If you like DoTA but you're still playing a Warcraft expansion, stop right there, criminal scum.
That's right! The creative minds being the most popular actually pretty clever map in a RTS with a map-maker have formed their own teams to get actual jobs remaking that mod in the modern day!
Heroes of Newerth is the dead serious one and has just finished it's open beta, releasing for a one-time fee of $30. If you liked DoTA and you really liked professional DoTA or PRO DOTE as they might say on the streets, HoN will deliver. It's basically a straight up modern update of DoTA with all the shiny not-10-year-old graphics that entails.
But wait, there's more! They've actually shipped the game with netcode that isn't god-awful and a lobby system that doesn't suck, so if you get disconnected you can reconnect to games! You can more effectively friend people and invite them to your games without archaic games of musical chairs! By God, even those terrible Leavers are automatically tracked and you can apply a filter to any game you make that tells them to STEP OFF! That's right: If you leave over 10% of the games you join, you are branded as a heretic. Good. Great. Fuck off because you went 0 and 3 in 10 minutes and left in a tizzy, faggot.
HoN allows you to play every hero at the start but at a steep price: This is the serious business DoTA update. A meticulous rating program keeps track of how bad you suck and feed and can be used to at a glance tell what a noob you are. You start at 1500 rating and gain/lose 1-30 per win or loss, either descending to noob town(where shameless pros will sneak down to stomp them noobs) or ascending to More Serious Land. As early as 1700 you are going to run into guys who've been playing the Dote for nine years.
Every member of the HoN community has been playing DoTA
perfectly for nearly a decade and will tell you what a dumb faggot you are for even the slightest misstep off a pre-determined perfect path of twinking.
But it's still an incredible system, graphics and accessibility update to DoTA and worth the price.
League of Legends is the fun one. The one for "casuals." Not that I know, care or believe in the use of that word. But basically, it did everything I told you about HoN in general with a few key changes:
It's free, hell yeah!
But you start with no heroes. What? Every week a new set of 10 is made freely available to be tried, and every game you lose/win earns you IP. There's about 8 heroes that are 430 IP, so you can start buying and trying a few within 1-4 games, win or lose. Sadly, the pricing system varies wildly and tops off at 6300 per hero. Ouch!
[spoiler]If you download LoL today and follow the Riot Girl Tristana facebook ad and the Nightmare Cho'goth Alienware ad, you can get those heroes and their skins for free. Apparently getting the promo skin gets you the hero for free! If you are reading this spoiler too long after my posting this thread, tooooo baaaaaaad.[/spoiler]
You can also convert your real dollars into Riot Land Fun Bux and just buy everything as you please. This seems to be a point of contention among many... myself? I'm just going to "grind" the IP. But there's no grinding in DoTA and DoTA-likes. It's called playing the game.
LoL has significant customization. You can purchase Runes and fill a spell-book page that gives you huge advantages: passive dodge/crit, defenses/attacks, etc. You also get 2 free summoner spells on significant cooldowns from a pool of 10+ that can do awesome things like AoE heal, debuff and DoT a guy, or help you farm cash.
LoL has some significant "dumbing down" changes as well. There is
NO Denying, or killing your own units when they're near death to deprive your foes of the maximum possible money and XP. Personally, I consider this a blessing. I know that Denying is a big skill thing. I know it has an impact. But it still bores me to tears.
To counter this, every map has bushes spread around it that let you stealth and hide. They're fun and a nice mix-up to jungling and ganking.
The level cap is 18 and games tend to be significantly shorter than HoN/DoTA. 30-40 minutes compared to the easily possible 60-120. You can surrender(or try to vote to) without penalty(beyond a loss) after 25 minutes. Your Super Creep buildings respawn after several minutes, making it feasible to recover from a base breach.
And finally, where-as HoN basically gave DoTA a soak in the next gen vat, I find that LoL actually employed some elements of pleasing aesthetics and design, like a color palette and some humor. The world of LoL appears to have
several taru-taru heroes.
I feel obligated to point out that even though HoN definitely wears it's PRO DOTE cred on it's sleeve, LoL's player base is also full of insufferable shit-heads who will scream at you for not joining in on their suicide runs. LoL is however much more friendlier to you just wanting to hop on by yourself and knock out some games with luck of the draw(all of LoL's ratings/match-making are behind the scenes) rather than convince four of your friends to be terrible with you.
It's free so it's worth checking out, especially if you are curious about this DoTA thing.
