DotA 2 has officially added smartcasting, for those who couldn't live without it.
Oh hey, welcome to 2009.
Well, Riot can welcome to 2013 when they add the ability to resell items for full price that you buy accidentally, or when they add different announcers to the game, or when they add custom HUD skins that you can share with anyone on your team, or when they add the ability to draw on the minimap to give your team specific travel routes, or the ability to pause the game when somebody inevitably disconnects or a personal emergency arises among 10 people in an often hour+ game. Or when they make a model which allows full access to the entire hero pool so that people with more money or FotM champions don't have a huge advantage. Heck, they can welcome to 2006 when they add VOIP to their game ;p
Sure, LoL has new maps and modes (well technically DotA has many modes: AR, AP, RD, CM, SD, LH, LP). However, DotA 2 adds new maps for big holiday events, like
Diretide or
Greevling. You've got to realize that DotA was in originally in development on the WC3 Engine, in which it wasn't possible to do things like add new maps to the existing one, without making an entirely new map with the map editor, along with all the same information used in the old one (perfected over about 10 years of work). Not to mention something like that would have probably split the community, which isn't something you want when your all-to-quaint platform was the unreliable WC3 custom games system. I'm sure DotA will have a permanent “new map” within a year or so, though it will probably just be for fun, and not generally taken seriously competitively the same as with the other LoL maps.
In terms of change-phobia, I think the DotA community is a lot better than LoL's tbh. Sure, they'll add new maps and such, but that doesn't really impact the core gameplay of the main map whatsoever. Adding new maps/modes to the game actually isn't necessarily a product of change at all, because using them is completely optional, it doesn't negatively affects the maps and modes already there. A significant change is, for example, altering some core aspect of the gameplay that has far-reaching implications on the way the game must be played. To my knowledge, LoL has been out for 3 years, and this has never happened; not like it has in DotA.
I'll give you a shining example: Flash. Everybody knows there is a problem with Flash. There has been a problem with Flash since basically day one. It's the most taken Summoner Spell by far. Every game, 90% or more players take it, and it would be silly not to. Even after countless nerfs, it is still in the game, and still the best Summoner Spell hands down. In DotA, there was a very similar crisis with an item called “Blink Dagger”. It basically gave the same ability as Flash, albeit it costed money, took up an inventory slot, and was on a lower cooldown. Over time, it became the most overpowered item in the game. It was basically bought on every single hero in competitive play, every single game (sound familiar?). It was the only truly uncounterable item that existed in the game. Ohhh suree, you had the same arguments you do now: “If Blink Dagger is overpowered, why not just buy your own Blink Dagger?” But pointing out the logical flaws in this line of thinking were quite easy. Even the pro players were complaining to IceFrog about how overpowered the item was, and eventually he changed the item completely. It had a new effect: If the hero takes damage, BD becomes unusable for 3 seconds. This immediately made it counterable. It was now much harder to use to escape, though it still kept most of its value as an initiation tool. There were some items in the game, such as Radiance, a huge, passive, aoe burning effect, which were great against it because any hero who owned a Radiance could disable enemy blinks in a large range. Some heroes like Zeus or Spectre could cancel initiations with their ability to damage an enemy mapwide, thus disabling Blink.
This suggestion has been brought up to the Riot team MANY times. Their excuse? “It's too COMPLICATED!” Yes, it is much too complicated to understand that when you take damage, a summoner spell because inactive for a few seconds. Man, they must really have a low opinion of their playerbase's intelligence.
So here's another good example: Turtling became too good in DotA, and the games just became boring farmfests because wards were so cheap and infinite, and the two teams could just put them everywhere and having huge advanced warning of incoming gank attempts. So what did IceFrog do? He took away vision of the blue (vision wards). He made it so that they were only used to counter invis, not give vision themselves. Still, it did not prevent the game from being a farm/turtle fest.
So then what did he do? He limited the observer wards (sight wards) to 4, with a 6 minute cooldown on each purchase. This made it so that map vision became much more limited, and the player/team had to be much more careful about when and where he placed his wards. This also meant counter-warding became even more practical than before.
But that didn't work either, the game was STILL too much of a farm-fest. So what did he do? He added an item called “Smoke”, which basically makes an entire team invisible for 60 seconds, and move 15% faster, until they come within a certain range of an enemy hero or tower. This bypasses regular ward vision completely and allows gank opportunities that simply weren't possible before. Can you imagine if an item like this were added to LoL? How drastically would it change the game?
There are countless examples of huge changes like this to the core DotA gameplay. Even certain heroes like Wisp who can teleport with an allied champion anywhere on the map (So the old TF ult, but better), Slark, who can continue to attack whole remaining invisible, or Omniknight, who makes an entire team invulnerable to physical damage for 7 seconds etc. are much more game-changing, in themselves, than any champion LoL has ever added, which typically just use recycled skillsets in different ways because they've run out of things to do, and are unwilling to try anything new.
Sure, LoL has had some (much-needed) item reworks, and a few new Summoner Spells here and there, but none of it has been anywhere closed to as game-changing as the DotA alterations. To my knowledge, no change Riot has implemented into the game has, for example, changed the most popular lane setup for the past 2 years, while in DotA, the lane metagame is much more diverse, and constantly changing.
So it's kind of ironic when I hear a LoL player calling DotA players “change-phobic”, when I would say, if anything, the opposite is true.