Are the New Dota Heroes too Versatile?
It’s crazy to think that Dota heroes have been consistently developed and released for almost two decades at this point. That is 122 unique opportunities to practice hero design, not to mention the countless patches of tweaking and reworking or the likelihood of many partially developed hero concepts. That is a lot of time to optimize what makes a good hero. It also means there are a lot of other moving pieces to consider when trying to create a hero that will be relevant and unique enough to be interesting.
With that in mind, the fact that Dota 2 only gets one or two new heroes per year is not that surprising. There is a ton of pressure on the Dota team to continue delivering engaging new content. Because of all these factors and the long development cycle the heroes being released in the 2020s feel like a different breed than those ported over from Dota 1.
This idea is abundantly clear in the heroes released in the past four or five years. Everything from new mechanics like vector targeting (Pangolier and Marci) to a clear deviation in art style (Mars and Dawnbreaker) is apparent. Other new ideas like jumping on trees, having two ultimates or turning into a lizard-powered siege tank have all introduced new wrinkles to the gameplay.
The crazy part about this development trajectory is that the game still feels relatively balanced to play. After all, Dota is a game where skill testing and seemingly limitless heroes like Invoker and Morphling can co-exist with low skill-ceiling options. such as Ogre Magi and Wraith King. Even so, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the direction that hero development appears to be going in.
For many years, the recipe has seemed to follow the old adage that everything in Dota is overpowered so nothing is. Certainly the team aspect of the game and the ability to counter pick and counter itemize keeps most egregious imbalances in check. At the same time it is hard to ignore just how versatile and powerful almost every single new hero has been upon release and even after many subsequent nerfs.
Here is the list of heroes introduced since Dota 2 Reborn:
- Arc Warden
- Underlord
- Monkey King
- Pangolier
- Dark Willow
- Grimstroke
- Mars
- Void Spirit
- Snapfire
- Dawnbreaker
- Marci
All of these, with the exception of maybe Underlord has almost immediately commanded a huge role in the meta. Simpler heroes like Mars and Dawnbreaker dove right into the tier one conversation while the more complex ones such as Hoodwink or Dark Willow took a few weeks of practice for pros to start stomping with. Each hero aside from maybe Dawnbreaker, who has only been available for a few competitive tournaments, has spent the majority of their time as a top tier pick in at least one role.
Grimstroke and Dark Willow might not be as big players today in shaping the meta but the memories of their years long reigns of terror are still fresh. To be clear, it is not necessarily a bad thing that new heroes are good and play a big role in shaping the game. This is certainly the intent of the Dota team and a necessary side-effect of keeping the game fresh. However, the practice of cramming so many new ideas into each new hero has created a bit of a versatility problem.
Since Monkey King, every new hero has been immediately viable in at least three different roles. Yes, most new heroes are overpowered on release but the Dota team is also simply designing more versatile heroes. Again, this is not necessarily a problem and I personally love every new hero added to Dota. The bigger concern is the shadow that these newer designs cast over the more antiquated members of Dota’s roster of heroes.
Is it really still worthwhile to play a hero like Lich when Grimstroke or Snapfire exist? Realistically, Lich only functions well in one role and his strength in laning and team fights is easily matched and exceeded by both other options. This is not to mention the flexibility of position four, offlane or even mid that have all proven to be viable for both Grimstroke and Snapfire. Likewise, why play Sniper when you can essentially do the same thing twice as well with Arc Warden?
I’m sure there is some argument for simplicity or nostalgia in playing Dota’s classic heroes. However, it’s been a long time since we got a new hero that just does one thing well and fills a specific niche in a specific team composition. I want to reiterate that it’s not a bad thing that Dota’s heroes are getting more diverse and interesting to play. In fact, it’s a true testament of skill to all of the developers who have worked on Dota over the years that so many of the original hero designs remain relevant and fun to this day. At the same time, it’s probably worth considering where the game will be in another five to ten years. Will the original cast of characters be relevant pieces of the puzzle or simply antiquated bloat that have been outdated by the newest vector targeting, hyper carry-support-mid-ganker with three ultimates and global teleport?
All the new heroes feel too mobile for the pace of the game, making lots of previously good heroes much worse. Power creep with hero mobility is pretty wild.
I think we need 5-10 new simple heroes like Leshrac or Sven on all positions. 2-3 only carry-role heroes. 1 only middle hero and 2 offlane & mid heroes (like Magnus or Puck). 1 only offlane & 1 offlane & pos4 heroes. And 2 hard-support heroes. And next heroes must be an utility-alwaysInMeta-heroes. In My Humble Opinion ofc
All these new heroes come with additional mobility... Almost all of them. That is one thing that is making them "top tier" in the instance they are released... The problem with the new heroes has usually been a more "jack-of-all-trades" thing. They have a really varied skill set built to handle almost any situation that comes up, when older heroes have clear issues in one way or another. It was seemingly a game for the dev team: "How can we add all the different features in the game into 4 abilities?"... And out came heroes like Monkey King, Pangolier etc. Heroes that have been changed later on or nerfed heavily. We need more heroes like Underlord and Mars, who have clear advantages, but are flawed. First off, neither of these heroes are mobile in any way of the word. A little over average movement speed etc. Mars has nice physical damage resistance feature, but is susceptible to magic damage. PA can have issues with him, but Lion can burst him down... Underlord was really fun when he was collecting permanent damage, but they removed that from him. He wasn't OP with it, but it was a nice to have ability that made him scale a little bit towards the end of the game if he was able to get in on kills. But neither Mars nor Underlord or Dawnbreaker was broken all that broken on day 1. Marci while very powerful, is still reduced to almost nothing with stuns and disarms... There just needs to be a way to handle the new heroes or they will simply delete multiple heroes already in the game when they do come out...
Marci was released, but what hero is coming in the Spring? I can't recall seeing anything about the other new hero... If they are not planning on releasing another hero in the next 12 months, they are getting just lazy. What are they doing with all this time and money??? They didn't even do a real "patch" after TI. Just a little balance thing...
I think the answer to this is simply yes. The new heroes are too versatile, it makes them very hard to nerf and very hard to counter whilst making the older designed heroes harder to buff without making them unbalanced. As mentioned by the other comments mobility is another huge issue with the new heroes, far too many have a mobility skill which again makes them very strong and also on turn has a negative effect of making heroes like AM and QOP less unique and easier to counter.
The hero design team need to understand that this is a problem for the games longevity; new heroes are fun and important to keeping the game fresh but that shouldn't come at the expense of the viability of older heroes.
They are versatile heroes and are often top tier picks undeniably, but i don't think they're harmful to the game or being too versatile makes the game less enjoyable, because even though they're often top picks, they don't make older heroes unviable or unpickable,
for instance void spirit is strong but he's not like some pick to win hero and what he does is signature to the hero, for example storm and void spirit do the same magical damage but the approach to playing with or against them differ drastically , Arc warden can do what sniper does but, they have heavily different timings and playstyles, people don't fight arc warden the same way they fight sniper, and arc warden doesn't neccessarily win lanes that sniper would stomp, Snapfire being a strong support hero, but his role can be filled by another support for instance tusk, with a complete different array of spells, the new heroes are versatile and do alot of good things but they're not just infinitely better because they do some more damage or have more stuns, they're flying at the same winrates as older heroes, because dota involves creativity and chaos, its a beautiful game because there can be just too much that can go wrong and just too many possibilities and synergies between heroes, there is no such "This hero is the best dota hero" or One hero is strictly better than the other
That being said, the trend of omega versatile heroes is getting kinda stale with each new hero fitting the "versatile" role.
Instead of versatility, i think i speak for the community when i say we need a new hard carry, which has simple farming mechanics, proper item scaling abilities and a fun playstyle. With valve being often creative with heroes, i doubt they lack the skill or creativity to create such a hero.
so many versatile heroes, 0 new POS 1s..
Yes. They are.
It's OK to have versatile heroes, but 10 of them in the past four years makes me think Valve only wants versatile heroes from now on.
We need some variation. We need to have simplistic heroes to balance out the versatile ones.
If everyone is versatile, then no one is.
What's even more interesting is that we have yet to get a single hard carry hero from Valve.
What I would like to see is a bunch of new heroes that fill very specific roles. Dedicated supports or carries, multiple of them.
They might be boring, yes, but that is what Dota needs. If everyone is exciting then no one is.
They're versatile, yet still fairly stagnant. I was concerned as soon as heroes started to come out after Dark Willow and Pangolier. They released those two heroes at the same time but we saw the addition of new mechanics and I thought that was a cool idea. New hero = New Mechanic. Dark Willow brought in the first fear mechanic and Pango brought in the first use of vector aiming. Most of the other heroes just became skillshots and slight variations of other spells. Grimstrokes ult is fairly fresh but with marci, snapfire, Dawnbreaker and hoodwink I was quite disappointed. Void is okay, but he is mostly just a skill shot wombo combo hero.
But the biggest problem I have with all of this is how it affects heroes that don't have these versatile or "QoL" updates to them. Chen just gets run down by these high mobile heroes while meepo is affected by almost everyone having an aoe spell or a shard that gives them an aoe spell.
But it does seem they are afraid to put in micro heroes, illusion heroes, hard carry heroes, or heroes that have any intricate mechanics that dota once took seriously.
Imo yes . Even mars , a hero i have played a lot , (kind of a variation to axe) anti range and spelll oriented , has tools to deal with multiple difficult situations . We need more heroes with clear , simple designe and one mechanic in mind that they bring to the table or deal with ( et with stats , mars with range carrys , tide with debufs , axe with mele heroes , disruptor with escape heroes ,bane with single target lockdown...).
You forgot about Hoodwink in your list of heroes released since Reborn
Dota could solve this issue by introducing spell scaling like league does, so that way older characters can be tuned up with new items to keep up with newer characters regardless of power creep. With items like blink and force staff, and QoP and AM being OG characters with a free blink dagger, there isn't too bad of an issue with mobility. The biggest issues IMO is damage and CC with newer characters.
Underlord is a dota 1 hero, Donnie, he has been released in 2007
Maybe zet the arc warden to?
@oknotnotok r u insane ? Did u never play a single game of league to realise what kinda of dmg that will cause ? Just imagine a zeus ,that has tons of dmg early to mid game and even some of it transitions into late game, with that kind of scaling. Not even mentioning spirit brothers , viper , timber etc.
To add,there is no need to add vector mechanic to the game(like marci and dawn braker) it adds nothing,they can focus on existed game mechanics.
While some of the new heroes seemed to have a good escape mechanism and more versatile, that doesn't mean devs completely forgotten about the older heroes as well. Some of the older heroes even got their skill tweaked so that they also have some more mobility like Ursa's Earthshock gain a small leap, Mirana's Leap get 3 charges, Sniper's shard give him a chance positioning himself, and etc
But what I don't like about some the new heroes is they are such a "jack-of-the-trade, master of none" characters. While it has its own benefit like draft pick by the pros such as Nine's mid Wyvern (Wyvern comes with Arc Warden in the original Dota if I'm not mistaken) , Topson's mid Dawnbreaker and Hoodwink or MK's support/carry which makes him 2nd most contested hero at TI 10. But what captivated me in the first place, which hooked me into Dota is some of the heroes is just creatively design skillset like Invoker, Rubick, Meepo, Chen even the old Gambler in the original Dota is one of a hell concept which use your gold as damage.
I just hope that devs would create the new heroes with old concept, a creative skillset even though that is a hard request and also a much less "versatile".
Devs try to change old heroes, viper is a completely diffèrent hero now for example. Then there is constantly new pos5 heroes like faceless void, weaver, clock, one can say they are versatile too. Pretty sure devs will change sniper somehow, wild idea is to give him save ability like innate force staff
I just came here to read tittle and comments, pretty awesome reading thanks kids
you forgot to mention hoodwink in the list
Arc Warden/Monkey King can fit into position 1 role easily, AW being the stronger of the two compared to being placed in the mid role because of how farm dependent he is.
I played hoodwink pos 1 to some avail, with maelstrom for farming, then rod and orchid for mana regen and fights, to transition to their upgrades
Tbh all hero's that have been added since monkey king have been kind of non existing for me lol. I know they are there and annoying as hell such as void spirit or marci, but i just dont care about them. They feel like they dont really fit in dota for some reason.. comparing them to older heroes makes older heroes just look unfinished and it creates kind of a bridge between the older heroes and the new ones which i think is really bad. For example some older heroes still have some of the most bare bones gameplay compared to the newer ones. When will older heroes that have been ignored finally get a good kit update? A lot of them just feel boring or underwhelming first example i can think of is sniper, character stands and shoots, there it is. Occasional ulti or shrapnel, but in general he is just such a snorefest compared to marci backflipping around the map throwing heros into the tower healing the team 1 shotting supports with ulti etc etc
I do miss the old dota days when there basically was no real late game because heroes scaled like garbage lol
Does anybody remember when magic damage did not scale and heroes like zeus where literally useless past the 25 min mark? Or snipers perma stun passive? Those where the days i tell you, i still have my bloodstone from i think 2012 and i cherish it.