The main Dota sub doesn't want to post my thread for some reason ("pending moderation" ad infinitum), so I was wondering if I can get some objective opinions here from people who have played both games.
So anways, that friend of mine has around 3k hours in both games, while I'm mostly a fan of Dota with 150h of playtime and ~ 1-2k hours of watch time (been watching on and off some tournaments since the first TI).
His main argument is solely because LoL has more "skill shots" it is by definition a harder game to play and master than Dota (because of "point and click" spells, as he says, in Dota).
His 2nd argument which rubs me the wrong way even more is that given that Dota has more RNG than LoL it's difficult to even consider Dota a serious eSport? (rune spawns, uphill miss chance, spell and physical hit damage spread and other rng). As if RNG should disqualify it from being an eSport...
I said it's part of the tradition, WC3 has RNG, so Dota 1 had the same mechanics (day/night cycle, uphill miss chance, damage spread etc), so therefore Dota 2 respects its ancestry and it has adopted that RNG as part of the tradition.
Is my friend correct on these 2 points ? I don't know what to say to him given I have only a few hours of playtime on LoL, and therefore can't have an objective opinion.
I think anyone who argues about the 'difficulty' of competitive games is inherently taking a flawed stance.
Look at chess, it's very simple and nothing about it is particularly 'hard.' However, to become a high ranking chess player requires an insane amount of hours and is not at all easy.
Is this because chess is hard? No, it's because competitive games are about Player vs Player. The difficulty is determined by the playerbase, not the game itself.
As long as a game has enough complexity and variables to allow a significant amount of min-maxxing and psychological battles, then the main difficulty will always be with how good the players you face are, not how 'hard' the game is.
Just make chess with skillshots and it will be the world's hardest game!
Thats just starcraft 2
Wait, there are skillshots there?
There are some, like Ravagers for zerg.
You know what competitive game surprises with its skill shots though? Magic the Gathering!
Or its cousin, Chaos Confetti
Damn.
I haven't yet dived into MTG deeper than "a card game with very diverse possibilities haha".
I'm starting to be afraid that's not something I can just pick up casually...
So, it really depends on what you want to do. If you're looking to play competitively there are a number of formats, all of which have a ton of resources on how to play the format and the decks within. Things can get complicated, just look up the modern amulet titan primer, but there are simpler decks and formats.
Now if you just want to play casually you'll probably end up playing commander. It's a four player free-for-all and is mainly played for fun. There is a competitive subsection called cedh but it is quite niche. If that's the direction you want to got I'd pick up a precon and see if you like. It's also usually pretty easy to find games in paper because it is the most popular format. That being said, I would probably not recommend edh as how you learn the game. There is a very small banned list, which means there are over 30 years of cards that can show up and interact in strange and niche ways that won't be easy for a new player to understand, see layers. Also, people can be weird and make bad or illogical plays because it's a "casual" format and you will, at some point, have to deal with some social faux pas or unwritten rule.
Lots of players will tell you cube or limited is the best way to play the game but that requires deck building knowledge which a new player will not have. Others, including wotc, the makers of the game, will tell you to play standard as it is the "beginner" format but, it's in a very weird place right now and not a great jumping in point imo. I'd personally recommend pauper. It's cheap, competitive and has a wide card pool. It's a bit slower as well which makes it a bit easier to learn. It is a niche format, and it is a community run format, wotc does not have any direct involvement with it. So, it can be a bit harder to find paper games but people are always online on mtgo and its has plenty of events too. It is slightly more popular in eu than na as well.
Anyways, that a lotta words. Biggest take away I can give you: play in paper. Go to a shop and meet people. It is Magic: "The Gathering". The gathering is just as important as the magic.
Yes some units have spells you need to aim
There are a few yes but not that many tbf
Yes though it's more of placing AoE circles kind of skillshots rather than firing a projectile in a line from a character from what I remember.
Storm, EMP, forcefields to name a few
Bobby Fischer tried to introduce “skill shots” into chess but it was met with “resistance.”
I do love watching Fisher chess tournaments. There not many of them but they are good.
Magnus did what Fischer couldn't do. Now we have freestyle chess.
I think that's called curling.
Fps chess is in fact a game that exists
Chess Boxing has this covered, and it truly does sound like a hard ass game.
Someone is actually making this, I saw a dev progress video a few days ago but I can't remember the name of the game.
There's a game called chess arena I think on steam that is chess as a battle royale... kinda getting close to this.
This is always my favourite argument. Chess is easier than LoL, yet you could argue top chess players demonstrate more complex play than top league players.
I play both, below average at both lol.
Sure, complex mental play, but LoL isn't just about mental play. The physical aspect is entirely missing in chess. You could play chess with your anal sphincter if you were forced to and not lose your skill (and some pros tried a variation of this and got caught). You just can't compare the two.
Meanwhile the goated ChessBoxing
In lol your not playing with perfect information like they do in chess and the pieces and boards remain the same. Chess grand masters require huge amounts of study to learn multiple lines and best moves sometimes 20+ moves long. It often relies on blunders by an opponent than just finding some insane move.
Lol complexity comes from team comps, item builds plus the hidden information like runes and wards. Then you need someone whose able to see what all the other lanes are doing to be able to push advantage or answer set ups. If league had no FoW it would be a significantly easier game
„You could argue“
I mean, COULD?
I mean even then it depends on what you mean about complex. A classical chess player would probably fry their brain with the pace of league. Its a lot to track while making mechanics.
Difficulty just cant really be compared 1 to 1 between most things honestly
Correct but You could argue that rts pros like SC2 combine both sides in this example
I agree with that. Even the macro in SC2 needed a high APM. Piano skills.
Just on different level
Freestyle avantgarde improv jazz is the hardest game!
When playing Dota I noticed I'd "Intuit" a lot of plays and from watching grandmasters play speed chess there seems to be a lot going on in terms of intuition too after some point.
So I think rating complexity is inherently flawed from the get go...
For example : id look at two lineups and determine in a split second which team I think has better odds of winning, at that point I wouldn't even be able to tell you the exact roster of both teams. The same way some plays would feel inherently flawed and the same way I'd retreat while laning because the "semi random" movement pattern of my opponent skipped a beat just to see a very sad enemy support slump out from behind the trees a couple seconds later.
At the same time there's loads of active "reasoning" going on too which can be learned too but requires actual mental capacity and feels "hard" like deciding bans while picking trying to determine wether straight farming continuing ganking or trying to finish off the match is correct.
Definitely could, top chess players make moves that are unfathomable to the average player. However, the skill set is very different. While top chess moves are very complex, chess is simple enough that computers now consistently beat humans while the opposite is true for league. In a way, league is more complex that advanced human gameplay could not be replicated by a computer at this time.
You've touched on a very fascinating idea here imo. Chess has lower computational complexity than League for a variety of reasons. There's a finite amount of pieces and the game is turn-based so time is essentially discrete. Despite the inconceivably large number of possible board states, the next board state is determined by the previous one and computers can crunch several lines at rapid pace to identify the best play based on predicted outcome. On the other hand, League has 10 players simultaneously interacting with the game in real-time, and time is continuous - a juke could be ineffective if it's just 5ms off.
This "state space explosion" means that computers can't play League anywhere near as well as they can play chess. Scripts have been used before to simplify mechanical ideas, e.g. hit and dodge every skillshot. But then the macro layer is something else to try and solve.
To get to the point, I think it's an interesting comparison of computational complexity vs. strategic complexity. I think LoL is more computationally complex than chess any day, but I think chess is the more strategically complex game. I'd hazard a guess that computers don't play League very well because efforts to make Leaguebots pale in comparison to efforts to make chess engines, which had major funding for a long time. Maybe one day we'll see an AI team winning Worlds lol
We don’t see league AI partly because riot doesn’t allow direct access to the game (e.g. how scripts work). Imagine chess had to use computer vision to view the chess board and figure out where the pieces are. We can do that now but not so much when the first chess engines came out.
Elon has claimed he wants to make Grok do exactly that this year, using computer vision to see the screen and send keyboard inputs to play. It will be quite interesting to see if it works and to what level.
I think computers already do a pretty good job of playing league, lol. i think if they released an “expert” or “challenger” mode of the bots mode it would consistently win against a lot of players. even the intermediate bots have decent macro. i don’t think it would be very hard at all to have an AI analyze a bunch of T1 games and then emulate that
You don't even have to go that far to prove this. While it wasn't LoL, there was already an AI model that was trained on high level Dota gameplay and the world champions couldn't beat it.
https://openai.com/index/openai-five-defeats-dota-2-world-champions/
There were lots of restrictions in place though, both for hero choice and game mechanics. It was not the real game being played. Also, while OG "lost", other more mechanical (meaning stronger laners) teams did manage to consistently beat the OpenAI bots. I played against it a few times as a low immortal back then and they were good though, like scary good lmao. Most of the player base would get gutted by them.
It was also over 6 years ago, if made today it would absolutely be unbeatable by any humans regardless of restrictions. Chess engines have had magnitudes more development efforts than moba AI's.
If OpenAI put full resources it would probably be insane though (however there is no financial incentive for this). Micro heroes were also banned if you remember, as AI would be overpowered with them. Chess engines are a completely different architecture, more akin to brute force than neural networks. Still cool though!
just fwiw ian nepomniatchi was a literal semi pro dota player in 2011 and most of this line of thinking is nonsense and mostly just tries to downplay two things.
1: how important foresight is in league.
and 2: the fact that computers are... not trained to play league? what do you even mean that players consistently beat computers at it? AI if properly trained absolutely could compete with and likely beat humans.
did you see what open AI did in dota years back? and that was YEARS ago. it would take them time but ultimately computers learn faster than humans and no one is willing to waste the money and computational power to do it.
A computer can easily win a professional player in chess every time but it doesn't understand nor can it write jokes.
So do you think writing a simple joke is more difficult than playing on the level of Magnus Carlsen?
Saying something is difficult or easy for humans because a machine can do it is an incredibly flawed argument...
Computers could very likely defeat human players if a competent team actually developed an AI to play the game. OpenAI back in the day when they were just a research company developed a dota2 AI that actually crushed the TI winners of that year. And if I remember, something similar happened with SC2 too.
I could argue that a sphere is round.
Yes. GMs have stated before chess is lots of pattern recognition, so with enough games you can theoretically get better than the top 1% of chess players (obviously same thing applies for league or anything else ITW) but league has so many variables which are constantly changing patch by patch year by year I’d argue the sheer amounts of extra factors that needs to be taken into consideration, especially for an imperfect information game all in real time makes it more complex. This doesn’t mean chess isn’t complex btw.
Yeah I've never understood these debates. As long as the skill ceiling of a game cannot be reached, then every game is as hard as any other competitively.
I don't think this is true. The more players a game has the more competitive it is, within reason. As a hypothetical using arbitrary numbers: league is 10x bigger than Dota. If we assume a Dota pro is 1/100,000 then a league pro is 1/1,000,000. Unless a game is super simple and not made to be a competitive setting, the size of the playerbase is basically all that matters
But that is only at the highest level. Normal people won't see this unless the pool is ridiculously small.
The actual factor determining how difficult a competitive pvp game is the playerbase imo. Some games are much, much more difficult to get 'good' at.
That's why I think distributional tests are what is used to assess whether how skill vs other random factors impact win. For single player games, you match a median players (top 50%) with good players (top 10%) and make them play several games to see the winrate of each player. And I think you can adapt this test to 5v5 games, but it depends on how you want to do it. In a skilled game like chess, the chances of a lower rated player beating a top 10% player is really low, but in games like Poker, it's significantly higher.
People obsessing over difficulty in a PvP game are out there fighting PvE and dying to jungle creeps. PvP games you’re versing other people with the exact same tool set as yourself. The difficulty comes in how good your opponents are at the game which is why LoL wins here given the significantly larger player base so much more competition in the way for you to reach the top.
If they are talking about APM as “difficulty” instead, then LoL and DotA are like little kids squabbling in front of any RTS game. APM does not mean more difficult if your opponents are doing the same as you.
Okay but chess players have TERRIBLE apm.
this dude's never watched some andrew tang hyperbullet
Nice take but you are confusing simple vs complex with easy vs hard.
You are also mixing mastery with a couple of the above.
Chess is simple but hard and has virtually infinite depth of mastery for a human.
I can't talk much about Dota but it can't be too different from LoL and LoL is definitely complex and hard.
Regarding mastery, and the degree as we humans can improve and evolve the game to, we would need some deep nerdy analysis and a bit of math to compare it to chess but I am sure even though achieving mastery on LoL is not as prestigious as one may see with chess, it definitely puts up with a good fight in terms of attainable "degrees of mastery".
I mean, checkers is objectively easier than chess, no?
‘Skill expression’ is the term.
In the context of skill shots vs point and click. Obviously skill shots require you to land the spell. But it also opens the doorway to things like using the skill shot when an enemy is positioned in a certain way. Like when they’re about to do something (auto attack, use a spell, etc), or when they’re near a wall, something to that effect.
However even point and click champions might have other forms of skill expression. Like more intensive positioning requirements. More intense micro requirements (ADC kiting). Perhaps macro stuff like map roaming and such. What have you.
I think in this debate people misunderstand also difficulty vs skill ceiling. Theoretically Dota seems to have higher skill ceiling but does not matter as in most games no players ever reach it. Chess is also an example of that as no Player had reached the unimprovable peak.
Dota is harder to get into because there is more to learn before you can even play properly. In my opinion it is unnecessary complexity. Lol makes it much easier to get to actually playing at a basic level. It does this removing said complexity and by guiding the player but the ceiling is similarly high in both.
Not sure I would say any specific part in dota is unnecessary specifically. What did you have in mind?
The number of champs that don't actually contribute to draft strategy at all are unnecessary complexity when it comes to LoL. Only sharp strengths and weaknesses truly matter; reasons to be picked/not picked based on design. The rest are noise that are only a good/bad choice based on the current state of balance.
Like, what purpose does kai'sa serve relative to other ADCs? She's a "generalist", so either strong on that patch or she's not; worth existing or not. But you still need to learn and understand everything related to Kai'Sa's gameplay and how to interact with it for any given champ you play.
DotA's "unnecessary complexity" is just in something that actually matters and you as a player can actively control on each character: gameplay.
Both have skillshots. But Dota having that slow ass turning speed is what gives the impression that most skills are just point ans click
That turning rate existing is the main reason I can't bring myself to play dota, it feels so janky
Yeah if you play against Batrider you'd probably delete it after the game 💀 Batrider SLOWS your turnrate even more that you can't physically move until your character finishes turning around
Playing Ezreal or Gwen afterwards must feel like cutting butter with a hot knife.... (or however that saying goes pretty sure I fucked it up..)
It’s usually “a hot knife through butter” but you still made sense!
Hor butter through a knife.
It exists so melee carries can exist without needing ridiculous movespeed or buttons dedicated go blocking projectiles. A melee can face a ranged in dota because of turn rate.
You get used to it and eventually stop noticing it entirely, until you get hit with a fat-ass slow - but that's just like Nasus hitting you with Wither.
Now that's you put it that way, I realized that every champion in DoTA honestly felt like playing a league champion with a 40% slow.
No wonder I didn't like it.
Funny. As someone who plays mostly Dota, whenever I play League I feel like I have 40% slow all the time. Sure, Dota has turn rates, but movement speed is much higher in Dota, so it feels like champions in League are slowly crawling.
The map is much bigger in Dota also isn’t it?
Sure, the bigger map is probably the reason why movement speed needs to be higher in Dota, but I'm talking more about game feel than balance or reason behind each game's speed. Whenever I play League, I just feel like my characters are walking, whereas in Dota it feels like I'm running.
A few months ago I made a test out of curiosity to see if it was only in my head or if the speed overall is indeed lower in League. Minion waves take around 30 seconds to meet each other on side lanes in both games (give or take), so I used that as a comparison. Going from spawn to the point in which they meet is faster in Dota than in League. So, even with the bigger map, Dota characters are a bit faster overall.
It’s so weird, because it definitely starts like that, but by the end of a match or once you get used to it, it feels like league is the slow one. Blinks from a screen away, with boots and effects you’re moving faster than most league champs. Similarly with attacking it starts with long attack windups then by end game you’re attacking 10 times a second from 1200 units away.
full build shadow fiend is absolutely booking it in a way that would make league of dashes look like molasses, and he has no innate movement steroid/blink/or dash lol.
I tried some Dota2 games and realized that Morgana's Q is not that bad
Whens the last time you played? Turn rates have been increased across the board a loooong time ago, it doesn't really feel clunky anymore.
tbh it's what allowed "melee ADCs" to thrive without being perma-kited by the ranged ADCs
if League also had turn rates (in which I hope it doesn't, I want DotA and League to remain distinct with each other), then I'd reckon Yi, Fiora, Irelia, Kayn, etc. would be viable ADCs
Irelia isnt exactly getting kited and is not an adc, I dont think that is what really makes the adc role viable. Pos 1 in Dota is absolutely not congruent to the adc role.
I mean it is and it isnt. DotA is just far more flexible in what it allows to be an ADC and what ADCs are allowed to do, but fundamentally they fulfill the same role - someone who is weak early and needs someone to babysit them until they can blow people up.
I mean even take someone like DK who is not really a traditional ADC - he kinda just doesn't do shit early on. He has boosts to help him not get bullied out but being melee with no damage hes just not very good in lane alone. Steady and dependable, you could leave him alone, but hes not exactly gonna carry from there and its going to hamper his ability to farm to self-sufficiency greatly.
I think also DotA just allows cores to be their own thing, less constrained by what their role is supposed to be. League COULD also be this way, but the second champions start inching out of their prescribed role they get slammed into the Shadow Realm. Meanwhile Riki goes from a mid assassin to a pos 1 ADC to a support and that's a-OK.
League really likes well defined lanes, roles, and champ allotment to a specific lane and role. They will insta nuke adcs if they try to leave the bot lane. We have seen this with Lucian and Tristana. I just dont see that many similarities between adc and pos 1 beside people getting caught on the carry word since weak early, strong late is not even consistently true for adc and definitely not exclusive. I would say old yi/taric strats are the closest thing we have seen to a safe laner in lol and that spawned at least 5 different anti funnel mechanics to be added to the game.
It’s been so long that people forget or don’t realize that League was designed with the intent of fixing a lot of the stuff that made DotA a hard game to get into. Turning speeds and animation times in DotA are insane.
Even the worst animations in LoL don’t compare to Crystal Maiden waiving her wand for 2 days any time she does anything.
It’s changed now but man I remember back in the day, trying to auto attack on Zeus was like pulling teeth. He would wind that shit up for 5 mins while you could go take a shit and then one 40 dmg auto would come out
I mean dota has much much less skillshots. But doesnt matter. So what if you have point and click, guess what? Enemy also has point and click. If it is easier for you to land AND get hit, then is it even easier? Suddenly, positioning, baiting and playing around cooldown timers becomes even more crucial. Things you might have gotten away in league by being a god at dodging. And tbf, skillshots are easy for newbies since you can basically just treat it as point and click and it will work in low elo most of the time. Nothing hard to learn or understand about i shoot straight line need hit enemy. Dota is harsh on newbies because there are way too many basic game mechanics you need to know. The game is designed to give you a shit ton of options and flexibility that if you don't know them, you are fucked.
It also does have more click and shoot abilities. Sion use to have a point and click stun for example that league changed because of how frustrating it was to play against. Well guess what? That point and click stun is extremely similar to the hellfire blast ability skeleton king has in Dota. Stuns also last SO long in Dota whereas they don't in league, but then you can buy an item that makes you cc immune for a long time. It's a lot of back and forth
I mean you also don't tend to die over the course of a 1 second stun in DotA, unlike in LoL.
Dota is more macro intensive and league more micro. I played both games and Dota you just need to know more. If you played league first you probably find dota slow and if you played Dota you probably find league simpler in terms of understanding. Same genre, but very different.
Dota’s micro can be insanely hard depending on who you’re playing. Characters like Axe and Lina are simple sure but playing someone like Invoker or Lone Druid requires a lot of skills. I mean Riot made Hwei who is just a simpler Invoker. There are characters that are just way more complex in Dota in terms of micro.
A good Meepo is just god tier.
The micro ceiling is wayyyy higher in Dota. The micro floor is higher in league.
The micro floor in league is someone like Yuumi, Yi or Garen, you'll find no one in dota as easy to play as either of them
Axe legit exist
axe is harder to play than yuumi,garen
Juggernaut is literally just a mix of Yi and Garen though no?
Has Yi Q, Yi W as the totem, bonus stats when not taking damage, basic attack gets a boost every so often and he has the Garen spin
Jugg is a lot more micro intensive than people realize. Obv theres the fact that the W is a healing ward that you have to independently control and is a ome shot so you have to micro manage it away from enemies. But more importantly his Q has spell immunity so you have to use it as a anti engage anytime you see someone "flash" you. That and its used as a base siege mode where you go in, hit the tower and leave before your Q runs out.
You have to micro the ward. Jugg is not super easy.
Eh, these high ceiling micro hero’s are usually balance around them being in good hands. In most metas hero’s with good stats and mechanics will often dominate the ladder. I remember Lina was just pick/ban nearly every game because of how absurd her scepter is.
Only hero I seen that will outperform meta hero’s is morph
I think Meepo is much harder than all these champions you mentioned. Invoker is considered hard but honestly with how many people play him, he's become much more easier to play. Lone Druid, Meepo are definitely harder because unit switching is inherently different than how most heroes are played. I'd even say Invo is easier than Hwei at higher levels in that there's almost no delay in you inputting and his orbs changing and because the game is lot more slower tempo, you get the time. With Hwei, you can't be as instant and you can be one shot way faster.
It’s the opposite? Almost all items in Dota have active effects. Dota has denies. Dota has high ground. Dota has creep blocking. Dota has jungle stacking and jungle pulls. Dota has courier management. Dota has tree jukes. Dota has multiple champions that must control multiple units simultaneously. Dota has turn speed.
League has skill shots absolutely, but Dota requires a lot of APM and mechanical execution in different forms.
This was my instant initial thought as someone who has played a lot of league and attempted to get in to dota a few years back, the entire cancel mechanic add a huge layer of complexity. It’s hard enough to maximize your own cs in some regards but also having to worry about denying your enemy makes laning so much harder
It's important to define what exactly you mean by mechanics, which is a little subjective, but I think fundamentally what most people mean is the difference between making a decision and carrying out that decision.
Aiming in an fps is a classic example of mechanics - deciding to shoot someone in the head is easy, but actually shooting them requires fast reaction times and good motor control to consistently land on target.
(Non-speed) Chess is the opposite. It's really hard to decide which piece to move to which location, but when you've decided to make a decision you can move your piece from point A to point B 1,000 times in a row without trouble.
I will admit modern dota is honestly pretty mechanically demanding, but the main reason why dota is mechanically "easier" than league (with a few exceptions) is because of turn rate and cast animations.
Turn rate and cast animations put a relatively low hard cap on physical execution that places the emphasis on making good decisions rather than carrying out those decisions. Turn rate and animations slow down the game by literally increasing the amount of time you have to things you see on your screen and increasing the amount of time it takes for your hero to respond. The comparison to a real time vs turn based game should be obvious here.
Most of the things you've described are mechanically easy to execute, with the difficulty being related to the decision making around it.
Most items are literally point and click. You literally just right click to move to high ground. Jungle stacking and pulling requires you to hit a creep at a specific time with a literal clock provided to you in the game. It is easy to physically accomplish any of these tasks, but it's hard to know when you should be doing them.
Again, there are obvious exceptions like invoker and modern dota has so many mechanics stacked together that it actually is genuinely mechanically challenging, but on a fundamental gameplay level the game is slower and easier to engage with than league of legends is.
Leagues has more skill shots and fast paced stuff, everything else in Dota is harder. As someone who has played both games, League feels like a nice walk in the park compared to Dota terms of how much of my brain I use it to play it.
Now let’s just play some Deadlock.
it is the opposite though? Druid, Ember with ult, MEEPO, maybe Invoker? Like come on just from the top of my head without properly playing Dota2 I got examples of harder micro than most league champs
That’s pretty much it. Difficulty depends on what clicks for you. League asks for sharper hands moment to moment, Dota asks you to juggle way more systems and decisions. People tend to call the one they didn’t start with harder.
I have not played Dota 2, but have watched the eSports side of it on and off for years. This whole dickmeasuring about which is harder is just completely pointless. Difficulty isn't a value in itself, it's how you implement various mechanics and interactions in a meaningful way that's important.
Overall the games approach this in very different ways. LoL is more about asking "How can I avoid getting hit?" - the abundance of skillshots (or similar) skills is also a part of it. Thus it puts more emphasis on mechanics. Mandatory - this doesn't mean Dota lacks mechanically demanding characters.
Dota however asks "what should I do when (not if) I get hit?". Thus it puts more emphasis on interactions between different mechanics.
I'd argue that Dota also asks "How can I avoid getting hit?" but the answers in each game are very different. Dota plays out on a different scale that's more punishing.
If you're a support in the wrong position in a team fight, you will die. You cannot outplay getting stunned by a point and click ability and nuked by finger of death unless you consider sitting out of vision outplaying.
In League, most fights will give you ample opportunities to outplay on a micro level. This means mechanical skill can carry you a lot higher in League than Dota.
IME you can outplay getting stunned a lot better in dota.
Dota its easier to recover from a mistake (a ton of dispel items like manta, BKB and support especially with eul's, invis active, lotus orb, force staff, etc.)
In league its easier to prevent a mistake cause you have flash for free but you're 100% dead if you get CC'd and one shot. Unless you have a support with mikaels or milio/tahm there aren't no get out of jail free card only prevention with flashing/dodging, black shield, and spell shields.
This. I played both but dota always felt like a 9 to 5 job, you have to maintain focus throughout but the games tend to last more than an hour, you slip once and you're dead, praying you had enough gold for a buyback. I tend to enjoy LoL more besides the toxicity, but i'd argue that dota will be more toxic to play if not for their excellent punishment systems, pause to let dc'd players return, etc
I think the reason I stick with Dota is because they don't butcher and rework my favorite heroes to accomplish nothing. Rek'Sai was kind of the last straw for me. I just hate the Riot dev team at this point. Played thousands of hours though so I enjoyed quite a bit of League. Also playing Deadlock right now and enjoying that.
Yeah i like how everyone is op and they just find ways to make boring heroes be interesting, and interesting heroes be more whacky because of the talent tree and scepter. Riot does suck at balancing, i find that dota just tones down op heroes a bit and jacks up those that are lacking. Every single one is viable
Dota and LoL gotta take a knee in the difficulty measuring contest when SC2 joins the chat
Yeah SC2 players must have like 7 brains operating at once, I tried myself so many times and ended up crying in a corner 🤣
Nah, the majority of SC2 players just memorize one build order and surrender if they aren't winning at a certain point. If they don't surrender, they just make up shit for mid/late game. It's really similar to Chess.
I think all of these discussions are silly because what do you mean by harder. You mention difficulty to master so let’s use that as our standard. Both games have thriving professional scenes, with skill gaps among the best players.
If you aren’t a top 10 player in each game, this conversation is irrelevant as those players would likely say they haven’t mastered the game.
If you mean learning curve to play initially, I’d expect LoL to have a lower learning curve just because it’s more popular and designed to be more popular. But I’ve never play Dota so I don’t know.
I think all of these conversation have the intent of ego inflating without any work of playing the other’s game.
I think Dota might actually be easier to learn just because it has useful tutorials compared to the useless shit new players in LoL get
Never played Dota but you have to actively TRY to have a worse Tutorial than League in 2025
Dead by Daylight enters the room. Dont know if its worse but its at least comparable.
Dota might have better tutorials. But they still do fuck all to actually teach you how to play the game.
And when it comes to a new player in the game, LoL is still way more approachable.
This... is a strong point i think. I just think Dota feels really weird to pilot if you aren't prepared for its weirdness a la turning speed
true, i think Dota has to have superior tutorial cuz the game is way more complex than league so its less likely a new player play the game if that great tutorial intarface doesnt exist.
And if you ARE a top 10 player, that's a much lower percentile in league because you're competing with a much larger player base. This is a hyperbole, but being the best at a game with 10000 players is probably harder than being the best at a game with 10 players, for example.
Dota skillfloor is insanely high mostly because its just weird.
In league, if you're learning and you don't know how to 2v2 you probably just press all your spells on the enemy on cooldown and its kind of okay.
In dota, you have to identify what the 2v2 will be like and then determine whether that means you need to laneskip, what laneskipping entails, what camps you need to block etc... and sometimes if you press all your spells its worse than you being afk
Its a knowledge issue and knowing things in dota is really hard
The skill floor is higher not because it is more weird or a "harder" game, it's just the playerbase demographic and size. Both games require the same set of skills to be successful, whether it's knowing when to wave cut/proxy, or understanding interactions between different spells, it's just, broadly speaking, they feel and are paced different
It's easy to understand when you look at the ranked MMR. Bronze in LoL and Herald in DOTA, both sets of players have similar skillsets and game knowledge. They both can't play well, but they've played the game and understand some interactions and mechanics and can "see" what is happening.
It's just nowadays only 7% of DOTAs playerbase is in Herald. 17% of leagues larger playerbase is in Bronze. And then 13% in Iron below those people which is populated of a mix of people that can "play" the game to an almost Bronze standard and people that still hop on the game as if they're just opening a MOBA for the first time.
It's a lower skillfloor for League because if you can't play the game, there are simply more people in your position to be matchmade against.
Im immortal in dota and emerald in league. Imo league is closer to street fighter than it is to dota and dota is closer to chess than it is to league. Both games just happen to be in a moba format. Therefore it’s basically impossible to compare the 2
Wow this is like 100% my thoughts as literally the same ranks immortal/emerald haha.
Best comparison my friend told me when I was learning league this year was that league is like a fighting tactics game and Dota is a strategy tactics game.
I like this. Both have a different skill set so not comparable. Die some Dota will be harder for other leagues depending on talent.
I have thousands of hours in both, unhealthy amounts
Late game wise I'd say dota definitely becomes harder, both for micro and macro
Early game LOL micro is heavier. Camera locking/dodgin skill shots/flash reactions are of utmost importance
Late game definitely dota. You buy so many things you have SO many activable items/spells and whatnot, while league endgame is very bland and limited, without changing anything on gameplay
Thing is, late game time to kill in league is a shitfest. The punishment for not insta flashing while you're an adc for example is massive. In dota there is more lenience given its hard to one shot someone in a second
I wish LOL had Dota's late game complexity, but it would make the game way harder.
Every time I get full build on League I'm just... "shit. is that it? it just started"
The enemy team has voted to surrender! (4/5)
Honestly since league has a surrender button, it wouldn't really matter if they balanced the game around push and pull item purchases and comeback mechanics. People would just still surrender at whatever time riot puts it at, or just leave entirely if it's at the 30 minute mark.
I feel like League developers dislike lategame. They removed lategame items like banner of command and old GA which were the premiere late game items back in the day. League is just so fast with 3 items being the "lategame" these days
Imho its not about liking late game or not, its about bringing new players.
Dota is stressful and matches take a long long time. Very hard get into and to maintain a good influx of players. On the other hand mobile mobas are very successful with their quick click-and-play games.
They're approaching the Wild Rift model, sacrificing any idea of late game and any resemblance of macro thought for quick 15 minute matches that wont be frustrating for players on the losing side
I would love to see endgame league with a higher TTK. Not sure if that's what they are planning for 2027. I doubt it though
they want the game to be fast in order to appeal to the most amount of people possible
Meepo alone is harder than the entire League roster. I wish they'd create champs like Meepo or Abathur from HotS. A good Techies probably has League players uninstall after one game
Funny thing about Techies is that he warped the game so much he's been reworked several times. Similar to Tinker too I guess. Champs that are inherently just broken and anti-fun
Fun on Techies was exactly proportional to how much fun the other guys weren't able to have.
DotA 2 players will literally storm you with torches and pitchforks if you say you want old techies back
Justifiably so. He was taking games hostage for 1h30 or more, and in Dota you can't 100% ban a hero, you have a small list of heroes that the game randomly chooses from, so you have to play against him even if you really don't want to!
Why does it matter?
People argue about DotA being harder and more complex. And if you look at other sports like football (⚽) which is one of the simplest sports in the world. I don't see people arguing over it to be less harder than other sports.
Conclusion, just grow up mentally and stop discuss pointless topics.
In fact football being simple is probably the main reason why it is the most popular sport in the world. Along with how easily accessible it is, you just need a ball, not even the football, just any ball.
It's also so easy for spectators to catch the action.
I had this conversation with a bit of a sports fanatic friend, who was like giving me a whole lecture about the 'viewing experience' of various sports.
He made a note that games that are very precise or played with small targets or balls are just not a fun experience in a crowd. He cited hockey as one where if your seats aren't good, you might as well just watch the camera screens. Meanwhile you can be in the furthest possible seat in a soccer stadium and all you really need to keep track of is where the ball is and how close it to the goal.
I found it very interesting as I'm not someone for event attendance in general and it made a lot of sense to me that while I would probably enjoy trying it a few times, keeping track of something like hockey would be way more difficult for me without the various bits of camerawork and editing done on the broadcast.
The games are fundamentally different to master. Same game principle in general, but that's about it. Different aspects are weighted very differently between the two games. I don't see any reasonable way to really compare the two. It's like comparing american football to football. Both are similar as in having a "goal" and a ball and a team of players facing each other. But they are still not comparable at all.
Some people will find A harder to learn, some will struggle with B. It's just player diff.
I've played both games, both are completely difficult in terms of complexity. I originally came from playing Dota 2 (the first moba I played). I didn't get far into my learning at the time before switching to League but I did spend a few years playing it and wasn't a newb when I left.
Dota 2 compared 2 League is an entirely different experience and I would ultimately say Leagues inferior in complexity.
League boils down to knowing what every champion can do, skill shots or no. With 172 champions, thats a big task. I can tell you what everyone of their skills do, and sometimes what they did pre-rework. If we count pre-skill adjustments and reworks some of us have over 200 champions in our heads. Like Warwick, Swain, Fiddle, Aatrox, Udyr these guys have gone through an entire identity change. The only other complexity in league is the items, map awareness and timing.
All items affect champions the same it just depends on how the skill scales with the item. League doesn't have RNG, its a predictable game that rewards timing.
Im not gonna lie, the complexity of Dota made it so it took me a long time to adjust to League when I switched. Estheticly, league is beautiful but its mechanics are so limited in comparison.
For Dota 2, a lot of things might have changed while I've been gone,
Dota 2 has an battlefield not a map! The league map might be a little more than half of the entire Dota 2 map
It's skills can build into different paths with a literal skill tree or be changed by items.
You have a flying pet to send you items from shops (multiple scattered across the map) that can be intercepted.
Shops offer different things at different locations
Tp's are purchase-able
You can make towers invulnerable at will
You can send a blank scan towards a location you think they might be (this is like an ashe E landing at a specific location as a summoner spell for League players)
There is a day night cycle.
Rng runes are neutral spawns on the map that you can absorb into a potion flask
Bounties are spawned collectibles
You can purchase items and drop them for friends
You can control your pets separate from the character and have them affect the entire game.
Any character can use items to control jungle camps
An ask player can be controlled by an active player
A permanent item can become limited for some champions and give stat boots or change the ability entirely.
I could go on and on, like
having miniature fountains scattered across the map to refill health
being able to tax creeps
the interact ability of the map like choping down trees
Being able to view your character in 1st person
Having an blink item that can change the elevation of the game literally (you can blink on top of pillars as example)
This is just what I remember from playing in 2013-2016 casually and rarely
League is mechanically more intensive from champion perspective only. Dota is harder in everything else.
This is a good approach, I think that's why people in LoL tend to focus on mastering a small pool of champions, while in DotA people tend to master a position and is expected to be able to play from a large pool of champions depending on teams composition and meta
Also dota heavily punishes 'maining' characters.
We calling it OTPing in league, its called 'spamming' in dota. Hero select bans only have a 50% chance of actually working (you can't perma ban your counters) and at the end of select a random pool of additional heroes no one even voted for get banned as well. Dota will also ban the hero if you and the opponent lock it in blind, its not like league where it shows what the enemy picked in each 'pick turn' it reveals for both sides afterwards and if it happens to be the same hero you picked its banned for both players.
You can't dodge cause it counts as an abandon and severely guts your behavior score (which also affects matchmaking), counts as a loss, and overall just isn't something you can do since its a lot slower getting behavior score back up its an aggressive drop off. There is no "enemy team picked my hero" or "my 1% PR hero was randomly banned time to dodge".
Dota pretty much forces versatility, and their casual mode all-pick doesn't even have a role queue option thats exclusive to ranked for some god forsaken reason (I genuinely think the game would have more players if they had normals role queueing idk how it's taken them this long to realize how much better it is). Its basically the same as old pick order days league had before 2016.
Idk if I even agree with that. I played both and Dota had a legit tough learning curve on many champs. LoL has definitely released more saturated kits over time but not like some of the most complex dota champs.
I opted for LoL since in the end I just enjoyed LoL much more and cba all the micro complexities Dota had.
I have played 14 years of DotA basically since DotA Allstars and played about 5 years of LoL. Peak LoL rank is plat 2 promos before Emerald and in DotA I peaked 4.9k mmr so around today's Emerald 1-2. So not high just above average. But my 2 cents I think LoL is the harder in some aspects because of the skill shots and micro. DotA has micro levels of depth but it's just different... it's not dodging and landing skill shots but other mechanics through item actives. Such as armlet toggling before it got nerfed, power treads switching, or playing actual micro intensive champs like Meepo or Chen etc. DotA always seems to have more depth in strategy and macro imo since there's far more laning compositions, stronger counter picks, the map is bigger, everyone has TP, smoke ganks etc.
LoL is easier to get into but hard to master. DotA is harder to get into and hard to master if that makes sense and doesn't piss of people reading this. Also SneakyLoL once talked about this in response to some DotA vs LoL video and he said LoL was harder. Obviously he's an ex-pro but he played DotA2 for a while and reached Immortal rank (DotA's challenger).
I disagree with your points but I wanted to say don’t put yourself down with “just above average” - both of those ranks are pretty damn high percentile, not just 60th.
well, for what it's worth, grubby has said the exact same thing.
he thinks league is more like a fighting game. dota has more complexity in both micro and macro, but league is more reaction demanding. if u get mechanically gapped by your opposing laner in league, there's not much u can do except turtle. in dota, there's more options to compensate
so this guy, sneaky, grubby, and several others in this thread all have had the same opinion on this, which is interesting
Immortal is the highest rank, but it also has the same percent of the player base in it as emerald 1+ in league.
In the end it really doesn’t matter, but as someone with over 2k hours in both, Dota 2 feels significantly harder holistically.
League can initially be harder for newbies because smurfing is out of control and the laning stage is far more punishing. In Dota there is sooo much you can do if you don’t want to interact with your planning opponent. In League, (for the most part) you have no choice but eat shit for the next 10-15mins while begging for jg to reset your lane.
Once you get to higher ranks, everyone is landing most of their skill shots anyways, so there really isn’t a massive difference between aiming & point n click spells, minus some exceptions. Macro, decision making, good CSing/denying, etc. are way more important.
I find it very hard to believe Dota's lane phase is less punishing when you can deny, and you lose gold on death
You’re absolutely right for midlane, and I shoulda clarified that in my og comment. Mid is almost entirely decided by skill gap. If you’re simply a better player, it’s such an oppressive/frustrating experience for your opponent. Viper/Huskar mid players are psychological terrorists, good luck getting a single ranged creep against a Tiny b4 you have bottle to spam your ranged nuke (if you have one), etc.
Dota 2 mid feels a lot like League top lane. If you fuck up your lane, better start buttering up your Pos 4/5 to smoke gank, secure power runes or stack nearby camps.
D2 Side lanes are a different story. Tons of freedom for the supports to salvage the lane and/or scrape together resources for their carries. Unlike League, it’s pretty bad to freeze wave in front of your tower after 6-7mins, for the most part. Enemy laners can just stack jg camps, smoke mid or take gateway top, dive and get a free towers.
You’re right the gold loss on death hurts, but there is way, way, waaay more gold on the map in Dota, especially since the map expansion and its encouraged for supports to take jungle camps or catch waves.
It's less punishing in a sense that you always have some play you can make even if you get stomped in lane since you can buy teleport with only 90 sec cd and gank and since there is no jungler you can just farm jungle too.
I played pos 4 and 5 all through my Dota days and even when enemy carries are fed and you're 5 levels down, you can still CC, stack camps and do ganks. There's a lot of safety in playing sidelanes and you can get away from lot of engagements. There's also the element of pos1s not really bothering to kill you if you're a hassle to kill because anytime they're not farming or killing is them losing the game.
Good way to think about it is that dying in dota is just nowhere near as punishing as dying is in lol. It's also lot harder to die in dota than in lol where you can get one shot all game.
You just have more options in Dota. If you're really losing lane hard you can just leave to jungle or a support can come help you.
Also casting like 3 spells in lane early game puts you at 0 mana, it's much harder to poke in early game.
no they are wrong. dota is harder generally, this does not speak to whichever game is better
I mean, if he's played that much of both games, I'm kinda inclined to give it to him. I will say that when I tried it out, I personally found Dota's, well, everything to be insanely slow and clunky compared to League, which I guess makes Dota the harder game in that it's harder to do what you want, while League is the harder game in that it's much faster paced, and one mistake can get you killed before you can even react.
His RNG comment is pretty silly though... lots of competitive games have some RNG elements (including League!), especially card games. It's not even limited to virtual ones: poker and blackjack and such have pretty big competitive scenes, and those games are basically all about RNG. The skill check in those is all about what you do with the information you have + the hand you've been dealt.
Thank you for your feedback 👍🏻
What would be LoL's most important RNG you think ? 🤔
Depending on the Third Dragon, it changes the whole function of the map (more bushes, or more walls, or portals taking you to different spots) and can make tons of champions way more abusive depending on what dragon it is
Critical hits will probably be the biggest RNG factor. There used to be some RNG elements. But Riot has greatly reduced RNG over the last 10 years and added things like every third hit, etc.
The two big RNG elements in LoL (gameplay-wise) would be Crit Chance (when you have some but not 100%) and which elemental drakes spawn.
Teammates 🤣
If enemy jungler is bot when i all-in engage lvl2
I always find it funny how DOTA players bring up how hard their game is instead of how much more fun it is than League
I mean what's your point? People who play League every single day will tell you how much they hate it
Dota players love the game.
Problem is you just find such discussions in a "which game is harder herp derp" post.
Dota is incredibly addicting and engaging, even more than league because its gameplay is about efficiency. the map is big and full of resources, items are shipped to you so recalling to reset is highly discouraged thus creating the type of gameplay where you are always on the map doing something, and to stay on the map you have to manage your hp/mana which is another layer of engagement.
A whole lot of fence sitting here but the answer is obvious. Dota 2 is harder and more complex especially at macro. Look at invoker vs Hwei. I can pick up Hwei in 3/4 games and do good with him. Invoker will take hours of gameplay to even get comfortable remembering his spells and when to use them. League just offers a “cleaner” micro experience so the skill expression feels and looks more impactful. No turn speed so you can kite and skill shots are easier to follow. Way less item/hero knowledge to keep track of and you will never have to control multiple units to the extent Dota requires for you to be useful. I’ve played both on and off since middle school.
these are competitive games. the difficulty depends on the people you're playing against. unless you're the literal best in the world, there is always a new obstacle to surpass.
A wise man once said LoL is akin to an action game while Dota 2 plays more like a strategy game. ‘Nuff said.
Mechanically, the ceiling for LoL has become crazy. The best players have insane reaction speeds, predictions or just skill. This is mostly because the time to kill has become pretty low, mobility is high AF and most point-and-click spells are weak or have been removed.
Now, idk about DoTA, but DOTA 2 is much more strategic. The fact you can deny your lane creeps, lose money when you die, have to fight for runes, stack jungle camps and, most important, a lot of of spells and items with weird interactions make the game complex. I can tell you that I find playing support much harder in Dota bc of how much you need to roam and how careful you need to be to not get one-shot bc you have no items.
That's a very narrow minded pov. Skillshots are just one criteria among so many.
They're probably the kind of player that thinks FPS games are the apex of skill in gaming.
As someone with a lot of hours in LoL and no hours in Dota, yeah I think they're arguing in bad faith. RNG has nothing to do with it really unless the entire game is being decided on pure RNG.
My stance on this is that the difficulty is just different. If we imagine a gradation where one side is a fighting game and the other side is an RTS, League will be closer to a fighting game whereas DotA will be closer to an RTS, and subsequently they take different skillsets to be good at. In DotA, your ability to adapt to what's happening in the game (including draft), predict, analyze and counter what your enemy is doing is more important than in League, whereas in League pressing your buttons at the correct order aiming at the correct spot quickly is more important than in DotA. As such, players who are better at the former are going to be better at DotA, whereas players who are better at the latter are going to be better at League.
However, some players only consider one aspect "difficulty" and completely ignore other aspects, for them the game that is more advanced in that aspect is going to feel more "difficult": if we take your example, if your friend mains Pudge and considers MOBAs basically hero shooters with top down view, then for him obviously League would seem more difficult, because hitting a skillshot is more difficult than hitting a point-and-click ability. On the other hand, if someone mains Furion and considers MOBAs dumbed down RTS, then for them DotA is more difficult because it has more ways to apply your game knowledge and strategy.
As for the RNG, adapting to RNG is a skill too, and I don't believe there's any RNG in DotA that can allow a significantly weaker team to win.
League and Dota are both incredibly hard games - I have 10k hours in Dota Allstars on wc3 and probably north of 20k on league of legends since the game launched and they are both some of the most complex, hard to master games ever made with the level of popularity they have.
Dota has much more item complexity, more flexibility with player roles, more heroes that are meta at once (in general), heroes that control summons, denying, creeping complexity, no recalls so you have to understand tempo way better, etc etc.
On the other hand, league has some crazy mechanical complexity (pros don't even touch riven really because of how knowledgeable you'd have to be to play the one champion at the highest level and it's not worth their time), the rune system, builds that completely vary up what type of role your character fills, every hero has flash which you always have to account for which allows for so much teamifight creativity, and yes, many skillshots and less randomness (though obviously not none).
Both games are awesome, both games are hard, and both games require an insane amount of attention to detail and long term commitment to even become pretty good at them at ONE character in rosters that are almost 200+.
While Dota has point click stuns and such, there are also ways to counter this like blinking away or BKB, unless of course you're doomed.
I have a ton of time in both games.
League has a higher mechanical skill ceiling than Dota in that executing skill shots better than other people is more important and can carry you higher in League.
But Dota has a much higher skill ceiling when it comes to game knowledge and macro. There's just so much more to learn and there's a lot you can be doing on the map at a single time.
League is mechanically more difficult, Dota has way more systems and interactions, and the macro is much more difficult. They are different games, Dota is more strategic and team oriented, but feels slow and clunky. League is faster paced, allows for 1v9 stomps and is generally easier to get into, but doesn't have as much depth.
Just to be clear: if something is "simpler", that doesn't mean it's "worse". I personally think Dota is too overwhelming for new players, and it's too complex for its own good.
Arguing that RNG means it cant be an esport is very funny considering the competative Pokemon (videogame) scene has been growing to the point established players cant get in sometimes. That game is ALL dice rolls and coinflips lol
From what I understand l League of Legends is a much faster paced game where micro is more focused on, while Dota is slower paced and favors macro more.
There is no answer for which one is harder, it differs from person to person. Some people have an easier time with mechanical aspects which would make Dota hsrder, while others have it the other way around
Denial and wave control vs no denial and wave control. Is one mech that would gap 90% of league players if introduced. It would literally throw the balance off , almost all the meta. Leading to wide spread balance changes from the top of my head.
Smurfs would have a field day, can you imagine losing a lane pick already. Getting ganked repeatedly, then lose exp+denial due skill gap, then them controlling the wave, into tower crashes lol. The rate of gold loss and exp denial would drive lower tiered players crazy.
I played league first,and for much more time than Dota,but I can for sure say Dota 2 is harder,you have to manage many more things than in league,not just farming and 1v1 on lane,you can see the most recent example of Tarzaned trying Dota,arguably one of the best soloQ junglers,he said he s overwhelmed by Dota2.In my opinion Dota is also more interesting than league and more boredom-proof,it s kind of a shame it s not getting as much attention as League,but fast-paced,arcade style games are what appeals to the masses,see Fortnite vs PUBG-similar situation
I started playing Dota 1 a long time ago, played some thousands of hours of Dota 2 and I would play it way more if I had friends to play with. I love the designs and skill sets of heroes, I think their skills are way more creative and fun, and their items are way more varied in effects that can change your build or maximize it. I don't have friends to play Dota and that's why I only play Lol now, sadly.
Also there are harder champs in Dota 2 than any champ of league, there are champions that you need to play for thousands of hours literally to master. like Meepo, Invoker, Chen, the fact that you can actively Interact and use the scenario into your strategy like trees, night/day cycle, higher or lower ground affecting accuracy, added vendors in the map for additional danger zones, the fact that jungler is not a role, healing zones, the different runes that appear in the map with different effects, and mostly the fact that you can (and must) kill your minions (creeps) and your own towers, and your own teammates when their health is low to prevent the other team to get exp and gold, makes it WAY more harder. There's so much to have into consideration on a Dota match.
Now besides only farming your minions you have to last hit yours and that adds so much. I know there's a lot I'm forgetting but league is just so much easier and simple, like light fun and all my friends play it so that's why I play mostly league now. Anyone that has played enough time both games can tell you this, usually people say Dota is WAY harder.
Regarding to which game is more fun, that's an opinion and whatever is yours is valid.
I think the average league champion is harder than the average dota hero. The extremes of dota heroes are much harder though.
I think dota is also a much harder game in general because there are so many obscure mechanics to master like creep pulls etc. That's just my opinion though.
A mediocre Dota player who plays League for the first time will think "ah ok this is pretty easy." They'll have to learn that juking skillshots is more important but otherwise it's just Dota with half the mechanics.
A mediocre League player who plays Dota for the first time will be utterly lost.
Source: I am a mediocre League player who converted to being a very bad Dota player. Went back to give League another go after a couple years and man, the mechanics difference is an ocean.
No PvP focused game is inherently harder than any other PvP game. You can be better at one than the other, but the nature of it being real people you're playing against doesn't make sense to compare overall difficulty. There will always he someone better than you either way
League to me is more complex in terms of micro and teamfighting and is very action heavy, there's basically fighting ALL the time and there's always objectives or something happening.
DOTA sticks a lot more to the strategy game origins of the genre, its a lot slower, more methodical and its more about strategy than flashy teamfights that are over in 0.2 seconds. The games are basically opposites which I find very, very interesting.
And the thing I find most amusing, is if they looked at the other game for certain things they'd find fixes to problems that have bothered them for a long time, but they would rather suffer with their problems than copy the homework which is both admirable and not very helpful for the players lol.
As someone who played both games - 1.3k in dota in high school and probably twice that in league, I'd say that Rohan (the guy who gets top rank in a bunch of games) describes it best:
"League is harder simply because there are more players. The more people that consume League and play, the base level of understanding and knowledge required to be decent is higher"
Yes
I have about 1600 hours in Dota 2 (last played 10 years ago though) and much more than that in League. Dota was way more complex even 10 years ago and has gotten more complex since then. League has in my opinion gotten much simpler, especially regarding items. Most games play out following a very similar path, people generally will build the same few items, lane assignments have pretty much been on a complete lock barring a few deviations for the last 10+ years. In Dota there are just soooo many more variations. I think in general you need to be snappier in League, but then there are some heroes in Dota that are way more difficult than anything in League by a good margin. The complexity, control jankiness and lack of "cool factor" (I think League splash arts, lore and the cinematics contribute massively) are why it's less popular.
10 year Dota player/1 year League player here
Dota has much harder macro, you need to be aware of so much more stuff going on, mechanics, denying, teleports, positioning and builds and need to be good at being versatile and sinergizing combos well with your whole team.
League has harder micro, it feels closer to a 1v1 fighting game where you gotta be better at reaction time and predicting movement, but it feels much more individualistic, a lot of the champions has their own all in combo that doesn't need of other players, you just need to land it and that's it, you got the kill. You don't get to see most of your teammates by at least half of the game.
But if your goal is to enjoy both, you only achieve that when you stop comparing them and treat them as they are, 2 different games.
Been playing both since they came out and started off playing Dota Allstars back in WC3.
Both games are amazing and difficult. Dota is objectively more difficult because the skill ceiling is higher with more active items, unit micro is actually a thing, a bigger map, more game mechanics, etc.
That being said. League is MUCH more punishing when it comes to mistakes. It's a game of precision whereas Dota is a game of knowledge.
Dota has a lot more when it comes to comeback mechanics and because the game has so many more variables at play at any given time, more things can happen that allow one to recover.
When it comes to the importance of mechanics, League rewards it more but Dota has a higher ceiling for it. There isn't a champion that comes close to the mechanics needed to properly play Invoker or Meepo without being a complete inter for example.
But game knowledge can overcome a difference in mechanical skill in Dota compared to League.
Both games are great.
League has done a way better job at balancing making a game that's beginner friendly but still have a lot of nuance and factors that make its top level pro scene interesting.
Dota is something you need to really study and learn to appreciate. It's a LOT harder to get into and the playerbase growth compared to League reflects that.
But if you know the game, holy fuck are the eSports games so much fun to watch. Watching OG vs LGD TI8 grand finals at 4 AM in the morning years ago was some of the best memories I have, whereas I've watched most Worlds playoffs in the last 5 years and haven't really had a super memorable one.
I'd say LoL is mechanically the harder (though not by much), and DOTA is the tactically harder (again, not by much). But they feel pretty different; I'm not claiming either is better.
LoL is harder because you have to beat Faker
It is true that there are many more skill shots. It’s also true that Dota makes up in that complexity in multiple forms of game knowledge, more intense micro movement, more complicated map and routes and much more confusing champs.
There is just so much more to learn, and with a much more dangerous snowball effect a new player is going to feel totally useless. Both games are nuts, but the knowledge required to play Dota, imo, is on another level.
Not really. Having more skillshots doesn’t automatically make LoL harder-Dota has a lot of complexity too, from item timings to map control and draft interactions. RNG doesn’t make a game less serious either; it just adds another layer of strategy, which Dota players have dealt with for years.
Your friend is dumb as fuck
I'm impressed by the number of players in this thread arguing how LoL is more "micro-intensive" that have obviously never played DotA2 for longer than a few hours. 😂
I've played both games for thousands of hours (and some WC3 DotA, and some HotS, and some Smite, and... you get the idea), and I think it's obvious that DotA2 is the harder game on all levels - hero mechanics, game mechanics, item and build complexity, tactical and strategic decision-making.
You can argue some of those mechanics are outdated, clunky or janky; and that makes LoL better/more fun to play - or even vice versa. But I don't think you can argue that one of those games is objectively more complex in almost all aspects, and it's obviously not League.
Dota is harder it's not even close. Many league players are able to have fun and play the game to an enjoyable level because they don't lose gold when they die and they can't be denied cs because they aren't good enough at it. Dota has many things that will punish you for being worse. Whereas league has heroes and game mechanics built around making the game as easy as possible for people. Which i think is smarter. League advantage over Dota and why I made the switch many years ago was because it was just the easier game and way more enjoyable. There is no 0-10 yasuo spike in Dota. You just lose if you die that much.