DOTA 2 invite from Steam

So, animation cancelling? I don’t quite understand what the issue is. This is probably because I’ve played LoL but not DotA.

Are you guys saying that in DotA, once you right click to attack someone, you can immediately click somewhere else to do something else, and it will cancel the attack animation from before? And is it that if you click elsewhere too early you’ll cancel the attack itself, but click somewhere else too late and you wasted time? Is that what’s going on?

Basically each attack has “follow through” frames, where you’re doing nothing other than standing there and completing your animation, this is AFTER you’ve already fired your projectile/done damage. “Animation cancelling” allows you to cancel these follow through frames, higher level players can use this to cancel frames and then attack again, thereby increasing their DPS since they get more attacks per second than people who don’t cancel the follow through frames.

Animation cancelling doesn’t instead your attack rate. The attack cooldown always remains the same. It allows you to spend more time moving, so you can better maintain position on a hero (and get in more hits while chasing since you stay on him longer) or last hit a few creeps while walking somewhere.

Which is another dynamic I find useless and annoying: you only get credit for attacking creeps if you get the last hit on the creep. That’s clearly an engine-limitation thing, not something required by the game or something that makes “story sense”: it ought to be the case that heroes who are attacking in the same area divide the gold amongst themselves. Instead, it leads to stupid behavior: rather than attacking the enemies, I’m supposed to run around in circles until an enemy is almost dead, and then kill the enemy. Also, I’m supposed to kill my own creeps to prevent the enemy from killing him. Engine limitations should be overcome, not replicated.

Last hitting is a core part of playing the game, both getting them yourselves with minimum exposure and denying them to the enemy. It’s a significant part of the tactics of the game and removing it would make things a lot more boring. It also plays a significant balance in ranged vs melee heros.

I applied for the beta like 2 months ago, but oddly enough today when I was talking to someone about it on steam, 20 minutes later my beta invite shows up. Kind of creepy.

So far looks good though - I especially like how seamless and smooth the broadcast and watching options are. I’m completely incompetant because I barely played the game and that was 5 years ago.

Are there a general stable of heros that are considered newbie friendly to learn on?

There are other reasons to last hit such that it doesn’t bother me they left it in. For instance, auto-attacking will push your line against the towers, and early game this can be suicide since heroes can potshot you and you can’t chase them behind the tower unless you want to die.

Likewise, killing other heroes has complex mechanics. Being within a certain range of an enemy hero when he dies grants bonus gold and EXP regardless of whether you even paid attention to him or not. If you deal damage within some time (15 seconds?) before he dies, but don’t last hit, you get an assist which grants you even more bonus gold.

Further, the limitation of last-hitting actually turns into a bonus when you consider strategies. There are units which are “carries” and they rely heavily on gold and exp, early game heroes which are meant to assassinate early and then tucker out and become useless are better off defending a carry while they last hit. This gets the carry more gold, if last-hitting were distributed evenly it would be impossible to distribute gold in such a way that buffs the carry and neglects the early game hero. In other words, since the only person who gets it is the last hitter, it allows for ad hoc resource allocation.

It doesn’t matter all that much, since the match making works well enough. Even if you’re underplaying your hero, everyone is underplaying their hero too. Pretty straight forward heroes include Skeleton King, Drow Ranger, Crystal Maiden, Lich, Tide Hunter, Sven, Bloodseeker, and Viper. Viper and Bloodseeker really stomp low-level games, where teamwork and game-awareness isn’t strong enough to deal with them.

Is there some way to vote to surrender as a team in this game?

Because the lack of that option is inexplicable and really stupid, IMO. Some games are massively unbalanced and the game is decided in 15 minutes, and yet you still have to play for a half hour, lest you get a serious punishment for leaving.

I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t have an option to have a unanimous vote to surrender.

No option exists anywhere in the game even when setting up a match, and it is never planned to be added. :smack: I was reading the Dota2 thread on SomethingAwful, and it turns out one of the devs is a goon. People asked him the same question, and he replied with something to the effect that even having the option hurts teamwork, because apparently people are going to force votes on every game that isn’t a complete steamroll in their favor, and constantly rage out or troll if the vote doesn’t pass.

Now on the one hand I sympathize, because I understand that’s exactly how every game of HoN plays out, but on the other hand he’s completely fucking insane.
But I’ll be playing exclusively against bots until they get easy, so it won’t be an issue for me for a very long time.

I don’t know if I agree with that logic. If you’re fed up enough with the game that you’re willing to call a surrender vote and leave if it fails, you’re probably fed up to just leave anyway even without a vote.

It may just be because the matchmaker can’t place me over my first few games and the future games will be more competitive, but I was in a game earlier where 15 minutes in it seemed totally clear who would win, but it still lasted another inescapable 20 minutes.

That’s how it played out with Heroes of Newerth and its concede vote. It’s terrible. If you’re remotely behind, someone votes to concede to protect their stats and then it’s a 10 minute fight until it finally happens.

How does it “protect their stats”? If you surrender, it’s the same as you lost 20 minutes later. I don’t understand how it’s exploitable or why it would change any behavior except people sitting there idling waiting for the game to end.

I had a long post written up but I accidentally lost it in the quick reply.

I have a Dota 2 beta key and I’ve been playing since December. I’ve gotten pretty decent at the game, but I’m not “good”.

The Dota 2 Wiki is a good place to learn about heroes and items. Every day, Reddit has a Hero of the Day discussion on their Dota 2 subreddit. The archives are here (google doc).

If you want to get better, here are the things you need to prioritize learning.

  1. Learn to watch the minimap. It will save you so many times from getting killed and it will help you set up ganks and coordinate with your team. Playing with bots you can ping the minimap with alt-click to direct them a bit.

  2. Learn how to not die. Not simple. You have to do so many things in this game to not die that feel really counter-intuitive. For example, retreating. If you’re out alone, especially past the river, you probably shouldn’t be there (except in the early laning phase). Speaking of the laning phase, you shouldn’t be auto-attacking creeps at all except to last hit. Click around to move until you want to last hit.

  3. Understand your role in the game. The wiki has a good write-up on the three main hero roles, Carry, Support, and Ganker.

  4. Learn how to last hit and farm gold. Once you learn how to last hit well and learn the mechanics of the jungle, the game becomes much easier.

  5. Learn how to fight as a team - learn how to position yourself and how to prioritize targets. This requires a lot of practice.

Dota is a game with an extremely steep learning curve. I was terrible when I started Dota 2, but I picked it up fairly quickly thanks to having played a bit of Dota 1 a long time ago and from picking up skills in RTS games like Starcraft 2. If you enjoy the game, keep practicing, because you will get better! Especially if you have a mentor.

Forgot to add to previous post, but good heroes to start with: Omniknight, Queen of Pain, Huskar, Lion, Vengeful Spirit, Ursa, Blood Seeker, Lifestealer (in the jungle).

Avoid Weaver, Brood Mother, Puck, Tinker, Chen, Pugna, Enigma, Invoker, and Ancient Apparition for now while you’re learning.

Heroes of Newerth had more stats tracked than just wins and losses. KDR was the main one.

Well, not really applicable to my complaint then, I don’t care what HoN did, I just find it pointless to make DOTA games last 15-20 minutes too long where most of the action comes from assholes yelling at each other.

I have been waiting years hoping for a Dota thread.

I’m happy to see that they’re finally releasing some more beta keys for Dota 2 - although, amusingly, it’s extremely evident when big waves of inexperienced players get released upon the community. With about 100 wins, I’m fairly comfortable with the new engine, and I played the original extensively. If anybody would like to get a game together, or even stomp some bots, I’d be happy to tag along and help you guys get introduced to the game.

As others have said, it’s a brutally difficult learning curve and you will take lots of abuse from other players while figuring everything out. It’s cool - everybody goes through this. Everything StP has said is really spot on - there are lots of very important but rather subtle things one needs to do while playing, as Dota is a game constantly pulling your attention between the immediate and the meta. With the big time investment (most pubs last ~35 minutes) and excruciatingly prolonged death-of-a-thousand-cuts losing process, it’s a high risk/high reward sort of experience. Losing can be enraging, but a good victory is so satisfying.

The lack of surrender, constant whining, and general shitbaggery are all very relevant points, but as you gain experience and start stacking up wins, the matchmaking system will start placing you with better players. All these issues are generally diminished as you climb the skill ladder, as players are better, more focused on the game (and not on crying,) and end things more decisively. One of the cruel ironies of the matchmaking system is that teams of friends get matched against other teams - so your relaxed four-man party might very well get stacked against five caffeinated semi-pro Koreans.

Dota definitely is not a game for everyone. It’s extremely competitive. There really are no laid-back games except for complete dominations. As mentioned, there are probably a dozen or so outright bugs which have now become official features; that’s just the way it is. If closet camping existed in Dota, everybody would be doing it all the time, and cussing you out if you weren’t.

That being said, I frigging love this game, and I’d love to grab a few games with you guys. My handle is “kessler syndrome” on steam, feel free to look me up.

I’ll add you today or tomorrow, ISoT.

If there’s enough interest, I can start a Dota help thread where we can do Q and A and I can post short tutorials and blurbs. We could also do a coaching session where we play against some bots together and suggest how to improve.

There are plenty of fantastic videos on youtube on learning how to play, even for intermediate players such as myself. Just search for DoTA 2 Introductions on the youtube search engine.

An example, (the audio seems a bit off in this video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdwS_yfQ8DQ
If you’ve got the fundamentals down, many experienced and even some professional players stream their games/tutorials/help sessions http://streamdota2.com/

Hey guys,
seems like this place is still pretty crowded these days, most of the keys discussion kinda died out on the net…
My mate and me, we played dota for ages and signed up for the beta as soon as it was available but none of us got an invite yet. Would anyone share one of his invites to invite me? Id appreciate it, we could play then, too :stuck_out_tongue:
My steam account is rambazander,
thanks in advance! Cheers.
Btw if youre new to dota2, just look up dota 1 guides, they work (maybe some minor glitches but you get the idea) pretty fine since the game was taken over 1 by 1.