Comic Sans said:
Diminishing returns on CC is dumb. Why should it exist? If you put yourself in that position, you deserve it. If they had enough people to chain CC you, where was your own backup to return fire? It's a team game, if they can organize a hit on you and get it off they deserve the kill. CC spam exists in LoL, the difference being that sustain is so out of control that it's impossible to kill people in almost ny circumstance but a team fight. That's why competitive games have like half hour laning phases with kills in the single digits. Killing people is too much effort for too little gain. Last hitting actually heavily favors melee. They have quicker animations, and access to the hatchet that gives them even more damage. The downside is they are more vulnerable to harass. Denying is a great mechanic. It allows more ways to control a lane. You can stop your lane from pushing, or allow it to push as you see fit, and gives more to do in lane. Watch high level LoL, they just sit there waiting for last hits with no interaction. Denying reduces lane passiveness and is good for the game. I'm hardly a hardcore player and I recognize it.
Reducing cumulative CC is not dumb, simply because it shifts the focus towards many other types of ability, instead of the ubiquitous "chainlock gogogo". It is specially important in a game such as DotA, that has LUDICROUS CC amount/duration, soft and hard. It's nice to see teams composed by more than simply locking potential. Diversity is a good thing.
Denying is an old mechanic that was gladly left out in LoL. There are many things happening during the laning phase, and without the added deny layer, you can concentrate in the enemy champion instead of playing "whack-a-creep". The fact that some heroes are MUCH better at it overstates the fact that it is not the best thing to have in a game.
About sustain being out of control in LoL, please elaborate. The only champion that is really annoying to play against (as a duo crutch) is Soraka, simply because she is a self-sustaining healbot which brings little else in terms of damage and utility. Other than that, sustain is ok. Even then, Riot will cater to the wailing masses and will nerf laning sustain by quite a bit in a future patch.
I like DotA, and I played it weekly with a group of friends (and enemies) for... maybe 3 years, give or take. But, it has aged poorly. I am quite flabbergasted that DotA 2 will be the copy/paste we've seen so far. It is a game locked up in time by mass CC. And, it makes even less sense since HoN has already done the exact same thing.
LoL at least had the decency to grab the genre and add to it, via removal of denying and gold loss on death, runes and masteries, AP system (making Mages useful from beginning to end), etc. Riot just needs to provide some core elements the game is still missing, such as replays and observer. They are long overdue.
I'll keep on reading about DotA 2, but if this video is any indication of what's to come... thanks but no thanks. I have moved on.
