Thank God It's FriDota: The All Hero Challenge 07/21/17

Potentially my favourite new feature.

You could call it the Dota2 BKB (Ben Kibitz Brad :P)!

@dizzyhippos said:

Meanwhile as a dirty League player, I was totally fine with that and mentally noting to do that the next time I try out Dota 2...

As a heavy LoL player (over 4000 games played) who has tried several times over the years to play and understand Dota 2 and just leave scratching my head at all the intricacies that are different, this video was SUPER helpful and might encourage me to try picking it up again. Looking forward to more of this down the road!

@oni: @bladededge: I don't like wrestling, and don't care for Dota either, but I still watch ALL content, because regardless of what's being played, I'm a premium member because of the hilarity that the GBW/GBE entails with all of their content..

but I guess to each their own?

I have zero interest in DotA2, but this video was a good watch. Brad gettin' to concentrate on playing this seemingly impenetrable game while Ben explains the what and why of some of what is going on in the game was an interesting combo. I've never been tempted to play the DotA2, and having watched the video I'm further convinced that this just isn't my sort of game, but when the video ended I found myself wanting more, I wanted Brad to try just one more hero so that Mr.Pack could illuminate a bit more of this dark and seedy part of gaming. Teach us o master!

The friendly team that Brad was on certainly helped to make this a winning video. LoL and DotA2 have a reputation as having extremely hostile players, but with some luck and skill I hope that the vitriol can be kept to a minimum in future videos. That is unless Jeff wanders by to cast aspersions, I can get behind that.

Neat video series, looking forward to more.

They're actually playing in colorblind mode. That's why the health is blue.

Ok so I watched this despite my problems with DOTA (never played 2 only the WC 3 mod) and since I've been playing Heroes of the Storm off and on for a few months this almost looks like it would be fun. But on a really casual level.

I don't have access to all the chars in games like HOTS so I just play whatever free ones are available and I basically try all of them so hearing Brad completely confused on not just one character but an ENTIRE classification of characters (support) was boggling. I understood how to play this char as soon as Ben explained it and watching them play I was like well maybe I can do this?

The thing is I don't wanna play online. Is the AI worth playing here at all? In HOTS you can play vs AI and it is almost the same as playing real players just get less exp. I would be interested in playing this as long as I can never step into a multiplayer match. Is this an option? It looks kinda fun, minus the people of course.

@steveurkel: The AI can be fun to mess around with a character but I remember last I played, it was very buggy. Some bots would just stand in one location for the rest of the game, some dive past towers alone for NO reason, etc. Not sure what the state of that is, now. There were suppose to be community scripted AI but none were around when I last played. When the AI works right, it can be an alright experience.

Instead, just hop online, mute enemy players, and instantly mute players on your team the second they are negative to you. It's like a bot experience but with better rationale on the team. Yes, this is unfair for most of your team a lot of the time, but hey, everyone plays for a different reason and they should have been supportive.

The old DOTA2 player in me would have hated that kind of player, but now that I'm removed from it and not a try-hard, I see the value in just jumping in and have a fun match for yourself. You really should get to experience it the way you want.

I don't play Dota, but this was a fun video. Definitely looking forward to more!

I just enjoyed Dota content for the first time.

Brad's original DOTA videos are what got me into the game I still either watch or play daily. Glad to see more of it on the site.

That was really cool, thanks Ben and Brad :) Looking forward to next episode!!

RHS map + LHS Shop = Triggered! nah i joke, i just keep looking at the wrong thing out of habit. I bet Ben used to play LOL, i think that is LOLs set up?

If you listen he realizes he misspoke, he's at 14k not 1400

I just wanted to chime in and say I like DOTA content, especially as we're getting close to TI and I need to brush up a bit.

@steveurkel: I play bots often when i'm listening to a podcast and it's generally pretty good as long as you don't actively try to disrupt their logic. Over time, you will notice some very exploitable flaws but in general it's pretty good (at least on the highest difficulty, haven't played below that in years so i don't know the state of the bots there). The laningstage feels very similar to real humans and they generally buy items that make sense and use their spells properly. After the laningstage, they team up to push your towers unless they have to defend their own tower or see enemies that are easy to pick off.

in 1v1 fights early on they get flustered sometimes and try to run away , come back to fight you and then run away again. Using heroes that rely on reactionspeed or the surprise them from invisibility are often not the best against them though, since bots immediately react to you unlike humans. For instance, if you use Pudge to hook guys from far away, bots will almost always be able to dodge it, unless you manage to throw it so perfectly that it makes it impossible for them to dodge it with their movespeed. Humans are generally easier to hook. A hero like bounty hunter likes to be invisible, hit someone, and go invisible again. Humans won't react in time to punish you for this, but bots will immediatly will use their spells as you hit them since they have no reaction time.

The client now also lets you download bot scripts from the workshop to play around with different AI. I downloaded the highest rated one ( Ranked matchmaking AI ) and that one is pretty agressive early on, but pretty good none the less. Teammates give you regen items when you have none, they use their healing spells on you when you're low. That kind of stuff.

You can also play 5 humans vs AI , but i'm not sure how populated that mode is.

@phancypants

Magic stick is a pretty cheap item (200 gold) that gathers charges whenever a spell is casted nearby. Each charge gives you +15 health, +15 mana and you can hold 10 charges. This means that during a big teamfight, you suddenly might have an extra 150 hp and a 150 mana to play around with, which can be the difference between a lost fight and a won fight. Once the charges are used, you start at 0 again and it will refill as spells are used near you. For reference, most heroes early on attack with ~55-70 damage per hit.

Disruptor is also a support hero that doesn't offer much besides his spells and is generally easy to kill. So being able to stay longer in lane because your health / mana can be regenerated with a stick is very valuable. It's also cheap to upgrade to a magic wand, which gives you 17 charges and some strength, agility and intelligence (basically, stuff that makes your hero inherently stronger). This means that you suddenly can have +255 health and +255 mana in a fight, which is enough to let you cast 2 more spells on a hero like Disruptor or get away from enemies with a smidge of health left. Super valuable! For instance, if a hero runs away from the fight, Brad could have glimpsed the enemy back to the fight and use the kinetic field to trap him while his teammates finish the job. I think 50-70% of the heroes generally buy one early on. Support heroes especially.

Last reason for buying it: Dota has multiple shops, in the lane where Brad started, there's a shop to the side that sells you a few items, including magic stick. Your team has only one courier. Whenever you use it to get your items, the rest of the team has to wait. The mid hero generally needs the courier the most, since he is in a 1v1 situation and him getting a good start is often the first step to victory. Having a support use the courier early on is best prevented, so being able to buy items without having to go back to base / use the courier is welcome.

@westernwizard:

14k was the joke, people like Miracle and Paparazzi are in the 9-10k range. I think someone in the comments said he was 2.9k which would make sense based on how he was talking. 1400 is pretty low.

I highly recommend this guys guides on DOTA characters. He actually explains a methodology behind choosing items and picking abilities, and as a result he comes to very different conclusions about how to build some characters. I recommend it as a way to build that "muscle" for switching up your items mid-game. He also typically goes into the more technical or hidden properties of characters that you wouldn't really think about.

I enjoyed this video a lot, Ben and Brad. I have zero interest in playing Dota, but I enjoy watching y'all play.

Agree on both counts. I would totally watch @brad play more Dota. I appreciated Bens occasional input but his inability to focus on what was going on and stay with Brad was FRUSTRATING!. Also his non-sequiturs, a-la Rychert are also frustrating.

Good stuff! I think the coaching aspect makes this more interesting than just a feature where someone plays with random players.

Man, I find Dota 2 to be... so...

I want to understand it, but every time I see it or hear about it, it just seems so damn dense. I have no idea what's going on.

I also really, really think I shouldn't try it. In many games with classes/characters/whatever (TF2, Overwatch, Monster Hunter, etc.), I am compulsed to play everyone. I abhor the idea of "maining" characters. And with a roster this long... I don't know if I'd ever make it back out of this one.

All said, I will be keeping an eye on this feature, I think. My only suggestion would be a little more education for the uninitiated. You guys use a lot of terms that mean nothing to me, and don't explain what they are. (And I know Dota has a lot of those.) And a little elaboration on who has what skills and how they work wouldn't go astray.

This was an absolutely fantastic feature, providing a wonderful mix of learning, personality, and intensely silly shit. I've never been one for MOBA's, having briefly tried League of Legends with friends who are deep into it and a Little who plays often (a high school aged Little whose self described antics are part of why I can't get into the community), but Heroes of the Storm got me intrigued as a casual player by a huge roster of characters I'm familiar with from other games. I don't play often, or competitively really (I have fun enough trying various heroes against bot teams) and this feature is entertaining for that reason of watching someone else experience something similar outside of their comfort zone, while learning about new lore and goofy characters from a couple guys who genuinely love the game have fun showing it off with this casual friendly dynamic.

+1 for people who don't particularly enjoy dota but really enjoyed watching this video. Keep up the good work.

Minimap on the right side... nasty.

Yay! I had been hoping we'd see another one of these. I've dipped my toes into mobas recently, so this is pretty fun to watch. Don't think I'll ever get up to Brad or Ben's tier though.

This is awesome! It took me 2-3 months to finish the all hero challenge normally so we're in for a long haul if it's one video every friday, lol. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this series. Keep it up!

0 interest in the game. Muchos interest in the series, real fun time y'all.

There's a Giant Bomb chat channel in-game, you could try joining that and let people in there know you're new. I'm sure there will be people willing to guide you through the early stages! The game has a (fairly basic) tutorial now, too, and you can play against AI until you feel comfortable. The Purge videos Brad and Ben recommended are well worth checking out, as is his "You Suck" guide for new players (which he has actually updated relatively recently).

The AI is pretty good going - much like in HotS, you can join a "Players vs. AI" match or you can create a private match and fill it entirely with bots on both sides (at whatever difficulty level suits you). From what you've talked about, I think you'll be fine picking up the basics - Dota 2 puts a much higher strain on your precision than HotS does (because of more finicky mechanics like last-hitting and denying, and lane composition mattering a little more), but you'll get there.

If you'd like some reassurance, I totally did the thing you're asking about. I basically did the same challenge as Brad is attempting, because I wanted to have a basic understanding of every hero, but I did it all in AI matches (with AI teammates). In fact the idea of playing online without having done that was borderline unfathomable to me. I actually almost never play online matches, I mostly play vs. AI when I do play (although I watch more Dota 2 than I play these days, for time constraint reasons).

I don't care about Dota at all, but this was fun =)

I've never watched or played DOTA, still really enjoyed this video. Eager to see more of these. Thanks!

fwiw, so much of Dota's obtuse systems can be attributed to how Dota 1 is a Warcraft 3 custom map that really pushes the edges of that custom map creation tool to add a bunch of weird stuff to what is supposed to be an RTS game. I think Brad Muir talked to Brad Shoemaker on-stream once about how Dota, from a game design point of view, is a clunky mess that has overly complicated systems that are poorly communicated to the players. It's a cool idea for sure, but I kinda get the sense that so many of the core tenets of Dota were just kinda thrown together by inexperienced modders like 15 years ago who barely had any idea what was good game design, but so many of those choices are now "tradition" that the playerbase would get really upset if they changed too much of it.

Compare two different games that both came from mods. It's kinda weird to think that Dota 2 is so slavishly devoted to maintaining all of the core mechanics and ideas of Dota 1, while Team Fortress 2 significantly honed and refined the ideas from Team Fortress/TF Classic and reinvented the game into something that became much more approachable and popular than the original mod.

They've massaged the Dota map to include some new ideas/reworks, and they've added stuff like the talents Brad was talking about (at certain levels you choose from 1 of 2 passive buffs, independent of your regular character upgrades), but overall a bunch of really clunky, overly complex stuff has remained in the game. It gives the game a lot of flexibility at high levels for how you can reactively create certain items based on your allies/enemies and their actions, but it's still a pretty horrible experience for beginners.

Even in Brad's case, he still doesn't know how to make judgment calls of what items to buy in a given match, and still relies on guides. Part of that is because I think he spends too much time playing in parties of experienced Dota players and lets them make decisions for him, and doesn't seem to have put as much time into solo queue, learning the hard lessons on his own. Even if that weren't the case, it definitely takes a while to learn why you buy certain items in some matches but not others. And then the entire concept of drafting/creating teams also has a lot of nuance to it that takes forever to learn.

So I get it. It's pretty dense, and it takes a while to understand what is going on.

Thanks guys. I have never played Dota but really liked watching the old Daily Dota vids. I hope this becomes a regular thing.

This was fun. Dota 2 is a fun game. Thanks.

Yesssss!!!! This is the kind of content I want to see out of West. Now if only Jeff and Jason could apply some freaking science! I don't understand why it takes so long to set up experiments.

Don't play DOTA, love this series! Keep it up!

This ruled.

I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I've played DOTA once and the community made sure I never played again after that. This makes me want to try playing again (as well as watch more of these videos). Give us more!

The only DotA I watch is the Majors and GiantBomb, so I'm so, so, so glad DotA is back on the site. It's not Daily, but I'll take anything I can get. Keep it up duders!

(I hope they work out the technical issues, and the coaching interface stuff)

The only things i know about DoTA are it's super toxic to players and it takes a lot of practice and understanding to be able to play it to a decent level when it's not toxic.

I sat down to kill 10 mins with this thing and ended up watching the whole thing. Well done to Ben for making it super understandable and Brad for gracefully taking the feedback even though he already has a lot of time in DoTA. And massive respect to his pub team who all seemed amazingly friendly and co-ordinated it well.

Great stream and would watch another like it.

This was quite fun, moar please!

I have always been pushed away from the GB dota videos because it seemed too complex to understand but this makes me want to play it. Its like watching a sport you don't understand with a passionate fan to explain it to you.

I actually kinda want to play Dota 2 after watching this. Brad and Ben have actually managed to bring a sense of "sport" to a game that I would have otherwise shrugged my shoulders about. Not to mention the fact that the word "eSports" would normally cause me to roll my eyes. Yet, there is a Coach and Athlete dynamic here in this that is really interesting to me.

I don't play DOTA, and this was fun!

bad

this was great, please continue!

Look I played DOTA for a little bit but got super overwhelmed with how much was going on. This is both informative and entertaining! Thanks for the great work y'all!