tinyvalor

will never have the shoes

  • she/her

tinyvalor
@tinyvalor

i think i decided on my goal for dota 2. i want to finish the all hero challenge one time. raising mmr is a lame goal and one that just makes you mad at everything. the all hero challenge is an incentive to sincerely try and learn a bit about everything while utilizing your fundamentals in the game. you get assigned heroes in order. when you finish one the game tells you your next one. i'm probably going to write a bit about each one (or most of them) since it'll be a fun way to talk about the game and the heroes. gonna make each post a reply to this one and also tag it with "d2ahc" and "[hero name] (dota)" in case anyone wants to find these later for some reason. technically i started this years ago and forgot about a couple of the early ones...

i'll probably also try and get in some games with my favs from time to time in the middle still. especially bc i've still gotta figure out how you can win with morphling. i think he's the #1 hardest hero in the game to play...

i've always liked playing everything, in fighting games too. being so close to competitive scenes kinda beats that out of you unless you really play only one game and are really smart, which does not describe how i feel about myself in fighting games. but maybe this'll teach me something about that. i'd like if it did. but the first one i got...is "wisp"


tinyvalor
@tinyvalor

storm spirit is the game's iconic midlane hero. he wants to get a huge lead early and becomes untouchable if he gets far enough ahead, just picking off enemy heroes over and over relentlessly with the help of teammates. if you fail at that he usually becomes a garbage bag who gets slam dunked into a dumpster for 30 minutes by the other midlaner. this is one of the heroes to learn for people who want to feel cooler and smarter than everyone else in the game. i played a practice game because i'm pretty sure i've never played this hero before and it was way more interesting than the real one, where an axe player got like 30 kills on the rest of the enemy team. it really does feel sometimes like you lose the game in one play as a mid player, and i actually don't think this hero is the worst for that; he actually farms incredibly fast as soon as you get an item like witch blade or kaya, and is not that easy to kill. but you lose the ability to do what you were supposed to do. you can gain it back, and in the practice game i actually did have a rough mid stretch before finally pulling off the banger fight that people play this hero for.

there are four "spirit" heroes in dota, and they all share various characteristics, with each one representing one of the attack attributes, having a "remnant" skill which puts an inert copy of them down for some kind of followup, and having strong linear mobility skills which deal damage (either along or at the end of their path). storm is the oldest, so it's nice i got him first. he's the intelligence spirit, and his "remnant" puts an electric copy of him on the field that explodes when something is nearby. he also has "electric vortex", which pulls one enemy towards him, and all heroes in an area if you buy scepter. his ultimate, "ball lightning", costs a percentage of his mana to start up, but then travels a variable distance, spending additional mana for the amount traveled. this allows him to enter fights from far away (dealing high damage at the endpoint) and even leads to some people not buying boots on him at all (which usually pretty much anyone builds to move faster)...finally, he has a passive called "overload" which gives him an extra powered attack every time he casts a spell. much like death prophet, the actual limitation on what you can do in a fight is not cooldowns but only how long you can keep spending mana before you run out. ball lightning's starting cost is based on your total mana pool, so you actually can't stack pure mana increases to spam it...he really needs a lot of regen. he's also a popular choice for carrying the "aegis" item dropped by roshan and used to allow a hero to instantly return to a fight.

there's a reason this hero is a hallmark of specialists; he feels really exciting and dynamic when you get going, and you have lots of choices all game every game about how to approach the game and each fight. it really never feels like you're following some rote path. but for this challenge, this makes him really stressful at the same time, and i hate having to feel like a superstar for a whole game...fortunately, i got carried and didn't have to suffer through embarrassing myself too hard a bunch of times. i had an ok game for a while, especially since i picked him early and got counterpicked, but in the end nothing mattered anyway and i bought parasma for the memes instead of something sensible like black king bar.

next up is another hero with "spirit" in its name but who is not a spirit...spirit breaker. this hero has been pretty strong for the past several months but i keep beating him. i think he's still strong but people have gotten used to playing like total idiots. i guess i'll find out.


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in reply to @tinyvalor's post:

there's some meme builds that have arisen in recent years where you make your buddy a neutral enemy during the midgame

I briefly misinterpreted this as transforming your buddy into a creep mob and while I have no idea how that would work I think it’s an awesome concept.

yeah, that should've been phrased the other way around. and i say it's a meme but it got banned for basically an entire international because ana won one game playing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B15PEmjpmeA

this year that happened again with dark willow, whose ult has virtually no item counters (so if your draft can't hit unclickable enemies with stuns or lots of spell damage you eventually can't kill her), though in retrospect she only actually won one game and most of the others she didn't get strong enough or made one mistake and lost. there's a good chunk of supports with disgusting carry potential but they tend to be a lot riskier since they suck at making money unless you're killing people all the time or have your team buying you 40 minutes to use midas and right click creeps

It’s super interesting how games like DOTA build this enormous edifice of interlocking rules and then base their characters around “except not that”. It feels like they inevitably have to build in more and more exceptions, like the “character has 0 stat” ones you were talking about else where in the thread. I think that’s a cool design direction and love hearing about the wild ways they’ve found to break everything.

This actually reminds me that I was thinking about Yuumi in league, who's kind of a similar design, but universally hated because her whole thing is that she attaches to a carry and becomes untargetable/immune to everything. Like...when I played there was no real cooldown on it too, and you could just hop between people on your team pretty freely. and obviously there have been various meme builds/dev unintended things of the kind league devs and players really hate where she just attaches to a tank and blasts out spell damage, through the game's history, but for the most part I just think she's...boring to play. I tried to like playing her because people hate her, but not making a mistake and dying is kind of fundamental to the fun of playing a support and she removes a lot of that risk, even if it's obviously correct to jump off and auto them in a lot of situations.

Wisp is cool though, even though I never really got to play it back when I played dota.

yeah a lot of the fun is definitely the robust nature of support items and stuff in dota. plus relocate, which even though it's scary as hell to press, is a total rush

also the invincibility thing just sounds dumb, i think part of why people do like wisp is because there's fucked up counters like grimstroke, witch doctor, and lich, and the general push/pull of "yeah i'm weak, come and get me." overcoming that kind of shit is awesome