Anyone play this? For those unfamiliar, there was a Warcraft III custom map called Defense of the Ancients (DotA), an addicting map where you pick a hero and fight your way into the enemy’s base, destroying turrets and gaining items along the way.
The original creators released a standalone version. The best part is that it is FREE, though like a lot of ‘free’ games, its free but you can spend real money to get bonuses.
Like its predecessor, its similar looking to WCIII, you play a hero with 3 spells (and 1 ultimate), leveling up and getting money by killing enemy minions. There are many items you can buy and TONS of heroes to pick from. Each week they put about 10 heroes on rotation (you can use them free) or you can spend in-game Influence Points to unlock others, along with new skins for heroes.
There’s lots of variety to the heroes, including 3 different ninjas, a pirate, a midget evil wizard (“I AM evil!..stop laughing!”), depressed mummy, armadillo, a few evil wizards of normal stature, and your generic swordsmen/women.
How present is the infamous DotA community in LoL?
Never played DotA, but I have a good idea of what you’re talking about. I tried the Heroes of Newerth beta for a few days before I moved to LoL, and holy crap people played that game like it was their job. It had no bots and no unranked games and a broken tutorial, and I got cussed out of every game I played within ten minutes, and everyone liked it like that. From what I’ve heard from my friends and in chat. HoN siphoned off all the players of that type and the League of Legends community is incredibly friendly and casual, at least in the unranked games. It’s still the same mechanics, of course; one errant mouseclick and not only do you die, you miss out on enough XP to make you useless at fighting and a liability for your entire team – but the other players are a lot more forgiving if you accidentally make them lose.
I played it for a bit but this very quickly became apparent, and that to me just doesn’t equal fun.
I’ve been playing for awhile now and I really like it. Singed and Shaco are my favorite to play. I tried HON too but was also very put off by the community and gave up on it. LoL is a much less hostile environment to newer players.
Singed is definitely an interesting character in theory (I haven’t tried him yet). He’s very easy to kill unwary players who chase you while you drop a poison trail.
Right now my fave character is Karthus. Put him in the middle lane and he can farm xp and gold pretty fast, and his ultimate is great for finishing off wounded players.
The game, much like WoW, follows the ‘holy trinity’ of archetypes- you have Tanks, DPS, and Support. THe neat thing about this game is that Tank-like characters that have a ‘taunt’ ability can use it on enemy players (forces them to attack you briefly) meaning you can actually ‘tank’ an enemy player much like you would a mob. That and people are kinda slow sometimes and seem to like to focus on the guy with the most HP/hardest to kill :dubious:
That last part is frighteningly accurate. DotA-type games are the elements of WoW 5v5 – designing a comp, leveling on a PvP server, executing your strategy – distilled down into about 45 minutes with far deeper gameplay and a magnitude more classes.