The KEY Differences in Carrying In Dota and League

The main difference I've often felt is that lategame lol carries always become glass cannons, while lategame dota carries always become raidbosses

The main difference is that in the lategame a carry in dota is a strong and, sometimes, tanky, right-clicker, which shows the product of all the farming needed to achieve that point. In league of legends, you are a bag of gold that gets oneshot without any kind of counterplay if there is a character called "Rengar" in the game

As someone who has played both games for a long time, I find the differences between the two games really fascinating. They sometimes look similar if you haven't played both, but it's almost like they're made for completely opposite types of people. Not just in their gameplay, but in their fundamental design philosophy. It's no wonder most Dota players can't stand League, and most League players never get interested in Dota.

I love how in Dota the definition of a carry is p much just "given enough gold you become unstoppable" and that can mean anything from a sniper shooting up highground to an insta killing es with daedalus

EE risky farm joke goes hard lmfao

>"there are no magic damage carries in Dota" >Pos 1 Pudge slowly creeps in, starts to rot and heal back and chew your ass off with his ulti Dismember"

And then there's Morhpling a whatever carry that thing is

In League you get to scale all your abilities through your items, where as in dota, your skills will scale far more with just raw experience. For carries, their late game potential usually comes down to how these abilities synergize with key items, where as supports and mid-game based mages scale mostly with getting levels to scale up their damage, and use items for utility. There aren't a lot of crit items in dota, but assassins attain it mostly through skills that give critical strike. Phantom lancer is hard to kill because his ultimate makes illusions, and illusions get to benefit from health scaling of strength, and the damage from agility.

5:25 100% slow in dota doesn't actually make a hero completely unable to move, but instead sets their ms to 100, which the minimum ms for heroes and is one third of the average base ms.

A support main here. I haven't really played dota 2 in quite a while, but I feel like it's a lot more necessary to support for your hard carry whereas in LoL, I think very little of abandoning an underperforming ADC in favor of helping a higher performing player. I think it's because of the abundance of hyper carry champs who can 1v9 with cataclysmic late game damage in other positions like Gwen, Bel'Veth, and Master Yi. A snowballing Yone is worth far more of my attention as a win condition than a 0/3 Jinx. Hell, there are even support champs like Senna and Pyke who can hard carry if I REALLY don't trust my team.

You may think the pos 1 carries in dota, wait till you see the late game pos 5 snap who left to jungle at min 40 and reenters the game with Daedalus+25 talent and 1 shots your 3 cores

One of the things that feels the most different being the carry in League is that in the early game it feels like there's less to do; in DOTA it's pretty common to farm up to a farming item and rotate in and out of jungle to more efficiently get gold. In League I was surprised that the jungle is off limits (because of junglers) and that 'picking up' lanes for exp/last hits when that lane's core is backing/dead is not common place (usually supports).

in DotA the hardest position to play is Hard Support(the carries support) - the life of the carry becomes very easy if you have a really good support; a good support will stack, pull, denied and die for the carry; all position main goal in the DotA is to make space for the carry to farm, most people don't get that, that's why they lose; and the priority of Position 1(Carry) and Position 2 (Mid) can change of who gets the farm; position 3(core offlane) never has prio to farm, he always takes the unsafe farm and always prioritizes to make space.

From my personal experience (as a newbie in league and old-time player in dota) it's much more fun to play carry in dota than to play adc in league. I like dota's macro and item build choises much more. Items in dota can offer you cc, movement, survivability in form of extra health, armor, lifesteal, dispels. And in league it's just damage, attack speed, crits. While some items have additional passive components, they don't feel that interesting. What makes playing adc a literal torture for me is the fact that all adcs are just glass cannons which get one shot by everyone else. You need to have incredibly good positioning and your team has to protect you from enemy assasins/bruisers diving and deleting you in a fraction of second. But there is no reason for them to protect you because in league everyone can carry and your damage dealing capabilities don't matter that much, since anyone else can dish out pretty good damage while also having better mobility / survivability / cc. As an adc you build only damage to keep up with everyone else, while some tank builds nothing but hp and armor but has abilities that scale with his health, allowing him to deal good damage while also being harder to kill. Playing assassin is a high-risk/high-reward playstyle. While playing adc is basically very high-risk/low-reward. I can deal much more damage when playing lux support, hitting enemies from an actually safe distance, which is harder to cover with a built-in dash that every new champ has. Or I can go toplane with some easy to grasp frontlane champ, just turn off my brain and run into enemies. Or i can play assassin and just insta-gib most characters without breaking a sweat. I'm not really good on akali but damn sometimes I roll my face on keyboard and miss half of my abilities and still manage to easily kill some poor squishy without almost any counterplay availible to them. And I can kinda do all this stuff while playing carry in dota, since there are so many different carries with different playstyles. But even when I play drow, who is similar to adc's in league (long-range glass cannon), it's still much more fun. I actually have items which help me survive like pike, bkb or manta. And my team actually plays around me because I'm their main source of damage, so I can usually expect that my support will help me if I get jumped and my frontlaner will lock down enemy team so I can shoot them. It also doesn't help that carries are supposed to scale well into late game, but due to snowballing, players being easily tilted and surrender option available at 15min mark, most games just end before adc can even hit a major powerspike and become an actual character that can do stuff.

Something you missed about the prevalence of melee carries in Dota is actually attack animations. Aside from most melee carries having faster attack animations than ranged cores, they also don't have to deal with attack travel time. This means that it's generally easier to last hit and assuming stats and items were the same, a faster animation means more damage. It's been evened out a lot but Terrorblade was a huge addition because he had the same attack point as Antimage. And back in the day, Antimages attack animation was considered so good that some players would buy blink dagger and only level stats.

The biggest difference in League and Dota is, in non-pro games, one person cannot win a game in League, but one person can lose it. Meanwhile in Dota, as long as the carry is fed and head and shoulders above all the other players in terms of skill, he alone can win a game, even if one or two of his teammates are actively trying to lose.

Just a small note; Muerta was not the first Magic Damage carry; Outworld Devourer, Leshrac, Tinker, Dazzle, and Sniper were at one point all magic damage carrys. Tinker and Dazzle got nerfed into support roles (Dazzle was originally there, but Tinker was a carry since the WC3 days). Sniper's headshot and shrapnel got reworked to not work on buildings and (for headshot) be bonus attack damage rather than a magic dmg tick. Lesh and OD are still quite strong but not popular because they require a decent amount of skill. Also DotA doesn't have many items that improve spell damage directly (Parasma, Veil, Shivas, & Kaya's various upgrades), but they do still have a lot of items that improve spell damage (cooldown reduction, range increase, spell lifesteal, int based magic damage amplification, repositioning tools, etc.)

Another great vid~! May we please have one on the differences between Supports in Dota and LoL as well?

Spell based carrys do exist in dota2( pudge, Lesh). However unlike league, dota isnt about skillshots and bursts, not always. So when it comes to spell based carrys, they are tanky mfs who you wont be able to deal with. Pudge as a pos1 doesnt out damages you, he out healths you.

I love this video it hits the nail on the head of what i feel is different and helped me identify what I was feeling