After trying hard to make Teemo mushroom strat viable, I am utterly shocked after playing techies

It's been a long time since I played Dota. But I decide I want to load it up specifically just to play techies.

I forgot what it's like to play a game where the devs aren't afraid of letting you be powerful.

Imagine Teemo, except he trades out his high single target ranged damage to focus entirely on his mushrooms. Now imagine that these mushrooms can take off a third of your HP near the start of the game and you get them at level 1. And further imagine that he is capable of stacking them, and manually detonating them, to kill anyone regardless of how much defense they have. Oh, and you can have as many out at once on the map as you want and they have no decay timer. On top of that, the enemy doesn't have free red trinkets that reveal stealthed objects. They either have to pay money for stealth revealing wards or they need to pay money and sacrifice an item slot for a truesight gem that reveals steathed things around them (but the gem is dropped when they die).

I can completely wall of an entire lane as impassable and slowly creep towards the enemy base to siege it. This is kind of what I did with Teemo, it just was so unreliable in execution because your mushrooms are so weak and it's a lot more difficult to build up a network of them due to the low timers on them.

It's also an interesting contrast to go play HotS again after years and be reminded of what it's like to play a game where the devs are even more afraid of letting you be powerful than Riot is. You have to struggle so hard to find a character that will even somewhat let you carry the game through skill expression. Way too many fights look like 5vs5 wet noodle mashups. It's hard to punish enemy mistakes and gain an advantage, which puts you at the mercy of your team not screwing up.