Veteran MOBA players, what's your opinion of Paragon?

I don't play them, but I'm always fascinated by the game mechanics and I love watching people play them on Twitch.

I am genuinely curious what you guys think of Paragon. Is it doing anything well? How is the third person? Could it be your new favorite?

I just started playing it a few days ago and I'm liking it enough. I like it more than my brief time with Smite, it feels good but it is a slower paced game. I can't tell if the game meant to be as slow as the matches I've played are leading me to believe, because people playing the game could be new to MOBAs and die a lot, teams don't push when they have an advantage, and more than half of the people I play with don't know what a hero is capable of.

I wish everyone moved a little bit faster, because potions don't heal or provide as much mana as I would like and it leads me going back to the fountain more than I'd like (usually from taking a lot of damage from being ganked or trying to help someone that's out of position).

I really don't know if I can recommend the game with so few characters and it lacking good tutorials. I can tell that there are a lot of new people to this style of game playing it, so maybe it isn't the worst way to get introduced to the genre.

It looks like the kind of MOBA I don't like, an old fashioned one which is not Heroes of the Storm. Judging from the Quick Look I saw games take 40 minutes rather than 20 minutes, there's little teamfighting to be found in the first half, the progression system is odd and there's not a fair playing field even if you did understand the mechanics as well as more experienced players.

(Note: I don't know if fans of old fashioned mobas think Heroes players can be veterans, but I've played over 300 hours of Heroes over this last year so I'm pretty sure I qualify.)

It's plenty fine. It's nothing spectacular, but it's enjoyable and far enough removed from the other games of its kind to make it work well. The character designs and skillsets are a bit bland, but it's tough to make anything interesting in the very beginning of your game's life with champions when you have to fill out the most basic of roles first.

The inclusion of the harvesters definitely helps set this game apart, though. It's basically rewarding you for heading over to other lanes and help out, and I like that.

As for the card system... Man, I'm already fucking sick and tired of hearing about "card systems" in games. Halo 5, Garden Warfare 2, Paragon, Paladins...and it's just going to keep happening more and more and more and more. Titanfall really started a good ol' horseshit thing. It's a trend that I'm ready to see fucking die.

For $20, I would recommend buying it.

I don't mind the card system. It's an interesting take on item shopping but is actually very specific with numbers. The set/creative items in mobas add to interesting build choices and creative uses of items. I feel in paragon it's only a matter of time before it becomes a min/max system. The rare cards vs commons seems incredibly stupid and ruins any sort of balance to me since it removes the level playing ground for everyone.

Characters move stupidly slow. There are no escapes, only faux ones that make you think you can get away. In my last game I rage quit out, I was ganked at level 5 under my own tower. Not over extending, not doing any of the rookie mistakes in mobas. Just straight ganked and no possible escape. This is just bad game design to me. There's a reason why over extending and poor game play is punished in mobas. There is a reason why you can strategically with items or tactical awareness get away with risky game play. Paragon doesn't play by any of these rules and has too many bad design flaws to be worth anything right now.

I've dumped a decent amount of time into the game but I will reiterate on my first rant of it: it's hot garbage.

I think it's an interesting game, with a number of problems that are holding it back.

1. The minion spawn times seem way to quick. In league/dota, when you push well, you are able to clear a creep wave in a few seconds, and then cover a good amount of ground before the next creep wave. In this game, when after cleaning up a creep wave in a few seconds, I feel like the next wave comes before my creeps cover any ground.

2. The card system seems incredibly limited right now. I am constantly maxing out my cards around or a little before the 30 minute mark. This leaves me with nothing to do with my remaining card points, and the only progression left to my character is leveling up. In League/DOTA you constantly feel like you are getting stronger, even into the late game. This game makes me feel like I am getting stronger, and then I just max out, long before we are close to the late game. Even Heroes of the Storm has a more solid progression, even though you don't get items, they have the XP system balanced to a point where you usually don't max out until you are in the late game. Heroes of the Storm helps it's sense of progression by also having shorter match times, which brings me to my final point

3. The games currently feel like they take to long. I have no problem with long matches, I play a ton of DOTA and am no stranger to matches going over an hour. This games match length, when it goes long, feels dreadful because of how quickly the progression tops off. I think if they managed to be more like Heroes of the Storm and make longer games fall into the 30/45 min mark, the game would be a lot better.

I still want to play the game some more. The combat is really fun, and they have some interesting heroes, but with these issues I currently have with it, I doubt it will uproot DOTA or Heroes of the Storm as my go-to MOBAs.

@ssully: This may help you with the convoluted card system. You can place passive equipment cards in active slots, meaning you can put armors, weapons, etc. in the d-pad (1-4 keys on PC, I think) spaces. As long as you have the cards in your deck and slots of any kind available, you can keep making your hero stronger. I was frustrated in the same way until I figured this out.

Well that will help. I thought it was pretty dumb how a carry was constantly carrying a health/mana potion, and a ward into the late game. They really need to rename the active/inactive slots, because that's incredibly confusing.

I am going to go try another game and see how it goes with this new information.

Have a strange feeling about it. It's rather good and interesting, can differ from other MOBAs. On the other side - there are a lor of ... undone things: i don't feel the moment of hitting targets, don't feel enemies hitting me, can't understand the use of forest and don't feel the combat enough intense and involving.

I just hope they can fix it in future.

I haven't played nearly enough to form a real opinion on it yet, but the main thing that concerns me right now is the whole card system and how that mechanic alters play. On its face it sounds like a really cool idea to offer more customization between different players but in practice I can't help but feel like removing the symmetry in available items for all heroes creates situations where you end up in a match that your currently available deck loadout is just not equipped to handle.

The concept of countering particular item builds is a pretty important strategic consideration in Dota and (I assume) LoL and so far my feeling is that having this sort of asymmetry takes away this important element of the game flow. One could argue that part of the strategy then is in building a deck that can respond to a wide variety of situations but the fact that you won't (in my experience) be able to have perfect coverage among your available cards is worrying. Even more worrying then is that the available cards are gated by drops so you might not even have the card you might need to finish your deck. I think I read somewhere that this might be addressed in future with crafting but for now this whole card system just seems like a negative when compared to the traditional item format of Dota and LoL.

I'd rather play HotS. Games take 20 minutes and shit is popping off in the first 30 seconds, none of this waiting around bullshit. I like my MOBA's tight with no fluff.

Haven't played it. But it seems awfully clunky on first glance. I am not the biggest fan of making a moba around a shooter, but they tying down the shooter part of it to make it balanced.
Super monday night combat was dragged down by it. The danger is that you end up making a bad shooter, and that might still be trapped in a decent moba, if the base experience is questionable I don't know how far that would take me.

And ultimately, I fear there might be too many decent to great moba's out there already. But I can't know for sure till I played it.

It's been around two years since I've sat down and played a MOBA (was big into DotA, somewhat into Smite) for any meaningful amount of time. I thought I would never get back into the genre.

I am genuinely excited to try Paragon out. Take that for what you will.

@imhungry: That has been my only real complaint with Hots in general. Removing the universal items takes away a huge failsafe for balancing the game. It's suddenly now entirely on Blizzard's or Epic's shoulders to finetunely balance the game in such a way that you won't put yourself in unwinnable situations. Which might as well be impossible.

Dota definitely makes the best use of items for the purpose of countering unforseen situations. League tries to do the same in some capacity but the counter items lack teeth. It more or less still ends up becoming more about either increasing defensive or offensive stats, and deciding on which of those are most key (raw damage, defense penetration, magic vs phys def, hp). Which is still more than you can do in games without universal building blocks.

The example I've used in the past is Valla the Demon Hunter from Hots. That game is riddled with stuns and long range gap closers which just take a click to home in you. But her defensive talents are all about being evasive and/or lifestealing. Both of which are entirely pointless when the Illidans and Zeratuls are on your ass. You are basically screwed at the character drafting stage. But a Drow Ranger could opt out of crit/MoM builds to get manta or BKB to increase her survivability and become useful in those pointlessly unfair fights.

Though I guess that's also just thematically consistent for Diablo Demon Hunting. Jailer, Waller, Frozen Pulse, Vortex RIP

Well, it's not really clunky. And calling a MOBA clunky is kind of hilarious because every MOBA is kind of clunky... also how is "too many decent to great" games a bad thing? What?

That being said, I've played MOBAs in the past, and I've played Paragon. I will continue to play Paragon because it feels good, and getting kills and building your character is satisfying... and doesn't require buying items from a store. That is my least favorite part of DOTA, etc. Also, I think Heroes of the Storm is not a good game. Not because it's a bad MOBA or whatever, I just don't think it's a particularly good game. I also do not like buying heroes or relying on their stupid system of rotating free characters. That's dumb in every game it is featured in, and I am very glad that it is not present in Paragon (yet, anyway, who knows what the future holds.) Just let me buy the fucking game. I'd rather drop 30-60 bucks on a game than be nickle-and-dimed to death on stupid character purchases. Either make me buy the game, or just make me buy cosmetics.

Sorry, micro-rant. Either way, if you like MOBAs, it'll be worth checking out. As it is, it's got some rough edges, but the combat is solid and the characters are super fun and satisfying to play. Once it's out, I imagine it'll be an A-tier MOBA in terms of how fun it is.

300 hours in a moba is surprisingly not much, and with a game like Dota you'd still be considered very very new. HotS is (not sure how to put this without seeming like I'm being a dick) incredibly shallow and also kinda barely a moba, so 300 hours with it is probably plenty.

Uuuh HotS has plenty of depth, calling it shallow is doing it a disservice. However I agree it's not a moba in the traditional sense.

@alexw00d: In fairness it might be a fair bit more than that, that's just what HOTSLogs has on record. For the first few months I played Heroes I stuck to vs AI. Those logs aren't added up by HOTSLogs. Additionally, it's worth noting, where in a old fashioned moba 300 hours would mean 300 games in Heroes it's 900 games. Heroes is a much faster game with less down time. Also I play it nearly every day, if not a veteran persay I can definitely be called a MOBA person.

@tothenines: It's not a traditional moba, but that doesn't mean it's not a moba. MOBAs don't have to be as limited in scope as the original definition of "roguelike" was. Look at other genres. Some RPGs are like Elder Scrolls, others like Pokemon, others like Diablo. They all can be called RPGs despite how far apart they are. Heroes is not as different from DOTA as Diablo is from Pokemon.

Oooooh no. Oh boy. This is bad. Guys...I think I love this game. I think I'm hooked on MOBA...again. Can't say for sure if I'm just still in that honeymoon phase or not, but either way, I still had a ton of fun with the handful of matches I played today.

As much as I enjoyed Smite, one big problem I had with it was the movement and animations in general often felt sorta floaty and janky. Certainly not terrible, but never quite right for me personally. Spells/skills sometimes lacked that "punch" as well. Paragon, in my opinion, fixes all that. Pretty much everything about the way it "feels" is solid. A tad slow in some cases, but solid nonetheless. There is a real nice weight and impact to damn near everything and every single animation feels fluid.

Unless I'm missing something, every character has the same or close to the same walk speed (not sure about run speed). That, I don't like. There seem to be a lot of disables and slows and whatnot which isn't bad in and of itself, but when playing a squishier character, it just feels like once an enemy gets in your face, you're pretty much done. I feel like giving the squishier characters escapes and/or more potent disables earlier would be nice, but honestly I would much rather prefer every character have their own unique move speed.

Card system seems neat, but they don't really start you with enough to get a proper feel for ir.

Think that's all I had to say at the moment. So far, so good. I'm looking forward to playing more.

I'm going to play it when I get the chance, looks more like a casual moba like Heros of the Storm than DOTA or League. Looking forward to playing it but I don't think it will replace League as my go-to

Looks - 9/10

Gameplay - 7/10

UI - 5/10

It is the best looking MOBA, in my opinion. While I am a huge fan of how Dota 2 looks, I think that the Paragon map looks beautiful, and that its character models are fantastic.

Playing it is fun, but in my experience matches tend to be one-sided. I am sure that this will change, though, as they add more heroes and balance the game.

There needs to be better text chat/ map pinging options on PS4. Plus, I think the UI is severely lacking. There should be an indicator that shows you how much mana each ability costs.

I played league for about 5 years, got sick of it eventually and tried soo damn hard to get into something else; dota, hots, smite and a bunch of lesser known ones, non of them got me until paragon came along. I agree with an above comment that it is of the oldschool style, patients pays off, this is not an arcade game or some consolified equivalent of moba, it is moba ass moba.

The worst thing that's happened in the 20+ hours I've played so far is 1 time a pc player was in the game, they had a pc tag next to their name, and yep they were spamming cancer into chat. The lack of talking between console players fixes a lot of problems with the genre, the games built in team notification stuff does an ok job of allowing you to communicate all you need to, although there's definitely room for improvement there, it does feel like it's designed for pc but that's really to be expected in this stage of development and UI fixes are in the updates which have seemed geared towards a controller. It looks promising to me.

All in all I'm hooked and glad to be able to play a decent moba on my console.

Feels like a step backwards compared to Dota2. I just don't think i will put time into it when i can put that same amount of time in dota.