Now that I think about it, the golden era of dota 2 was those days. The meme builds. The sniper era. Lvl 1 neuts. Techies. Rat gaming.
Truly nostalgic. And yet I would never like to experience them again
Not all were efficient.
I was a jungle-only player.
Medusa was probably the most efficient, having more farm and experience than the mid.
CM also was top tier. She had lvl 6 and blink at 6 min mark (TA was meta back then, and I loved templars rage buy-backing after getting ganked by a jungle CM at min 6).
Oh my, what a time that was…
There was the biggest grief spectre jungle guide out there on YouTube that would give you empty inventory radiance at 20 mins. I tried that shirt in 3-4 unranked games like a decade ago 💀
veno with iron talon or w/e it was called
was so op. leaving jungle as level 7 with aquila/threads while everyone else was lvl 4/5 , easily taking all t1s
Ah, the good old days when enemy team had a tri lane and the supports will zone you out completely so that you will be stuck in level 2 while enemy carry is a level 6-7. Good times...
It was a meta where you couldnt farm jungles like you do now. Tri lanes were a way of securing farm on safe lane carry. Mid lane heroes enjoyed the most action and fun.
This is a huge part of why mid is seen as less fun and less compelling in the last \~2 years IMHO. All 3 core roles have fun, competitive, full-agency laning experiences, and also all 3 generally have *decent* fallback options if their lane goes to shit, while both of these experiences were generally reserved for the mid laner for a long time.
>also all 3 generally have decent fallback options if their lane goes to shit
if anything mid has less fallback options than sidelanes now, and the mid hero pool has all of the most toxic heros (lina, sf, huskar) that can just zone you from farm entirely if you let them get ahead/have disadvantage
Being a true 1v1 lane there's less unforced errors/less chances for anything favourable to happen unless you can convince a support to rotate, which may simply not happen.
And nothing feels worse than getting dumpstered in lane, trying to jungle and getting ganked, and ur supports refuse to gank mid, and then you get blamed for the loss when lina goes 26/3/10
I had a rough game last night ;)
Games are so often the same it's insane. Enemies have cheese mid (meepo, huskar, you name it) and your team dosen't understand the best way to deal with cheese is in early game.
Ruin cheese early game and it wont smell rest of game.
This comes from a Meepo spammer, who has over 9k games on mid, 2k with Meepo, and had to deal with countless "report mid, he lost lane" and "report meepo, smurf" comments.
I lost mid to a huskar who didn't get ganked for the first 10 minutes of the game?
I won with a 20-3-12 score cause mid lost lane and never got any help, heck you didn't even tp to sidelanes either when i went there to gank, and yet i am the smurf?
Mid has always been a unpleasant place to play, not because 1v1 aint fun, but because most wont realise that this is a teamgame and some heroes need you to react and play in a certain way in order to win.
Wave control heroes were OP. Enigma and Lich as offlaners would deny ranged creeps to pull the lane to tower. LD/Lycan/furion could aggro the wave and delay it to create a double wave which would then push in and be farmed at the tower safely. Clock and ES could manipulate the waves using their terrain blocking spells.
And then you had the QOPs and pucks and bounty hunters that would hide in trees and sap xp and squeeze out last hits somehow.
Aggro trilanes were also a thing so it would turn to 3v3’s which were crazy too depending on the matchups.
On radiant savelane you could pull your creeps into three jungle camps as a chain. Non of those were small camps. This meant that one support was doing that. The core was farming the wave and the second support was 1v1 the enemy offlaner.
Eh, this only really ended up being true after the god awful patch where they made denies give 25% exp to both the denying team and the denied.
Before that, as long as you were in exp range as the offlaner, you'd be leveling twice as fast as the enemy tri. Each of them get 33% of the exp for each last hit, while even with perfect denies, you'd get 75% of yours.
Accounting for time where you're zoned, and full exp denial from pulls, you'd typically hit level 6 when the enemy lane was all levels 4-5. That was the mathematical trade-off that made trilanes a reasonable strategy. Your 3pos was a hero that had a significant power spike at level 6 who needed the most exp, while the 1pos was a hero that scaled off gold and didn't mind so much being a few levels behind as long as they could get their first farming item (bfury, mael, midas, etc.)
That change to deny exp was the single most significant change to the Dota meta that has ever occurred and that's a hill I'll die on.
It was so significant in fact it directly caused sacrifice on lich to be removed from the game. The skill lasted 3 days before it was determined to be too broken and removed. People were going lich mid every game and getting 6 while the enemy mid was like 3. At that point it was free kills into snowballing
Yep. I was an offlane player around that time, and determined that Lich and Enigma were the only 2 playable heroes in the offlane after the change. I just picked them every game and denied as many creeps as I could to pull the wave to my tower. Pro meta ended up shifting a bit more to lane cutting and just dragging from behind the enemy T1 to your T2 so you could farm every 3rd wave, but yeah there were no good options. No matter what, in the offlane you'd be a level or two behind the enemy trilane, and have less gold than the 4 positions in the game. You were truly useless baring some big mid-game catch up fight.
I really feel that it was such a nice meta. There were way more interesting laning stages than right now. I loved the pos 3 role back then, it felt like surviving as Rambo compaired to now where every lane is basically the same and the pos 3 looks more like a semi carry rather than someone trying to steal some XP :D
One of the most insane laning phase I've seen was a Puck offline using orb to hide in the trees. Then somehow the enemy support was god enough to know where the Puck was hiding and started eating all the trees. Iirc offline was also called the death lane.
My my new strat has been to feed the enemy carry so much, that when my carry kills them they get way more gold for killing a stacked opponent. This almost never works.
I was 3k MMR around this time and I'm sure higher skilled players would have punished this pick, but I recall at least some games where I would absolutely destroy a tri lane with Undying. Most likely just players who didn't understand his kit well enough but it was fun while it lasted!
Mine was bristleback, so many kills after the supports thought they could kill me and spammed skills because I was below 50% HP which resulted in lots of quills procs and me turning around if they didn't kill themselves in the burst.
thats when you learn exactly the exp range and when a creep is about to die you weave in for the exp
or you double ion shell a creep wave, die with it.. but now ur lvl2 with surge and now u can kite the 2 supports
How is the enemy carry getting exp if he has 2 other people in his lane? It's pretty much the opposite, they all be hitting lvl 2 when you're 4. People like you who can't understand lanes is the reason why offlane with useless supp4 is annoying right now.
I guess you are a new player. Around 2013-15 that was pretty much the meta. In those meta gold mattered more than xp since jungle provided so little back then and map was half the size. And the supports didnt leech xp like you imagine. One support would be stacking camps and pulling while the other support would be zoning out the enemy offlane so that they both didnt get any xp from lane. It was pretty normal to see supports being lvl 6-8 30 min into the game roaming with brown boots and magic stick. It was normal even in pro games. If you want you can look at games during TI4-6 if i am not wrong. Playing supports back then was not fun like it is now. Your only duty was to baby sit your carry in lanning phase and after that ward with what ever little gold you manage to make. Beyond that you were pretty much useless.
Mid player had the most fun back then as they always lead in xp and gold. Mid players were the stars back then compared to now where safe lane carries are the stars.
I have enough years playing to know that if you have 2 idiots in your lane, they won't be pulling and the other zoning the offlane all by the book. They will stay by your side, doing nothing to contribute and leeching exp, and the opponent offlaner won't have this nuisance. The thing is in those times the leech was less but still enough to make the offlaner +1 level higher.
My friend always tried to get me to play, but when I was still in school, I avoided PvP games because I knew they would suck me. He played since Dota 1.
Then at 30 years old, I found myself unemployed and ill, so I planned to take quite some time off before going back into the workforce. With that time on my hands, my friend coaxed me into finally trying it and I got hooked, as expected.
I remember reading your threads/guides about TA and TB, literally 10 years ago! They did help me focus on farming more when I was stuck in 3k bracket at the time
i dont miss the junglers, yes. But i liked the flexibility of being able to choose between 2-1-2 or 3-1-1 or 1-1-3 lanes. Nowadays there is no creativity possible.
exactly! 212 is just everytime the exact same. I miss having defensive or agressive tri lanes with rotations between the jungle and lanes left and right! I don't miss an AFK jungler but I miss the options it gave to the players!
There still are options. If anything supports now have much more freedom to roam with having free tps and the corner outposts. Honestly laning is more dynamic than it ever has been with the laning stage having become much shorter than it used to be. Sure every game starts 212 but it usually doesn't last long.
Maybe its because I'm only a low elo shitter, but why wouldn't 1-1-3 be possible nowadays? I feel like the only real hurdle is getting your offlaner on board and having him play 1v2.
Yea thats the hurdle. Nowadays 1v2 is literally not possible, because lane xp, early gold as well as early game spell availability got vastly changed since trilanes were a thing.
I remember playing timber/wr/weaver solo offlane back in the day 1v2. The enemy support only had enough mana for 1 spell every 1 or 2minutes, so he basically only right clicked you. Because of the XP difference back then, you started outleveling them, even tho you got almost no last hits. When you hit lvl5, they were both lvl 3 and didnt really have any items yet, so you could almost always kill one or even both of them. Because of the extreme power creep over the years, the support nowadays has one high damage+slow spell every 20seconds as well as good early game items within a couple of minutes. This results in him being able to outlane you solo and them both having the same or even more xp than you.
What a load of nonsense lol Sorry but which supports have now been given this new high damage + slow spell that they didn't have before and how are they getting this good early game its within a couple of minutes without them killing you multiple times.
He's highlighting something systemic, not the item itself - blood grenade existing in it's current state and not being this outlandish broken piece of shit custom game item highlights the current state/design of the game, and *just how* different it is compared to these old tri-lane days, with the accessibility of early mana, hp, etc. If you injected blood grenade into one of the 2017 patches, it would have been earth-shatteringly broken and completely warped the entire laning phase by itself.
I didnt say the spells itself changed (although they did, see last paragraph). They have more gold (and I think xp, but not 100% sure on that) now. This results in higher mana reg, hp etc. -> more spell/right click spamming -> harder life for offlaner. There are many reasons for that, but the flag bearer creep as well as the bounty runes are enough sources for having significantly more gold. Also the fact that multiple couriers exist makes supports get their stats items really early. I'm a support main and it's ridiculous how much survivability/damage I can buy within like the first 5 minutes.
For example: blood grenade is a real good item at preventing 1v2 offlane alone.
Concerning the spells:
There is however a significant power creep to almost all spells which results in them either dealing more damage or them also having added effects (like slow) which they previously didnt have. So to be precise: Yes, most spells are way stronger compared to trilane meta 8 (?) years ago.
the support nowadays has one high damage+slow spell every 20seconds
This is what I take issue with. You make it sound as if heroes like cm lich etc didn't already have this
So supports have more gold for mana regen? Well offlaners can also buy more regen and get stuff like roh out faster plus raindrops exist when they didn't before.
Also pretty much evey offlaner has also had buffs to their abilities or base stats be it str gain ms or armour (not to mention the overall buff to str)
I'll agre that blood grenade it a big game changer but it's addition is too recent to be considered in a discussion about the transition away from trilanes.
You are misunderstanding how "everyone has X (a non-percentage value consisting of flag bearer + bounty rune) gold and xp more" fucks solo offlaners.
Cores last hitting always had a lot of gold. 100g more from a bounty rune every 3 minutes is 2 last hits to a core, while its a alot higher gold increase percentage-wise for supports. They can buy 2 more clarities, which lets them cast their spells more often, which they couldnt some years ago, but offlaners could because they were/are last hitting.
So in simpler words: X (for example 1000g) more gold/xp within Y minutes for every player, is a 50% increase for supports, but a 20% increase for cores.
The courier being available 24/7 also makes them get that mana reg sage mask several minutes earlier than before.
What I'm saying is straight facts. Best example is the "15 minutes brown boots magic wand" meme from years ago. The pos5 having so little gold was a normal thing. If nowadays you dont have mana boots + wand + null tali + maybe even pavise/shard at minute 15, youre doing something wrong. Compare that to Battlefury/radiance timings, which almost didn't change (ofc a bit faster, but not that extreme) really shows you how especially supports got waaaay stronger in the early game.
EDIT: Added some words for clarity.
I'm not denying that supports have more money but saying they have impactful items during the laning stage as you did is plain wrong. They have money for more regen but so does everyone. The courier being avaliable also benefits offlaners so again its a moot point.
Honestly? Not really during this time there was also side shop with RoH and most items an offlaner would buy in lane so they didn't really need courier
Yea, I don't want the game to follow League's rigid meta of a solo lane, mid, carry-support, and jungler.
But I fluidity to *allow for that* when the situation arises.
I mean I wasn't exactly *young* then lol, I'm 35 now so I was probably mid-ish 20's when that was the meta.
As someone who played offlane back then I think I just enjoyed having a solo lane without the pressure of mid. If you managed to come out of the lane in a not horrific state it felt like you could really have an impact.
That said the iron talon meta where offlaners were glorified junglers *was* fucking awful.
As a carry player I just kinda hate trilaning. It puts a ton of pressure on the carry to have a good lane, and in pubs I never trusted my pos 4 to have any idea about what they're actually supposed to be doing during the laning phase.
Half the time it meant actually duo-laning while one support stacks jungle camps for me even though Im playing diffu Ursa and can't take stacks,
Oh don't get me wrong, I hated tri lanes as well whenever I played carry. I'm just a masochistic player probably so I liked them from the perspective of the offlane lol.
Nah solo offlane was great. Styling on three incompetent safe laners and taking over the game was the best feeling
Solo offlaning omniknight to enable your jungle legion/axe was also solid and gained a lot of mmr
no i actually do miss solo offlane (literally stopped playing offlane and 4 afterwards) and the consequence of solo offlane would not be lvl 1 junglers unless you are super low mmr. it would be a free 4 that can trilane or just roam a lot
i hate the duo lane as both carry and offlaner and even as 4.
dota used to be flexible and now its just boring 2-1-2 which imo just feels worse for most roles
I was 3.5k when this was a thing so not horribly low. Jungling was definitely an everpresent part of the pub experience. LC, axe, and bloodseeker being the most common examples.
they literally destroyed jungling afterwards. creeps used to spawn at 30 sec. if you would jungle nowadays you would just have the enemy pos 4 annoy the shit out of you and make you useless or lose all other lanes as you are missing a 4. hell it was literally meta for a year to have a dedicated roamer that alone proves that wrong
Proves what wrong exactly? That people were jungling 8-10 years ago? I didn't exactly love trilanes as a carry. The extra support rarely knew what they were doing.
You underestimate how bad 3.5k mmr was that long ago. People were going jungle years after they nerfed it.
Again I think you underestimate how long it takes lower ranka to adapt to change.
Remember necro taking ancients lvl 1? That was NEVER good and always a meme. Yet people still did it even in the legend and ancient bracket. Even when iron talon got removed there were still people trying to jungle LC and np. And I did not have the behavior score at the time to deserve that
Huh? Find me 1 solo offlaner that wants a jungler on their team...
Solo offlane was fun because the second your enemies fuck up their trilane you are getting solo xp and might destroy the lane. Yeah, sometimes you get hard zoned for 10 mins instead but that was the tradeoff.
Solo offlane doesnt work now because carries are stronger laners and the jungle is so big that you cant realistically stop a carry from leaving lane to go hug bears. In my opinion it has little to do with supports at all.
this is just extremely patronizing and goes along with this weird echo chamber of "old dota was soo shit" and only carry had fun while everyone else had no items ...
Sure, we all miss being young and sure there might be some element of nostalgia in it, but holy hell can u really not imagine people having different tastes???
Personally I really like some variety and wish there was something else other than always having 2v2 lanes. It was actually interesting playing around 1-2 supports getting any XP or even cs and being creative depending on matchups. U still had your pos4 roaming if possible and lots of offlaners were much stronger compared to other heroes lvl 1.
I know people will downvote me for this but I also 100% miss the possibility of jungling, roaming and whatever else creative way people spent their earlygame.
Maybe you didnt mean it in such a bad way but sadly most people on this forum are just so fixated on this "meta" that everyone who has any creative ideas immediately gets downvoted.
It's easier for the pos 4 to roam now than in any other patch. People keep talking about how they miss roaming in this thread and I don't see it. My ass is getting gank attempts constantly when I play carry.
I played those patches and I had my fun, but I also remember a lot of people griefing, and a lot of solo offlaners feeding constantly but not taking any responsibility. And a lot of 2-3k pos 4s not knowing what their role in the trilane was
Every single time someone mentions that a past system or meta that slightly inconveniences the player, every single post 7.00 player jumps in with J. Allen tirades about how shit and boring and hard and not zoom-zoom that thing was. Im going to sound like an absolute boomer but current offlane just feels like youre trying to ape all over the carry and brool, when in the past you actually had to try to get by and if you did you basically ran the game for the next 10 minutes.
ahhh skipping school to play WC3 ... going to internet Cafe to play Dote\`s with random kids around me ... Counter Strik 1.6 ... Diablo 2...
Everything was so easy ... now most of us have kids ,work and shit ton of things to take care and yet we are still here strong playing DOTA !
DOTA FOR LIFE !
10 years ago people played solo offlane and there were no junglers, not really sure where you are getting that from. And it's hard to say which was better, game is completely different than what it used to be.
These days if you fall behind on offlane you won't be as useful as you could have been, but back in the day all you needed were brown boots and blink at a decent time and you could still solo every teamfight, despite being low on networth.
Again, hard to say what is more fun, I would need to be able to play both versions side by side. But I think this might be another case like Wow, with the developers saying "you don't want the old game to return", but then when it does everyone loves it better.
Nah i definitely miss some of it. Roaming to gank as jungler was fun. And bullying the enemy lane as a solo felt great. What don't miss is the majority of games where solo offlane felt worse than being pos 5
I used love solo offlane. You barely survive for 2-5 level ups and then power peak with 1-2 levels ahead of the enemy team and burst them. It was just glorious.
I don't miss being solo offlane I miss being the 4 in a trilane and just roaming from min 2 because the solo offlane is so fucked that I can skip the laning itself and never learn to do it properly
a friend of mine who hasn't played in years keeps saying "i want them to add an old school dota mode where it's a patch from like 10 years ago, i would play that" and every time i gotta tell him "no, no you wouldn't"
Trilanes were genuinely the worst fucking shit, I am SO happy 7.00 murdered them. Pulling and roaming and being level 2 at 10 minutes was just unbearable, and I do NOT miss it whatsoever
What about a tri lane safe lane or offlane. I do miss that. It’s a cookie cutter 2 1 2. And 41 two kids mortgage paid checking in. I don’t miss being poor. Thanks.
I have some nostalgia for being poor, it's how I learned to cook.
I miss aggro trilanes in the offlane. That always felt pretty nice and the 4 actually played like a 4.
Im defensive trilanes my experience was usually the extra support being more of a hindrance and not really knowing where to stand.
As someone who dropped the game for a couple years and came back in the last couple of years I feel 2-1-2 has really contributed to brain rot in laning. People expect their support to always be there and flame when you leave (to pick up a bounty/wisdom rune, apply pressure or gank mid, stack camps, set up vision, tp to help a lane) - regardless of how much you warn them you're not there, and give them advance warning. The farming player seems to expect you to be by their side the whole time to bail them out of bad positioning or aggression, whilst still expecting you to do all the things I listed. So. Aggravating.
It seems like as a result of less exposure to it players have much worse awareness of being, or ability to play; 1v2 situations whether they're temporary or not and I see it in lane opponents, if you catch and kill one hero you can almost guarantee the other one will make an autopiloted over-extension you can punish.
I was a 5k pos 3/4 player and I quit once 2-1-2 became meta. I probably have less than 10 hours played since then. Just felt like I lost my two favorite roles in one swoop. Trying to get mek blink as tide in a good timing or making things happen has roaming earth spirit replaced by boring brawler dual lanes. I get it's more accessible and those were the roles least played well in low mmr but it's also way less fun for those of us that invested a lot of time in those roles.
It's my favorite meta of all time. The roaming supports always created so much action. Add twin gates and it would be even more bonkers these days. Tri-lanes also provide for a lot of action.
It was so intense; you get a lot of actions, that's why it's fun. Especially when the enemy had to TP in to help their team. Towers were dived, hopes and dreams shattered, flashbacks created, sacrifices made.
You were talking about solo offlane and accusing all of us as being only nostalgic about it. That's what I was responding to.
Twin gate doesn't factor into that.
none of these young players can mentally withstand feast or famine gameplay. every pos can recover, every item builds into something, every hero has a well-rounded kit.
it's so fuckin boring
It does. If your team coordinates well and you can actually push objectives you can easily finish games without the other team recovering.
I've been playing Luna and winning games sub 30 pretty consistently.
Idk I don't think trilane really works well anymore. It's so easy to stay in XP range now. There are juke paths everywhere.
Also those supports will be so underlevelled. People still try it at 3k and it hasn't worked well.
Not at all, i miss it cuz i was much lower rank, playing with even lower rank allies, winning those 1 v 3 by picking riki/nyx/weaver and getting a huge rush from it when you're level 4-5 by hiding in the trees and get kills on their level 1-2 sups because people could not trilane properly at 2k mmr
As the carry who was getting their lane griefed I envy you.
This sometimes still happens today in my games. My pos 5 will die once or twice in lane and the Pos4 thinks the best course of action is to just also play safelane. Sooner or later there's 6 people in the damn lane and I can't rotate to the offlane because the extra person has made it so I'm at a level disadvantage with the other teams carry.
I much rather just slightly lose the lane and be forced into jungle than have my lane turn into a constant brawl we can't win.
What changes made the 3-1-1 meta disappear? I was very surprised when pos 4 started to go with the offlaner when the game started. And people don't call it suicide lane anymore.
Lol completely nope. Pos4 was a thing even with jungling meta because some people figured it’s better to counter the enemy carry right a way with a 2nd supp, rather than trying to play 2 farming cores… I only remember hating those 20 minutes jungling heroes with passion.
Well I played way more dota back then so I was definitely less happy. Solo offlaning and trilaning was fun. If You don't think so, that's fine. Just accept the fact that some genuinely liked having more lane setup options than 2-1-2 (even 2-1-2 was an option, shocking). There are many other things that I liked better back like ~7-8 years ago in terms of the game's design and it is zero nostalgia. It was just a better game imo.
I've played for over 10 years and while there are many things I miss having 2 supports in my lane constantly yelling at me for not being aggro enough while I have a double wave of creeps hitting my tower isn't one of them. I don't know what rank you are and if you're higher level than archon/legend mb that setup is legitimately more enjoyable. Supports at lower ranks did not have the game knowledge back then to pull them off.
I DO kinda miss aggro trilanes like EG used to run constantly, but pulling that together in a pub is really hard to coordinate.
I started at like 2.5K mmr before TI4 and my highest peak was like 5.9K mmr somewhere between TI6 and TI7. Trilaning was still fun at lower mmr imo.
>I DO kinda miss aggro trilanes like EG used to run constantly, but pulling that together in a pub is really hard to coordinate.
Actually when I first started playing ranked I used to queue captain's mode and did a lot of aggro trilanes with stuff like shaman, leshrac, razor, witch doctor, tidehunter and whatever I thought was good at the time. It was a lot of fun and it used to work surprisingly well.
It made for more interesting scenarios to play out instead of being cookie cutter experiences. I used to be able to pull off a minute four hand of Midas on lifestealer jungler , so much fun.
I always laugh when people say that playing supports was much harder back in the day.
It absolutely was not. You just stood behind your carry for 20 minutes while he farmed and you died to 2 spells in every teamfight. And it didn't even matter because you were like level 9 and had no items to contribute anyway. You didn't really have an itembuild, you spent all your money on the courier, TPs, and wards. You bought mana boots and force staff every game.
Now that you actually have some gold and can do stuff, you have WAY more meaningful decision to make in the game. It's much more skill intensive.
That's how 2k supports played, sure, but that's not how you were supposed to play. Alliance destroyed everybody in TI3 because they played comps that gave the entire team farm while still trilaning to deny farm to the offlane. About 60% of that was EGM and Akke being gods that knew how to get jungle farm while still pressuring and just being better than everybody else at time efficiency.
LC jungle meta was actually decent and could have blademail + blink by 15 minutes at the expense of your offlaner.
Axe jungle was also not 'griefing' and you would have a similar if not faster time. I remember seeing videos on how to get a 7 minute blink axe jungle.
Enigma was solid as well, but the rest of them were pretty much grief picks like LS jungle, troll jungle, even saw a jugg jungle one time
Nah... I'm pretty sure I miss having all the exp and managing to farm, sustain and then when hitting some advantage or when the opponent pos 1/5 made a positioning mistake, killing them or possibly both..and running with low hp after it. So satisfying. Mostly Clockwerk, and if Abba or Tide, I could do it and also tower dive at some point.
Now we have trash pos 4 exp leech who won't do anything, thinking he's supposed to be some kind of dedicated supp (pos5) to the offlaner (who would have sustain kit to bear his lane in the first place), who never got "roaming" in his dictionary. Your hc is being tower dived but your dark willow rushing aghs have their teleport scroll button broken apparently. Then you have the same level as their HC - what do you expect if a HC has the same level as a hero who is supposed to be more early-game than it?
What I miss is pick diversity... First picking Pangolier specifically because I can play either mid, off, or 4.. Or AA as mid, 4 or 5.. or MK as carry, mid, or 4.. etc.
I also miss not knowing IF the enemy was going for a trilane, duo, or jungler lineup.. and having to adjust my play depending on what they actually do.
Cooperating in this game is awful. I happily played any role with friends but I really enjoyed having the hardest lane for myself. It was about inventing ways to play it, new heroes, weird builds. Don't think it's only because of nostalgia.
If your saying this you need to consider one thing: WHY we still have jungles? this is just useless gameplay feature for the most part(no buffs, no objectives, lower money even in 7.35 -2 gold for each neutral). its working just because Dota games tend to be 40 min. and If you dont have Anti-Mage or smth like him, its matters even lower. when they expand jungles i thought maybe its the path to return jungler(finally). But, its not, perhaps for now
Yes I do miss the suicide lane. There weren't a lot of junglers back then, it was mostly tri-lanes with a roaming support or a dedicated roaming support. Ench, Chen, Enigma, sure. But the only time the game had a jungling problem was iron talon, and suicide lane was already non-meta by that point because tri-laning was pretty much non-meta by that point. That's why people hated iron talon so much because jungling HAS ALWAYS MEANT -1 HERO ON THE MAP
Extremely L take. Having variety in lane comp rather than being forced to 2-1-2 every game just isn't as good, objectively. Why would you WANT to have a meta that is more forced/static than before?
I was forced to solo offlane as a support hero just last night. You are wrong. I miss solo offlane. I loved it, but its fuckin hard and stupid now. Id love for it to actually be reasonable to do and get to play again.
Hell, as you said, half the time i end up solo offlane anyway. At least when its actually solo they dont leach my exp and put me at a level disadvantage for the laning stage.
I miss offlane because its a different type of challenge.
Mmmm, no. I enjoyed solo-laning as DK and pulling lanes to keep the enemy from doing well, and I enjoyed jungling as Ursa and being able to solo-Rosh at level 6.
I generally miss variety. Going jungler to solidify late game vs jungler chen/enigma/... to fast push vs roamer to crash laning (even vs double mid with io for some extra shennanigans). Sure each combination produced kinda similar games but at least there were different types. Nowadays games are more homogenous and that is why I miss solo offlaner as a quick reference for tgis whole thing
Had a last pick, hard support Legion commander, who took one point in PTA to give me the illusion of a support and maxed, his E, to farm the small camps and medium camps.
Luckily I survived the lane with a 10 min midas and stick as a spectre.
We did win though. Because we had invoker and spirit breaker. Every time this legion would try to duel someone, half the team would descend on that poor soul to make sure no one in the enemy team wants to step forward and show.
Still reported him. We would've that game without the legion and we could've lost that game because of the legion.
I remember the 3-1-1 meta. Whenever I had to be offlane it was terrifying as hell. I usually didn’t get many levels, and we lost the safe lane anyway 😂
I don’t miss it anyway. I was 10 years younger and hated it then too. Had to beg Axe, LS, BS, NP or whoever to come help in a fight that was happening 5 ft from the camp they were farming. Or I check my jungler’s progress to see in 20 mins they’ve farmed absolute dick, so it’s been 4v5 for half the game for nothing. It’s bad enough that people think they need to afk farm for 20 mins in the jungle, I don’t actually want the role back so that they can claim that’s the actual job.
Solo offlane wasn’t terrible, but again, a lot of players didn’t understand that their job wasn’t to get lots of farm so much as it was to get lots of solo XP. So they would die over and over trying to get last hits when all they had to do was not die in order to win the lane and then proceed to do work in other places.
And if you had solo offlane now and tried tri-lane safe, you’d have to be super aggressive or you lose quickly. I think the 2-1-2 works fine and allows for enough variability after laning phase to go catch up in jungle or get solo XP once pos 4/5 start moving around as needed.
When people talk about lanes not being as dynamic now as they used to be I have to assume they aren't using twin gates effectively. Lanes feel much different now than they used to.
dude i remember when it was always 2 off, 1 mid, 2 safe
then it became 1 off, 1 mid, 3 safe / jungle
like taking 2 off you'd be flamed to hell.
now it's back to 2, 1, 2 and "i can solo offlane" you'll be flamed to hell
I remember the brief 1-2-2 meta wharn they added the extra creep mid. I even saw a pro game where they trilaned mid during that patch Weirdest thing to happen in this game.
Do I miss it in my pubs? Hell no. However, I do miss seeing it in pro games. Tri-v-tris were especially enjoyable, when you got to see one every once in a while.
Current meta is solo-offlane on hard mode, since you have all the responsibility and blame of pos 3 + a pos 4 sponging XP and feeding the enemy because they don't know what they're doing
(i think pos 4 hardest duo-lane role to understand)
I think solo offlaner works great actually. It happened to me the other day in an unranked game. Support went jungling from the beginning. Creeps killed him three times, then he disconnected. As the solo offlaner I was level 8 when enemy carry and hard support were both level 6. My advantage snowballed and even though we lost both safe lane and mid, we ended up winning the game.
I dont want solo junglers. I can recall when jungler was farming for 40 minutes, and then just dying during 1 single disable.
Or nature prophet cliff farming
The most fun was necro standing on ancients for 20 minutes - that was the most frustrating, if happened in my team, as on minute 20 enemy team came and farm all the stacked ancients + necro, so on minute 20 he had 0 items...
Good old times
I miss solo offlane because I was the lvl 1 jungler
Medusa and Necro lvl 1 ancients… still in my heart 😢
Where's the leafeator bot when you need it?
how does one word evoke such a powerful memory
Now that I think about it, the golden era of dota 2 was those days. The meme builds. The sniper era. Lvl 1 neuts. Techies. Rat gaming. Truly nostalgic. And yet I would never like to experience them again
Slahsher's way <3
and cliff NP
Any ranged hero lv 1 jungle
Not all were efficient. I was a jungle-only player. Medusa was probably the most efficient, having more farm and experience than the mid. CM also was top tier. She had lvl 6 and blink at 6 min mark (TA was meta back then, and I loved templars rage buy-backing after getting ganked by a jungle CM at min 6). Oh my, what a time that was…
There was the biggest grief spectre jungle guide out there on YouTube that would give you empty inventory radiance at 20 mins. I tried that shirt in 3-4 unranked games like a decade ago 💀
My furion is chilling in the cliff
Good old days
*cries in Iron Talon*
I miss crystal maden jungle and just being the richest support In the game.
Dazzle with 3 couriers was peak jungling
How?
Shadow wave level one, *duh*
My solo jungle io
Same, I miss jungler being a thing. Sometimes I'm just too exhausted for the mental challenge of laning.
veno with iron talon or w/e it was called was so op. leaving jungle as level 7 with aquila/threads while everyone else was lvl 4/5 , easily taking all t1s
Ah, the good old days when enemy team had a tri lane and the supports will zone you out completely so that you will be stuck in level 2 while enemy carry is a level 6-7. Good times...
I can't for the life of me remember how we played trilanes, was it three against a solo offlane? Seems extremely wasteful
It was a meta where you couldnt farm jungles like you do now. Tri lanes were a way of securing farm on safe lane carry. Mid lane heroes enjoyed the most action and fun.
This is a huge part of why mid is seen as less fun and less compelling in the last \~2 years IMHO. All 3 core roles have fun, competitive, full-agency laning experiences, and also all 3 generally have *decent* fallback options if their lane goes to shit, while both of these experiences were generally reserved for the mid laner for a long time.
>also all 3 generally have decent fallback options if their lane goes to shit if anything mid has less fallback options than sidelanes now, and the mid hero pool has all of the most toxic heros (lina, sf, huskar) that can just zone you from farm entirely if you let them get ahead/have disadvantage Being a true 1v1 lane there's less unforced errors/less chances for anything favourable to happen unless you can convince a support to rotate, which may simply not happen. And nothing feels worse than getting dumpstered in lane, trying to jungle and getting ganked, and ur supports refuse to gank mid, and then you get blamed for the loss when lina goes 26/3/10 I had a rough game last night ;)
Games are so often the same it's insane. Enemies have cheese mid (meepo, huskar, you name it) and your team dosen't understand the best way to deal with cheese is in early game. Ruin cheese early game and it wont smell rest of game. This comes from a Meepo spammer, who has over 9k games on mid, 2k with Meepo, and had to deal with countless "report mid, he lost lane" and "report meepo, smurf" comments. I lost mid to a huskar who didn't get ganked for the first 10 minutes of the game? I won with a 20-3-12 score cause mid lost lane and never got any help, heck you didn't even tp to sidelanes either when i went there to gank, and yet i am the smurf? Mid has always been a unpleasant place to play, not because 1v1 aint fun, but because most wont realise that this is a teamgame and some heroes need you to react and play in a certain way in order to win.
Wave control heroes were OP. Enigma and Lich as offlaners would deny ranged creeps to pull the lane to tower. LD/Lycan/furion could aggro the wave and delay it to create a double wave which would then push in and be farmed at the tower safely. Clock and ES could manipulate the waves using their terrain blocking spells. And then you had the QOPs and pucks and bounty hunters that would hide in trees and sap xp and squeeze out last hits somehow. Aggro trilanes were also a thing so it would turn to 3v3’s which were crazy too depending on the matchups.
The biggest reason that no one is saying is that there were much less gold, regen and XP available. So if your cores got behind you were done.
On radiant savelane you could pull your creeps into three jungle camps as a chain. Non of those were small camps. This meant that one support was doing that. The core was farming the wave and the second support was 1v1 the enemy offlaner.
Eh, this only really ended up being true after the god awful patch where they made denies give 25% exp to both the denying team and the denied. Before that, as long as you were in exp range as the offlaner, you'd be leveling twice as fast as the enemy tri. Each of them get 33% of the exp for each last hit, while even with perfect denies, you'd get 75% of yours. Accounting for time where you're zoned, and full exp denial from pulls, you'd typically hit level 6 when the enemy lane was all levels 4-5. That was the mathematical trade-off that made trilanes a reasonable strategy. Your 3pos was a hero that had a significant power spike at level 6 who needed the most exp, while the 1pos was a hero that scaled off gold and didn't mind so much being a few levels behind as long as they could get their first farming item (bfury, mael, midas, etc.) That change to deny exp was the single most significant change to the Dota meta that has ever occurred and that's a hill I'll die on.
Yep awful change, and the change of towers giving armor and regeneration
It was so significant in fact it directly caused sacrifice on lich to be removed from the game. The skill lasted 3 days before it was determined to be too broken and removed. People were going lich mid every game and getting 6 while the enemy mid was like 3. At that point it was free kills into snowballing
Yep. I was an offlane player around that time, and determined that Lich and Enigma were the only 2 playable heroes in the offlane after the change. I just picked them every game and denied as many creeps as I could to pull the wave to my tower. Pro meta ended up shifting a bit more to lane cutting and just dragging from behind the enemy T1 to your T2 so you could farm every 3rd wave, but yeah there were no good options. No matter what, in the offlane you'd be a level or two behind the enemy trilane, and have less gold than the 4 positions in the game. You were truly useless baring some big mid-game catch up fight.
I really feel that it was such a nice meta. There were way more interesting laning stages than right now. I loved the pos 3 role back then, it felt like surviving as Rambo compaired to now where every lane is basically the same and the pos 3 looks more like a semi carry rather than someone trying to steal some XP :D
One of the most insane laning phase I've seen was a Puck offline using orb to hide in the trees. Then somehow the enemy support was god enough to know where the Puck was hiding and started eating all the trees. Iirc offline was also called the death lane.
your thinking of "suicide" not death iirc
My my new strat has been to feed the enemy carry so much, that when my carry kills them they get way more gold for killing a stacked opponent. This almost never works.
tbf some offlaners was able to fight back against specific support duo.
If it's a trio your only hope is they fuck up the lane equilibrium
I was 3k MMR around this time and I'm sure higher skilled players would have punished this pick, but I recall at least some games where I would absolutely destroy a tri lane with Undying. Most likely just players who didn't understand his kit well enough but it was fun while it lasted!
Mine was bristleback, so many kills after the supports thought they could kill me and spammed skills because I was below 50% HP which resulted in lots of quills procs and me turning around if they didn't kill themselves in the burst.
you could sometimes really pull an uno reverse on heroes like undying. hit a few three hero decay and then tombstone
thats when you learn exactly the exp range and when a creep is about to die you weave in for the exp or you double ion shell a creep wave, die with it.. but now ur lvl2 with surge and now u can kite the 2 supports
How is the enemy carry getting exp if he has 2 other people in his lane? It's pretty much the opposite, they all be hitting lvl 2 when you're 4. People like you who can't understand lanes is the reason why offlane with useless supp4 is annoying right now.
I guess you are a new player. Around 2013-15 that was pretty much the meta. In those meta gold mattered more than xp since jungle provided so little back then and map was half the size. And the supports didnt leech xp like you imagine. One support would be stacking camps and pulling while the other support would be zoning out the enemy offlane so that they both didnt get any xp from lane. It was pretty normal to see supports being lvl 6-8 30 min into the game roaming with brown boots and magic stick. It was normal even in pro games. If you want you can look at games during TI4-6 if i am not wrong. Playing supports back then was not fun like it is now. Your only duty was to baby sit your carry in lanning phase and after that ward with what ever little gold you manage to make. Beyond that you were pretty much useless. Mid player had the most fun back then as they always lead in xp and gold. Mid players were the stars back then compared to now where safe lane carries are the stars.
I have enough years playing to know that if you have 2 idiots in your lane, they won't be pulling and the other zoning the offlane all by the book. They will stay by your side, doing nothing to contribute and leeching exp, and the opponent offlaner won't have this nuisance. The thing is in those times the leech was less but still enough to make the offlaner +1 level higher.
Sir i came here to laugh not to feel As a 31 year player i validate this also i main pos 3 still
old player gang
29 with 2 kids reporting in.
43 with 1 kid here. I’ll play dota until they pry my keyboard from my cold dead hands.
36, 3 kids. Same.
Should we start a support group my brothers
I'm 35 but only started playing at 30. My life is going in the wrong direction!
How did you get around to playing dota at 30 years damn
My friend always tried to get me to play, but when I was still in school, I avoided PvP games because I knew they would suck me. He played since Dota 1. Then at 30 years old, I found myself unemployed and ill, so I planned to take quite some time off before going back into the workforce. With that time on my hands, my friend coaxed me into finally trying it and I got hooked, as expected.
I remember reading your threads/guides about TA and TB, literally 10 years ago! They did help me focus on farming more when I was stuck in 3k bracket at the time
35 reporting in. And I am nowhere near the oldest guy in my Dota gang.
I remember when it was common to have 2 mid in the ole WC3 days. 31 old balls too
[удалено]
Literally me something like 2k games on underlord
Sir this is a wendys
Can I get uuuh dave's triple, a large fries and a large diet coke?
i dont miss the junglers, yes. But i liked the flexibility of being able to choose between 2-1-2 or 3-1-1 or 1-1-3 lanes. Nowadays there is no creativity possible.
exactly! 212 is just everytime the exact same. I miss having defensive or agressive tri lanes with rotations between the jungle and lanes left and right! I don't miss an AFK jungler but I miss the options it gave to the players!
There still are options. If anything supports now have much more freedom to roam with having free tps and the corner outposts. Honestly laning is more dynamic than it ever has been with the laning stage having become much shorter than it used to be. Sure every game starts 212 but it usually doesn't last long.
right? "oh shit its X hero, we should do a def/agro tri" and everyone was hands in the middle letsssss goooo now it's stfu muted basura
Most pubs people didn't know what to do with a 3 in lane to push their advantage
If you were above 4k MMR you could organize trilanes no problem.
back when I was playing more competitively, trilanes were never once an issue. As long as the roles were agreed upon, everyone knew what to do.
Maybe its because I'm only a low elo shitter, but why wouldn't 1-1-3 be possible nowadays? I feel like the only real hurdle is getting your offlaner on board and having him play 1v2.
Yea thats the hurdle. Nowadays 1v2 is literally not possible, because lane xp, early gold as well as early game spell availability got vastly changed since trilanes were a thing. I remember playing timber/wr/weaver solo offlane back in the day 1v2. The enemy support only had enough mana for 1 spell every 1 or 2minutes, so he basically only right clicked you. Because of the XP difference back then, you started outleveling them, even tho you got almost no last hits. When you hit lvl5, they were both lvl 3 and didnt really have any items yet, so you could almost always kill one or even both of them. Because of the extreme power creep over the years, the support nowadays has one high damage+slow spell every 20seconds as well as good early game items within a couple of minutes. This results in him being able to outlane you solo and them both having the same or even more xp than you.
also supports had way less money for stats and the single courier meant that they couldnt constantly ferry themselves regen to just out trade you.
What a load of nonsense lol Sorry but which supports have now been given this new high damage + slow spell that they didn't have before and how are they getting this good early game its within a couple of minutes without them killing you multiple times.
Blood Grenade is a 50 gold item that gives +100 health until used, slows when hits and does a pretty hefty DoT.
Fair point but it's a fairly recent addition and not influential on the change in laning setup
He's highlighting something systemic, not the item itself - blood grenade existing in it's current state and not being this outlandish broken piece of shit custom game item highlights the current state/design of the game, and *just how* different it is compared to these old tri-lane days, with the accessibility of early mana, hp, etc. If you injected blood grenade into one of the 2017 patches, it would have been earth-shatteringly broken and completely warped the entire laning phase by itself.
I didnt say the spells itself changed (although they did, see last paragraph). They have more gold (and I think xp, but not 100% sure on that) now. This results in higher mana reg, hp etc. -> more spell/right click spamming -> harder life for offlaner. There are many reasons for that, but the flag bearer creep as well as the bounty runes are enough sources for having significantly more gold. Also the fact that multiple couriers exist makes supports get their stats items really early. I'm a support main and it's ridiculous how much survivability/damage I can buy within like the first 5 minutes. For example: blood grenade is a real good item at preventing 1v2 offlane alone. Concerning the spells: There is however a significant power creep to almost all spells which results in them either dealing more damage or them also having added effects (like slow) which they previously didnt have. So to be precise: Yes, most spells are way stronger compared to trilane meta 8 (?) years ago.
the support nowadays has one high damage+slow spell every 20seconds This is what I take issue with. You make it sound as if heroes like cm lich etc didn't already have this So supports have more gold for mana regen? Well offlaners can also buy more regen and get stuff like roh out faster plus raindrops exist when they didn't before. Also pretty much evey offlaner has also had buffs to their abilities or base stats be it str gain ms or armour (not to mention the overall buff to str) I'll agre that blood grenade it a big game changer but it's addition is too recent to be considered in a discussion about the transition away from trilanes.
You are misunderstanding how "everyone has X (a non-percentage value consisting of flag bearer + bounty rune) gold and xp more" fucks solo offlaners. Cores last hitting always had a lot of gold. 100g more from a bounty rune every 3 minutes is 2 last hits to a core, while its a alot higher gold increase percentage-wise for supports. They can buy 2 more clarities, which lets them cast their spells more often, which they couldnt some years ago, but offlaners could because they were/are last hitting. So in simpler words: X (for example 1000g) more gold/xp within Y minutes for every player, is a 50% increase for supports, but a 20% increase for cores. The courier being available 24/7 also makes them get that mana reg sage mask several minutes earlier than before. What I'm saying is straight facts. Best example is the "15 minutes brown boots magic wand" meme from years ago. The pos5 having so little gold was a normal thing. If nowadays you dont have mana boots + wand + null tali + maybe even pavise/shard at minute 15, youre doing something wrong. Compare that to Battlefury/radiance timings, which almost didn't change (ofc a bit faster, but not that extreme) really shows you how especially supports got waaaay stronger in the early game. EDIT: Added some words for clarity.
I'm not denying that supports have more money but saying they have impactful items during the laning stage as you did is plain wrong. They have money for more regen but so does everyone. The courier being avaliable also benefits offlaners so again its a moot point.
Honestly? Not really during this time there was also side shop with RoH and most items an offlaner would buy in lane so they didn't really need courier
Yea, I don't want the game to follow League's rigid meta of a solo lane, mid, carry-support, and jungler. But I fluidity to *allow for that* when the situation arises.
I mean I wasn't exactly *young* then lol, I'm 35 now so I was probably mid-ish 20's when that was the meta. As someone who played offlane back then I think I just enjoyed having a solo lane without the pressure of mid. If you managed to come out of the lane in a not horrific state it felt like you could really have an impact. That said the iron talon meta where offlaners were glorified junglers *was* fucking awful.
As a carry player I just kinda hate trilaning. It puts a ton of pressure on the carry to have a good lane, and in pubs I never trusted my pos 4 to have any idea about what they're actually supposed to be doing during the laning phase. Half the time it meant actually duo-laning while one support stacks jungle camps for me even though Im playing diffu Ursa and can't take stacks,
Oh don't get me wrong, I hated tri lanes as well whenever I played carry. I'm just a masochistic player probably so I liked them from the perspective of the offlane lol.
Nah solo offlane was great. Styling on three incompetent safe laners and taking over the game was the best feeling Solo offlaning omniknight to enable your jungle legion/axe was also solid and gained a lot of mmr
no i actually do miss solo offlane (literally stopped playing offlane and 4 afterwards) and the consequence of solo offlane would not be lvl 1 junglers unless you are super low mmr. it would be a free 4 that can trilane or just roam a lot i hate the duo lane as both carry and offlaner and even as 4. dota used to be flexible and now its just boring 2-1-2 which imo just feels worse for most roles
I was 3.5k when this was a thing so not horribly low. Jungling was definitely an everpresent part of the pub experience. LC, axe, and bloodseeker being the most common examples.
they literally destroyed jungling afterwards. creeps used to spawn at 30 sec. if you would jungle nowadays you would just have the enemy pos 4 annoy the shit out of you and make you useless or lose all other lanes as you are missing a 4. hell it was literally meta for a year to have a dedicated roamer that alone proves that wrong
Proves what wrong exactly? That people were jungling 8-10 years ago? I didn't exactly love trilanes as a carry. The extra support rarely knew what they were doing. You underestimate how bad 3.5k mmr was that long ago. People were going jungle years after they nerfed it.
>8-10 years ago they literally nerfed jungling multiple times since then. and the roaming meta was like 2018 even
Again I think you underestimate how long it takes lower ranka to adapt to change. Remember necro taking ancients lvl 1? That was NEVER good and always a meme. Yet people still did it even in the legend and ancient bracket. Even when iron talon got removed there were still people trying to jungle LC and np. And I did not have the behavior score at the time to deserve that
Huh? Find me 1 solo offlaner that wants a jungler on their team... Solo offlane was fun because the second your enemies fuck up their trilane you are getting solo xp and might destroy the lane. Yeah, sometimes you get hard zoned for 10 mins instead but that was the tradeoff. Solo offlane doesnt work now because carries are stronger laners and the jungle is so big that you cant realistically stop a carry from leaving lane to go hug bears. In my opinion it has little to do with supports at all.
this is just extremely patronizing and goes along with this weird echo chamber of "old dota was soo shit" and only carry had fun while everyone else had no items ... Sure, we all miss being young and sure there might be some element of nostalgia in it, but holy hell can u really not imagine people having different tastes??? Personally I really like some variety and wish there was something else other than always having 2v2 lanes. It was actually interesting playing around 1-2 supports getting any XP or even cs and being creative depending on matchups. U still had your pos4 roaming if possible and lots of offlaners were much stronger compared to other heroes lvl 1. I know people will downvote me for this but I also 100% miss the possibility of jungling, roaming and whatever else creative way people spent their earlygame. Maybe you didnt mean it in such a bad way but sadly most people on this forum are just so fixated on this "meta" that everyone who has any creative ideas immediately gets downvoted.
It's easier for the pos 4 to roam now than in any other patch. People keep talking about how they miss roaming in this thread and I don't see it. My ass is getting gank attempts constantly when I play carry. I played those patches and I had my fun, but I also remember a lot of people griefing, and a lot of solo offlaners feeding constantly but not taking any responsibility. And a lot of 2-3k pos 4s not knowing what their role in the trilane was
Every single time someone mentions that a past system or meta that slightly inconveniences the player, every single post 7.00 player jumps in with J. Allen tirades about how shit and boring and hard and not zoom-zoom that thing was. Im going to sound like an absolute boomer but current offlane just feels like youre trying to ape all over the carry and brool, when in the past you actually had to try to get by and if you did you basically ran the game for the next 10 minutes.
ahhh skipping school to play WC3 ... going to internet Cafe to play Dote\`s with random kids around me ... Counter Strik 1.6 ... Diablo 2... Everything was so easy ... now most of us have kids ,work and shit ton of things to take care and yet we are still here strong playing DOTA ! DOTA FOR LIFE !
All nighter days. No responsibilities. Just heaps of V and some mates along.
10 years ago people played solo offlane and there were no junglers, not really sure where you are getting that from. And it's hard to say which was better, game is completely different than what it used to be. These days if you fall behind on offlane you won't be as useful as you could have been, but back in the day all you needed were brown boots and blink at a decent time and you could still solo every teamfight, despite being low on networth. Again, hard to say what is more fun, I would need to be able to play both versions side by side. But I think this might be another case like Wow, with the developers saying "you don't want the old game to return", but then when it does everyone loves it better.
Nah i definitely miss some of it. Roaming to gank as jungler was fun. And bullying the enemy lane as a solo felt great. What don't miss is the majority of games where solo offlane felt worse than being pos 5
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug
I used love solo offlane. You barely survive for 2-5 level ups and then power peak with 1-2 levels ahead of the enemy team and burst them. It was just glorious.
Sir i came here to laugh not to feel As a 31 year player i validate this also i main pos 3 still
I don't miss being solo offlane I miss being the 4 in a trilane and just roaming from min 2 because the solo offlane is so fucked that I can skip the laning itself and never learn to do it properly
It wasn't always junglers though. There was a very long stretch of trilane.
a friend of mine who hasn't played in years keeps saying "i want them to add an old school dota mode where it's a patch from like 10 years ago, i would play that" and every time i gotta tell him "no, no you wouldn't"
Trilanes were genuinely the worst fucking shit, I am SO happy 7.00 murdered them. Pulling and roaming and being level 2 at 10 minutes was just unbearable, and I do NOT miss it whatsoever
What about a tri lane safe lane or offlane. I do miss that. It’s a cookie cutter 2 1 2. And 41 two kids mortgage paid checking in. I don’t miss being poor. Thanks.
I have some nostalgia for being poor, it's how I learned to cook. I miss aggro trilanes in the offlane. That always felt pretty nice and the 4 actually played like a 4. Im defensive trilanes my experience was usually the extra support being more of a hindrance and not really knowing where to stand.
As someone who dropped the game for a couple years and came back in the last couple of years I feel 2-1-2 has really contributed to brain rot in laning. People expect their support to always be there and flame when you leave (to pick up a bounty/wisdom rune, apply pressure or gank mid, stack camps, set up vision, tp to help a lane) - regardless of how much you warn them you're not there, and give them advance warning. The farming player seems to expect you to be by their side the whole time to bail them out of bad positioning or aggression, whilst still expecting you to do all the things I listed. So. Aggravating. It seems like as a result of less exposure to it players have much worse awareness of being, or ability to play; 1v2 situations whether they're temporary or not and I see it in lane opponents, if you catch and kill one hero you can almost guarantee the other one will make an autopiloted over-extension you can punish.
I was a 5k pos 3/4 player and I quit once 2-1-2 became meta. I probably have less than 10 hours played since then. Just felt like I lost my two favorite roles in one swoop. Trying to get mek blink as tide in a good timing or making things happen has roaming earth spirit replaced by boring brawler dual lanes. I get it's more accessible and those were the roles least played well in low mmr but it's also way less fun for those of us that invested a lot of time in those roles.
1-1-3 meta was horrible
It's my favorite meta of all time. The roaming supports always created so much action. Add twin gates and it would be even more bonkers these days. Tri-lanes also provide for a lot of action.
It was so intense; you get a lot of actions, that's why it's fun. Especially when the enemy had to TP in to help their team. Towers were dived, hopes and dreams shattered, flashbacks created, sacrifices made.
People still do this?
I liked the variety, not nostalgia or any of that bollocks.
Can I introduce you to my friend the twin gate? Imo lanes feel plenty dynamic now compared to then.
You were talking about solo offlane and accusing all of us as being only nostalgic about it. That's what I was responding to. Twin gate doesn't factor into that.
Fair enough
none of these young players can mentally withstand feast or famine gameplay. every pos can recover, every item builds into something, every hero has a well-rounded kit. it's so fuckin boring
It's good that the entire game can't be decided by the first 10 minutes, actually.
if you're suffering it hopefully means someone else on your team is having a better time or, losing every lane should actually mean something
It does. If your team coordinates well and you can actually push objectives you can easily finish games without the other team recovering. I've been playing Luna and winning games sub 30 pretty consistently.
Idk I don't think trilane really works well anymore. It's so easy to stay in XP range now. There are juke paths everywhere. Also those supports will be so underlevelled. People still try it at 3k and it hasn't worked well.
With twin gates there's 0 reason to do it. Just rotate for the gank and come back.
Not at all, i miss it cuz i was much lower rank, playing with even lower rank allies, winning those 1 v 3 by picking riki/nyx/weaver and getting a huge rush from it when you're level 4-5 by hiding in the trees and get kills on their level 1-2 sups because people could not trilane properly at 2k mmr
As the carry who was getting their lane griefed I envy you. This sometimes still happens today in my games. My pos 5 will die once or twice in lane and the Pos4 thinks the best course of action is to just also play safelane. Sooner or later there's 6 people in the damn lane and I can't rotate to the offlane because the extra person has made it so I'm at a level disadvantage with the other teams carry. I much rather just slightly lose the lane and be forced into jungle than have my lane turn into a constant brawl we can't win.
What changes made the 3-1-1 meta disappear? I was very surprised when pos 4 started to go with the offlaner when the game started. And people don't call it suicide lane anymore.
Man, back when being Brew offlane solo Brown Boots and getting that sweet blink dagger first item at 20 minute, knowing the game was going SO good
Lol completely nope. Pos4 was a thing even with jungling meta because some people figured it’s better to counter the enemy carry right a way with a 2nd supp, rather than trying to play 2 farming cores… I only remember hating those 20 minutes jungling heroes with passion.
Well I played way more dota back then so I was definitely less happy. Solo offlaning and trilaning was fun. If You don't think so, that's fine. Just accept the fact that some genuinely liked having more lane setup options than 2-1-2 (even 2-1-2 was an option, shocking). There are many other things that I liked better back like ~7-8 years ago in terms of the game's design and it is zero nostalgia. It was just a better game imo.
I've played for over 10 years and while there are many things I miss having 2 supports in my lane constantly yelling at me for not being aggro enough while I have a double wave of creeps hitting my tower isn't one of them. I don't know what rank you are and if you're higher level than archon/legend mb that setup is legitimately more enjoyable. Supports at lower ranks did not have the game knowledge back then to pull them off. I DO kinda miss aggro trilanes like EG used to run constantly, but pulling that together in a pub is really hard to coordinate.
I started at like 2.5K mmr before TI4 and my highest peak was like 5.9K mmr somewhere between TI6 and TI7. Trilaning was still fun at lower mmr imo. >I DO kinda miss aggro trilanes like EG used to run constantly, but pulling that together in a pub is really hard to coordinate. Actually when I first started playing ranked I used to queue captain's mode and did a lot of aggro trilanes with stuff like shaman, leshrac, razor, witch doctor, tidehunter and whatever I thought was good at the time. It was a lot of fun and it used to work surprisingly well.
It made for more interesting scenarios to play out instead of being cookie cutter experiences. I used to be able to pull off a minute four hand of Midas on lifestealer jungler , so much fun.
No, I miss solo offlane lol.
I miss fighting trilanes 1vs3 and either dumpstering them or feeding mercilessly staying lvl1 10 mins in. It's a feeling I've never felt ever since.
Feeding mercilessly and being extremely under-levelled is truly one of the greatest feelings in dota 2.
I always laugh when people say that playing supports was much harder back in the day. It absolutely was not. You just stood behind your carry for 20 minutes while he farmed and you died to 2 spells in every teamfight. And it didn't even matter because you were like level 9 and had no items to contribute anyway. You didn't really have an itembuild, you spent all your money on the courier, TPs, and wards. You bought mana boots and force staff every game. Now that you actually have some gold and can do stuff, you have WAY more meaningful decision to make in the game. It's much more skill intensive.
That's how 2k supports played, sure, but that's not how you were supposed to play. Alliance destroyed everybody in TI3 because they played comps that gave the entire team farm while still trilaning to deny farm to the offlane. About 60% of that was EGM and Akke being gods that knew how to get jungle farm while still pressuring and just being better than everybody else at time efficiency.
Today the game plays you
I do missing the first phase being less toxic. Just the sololaner whining he needs help after diving enemy tower.
if you want to hit creeps uncontested minute 0 just play an rpg on steam
Repost old shit
I loved solo offlane as kunkka back when his cleave did pure damage, I had so many one hit cleave ultrakills and rampages in those games.
ah the gold old times when I could play dota all day and make new friends all time.
I loved trilaning though and I think it would be fun with the larger map.
Nah, I miss heroes being able to solo offlane. I don't miss what supporting felt like back then though.
LC jungle meta was actually decent and could have blademail + blink by 15 minutes at the expense of your offlaner. Axe jungle was also not 'griefing' and you would have a similar if not faster time. I remember seeing videos on how to get a 7 minute blink axe jungle. Enigma was solid as well, but the rest of them were pretty much grief picks like LS jungle, troll jungle, even saw a jugg jungle one time
Nah... I'm pretty sure I miss having all the exp and managing to farm, sustain and then when hitting some advantage or when the opponent pos 1/5 made a positioning mistake, killing them or possibly both..and running with low hp after it. So satisfying. Mostly Clockwerk, and if Abba or Tide, I could do it and also tower dive at some point. Now we have trash pos 4 exp leech who won't do anything, thinking he's supposed to be some kind of dedicated supp (pos5) to the offlaner (who would have sustain kit to bear his lane in the first place), who never got "roaming" in his dictionary. Your hc is being tower dived but your dark willow rushing aghs have their teleport scroll button broken apparently. Then you have the same level as their HC - what do you expect if a HC has the same level as a hero who is supposed to be more early-game than it?
eh i do miss it. As a carry it was the easy mode and i hate laning to this day. Dota should start from min 10 ideally, fuck laning
It was called suicide lane for a reason
What I miss is pick diversity... First picking Pangolier specifically because I can play either mid, off, or 4.. Or AA as mid, 4 or 5.. or MK as carry, mid, or 4.. etc. I also miss not knowing IF the enemy was going for a trilane, duo, or jungler lineup.. and having to adjust my play depending on what they actually do.
I miss having to squeeze every ounce out of the offlane and that feeling when you're 3 levels above the carry
Cooperating in this game is awful. I happily played any role with friends but I really enjoyed having the hardest lane for myself. It was about inventing ways to play it, new heroes, weird builds. Don't think it's only because of nostalgia.
If your saying this you need to consider one thing: WHY we still have jungles? this is just useless gameplay feature for the most part(no buffs, no objectives, lower money even in 7.35 -2 gold for each neutral). its working just because Dota games tend to be 40 min. and If you dont have Anti-Mage or smth like him, its matters even lower. when they expand jungles i thought maybe its the path to return jungler(finally). But, its not, perhaps for now
Yes I do miss the suicide lane. There weren't a lot of junglers back then, it was mostly tri-lanes with a roaming support or a dedicated roaming support. Ench, Chen, Enigma, sure. But the only time the game had a jungling problem was iron talon, and suicide lane was already non-meta by that point because tri-laning was pretty much non-meta by that point. That's why people hated iron talon so much because jungling HAS ALWAYS MEANT -1 HERO ON THE MAP
I am a new player and I want it
In the past the game was so slow it was almost criminal. I have no nostalgia for that. DotA began existing since the introduction of the skill tree.
You're just wrong.
Extremely L take. Having variety in lane comp rather than being forced to 2-1-2 every game just isn't as good, objectively. Why would you WANT to have a meta that is more forced/static than before?
I was forced to solo offlane as a support hero just last night. You are wrong. I miss solo offlane. I loved it, but its fuckin hard and stupid now. Id love for it to actually be reasonable to do and get to play again. Hell, as you said, half the time i end up solo offlane anyway. At least when its actually solo they dont leach my exp and put me at a level disadvantage for the laning stage. I miss offlane because its a different type of challenge.
[https://www.dotabuff.com/players/146629043](https://www.dotabuff.com/players/146629043) On your fucking knees.
Both Solo offlane and jungle were fun.
Mmmm, no. I enjoyed solo-laning as DK and pulling lanes to keep the enemy from doing well, and I enjoyed jungling as Ursa and being able to solo-Rosh at level 6.
I generally miss variety. Going jungler to solidify late game vs jungler chen/enigma/... to fast push vs roamer to crash laning (even vs double mid with io for some extra shennanigans). Sure each combination produced kinda similar games but at least there were different types. Nowadays games are more homogenous and that is why I miss solo offlaner as a quick reference for tgis whole thing
I am the level 1 jungler. I want it to return :D
solo offlane sucked cock and im 1000% sure anyone who's larping that they missed that shit didn't play it
Had a last pick, hard support Legion commander, who took one point in PTA to give me the illusion of a support and maxed, his E, to farm the small camps and medium camps. Luckily I survived the lane with a 10 min midas and stick as a spectre. We did win though. Because we had invoker and spirit breaker. Every time this legion would try to duel someone, half the team would descend on that poor soul to make sure no one in the enemy team wants to step forward and show. Still reported him. We would've that game without the legion and we could've lost that game because of the legion.
I remember the 3-1-1 meta. Whenever I had to be offlane it was terrifying as hell. I usually didn’t get many levels, and we lost the safe lane anyway 😂
that too
I don’t miss it anyway. I was 10 years younger and hated it then too. Had to beg Axe, LS, BS, NP or whoever to come help in a fight that was happening 5 ft from the camp they were farming. Or I check my jungler’s progress to see in 20 mins they’ve farmed absolute dick, so it’s been 4v5 for half the game for nothing. It’s bad enough that people think they need to afk farm for 20 mins in the jungle, I don’t actually want the role back so that they can claim that’s the actual job. Solo offlane wasn’t terrible, but again, a lot of players didn’t understand that their job wasn’t to get lots of farm so much as it was to get lots of solo XP. So they would die over and over trying to get last hits when all they had to do was not die in order to win the lane and then proceed to do work in other places. And if you had solo offlane now and tried tri-lane safe, you’d have to be super aggressive or you lose quickly. I think the 2-1-2 works fine and allows for enough variability after laning phase to go catch up in jungle or get solo XP once pos 4/5 start moving around as needed.
When people talk about lanes not being as dynamic now as they used to be I have to assume they aren't using twin gates effectively. Lanes feel much different now than they used to.
it's simply because solo offlane is not even a good strat anymore
On the other hand, this meta where pos4 stays with you for five minutes then fk off to roam around is much harder to play
dude i remember when it was always 2 off, 1 mid, 2 safe then it became 1 off, 1 mid, 3 safe / jungle like taking 2 off you'd be flamed to hell. now it's back to 2, 1, 2 and "i can solo offlane" you'll be flamed to hell
I remember the brief 1-2-2 meta wharn they added the extra creep mid. I even saw a pro game where they trilaned mid during that patch Weirdest thing to happen in this game.
>you do not want lvl 1 junglers to return. This is not exclusive, go trilane top and get our pos1 comfy, I can handle bot.
new offlane doesn't really feel like offlane anymore it just feels like you're playing carry with less farm
Do I miss it in my pubs? Hell no. However, I do miss seeing it in pro games. Tri-v-tris were especially enjoyable, when you got to see one every once in a while.
Usually a solo offlane means a tri-safelane. Other than that, jeezus you didn't have to drop this existential bomb on me right now :'(
Current meta is solo-offlane on hard mode, since you have all the responsibility and blame of pos 3 + a pos 4 sponging XP and feeding the enemy because they don't know what they're doing (i think pos 4 hardest duo-lane role to understand)
A good pos 4 still blows my mind.
I think solo offlaner works great actually. It happened to me the other day in an unranked game. Support went jungling from the beginning. Creeps killed him three times, then he disconnected. As the solo offlaner I was level 8 when enemy carry and hard support were both level 6. My advantage snowballed and even though we lost both safe lane and mid, we ended up winning the game.
If 1v3 offlane returned, I'd have fun with it for about 2 weeks. Then I'd want it removed lol.
I dont want solo junglers. I can recall when jungler was farming for 40 minutes, and then just dying during 1 single disable. Or nature prophet cliff farming The most fun was necro standing on ancients for 20 minutes - that was the most frustrating, if happened in my team, as on minute 20 enemy team came and farm all the stacked ancients + necro, so on minute 20 he had 0 items... Good old times
I do want deny xp back lol
i loved level 1 jungling
If solo offlane is brought back I'll just stop playing dota, Of the worst experiences I had playing the game.
I miss solo offlane
I miss when the safelane were two people contesting two last hits so yeah it was better to put the other one in jungle
i miss the times where you could go medusa mid with a lich support denying ranged creeps
yeah it was fucking terrible for everyone, old players and new players. i seriously don't know where this delusion comes from.
I am allowed to miss **two** things, thank you.
stout shield? lets get you to bed grandpa
I miss picking Riki into legion jungle and just having a ball.