From an old long-gone dota player. Are the roles now fixed in the game ?

Hi all,

I'm a former dota player, in the old times of Warcraft 3, and I played Dota 2 until the Pit Lord was realeased.

I recently began to watch some streams, pleased to see how much the game has changed since then (map symmetry, woods, items, new runes, new awesome heroes, dotaplus that gives pull and stack timers wtf…).

However, it seems that roles are now fixed, which was not really the case before. We could see trilanes, sometimes two supports roaming, one jungler, a lot of diversity (which was a main advantage versus LoL with the same configuration). After watching the streams, and reading some stuff on the internet, it seems that every game is played with the same 5 roles (position 1 to 5).

My question to you is : are these roles always respected now ? And if they are, what happened ? Was this kind of forced into the game with the gameplay changes ? Or the meta slowly shifted to that ?

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Thanks for your insights ! I used to love discussing Dota strategy on the old playdota forum 🙂