LOL2DOTA

[PSA I played LoL. I'm a highly ranked player. I joined Dota2. What now?] (self.DotA2) by denunciator

So, you're an ardent LoL player. You have all the champions, a perfect runebook and you have an Elo rating of 1900. You think to yourself, DotA is going to be easy.

And you realize that, no matter how good you are at LoL, you're nobody in Dota 2.

Champions - Heroes

When I use Champions, I refer to LoL. When I use Heroes, I refer to DotA. Get used to it.

The first barrier you have to get over in MOBA/ARTS games is the characters. Who are they, and what do they do? Their roles determine what items they obtain and what they do in the course of the game.

Generally, champions can be classified in a few ways:
 * Tanks - they have naturally high HP growths. They abosrb damage by being thick, irritating and/or utilizing Crowd Control abilities.
 * AD carries - they deal huge physical, autoattack damage.
 * AP carries - they deal huge magical, spell damage.
 * Supports - Clairvoyance, Wards, Heals. Soraka, Sona. Sounding familiar?
 * Disablers - they have huge CC abilities. Keeps opponents down, allows your carries to rip into them.

Your champion is one of the above, very rarely two. They may have differing roles such as gank, jungle, but in the end it boils down to their primary utility. Then, you come to DotA, and you realize things are drastically different.

Heroes are classified in many ways, but two main ones are used in the competitive scene, and have trickled down to usage in the pub scene. The first is role classification. But, you might protest, DotA just has a simply different classification system! Ah, but here is the brilliant part about DotA - any hero can transition into any other role. Let me give you a couple of examples from real trends in Dota2. You might have noticed Prophet quite often. His primary role? Pusher. Yet with the limited amount of junglers in Dota2, and a lack of proper counterjungling, Prophet has become a powerful jungler. Although his laning is quite brilliant (Sprout is strong without a Quelling Blade on the lane), and he can push very quickly, his farming potential with summons is significantly greater than most other heroes. He does not face the problem with neutrals' high base damage/tankiness, or travelling times between camps with his tree-removing spell. With a quick Hand of Midas (post-buff), he can outlevel and outfarm any other hero - this aids his transition into a Carry. It is not uncommon to have a Prophet go Basilius (jungler), Midas ("farmer/carry"), Aghanim (pusher), Desolater (carry) as a build, for example.
 * Tanks - are still tanks! The only thing they lack is spell-based aggro attraction - only one hero has it, and he is Axe. Every other hero depends on being irritating enough to draw the attention of opponents; it is up to the opponents whether they decide to ignore you. These heroes have good HP/Armor growth and brilliant damage mitigation abilities. Axe and Centaur come to mind.
 * Carries - they are the primary carries. They utilize their huge physical damage to mow down opponents and buildings, and makes good use of farm to completely destroy opponents. They are primarily autoattack users, although there are always exceptions. Anti-Mage, Specter, Nerubian Weaver, Obsidian Destroyer, Lone Druid (Syllabear), Doom Bringer - are all examples.
 * Semi-carry/Utility - they are not carries and not supporters. Generally known by the more common "utility" title, they have a good mixture of disables/magic damage on top of average physical damage, and they are allrounder heroes that are capable of stepping up to the mark if your carry is getting shut down. Weaver, Mirana (PotM), Windrunner are good examples of semicarry heroes.
 * Roamer/Gankers - they have a mix of disables and magic damage. Unlike Semi-Carries, their damage is not as strong physically, but they have good magic damage to compensate for that. Both disablers and burst damage fall under this category, and their job is to "go around and kill" heroes - hence gank. Their job is primarily to put pressure on the carry and remove freefarm, as well as to open freefarm lanes for their carries. Lion, Lich, Queen of Pain, Lina, Earthshaker, Tidehunter, Vengeful Spirit, Tiny are all examples of competitive heroes that come to mind.
 * Jungler/Pusher - Some might disagree with this classification. The five top junglers as of this meta are Enigma, Chen, Enchantress, Prophet and Lycanthrope. Syllabear is less seen in the European scene, but is still quite liberally used in the Chinese scene. The similarity between all of them is that they start off brilliantly in the jungle. Their individual abilities - to dominate or create units to fight for them - allows them to easily clean up the jungle, more so than in LoL. Their job, similar to LoL, is to utilize the resources of the "fourth lane" (jungle), and provide aid to neighboring lanes via timely ganks.
 * Turtler - They're not really anyone else. They can be brilliant pushers, but it is often in these heroes' favor to drag out games, as they are picked together with ultra-late-game carries (think 40+minutes). Their primary role? Hold opponents off and create tension and suspense, disallow opponent pushes while all the time giving places to your carry to farm. These heroes are extremely hard to play well due to the counterintuitiveness of their role. Goblin Techies, Pit Lord and Keeper of the Light are brilliant examples of this role.
 * Supporter - The ward-bitches, the pullers, the stackers. You might not know what these are yet, but suffice it to say their role is one of the hardest and requires a good command of both the map and the gameflow. You can't simply play a brilliant Crystal Maiden, Dazzle or Tidehunter on your first try - wards require thinking up to 4 minutes in advance, and you must have great awareness of your team and your opponents' positioning. Add that on to the fact that you're naturally paper, and you have a very difficult role to fufil. They are the healers, the Pipe holders, the people every carry expects to be there when they make a suicidal dive for the opponents. They are people who die for the carry and ensure the victory of the team.

Slithereen Guard is another good example. Slithereen Crush is a strong ganking skill and a powerful stun, given that it's physical damage - heroes with armor reduction (Venge) work with him well, and once he reaches level 6, he is formidable. He can be played as a ganker, a semicarry or even a carry, if given an appropriate amount of farm. He can jungle with his natural tank and a simple Medallion, and he can turtle quite well given that he has fantastic sight over his enemies with his ultimate. He can tank well if he gets Vanguard/Cuirass/Heart (all of which synergize with either his Strength and HP growth or armor reduction). His multi-facted role defines him as a utility hero, but he can go all the way to a full-carry status, or even, if the situation calls for it, a measly support, for he does not need much money to be effective.

Now, you might say, why do I call a support 'measly' if I praise their importance so much? It is because of the alternative, more effective (but harder to learn) farm priority system first popularized in the Chinese scene. This system ranks the heroes by who needs the most farm to be effective. The hard-carry hero, or the AD-carry champion, is ranked #1, and is called the priority-1 hero. All freefarm goes to him; open lanes go to him; big incoming pushes go to him. This is the reason why competitive FVs and AMs go for the Battlefury, or, as you might know it, the Tiamat. Unlike in LoL, the DotA towers hit for much less. By pushing a lane hard, supports can force enemies to defend the towers, generating a backlog of opponent creeps; this large wave will approach your tower slowly, opening up safe farm for the carry to use. The Cleave/splash damage allows them to quickly clear this up and move lanes to farm, increasing their effectiveness. This more advanced form of equilibrium management is risky, and requires the manipulation of multiple waves to both keep opponents on their toes (disallowing them from controlling creeps in their favor), as well as to generate multiple such pushes.

The semi-carry/utility hero is ranked #2, and the two gankers are ranked #3 and #4; generally, these gankers will be one burst and one disabler, in which case the burst gets assigned #3 (he needs survivability items) and the disabler #4. The support generally gets #5 (last) farm priority, and will be heroes like CM and Dazzle. But don't feel too bad for them - with just a magic wand and boots, they are very deadly in combat. CM is possessive of one of the strongest slows and a huge, global mana regeneration aura that makes spamming much easier (more on this later); Dazzle is possessive of a synergetically insane skillset that makes killing him and his allies a huge pain in the ass. The simple fact that all his damage is physical and he has a huge, armor-reducing ultimate, as well as a heal that simultaenously deals almost 500 burst physical damage, makes him an insane, unparalleled killing machine in midgame. In fact, Dazzle can often go as far as semicarry with that skillset, but it is often favorable to stick him with an ally and support/gank (due to the fact that he lacks a solid disable).

So much for hero categorization. Now, you think, I will find the perfect tank/carry/utility/gank/support lineup, because that is the perfect lineup right? "I'll lane the tank top, utility mid, carry/support bot and a ganker such as Chen in jungle," you think. "Axe/AM/PotM/Chen/CM seems like a brilliant lineup," you think.

And then Axe feeds to a Lina/RK dual lane up top, Pudge decimates your PotM, AM and CM are powerless against a Lich/Tide/Naix trilane and your Chen gets raped every single time he comes out of the jungle.