Defense of the Ancients Allstars

[Fattyfat]

Any of you still have war3 and play this? The dota Mod (www.dota-allstars.com) has become like one of the most popular mods on battle.net

If you still like competitive play, I suggest checking it out. I play on east.

[Modo Icecrown]

I quit playing awhile back. 5.36 was my favorite version.

Some of the heroes just get to imba, Guinsoo fix's shit that's not broken and ends up fucking his game up really bad every patch.

Fuck Guinsoo anyway, he banned a bunch of us on a network from channel TDA because we beat him a few months before wow came out.

[Etadanik]

You'll be happy to know then that Guinsoo is no longer working on DoTA. IceFrog is now the new head.

[Modo Icecrown]

Most Excellent.

[Zinke]

Every person's version either gets too complicated, requiring intimate knowledge of the map secrets, too imbalanced with certain item combos for certain heroes, or starts to become balanced by not making huge changes and then everyone gets bored of it.

The original DOTA: allstars guys were good about making things balanced, but they stopped making sweeping changes and then when Guinsoo or whoever made those item recipes, everyone loved that and started playing that version. It was unbalanced as hell though, so you rarely got a serious game. I played with the allstar creators a lot, and we had a good group of players going. I never got the hang of the new DOTA with item combos though, and quit wc3 shortly after that.

It was frustrating to play public games because no one ever got the basic strategy of playing defensively to build up a gold/item advantage until you could steamroll. They would be out matched by 3 or 4 levels, out matched on items, but think they were winning because they killed more buildings and wanted to 'PUSH DAMNIT!!!' . Then they'd curse me out when we lost and I had been telling them not to push.

anyway... DOTA is a great concept, and I figured the WoW battlegrounds would be alot like DOTA in first person, but I have yet to try out battelgrounds since I don't have time to play WoW anymore.

[Cybsled]

Pushing is the only way to win. You need to be defensive, yes, but you need to hit their weak sides or in the end you will lose.

I remember one game, some guy had the troll warlord and a fuckton of items because he farmed the whole game. He could literally solo 4 of our team at the sametime. He was raping our base pretty hard...I think the only reason we held him off is we had a techies who would use the jihad move on him and the nerubian assassin.

I forgot what hero I even had, but I kept pushing the weaksides...changing my focus when they came to defend. Eventually I killed all their rax and they lost. I dont care how awesome your character is...if you get zerged by creeps doing 120 a shot, you die. And more importantly, your BASE dies fast.

[Piriwi]

Dota Classic was the real strategic game (although it had it flaws too: undead, dispell and aoe being overpowered), while Allstars was too much about getting the superhero/item combination in my opinion.

Not to mention some classes could be very overpowered even without certain items. If I played techies with a bad team, I could pretty much add 20 minutes to the playtime alone before losing. Allstars was fun to do every once in a while, but if you wanted teamplay classic was way better (both in pubs and inhouses).
Most of us classic players looked down on Allstars players like people here do on bnetters. I remember some insane tournament games in Dota, both allstars and classic were certainly 10x better then any pvp in WoW.

[wamphyr]

Dota has the best PVP ever. Period . Sure it is not perfect but for those who complain about hero imbalances .. cmon get a clue .. it starts with guin and ends with soo scyte of the wise.

A troll with aegis and 5 divines rapiers does shit is he is sheep all the time.

Also this game is sooo much more fun playing on Game Clubs and iternet cafees . With friends and all. Real Drama somethimes .. lots of fun.

And as in WoW Pickup groups sux .. get a team and do some clan wars it is amazing. Oh and for those who want to try it on a non-leaver enviroment there is a channel on quakenet named #dotapickup.euro . U have to register with Q ( /msg q hello ) and u have to play on Europe Bnet but it is worth it .
Good players and no leavers.

[DJ3]

DotA's a fun game to play just in a few hours free time, and laugh at the b.net tards who get all caught up in it. It takes maybe a couple games or an hour reading the strategy forum to get the hang of all the items, and maybe 10-15 games before you know which heroes do what and what to watch out for.

There are some incredible hero imbalances, though. Naix comes to mind, even if you curbstomp him early game, lots of teams will feed him items to prop him up. Making a melee hero who is balanced by his low health, then giving him spell immunity (No sheep for you!) and the best lifeleech (I think?) in the game is pretty fucking retarded, and whoever actually programmed it into the game without going "hey, even on paper this guy looks pretty fucked up" had to be a retard. You counter low HP/high damage heroes by either outlasting them by having more HP or pounding them with spell damage. You counter lifeleech heroes by either disabling them or pounding them with spell damage. When you combine the inability to outlast (due to incredible lifeleech) with his ability to completely negate heavy spell-based damage as well as disable via any normal method (via spell immunity from avatar) you end up with a fucked up hero.

It's one of those things where nothing looks overpowered, but when you put it all together, it clicks and makes everything stupidly easy. It's sort of a Necromancer type situation. You gave them fear, and you gave them snare, and you gave them free damage via pets, and some developer never considered that they'd fear kite.

Really, there's a few heroes like that, Naix is just the one that pisses me off in any given -ap game. At least things like Rhasta ward trapping involve some small, tiny degree of timing, patience, and/or skill, whereas Naix past level 15 just hits Avatar and right clicks somebody and waits for them to die.

Granted, when you get tired of that shit (which people invariably do) you just move on to all random games, and you don't have to go up against some Dream Team every game.

I also imagine the competitive side of DotA, the tournaments, organized teams and all that, could be rather entertaining, as there's a lot of strategy to be seen in picking heroes that mesh together, as well as picking a team to counter the other. I just don't have it in me to get too serious about any b.net game, as that's the sort of thing which rots the brain.

[Josh]

I love dota. It's the only game I keep coming back to, it's just a lot of fun. Hell I even buy new games and come home and play dota first. It's even more fun when you have a few close friends to play with.

And yea ap sucks, same heros always getting fixed. ar is the way to go.

[Murr]

Yeah, I started on DOTA Classic and scorned Allstars for awhile but classic just doesn't offer the variety or volume of players (at least anymore) that Allstars does. I feel like it's improved since Guinsoo left but there's still problems. My friends and I still play, though - a lot. Sadly we mostly pubstomp on Bnet because #tda is either toast or I don't know what, and we're too lazy to get into league play.

The only issue I really have with Allstars relative to Classic is the heavy use of stuns as character abilities. Classic was a lot more about preparation, timing, and flanking and there wasn't anywhere NEAR the sheer amount of disable available to any given team of 5 in Allstars. Not to mention what a disadvantage a good team can be at in an -allrandom game simply because the other team got 2 or more disables and your team has 0.

What I really don't comprehend is their design philosophy for certain characters - it's obvious even to armchair designers why certain things or characters, such as previously mentioned Naix, aren't a good idea (Personally I loved the N'aix from Classic). Not to mention poor coding..
Example: Spiritbreaker's triggers are easily thwarted. Ever played him against a Crystal Maiden or someone who's Guinsoo happy? It's painfully obvious when his charge or Nether Strike are executing and you lose both Mana AND Cooldown when your aborted move triggers thanks to Frostbite or Sheep.

Not to mention generic melee character design - why give heroes like Sven and Leoric huge range single target bolt stuns and cleave/lifesteal/superstrength and then give your other melee heroes either no stuns or 0 range stuns and other abilities that are INFERIOR to lifesteal/cleave/superstrength etc. Juggs for example is just poor design - Bladefury is alright but he's really just a one trick pony with Omnislash (again, a dull spell that leaves you less in awe of a player's skill and more in annoyance at yet another gg ability).

I realize how stupid it can sound to bitch so thoroughly about a game you play all the time but it's just testament to how addictive games of this NATURE are, not DOTA itself - if done and balanced by a professional studio, perhaps if Blizzard had taken the idea and produced their own map - it's be INSANE.

[Murr]

And just to recap: Imagine if someone took an engine like WoW's or Guildwars' and made a standalone DOTA game out of it? My friends and I toyed with using Source to produce something like that but we just didn't have the time on our hands - would be insane, though.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Team Fortress?

[Murr]

Originally Posted by Zehn_Druidbane

Team Fortress?

TF2, maybe.

[Zehn - Vhex]

TF could use an overhaul in graphics though, I agree. But it's still fun to bust it out from time to time and get my ass handed to me by people that haven't stopped playing it since it started at the dawn of time.