4Game

I want to start saying that I don't really think I have the ultimate truth about this topic. Nor do I have a personal thing against boots. The following post is just an honest opinion that's been roaming my mind since I started playing DotA around 2014. So please take my post with an open mind. I appreciate your feedback as I am always happy to see different perspectives than mine.

First off, Dota was born conceptually as a sandbox-like game. You were not forced to do anything: you were not forced to take all three lanes of barracks, you were not forced to take rosh, pick a specific hero or item, nor go a specific lineup (we have had 2-1-2, 1-1-3, 1-2-2, and so on). The game has mostly revolved around the player's creativity and freedom to buy whatever they can and do whatever they want in order to win the game.

As the game matured and focused more and more in the competitive scene balance, we got somewhat "forced" objectives, like pos 4 rotating to secure runes or taking outposts after a teamfight. These objectives, while being pretty strong, are not game winning by themselves and not taking them is not the end of the world.

And then items come to the discussion. There is one item which is a forced item in every game for every hero: Boots. Boots is a forced item because everyone will buy them, since +40 movespeed for such a low price, adding up the fact that you can IMPROVE them, is just too good.

The problem that derives from this is that everyone ends up with effectively the same movespeed difference. Except for tranquils (and BoTs, which I will address later) having every hero get +40 movespeed is effectively getting +0 movespeed relative to each other. So why instead of forcing everyone to spend 500 gold in +0 effective movespeed we just don't delete this forced item?

BoTs are a different kind of boot and I think they are (conceptually) fine: an item which makes you have almost global presence and a big splitpush potential, but an item like this does not have to be built with boots. I think an improved TP would make sense to be a better TP, not a better boot. Tranquils, on the other side, are a cool item for roamers who need the regen and ms, but hey, look! Tranquils give +65 ms (or +25 relative speed) because they are meant for roamers who want to move faster than an average hero! So why not making it a +25 movespeed item that does not need boots?

As you see, the movespeed topic does not have to include the same +40 movespeed boots factor. I am not saying it is impossible to tackle this issue without removing them, but having a must-buy item for every single hero is not something that goes along with how Dota works.

Thanks for reading this far. I appreciate your opinion as I really want to know what other players think about this.