KuroKy: "Strategische Teil von DotA so gut wie tot"

This mostly misses the point.

You can argue semantics about bottles, but to be frank the bottle becomes core on nearly everyone if you buff it. The bottle works better when slightly weak than when slightly strong (a rule that probably fits nearly every hero and item in dota). Slightly underpowered items don't consistantly cause frustrating bullshit and boring lineups the way slightly overpowered things do.

Dagger in .48b was too strong because it was too general an item - it had to be core on every single hero in every single game without alternatives because it functioned as the games most powerful offensive and defensive item. By forcing it into a niche with counters and strengths, Ice brought it into line with all of the game's other items. The numbers weren't right at first, but they worked out.

Creep/Hero gold is a little bit of a meh issue so long as the game forces farming to carry a risk. I have always felt that the ward changes were double edged in this respect - while they made it harder to defensively ward, they made the jungle too easy to farm throughout the mid-game which fagged up interaction and contributed to the turtlefest that kicked around for a while. The problem to my mind isn't that farming yields too much gold leading to overpowered items, it's that there are overpowered heroes who find it too easy to exploit these items caused by the creeping power increase and a few slightly imbalanced concepts lurking around.

Hood - meh issue. Hood didn't dominate the metagame until tanking did too. The assertion that the hood has always been imbalanced is mostly bullshit - it's the complementary items that go with hood as well as the build into Pipe that have opened it up as such a strong choice by means of scaling it into lategame. The problem with arguing that cheaper hood is the problem is that it ignores the underlying problem which is that heroes are far too potent at the moment without damage items due to overpowered spells, stats and abilities that were introduced in remakes and the fourth taverns. It seems counterintuitive, but tanking is viable because heroes generally do too much damage without items in the mid and lategame. On this, pipe needs tweaks, not removal, the game did need some kind of a counter to AOE shitstorms because there just weren't any kicking around before like they should have been.

On HoT: The goal apparently wasn't so much to make it stronger as it was to make it situationally stronger. The problem was that the numbers were wrong. The idea from the start was to make HoT a "first choice" item for heroes who are meant to tank, without making it a first choice item for heroes who are meant to DPS. The problem is that the crossover point before it became a buff for all the heroes who didn't need or deserve the buff to regen was far too low - 1100 hp (roughly what you get from Heart itself) means that it ended up a buff to nearly everyone instead of just the pureform tanks who needed it so badly like Cent, and instead it just boosted heroes who had little to no innate tanking ability but had abilities that happened to get a lot out of being tanky, like Necro and DP to the point of being OP (BloodStone helped these two a lot as well). Basically some heroes should have had heart nerfed as an item choice to make it a specific item, but it just got stronger on everyone making it a game dominating item.

Rune visibility? Another moot point. Artificial mechanisms to force interaction are little better than Arena events in old (and not very deep) hero maps. DotA has always been a superior game because it didn't take easy short cuts like this, it used more subtle factors to influence teams into particular patterns of interaction. Something like this would just be lame.

Manta costing is also a pretty petty issue in the face of everything else that contributes to imbalance in DotA. I'm not saying Manta isn't underpriced, or that it is, just that a cheaper manta is hardly a big contributing factor to the state of the metagame.


If HoT goes back to 11hp/s then it simply means no one will buy it anymore, which is fine for some people because they have a narrow view of how DotA should be played - hard ganks and old style pushing only with no real room for high tier items. This is a bad thing because it hasn't really fixed the metagame, it's just made a new line of strategies overpowered. DotA is fundamentally a richer game than it was six months ago, a year ago, two years ago and so on because more strategies have been made viable, expanding the metagame. Some strategies (particularly non-interactive ones that place emphasis, or rely on the jungle can be confidently classed as "bad" because they detract from the core of what makes a game good - the creative and skill based interplay of the actors - have been too strong, and the most recent of these is the predominance of tanking. On the whole the metagame has grown richer and more complex at the expense of balance - in order to make alternative strats more viable, Icefrog has buffed much, much, much more than he's nerfed. This has worked, but has also created a lot of underlying problems within the game which become unbearable when exacerbated by other gameplay changes - in this case heroes being too potent without damage items combined with buffs to tanking items has led to a metagame too dominated by tank-carries. The old addage that a tank was useless because you couldn't make the enemy hit you was right - teams now win by doing great damage even with pure tanking items, not simply by wearing damage.