Blog: Noob times with DoTA 2

So I decided it would be in my best interest to play and document my time playing one of, in my opinion, the least noob friendly games of all time, DoTA 2. I have gotten about 70 hours so far clocked according to steam so I thought, now would be as best a time as ever to go over my thoughts and feelings on how the game plays compared to other games I have played, such as League of Legends. Also my knowledge of DoTA is limited, to say the least, so I thought now would be as a good a time as ever to start!

So what is DoTA? Well it is an Action RTS game, much like League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth, and to most, they are the same. However if you have played all or atleast 2 of the 3 of games, you will realise very quickly that DoTA has a lot more things to take into consideration when playing. There are no set heroes for one role, there are certain ones that do a job better, for example, Omniknight is seen as a support hero, but if built correctly, as I have seen Puppey from Na'Vi do, Omniknight can carry.

So where to begin. The first thing I noticed is that that the UI, and I know this is being picky, but it's very cluttered, it just seems to me that when it was designed, it was made just to be there, it wasn't planned to be as out of the way as possible, and as a player who likes a clean UI to maximise the amount of space I can view, this bothered me, a lot. Other than that the game is really nicely designed, the visuals and the gameplay are nice and the character design and lore is also really well played out.

To be honest I like the way the game plays, the only tiny little problem I have is, and this is purely because I could possibly be the wrst player in the world, is the last hitting, how can you make something so simple, so damn hard!? I mean don't get me wrong a challenge is awesome, and hey I could be the worst person ever to be considered as someone with a valid opinion, I'm naturally bad at games. None the less the point is that they have given me the worst time with last hitting creeps, and this makes me sad.

Looking further into the game, there are the items. Now this is where I thought I had a chance, being a MOBA player I generally understand the use and importance of items and how they  affect the flow and the tilt of the game, so naturally I thought that they would be similar to League of Legends, in the sense of buying to snowball the lane or defend against such tacticts. Sadly not to be the case, it appears that DoTA has a astronomical amount of actives, nearly every item within the game does something different when you use it, and this is not an exaggeration, I can honestly say that when I looked through the item list, I almost cried. I can barely remember to buy boots in LoL let alone all these stims and buffs I'm supposed to get!

Overall though I like DoTA, I think it maybe one of those games I don't play unless I'm in the mood to fail and laugh about it, if I'm in need of a game that I can play and not hurt myself by just trying to think, then I will have to stick to League. The game is fun and I do like playing it with friends, but I don't think it is something that I'm destined to put too much time into! What I will say though is that the players that are a high level, and deffinately the pros, I salute you!