My Current View Of LoL

To start off, LoL is my 4th MOBA. I've played 750+ hours of Dota 2, 255 matches of HoTS, and 25+ hours of Awesomenauts. I have some understanding of MOBAs.

• Visuals: LoL looks very nice. The hand painted look to the map textures and the little details on and around the map are very nice. However it's not very easy to see champion details unless the champion is pretty large. It also bugs me that champion portraits in game are not animated and don't even change with most/all skins.

• Champion/character acess: Compared to HoTS unlocking champions in LoL is pretty quick. But you can not even test their kit against a single bot to (you can test heroes out in HoTS) see if you like or have the skill to use a champ's kit. You have to hope that they happen to be in the weekly rotation.

• Purchases: Three refunds per account annoys me, but I suppose that HoTS doesn't offer any refunds, although Dota 2 does so long as you don't modify the items and don't play two hours after purchase. The shop does not show all details on a champion's abilities so I have to use the wiki.

Also riot points instead of money makes gauging a champion's or skins's price in real money difficult.

• Balance: This is where I'm most bothered. Riot tends to break a champion if they nerf or rework them. And they don't seem keen on nerfing champions considered OP by the community. By contrast Dota 2 has a pretty well balanced hero pool, with only a few heroes have poor balance.

• Player Progression: I like masteries. I do not like Runes.

• Gameplay itself: I find LoL fun. But I'm annoyed by the rigidity of laning and champion comps after you reach summoner level 10. I'm okay with one person mid and having a jungler. I am not okay with top and bottom always having the same roles, and it's so deeply ingrained in the community now that you can't safely do anything different.

Ultimates have obscenely long cooldowns too.

• Verdict: I like LoL and wanted to play it because of how unique the champions are. I also think the game looks beautiful. I'm going to keep playing despite the things I dislike. I'll say that LoL is better than HoTS too. I also don't say LoL or Dota 2 is flat out better than one another, as the games have to many differences to make a comparison like that.