User blog comment:Krufix/Dota2 - Is it REALLY so much harder than LoL?/@comment-60.242.56.187-20130122103223

The one thing I really have to say is that LoL builds are more adaptive than dota. What happens if the enemy apc is horribly fed/their team is ap heavy? Mres. AD? Armor. Having trouble catching up early? GP10s, dorans, wriggles. But put the same to Dota. You end up with a very hard choice: deviate from your standard build in an attempt to fix what's wrong, or follow it to a tee and hope everything turns out right. That's items covered. It's not harder per se, just different. Also, carries are much more linear in LoL than Dota. With very few exceptions, it's vamp->IE->PD->BT->offensive or defensive item of choice->what you didn't get before. With dota it's different. There's farming accelerants that themselves cost a butt-ton (battefury, radiance) which tend to be niche as some do benefit more. There's mid game dps items, like SnY. There's the all important magic-immune (BKB). Then finally there's late tier items, such as butterfly, manta, buriza, so on so forth. Carries in dota need to decide what to get. For example, if you're 20 minutes in with under 80 cs, you would ditch the radiance and go straight for a higher end item in order to try and get back in.

But that's just items. I still call it a different system because you can't say it's harder. Last hitting may be the same concept, but you can't deny (haha.) the act itself is much harder. Heroes tend to have much lower base damage, and creeps do more damage individually. If you're a ranged carry, you tend to have ~45 base damage. There's no runes to boost this to ~60 like in LoL. Add in the fact that, in a pub game where there isn't a defensive trilane to ensure freefarm, a carry will probably find himself trying to sneak last hits in while being potentially denied and zoned at the same time. Also, the laning phase itself tends to be harder. The mid's goal isn't to win the lane, it's to hit 6 asap so they can destroy other lanes.

Then there's the static differences of the map. Rather than a top and bot which are more or less mirrors of eachother, Dota has a safe lane and offlane. The safe lane is the safest relatively- you can pull a neutral camp into your lane, attract the aggro of your creeps, and deny the opponent an entire wave of exp. If you're in the offlane, you'll be suffering from it. To make it worse, competitive games (captains' mode which is kind of like draft pick) tends to have an aggressive/defensive trilane and a solo. The solo is usually put on the offlane. What this results in is said solo being level 3 by 8 minutes.

That's metagame covered. Anyway, the main thing that makes Dota harder than LoL is how punishing it is. If you die, you lose gold. To make it worse, the gold you lose is called unreliable gold... Which is what you get over time and from cs. Combine that with the fact that aggression is far easier to pull off if you know what you're doing (towers are weaker, but hit faster) and you'll find that it's dangerously easy to die if you aren't careful enough.

There's also the juking system. In Dota there aren't brushes. That means you rely purely on fog and trees (which create said fog) to escape your gankers. This results in far more tricky situations, such as using a tango or quelling blade to cut yourself a niche to squeeze through. There's also already pre-made juke spots, but that itself takes a lot of getting used to (some are dead ends, others are passages).

Well, I've ranted long enough. All I mean to say is that you're pretty mistaken if you think LoL is the harder game.