4Game

It's a whole new game. Sure, I still have my mechanics and laning phase to fall back on, but as a frequent pos 2 Str hero player, after laning phase is over, I generally feel like "wtf is going on". I've played 5 games, and these are just some of my observations.

All 5 games I've played have boiled down to the mid-laner taking off and snowballing out of control, and they stay raid boss the whole game. And then the rest of the game is just 45 minutes of fighting from my back foot trying to coordinate with the team and get lucky for some bounty gold. It usually never happens or just isn't enough. It seems that because of the decrease in creep/jungle farming efficacy, and fighting being more rewarding, the ahead team pushes fights, wins fights, and continues to snowball, while the underdogs don't have the ability to fall back on avoidance and taking turns farming big camps to get pos 2 and 3 some core items in the mid-game.

Conversely, in the games when our mid-laner won lane phase and was able to run rampant, our experience was the opposite, and we just oppressed the other team for 45 minutes while they scrambled to get any kind of scraps.

When a team gets ahead, they're able to establish a stranglehold on the map. Even though it's 40% bigger it feels even more 1-sided of being unable to leave base and farm. Though I am a solo-player so randos could be the issue here.

There's so much going on with the new map, that it's difficult to coordinate and intuitively mesh with your team to place wards in strategic areas or contest as well. When we clear and put wards in a spot, because the map is so big, the fights never happen there again and people just go somewhere else, in a totally unpredictable fashion. This leads to feeling like wards are wasted and that there are 1 to 2-too few wards available in the shop perhaps. Because of the distance involved, the Twin Gates (fantastic idea in theory I feel) I've seen them used twice, and I used them once, because things that are happening are long since over by the time you get there. You really have to plan a substantial amount of time in advance, leading again to my feelings of exasperation playing with randos, who seldom if ever communicate (at least on SEA anyway).

Again because of the map size, Wisdom Runes don't feel essential to control because the time it takes to collect one and come back to lane as the offlaner, my lane opponent is already at the same or slighty higher XP than I am.

I barely see most of the players for most of the game. In a team game it really feels this has pushed individual skill to the forefront as there's more time involved with intra-lane conflict and less rotations. This has both positive and negative implications. But in a typically very-team oriented fashion, we could help out a struggling lane more efficiently and close the gap and give the teammate some breathing room. Now it feels like it's too much of a substantial economic risk (cost over time) to gank a lane. People seem to be on their own more often than not in the lane phase, and this means that a mismatch in lane will be punished even more.

A lot of time is spent by players just "wtf-ing" around trying to figure what's the next best play.

Let me be clear, none of this is "wtf Volvo doter is LoL now game sucks qutting now!". These are merely observations.

To me, this feels like a dota 2 patch for the most hardcore dota 2 players. It feels like I'm playing a whole new game and I'm struggling to intuit what the strategic moves at any given time are.

Obviously in time things will settle and strategies will solidify, but man this all feels so topsy-turvy.