Author Topic: DotA Abilities Translated into D&D. Imbalanced?  (Read 1987 times)

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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DotA Abilities Translated into D&D. Imbalanced?
« on: August 27, 2017, 08:36:03 PM »
For those gamers who haven't noticed the crown jewel of the ESports scene, DotA is an immensely popular team-based PvP game with heavy RPG influences from Warcraft 3. I play a version of DotA that allows any character to have any 6 abilities rather than being stuck with the 4 pre-designed ones.

I was thinking about its balance, in general. On-attack passives by mundane fighters are wildly powerful. This is in stark contrast to 3rd edition. Now, I know many of you don't play DotA, so I've done all the work of translating the abilities below. Keep in mind that I'm importing them in as honestly as I can. Imagine you had a player who wanted to play the following abilities. What would your impressions be?

Quote from: Quick D&D reminder
In a 6 second round, a character has a 3second standard attack and a 2 second move and a 1 second swift action, there-abouts

Some starting mechanics concerning iterations
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Spells
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Stats:
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DotA's ability balance varies wildly from D&D's. I'll be building an LoD Dota a mundane and caster carry before translating it into D&D terms so we can see how powerful they really can get. Basically one is all passive abilties and the other is mostly active abilities (aka spells).

Agi (passive carry) (standard skills chose one to boost every level up. Any are selectable but follow the minimum levels above as if they were spells):

Essence Shift
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Fury Swipes
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Fervor
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Beserker's Blood
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Agi Carry ultimate skills can be taken any time starting when a 4th level spell would. For instance 2nd level of marksmanship would count as a 5th level spell, selectable starting at ECL 10)

Marksmanship
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Shadow Dance:
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Mundane Dex-based tl;dr summary: much like D&D, DotA assumes that players will buy certain items to give them abilities that they simply need to function: a big HP boost item, a big movement item, true sight, 15% Lifesteal upon attack, a bashing item (it takes away actions from those you hit 25% of the time, 1 round magic immunity usable every 14 rounds and even a plus iteratives item. Trying to play an hardcore agi carry without them is an exercise in frustration. Once you get them, the only thing that can stop you is continuous mass stuns.


Int (active carry): Now we can compare that to a similarly optimized caster build (the best of the best):

Purification
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Deafening Blast
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Meat Hook
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Sunstrike
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Multi-cast
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Laguna Blade
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Summary of the caster build: You rush a scepter or have a support with greed to give you one. Think of it as an item that applies free augmentation to your spells/psionic powers, augmentations that are only available if you have the item. Then octarine core is your second best item. The 25% cooldown reduction let's you kill a nontank or carry while waiting the now 4 rounds to fire your laser again. The point is to basically get iteratives on spells. Spells that can't have their damage lowered. The order is: fireblast, hook, purify, deafening, laguna. If you get good odds, you could deal enough damage to kill two heavy tanks, on top of locking down any other enemies around.