I gave it a try. People were going on all (online) around me about the Internationals, which by the looks of it is the Dota equivalent of LCS,  and I decided I’d see for myself what’s going on – I could hardly tell what was going on at all from replays after all.

That didn’t change much after trying it out for myself though. The attack ranges are huge compared to how much of the map can be on screen at once, and there are often no clear indicators as for what or where from is hitting me. I still don’t know how I died a few times in-game, because there was no one attacking me as far as I could see, nor were there any indicators that I were under attack.

The gameplay itself feels like playing LoL with all assassins. Everything seems to be extremely powerful, and more often than not I don’t even know what’s going on, I’m just spamming all my spells at the enemy, hoping it’s gonna work. The lack of serious cooldowns makes things really extreme very quick. The role of terrain levels is interesting too.

Also, learning the items is a huge drag. As far as I can see, they are not categorized by anything, and most of them have such multi-layered effects that I have no idea how they’d work out on the battlefield. There aren’t any indicators for what (if at all) makes spells stronger, so picking what to build at first was pure guesswork.

On the positive side, it runs on linux, so I don’t have to reboot just to play as I’d have to with LoL. Gonna see if I can get used to it (Dota, not not having to reboot) in the long term.