Dota 2- 7.00

[TheVampire100]

Dota will release tomorrow their all-new major patch 7.00. This features a LOT of core gameplay changes, including new mechanics, a new hero, sadly no new items but tweaks to all heroes (no exceptions) and some other stuff.

The official page is here: http://www.dota2.com/700
Some stuff of this might still change till tomorrow.

A small summarization of the biggest changes. First, the map will get (again) a complete make-over. The map will now be divided on each side in two jungles instead of one, a bigger one and a smaller one. Both sides will have more creeps, including a second ancient creep camp. Bounty runes will also now spawn only in the jungle, not in the river anymore. Neutral camps will now respawn after two minutes instead of one. Happy stacking then, if you mess up you mess up good.
Roshan will now be located on the other side of the map (left side instead of right). I think he was there already in the earlier phases of the game but I don't remember.

Heroes cannot gain stats anymore from level ups. That is, the "stat gain bonus" that you can use instead of leveling up an ability. You still get the normal bonus depending on your hero. Instead you gain now talents at certain thresholds. These are at 10, 15, 20 and 25, so you can have 4 talents. At each point you can select between two different talents, for example you can select between a +10 stat bonus or a cooldown reduction for all your skills. The most powerful talents are of course reserved for level 25 and these are most of the time fitted for their hero. Wraith King does not need any Mana for his ultimate ressurraction anymore or a bigger boost on his vampiric aura.

Additionally to this some heroes get now scepter upgrades. One is really cringeworthy and that one is Slark. Already one of the most hated, most annoying heroes int he game he can now be even a bigger pest with a scepter. He can now apply his ultimate on allies around him. Also halves the cooldown of his ulti.
You can check all the talents and tweaks to heroes and items here: http://www.dota2.com/700/gameplay/

Illusions will now give gold and xp depending on the level of the hero. Phantomlancer and Chaos Knight can ow be lucrative farming ictims if they are not careful enough with their illusions.

They also add a new backpack that allows you to carry three additional items that don't work there but can be swapped out at any time (however, with a small cooldown until the item works). Great possibilities there in the pro scene. Also nice for supports that can carry there wards in there until they need them.

The new hero is no other than the Monkey King. His abilities seem a little off. He can jump on trees, I don't know if he is invulnerable or invisible there but at least he can easily cross the map and escape from enemies that way. He also can disguise himselfs as trees, runes and other stuff on the map, to confuse his enemies. This makes it really hard to get a grip on him I guess. Even more annoying than slark?
His ulti is rather underwhelming, it is Rikis Ulti all over again, basically he creates an areay where he attacks all enemies at once but in his case with illusions instead of backstabs.



Also, the players for some reason don't like this patch at all. The rage is very real in the official forum, it is so toxic, you need to take a gas mask in there.

I'm actually a little excited. And a little scared because the most annoying heroes int he game just got a lot more annoying. But hey, that's Dota ina nutshell, you will always find that one game where you get curbstomped by a powerful hero that is hard to counter because you and your team picked the wrong items and heroes and realize too late what you actually need.

[Misery]

Also, the players for some reason don't like this patch at all. The rage is very real in the official forum, it is so toxic, you need to take a gas mask in there.

Ah yeah, I heard about that.

From what I understand, the basic reason for much of the rage is that the thing like the "talents" bit is *ahem*  "dumbing down the game!  Making it for casuals!".  Because, you know, accessibility is a terrible, sinful thing.  As usual, I reiterate that most gamers don't actually know what "hardcore" really means.  I saw a video from TB that had a lot to do with this, and he made a good point:  The whole "stats upgrade" bit is busywork at best.  In other words, utterly devoid of A: skill or B: tactical choices.  It's the sort of thing that's already super-optimized by the playerbase, so all you ACTUALLY do is memorize it and then input the correct choice at the correct moments.  That's not interesting or strategic, and it's not something that feels important like grabbing a new item or getting a new power.  And this game is STUFFED with things like that.  Making them less bloody arbitrary doesn't reduce the damn challenge or depth.  It just makes things less pointlessly annoying.  That sort of thing is "fake difficulty" as it's finest.

[TheVampire100]

If anything at all, the new talents give the game even more depth, not less. It's the usual "This is new and I don't like it" attitude that long-term players have. Because they play the game for years they mean they own the game and have to decide what has to be in it and what not. They think they know better than the developers.

I don't aggree on all design choices but I think talents are the least harmful thing here. I still am glaring at Slark and his unecessary buff. He is not in a bracket where is overpowered or underpowered but he is annoying to deal with and if he has a good streak, he spins out of control really fast and all you can do is give up. But because Dota does not allow this, you have to sit through and let you kill multiple times. And Slark players like to dominate you, they use their ulti to kill you in your fountain which should be the only safe place left. They really want to humilate you, I never have seen toxier players than Slark players. Pudge is in a simliar spot but Slark is the uncrowned king of the dicks.
And the new changes give him just another good reason to be a dick to the enemy team. As if loosing wasn't bad enough, no, you have to bear all the taunts fromt he enemy team and that they chase you all down to the fountain. UGH!

Also Sniper get's an AOE Ulti, this is in two ways annoying. For the enemy team this is annoying because he can now group-snipe you, dealing big damage too fleeing players that cluster together.
For your own team it is annoying because he can now steal more kills at once with his ultimate. Normalle I say there is no thing as "killsteal" in a team fight but Sniper reserves a special spot because he does not have to be in the figth at all and can still get all the kills. Also he gets another range buff with the talents, so even more camping from afar. As Slark, Sniper is not one of the top tier heroes, he gets rarely picked in pro teams because he has a low teamplay value, so I guess the change is there to appeal the pro players. If he can hit multiple heroes at once with his skill, he can play better with specific heroes like Magnus or Enigma. This makes him now viable. But for the casual players this is another annyoing tweak, one of many.


I do however like the new strategic pre-game. Basically you can decide what heroes to pick even before the game begins (during the loading screen). This helps to flesh out better what heroes you should choose against the enemy group, decide what counters you need, what lanes you should take. I think this could help public games a lot.

[Mánagarmr]

Because lowering the skill floor without really affecting the skill ceiling is clearly "dumbing down". I'm not really sure the DOTA community understands how much bloody busywork and unnecessary obtuseness there is in DOTA compared to other games in the same genre, and it IS absolutely hurting the game.

[Mánagarmr]

TotalBiscuit's analysis.

[Misery]

Because lowering the skill floor without really affecting the skill ceiling is clearly "dumbing down". I'm not really sure the DOTA community understands how much bloody busywork and unnecessary obtuseness there is in DOTA compared to other games in the same genre, and it IS absolutely hurting the game.

Yeah, pretty much.   Sadly, LOTS of gamers see their "hardcore" games in this very light:  Lower the skill floor and it's suddenly for "casuals".  This is idiotic.  Which is something I repeat FREQUENTLY but outside of this forum, nobody bloody listens.

Hell, that obtuseness and busywork is exactly WHY I stopped playing Dota.  It really, really is just full of it.  The last-hit thing is the worst of it for me, but.... it really was all sorts of elements.   Which is really too bad, as all of the OTHER stuff is so interesting.  If I wasn't so easily irritated I might have stuck with it.   Even despite the poisonous community.   But those elements sucked a lot of the fun out of it.  At some point I'd like to dive back in, but it hasn't happened yet, though I still have something of an interest.

I can think of fighting games and such that did this too... much as I love Guilty Gear, X2 pulled this crap with it's cancel system.  Two types:  Normal cancels, which eat half of your meter, and nonsensically-named "false" cancels, which only take 25%.  The normal ones made sense.... during any move, at any point after contact had been made, you could hit the button to cancel out of the animation.  It made a lot of special combos possible, and is still used in Arc's fighting games today.   The false cancels, however, were all sorts of stupid.  Only very specific moves could do them.  And you had to time it at EXACT points during the move.  These were like, a couple of frames long... that's the window in which you had to do them.  And then, you were expected not only to do this during heated combat, but ALSO to do them as part of long, complicated combos.  They were so stupidly difficult that even most high-level players could not do any.  I learned to do them, but it took ages and honestly, never felt like it added a damn thing to the game.  It was this bizarre, frustrating element that seemed shoehorned in just so that the developers could say their game had super advanced features (and this series is already EXTREMELY hard to learn to start with, probably moreso than any other fighting game).   And developers of hardcore games just tend to do this sort of thing.  They put something like that in because it carries the "advanced" or "hardcore" label, NOT because it's a genuinely good or deep addition to the game.    And plenty of singleplayer games pull this crap as well.  I could rattle off pages of examples of the roguelike genre doing this.

Honestly, the reactions that people have to this sort of crap always baffles me.  It's moreso just a bizarre form of blind loyalty than anything else.... except it seems more a loyalty to their own stupid pride than to the game or it's developers.  Like the players themselves wont be seen as amazingly skilled/hardcore if ANYTHING in their game is dumbed down.   Despite that, as Vampire puts it, something like this talent system is likely to only add MORE depth to DOTA.  It's a GOOD idea.  More specifically, it's the right kind of depth, instead of the totally pointless type that creates what could be called fake depth.


And all of this in a multiplayer game, where the majority of the challenge comes from the opposing players, not the game mechanics.  Even MUCH more casual titles can be equally difficult, when you're going up against players of real skill.  They don't NEED all of that obtuse stuff to do that.

A lot of interesting psychology as well as game design aspects/concepts at work here, really.

[Mánagarmr]

I could rattle off pages of examples of the roguelike genre doing this.

What? What do you mean? Isn't it fun to have a "red potion" that, in one game heals you, and in another it's a lethal poison? Or why not a "weapon" and you can't even tell if it's a mace or a sword. But let's use it! Oh no, apparently it's shitty, lowers all your stats AND is cursed so you can't remove it. Enjoy your ruined run because of stupid mechanics.

Yeah...

[Misery]

I could rattle off pages of examples of the roguelike genre doing this.

What? What do you mean? Isn't it fun to have a "red potion" that, in one game heals you, and in another it's a lethal poison? Or why not a "weapon" and you can't even tell if it's a mace or a sword. But let's use it! Oh no, apparently it's shitty, lowers all your stats AND is cursed so you can't remove it. Enjoy your ruined run because of stupid mechanics.

Yeah...

I could rant on and on and on and on about just that ONE mechanic.  The whole "unidentified everything" bit.  Just.... so.... freaking.... stupid....

Granted, I HAVE seen the occaisional game that can manage to do it in a good way... I'm playing Unexplored recently (fantastic game, that) and the way it's designed and balanced, it's not too hard to find a RELIABLE and thought-out method of identifying scrolls and potions (pretty much everything else is identified to start with). So it doesn't feel like a broken mess based purely on RNG.  It actually feels like it ADDS SOMETHING, simply because the devs took the time to think it out.  It does have unidentified enchantments on equipment (but the equipment itself is identified) but actual curses are rare, and by the time you run into any of that, you've probably got the tools to deal with or avoid the bad ones entirely.  This is of course provided that your character doesn't auto-identify the thing, which happens randomly.

But most roguelike developers don't think it out even a bit.  There's no truly reliable strategy that you can come up with in something like Nethack (which I think is a bloody awful game in pretty much every way).  And then people just go on and on about how "Well I guess you just cant handle a REAL hardcore game, that's what it is" and I facepalm/desk/tree.  I just don't get how in the world that sort of thing could ever be considered good game design.  I mean, seriously, how does that add depth or enjoyment?

I just don't get things like that.  In any genre.  I know sometimes super-arbitrary elements of that sort can end up in a game kinda accidentally, but often they're on purpose, and it's like... what were they thinking here?

[Mánagarmr]

I understand the idea behind unidentified items but the problem lies in that it becomes unnecessary busywork. Because all that's going to happen is that you will bring a pile of unidentified crap with you to town, mass identify them for a small amount of currency, and most likely sell the lot because loot-drop games love to shower you in useless crap.

I much prefer something like say Path of Exile, where crap is really plentiful but you can safely leave it on the ground, and magic and rarer items are unidentified in what specific bonuses they give, but the item type is readily visible. And most of the time in PoE you can ignore everything isn't a Rare item type you want, or a Unique. Just leave everything else.

The whole "everything is unidentified" is just busywork and REALLY dumb if there is no town mechanic and the only way to identify is to try it and spend your entire run's luck on RNG. How about NO?

[Misery]

Sadly, most games that go the "unidentified stuff" route do not use a system like that.  No paying in a town or anything in most roguelikes.  It's JUST that mechanic, by itself, no way around it, ever.

So one way or another you MUST use trial and error, usually in ways that absolutely can kill you even if you know what you're doing.  Somehow, this is apparently okay and doesn't diminish the quality of a "masterpiece" like Nethack.

That it's so freakishly common in the genre just makes it that much worse. 

[Wingflier]

For the life of me I can't understand why anybody would be resistant to these changes. It's what DotA has needed for an inordinate amount of time, and it's a been a long time coming.

Can you link some of the toxic forum posts Vampire100? I'm interested in reading the objections to these wonderful changes.

[TheVampire100]

Link to posts? All I have to do is show you the Dota 2 forum at this moment: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/
The whole page is full of these threads.
There is currently a trend of two types of threads. One are those that say that this changes are cancerous and will ruin Dota because elements of an "inferioir" Moba are used in Dota.

The other site tries to defend the changes and calls out the complainers and tell them to stop.

This was probably the worst one until it got closed: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/0/1843493219425725603/

[TheVampire100]

The patch is now live, I'm currently downloading it. I'm a little excited about it. If anyone ever wants to play with me, just send me a message either here or on Steam.
Would be interesting if we could form an Arcen forum team.

[Mánagarmr]

Link to posts? All I have to do is show you the Dota 2 forum at this moment: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/
The whole page is full of these threads.
There is currently a trend of two types of threads. One are those that say that this changes are cancerous and will ruin Dota because elements of an "inferioir" Moba are used in Dota.

The other site tries to defend the changes and calls out the complainers and tell them to stop.

This was probably the worst one until it got closed: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/0/1843493219425725603/

Too bad he's just a troll. There's no way anyone is that stupid. The absolutely most weird part is that he spent all that time raging over the game, yet when I visited the thread, guess what he was playing?

[Wingflier]

Steam clocks me at having played DotA 2 for over 2,000 hours. However, the amount of time I played DotA 1 in my childhood (started around 16, I'm 29 now) probably puts the total time playing DotA between 15,000-20,000 hours of my life.

Having said that, I hope I've imparted to you the graveness of my honesty when I share that within the past year, I had essentially decided I was never going to play DotA again. Because after nearly 15 years of playing, the game had not changed or improved in any meaningful way, in a market of MOBA games which thrive off of interesting and inspirational improvements on the original formula.

I never expected anything like this to happen. I would sooner have believed a miracle than if someone had told me a few months ago DotA 2 would have changed this radically. I'm amazed that people could be upset about that.