Recent reviews by Alucasta

Dota 2 can only be described through this sentence - "This mechanic works this way, except when it doesn't."

The skill-floor for this game is purely based on how much you know about the way in which things resolve themselves, and by which exceptions there are to those things. Expecting newcomers to just immediately understand the difference and interactions between dispel, strong dispel, magic immunity, magic resistance, status resistance, and magic immunity piercing effects is more of a skill cliff than a learning curve. A lot of this could be resolved by just making an effort to clarify and reduce the "differences" that exist in the game. Knowing that there are 3 classifications of stuns, a secondary classifcation of silences, and a multitude of "differences" between roots, leashes, hexes, traps, and the "exceptions" amongst them (Why does frostbite root AND disarm when earthbind only roots? What intrinsically is the difference between a stun and a ministun other than duration? It's not like we call a longer stun a "megastun") is a terrible way to add fake difficulty to an already difficult game.

The fun parts of Dota 2 is undeniably the core game play. The characters and the map they've created have lead to thousands of enjoyable hours. The reason I can't recommend this game to anyone is strickly due to the amount of work you'd have to put in even start to see that fun. I hope that the developers make changes to the game to make it easier for new people to pick up, communicate these distinctions a little bit better IN CLIENT rather than having to track down information from an external source, and create a better tutorial/newbie friendly way to get new players in or this game will start losing it's already aging player base.