Quote Originally Posted by Spuuky View Post
LoL has problems, but to me they don't stem from a lack of action in the early game (in fact, I find there's quite a lot of action and the laning phase of every MOBA is by far the most compelling part to me). Limitations on what you can do breed a creativity to accomplish what you can with very little. I also certainly can't possibly imagine not wanting to win because of my character's development; I am good at MOBAs because I don't just "want" to win, I am driven to win. And I certainly don't care much about the state my character is in, except inasmuch as it enables victory. Gaining levels and buying items are a means to an end. Although, you can get all your abilities except your ultimate in about the first 2 minutes of any game anyway; having them all unlocked already is not actually fundamentally different, there will still be abilities that are better early and abilities that are better late, it's just a narrower band.
I seem to recall a certain Spuuky praising LOL for fixing Dota's apparent problem of a "boring" early game! Hahaha but seriously I agree with you about having all abilities unlocked isn't a drastic change. I typically have all my abilities unlocked at level 4, with 2 points in a nuke/stun and a point in each of the others. It still seems like HotS' approach does add in some flavor, though, considering at level 1, no one really does anything but auto-attack, especially for heroes with a defensive passive which makes sense to take first. At the same time, the low mana pool of level 1 heroes also inhibits using abilities, so I wonder if HotS actually isn't different at all from the early game of other mobas. Any thoughts on that Sky?

Even still, I think it's great that Blizzard is messing with these ideas as it joins the MOBA fray. Valve also plays with the her build formula and creep behavior during Dota 2's seasonal co-op events, so I wonder if some of these ideas might make it into those at some point.