Ahhhhhhh..... *Cracks his knuckles* Alright, where to begin.
As some of you might know, Bal, Rico, Ocksi (Dima), Malvado, Kazz, Doom, probably a few others I'm forgetting and I have been playing DotA while voice chatting over ventrilo for over 3 years or so now (probably more actually). I don't profess to be the best player to take up the game, but I can safely say that I know more about the ins and outs of the game than I know about any other online game I have ever played. DotA for me is pretty much what WoW has become for far too many people. So let me try to explain some of these things for you, Defenstration.
First up, let me be up front. I hate RTS games. I just cannot wrap my mind around them or force myself to have any skill despite time played or training that I might force upon myself. At one point, I knew every possible build pattern I could do as a Terran in SC, reasons for building this first or that first, common ways I'll be attacked, but I'll still have a base in its mere infancy when I begin to be assaulted by endless hordes created by some magic of the other players. And I really really REALLY hate the isometric click click click and click some more control scheme. But that aside...
DotA is not an RTS in any real sense. There is no resource gathering or base building. You control nothing more than your single hero unless you are playing a hero with summons or that can convert enemy units. It controls like an RTS because it is a WC3 custom map, but other than that the gameplay mechanics are completely different.
At first, I thought I might actually like it, since the amount of micro needed is infinitely less than an actual WC3 game, since all you are in control of is a single hero. Yeah, I think to myself, I won't be punished for not looking in a million places at once, since all I have is one unit! As long as I level him and choose smart items, I surely must be able to perform well! I was wrong. As far as I can discern, the outcome of the entire game is determined in the first 10 minutes. The team with the highest level player always wins.
DotA is very much about levels. You need to keep your team's overall experience level close to that of the other team or they will overpower you and kill you. This is a concept that you have to learn quickly. Now, when a player kills an other player, this affects the level balance in two ways, the killer gets a lot of experience for the kill and the killed loses the potential experience they could have gained through killing creeps while they are dead and waiting to spawn. Early in the game this penalty is not severe though as spawn timers for low level heroes are very short.
The main thing to keep in mind is simple, Always try to be gaining experience and don't waste time doing things like shopping and traveling between lanes. You have to do those two things to play the game properly, but you have to do them PROMPTLY and limit the amount of time you are not farming creeps in lanes or ganking enemy heroes(the two ways you can gain experience).
Don't worry too much about deaths to ganks, you
can come back in the end. I have been in DotA games where both my teamates and myself have been getting DESTROYED by ganks to the tune of the game being 25-2 in the other team's favor and still won in the end. Were we in a bad state? Yes, of course we were. But we HELD ON and we defended our base as best we could. We used our towers for cover, we watched our minimap like a hawk for further gank attempts, we stuck together and fought as team when we had to and split up and tried not to drain eachothers experience gaining when it was safe to do so and in the end we beat the bastards back and broke their throne.
It is very possible to gain an advantage in DotA due to items and level advantage, but until they can actually walk in and kill your World Tree or Frozen Throne without you being able to stop them, it isn't over.
And if you are ever ganked by another player, then you might as well resign yourself to losing now since you'll be 3 levels behind the dude in your lane that killed you.
There's no way that this should happen unless you are just getting killed over and over again or the more probable reason, you aren't getting back to your lane fast enough after the death. You have to remember, while you only get gold if you are the one who kills a creep or hero, you always game experience as long as you are nearby when a creep or hero dies. Even if you are having trouble actually getting kills and therefore gold, always try to remain near your frontline creeps so that you are gaining experience otherwise you can get out levelled very quickly, yes.
That is, of course, if you weren't doomed before the game even started. If DotA isn't Rock Paper Scissors balance, I don't know what is, aside from the fact that some heroes are simply worlds better than the others. I have yet to see a game where a team with either Stealth Assassin or Balnazzar lost.
Hahahah.
Stealth Assassin can be a very powerful hero if he is allowed to farm gold early and can get a level advantage on other players. Balanar, the Night Stalker, is a hero who can be very powerful in the late-early game and mid game if he can get the jump on people or if people he is playing against are too inexperienced to know how to handle him or just generally handle any good chaser. Both of these heroes are similar though in the fact that when played well, they can WIPE OUT bad or inexperienced players with a lot of flare and style. Just know that in our hundreds of vent-gang games, we have mercilessly slaughtered countless Balanars and Stealth Assassins. They are not imbalanced in anyway, in fact I used to love playing as the Night Stalker but in the last 2 years or so, don't really enjoy playing as him anymore because he isn't terribly effective against good, careful players and he gets out-scaled pretty quickly towards the end game.
DotA can definitely be a game of rock-paper-scissors. However, the fact that you can see what the other team is choosing as their heros as they choose them and the fact that there are so many heroes really makes it seldom a real problem. The other thing you have to keep in mind is how a hero
scales. There are some heroes like say Faceless Void, who have a lot of abilities that are percentage-based making them very weak early in the game when stats are low but incredibly powerful later on when stats are high. Then there are other heroes like say Zeus who have a lot of fixed damage nukes making them annoyingly brutal early game, but completely helpless without a lot of good items in the late game.
The other force for winning is how well you know the game. I've had many a team yell at me for taking too long shopping simply because it's a giant pain in the ass to find ANYTHING you need to make the next item.
This is really a big barrier to new players but I don't know how you can fix it without greatly reducing the complexity of DotA strategy and there for many people's enjoyment. You have to learn the game before you can hope to play well and beat people, it's just how it is. Experience does matter, a lot. You need to know what items you should be making based on what is happening in the game and you have to know where to go to get them. It's just how it is.
And what exactly is the point of the "secret" shop that's required to make anything more than a lower-mid level item anyway? Put it in the goddamn base with everything else!
They point of the secret shop (which is not secret but is a shop) is to place high value items somewhere that is outside of the safety of your main base. This is intentional as it adds risk of attack to buying the high-level items and their components.
Also, the players themselves are infuriating. While pubbing games to try to get better for the games I play with friends, I've been banned for everything from picking the wrong hero to picking the wrong item to "backdooring" (I'm sorry, I don't give a shit if mobs are in my base. If the rest of my team are handling the mobs, it's the PERFECT time to take out lane towers while the enemy team is pushing ahead.
I don't know why anyone would ban you for picking "the wrong hero" but some people are just jerks I guess. Backdooring is seen across most of the dota community as bad form though. The reason is that the game is not perfect and it is potentially possible for one hero to farm like crazy and then just march through tower after tower by himself and thereby end the game before the other team has a chance to farm up themselves and stage a comeback. Is it ban worthy? It's not technically illegal but a lot of people do see it as "rude" so it's best to avoid it.
And what horrible neckbeard started the trend of banning people for leaving a game early?
Getting a full DotA game together can be tough sometimes and the last thing you want once you have a good one going is for people to leave. Teams only have 5 players and even just one person leaving has a huge impact on the game. If you join a DotA game you are committing to playing it out to its logical conclusion, not playing until you think you've died too many times or your AWESOME PRO STRAT you just read on the DotA forums didn't work out and then leaving like a little bitch and making any good playing other players have done up until that point worthless.
