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.
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