A retrospective of DotA heroes, part 4 (Skeletons oh noooooo)

So I've talked about caster carries, physical carries, lane harassers, lane pushers and Techies, now let's meet a hero who maintains supreme control over his lane from minute one of the game, however, it really wasn't illustrated that well today, but trust me, it's there.

Kel'thuzad, The Lich

When you face Kel'thuzad, one of the first things you'll notice is an odd one indeed, one of the creeps in his wave is missing, just not there, gone, erased from existence. You find it strange, but you'll deal with it, it was probably just a bug, a bug that inconveniences you, since you won't get the gold and experience from it, but probably just a bug nonetheless. Then, around 10 seconds later, the Lich just kills another one of his creeps, nothing else seems to happen yet, he just kills another one of his creeps, robbing you of more gold and experience.

So he hits level 2, while you're around 3/4s of the way there, and he doesn't seem to be doing much else other than killing his melee creeps when they're at full health, forcing the lane to get pushed up further, forcing you to overextend and make yourself much more vulnerable to an attack from behind, and allowing Lich to have a position of absolute, complete safty, sitting next to his tower, getting last hits and denying you at will.

Once hits level 3, the real fun begins, at least for him. He runs forward, hits you with a physical attack, then casts Frost Nova. If you've played Warcraft 3, you're familiar with Frost Nova, it was the second half of the feared Coil-Nova combo employed by the Undead race and designed to cripple, if not kill a unit with each and every cast of it. None of its potency has been lost in the transfer to DotA, and once he begins casting its Rank 2 version at level 3, he'll be dealing 200 damage per cast to you, on a 9.25 second cooldown, for the cost of 150 mana.

Now, you'll notice Lich's mana starting to slowly dwindle as he begins to barrage you with Nova after Nova, they're not cheap, and the cooldown is low, but then Kel'thuzad, at this point level 4, turns to kill another full health friendly melee creep and, to your utter shock, you notice his mana go up by 165. The second half of his creep denial spell, Dark Ritual, is now revealed. Whenever it is used, he not only kills one of his own creeps, but receives a percentage of their current health, eventually capping out at 60% at its max rank, which means he'll be receiving 330 mana at that point, compared to the max rank 190 mana cost of his Frost Nova.

So what does this mean in simple terms? He's never, at least normally, going to run out of mana, he'll keep on killing his friendly creeps, denying you gold and experience before you even get the chance to consider taking it, before darting forward and either hitting you with a combination of physical attacks and low cooldown, damaging Frost Novas, or forcing you away from your creep line, you'll either be crippled through constant harassment or crippled through being grossly outfarmed by Lich.

So eventually, obviously, you tire of this unending, perpetual bullshit, any sane person would, You ask for help from another lane, a lanemate gladly obliges and surprises Lich, now at level 11, you both begin to chase him. Lich throws on Frost Armor, a 40 second buff giving him 3 Armour and giving you a quite noticeable movement and attack speed debuff every time you hit him. However, rather strangely, he doesn't appear to be running towards his tower, but instead towards the river, almost like he's luring you into a trap, but he can't be, there's no runes, all his teammates are accounted for in different lanes, what type of shit could he possibly be pulling?

Then, as both of you wail on him, with nothing around but the Lich, he fires off Chain Frost, his ultimate, a giant ball of frozen death that the Lich gets to target once, after it hits its first target, it checks to see if there are any other available targets, if not, it fizzles. If there are, it bounces to them, then it bounces to another available target (which can include the initial target of the spell), and then another target, and so on, until its done so 7 times. The targets of the spell are essentially random, but if there's only one target that it can hit, it's going to hit that target.

Since there's only two things in front of him, one of them is going to take 370 x 4 damage, and the other one is going to take 370 x 3 damage, and due to the sheer closeness of the targets, they'll probably have half a second to react between the firing of Chain Frost and their deaths. Having secured a double kill with a single press of a button, Lich saunters back to his lane and continues his unparalleled dominance.

However, Lich does have one drawback, outside of getting an Aghanim's Scepter, he can't really make his spells deal increased damage, which means that, eventually, he's going to stagnate. Despite this, drawbacks can be turned into opportunities. Why should Lich exercise all his power in getting experience and gold for himself, as well as denying his enemies the chance to get either, when instead, he could get a carry, one with a traditionally weak early game, and instead protect them, let them farm with complete and utter impunity as he destroys anyone who tries to do anything with them, as well as using his slows and powerful nukes to help the carry secure his own kills, before respectfully accepting a support role and helping his team out with auras, wards and buffs.



Time to talk about by far, one of the most skill intensive heroes in the game, the hero that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Leoric, the Skeleton King

As you head to your lane, you'll find yourself facing a large, rather imposing looking Skeleton, a larger version of one of the most generic models in the game, but now he has a rather fetching crown, just so you can identify him as King of the Skeletons, rather than a simple grunt skeleton. He last hits efficiently, using his bulk to take your auto-attack harass. He eats trees when his health bar begins to move in any way that could bring even the slightest bit of fear to the King of Skeletons. Finally, at level 7, after the most boring 10 minutes of your life, it is his time to strike.

An enemy hero ambushes you and begins to hit you and burst you down, you think you can take him, so you turn to attack him, at that precise point, Leoric throws a Hellfire Blast at you, a 2 second stun that prevents you from moving and deals a rather hefty 200 points of damage to you. It then proceeds to slow you and further hurt you for another two seconds, spelling your death as a result of this decisive gank.

Suitably cowed, you let Skeleton King farm for another 15 minutes, you struggle to stay awake.

Now level 16, Skeleton King returns to base, and nothing seems to happen, enjoy the last minute of any hope of victory you have...

Down the middle lane, you see Leoric, the Lord of all Undead beginning to walk, his health is slowly draining due to his Armlet of Mordiggan being activated, but the fell talisman gives him Strength, Damage, and a Attack Speed buff. He begins to hit the enemy creeps, his team around him, quite content to watch as every hit revitalizes the fallen warrior, his life returning to him. The Armlet, with the combination of his Vampiric Aura, causes a third of the damage of his attacks to be returned to him as health. For his allies though, the bonus is the same 30%, a noticable boon.

He walks through the tower like it isn't there and your team decide to engage him. Every hit the Skeleton King deals out seems to restore his health back to full, your attacks seemingly useless against his Vampiric Aura, to make matters worse, every so often, he deals almost three times the normal damage on an attack, dealing a solid blow to you, or your allies, and restoring more of his health, the fight is a slaughter for you, and you lose another tower, and then another. Leoric still on his constant, unending march of victory

Finally, you mount another offensive and this time, through probably the sheer desperation of your team, you manage to make Skeleton King lose more health than he gains per hit, it's a slow, painful process, but you finally manage to fell Skeleton King. To your confusion though, there is no fanfare, just a faintly glowing corpse. Three seconds later, Leoric, the Immortal God King of all Skeletons rises back to his feet, his ultimate, Reincarnation functioning exactly as the name suggests. To make matters worse, the sheer shock of watching him rise from the 'further dead' to a state of 'undeath' causes your legs to turn to lead, unable to flee from him as you're slowed by one third of your movement speed.

Your team is destroyed again, and the wordless, emotionless Leoric, the Louis XIV of skeletons proceeds to rip your base to shreds, winning the game decisively.

It turns out the player had to go to the store and just attack moved into your base and didn't see any of this, he finally comes back and just laughs, then plays another game as a real hero.

References: http://www.playdota.com/guides/epic-return



Pugna, the Oblivion

Fun Fact: Pugna is the Latin word for "Fight"

Now, normally I've been writing this from the perspective of a hero getting owned by the target of the spotlight, but Pugna is so crazy and fun to play that I'm going to swap the perspective.

Alright, so you're Pugna, you're a flaming skeletal midget wizard, also your head is on fire and you're surprisingly cheerful, probably because you have a cool fucking cape. Also for some reason he reminds me of that "aaaay" noise the Fonz makes.

Now, a hero in DotA has to have the best Intelligence growth in the game, and surprise, it's you! You'll end the game with a staggering 142 Intellect, the next highest is some guy called Dazzle, who has 128, which no one cares about. To make it even better, you don't even have the worst Str or Agi growth, those dubious honors go to Enchantress (some dryad) and Dirge (some boring zombie guy) respectively. What this means for you, is that your mana pool slowly but surely becomes more and more insane, which is a good thing, because you're going to be casting a ton of spells.

So you head to your lane and start last hitting and denying. Your damage isn't the best at first, but due to your stat growth, it increases quickly, you also have higher range than most heroes, however, you have an ace up your sleeve, which I'm going to cover now.

You have a spell called Nether Blast, due to 'efficiency issues', you don't begin casting it straight away, unless you have to, so let's take the level 3 version. After a 1 second windup, you deal 250 damage to all enemies within a 400 unit area of effect, this means you can, with careful preparation, destroy an entire creepwave with a single spellcast, and also make it so the opponent cannot deny you in any way shape or form, unless it's Lich, but if it's Lich, he's going to have his own problems later on.

So, you're going to start demolishing creep waves, pushing your lane further and further up to the tower. "But Chucat!" I hear you cry "Pugna isn't a pushing hero, he can't summon minions and his base damage, while respectable due to his stat gain, is plagued with a bad attack speed!" and while that is correct, Nether Blast has a second component. It does damage to buildings, this eventually maxes out at 100 damage. Level 1 towers have 1300 health. Nether Blast has a 5.5 second cooldown. Assuming you had infinite mana regeneration, you'd be able to take down a tower in 71.5 seconds, it'll never be that fast, but it's just nice to know.

Now, your opponent might start trying to do the same to your creeps, hitting them a lot more to prevent you from pushing, now, if they're ranged, they might be able to get away with doing this, but if they're melee, you can quite simply Nether Blast them as they run in, or you can do that if you're not a jerk, but you're Pugna, so you're going to be a jerk, so you're going to Decrepify them beforehand.

Decrepify is a debuff that lasts for 3.5 seconds at max rank, it reduces the enemy's movement speed by 50%, prevents them from attacking or taking physical damage and causes them to take 40% extra damage from spells. An easier way to describe it is that it makes the enemy unit really, really shitty. So that poor melee hero who runs in to try and secure a deny or last hit now takes 40% more damage from a Nether Blast.

So now you've managed to push in the enemy's first tower, you have a ton of money, what do you do now? You have two choices:

Slightly more boring Pugna (in the same way that wrestling sharks is slightly more boring than wrestling crocodiles)

So the enemy team has a lot of health, which makes your burst damage weaker, but will allow you to use your sustained damage to your advantage. Most of Pugna's sustained damage comes in the form of his Ultimate ability, called Life Drain. It drains an absolutely insane 185 health per second at max rank and lasts for 9 seconds, with a hilariously low cooldown of 22 seconds, which is already pretty terrifying, but there's a way to make it more fun. You pick up an Aghanim's Scepter, which casues Pugna's ultimate to suddenly drain 250 health per second, which, quite frankly, is fucking ludicrous.

So your plan now involves running up to someone, Decrepifying them, Draining 350 health per second for 3 seconds, and then draining 250 health for the next 6. After that, you stand around and wait for the cooldown to expire. Except with Aghanim's Scepter, the cooldown is 0 seconds, as in, you can cast it again, and again, and again, until they die, obviously.

Asshole Pugna aka the greatest build known to man

Decrepify (the spell that makes a hero shitty), causes ALL forms of magical damage to be increased. This includes an item known as Dagon, which has an active ability which is just a 400 damage nuke, which can then be upgraded to a 500 damage nuke, then a 600 damage nuke, and then an 700 damage nuke, and finally an 800 damage nuke. What does this mean for you? A fully upgraded Decrepify + Dagon + Netherblast does somewhere in the region of 1500 damage. You'll start off doing slightly less, but then heroes have much less health at the start, so it's a completely unfair balance (but it's unfair to you so it's actually the best shit ever).

In case you hadn't gathered, your gameplan involves running up to someone with less than or equal to the damage of your nuke and doing an intricate keyboard command (E, N, Numpad 7) to wipe them from the face of the earth. To make it even better for you, let's say an enemy hero who does physical damage is wailing on an enemy and has them down to around 100 health. Decrepify your ally and then nuke down that enemy hero, or, if a bunch of your allies are killing an enemy, Decrepify the enemy and blow him up, you need the gold to upgrade your Dagon, if anyone insults you, tell them you're Pugna and to shut the fuck up, because Pugna fucking owns.

Once you have enough gold buy a Refresher so you can Dagon twice in a row, you inhuman monster.

"Hey doesn't Pugna have a fourth skill?"

Pugna's final skill, but not his ultimate, is called Nether Ward. Pugna summons a low health ward with a large area of effect that does the following things, in order of excitement:

- Causes enemies to regenerate Mana slower

- Causes enemies to get ZAPPED BY A GREEN BOLT OF LIGHTNING whenever they cast a spell, which does up to 1.5 times the mana cost of the spell in health to them.

So what does this mean for you?

Lich casts Level 3 Chain Frost, he just took 750 damage. Rhasta casts level 3 Serpent Ward, he just took 900 damage. Any orb effect a hero has causes them to take minor, but constant damage every time they attack. I can't emphasize how fun this spell is, like just watch any sort of teamfight in slow motion and see how many spells are cast, now imagine everytime a spell is cast they get zapped by a bolt of lightning, and that Pugna is just sitting there laughing his ass off about it, and if he kills someone he'll probably fall off his chair and die or something.

So what do you do in the relative downtime during a teamfight when you're not stealing kills or just draining the life out of someone?

You laugh at everyone who isn't Pugna.

A retrospective of DotA heroes, part 3

Magina, the Anti-Mage

Alright, let's talk about this top tier, which are hilarious and horrifying at the same time.

Magina, the Anti-Mage.

Magina has one of the most terrifying spellsets in the game, especially if, rather obviously, you happen to be a Mage, but let's start at his early game. Unlike in League of Legends, melee carries aren't given heals, or life drains, or anything like that. Instead they had to rely on their innate advantages, and a babysitter who could look out for them and keep them safe from the enemy team, who understandably wants to kill him. Magina's two main advantages are his speed, being one of the fastest heroes in the game, and his attack speed, which is the fastest in the game. Early on he'll be darting in and out, nabbing last hits, trying not to get hurt and so on and so forth, he wants items, so he's going to try his hardest to get the gold to buy them.

Despite this, he knows that heroes are much more lucrative than creeps, and he has the abilities to start messing up casters, seriously. As you decide to nuke him, you'll notice your spells doing less damage than normal, up to a 40% reduction, thanks to his passive ability called Spell Shield, and since this isn't League of Legends, you can't buy passive Magic Penetration, it's all tied to active items, and you can't buy ability power, so nuking him is almost a fool's errand.

So you decide to conserve your mana, as Anti-Mage proceeds his slow and steady farm. Eventually, a couple of your allies decide that it's best to gank him, because, you know, kill him before he gets too powerful. You start attacking him, he only has one hundred health but he's running away now, you fire off a targetted nuke, and you know it's going to kill him, it just has to reach him...

Then he pops Blink and the nuke vanishes into the ether. Remember old Flash, the one that could pop projectiles? Anti-Mage has that, except it costs mana, the range is larger, and it's on a 6 second cooldown, and DotA has so many more natural juke points which let him escape, the most mobile hero in the game just got even more mobile, without items, and to make it worse, he didn't die.

So you both go back to your lane and face each other, except this time, Anti-Mage wants payback, so he just runs up and starts beating the hell out of you. Oh well, at least you can still nuke him in return, except you then notice that your mana is dropping like a stone. Anti-Mage's second passive causes him to burn up to 64 mana per hit and keep in mind this is on the hero with the fastest base attack speed in the game, and each point of mana he burns off you deals 0.6 damage, which means he's doing at least 35 extra damage, no matter what type of hero you are, short of the fabled manaless carry (these exist), your offensive potential is going to be utterly neutered.

Oh well, at least you can try and run away, except he's the fastest hero in the game, enjoy your death.

So you fight him again, except this time you have an ally to stun him and start beating him up as well, except you're still at 0 mana, so once again, you run away, except you have a headstart, there's no way he can kill you, even with a Blink, he's too far away. Well, he just Blinks 400 units away from you and nukes you with ability called Mana Void, which does damage per point of mana you have missing. So you're missing 1000 points of mana and you have 250 health, once again, you're dead.

So finally Anti-Mage farms up his items and picks up something called a Cranium Basher, which gives him a 25% chance to stun for 1.4 seconds every 2 seconds. So next time he ganks you and you're by yourself, you won't even get the chance to move properly, then his team enables him to just go crazy on the rest of your team with his insane attack stats, and if he doesn't want to fight, he'll just teleport away and come back when you least suspect it.

Also here's a terrifying thought, Cranium Bashers used to stack and not have the cooldown, which meant you'd be getting permanently locked down from 100% to 0, and not even have the mana to respond in any sort of serious way, which you couldn't anyway, because of permastun.

Rattletrap, the Clockwerk Goblin

So, he's apparently one of the top tier heroes, though this fact doesn't surprise me at all. Let's meet a little something called synergy...

Rattletrap, the Clockwerk Goblin

The very first thing you'll notice about someone picking Rattletrap is the notification where you get told that someone on the enemy team picking Rattletrap. You'll notice the second thing around ten seconds later, when a missile crashes into your spawn location, hitting you all for 80 damage, and revealing the location for 10 seconds, pretty much showing him where you're going, what items you're buying, and what you all are (though the last one is obvious due to the nature of DotA).

Rocket Flare is a missile that hurts people, the reveal lasts for 10 seconds, and the range is GLOBAL. The mana cost is low and the cooldown finally ends at 14 seconds.

Actually you know what, I'm going to compare it to Hawkshot from League of Legends:


                               Hawkshot                            Rocket Flare

Range:                    5500                                    Global
Cooldown:              60                                       14
Damage:                 0                                         200
Mana Cost:             0                                         50
Duration:                5                                         10


I'll just let you deal with the ramifications of this skill, he can see anywhere on the map, runes, towers, river, jungle creeps, anywhere, with little to no penalty, especially since he won't be using mana in the early game. It's like Clairvoyance, but better, it's like Hawkshot, but better, for the purposes of intelligence, kill sniping (if you're good at prediction), last hitting, this skill reigns supreme, it's so good I've spent three paragraphs and a table talking about how good it is.

So uh, yeah, and I'm still only his first skill and he hasn't even started laning yet and he sounds insane, it gets worse.

So Clockwerk begins laning, he's last hitting with his Rocket Flare unless he wishes to descend to the level of mere mortals and last hit normally, he's not really using mana except to harass you or take creep kills, but still, he's content to farm, after all, he only needs two items to begin his reign of terror.

Eventually, he'll get them, and he'll just leave the lane, apparently bested, let's assume he's level 11 and just been farming for the purposes of this excercise. The next thing you know, a Rocket Flare lands on you, annoying, but you're more than used to it. So you don't really mind, he can see you, so what?

Suddenly a giant hook smashes into you and Clockwerk activates both of his spells and proceeds to beat the hell out of you while you're unable to move and then die in the space of 6 seconds.

So what just happened? Let's break it down and take it slow.

Clockwerk's ultimate is called Hookshot, it has a maximum range of 3000 (keep in mind the two screen range of Tinker's missiles are 2500), once it hits an enemy, Clockwerk is dragged towards them, stunning the enemy for 2 seconds and dealing 300 damage. Once next to you, he'll activate something called Battery Assault, a point black AoE that deals a ministun and damage to a random target in range every 0.75 seconds. It lasts for 10 seconds, can deal a maximum of 1125 damage, and has a 20 second cooldown, so to put it simply, you're not escaping from this.

Though if by some miracle you begin to crawl away, he'll employ something called Power Cogs. Eight cogs surround him, preventing whatever's inside from getting out, and this will normally be you and him. The only way to break the cogs is to hit them 3 times, and to make it even worse, if an enemy comes to try and melee them, he'll take 100 mana and health damage, and get knocked back. Said cogs survive for 6 secnds, so have fun.

So yeah, Clockwerk will hook onto you halfway across the map, stun you, stun you some more, lock you inside a death room and then proceed to beat you to death with a spanner. If by some supreme miracle you begin to get the best of him, he'll start to run away, if you're staying close to him and hitting him hard, he'll trap you inside cogs again and then use his upgraded ult to GRAB AN ALLIED CREEP OR HERO 3000 UNITS AWAY AND HOOK HIMSELF TO THEM, meaning he's got away scot free. Also his upgraded ultimate has a 14 second cooldown, so you know he's going to be back for more.

So let's review, Clockwerk has:

- The best global vision spell in the game
- The best single target initation in the game, with a low cooldown.
- One of the best lockdowns in the game.
- One of the best escapes in the game.
- The best voice in the game.

Squee, Spleen and Spoon, the Goblin Techies

From top tier to bottom tier, I wasn't even planning to do this, but because you're all so eager for it...

God I hate all of you.

Squee, Spleen and Spoon, the Goblin Techies.

The Goblin Techies have the dubious honour of having the slowest movement speed, and the lowest autoattack damage in the game. On the bright side, they have decent range.

If you're unlucky, the first thing you'll see of Techies will be a tiny green and brown blob running towards you at blinding speed and then taking both you and them out in an enormous fireball. If you're really unlucky, you won't even see them coming towards you, you'll just explode and die. This is Techies' most famous early game gimmick, and it relies a fair bit on luck.

Said gimmick sitting in river and waiting for a rune to spawn, if said rune offers them Haste or Invisibility, they'll take their Suicide Ability snd then proceed to run full barrel into the most valuble hero on the enemy team and blow themselves, and them up. Suicide Squad, Attack! is the most damaging nuke in the game, dealing 650 damage at level 1, enough to kill most heroes in the game. In addition to this, it denies Techies, and halves their death timer, letting them get back into the action faster.

(Disclaimer: If Techies has a Tiny in his party, expect Tiny to use Techies as a literal hand grenade and throw him onto you, where he then proceeds to detonate and kill you)

If you're marginally luckier, Techies won't decide to blow himself up on you, apparently not putting his fate down to the RNG, instead you'll head to your lane and begin farming, facing the Techies who seems extremely passive, and another enemy hero. The enemy hero seems strangely eager to let you attack him, however, once he gets near death, he proceeds to run in a rather strange direction, into the forest, or down the river, just not in a place your creeps have walked over.

So you chase him, then you proceed to just run into four Land Mines and explode. Land Mines are invisible and deal 300 damage at level 1, and 600 damage at level 4. If the Techies player is skilled, he'll stack them, meaning if you step on one mine, you'll step on them all, causing you to take a huge amount of damage in the space of a second.

(Disclaimer: Tiny can walk up and throw you onto a clump of Land Mines, killing you. Pudge can also pull you onto Land Mines, killing you. Bat Rider can drag you through a group of Land Mines, killing you.)

So now you've learnt that you shouldn't stand where creeps haven't walked over, and every so often Techies uses a single Land Mine to clear a creep wave, giving him a fair amount of gold. Once again, some time after Techies has hit level 8 and backed off into the fog of war every so often, him and his ally get low on health, you give chase again, making sure to walk in places your creeps have walked on.

Then you hear Techies said "Goodbye" and just raze an entire area of the screen to the ground, the area that you and your ally were on, who are both now dead. Techies' ultimate is named Remote Mines, an invisible keg of explosives that lasts for 8 minutes and deals a huge amount of damage per keg, eventually topping out at 750. Unlike the landmines, these can only be detonated by Techies himself, which means you won't be aware of them until he wants you to be.

So the game goes on, Techies has mined the runes, the Secret Shop, random forest passageways, the river, things you've only discovered after you've ran on the mines and died. Eventually you manage to force a fullblown teamfight, Techies can't do much if he hasn't been given time to prepare, right? After all, all he did so far is drop an innocous looking ward.

Said ward is a Stasis Trap, which upon priming and detonating, proceeds to stun all enemy heroes in a moderate area for 6 seconds, then Techies just picks a target, drops a Land Mine under them, then picks another target and proceeds to suicide into them for 1550 damage, thus contributing to the teamfight.

However, you finally wise up to Techies, you get a Gem of Truesight, you're ready for his bullshit mines and are able to take them out before running into them. So Techies employs a change of tactics, he begins to push, using Land Mines to kill entire creep waves, and then once he gets to the tower, proceeds to drop said Mines under the tower, dealing 500+ damage to the tower for every mine that detonates, which makes short work of a tower.

Once again, you chase Techies, after all, he can't do much to you by himself, he tries to lead you through mines but because of your Gem of Truesight, you're able to destroy them or dodge them entirely, he runs down river and then up the ramp on the other side. You follow him, and then explode on the Land mines on top of the ramp that you couldn't see due to elevation vision in DotA. Then he blows up your Gem and buys a Divine Rapier and just kills everything by A-Moving because holy fuck how can you die to Techies so many times.

A retrospective of DotA heroes, part 2

Orb Walking and Viper

Okay this time I'm going to teach all of you League of Legends players a very, very interesting mechanic, known as "Orbwalking". to help me out, I'm going to use a hero known as Viper, the Netherdrake.

(Pretend I just posted that bit from the Wicker Man where Nicolas Cage was just stumbling into a bunch of beehives in a field.)

So you lane against Viper, and levels 1-4 are just, a bit strange, to put it simply, every so often he runs forward, hits you with a physical attack that poisons you and slows you down for a bit, and then just backs off. Nothing else to it, you're probably thinking he's just an underpowered piece of crap.

Level 5 comes around for him and something very interesting happens, his key skill, the rather unimaginatively named Poison Attack, suddenly has 0 cooldown. What this means is that Viper can now Orbwalk, to put it bluntly, what this means is, when you manually cast a buff placing autoattack, you get to cancel the wasted frames of the animation, walk forward, and cast it again.

So what begins to happen is, Viper walks up to you, spits out some poison that does moderate damage, and then walks a bit closer to you and does it again, and again, and again. You turn to run away but it's like one of those horrible nightmares where your legs have turned to lead and Viper isn't slowing down as he continues to spit out poison death. Your creeps should be helping you, but becuase Viper is casting the spell manually, rather than clicking on you, their AI doesn't realize what's going on and they just go about their business.

To make matters somehow even worse, Viper's passive, Nethertoxin causes him to do more damage the lower your health is. If you're at 100-80% health it'll do X, 80-60% it'll do X^2, 60-40% it'll do X^3 and so on, until it's doing +128 damage at maximum, per hit.

So you're almost at your tower because this is a horrible nightmare and you can't die in nightmares I guess and you have 200 health because you stacked Bracers and I want to make this as terrifying as possible for you. Then Viper throws out his ultimate, Viper Strike, which does 300 poison damage over 5 seconds and slows you down by 40%, so yeah, now you're dead.

When you come back you decide to start hitting him first because you're suicidal or something. Viper comes back with items that make him even more beefy and starts his tyrannical reign of Orbwalking again, except this time you're ready for him and start hitting him in response. Except he has a second passive called Corrosive Skin, which causes you to take Poison damage and have a slow applied to you, this is in addition to the poison and slow he's manually putting onto you and the additional poison and slow he'll put onto you if he's a further asshole (which he is, all Viper players are assholes).

Then he kills you again and again and farms up into a carry, but not a supercarry, because life is unfair.

Though if he decides to build like a caster and gets Scepter, his ultimate suddenly has a 12 second cooldown and a range of 800, so uh, enjoy taking 145 poison damage per second, for five seconds, every 12 seconds, in addition to all the other poison that's being thrown out.

Broodmother and the summoned monster push

Okay another thing that really wasn't in League of Legends, at least until they put in Heimerdinger, was the concept of a hard push hero. There's two types of push heroes in DotA, agressive pushers, which are pretty much like those giant trucks in Soylent Green that push people down an alleyway or something or like a Terran siege push in Starcraft, and backdoor pushers, which just run up to a tower or barracks and burn it down in like 20 seconds. Tinker is one example of the former, but he requires quite major ramp up time to get there, so I'm going to talk about an early game one.

Black Arachnia, the Broodmother.

As soon as Archnia gets to a lane, she begins to establish her position as the ultimate annoying squatter by setting up two giant spider webs. These things are big, like a 650 radius disc, like imagine the entire middle area of Summoner's rift (the square between towers and rivers), that's what this web can cover. when she's inside of them, she gets faster, regenerates her health faster, oh, and she turns invisible while inside of them, though unlike in League of Legends, there's a fade time on this, two seconds to be precise. Also their duration is infinite and they cannot be destroyed by anything.

Like most of the other heroes, she keeps herself to herself, only popping out of her invisibility to web to last hit, maybe get hit in retaliation, but she's able to quickly recover her health due to those webs. Once she hits level 4, she proceeds to throw down two more of these webs, pretty much fucking up the lane further for you. Still though, she's not really doing much, just last hitting and not really making herself known outside of that.

Eventually though, she's going to hit level 7, head back to buy certain items to help with her mana problem, and then when she gets back the 'fun' begins. Almost instantly she nukes one of your creeps for 300 damage with a spell called Spawn Spiderlings (she could do this to you but it doesn't factor into her plan yet) and as soon as the creep dies, three miniture spiders spawn, these last for a minute, they then proceed to go to town on your creeps, and everytime they kill one of your creeps, they spawn a bunch of smaller spiders, which still do decent damage. While this is happening, Broodmother continues to nuke your creeps, making the small spiders, and then before you know it, you're facing an army of spiders that you can't concievably deal with unless you're Axe with Vanguard, or one of the AoE heroes.

Said spiders proceed to sweep aside all the creeps in your lane (making more spiders as they do so) and then proceed to just completely and utterly wail on your tower, and they're going to kill it, and they're going to kill the next tower, and they're going to kill the next tower, all the while Broodmother continues to push her webs up (and the webs make the mini spiders invisible as well), and then, before you know it, you've lost your towers and your barracks and she just goes home and proceeds to spend the gold she made on her items, before repeating this on another lane.

Now, let's say you're Pugna, or a squishy Int hero with a strong AoE, you're not going to be that scared of the wave of spiders. Except, Broodmother still has two more abilities, one of these is a passive called Incapacitating Bite, this gives enemies hit by her a chance to miss, a movement speed debuff and causes them to take more damage from her attacks, and since she doesn't have to worry about spawning spiders to push, she's going to throw that Spawn Spidering spell on you instead, doing a nice, sizable nuke, and the nuke hurts, a lot.

Finally, her ultimate, called Insastiable Hunger gives her a 14 second buff that increases her attack damage by a huge amount (60-100) and gives her an obscene amount of lifesteal (40-80%), so at any point after she's level 6, she has a chance of just appearing from a web that you're going to have to walk through, doing a huge amount of physical damage and doing a huge amount of lifesteal, as well as slowing you down, making it harder to run away, before just nuking you for 300 damage and killing you.

Then once you're dead she'll push the tower in, and she'll probably do it faster becuase you wasted her time.

Also she can't teleport from web to web...yet.

Phantom Lancer

So we've covered late game multiple lane pushing, and we've covered early game minion pushing, now let's cover the perpetual death push, something so utterly terrifying that both Riot and S2 wanted nothing to do with it.

Azwraith, the Phantom Lancer.

So you'll face this guy and notice his icon looks like Kimahri from FFX, and you'll notice also that his model looks completely and utterly terrible, you'll be thinking to yourself that a hero this obviously low effort probably plays like complete and utter shit and has skills that are lame and boring.

Then he proceeds to nuke you with a Spirit Lance, slow moving green laser that does damage and spawns a clone of him right next to you. The clone then proceeds to start hitting you as well, though it only does a quarter of his damage and takes 4 times as much damage as the main hero does, regardless, it's annoying, distracting, and lets him last hit a hell of a lot more than he should be.

Regardless, you manage to start bursting him down, through playing carefully, using autoattacks liberally on him, and you get him to around half health, and then you decide to move in for the kill, you've got your nukes ready and he's in kill range. You nuke him down hard and fast, and he just promptly explodes in a puff of smoke. It turns out the real Phantom Lancer was actually invisible, and now he's deciding to wail on you as you run back to your tower, your spells still on cooldown, oh and he throws a Spirit Lance illusion at you as well just to rub it in.

So the game continues, he's picked up a Diffusal Blade, which grants a passive Mana Burn and an active slow/buff remover called Purge, and you notice that every so often when he hits enemies, he spawns a duplicate, and another duplicate, up to a maximum of five duplicates, said duplicates are able to deal decent damage and all have the mana burn effect, which means that almost any caster that fights him will get swarmed, have their mana removed, and then absolutely wrecked, and he's able to push towers faster and faster, he's a growing problem, and it's becoming harder and harder to deal with him.

Now he's level 16 or so, he's picked up a Manta Style, which lets him spawn TWO MORE ILLUSIONS giving you a total of 8 Phantom Lancers to deal with at any one time. Then you begin to notice something horrifying, his images are starting to spawn their own images, though they're still capped at having 5 maximum images, and they all have Radiance, they all have Mana Burn, they all benefit from auras, and then, to make matters worse, once you managed to cleave through the multiplying images to and think you've killed the real Phantom Lancer, it turns out he ran off a good minute beforehand and it now pushing in another lane, using his multiple positive feedback loops to help him and you get to repeat the process all over again until eventually you get steamrolled by a literal one man army.

Have fun guys.

A retrospective of DotA heroes, part 1

I've been making a bunch of posts on another forum in anticipation of DotA 2 and how good and overpowered some of the heroes were, so I'm just going to put them here so people can look at them if they're interested.

Old Harbinger

League of Legends is generally credited with causing casters to scale with the addition of ability power and cooldown reduction, however, this is wrong.

Meet Harbinger, the Obsidian Destroyer.

When you lane against Harbinger, he'll do a spell called Astral Imprisonment, what this does is REMOVES YOU FROM PLAY FOR X SECONDS and gives him some of your Intellect. Intellect gives you mana, which allows you to cast spells, which means if he does this enough, which he will, you will have a mana pool of below 100 if you're certain unlucky heroes, which means you'll get to cast one spell, tops.

You might be thinking "Oh he'll just run out of mana", but Harbinger has a passive (AURA!!!) that means any spell cast has a chance to restore one quarter of their entire mana pool, which means that hypothetically, he'll keep on doing this until mid game, since he'll tire of you.

Harbinger will then go and farm, and leave you alone, if you're a newbie, you'll think it's because his reign of terror is over, but to be truthful, it's just beginning.

There was an item called Aghanim's Scepter, which boosted ultimates of certain heroes (except for Tinker because he's broken anyway) and gave them sizable health, mana and Intellect. Harbinger would begin to farm these up, giving himself an obscene mana pool (think in the thousands) and a absurd amount of Intelligence.

His Ultimate was pretty much a giant algebra problem that boiled down to "IF HARBINGER HAS MORE INTELLECT THAN YOU YOU GET HURT A LOT". Harbinger was stacking items that gave him huge amounts of Intellect and unless you're a caster, you're going to have around 50 Intellect, if you're lucky, soyou're getting hurt by that.

Harbinger's Q was something called Arcane Orb, this was an autoattack modifier that cost him 100 mana per hit and caused him to do extra damage equal to 9% of his current mana pool. Go work out what 9% of 3342 is and then realize this is true damage, and then realize he'll get stuff to make him hit you faster.

Now if you're sort of smart, you'll work out that he'll run out of mana if he keeps on doing this, except his Aura procs on his Arcane Orb, which means he's never going to run out of mana, and keep on doing his obscene damage.

So yeah enjoy caster carries with built in positive feedback loops and disgusting damage, then realize this guy isn't even top tier.

Goblin Tinker (Manta Style)

Once again you get told this dirty, horrible, terrible lie about DotA where casters cannot scale and after 25 minutes they become totally useless. That is completely untrue, there are Int Carries, and they scale off mana.

Meet example number 2, the most broken hero in the history of man, Boush, the Goblin Tinker.

So you begin laning against Tinker and you notice that once he hits around level 4 he just begins nuking the fuck out of you with a spell called Laser, this has the twin honour of being one of the few spells in the game that does True damage (which means it can't be mitigated by any form of armor or magic resistance) and that it's also one of the most damaging nukes in the game, you're going to see around a quarter of your health wiped out every time he uses this, and only its steep mana cost prevents him from completely spamming it on you.

After he hits you with around 3 or 4 Lasers, you think you're going to just play it safe and hang back at your tower, you have around 150 health so you know the next Laser will kill you, but Tinker isn't around, so you're fine, and then a missile comes out of nowhere and ends you instantly. Tinker's next spell is called Heat-Seeking Missile and fires two rockets at the closest heroes that he has vision of, however, this spell has a range of 2500(!), which is around 2 screens away, and the vision only has to go one way, so expect to get killed by a hero you can't even see.

After getting his fill of your lane and hitting level 8, Tinker decides to go and gank other lanes, this is just quite simply him looking at another lane, noticing a hero around the health range of 640 and telling the guy already in the lane to "Hit him once.", once he does that Tinker fires off both nukes and deals 600+ in the space of 1 second, getting yet another hero kill.

Now you might be thinking Tinker is a one trick pony, but then you notice him beginning to pick up items that can best be described as "Really fucking weird", namely because they all have active components (think Deathfire Grasp, but more interesting). Why would a hero be getting an item that casts Cyclone (3 second removal from the battlefield), Boots that give you an inbuilt teleport to any creep or tower on the map (with a 60 second cooldown), an item that lets him cast Illusions, and an item that lets him turn an enemy hero into a sheep?

Then suddenly, out of the blue, one of the creeps at the top lane begins glowing and Tinker appears, splits into three and casts March of the Machines, which fills the screen with Goblins that explode on impact with creeps, damaging them and beginning to clear the lane. Apparently not happy with taking just 10 seconds to clear the lane, Tinker casts his ultimate, Rearm, which REFRESHES THE COOLDOWN ON EVERYTHING HE HAS (It also has a cast time of 1 second at maximum level and has no cooldown at all.) and allows him to cast March of the Machines again, destroying your creep wave.

He then proceeds to teleport to middle, splits into three again, casts March of the Machines, casts Rearm, casts March again and then teleports to bottom, before repeating the process again. Apparently worried about his mana pool, he teleports back to fountain to get his mana back to full.

This time though, you're ready for him at top, you'll get him when he ports in and beat him up or something. He then proceeds to teleport back, turn you into a sheep (which means you can't move, do any damage, or do anything at all), throw down his Illusions and nuke you with everything you have. He then rearms, TURNS YOU INTO A SHEEP AGAIN and nukes you again. And then he'll keep on doing this until you're dead, then if he's low on mana he'll port back to his base and get mana back, and if he's really low on mana he'll just run back with his Sonic the Hedgehog class movement speed, otherwise he'll just keep on pushing in creeps, towers, barracks, anything that he can reach while maintaining relative safety.

Now for the scary bit.

You find out you're investing at least two heroes to stop Tinker, and then you remember, he's only one hero, and they have at least four more.

tl:dr version:

AM I PUSHING AS TINKER

10 TELEPORT TO A LANE
20 CAST MARCH + MANTA STYLE
30 GO TO 10

AM I KILLING AS TINKER

FIND HERO

10 USE SHEEPSTICK
20 NUKE THEM AND MANTA THEM
30 GO TO 10

Nerubian Assassin

Ironically, one of the heroes in DotA that suffers from a lack of scaling the most isn't an Int hero, it's an Agility hero, one that looks like a tank, but is anything but.

Meet Anub'arak, the Nerubian Assassin, and owner of one of the best voices in the game.

So you're a caster, you're young, level 1 and waiting to beat the shit out of some poor Agility or Intellect hero with your broken damage spells. Instead you see this giant Beetle which runs up and just instantly removes around a fifth of your mana pool with his half screen range Mana Burn, then he heads off for a bit and starts getting some creep kills, before burning your Mana again, and again, and again, and again. After a while, he has around half his mana, and you have barely any, you've been completely and utterly neutered spellwise, you've been unable to harass him with anything but physical attacks and he's just been sitting there removing your mana like an asshole.

Eventually he hits level 6, but he doesn't seem to be using his ult, instead he just continues to burn your mana. After a while, he seems to get bored and heads back to base to buy some items, you decide to start pushing up, getting some last hits, enjoying your solitude at being allowed to farm back your mana. While you're doing this Nerubian Assassin has used his ultimate, named Vendetta, which turns him invisible and causes him to do major damage upon hitting a target (ps the target is you, you are marked for death he is going to kill you and then laugh about it in chat you are so fucking dead).

Then Nerubian Assassin decloaks and hits you for 270 damage instantly, does his AoE stun for 200 damage and then Mana Burns you for around 150+ damage. If you're lucky you live, but if he's good with numbers, you're dead. You either limp home or you have to wait to respawn, with Nerubian Assassin getting gold either way.

As Nerubian Assassin levels up, Vendetta starts to do more and more damage, finally culminating in a 50 second long invisibility and 20% movement speed boost that does 525 damage upon hitting a target. His AoE stun does 260 damage, and because this guy really, really, really likes killing people, he's going to buy an item called Dagon that lets him do a nuke that begins at 400, and ends up being 800 damage by the time he upgrades it fully.

Factoring in passive magic mitigation, Nerubian Assassin is going to end up doing 1450 damage per combo, if you have less health than that, and you're not some sort of crowd control wizard, you're going to die, each and every time, and you're not going to see it coming unless you have Wards or a Gem of True Sight, and if you have a Gem and you're not a high HP hero, he'll just kill you and then destroy the Gem over the mangled remains of your corpse.

On the bright side though he doesn't scale past that.

ps Old Gorgon vs Old Nerubian Assassin was one of the worst matchups in the game.

My nineteen month thoughts on Bayonetta...

Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3
Developer: Platinum Games
Release Date: October 2009 (JP) January 2010 (Rest of World)
Genre: Action



...Is still the frontrunner in gaming disappointment of the decade, as well as being overshadowed by a game 10 years its junior.

While I mentioned my opinion of the game a long, long time ago, I feel that it needs restating, in a proper way.

There are two things I like in life, one about gaming, one not about gaming, let's deal with the latter first. Nerdy girls are the absolute best thing ever. Rachael Weisz is my favorite woman in cinema purely because of the bookish klutz she played in The Mummy. Ema Skye puts every character in video games to shame, and this random girl in an episode of Columbo looks absolutely awesome (ignoring the fact she's probably 60 now and possibly dead). Attractive girls own and putting glasses on them and making them smart is even better.

This is the first time I've searched for girls by name on Google in like a year.

The second thing I like is Devil May Cry, and to a lesser extent, Devil May Cry 3. The game has a simple, easily learned control scheme, perfect enemy and boss design, once I'm done with this I'll probably write another essay on why DMC1 is pretty much the best game ever.

So, imagine my surprise, when in mid 2009, I get a link to a gameplay trailer for something called Bayonetta. It looked like Devil May Cry, but instead of a white-haired, teenage half-demon, I'm playing a hot, leggy, librarian. It was like my dreams were made manifest, my two favorite things on the planet crashing into each other and leaving a pure diamond of gaming behind. I pre-ordered it instantly and waited over six months for it.

Look at this, look how perfect it is, imagine a game of this.

Eventually January rolls around and I get the game through my letterbox. I finish it two days later and just feel underwhelmed and cheated. Most of my criticism of the game so far has been shallow and petty, so I thought I'd attempt to explain it properly, but first, the good stuff.

The game is gorgeous, the aesthetics of everything from enemies to weapons to characters look good, however, there's a problem with this that I'll get to later. The music selection is good, though I feel some songs were squandered while others were massively overplayed (An instrumental version of their Fly Me to Moon remix would've been a decent main combat song, for example, instead of hearing the same, semi-bland song over and over again). Finally, Witch Time is a genuinely interesting mechanic.

Now, the bad.

1 - A homage without context is just a hamfisted reference.

One of the first scenes in the game begins with Enzo, one of the characters best defined as 'comic relief', talking about the recently deceased Eggman the Destroyer. You see, they mentioned Eggman, who is a character in Sonic, so it is a reference, hence you can nod sagely and smirk to yourself and go "Yes Bayonetta understands me, the oldschool gamer."

While I find these types of references strange and forced, they're nothing compared to the type of stuff Bayonetta pulls later on. Halfway through the game, you're riding a motorbike for what feels like five minutes, occasionally punctuate by fight sequences when you go to ground. Then later on, before the final act of the game, you're riding on a missile, shooting monsters out of the air for at least ten minutes, occasionally punctuate by fight sequences where you beat up angels while running along the missile. Older games who played different things to me will go "No you see, this a clear homage to Outrun and Space Harrier, you ignorant Philistine."

Leonardo De Vinci quite clearly has his finger on the pulse of culture.

The problem here is I don't care what game it's referencing, or how the game is trying to make me enjoy something through forced nostalgia, the homage doesn't work in the game due to the length and vastly different style of gameplay it puts on. I played Bayonetta expecting something like an action game with esoteric weaponry, an interesting main character and fun gameplay, not a game where things are awkwardly bolted on.

For example, a good reference, or homage, would be something like Mr Game and Watch in Super Smash Bros Melee. He still fundamentally plays like most characters in the game, but his appearance and moveset are so baffling, especially in an aesthetic sense, that you'd feel compelled to know who he is and what the hell he's doing in the game. SSBM doesn't make you play inside a Game and Watch and limit you to one button of play and force you to play simplistic minigames whenever someone picks the character.

Also, since I know someone will bring up the Space Harrier homage in Devil Mary Cry, there's a few crucial differences, the healthbar of the boss gives you a clear indication of primary progress, while you constantly advancing on him is 'secondary progress'. He does different attacks that have to be avoided in certain ways, and on Normal, the fight is short enough to just be something strange and interesting, rather than you just begging for it to end.

Of course, this gets worse when the game starts laughing at the plots of other action-adventure games for being overblown and childish, with Bayonetta telling bosses to shut up as they provide exposition and so on. However, the game then proceeds to pull some sort of double-ironic fake-out on the player by having the plot combine the worst parts of a grandfather paradox, prophetic messiah plot, and an ending that makes absolutely zero sense.

You can't call every cake in the bakery shit and then invite us to eat out of your toilet.

2 - Funderstanding, or the art of encouraging players to learn your game.

Almost every game I like for gameplay alone has certain things in common. The games almost always are simple to learn but hard, and much more importantly, rewarding to master. However, this mastery shouldn't come from memorization, but a simple understanding you come to with the game and the limitations it presents to you, and then mastering the game by working out the way to get around it. Here are some games with examples of what I mean.

Devil May Cry : Learning the game is about meter management and smart usage of Devil Trigger
Starcraft: Learning the importance of resources, unit creation and macro, as opposed to watching battles and using fancy control.
Street Fighter: Learning that -not- jumping is quite often the best course of action, as well as the importance of normal moves.
Pokemon: Learning the perfect balance between variety and specialization.

Despite this, there is some level of memorization in each of these games, Devil May Cry requires you to learn enemy patterns so you know when best to exploit their weakness and burn meter. Starcraft requires map knowledge, build order knowledge and knowledge of the units. Street Fighter requires you to know the moves of you and your opponents, as well as efficient combos, Pokemon requires knowledge of what each individual Pokemon is able to do, as well as its typing.

The point is, the memorization and the understanding dovetail into you visibly improving in the game, letting you play better, win more, get faster times, complete harder modes, so on and so forth.

However, this only works if the game is fun enough and the mechanic you're required to learn is actually deep.

If Street Fighter wasn't initially fun, nobody would care the slightest bit about this data, let alone demand to see it.

Now how this works with Bayonetta is interesting and is down to two things, the fighting system, and the enemy design.

I'm going to explain Bayonetta's and Devil May Cry's fighting systems, then explain the problem with the former.

Bayonetta's moves can be jumped into two general categories: Special Moves, and Combos. Special moves generally require a trigger to be pressed or a button to be held down or so on. The combos function in much the same way as God of War or Sonic Unleashed, you press buttons in a certain order at in a certain frequency to pull off a pre-defined combo, there are at least 15 of these. The game, at least early on also hinges on Witch Time and Dodge Offset, which essentially means, you're able to stagger a combo, dodge an enemy attack, then finish your combo on a slowed enemy, giving you increased style rating and increased damage.

On the other hand, Devil May Cry has special moves and combos. But the former are generally executed by pressing a direction on the analogue stick and/or either pressing or holding an attack button. Combos rely on the speed and frequency of your solo attack button, but unlike in Bayonetta, there are five of these combos at most, and only 2 or 3 of them see use at any one time.

What makes Devil May Cry's style interesting, is that due to the extremely small pool of moves, anything can chain into anything, and also, due to this extremely small pool of moves, you won't have to worry about putting effort into memorizing all of them, since it'll be done in the first hour or so at most, which then allows you to create free form combos and focus on dealing damage to enemies in the most stylish and efficient way.

Here's a short anecdote to explain it. Watching the demo, you see Dante knocking an enemy in the air, shooting them with his handguns, and then knocking them to the ground, it looks stylish and you'll want to give it a try. So you start the game and after a couple of minutes you fight an enemy, you can either check the manual or the ingame tips to see the move to knock an enemy in the air, as well as following them up there, once you do that, you just start hammering on the shoot button, and surprise, you're floating in the air by rapid firing your pistols, and keeping the enemy there as well! Then, to knock them down, you suppose you have to use your sword, so you press the attack button, and down they go. A stylish, easy combo that any newbie could learn instantly.

With Bayonetta, the problem comes with learning the combos, you have a vast volume of them to learn, they're split into Wicked Weaves and normal combos, the former of which do more damage, which means you should use those more than the former. What ends up happening is that you quite simply get overwhelmed with the sheer volume of data you have to process, leading to you not caring about improving, you know some of those combos will be better than other combos, and you sure as hell aren't going to work out the situational usage for each and every combo.

This would be like if Starcraft had 100 types of unit, or Street Fighter had each character start with 20 basic moves, or if Sonic had to run using the QWOP method, you'll get so bogged down in the minor details you don't find yourself caring about the gameplay because there's so much to learn at a low level. Which means you don't care about the gameplay at a high level, which means you're not going to bother playing it for any extended period of time.

3 - Twenty different types of problems, one way to solve them all. AKA Less is More

Bayonetta has bad enemy design, partially. The enemies are different and very nice to look at, however the way to beat almost every enemy boils down to dodging their attacks and then unloading a combo on them, and then possibly a QTE attack. The only variation is generally in the attacks you have to dodge and how the enemies look, even in the case of the Kinships, you're still dodging them and then hitting them, even though they're a giant floating ark.

In the first Devil May Cry, the enemies looked different and with the exception of the most basic enemies (which largely served as training dummies), they had to be dispatched in different ways, for example:

- Force a parry and then destroy in one hit.
- Dodge for an extended period of time while using guns to take down outer shell, then switch to melee weapons to destroy the core, then dodge them as they freak out.
- Ride tornadoes and bounce around and try to hit the enemy.
- Use a specific gun to force them onto their bellies, destroy them in one hit.
- Exploit their elemental weaknesses

The general point is, every enemy functioned as a specific encounter, the only enemies that -looked- similar were Marionettes/Fetishes and Sin Scythes/Sin Scissors, and even then they had to be dealt with very differently, to add to this, each enemy had a detailed file that got updated as you fought them and saw their moves and found out their weaknesses and so on. I can't overemphasize how different everything was to fight and how much more interesting it made the game.

In comparison, in Bayonetta, the only enemies I can remember in terms of having to fight them differently were the giant lions who were immune to Witch Time (the main draw of the combat system), and a giant ball that could kill you in one hit. These weren't fun or engaging, they were just really, really, really annoying.

The bigger brothers of these guys weren't very fun (not pictured: The Car, The Giant Ball and The Giant Ark)

To make matters worse, the difference in bosses are even more pronounced. In Bayonetta, every boss is an enormous set piece, loaded with QTEs, environmental gimmicks, cinematics and epic music. However, at their root, it's still the same basic encounter of dodge, combo, kill. Once again, in comparison, Devil May Cry had 5 bosses, in which you encountered them 3 times, with generally what seem to be minor differences between them. However, these differences generally include a different stage, which serves to help or hinder you, as well as increased movesets and weaknesses, and much more importantly, new phases.

In addition to this, the bosses in Devil May Cry were deep, I could write an entire essay on how fun it is to fight Nightmare, as well as how involved and strange the fight is, and once you learn what makes him tick and how to counter each and every attack, you're able to enjoy it as a legitimate challenge. You begin learning how to use meter and the vulnerabilities in a bosses phases and how best to deal the maximum amount of damage at the optimal time, and unlike in Bayonetta, it isn't punctuated by a dramatic zoom-in on the boss as he pants and gasps like a geriatric.

http://i.imgur.com/RCpiB.jpg
See that indistinct blob next to the giant spider? He has more depth and unique stuff going on than every enemy in Bayonetta combined.

This may seem like a minor gripe, but half of the fun in an action game is down to the enemies you fight, and the other half is down to what you can pull off, and if the former is samey and boring and the latter is boring and confusing, then there's a problem with your game.

4 - I had something about level design written here but then a QTE happened so I have to do it all over again

My last two criticisms of the game are relatively minor compared to the previous three, but still, they serve to further cripple an already damaged game.

Level design is important, the places you go have to look nice, flow relatively naturally and not outstay their welcome. Bayonetta succeeds in 1/3rd of these.

While in some games you can get away with each level being radically different (Sonic and Mario come to mind), and other games levels don't even matter (Street Fighter/Starcraft). In an action game there should be some sort of attempt to maintain some semblance of consistency. Devil May Cry managed this by having most of the game take place in the castle and its related grounds, each level finished where the last one left off (with one, obvious, understandable exception).

In comparison, Bayonetta has you going from place to place with no rhyme or reason unless you watch the cutscenes, which the game seems to almost mock you for doing. There's no sense of progression, one minute you're in a city then the next minute you're in Paradise then you're back in the city then you're on a cargo plane then you're riding a missile then I think you're in a time machine then you're in some guy's office block then I think you go into space then the game ends.

To make matters worse, it's not like these levels are short, Sonic had levels you finished in 2-5 minutes, Devil May Cry had levels you could finish in SEVENTEEN SECONDS. On the other hand, Bayonetta's levels take around 10 minutes or so at least, everything feels like this slog, there's a ton of content you'll miss that you're not even aware of until the game kicks you in the balls at the end of level results screen, and that's assuming you didn't die in the war of attrition it puts you in, in which case you'll definitely be getting a Stone Award, repeatedly.

Of course, dying just because of enemies slowly grinding you down during a level wouldn't be annoying enough, there's also the quick time events, during a cinematic or part of the game, you'll be asked to press buttons to dodge an obstacle or do an action. If you fail the former, you die, instantly, from full health. Have fun. I don't even have to explain the level of stupidity to have a way to die instantly to a purely reaction based puzzle, on the easiest difficulties of an action game, in the first couple of levels, with something that's nothing to do with an enemy. It's just a terrible decision.

You gotta mash that square button so Bayonetta pushes down harder on the angel who has a piece of serrated wood riding up her vagina. If you get enough 'megatons' the angel suffers an orgasm and explodes into a bloody mess of gore and halos.

5 - Epilogue

I was hyped for this game, I legitimately wanted to like it with every fiber of my being, which is probably why I hate it so much now. It's not an unplayable game, it's just a shallow action game that doesn't know what it's doing or how to do it. There's no urge to master it, there's no urge to improve at it or play it after the first time. Despite this, like I said at the start, it looks nice and I really, really like some of the items as well as some of the music and weapons, however, the lack of depth in the game doesn't entice me to try out these weapons or items, or play enough to grind enough to unlock them.

Final Opinion

Pros:

- Music
- Aesthetics
- Cinematics

Cons:

- Level design
- Enemy Design
- Battle System
- QTEs
- Plot

Just rent it, it's fun for two days but after that it's not worth it.

Greetings, or...

Will just be putting my general thoughts on gaming as well as anything I get up to, I'll try not to bore you with pointless updates on my personal life, unless they're gaming related. Happy reading!