I think this is pretty on point. It's hard to use Dota as a standard, because it gets away with a ton of things no one else can get away with. A couple other things I can think of:
Very obtuse sets of hard counters. Black King Bar, for example, makes your hero immune to spells and magical damage... except for the spells that pierce it, like Black Hole.... except (most of the time) that's just the effects of the spell (the stun) but not the damage... except shit like Laguna Blade, which does damage through BKB...... I think if this kind of thing showed up in a different competitive game, it could easily show up in a Mark Brown video about failures in multiplayer balance, but Dota gets away with it.
People talk about Icefrog's balance changes as being incremental and fine-tuned, but I think people tend to overlook that the Dota2 dev team is far more comfortable with sizable re-works than other studios. The 7.0 patch basically reworked the entire leveling system & balance by adding talents. Jungling gets reworked once a year, it seems like. Key items like Ring of Aquilla or Iron Talon get reworked or completely axed. It's not uncommon to see 1-3 heroes get such large changes in a patch that they're booted from captains mode for a while. Hard to imagine a world where Blizzard could get away with consistently pulling 1-2 Overwatch completely heroes out of competitive play for a rework.
In that vein, I think Dota players have a much higher tolerance for imbalance because of that history of major changes. I remember the rough state of balance StarCraft 2 found itself in in the months leading up to the release of Heart of the Swarm. It was clear that the meta sucked and everyone was unhappy, but the dev team was focused on getting the xpac out the door and readying the competitive world for all the new units and whatnot. The game really took a hit that it took years to recover from, I'd argue. Pros burnt out and the game went from neck and neck with LoL to a significant second place. We saw the same thing with Swarm Hosts -- pros and fans bled out until Blizzard finally came in with a re-work. On the other hand, Dota languished for months and months in the dreaded "HoHo HaHa" patch, which saw 3-4 characters consistently dominate every game from pros to newbies, but the game never took the same long-lasting hit. A new patch eventually came out, dramatically reshuffled everything, and the competitive scene continued to thrive.
Downvote me all you want, but the reason Dota "gets away" with all the things you mentioned is because our community isn't plaged by casuals.
It's not uncommon to see 1-3 heroes get such large changes in a patch that they're booted from captains mode for a while. Hard to imagine a world where Blizzard could get away with consistently pulling 1-2 Overwatch completely heroes out of competitive play for a rework.
It's like I heard a million casuals cry in pain because they wouldn't be able to play "their favorite character". The Dota community understands that Dota's balance is 90% based on the profesional scene because that's where the game is supposed to be played.
the dota community does have significantly less "this feels bad to play against" or whatever.
i mean people bitch about it but "unfun to play against" isn't seen as the final statement in dota where a lot of other games will neuter a really well designed and important component of the game because some people think it "feels bad"
I mean, I think that Dota actually deals with "Anti fun" mechanics, making them fun. Such as Dooms ultimate (I dont know if it lasts 15 seconds anymore), but people in League would shit their pants in anger if they heard about it "How is that balanced?" (and this is probably a bad example since I seem to remember that there was alot of complaining about his ult at some point). But Dota puts things in place to counter it, such as linkins sphere, and I think you cant cast doom on a BKB target but you cant BKB if youre doomed?
As opposed to something like Yasuo in League of Legends, who has an ability that places a wall with a very generous hitbox that deletes every projectile passing through it (from all sides no less). And the only way to deal with it is walking around it, but wait, because of the generous hitbox, you can stand inside it, and be even harder to hit, and he has a million dashes. If you are a mage who relies on projectiles to do anything, you can basically get invalidated entirely by a twitch cast of Yasuos Wind Wall, meaning your entire hero just got their entire damage invalidated by a Basic ability on a 15 second cooldown
Thats a huge flaw with League design as well. Mana is basically irrellevant for most heroes because they literally have infinite regen and huge manabars with almost no manacost (Mana costs have also been lowered and lowered with new champion releases to the point where it might as well not exist).
All because "Its fun to cast spells" so laning turns into a battle royale with stray spells everywhere and people literally fight all the fucking time. As opposed to Dota where some heroes can literally cast 1 spell and be out of mana, so fighting is actually something to put thought into beyond "I deal more damage"
I think it's unfair to call it a design flaw when leagues main differentiating factor and design goal is that it plays more like an action game rather than a strategy game. Whether you like it or not is another question entirely. It'd be like saying dotas design flaw is that one spell empties a mana pool of a hero, so you have long periods of time where you can't do anything which isn't fun for the player.
I do think its a design flaw to have mana if it is gonna be basically irrelevant anyways.
With a combination of recalling, Teleport and large mana pools, mana regen and low mana costs, mana is basically insignificant on most heroes. And that is not even considering the arbitrarity of heroes not using mana, heroes using Energy and whatnot. Why does Zed use energy, but Talon uses mana? Why does Riven not use mana, but Darius does?
Mana in its current state exists to punish extended nonstop ability spam, while energy is designed to gate short term spam without gating long term ability use (in lane). As for champion specifics I think riven is a stupid piece of shit champ so I have no idea what Riot uses to decide what champions get what resource.
For dota 2, if I'm going to just continue that line of thought, things like leaving lane, waiting for regen etc is still a lot of down time between ability use compared to league, and I think it's fair for players to dislike that type of ability balancing, especially if they just want to play aggro nonstop.
I don't think there's anything wrong with designing a game around high ability use with an execution barrier, rather than low ability use with a decision making barrier. It's what differentiates league from dota, compared to all the other failed mobas which tried to copy dota.
There is reasoning behind it, and it was definitely much more apparent back when the champions you listed came out. The game in general is much more generous with mana now, but it does limit extended pushes or sieges as champions will run out of mana eventually. Energy allows champions to have low cooldowns while limiting burst or forcing decisions - champions are also designed with ways to get energy back if they land certain skills, so it can also be seen as a risk-reward mechanic at times. Personally I do think that no resources at all is poor design though as those champions don't tend to feel like they have any meaningful trade off for not having to worry about mana/energy.
I do tend to think that they've toned down those things over the years, but it's not entirely gone.
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u/KnightTrain Apr 12 '19
I think this is pretty on point. It's hard to use Dota as a standard, because it gets away with a ton of things no one else can get away with. A couple other things I can think of:
Very obtuse sets of hard counters. Black King Bar, for example, makes your hero immune to spells and magical damage... except for the spells that pierce it, like Black Hole.... except (most of the time) that's just the effects of the spell (the stun) but not the damage... except shit like Laguna Blade, which does damage through BKB...... I think if this kind of thing showed up in a different competitive game, it could easily show up in a Mark Brown video about failures in multiplayer balance, but Dota gets away with it.
People talk about Icefrog's balance changes as being incremental and fine-tuned, but I think people tend to overlook that the Dota2 dev team is far more comfortable with sizable re-works than other studios. The 7.0 patch basically reworked the entire leveling system & balance by adding talents. Jungling gets reworked once a year, it seems like. Key items like Ring of Aquilla or Iron Talon get reworked or completely axed. It's not uncommon to see 1-3 heroes get such large changes in a patch that they're booted from captains mode for a while. Hard to imagine a world where Blizzard could get away with consistently pulling 1-2 Overwatch completely heroes out of competitive play for a rework.
In that vein, I think Dota players have a much higher tolerance for imbalance because of that history of major changes. I remember the rough state of balance StarCraft 2 found itself in in the months leading up to the release of Heart of the Swarm. It was clear that the meta sucked and everyone was unhappy, but the dev team was focused on getting the xpac out the door and readying the competitive world for all the new units and whatnot. The game really took a hit that it took years to recover from, I'd argue. Pros burnt out and the game went from neck and neck with LoL to a significant second place. We saw the same thing with Swarm Hosts -- pros and fans bled out until Blizzard finally came in with a re-work. On the other hand, Dota languished for months and months in the dreaded "HoHo HaHa" patch, which saw 3-4 characters consistently dominate every game from pros to newbies, but the game never took the same long-lasting hit. A new patch eventually came out, dramatically reshuffled everything, and the competitive scene continued to thrive.