indiefinch

@Zor said:

@IndieFinch: Hey, I am also new to Dota 2, so I was wondering what you meant by "200+ CS"

CS stands for Creep Score. It is another way of saying Last Hitting, in which you get the last hit on a minion to get the gold. In the upper right it will show your score kills / deaths / assists. Then below that, it shows creep score / denies (when you deny your own creeps preventing your enemy gold).

As others have said, youtube.com/purgegamers is a great place to start. He does a tutorial about purchasing starting items and a tutorial on all the items in the game. Plus he does a game with commentary for all the heros...find the heros you like and watch them. He will explain item builds / skill builds / how to play the hero.

Join the Giantbomb channel in game, we generally have a good amount of people idling in there and they probably would be more then willing to teach / play some games with you.

Some basic tips I would give:

Pick "easy" heros at first. These are heros who can be viable the full game without needing you to rely on getting a ton of farm. If you pick someone like Faceless Void and you do not get 200+ CS, you will be useless and lose the game for your team. So stick with guys who make a major difference in fights based on their abilities not items. Some I would recommend: Lich, Lion, Windrunner, Tidehunter, Shadow Shaman, Venomancer, Vengeful Spirit, and Skeleton King. Once you feel comfortable with positioning / last hitting...then start trying some of the soft carries like Drow Ranger, Mirana, Weaver. Then when you feel like "Wow I am really good at last hitting and usually am around 100 at the 20min mark" then pick up Anti-Mage, Broodmother, Faceless Void.

Items: Generally recommended items will work until you figure out what is best. But try to build items that let you support your team. Stuff such as Mekanism, Drums of Endurance, and Pipe of Insight. All of which make your team better in fights rather then them relying on you to get the kills. All of those heros I mentioned except Tidehunter / Skeleton King (generally build them tanky) should pick up a Mekanism ASAP to heal your team. Say you are playing Lich, you don't need to be super gosu and kill everyone. All you need to do is stay towards the back, slow the enemy team with your Q, pop your ultimate right when the team fight starts, then activate your Mekanism as soon as everyone starts taking damage to heal them all. If you do this, you are instantly MVP on your team because you contributed majorly to the fight.

Dont be afraid to ask questions. Sometimes people think if they go "What should I build on Lich this game?" that their team will just go "LOL NOOB!" If they do, then your team deserves to lose. But most of the time people will be pretty cool and say "Well just worry about purchasing obs wards and build a mek when you can." There have been a ton of games where a new player will not know what to do, then will buy the wrong items, then 45 min into the game they get yelled at for being bad and they say "Well I didnt know!" rather then just asking for some advice.

@Minorkos said:

-Get magic wand on every hero. It's the best item in the game. I'm serious.

I would second this. Magic wand is easily one of the best items in the game and should always be purchased. After every teamfight there is at least 7-15 charges on it and will be the difference between you winning and losing. Short on mana and can kill an enemy with 1 more Gush while playing Tidehunter? Pop wand, gush, get a kill. Or running away from a fight but have only 15 health while being chased? Pop the wand, get that extra 100 health and all of a sudden that Gush that would have killed you didnt and you live. Plus it gives you +3 to all stats which is amazing early game.

@spartanlolz92: I would actually say that Dota allows for easier comebacks then LoL. A few things factor in this, 1 is that there is no concede option. So people have the mindset of "Well I am stuck in here...might as well keep playing." There have been a ton of games where people stick around and we slowly claw our way back and start winning fights. Another is how carrys work, sure if you feed their Faceless Void / Spectre...you will lose. But if you have a hard carry on your team, they can farm your jungle / let them take all the incoming CS from the waves...and they can get to a point where they can 1v3 the other team. On top of this, the items are a lot more game changing. If you can survive long enough to get that Broodmother a BKB or get your AM a Manta Style...they make a major difference and are the difference of losing a fight or crushing the enemy team.

In my recent experience with LoL (I still try to go back and play some every now and then) people are really quick to give up. A game I played the other day was like 11 to 5 at the 20 min mark and they surrendered, even though I was playing Caitlyn and had close to 175 CS and the other team was sitting around 50-75 each...I probably could have gotten to a point to carry the team but their answer was "We lost the early game, give up now and we can play another quicker." Also if your team is losing the fights, you can't really have a guy say "Let me farm guys...ill carry you in 20 min from now." Since things scale up slower, you wont be able to fight 1v3 and win...you need your whole team to scale up together.

On paper LoL seems like you would have comebacks way more...but for some reason I feel like I have been apart of way more in dota in the past 3 months then I did in LoL for the past year.

As far as the community, yeah people can get very angry. But just ignore them and try to take constructive feedback. We all suck at the game and can improve, some people just have a false belief that they are better then everyone else. Plus use the report / compliment system...report the jerks and commend the people who give you actually good advice.

Just give me Monster Hunter on my Vita and I will pay whatever you want...

@Zidane_24 said:

I just can't wait for them to release Bane Elemental. He was always my favorite character in WC3 Dota.

Rumor is Bane Elemental is just about finished up, his art / voice stuff is just about complete within the code. The main thing holding him back now is the sleep animations for all the other heroes. So if Valve chooses to launch him without completed sleep animations across the board, he could be here on Thursday. If they decide to wait until the sleep animations are complete, it could be quite a bit longer.

I see a lot of people who posted looking for a key, if you are not signed up through Valve...do it now! I had a friend who didn't sign up until December and he got his key this past weekend. Valve just sent out a wave and seem to be finishing up some major systems this week (big Steam update and full replay overhaul) so I wouldn't be surprised if they keep sending out waves at this point.

I really enjoyed resistance. But it is good for Insomniac to move on. They pretty much did all they could in R3, so might as well try something new.

@CaptainTryHard said:

I'd love to get in on this as well, unfortunately I have no invite. How can I get one?

Make sure you have applied to the beta on dota2.com. You will be asked to take a survey and submit your system specs, then you will be put in the public beta test pool. From there you just hope you are lucky. You can try multiple others ways though. There are daily giveaways on playdota.com (but your account needs to be created before dota 2 came out), contests people hold on Reddit.com/r/dota2 and Reddit.com/r/sharedota. Then if you are extremely impatiant, you can try to purchase a key off someone or trade Steam games for one on Reddit.com/r/gameswap.

Patapon is a great unique game, has bits of RPG elements. You can't go wrong with any of the Final Fantasy games, Crisis Core or remakes. More of the "Strategy RPGs" would be Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, both of which are great. As far as beat'em ups, both God of War games are extremely good. As well as Final Fantasy Dassidia. A game you might actually really enjoy is Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. It is a RPG with hack and slash combat, but the strategy is involved in learning the monsters patterns and attacking correctly. Most people in the west dislike the Monster Hunter games, but it is the main reason I own a PSP and why my PSP got so much play.