Finding the Sweet Spot

Icefraud buff this! Volvo nerf that! ZOMG this patch is broken!

Every patch brings new buffs, nerfs and stupidly broken heroes (I'm looking at you Storm Spirit!).

Of course, a hero's ascension to overpoweredness doesn't all happen at once; it's a gradual process that happens over several patches. Buff a stat gain here, reduce a mana cost there, maybe tweak a BAT while you're at it, lower a cooldown or two and voila! You have created an OP monstrosity! Then realize that you've created a monster and proceed to nerf it into oblivion.

So, what I'm wondering is, what's a better way to go about bringing balance to the game then just giving out buffs faster than Oprah Winfrey can give out free cars to her audience? How do you find the "sweet spot" for a hero, where they're not too OP nor too UP, but just right?

Good post - I think we're all guilty of being a bit excitable when it comes to OMG OP NERF ICEFRAUD at times.

The thing is...Dota is inheritantly unbalanced game. The sheer number and divergent abilities of the different heroes, plus many of them being "OP in this scenario" type stuff make it difficult to keep in line...and also adds a lot of the fun.

For example...could imagine if they completely changed the map in some way for DOTA? Maybe double the size? Suddenly the likes of Nature's Prophet becomes massively more powerful, despite no other changes.

I think sometimes IceFrog is guilty of listening to the Pro's a little too much. They're obviously the people with the best understanding of the game, but they're also looking for every possible advantage and can also be guilty of falling into the same "group think" mentality as everyone else. I.e. this "meta" or "trend" or "fashion" means this hero sucks, and this one is OP.

Quite often, a single player "elevates" a particular hero with a slightly new or different build/playstyle etc. Remember when Mask of Madness Juggernaut would be laughed at? The new style catches on, gets played a lot, and the hero is then dubbed "OP", despite probably not being that different from how they were previously.

In the same way, heroes receive a small nerf, and fall off a cliff - I remember Magnus being a very popular pick for a while, they took like 50 or 100 damage off his ult, and suddenly he's in the gutter. That's not really a logical response to the change, more of a group mentality shift.

The other issue is Icefrog has the entire player base to balance for. I think he's wise to focus on the top end as that's where balance matters the most. Otherwise you'd look at the likes of Chen's stats at <2k MMR and decide he needs a massive series of buffs.

For me, the main issue I have with some of the balancing choices is that sometimes I don't think they take into account the overall meta shifts very well - e.g. pushers like Pugna, Leshrac and Dragon Knight were weakened drastically by the meta changes, even though no individual nerfs were made. In the same way, many heroes receive indirect buffs from this.

Balancing is always hard, it will always be wrong for at least some of the people, but the constant shift does keep the game interesting. Overall, I'd always say start with small changes, and work up.

Remember when Alchemist was the OP hero and they nerfed and nerfed and nerfed until he is literally one of the worst carries in the game now