Recent reviews by Jek

grug have club. grug eat deer. grug happy.

Not just an overwatch clone, brings a lot of unique mechanics to the field and also isn't made by blizzard

Every few months I hear one of the songs from this game and I have to dive back in. One of the best games ever made.

DotA 2 is the best game I've ever played, and the worst game I've ever played. When I first started I got to discover all of the heroes, the items, the skills, and it took me over 500 hours to learn them all. Once you learn them, you will likely be in the lower 20% of players. There is so much that goes into every match that I've got around 3000 matches and I'm still only at about the 70th percentile (not to say that others don't progress at different rates).

The downsides of DotA are pretty much the lack of tutorial and the people. New players will probably spend more time on the wiki than in game because of how little depth the tutorial offers. Valve is gradually making things better, but for now a new player will probably want to find a more experience player to help them learn the game. This won't be much of a problem at first because when you play your first 20 or so matches you will play against more experienced opponents as the game tries to figure out how much you already know. Add someone friendly and maybe they will help you out.
As for the people, the community consists of many terrible people that you will have to mute to keep your sanity. There are people who queue on servers with the wrong language, there are people who verbally abuse their team, and there are people who deliberatly die and give their enemies an advantage because they can't get over themselves. The punishment system is currently rather inadequate, so these people remain in the community.

I would recommend dowloading DotA if you want to play the best RTS on the market. If you have a tendency to get angry quickly or are not aware of the Dunning-Kreuger effect, you might not want to download the game. DotA is not a good way to relieve stress, it's more like a sport than a video game. If you can control your attitude and work actively to improve at the game, it will be one of the most rewarding things you can do with your time on Steam.