Dota is balanced around the philosophy of keeping heroes' strengths whilst amplifying their weaknesses. Riot takes the homogenisation approach where no champion really excels at anything, and all the top tier competitive picks are pocket knives, capable of doing pretty much anything reasonably well. You don't really counter champions like Lee Sin, Thresh, or Lucian, or think of some clever strategy to mitigate the impact of their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. You just try to out-pocket knife them. Theres no specific pick that will ruin Lee Sin, Thresh, or Lucian's day because all of the champions are too damn homogenised to do anything unique.
So yes, Dota is hard. Not having a get out of jail free card in the form of flash, long cc, high impact spells and long initiation ranges means that you will die very quickly if you are an inch out of position. Oh and you lose gold on death, so you really really don't want to die either.
So why don't I go ahead and take this opportunity to debunk your latest claims, since you were at least nice enough to provide specific examples.
" You don't really counter champions like Lee Sin, Thresh, or Lucian, or think of some clever strategy to mitigate the impact of their strengths and exploit their weaknesses."
Lucian has been changed so there is no point discussing him at this point in time. Another example of your obsolete arguments. But since it's recent, we'll just ignore it for now then.
Lee Sin is the result of Riot's balancing strategy of taking care of problems one at a time. He was so dominant in the last few patches because they reworked the other top junglers without affecting him. However, the recent changes to the jungle clearly develops counter strategies to Lee Sin. In particular, his strength is solely a strong control of early game and then only utility in later parts of the game. This shows your claim of "no champ being good at anything in particular" being false. In particular, in recent pro games, you would see Rengar and Nocturne being perfectly viable picks against Lee Sin. With Quill Coat, I wouldn't be surprised to see more.
Thresh is a very well-rounded champion. He excels at utility, has pick potential, and good crowd control if and only if he can get into range. Right there, you see the weaknesses. He must hit the hook on the appropriate target in order to get into range in order to chain his CC. Otherwise, his sole purpose is utility. Even there, counterstrategies involving ward placements have been done in Korea. His lack of reliable initiate has seen him decline in favor of other supports such as Nami or Braum. Both of these champions also have clear weaknesses/deficits where Thresh does excel.
Trinkets are very useful because it helps lvl 1 be less volatile. The problem right now is that there are too little champions that are viable and all assassins are completely useless. The game was a lot more action packed to watch when assassins were strong, but they were completely over nerfed.
In the assassin meta, individual players would be able to impact the game much more.
Riot needs to find a balance between having standard mid laners and also having assassins be viable as well.
As a spectator, its really boring to watch competitive teams farm for 30 minutes and fight at baron/dragon.
As a gamer, its really sucks to do extremely well in my lane and crush... but then have 1 lesser skilled player impact the game more than me.
DFG was nerfed to 90 seconds, was this too OP? I don't get it.
edit: FYI I'm bias and my opinion is solely based on Mid lane, competitive play, solo q.
Whoever made this statement is clearly basing his opinion mainly on the LCS. Watch the SK Telecoms T1K vs. Samsung White games and see if you still find this to be true. Game 1 SK Telecom T1K expertly identified their win conditions and power curves and also Samsung White's and exploited the discrepancies perfectly. Game 2 was filled to the brim with action with the result decided by some poor rotations in the latter parts of the game by SK Telecom T1K and also good teamfighting by Samsung White where they properly exploited a missed Shockwave with two simultaneous flash into CC on two different targets.
The game has changed but to call it stale just because LCS teams like to drag it out to 80 minutes is a complete misrepresentation. Just because LCS teams are unable to close out games doesn't mean it's impossible. You see very little fighting between LCS teams because they are unable to properly identify their power curves and win conditions as SKT T1K and White can.
- - - Post Merge - - -
Assassins are completely useless
Oh that's funny because Faker on SKT Telecoms T1K has played even utility champions as assassin types. His Xerath, Zilean, and (today) Orianna have created numerous picks and opportunities for his team.