4Game

Title.

And I'm not speaking about towers becoming tankier or towers having a defensive aura here, those are actually fine concepts. Neither I'm speaking about strength heroes being too tanky. This is about something else.

Since eternity tankiness has been buffed more than damage, be it though introduction of defensive items (while glimmer cape and lotus orb were okay, Aeon disk was a little bit of an overkill) or buffing HP (every single hero in the game has its strength gain higher than it had in 2014, HP per strength went from 19 to 20, starting HP went from 150 to 200 and now a level 6 pugna suddenly went from 587 HP to 780 in several patches. That's 33% more hp. The str gain and str per HP changes were probably required at some point due to stats being removed when talents were just introduced but now stats are back (and some heroes get durability talents) so both earlygame and endgame HP are inflated.

If you feel like tiny starting nuke buffs, starting damage buffs (which are mere compensation for how much HP was buffed) are enough, watch any old game of dota. Heroes exploded while being out of position. And while players were way worse back then, concept of heroes being generally squishier is something modern dota can borrow.

What's good in having all of those comeback mechanics (which I'm absolutely fine with) and stronger towers if a team that's in the lead becomes simply impossible to kill at some point? Players are better in 2021 than they were in 2015, players get out of position less and make less mistakes. Whichever team is ahead builds durability items. Heroes on the losing team are going to die anyway, be it in one hit or two but what matters is that if a hero on the winning team is actually killable. And then it's a patch of fresh air.

To summarize: There's enough objectives on the map now with bounties and outposts, no reason to fear for stalemate games with people just farming their own jungle afraid to make a mistake, it's time to make heroes squishy again. It doesn't matter if a dominating team makes kills easier as long as they can be killed themselves, buffing durability only helps the winning team as it leads to unkillability -> no reward for anything ever for losers, just slowly getting strangled. Whenever there's a patch when everybody feels like comeback bounty should be buffed, it's unkillability that should be nerfed.