Hey Y'all!

Hey everybody, many of you may or may not know me from teh SmiteFires, but I am here to grace the Dotafire community with my presence! I kid, of course. Seriously though, loving this game but I kinda suck. Assuming this is the intro place (it seems to be from the descriptions; feel free to correct me on that,) I just want to say Hi and that, while I know some stuff from casting and reading, I'd love to learn more!

Hey there! Welcome to Dotafire! I'm pretty new here myself, though I've been playing the game for about two years now.

Whether this place is for beginners or advanced players honestly depends on which guides you read. There's a good number of them that are written by trash pub players who took hours to figure out that right-clicking was how you moved AND attacked (this of course, includes myself), but there's also some authors here that provide some honest-to-god, downright professional level advice when it comes to building and using heroes. This place and the Dota 2 Wiki are what got me through a lot of my early struggles, though having a group of friends who were more than happy to yell at me whenever I did something wrong helped a bunch too. :p

And... I just realized that by 'intro place' you meant 'place to introduce yourself' not 'place for players to get introduced to game mechanics'. I'm super smart. Just... yeah.

Yeah, my friends have coined the phrase "Everything is Zane's fault." Also, yeah anyone who knows me knows my name because of my skype so I don't even hide it anymore ;P. But yeah, as the apparent "God of Feeding," I suck at most dota-style games despite having played Smite for like 3 years now, and Dota2 is no exception ;P

Hey welcome to the cancerous community know as Dota. Have a nice stay here because you can never leave. I kid, but in all honesty if you need to learn the mechanics of the game better just watch Purge. He is a youtuber who just went Pro and he makes every helpful videos.

I'll warn you now, even with your previous experience, you're in for a rough learning curve. There's a lot of spells, items, abilities, etc, etc that you need to have a working understanding of before you can do well, but you've played MOBAs before so you know the drill. There are some who will argue that Dota is worse because the heroes are more unique or complex or... something, I don't know, I'm not here to start a flame war.

Once you do understand a lot of it, though, you start to see how truly beautiful the game is. If you find complexity, balance, and elegance in gameplay beautiful, anyways.

^what he said.

It took me about 3 months of non-stop dota to learn all of the skills items herso etc... blah blah blah. And even then i still learn new things about skill and mechanics of the game.

Honestly, I hit the learning curve right around when I picked the game up. I've been watching casts, done a few myself as well, and I find the realistic simplicity of the abilities when compared to other mobas refreshing. Most would disagree with that description, but with most characters having 1 or more passives as their abilities it makes for a surprisingly easy system to pick up assuming you learn the last-hit animations well enough. Also, atleast for me, the flow of the game is real gud when compared to other top-downs. The slower, more meticulous movements make it easier to figure out what's going on and it's just a fun time.

Pro tip for learning the game. Start off with supporting (the hardest role in the game for pros, easiest for pubs) then pick some carries (easiest for Pros hardest in pubs). That should get you off to a nice basis of learning the game.

Also sign into Dotabuff.com with steam. It will track you and you can look up any player item or skill. You can see lots of helpful things with it. This one is mine just to give you an idea.
Your text to link here...

This ^

I would recommend trying Lion out. With 2 Disables, a giant Nuke, and a source of easy Mana, he's an incredibly fun Hero to start out with.

http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guide/angelobangelos-guide-to-support-lion-7373

Honestly, i'm just scared of being what dota's meta considers a "support" because that requires roaming and ganking and such. I enjoy in-lane supports but I tend to have a hard time with the roaming support meta that you guys have :P