Gank for Glory

Papa Dray is back yet again to share his seemingly neverending wisdom. This week: the ganker isn't rewarded enough.

Drayich, along with a majority of the community, have a great deal of respect for Icefrog and his team of beta-testers, but at the end of the day, someone will always find a way to turn a relatively "balanced" version into an overpowered struggle, be it with item choice or different line ups. So the question remains; what is this pivotal item in the modern day game? According to Drayich, it is none other than the versatile Magic Stick.

Upon arriving to this conclusion, Drayich took a trip into the past. In the days 48b, the first team to farm up their blink daggers won. Well, most of the time. In the days of mouse-sports, or the Black King Bar era, Dray and his team would play with atleast two BKB heroes and no matter how much they got pummeled early on, once they had their BKBs it was over. Even now, by winning one team battle, a team can go from having a twenty kill deficit to actually winning the match; merely because they had more farming power than their opponents. Drayich now poses the question: Is this how we want competitive DotA to look?

To support one of his suggestions on how to change the game, Dray used the following example:

-"I don't have many ideas on how to make the game more "fighty", more action packed. But something I have thinking about is having cooldowns shorter depending on what time it is in the game. What would happen if the cooldowns on ultimates, for example, changed over time. 200 seconds for Enigma's ultimate is fair later on, but early on, it makes a player very selective about when to use it. If say, for the first twenty minutes of the game, the cooldown was less - would Enigma fight more?"

Now back to Magic Stick. This is a highly useful and defensive item as it basically provides everyone with an extra 150HP during a team fight; making fragile support heroes, who have no items whatsoever, a lot more resilient. This then creates a vicious cycle of support heroes having more money for wards, therefor avoiding more fights and encouraging a farm based game.

On to the laning stages. If a Magic Stick user survives ten hostile spells, he has an automatic 150HP ready to use. This makes him that much harder to kill in a gank, making it less appealing to run around, ganking people.

An extremely controversial topic, but one cannot deny the fact that the version is more in favour towards the defensive aspect of the game. All Papa Dray is asking is that the ganker is rewarded for his early game endeavours, rather than losing to the passive farmer.