I figured I couldn’t call myself a PC Gamer if I had never played a DotA game before so I thought I would give it a go as its free.
Now I had always heard that the DotA community was a harsh one at best and from my brief experience of the Heroes of Newerth beta I found this to be true indeed, if you have no idea what you are doing and die alot people get very cross at you… This makes learning a game like this a little hard. Luckily League of Legends has a pretty good tutorial and even better the option to play with real people against computer controlled bots! After about 10 or so bot games I had the basics down and was learning what champions fit my play style.
For anyone who doesn’t quite understand how these games work, summed up its pretty much like this… You have 2 teams (5 or 3), each have a base at opposing corners, from each base is 3 lanes that head towards the other teams base, along these lanes are towers that do damage to enemies, every x seconds computer controlled minions spawn from your base and head towards the opposing base. The goal is to destroy the towers and make your way to the base and destroy it.
Now this sounds pretty straight forward, except its not. Each player has a control of one champion (there are loads to choose from, each with different styles and abilities) which gains XP from killing minions and other players, each level you get a point to spend in one of four abilities up until level 18. You also gain gold over time, extra given for getting the final kill shot on minions, killing players and turrets. This gold is used to buy items to further increase your champions stats. This is why people do not like people dying over and over, as this gives the other side more money in turn giving them the upper hand. Also the more you die the longer your re-spawn timer gets. My first rule of DotA is, don’t die! If you are close to death get back to base and heal up, you will only get killed otherwise.
Anyway, after I got fed up with facing bots I decided it was time to man up and do some proper player vs. player (PvP) matches. I choose Ashe as my champion of choice as I had been doing well with her against the AI and swiftly lost every match I tried with her… as you can see from my stats..
So I switched to Veigar, a champion I had also dabbled with. As you can see I had much better luck, but its worth mentioning that playing with random people is always going to be a mixed bag of results as having a few muppets on a team really does screw you over. I am still a noob but even I can see that.
However when you have two decent teams playing each other this is one of the best games I have ever played, the battle swings forwards and back with each team trying to get that edge to kill the others so that they can advance that little more. Nothing is more satisfying than pulling off a string of combos to trap and kill an enemy champion or pulling off a stun/slow that saves a team mate (or yourself) who is on a slither of health.
I can only imagine how much more fun it could be with a team of people on voice chat all working together…
This will be a game I continue to play, hopefully I can find a way of recording some fights to post on here to show how rubbish I really am 
I am now really looking forward to Valves DotA 2 when it arrives, it looks like a really nice update to the genre.
Updates will follow…. also my thoughts of Deus Ex Humann Revolution soon.
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