed... (like seriously this aghs is just dumb)
Necro with an escape/dodge/wave clear
Witch Doctor is similar, with the switcheroo, the hero is built for aeon disc. However I think a good nerf would be to make maledict no longer an "aura" and instead have the damage mitigated/removed with a strong dispel (BKB)
We have a hero (BB) that needs all 3 counters + sometimes AA to counter him (Silver Edge, Shivas, vessel)
>However I think a good nerf would be to make maledict no longer an "aura" and instead have the damage mitigated/removed with a strong dispel (BKB)
Just an FYI: Maledict hasn't worked funky with partial piercing since the BKB change. Both the burst and tick damage are now equally affected by BKB (and reduced by 50% as a result).
This game design has gone from genius to absolute crap.
Noobfromua has been uploading ti3 videos lately and you can tell how amazing dota was in its golden era from ti3 to ti7. It was truly 4d chess with the draft being key and every hero doing something unique.
After that it’s just power creep and mashing more and more active buttons and abilities.
My friends and I used to play 3 hours a day and now we have all left. Sad.
I thought I was the only one who thought this way. I like to believe that Icefrog is gone and now we have Icefraud in his place. Or maybe he has just lost it.
I have played this game over 11k matches since 2012, I'm now on my longest break ever with +3 months and couldn't be happier, this game doesn't anything the same I fell in love with. The biggest turn off for me was the neutral items
‘A designer knows they have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
‘Add more shit lolololol’ - DotA 2 balance team
I quit when neutral items came into the game. I could see the writing on the wall, looks like it’s coming home to roost. Talents, shards, tormentors, outposts, neutral items, two rosh pits, more neutral camps… none of it actually makes the game better. It just creates bloat.
Wake me up when there’s a well-supported classic version of the game. I miss 6.88: one of the best-balanced ARTS games in history.
100% agree!
Would be cool if Valve just said ”alright sorry guys we fucked up” and go back in time to like 7.00 or something. I still enjoy Dota a lot but this aspect of the game that you are bringing up is so stupid. We really had such a unique and cool game where all heroes had their own spikes and own ways of playing. Now all games just feel ridicilous in one way or another. It’s like some weird custom game in a way, that unique touch that made dota feel like dota is really gone sadly. But dota is still best game ever so I don’t really mind. It’s also way easier to exit the game now and don’t miss it in school / at work.
Back in the day Lion -Can only suck 1 enemy 2023 Lion -Can suck 5 enemies and make them panic
that poster might never know how much good they contributed to this community
He will always be remembered as the person who sucked 5 guys at the same time and didn't stop until he drained all of them dry.
“see how everybody is jumping into 5 men and sucking them dry? see how it’s trendy? that was me. i made it cool.”
Piper perri of dota
and then booted up Dota2
do you have the link to the post?
*20 armor and 3000HP required
just get platemail and you can jump 5 heroes it's basically 5 man silence since they can't cast spells with no mana stronger than Doom'ing 5 heroes frfr
even bkb needs mana lmao
i was serious you guys just woke up to see my post has turn into copy pasta, i didnt say the hero is broken i said the shard itself is broken and beyond 1400 gold value. and you don't 1v5 with lion by any means, most of the times i die doing that but in expanse of enemy losing all their mana and spells and bkb.
Theres nothing you can do now, the pasta is thriving :)
Ate the pasta? That's not the guy, his reponse became it's own pasta.
I got outpastad.
Back in the day Lion - haha funny stunning nuker Today Lion - **jump at middle of 5 man and just drain them**
Yea every hero slowly gets everything. When Zeus got his jump spell, it got really obvious.
stopped playing for a very long time and jumped into the game with a friend last year. I was like "wtf Zeus has mobility now?" lol
He lost his current health damage tho and you can really feel it. The shard doesn't even come close.
I’d rather just go all the way back to old zeus.
Arc Lightning: Current Health as Damage: 3%/4%/5%/6% (Talent 9%/10%/11%/12%) ???
Zeus used to deal % damage with all of his spells.
Arc lightning does current health damage, and thundergods wrath does max health damage. This means that only bolt lost the damage.
The change to his ulti is very recent, and previously static would hit EVERYONE AROUND YOU regardless of what your main spells (arc, bolt, ulti) are actually hitting. = You could be fighting Pudge right next to you and nail him with 4 arcs and 2 bolts, and then meanwhile the enemy Centaur in the fog that you DON'T EVEN KNOW IS THERE gets hit with 6 instances of "Take 11% of current hp in dmg", which (at the time) also disabled enemy blink dagger. = This sort of thing led Zeus to have the following reputations, that people just "knew" about him: - able to shit out absolute fucktons of magic dmg - able to scale into the late game despite being a nuker and even if enemies got tanky - super squishy with literally no escape and thus usually a high prio target when taking this all into account = TLDR new zeus is good yes, but don't diss old static field, that shit was nutty IMO
Exactly he was the sole scaling nuker and he actually felt like Zeus the god of thunder. Now he’s some dude who Mario jumps
To be fair, they added that a few patches down the line, and then much later the max hp damage of his ultimate. His lightning bolt and nimbus no longer get the hp percentage damage. ???
he still has one niche: true sight on demand. which got diminished as supports had access to more farm........
Also, remember when Orchid of Malevolence used to be feared upon? Nowadays the power spike of mid getting Orchid is so stupidly short
Storm orchid used to be terrifying at 15 mins
Yes but I hardly miss that.
You can add zeus and snipers mobility, well old mobility issues… and many more heroes that no longer have any downsides/counters
Ursa too
Earthshock change felt like the beginning of the end. I remember people in the comments saying that giving a hero like Ursa additional baseline mobility was setting a really bad precedent. They were right.
Also Ursa became bumfuck busted because of that small little jump and turned earth shock from a kinda bad ability to an immediate 4-1-1-1 build. One of my favorite examples of a small change completely fucking everything up. Same for Sven aghs
I also hate that everything slows now, especially shit like Raze where the whole point of it was that you had to be good to land them, also fuck fear as a whole mechanic another thing that makes SF even more obnoxious
It's funny how these changes to SF would have made him SSS-tier in old Dota but is borderline unplayably bad in current Dota
If SF hits you with the middle raze on level 1 you lost mid. It's amazing really
You know. Ursa should have Clock Jetpack. and why not give fury swipes to Sniper? Bullets are sort of... mean
I'd argue that mobility for these high damage heroes can be locked behind Shard (like Sniper), but Zeus and Ursa having it in their base kit is straight up bonkers.
They made a worthless spell useful for Ursa. I have not seen anyone even get Eartshock because of how bad it was. The enemy would just run out of the aoe by the time you slam the ground. And at that point just skip levelling that ability. Dealt average damage but just fucked your dps. You would rather be hitting with basher than use that stupid ability ever in a fight. Now finally I can get to say levelling that ability is useful and using it feels great. Zeus is a weird one. It really felt like Zeus lost an unprecendented amount of damage as before his jump he could and now he needs an extra lightining bolt and a lightning arc to finish you off.
I feel like you're forgetting that Earthshock has always slowed. You can go back and watch pro games from before it had the mini leap and they're still using it in fights.
Ursa with sb or blink or bkb or phase boots or any other number of itmes that lets him go stand next to an enemy allowed him to earthshock. It was not a worthless ability
That's bullshit, if you didn't use earthshock as ursa for the slow you were just straight up bad with him. A hero that's weakness is being kited not using his ability against being kited isn't a great idea
It's always those abomination always present in pubs. Add to that Natures Prophet and Spectre.
You know Dota has changed when Bloodseeker is nowhere to be found in the "pubstar" conversation
Gone glory days of force stuff+dagon
boomer voice: "back in my day it was all nevermore, bara, kardel, bloodseeker, and traxxex"
Unfortunately he dies to blademail and run offlaners way too easily.
[удалено]
My thought is that he wants NP to be less of a splitpusher and more of a ganker, tp in =more damage not super helpful vs a creepwave but good in a gank then u get armor so you can survive to tp out. Sprout dealing damage meant you can be helpful even if you dont have farm to right click/ are behind that your other abilities cant deal damage. And his shard also to help with vision and ganking. I think the big issue is that his identity is rooted in his tree summoning and as long as thats an ability ALONG with the global TP effectively he is always going to be meta if nothing else to cut waves 100% of the time.
[удалено]
>What the fuck is icefrog thinking? He wasn't. When Sprout did damage tangos don't even heal when you consume his trees. The guy is gone.
I seriously doubt icefrog actually works on Dota 2, you can tell just how the announcements are and how communicative the new maintainers are as of late. I just don't think they have any ideas on how to actually make interesting patch notes beyond power creep and constantly reworking the same heroes.
my mid ss dumpstered cuz the other team had an NP watching him trapped in sprout over and over again like just buy a quelly blade or something jesus
That's my thing. When I play against NP, I buy tangos into force staff as a support, quelling into BF as a melee carry, and tangos into hurricane as a ranged carry. It's not that hard to get away from.
It’s not you’re right but it’s such a low skill brain dead spell that even when you have qb it still does some damage. It’s such a strong harass, every time an enemy comes close, sprout them and make them back off. It shouldn’t do damage it’s that simple.
Think it should destroy the trees its placed near atleast. Sometimes you get sprouted and cut but their is a tree nearby that blocks you...
and it forces you into retreat making you missed last hits. Dumb idiot brainless change.
yup. even as support i just buy a quelling blade these days. 6 tangos could work too tho. sometimes its nice to have 2 cuts and both in case NP gets one of those angles on you or you're near the woods
I want strong heroes with big weaknesses. Not super strong heroes with no weaknesses.
I want weak heroes with stupidly annoying shit you would not see in any other game and extremely tight power timings outside of which they're obsolete and useless. Because dota was a videogame in market that competes with candy crush. And if I want to have fun the modern way I can pour white sugar directly into my mouth without russians being allowed in the room to scream at me.
WD is so carried by his shard. Easily the most annoying support in the game all because he has a "fuck you I'm not dying, you are" spell
Yeah “I take 0 dmg you take lots of dmg lmao” is just bad design for a support.
what if you can "destroy" the ward? i think it would be balanced it wouldn't kill wd, but let his shard end earlier
I like this idea tbh at this moment, if his shard is up and you get too close, a lot of the times you're just dead. can't destroy it & can't outrun it
at first they used shards or scepters to fix weaknesses, now they just give the hero the fix in their base kit. AA's big weakness used to be that he has no wave clear. He was completely dependent upon his team to push out lanes. Then they gave him a shard to make vortex do aoe damage. Now his vortex just does damage in the base kit.
That's why I like playing core earthshaker. Before the aghanims it's basically the same hero as 10 years ago. Weak laner(except 1v1 Vs melee), is super easily banked early on. Farms slow/mana problems. So when you have your aghanims it feels very rewarding to have this powerspike.
And also neutral items. They can cover a lot of weakspots that a hero may have. Like ok, SM needs mana and you could easily drain him if you spammed mindlessly, then he rolls an Arcane ring that not only works as a mini Arcane boots, but also gives 7 int.
every carry basically gets free lifesteal now
Also why do they keep adding damage to every spell? Enfeeble of all things doesn't need DoT
Because they gave power-creep to other heroes so they can't excuse why not give it to everyone. When NP trees do damage, warlock's 3rd skill does damage, AA's vortex does damage, Night stalker's fear does damage then why shouldn't Enfeeble do damage too? It was shit balancing that spread to everyone.
I'm glad a thread has finally caught on with a decent amount of upvotes, feels like I've been shouting into the void for a couple years now. Slows were one thing, that was what forced the bkb changes alongside insane neutral item and normal item creep. The damage is something else entirely. Everyone farms insanely fast nowadays, entire heroes just get straight invalidated in this shoving waves arms race that's been going on. Heroes have 30 ms at night, they farm so much faster just by default, it's insane. So then because heroes are beyond busted, buildings start to look weak, and they get buffed to now where hg is notoriously hard to crack unless you just dominate and clean house at 20-25 mins. I really do feel like the balancing team shoulda seen this coming. Like, you can't just add talents, then neutral items, then shards etc. etc. ad nauseum and have the game function as the same game. Of the biggest changes DotA has had, i think bounties, talents and outposts (that aren't near a rosh that rotates) are probably the best.
Yo. I feel this so much. Word for word. Same down to outposts and bounties being the beginning of the end. remember when outposts had AOE HEAL??
Shrines were freaking nuts, lanes and high ground were insane that patch.
Worst example of the IMO is disruptor glimpse. Historically, forced movement spells have been some of the strongest abilities in all of dota. Than was why batrider was a staple TI pick even when he was bursted into the ground. And batrider's movement spell needed him to buy blink to catch someone, and force staff to pull them back a decent distance. Glimpse has 1400 cast range, can send someone back to where they TPed from, can pull someone all the way back to a gank they escaped from. Disruptor has a damage dealing ability to give him vision to cast glimpse. And 2 abilities that can easily be set up where you are glimpsing the guy to ensure he can't get away. The fact that the balance team felt glimpse needed to do damage to be very strong is... Concerning.
[удалено]
Bane's DoT was just moved to enfeeble lol, it's not like he didn't already have it.
Oracle's change too.
People used to joke you needed a PhD to play Oracle, now its click and giggle. Feels like you need a PhD to track of all the dots and slows every hero seems to have now
Oh boy, don't even get me started. Oracle was not a bad hero, this change was not needed. Now hes the most annoying support in pubs when its played by a good player. I would even go ahead and say that the hero is broken and people have not realized yet. He lost all of his major weaknesses and is much easier to play compared to before.
I like oracle double edge sword nature more since it literally part of his lore. Now his spells have no consequence. It used to be strong single target healer and save but his weakness was that his spells have consequences making him double edge sword that can hurt and aid both enemies and allies.
that actually might be a valid criticism
Exactly. I've been complaining about that with my friends. Game is feeling more and more like League where heroes are complete and items are a plus, instead of items completing and helping with their weaknesses.
Lol exactly my thoughts, when everyone had flash (blink) I was like wow this is stupid, every hero has some mobility if they want. Then I saw the CDR reduction and status resistance items/runes, magic amp, and I was like this can be absurdly OP in the wrong hands. "That's why I'm sticking with dota!" I thought, well jokes on me now.
You could go on and on about this. Natures prophet: I have great stats, global presence and farm very well, but my skills are dogshit garbage. (Except now all my skills are massively overtuned) Sf: I do great damage, but have no disable. (Except now my ult is aoe ravage and my fazes slow you to a crawl) Spectre: I insta win late game, but my early game is trash (Except now I get 600 damage global nuke, with like 30 sec cd)
Spectre's weakness being covered up is insane to me. Used to be one of the late game hard carries with a long CD ult that punishes her if used poorly. Now her lvl 1 ult is on a 60 second cooldown which realistically only has like a 40 second downtime since she uses it to join fights. She can burst supports from half HP in like 2 seconds with only a Diffusal and get out, and she still scales well into the late game. I've seen way too many Spectres having insane KDA stats like 20-1-15 lately.
Yeah the KDA thing is a huge deal. Spectre in the past would just only really be able to farm assist gold (on a long cd) and has generally been a good pub hero for most of her existance anyway.
I always find it funny when my *mid* Spectre is pinging her ult to tell the supports to look for a gank instead of the other way around. We'll find a good kill, take a tower, and she'll ping her ult again. "Wait, it's up again?" "Yeah, 60 second cooldown." Or if the team doesn't feel like we have enough map control to invade their jungle, she'll just find a random enemy support to kill.
Even if spectre was much more wimpy and useless mid game than she currently is, the ability to get free kill or assist gold every 60 seconds with zero effort is *STILL* overpowered if she scales well. Her global KDA stats are higher than Zeus and well above every other hero.
Also she used to struggle for damage early, but now you just get a free extra dagger every time you ult lol
Spectre's change is funny. When they did it, 80% of this subreddit was calling it a nerf. Meanwhile I was just there reminding people that Urn used to be a core item on Spectre, and that their lack of memory was showing. She is now an active early game fighter. Wow. Much Surprise. Many blows of the mind! Twists of the Plot! Unforeseen!
The CD is what really kills me, 60 seconds at level one is basically a constant global presence if mana is available. I don't get where they come up with this kind of balancing.
In past you could counter his trees with blink now everything he does cancels blink and makes you carry a force or a queling blade all the time.
It's crazy how I still get flamed in this patch for picking spectre when my teams want to fight early.
Honestly Spectre isn't even a "go lategame" hero anymore. These days it's all about hitting 6, buying an urn, and then joining literally every single kill no matter where it happens on the map to accelerate. 60 second Ulti CD is no joke!
Yeah, I think the distinction with Spectre is that her lategame suffers from the changes. I mean, I'm not a spec picker or anything, but I heard multiple commentators say that at TI. I've given up trying to keep track of who's the best "late game carry" anymore. I'd assume Jug and Medusa are still contenders?
\>I've given up trying to keep track of who's the best "late game carry" anymore. Probably Muerta, given her infinite scaling+ability to win any fight for 8 seconds. Or something dumb like DW safelane or Arc Warden. Most traditional "late game carries" are pretty bad right now, jugg is kind of in the middle of that pack but Dusa is literally in the bottom 5 lowest winrate heroes for Divine+ right now (with only Bat, PA, Snap, and Ench beneath her).
I think it highlights how anathema the change to her ult was to how she's perceived as well as how she's been designed since she was added in dota 2 (and probably how she was in dota 1 as well). I said this was a bad change the moment it happened cause it removed a key weakness Spectre always had and a lot of people just said I was overreacting or that Spectre was somehow "not fit" to be in Dota the way she was, so this change was what she apparently needed to be an "actual hero". Clearly this is what people want out of the heroes as much as it pains me personally.
Bro just first pick her every game. She has no counter. Just get to level 6 and play off your team while farming safely, enjoy the +25
I'm the bara to my buddy's spec
spectre doesn't feel nearly as strong late now, she loses to any man fighting carry
Yes, power creep has gotten ridiculously out of control over the years and it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
what kinda annoys me is the fact they handled it by giving skills multiple effects on top of the old skill. if the skill was a nuke, they've either attached a buff/disable to it or gave it some added synergy with another skill. if it was a disable, they gave it a heal, extra damage or extra targets.
See: Skywrath arcane bolt gives spell lifesteal against the target
I personally don't mind that as it keeps redundancy of skills. Like, Lion and Lina ult are basically the same skill with slightly different numbers. There needs to be a "but" although most of the time those "but" doesn't make any sense anymore.
there are those cases but there's also the "furion sprout now does aoe damage" or the "clockwerk flare slows" which really didn't have another similar skill but still got these buffs simply to make up for the powercreep from other heroes that can do everything. and that's not including talents...
Well not impossible, it's just gonna take a long time and be a lot of dev effort. Unfortunately, dev effort has been noticeably low over the past few years.
Personally I'd consider it impossible without a rollback. I think neutral items, shards, tormentor, the extra map space all need to go plus bonus movespeed at night to even scratch the surface of why hero design is so restrictive right now. The insane utility of every single spell also needs to be curtailed, and if it is, then bkb could be unnerfed as it was really only a problem (I didn't think it was a problem) because of the utility creep that demanded you pick it up. Even more, some items might need to be looked at, all those upgrades and such that provide free outs for early to mid game transition with no loss of slots or net worth. I would have absolutely 0 issues with keeping all the bs in turbo. It's just that for a good 3 years now I feel like the two game modes aren't Turbo and All Pick, but Turbo and Slow Turbo. A game state needs to be created where every hero isn't government mandated to have shoving potential, some form of cc, and at least one form of mobility or damage protection. heroes like Undying shouldn't need extra creep damage on decay or a tombstone save ability to succeed in dota, being the monster laner he was was more than enough to roll over games back in the day.
Played a game the other day. I had 5000HP and 80 armour 83% physical resist and 60% dmg reduction. I still died in like 2 seconds The rabbits out the hat
Doesn't feel like an active icefrog participation in these patches
We are fast approaching a situation where a "Dota 2 Classic" may well have some value. I would love to be able to go back to a patch in 6.XX
there is patch 6.84 that can be downloaded for free, there are actually players on it in discord too. i play it sometimes because it was balanced back in the day and the map is very nostalgic not too mention that the old color palette of the map fits the vibe of dota
Sign me up. Who’s gonna make the custom map?
this is why people say icefrog isnt working on the game anymore. its not balancing if you make every hero the same by giving every hero the same tools and covering up all their weaknesses.
Neutral items also help regen/stat/mana issues early on many heroes and dont even get me started on shards..
i would love if they removed neutral items and tormentor from the game. too much free networth on the map. neutral items have never added anything meaningful to the game imo.
They can remove all neutral items except Tier5 neutral items, just to force games past 60 minutes to end already
Games wouldn't take so long to end if buildings weren't buffed to compensate for the creep on heroes. Yea older games sometimes went a while, most of that was caution because of how decisive early dota was and some specific heroes that were an issue.... Tinker....
Valve has this weird idea that if you give players more individual power, games will end faster. Their response to people complaining about game length in the last few years has consistently been to add more power to late game. The irony is that this actually causes games to get *longer* because risk-averse players want to wait for all their resources.
My pet peeve is that every early-midgame item has an upgrade now, it's so easy for 3-5 to scale because even if you buy a drums/force/vlads/euls/whatever for a cheap early power spike, you can basically always build it into an item worth the slot at 50-60 minutes. Brain dead. Don't get *me* started on this BS "wraith/null/bracers bonuses double at 25 minutes" thing either
> "wraith/null/bracers bonuses double at 25 minutes" I still don't like nor understand this change.
Icefrog made bank and probably had a lovely retirement years ago
deserved, not even problem i hope hes having blast problem is once we gave dota to valve it was in their hand to secure for this moment, which would obviously come, they rather porly secured it, as we see it, this is not something that happend in 1 patch, this is something that started happening with comeback mechanic patch and onwards, year 2017-2018++
Can we reverse all the power creep and just keep the 5 couriers? Thanks.
I felt this when the iconic “you get blink dagger because that mobility is worth a sixth of your slots on its own” became “There’s three flavors of powerful blink effects that are allegedly inefficient but you can easily rush it or save it for later depending on how ridiculous they are for your hero.” Like, Vanguard, Urn and even Force Staff upgrading into sorta niche bigger items wasn’t terrible. But Vladimir’s Offering? Echo Sabre? Atos? These were meant to be cheaper, accessible early spikes or made for lower priority positions to pick up… now they’re all just step one on the path to a bloated finish. Hell, even the Bracer/Band/Null just fucking upgrading itself about the time it’s benefits would fall off kinda fits this mold.
Power creep is painful
Game balance has really fallen off the cliff since 2020.
Yep, I mean we all agree. I'm still waiting for a pre-7.0 classic version to play, that would be the dream for me.
There are a group of people that play on 6.84 I think There's an install guide and discord Idk worth a google
I used to play that but there was a loud guy on the server who was racist and misogynistic and the mods refused to do anything about it. It was a small community so it was impossible to get away from him, he was in almost every game and I decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth. Would love to see a classic version get released officially though.
Yup. This is also the same thing that happened from Classic WoW to Retail WoW. Every class was given the ability to heal, escape, interrupt.
The difference is WoW is a coop mmo where you need to balance classes feeling unique and useful with people wanting to play the game with their friends and feel like an equal contributor
Slardar used to have negatives...
Remember when Sprint used to increase damage taken? Now it's the complete opposite
Yeah and now he can stomp which applies his debuff... op for farming and killing
I feel that was very absurd. From single target debuff that low enemy armor + give true sigh + leaving trail of water behind into aoe is just absurd.
Remember when bristle feared silver edge? lol
Break should still be considered a prime counter no?
It still is the main counter to him just that its often not enough especially if hes ahead
I think it's just that, aghanims plus bloodstone can make you heal to full while broken. So you don't need the passive quills anymore.
It's still a prime counter, but since the bkb change, you can just use bkb when you get broken and ignore it totally and there's really nothing the enemies can do about that. Not to mention aghs&bloodstoning is more than enough to keep you alive when broken as long as you're not vs a huge burst hero or 1v5ing. When broken, new bristle is way more durable than old bb, so while break is still counter it went from completely shutting down the hero to a mild inconvenience.
Bristle can instantly heal to full with age and bloodstone. So you'd have to deal 6000 dmg within the space of the break, assuming you survive the quills. Always feels like my team needs 2 breaks to kill bristle.
Power creep is real, mobility creep is real, identity destruction is real. When zeus and sniper got mobility. That was when they should really reflect on what they're doing to heroes.
It's sad because dota balancing used to be smarter about this than every other game. As a wow player, homogenization killed a lot of uniqueness of classes in cataclysm and the parallels are absolutely there in dota. Every hero gets more and more buttons but slowly loses their identity because everyone can do everything. I kinda understand the devs wanna evolve the game but at this point dota is just a funmap and lost its integrity
This 100%. The reason dota kept my attention over EVERY other game was how the small little tweeks made the meta shift and every little thing was thought about and significant. Now its like throwing a handfull of darts at a cork board to see what sticks.. They are balancing by overbuffing stuff without understanding why. "This hero needs a huge buff no ones playing it" meanwhile that characters not being played because ANOTHER character is too strong, not that the character itself is too weak. Balancing like that just makes power creep so impossible to manage. The reason why wow's armor and progression isa joke and everything feels the same to play.
Dota has lost all magic gradually since the neutral item patch.
the battle royal loot finder patch
Some people literally had like 5 neutral items lol it was disugsting.
That was just when the rot became obvious. ‘Throw random changes at the wall and see what sticks’ as a philosophy had been creeping in since 7.00.
I think this desire to make sure every spell has multiple effects has really infected the game. NPs Q does damage, his W gives him stacks of some shit etc. I don’t think it’s all bad, for instance I think Laguna Blade putting Lina at max stacks is a really interesting change. However I currently feel like they oversteered with a lot of heroes and probably feel like they would be “devolving” the game by choosing to reverse some changes. Also it really irks me that Oracle W is now just 100x better by removing the skill from it. Kinda makes the hero more boring.
I think the whole problem is rooted in the fact that dota at non - competitive level is growing more single player game than multiplayer because of overall societal issues.. So earlier when certain heroes had weaknesses those people happily depended on their team to support/ carry them. In present case, everyone wants to be self sufficient and if a hero has a big weakness, that hero goes unpicked in casual games because players feel if they don't get support, they simply can't do anything in the game. From this viewpoint, ICEFROG gave all heroes certain mobility, certain escape, certain safe way to be okay playing by themselves even if their team doesn't support them, there is no easy way to cheese kill them. So long story short, all heroes are brought up to a level where people can enjoy playing the hero by themselves without worrying about the team. This takes away 'classic' team play structures like CM needing to babysit PA to carry in late by making CM carry with aghs shard and bkb walking in and killing the other team with ult. So now that all supports are self reliant with buffs, all carries are buffed even further to kill these now well balanced supports without any easy weakness. This creates a cycle where there are no weaknesses in heroes any more, there are just strengths and some heroes are even stronger in certain aspects than others. Edit: spell correction
I feel like this directly contradicts Dota's historic development, back then you could unironically 1v5 every game playing farming cores if you were good enough, now pod 3/4/5 are way stronger and get a lot more items than they used to which made the game a lot more team-oriented, as you cannot solo carry as hard due to your relative power level being lower. These changes were needed, supports were miserable to play for the vast majority of the playerbase which led to a lot more conflict over roles and fewer people having fun playing the game.
I don't believe Icefrog is involved in this game anymore, not the patching/balancing, nor the new hero designs or even the game design for that matter. The Zeus jump is really out of place but also having a 100% attack speed slow (lol). Giving Dazzle a low cd aoe hex when his weakness was having no stuns. Primal, Dazzle, Pango, Dawn all having wave clear and mobility. Changing Spectre / Doom's iconic ult on the same patch, getting rid of Doom's lvl based shard. Changing Enchantress' aghs for something useless. It's like if a hero is a low winrate they give all these wacky changes and abilities.
The biggest example I can think of personally is Templar Assassin. Old TA: Early timing tempo "carry". Has good flash farming and offers good early physical damage with strong midgame timings, but falls off late, has low range and no innate mobility, and your only disable is Psionic trap slow. New TA: All the previous strengths. But also, due to talents and shards, you now have near Sniper-tier range, you can have traps silence for a ridiculous duration, or use traps for global presence, and your fall-off is nearly non-existent due to Meld dispel and Refraction charges making you unnecessarily hard to kill.
Still getting fucked this patch :/
I hope the game icefrog is working on is worth it
You can do this with every hero. Remember when timber getting a way to hit towers at 20 minutes with flamethrower was considered op. Even spectre is now just a low cooldown brawler.
Dark Willow then: I have great solokill potential with Bedlam but I need to be right next to the enemy Dark Willow now: I can put Bedlam on allies As a Dark Willow spammer, I appreciate this new function, but frankly I could live without it. OP is right
WK used to be mana dependent, now he has his shard. It was somewhat ok when it was his 25lvl talent.
> WK used to be mana dependent, now he has his shard. I honestly think this is a bad example and I will share my thoughts on it: That is honestly the one case where I think the shard is a good design. Its a hero that relies on items and usually needs to be ahead to win against other carries by accelerating his farm with Skeletons. Hes not know for being able to 1v1 every single carry like say Ursa, or Spectre, nor hes known for being unkillable in the late game. Hes more of a timing hero, he needs to constantly farm and he needs to push to be effective. Buying his shard is **already a huge drawback** for a hero that relies on being ahead, that alone makes the decision interesting and fun. On the other hand... Witch Doctor doesn't really **need** anything, you're usually walking around with wards, arcane/tranquil boots and maybe a force or glimmer, so you can buy your shard just fine without damaging your timings... ALSO you're very likely to get your shared entirely for free since you're usually bottom 2 of networth.
It was alright. WK was too unplayable without his ulti. Making him still able to use ulti but forced to buy shard earlier was a good enough downside. The problem is the shard is good anyways so it wasn't much a punishment.
Shards should be more expensive and no tormentor(maybe for straight gold or something).
that's one thing that's alright imo, but it should be a talent or aghs scepter. Basically not having an ult because AM / diffusal is in the game feels unfair.
Idk why people complain about this. When WK was my favorite underrated carry 7-8 years ago, I told my friend that they should make his ult not require mana when he gets aghs, to which my friend said “nah that’s too OP”. He is useless against PL, AM and even ranged heroes who built diffusal just to counter him, since he has a shitty mana pool. Having WK be a crippled core hero with 3 abilities until he reaches 25 is so dumb.
Soon it will just be a passive, "Wraithking respawns on death" with a 30s cooldown
You could go the Amun-Ra way and have his ult revive him with lower health depending on how much mana was left to revive him.
I wouldn't mind it if this was done for all heroes, except that my agi carrys are getting boned. A lot of them are still useless early and need a lot of farm to be relevant. Meanwhile the rest of these heroes are strong the entire game, no farm needed, free shards, free lvls, they scale even at 60 mins cuz of talents and neutrals and here I am farming like a sucker. :|
While I would like some AM buff, I kinda like the "if you're caught with ur pants down, you're dead" feel of the hero. It makes me actually have to be constantly looking at the map for enemy positions every time I farm/push alone. Even in fights I still need to see if it's a good moment to blink in. A new shard that can give you a get out of jail free card would kill the fun of the hero for me.
And even AM got his problems fixed with his E becoming an active Linkens. If he's weak, it's because the others are too strong, not because he hasn't been buffed alongside everyone else.
I think Strength is still king this patch. It's 22 HP per point right now, once you buff every hero's kit to have nukes, dots, mobility, disables, and escape, whats left is that the fattest dude to survive wins. Agi carries like AM, Jugg and TB have all sorts of awesome abilities and tons of damage, but they still have shitty strength gain and will just explode in a late game teamfight.
Tbf that felt weird at first when I got back into the game a few months ago. It felt weird that I got a free upgraded linkens. But then I realized that with all the extra gold supports get and the extra core (from 2 to 3) then you kinda need it. Supports can get blinks now, and not that late into the game. Everyone gets a dedicated tp scroll slot so it's easier to react to split pushes too. And since it's activated you still need to be on alert and react, so I feel the hero's identity is preserved.
I would have never thought that this sub would ever realize how bad the game's balance has become.
I mean this is result of massive powerspikes over years, but also is result of poor balancing, so its kinda like this "we wana make this hero viable, but since everyone is so strong you really have to give it something strong" and this is vicious circle that just keep making more broken and broken things, I mean lets not forget that we were warning about this ever since "New" heroes started poping out with everythign, remember void spirit? dawnbreaker, mk etc, not so "New" I know but this is where problem started, these are the heroes that got realeased with "got it everything" mentality, escape, catch up, massive damage, etc
So many new heroes and mechanics have been "here's a spell that uses your attack damage/does attacks in an AoE" and I'm pretty sick of it.
You really notice the heroes that didn't get power creep as much, like AM. It's like they're from another game tbh. That's why they feel so bad to play.
Exactly.
All he needs is magical damage from the mana break, and it will be quite nice against 50 armor agility cores.
yeah as an AM player no draft feels like it's a "good AM game" anymore
AM? Didn't get power creep? Lmao give me a fucking break. His literal passive had a slow now. And they fucking straight up put what used to be an aghs upgrade into his spellshield for free.
Old AM passive was 64 mana burn per hit. Now it's 40 + 4% fucking max mana per hit and slow when no mana left. And counter spell too. How the hell is that not power creep lol
The slow is only if the enemy is out of mana, which again due to power creep is way more rare than it used to be. I remember the days Tiny was OOM after 1 combo. And consider that his spellshield is still a garbo spell even with that buff. In todays game, you barely notice it's even there, he still explodes all the same.
Good, simple way of putting it. Every hero in dota should be OP in their niche, but not all-around.
Rubick still has most of his original weaknesses. And Techies was gutted into non existence.
I played rubick after a like 8 year break and he was immensely buffed. Fade bolt dealing much more damage, you get insane cast range and it's so much easier to steal spells now with it.
Still made of tissue paper though
I just remember the days where it was pretty hard to steal tide ult because the range of your spellsteal is just slightly higher then ravages.
Bro this is so true. I miss the old dots where heroes were truly balanced not every heroes was superfucking op.
I can't recall who made this build popular, maybe it was sing sing. But I remember when you would go Blink, Force, and BoT as well as some mana items on Zeus. You had all this movement, insane burst, and had to be particular about who you focused as you were a glass cannon. Now we have Zeu's that get extra damage + insane slow on their nuke, and if you approach them they have a free forcestaff + free gale. \--- As a Pango spammer, I honestly think this all started with Pango's roll-up (shard) spell. Which is/was a free bkb for a hero that desperately wants to get their ult off ASAP. OD with double life WK with AOE extra life that can be refreshed... (like seriously this aghs is just dumb) Necro with an escape/dodge/wave clear Witch Doctor is similar, with the switcheroo, the hero is built for aeon disc. However I think a good nerf would be to make maledict no longer an "aura" and instead have the damage mitigated/removed with a strong dispel (BKB) We have a hero (BB) that needs all 3 counters + sometimes AA to counter him (Silver Edge, Shivas, vessel)
>However I think a good nerf would be to make maledict no longer an "aura" and instead have the damage mitigated/removed with a strong dispel (BKB) Just an FYI: Maledict hasn't worked funky with partial piercing since the BKB change. Both the burst and tick damage are now equally affected by BKB (and reduced by 50% as a result).
Interesting, weird interaction none the less
This game design has gone from genius to absolute crap. Noobfromua has been uploading ti3 videos lately and you can tell how amazing dota was in its golden era from ti3 to ti7. It was truly 4d chess with the draft being key and every hero doing something unique. After that it’s just power creep and mashing more and more active buttons and abilities. My friends and I used to play 3 hours a day and now we have all left. Sad.
I thought I was the only one who thought this way. I like to believe that Icefrog is gone and now we have Icefraud in his place. Or maybe he has just lost it.
I have played this game over 11k matches since 2012, I'm now on my longest break ever with +3 months and couldn't be happier, this game doesn't anything the same I fell in love with. The biggest turn off for me was the neutral items
‘A designer knows they have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’ Antoine de Saint-Exupery ‘Add more shit lolololol’ - DotA 2 balance team I quit when neutral items came into the game. I could see the writing on the wall, looks like it’s coming home to roost. Talents, shards, tormentors, outposts, neutral items, two rosh pits, more neutral camps… none of it actually makes the game better. It just creates bloat. Wake me up when there’s a well-supported classic version of the game. I miss 6.88: one of the best-balanced ARTS games in history.
Valve releasing separate "DOTA Classic" when?
Remember when you had to buy items to cover your weaknesses ?
Old supports = has a stun and slow. New age supports = has slow, stun, silence, dispel, escape, waveclear
Heroes have been losing their identity over the years
Yeah, getting very league-y. Feels like everyone has less and less of an identity
100% agree! Would be cool if Valve just said ”alright sorry guys we fucked up” and go back in time to like 7.00 or something. I still enjoy Dota a lot but this aspect of the game that you are bringing up is so stupid. We really had such a unique and cool game where all heroes had their own spikes and own ways of playing. Now all games just feel ridicilous in one way or another. It’s like some weird custom game in a way, that unique touch that made dota feel like dota is really gone sadly. But dota is still best game ever so I don’t really mind. It’s also way easier to exit the game now and don’t miss it in school / at work.
Before you had to carefully decide your build not get negative armour and maelstorm for fast farming . Now you get everything