There is an improvement on the gameplay. Because IceFrog is no longer limited by the WCIII engine, he can do more things. These big changes that improve the gameplay include:Ickorus said:
1. Rubick can steal ALL active spells.
2. You can bash and crit while using Phase Boot's active components.
3. The orb effect of Maelstrom and Mjollnir can now stack with other orb effects if they do not proc.
4. Pudge can now hook enemies to your fountain thanks to Chen!
As for these perceived "game flaws..."
...there are reasons for them to be there.
Turning Speed: Balance reasons. Imagine you're chasing Pudge and then he instantly turns around and hooks you. With turning speed you can see when he is about to turn around to try to hook you and then take the measures needed to avoid the hook.
Attack Animation: Balance reasons. Each hero has different attack animations. Melee heroes tend to have better attack animations than ranged heroes. This allows melee heroes to last hit against ranged heroes.
Casting Animation: Balance reasons. There are heroes with very powerful abilities that would be broken if they are instantly casted. Examples include: Earthshaker's Fissure and Leshrac's Split Earth, Diabolic Edict, and Lightning Storm.
This so called "Burden of Knowledge:" By not limiting what he can do at the fear of player backlash (within reason), IceFrog has allowed himself to create very powerful and interesting heroes.
-You have Invoker, who is very versatile since he can cast up to ten spells (but he is very limited in the early game).
-Rubick, who can steal the enemy's spells and turn their magic against them.
-Meepo, who can create up to four clones of himself with each clone being able to use abilities separately (but not items separately.)
-Ancient Apparition, who can launch a hug ball of ice that stops any sort of healing and regeneration. The debuff also instantly kills the enemy if their current hp:max hp ratio falls under a certain ratio.
Int heroes do not scale (with a few exceptions): This is one factor that gives DotA\Dota 2 a lot of depth. Because abilities in the game do not scale (few exceptions) you get an extremely pronounced classification of early game, mid game, and late game heroes. Early game heroes are more powerful early game, mid game heroes are more powerful mid game, and late game heroes are more powerful late game. This diversity allows for multiple viable strategies.
-Early Push: A team comprised of powerful early game pushers. Their goal is to end the game as soon as possible by pushing to the ancient as fast as possible. This tactic is very powerful against team line ups who are relying on their carry to get farmed. The downside of this tactic is that if you fail to win the game under 20 minutes, your team's power will fall off and the enemy will be more powerful.
-Death Ball: A team comprised of very powerful gankers and disablers. Their goal is to gank the enemy team as much as possible so that that their enemy cannot get their farm and experience. The interesting aspect about death ball is that the carries, who usually come online later when they have their farm, on a death ball team tend to be active team players (they gank with the team.) The downside with death ball is that if you roam around for too long without getting kills, the enemy will have a level advantage due to the fact that the other lanes are untouched while you are focused on ganking one lane.
-Four Protect One: A team comprised of one hyper carry and four heroes with good defensive buffs and disables. Their goal is to occupy the entire enemy team so that their hyper carry can free farm for about 30 minutes. If they succeed, then their hyper carry can pretty much finish the game by himself/herself. The downside is that if they cannot prevent their hyper carry from being ganked, then they will not have the late game power.
There are more viable strategies than the three listed above.
RNG: Randomness in Dota 2 make the game exciting. To help make the game not too random, Dota 2 uses Pseudo Random Distribution. PRD is there to help ensure that a random event would happen while decreasing the chances for streaks. The item, Monkey King Bar, is used to negate any kind of miss chance or dodging. Good players will be able to predict the chance of something working out in their favor and adapt on the fly according on the outcome of a random ability.
Also, I must talk about Dota 2's snowballing vs. LoL's snowballing. Dota 2 doesn't snowball as hard as LoL, contrary to popular belief. Why? Let's look at two things.
1. Everything in LoL scales while very few abilities in Dota 2 scale. Feed a Queen of Pain 4 kills and Scream of Pain is not going to do any more damage than what it's hard coded to do, and Scream of Pain's cooldown never changes. Feed an AP mid 4 kills and their abilities will be hitting harder and more frequent thanks to Ability Power, Cool Down Reduction, and Magic Penetration.
2. The stat per gold ratio for items in DotA decreases as item tier increases while stat per gold ratio for items in LoL increases as item tier increases.
Read this: http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34288821&postcount=4011
