The basics of Dota are talked about in my other blog
Personally, I think Dota = 70% strategy game, 20% RPG and 10% deathmatch.
This game is mostly micromanagement, but there’s no frantic mouse clicking like in your typical real time strategy game. The only macro management involved is selecting your items and abilities (via Warcraft 3 hero-esque skill tree); both are sometimes dependent on the enemy heroes you’re facing. Please do yourself a favor and read the strategy guides (note: you have to register for the forum) for the different heroes because they’ll include helpful suggestions for item/skill builds that’ll best augment your hero.
The most important stat is your personal and the team’s kill-death ratio. The team with more kills will win the game the majority of the time. If you’re a support character, a hero who was 0-3 may have helped his team more than if he was 6-0.
There are two types of games: in house and pubs.
Inhouse = games within your clan or versus other clans
Pubs = Public games
In house games are the way to go, except you’ll need to join a clan and get ventrilo and jump thru a bunch of other hoops for the privilege of joining the clan. Ultimately, it’s probably worth the hassle, because pubs are a lot more unpredictable (see problems listed below).
Dota can be a lot of fun playing this game and I highly recommend it to my peers, but beware of the following drawbacks.
- In a close game between 2 teams, a newbie who feeds (aka dying repeatedly thus giving the other team money and experience points) will cost his team the victory. Usually your teammates will really get on your case.
- When you start playing Dota, you will suck. You’re going to die and die repeatedly. Unless you get really lucky, you won’t even get a single kill for your initial batch of games.
Basically you’ll suffer from 2 major problems:
1) no knowledge of your or your opponent’s abilities.
2) zero precognition.
If you read the character guides, it’ll take at least 10-15 hours to kind of get a hang of the game. It’ll take much longer if you don’t read the guides. Precognition is especially important because you want to be aggressive as possible without dying.
- Games tend to be around 1 hour long.
- Leavers (aka a teammate who leaves the game prematurely). Although you gain bonus gold for the duration of the game, you’ll be outnumbered. The longer the game goes, the bigger the disadvantage because the enemy heroes will max out their abilities and stat bonuses. Occasionally, the leaver will cause a mass exodus because everyone will think “what’s the point of sticking around”.
- Usually games are 5 versus 5 and usually someone will lag out of the game. See the above leaver problem.
- Of course with any internet game, especially in pubs, you’ll have to deal with a lot of immature, whiny, xenophobic and homophobic brats. CAPS IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
Fun game though. Enjoy.
