Dota 2 – Why you should be playing instead of League of Legends

Guide for Dota 2 – Why you should be playing instead of League of Legends

Why people ask the question "should i just play _____ "

It’s one of the most common asked questions amongst PC MOBA players: 
 
Should I play Dota 2 or League of Legends  
 
The games are extremely similar, one made by www.riotgames.com – https://www.riotgames.com/en in 2009, and now owned by Father Company www.tencent.com – https://www.tencent.com/en-us/about.html, another developed and published by Valve in 2013 on the gaming platform Steam. 
 
The main reasons why people ask the question "should I just play Dota 2" as a league of legends player or vice versa is primarily due to the similarities between the games. Throughout this guide I’m going to go in-depth as to the similarities between the two MOBA giants and explain why I believe Dota 2 is not only the better e-sports game but a better game-experience overall for Steam users. 
 

The similarities between Dota 2 and League of Legends

The similarities between Dota 2 and League of Legends (LoL) are apparent from the beginning. The similarities include: 

• Traditional ‘Ma*sive Online Battle Arena’ (MOBA) style 
• Ma*sive E-Sports Event 
• 100+ champions / heroes to play 
• Immensely popular in China / Korea 
• Skins / Cosmetic system 
• 5 vs 5 format 
• Jungle Monsters 
• Large / Legendary monsters (Roshan vs Baron) 
• 3 lanes with towers protecting 
• Game ends when Base is destroyed (Ancients vs Nexus)

 
As you can see from the dot points above there are easily more than 10 similarities between the two giants of the e-sports scene so it’s totally understandable for both Dota and LoL players to reconsider which game they’d like to invest their time and money :/ into. From here on in I’ll be going slightly more in-depth into each dot point specifically so if you don’t need any more information, or you’d rather not do the reading, I’ll be including a TL;DR at the bottom. 
 

Traditional ‘Ma*sive Online Battle Arena’ (MOBA) style

 
MOBA or ‘Ma*sive Online Battle Arena’ is defined as "a subgenre of strategy video games in which two teams of players compete against each other on a predefined battlefield. Each player controls a single character with a set of unique abilities that improve over the course of a game". 
 
MOBA’s are a subgenre of the Real-time Strategy genre of games and the first MOBA is widely considered to be Aeon of Strife, a fan-made mod of Starcraft released sometime post 1998. 
 
MOBA’s are considered to be one of, if not, the most complicated and complex forms of competitive gaming genre equal to that of RTS giants such as Starcraft. 
 

Ma*sive E-Sports Event

 
E-Sports, meaning Electronic Sports, are competitive games played in a similar way to that of professional sports played by E-Athletes or Professional Players for organisations for prize pools and sponsorship. As of 28th December 2020 (28/12/2020 or 12/28/2020), Dota 2 remains the highest prize pool for any E-Sports Event at $34,330,069.00 (2,706,119,184.03 ¥ or 170,819,750.85 元) won by OG. 
 
 

100+ Champions / Heroes to play

 
As it stands Dota 2 has 120 heroes to League of Legends’ 153 champions. The majority of Dotas heroes are pre-existing character designs from Defence of the Ancients while some such as Monkey King, Pangolier, Dark Willow, Grimstroke and Mars are entirely new designs not found in the original version of DotA. As of making this guide Pudge is the most played Hero with over 4 million games played in the last month, a 29.7% pick ration averaging more than once every 4 games, a 2.22 KDA ratio and 50.22% win rate. Below are the top 15 most played heroes in Dota 2 according to Dotabuff . com 
 
 

Immensely popular in China / Korea

 
Although slightly different geographically both Dota 2 and League of Legends are immensely popular amongst Eastern Asian players with over 500 Chinese E-Sports players dedicating their lives to being the best in Dota and Korean teams such as SKT T1 dominating the league of legends pro scene. Although it’s apparent by the results of the 2019 International, (referenced above) that unlike the LoL pro scene it’s much more balanced regionally rather than being dominated by an Asian powerhouse team but China still conquers in regards to gross earning with $65,220,642.81 across 555 players ($117514.68 average prize money per player or 585,160.82 Chinese Yuan). 
 
Furthermore, the best Dota 2 player at the moment is Johan "N0tail" Sundstein one of the core roster of the 2019 international championship champions and a total prize money earning, across 125 tournaments, of $6,969,737.80 . 
 
 

Skins / Cosmetic System

 
Both games possess a system to style your favourite champion or hero to your liking. Cosmetics are purely for aesthetic and "do not affect the game in any way, shape or form" although this can be argued upon in some cases. At the moment, the most expensive cosmetic item on the market is the "unusual platinum baby roshan" which sits at just under $2.5k with a buy order of just over $1.9k 
 
 
 
 

5 vs 5 format

 
This one is extremely self-explanatory and I won’t elaborate any more than this; there are 5 players on one team and 5 players on the other team. Each player attempts to work together to win the game although that doesn’t always go as planned. 
 

Jungle Monsters

 
Jungle Monsters are non-playable characters that provide gold or similar materials upon defeat. Generally speaking one player is a*signed the role of clearing through these camps and is known as a jungler although this may differ in Dota. Jungle camps respawn after a certain amount of time and may provide buffs. 
 

Large / Legendary Monsters (Roshan vs Baron Nashor)

 
Both Dota and League of Legends have a legendary monster that provides immense benefits to the team that slay it. For Dota 2 that creature is Roshan and for League of Legends that creature is Baron Nashor In case you didn’t notice Nashor was actually named after Defence of the Ancients’ Roshan 
 
 
 
 

3 lanes with towers protecting

 
This is another one I won’t be going into much detail with because it’s kind of obvious what this means. 
 
3 lanes. 
 
Towers protect base. 
 
Lanes have towers. 
 

Game ends when base is destroyed

 
As previously mentioned throughout this guide standard mobas follow the pattern of each lane being pushed to a point where the opponents base is exposes and susceptible to damage; for league of legends this is called the nexus and for Dota 2 this is referred to as Ancients (hence the name Defence of the Ancients how clever). 
 

Why I consider Dota 2 to be the better game

As someone who’s spent the last 5 years playing league of legends for 10s of hours per week and recently transitioned into Dota 2 I think my judgement in comparing them is quite good. I’d like to make it clear my knowledge of Dota 2 is extremely limited but doesn’t affect my opinion as to why I believe Dota 2 is the better game. 
 
I am not going to rip into League of Legends and call it trash, waste of time, pathetic rip off etc. because at the end of the day it is not; it stands tall and competes with Dota in almost every regard and remains as one of, if not, the most played game in the world. I am going to make it clear what I enjoy more about Dota. 
 
Dota, in my personal opinion, is the more polished e-sport MOBA; It provides numerous resources to improve long before Riot took the initiative to implement similar devices. The characters don’t feel cluttered and rushed but well-thought and clearly well designed. Furthermore having an offline feature is definitely a ma*sive bonus as people with inconsistent internet or waiting for friends can still enjoy a game by themselves without investing their time into either a guaranteed loss cause of lag or 30 min waiting to finish a game they don’t want to play anymore. The icing on an already delicious cake is how steam funds and your skins / cosmetics will transfer over; purchasing skins through Riot cannot be sold and used to buy for other games such as Valorant or Team Fight Tactics while, through the Steam Client, you are able to sell those skins or cosmetics if you lose pa*sion in the game and invest them into trading cards, cosmetics for other games or Paypal. 
 
At the end of the day, Valve and Steam are more accommodating to the average player using their platform. 
 

TL;DR

Dota is good 
 
league of legends is also good 
 
Dota is just better 
 

This is all that we can say about Dota 2 – Why you should be playing instead of League of Legends for now. I hope this post helped you. If there is anything that we should add, please let us know via comment below. See you soon!