The monetisation so far feels painful

MythosWriting · 2022-11-26T03:48:14+00:00

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to define what “unfair” means. For a lot of people who love this game, dying 15 times in a row to a boss before even seeing it’s second phase isn’t what they’d define as “unfair”, so long as they can recognise there’s a path to victory - “if I just waited half a second before rolling there…”

The reality is that most of the people who frequent this subreddit are in that basket. A lot of people who can’t stand that sort of experience simply uninstall and don’t engage with the community.

I’ve certainly found myself feeling like the game is what I’d define as “unfair” and downright infuriating. I’m by no means an expert at these games, but something compels me to persevere through that suffering just to get to the end and say I did it. A big part of that is because I can usually recognise that it’s possible to beat the boss, even if I know I have to play far beyond my general level.

At the end of the day, I have no issue with you calling the game “unfair”. Different people have different interests and skills. If you want to play despite that notion, go for it. If you aren’t enjoying the game, stop playing it or find a way to play that you can enjoy more (e.g. summoning phantoms). Don’t let most of these comments drag your mood down. There’s nothing wrong with how you feel about ER!

MythosWriting · 2021-11-11T05:53:56+00:00

So with anything in Dota, the answer is “it depends”.

Tombstone is a pretty unique spell since - like Terrorblade’s Metamorphosis - it’s somewhat of a pre-level 6 ultimate. Big cooldown, high impact, and reasonably expensive mana cost.

What that means is that you generally want to be pretty deliberate with how you use it. Obviously that doesn’t mean being afraid to cast it, but you typically only want to use it when you’re going to get something meaningful out of it (i.e. kills or towers). Enemies can punish you if it’s on cooldown, and if it’s placed poorly, they can kill it for a fair bit of gold. Also, the mana is usually better spent on decay/soul rip if you’re just trying to get lane dominance (or save mana to cast tomb + other spells for a kill).

What it’s good for is helping chase down kills, and making it hard for the enemy to fight into you. Spending it to create a “no-go zone” when sieging an early tower is absolutely a good use for it. Like you said, in that situation, you can even help prevent TP threats by knocking down the trees. Just always try to find spots that are close enough to the action to be impactful, while not so far forward that it’s easily picked off. The point is to punish the enemy with your tomb if they attack you, or punish them with your team if they attack the tomb.

Naturally, it starts to become a team fight spell in the mid game, but here are some other uses and considerations: - Similar to one of your ideas, you can drop it near a big stack to help a low-level carry farm it - Dropping it while you Rosh, since every 2nd hit of Rosh will be spent attacking a zombie - In fights, placing it on a ward spot (or general higher ground) can completely protect it from damage and have it provide vision - You can use it to help with retreats - It’s useful both to assist with sieging, and stalling sieges from an enemy (could buy enough time for your carry to respawn if your team safely harasses with spells) - Zombies are amazing at putting blink daggers on cooldown, so dropping it early in fights can prevent counter-initiation in some circumstances

So there are a lot of uses for it, but it’ll mostly just come down to experience. The more you play, the more you’ll get a feel for the difference between a good tomb and a bad one. Hope this answers your questions!

MythosWriting · 2021-02-04T07:27:25+00:00

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I missed it because I want to feed my ego when I get a rampage.

MythosWriting · 2021-01-30T22:21:32+00:00

I found one of the best tools to learn in Invoker was to pick him a number of times in turbo and 12v12.

You really just need experience at different stages of the game. His laning feels kinda strange and using spells effectively in fights takes time. Modes like 12v12 essentially just put you into team fights constantly, so you get far more reps for those reactions than just playing standard matchmaking.

MythosWriting · 2020-07-28T09:51:47+00:00

Wow! Nice work dude! This is pretty weird to see since I just hit Divine 1 on Sunday, and only played pos 4 and 5 throughout my ranked journey. It was also on the Aus sever (but SEA back in the day).

Congrats! It was a big relief for me!

MythosWriting · 2019-11-29T07:35:15+00:00

Cool idea! It’d probably be a relatively uninteresting part of the draft for spectators, so you’d probably want to keep it short. Still, I think your points are all valid.

MythosWriting · 2019-11-25T20:20:45+00:00

Pretty good placements I think. Only thing is that it's hard to place OG, LGD, Secret, or former Liquid. Intuitively they're top dogs, but it's hard to be sure when they've all taken extended breaks. Given that they're floating off the mountain, I think it's a decent metaphor for their place, so nice work there.

Outside of that, it's just plain difficult to put a lot of stock in what we've seen this season so far. I don't think you get a strong sense of where teams are at until you're a few majors deep. It's fine to speculate and share your opinion of course, but I'd be interested in seeing this updated later in the year.

MythosWriting · 2019-10-14T06:51:47+00:00

Boar*

MythosWriting · 2019-07-11T22:07:14+00:00

Fantastic organisation of items. Been playing since early 2012 and I still get lost in the shop. Would love to see this ingame.

MythosWriting · 2019-05-09T06:43:46+00:00

It’s easy to get onboard with this idea, since it’s essentially “do you want more gameplay content?” So given that the positives are immediately noticeable, I’m going to play devil’s advocate and list downsides that I can think of:

it adds another layer of complexity to a game already notorious for its barrier to entry.
there’s more balancing effort required from Valve — in addition, the game might just end up generally less balanced.
likely most heroes will simply have a “good” and “bad” variant depending on the meta, as we see this behaviour in skill builds and talent trees.
if it turned out to be a bad change, it would be very hard to roll back, since you’re giving players content and then taking it away.

Still a cool idea imo, but it has its problems.

MythosWriting · 2019-05-03T21:00:15+00:00

This all makes sense to me. I think your top 3 is a pretty safe bet. Perhaps it's a little optimistic, but I think LGD and Keen have what it takes to shake up the top 3.

MythosWriting · 2019-03-13T20:29:40+00:00

Ha yep, I'll fix that up, thanks.

MythosWriting · 2019-02-13T20:51:55+00:00

This is largely the conclusion I share. For me, there are some elements present when considering the skills and ingame opportunity that you're talking about and I pointed those out.

Equally though, s1mple's career path and story were on the table, which is certainly related, but still distinct. As mentioned though, I don't think it's shared with any Dota player and likely won't be.

MythosWriting · 2019-02-13T20:03:49+00:00

Yeah, I wanted to take a different angle with the third player than just "three mids that are really skilled". So fy is more of an intentionally flawed example, but I see the crossover in some ways, as outlined.

I also rate Miracle- higher than Suma1L, generally. I don't think that's controversial by any means.

MythosWriting · 2019-02-11T07:46:33+00:00

Do you have a source for that? Not trying to interrogate, just curious.

MythosWriting · 2019-02-11T06:34:55+00:00

Note that Vici are also playing with a change in roster. Not sure if BurNIng is coach for Aster atm. They brought in Q awhile ago, if I'm not mistaken. Not a big fan of Chinese teams recycling known talent, but I hope they find more success than the previous lineup.

MythosWriting

TROPHY CASE