Why Invoker Is Always Banned And Why Terran Is Stupid

There is a problem in multiplayer game design. It transcends genre and it affects even the best game designers. And, worst of all, after the mistake is made, its almost impossible to fix by patching, without completely remaking the game.

This is the link between the Invoker, of Defense of the Ancients, and Terran, a race in StarCraft II. Terran is frustrating to deal with, and Invoker is so frustrating to deal with that he is almost always banned in competitive play. This isn't because they are overpowered, or because they are easy to do well with. In fact, its the exact opposite.



Let's start with the Invoker, because most people already suspect what is wrong with it. Most heroes in DotA, as well as DotA-like games such as League of Legends and a billion SC2 custom maps, have a certain "feel" to them. There are nukers. There are tanks and tanky DPS. There are carries, and there are supports. There are gankers and there are disablers. These roles are universal in all games, and even in some other games such as MMOs. And each character, in addition to fitting one of these roles, also has a certain "feel" to how you're supposed to play them.

Related to this is the idea that each particular hero has an innate weakness. For example, a character such as Riki, which has permanent invisibility, can be countered by purchasing items that reveal invisible units. You can also counter him more neatly by picking heroes that have abilities that reveal invisibility, such as Bounty Hunter. This creates a complex dynamic in the pick phase of the game. For instance, the person that picks first should be expected to be counterpicked extremely hard.

Switching to using League of Legends as an example, since that game has a more consistent metagame, top laners are rarely picked first because they are countered the most easily. In Dota the metagame is more complex and varied, so something like this does not always happen. However, it is still a very important part of competitive play.

Another observation: All heroes (and champions, depending on what game you're playing) require the player to understand the hero fully in order to do well with it. In a well-designed game, the spells and passive abilities all work together.

I'll use my favorite DotA hero, Bloodseeker, as an example.

Isn't he cute? <3

Bloodseeker's first ability is a damage-over-time that also silences the target unit. His second ability passively heals him for kills. His third ability gives him vision of low-health enemies, and increased attack and movement speed when these enemies are detected. His ultimate damages and debuffs a target enemy unit so that it takes damage if it runs.

All of these abilities work well together. For example, in a teamfight, you should ult your target and dash up to them. You can use your silence for a bit of extra damage and to prevent them from hitting you back with spells. You can use your passive vision to chase if needed, and your passive healing to be able to have enough heal to get out after you've sniped your target.

However, this kind of stuff requires a complete knowledge of your hero. And there really isn't much else you can do with your hero. Of course you can probably play a support Bloodseeker, but that's not as good as most supports. When you pick a hero, you are committing to a certain strategy, and picking the hero gives your opponents a certain amount of information as to what exactly your team is doing.

So. Invoker. I was going to talk about him.

Even his portrait scares the crap out of everybody.

Here's how invoker works. You have three abilities, called Quas, Wex, and Extort. When you cast one of these abilities, you get an instance of Quas, Wex, or Exort, which give you stats depending on which one it is. Only the last three instances are kept. Your ultimate creates a new spell based on which three instances are currently up. This means that Invoker has ten additional spells due to this Invoke. Because of this, Invoker can be anything.

If you max your Quas and keep those up, you get extra health and health regeneration, making you a tank. If you max your Wex and keep those up, you get attack and movement speed, making you a carry. If you max your Extort and keep those up, you get extra damage and mana, making you a nuker. His skills can be buffs, disablers, damage, steroids, disruption- pretty much anything. He can even make new units.

Forge Spirit: Ability invokes if Invoker has 2 Exort and 1 Quas instances. Invoker forges a spirit embodying the strength of fire and fortitude of ice. Damage, health, and armor are based on the level of Exort while attack range, mana, and duration are based on the level of Quas. The elemental's scorching attack is capable of melting the armor of enemy heroes. If both Quas and Exort are level 4 or higher, Invoker will create two spirits instead of one. -Dota 2 Wiki

Invoker does have weaknesses. Its not that Invoker has all these options throughout the entire game; he can really only do one or two things at a time. In order for Invoker to be effective, he needs to specialize into one, or maybe two orbs.

For example, say a player wants to do a nuke/disabler Invoker. This means that they're going to spec deeply into Extort and Quas, forgoing Wex. This reduces the number of possible spells from ten to four, which is a lot more manageable. (Most EQ builds such as this also involve putting just one point in W so that you can cast those spells if you really need to, but the spells will be considerably weaker because you won't be spec'd as deeply into Wex.) If I were to do this, I would probably narrow it down even more to using primarily Forge Spirit and Cold Snap.

So eventually, you end up with an Invoker that has pretty much the same limitations as most other heroes. But the problem is that when you're picking Invoker, you're keeping your options open. But when you pick any other hero, you immediately know what the restrictions are on your hero and your opponents can counter it. But if you pick Invoker, even as your first pick, then... what? Your opponents really can't do anything to counter that, because you have absolutely no idea what Invoker plans on doing. And an experienced Invoker will be able to adapt their strategy in a way that other heroes are not able to do.

Another part of this is the fact that you don't really have to be able to understand Invoker completely to use him competently. I myself mostly only use the EQ combo that I described earlier, disregarding his other eight skills (almost) completely. I'll be the first to admit that I'm terrible at DotA, preferring to watch matches instead, but its not much of a stretch to say that a decent Invoker would emphasize the usage of only four or five skills. This is clearly not how the game is meant to be played, but it can be played this way.

Invoker's extra options do not mean that Invoker is overpowered; in order to compensate for Invoker's early-game ambiguity and uncounterablity, he has very poor scaling and mediocre stats, making his late-game extremely weak. But the fact that Invoker is so ambiguous in the early game means that most teams really don't want to play against him. This makes Invoker a very standard ban for the team that picks second. Its because its really difficult to know what he's doing, and by the time you know what he's doing, it may be too late to counter it completely.

The Terran race in StarCraft II has a similar problem. The game is designed differently, of course, because its a RTS game rather than a DotA-like. But it suffers from the same game design problem. The effect of this is different, of course, but it stems from the same problem.

Terran has a variety of early game options that the other races lack. Most importantly, Terran has the ability to move their buildings around. This means that they can completely wall-in their base, denying any form of scouting. You should be able to get your starting scout in, but after its killed by their first marine, you have no information until you get Observers if you're Protoss, or Overseers if you're Zerg.

Let's imagine that you see a depot, a Barracks, and no gas. The Terran could be going for one of two possible things. He could be going for a 16CC, or he could be going for a 3/4/5/6rax marine scv all-in. The problem is that these two builds require very different reactions. A 16CC requires you to also expand (and do it quickly), while an scv all-in is, well, an all-in. This means that the player is investing heavily into an early-game attack, to the point where holding this requires you to instead spend the expansion resources on getting extra units. In current high-level play, most players assume that the gasless build is a 16CC, but this makes marine/scv allins extremely scary. Terran players, such as BitByBit, have ranked up to the highest echelons of play for their famed marine/scv allins. Though this style has fallen out for various reasons, it is still possible for a Terran, especially in lower levels, to pull it out occasionally against unknowing opponents.

Imagine instead that you see a fast double gas build when you scout the opposing base. This means that the Terran is going for either a 1/1/1 build or a fast cloaked Banshee build. These are both powerful early-game aggression builds, but the correct reaction is different for both. The correct reaction to a 1/1/1 build is to go robo into immortal, but if the Terran is going for a Banshee build instead, Immortals have a weakness where they are unable to shoot up. And Banshees can fly. You also won't have enough observers to counter the number of cloaked Banshees. The problem isn't exactly as bad as I describe in high-level games; but it still is a problem. Famously, DongRaeGu, the best Zerg in the world  according to most analysts, lost a completely won game to Slayers_MMA because of surprise cloaked banshees.

Zerg and Protoss don't have the ability to surprise like Terran. Zerg can't do this except for lategame transitions; they are extremely expensive and they can't be done in the early game like Terran. Protoss has the ability to do fast attacks with unscouted units, but the units are much weaker. (I myself occasionally perform strategically-poor fast allins against Terran simply because I don't want to deal with their garbage.)

This guy looks scary, but just three marines will take it down easy. I still use it though. Not because I want to, but because I have to.

Its not just this. Because Terran has more options than the other two races, they can better take advantage of map features, such as ledges, tight choke points,  island expansions, gold minerals, etc. This is most notable when Lost Temple, a classic map from the original StarCraft that was also featured in WarCraft III, was removed because all the creative features, that all races could take advantage of in Broodwar, only favored Terran in StarCraft II.

Pictured: Lost Temple.

 So why doesn't Terran just, well, win? Well, Terran falls off extremely hard in lategame. In recent months, Terran has had trouble against Protoss and Zerg in super-lategame, because of their inability to remake armies as quickly as Zerg, and the fact that they die quickly to Protoss splash.

But StarCraft II is different from MOBA games; you won't have a late game if you simply win in early game. And for a while, Terran was doing this. But then the game was re-balanced. In StarCraft II, you can't just win if you have a small advantage, like Terran often does in the early game. Your advantage decreases as you travel across the map, as your opponent's army can increase the size of their army as your army travels. Therefore, in order to counter Terran advantage, maps were made progressively bigger. Also, creative map features were removed, because Terran could take advantage of them too much. For example, Lost Temple was replaced by The Shattered Temple:

Pictured: The Shattered Temple. Note the changes: A wider choke point outside the bases, the removal of the islands, the removal of the ledge outside each base's natural, wider chokepoints in the middle, one watchtower (the blue thing in the middle) instead of two. All of these things were changed because they were considered Terran-favored.

This means that, instead of players having to focus on taking down Terran, as is true for Invoker, Terran's breadth of options limits mapmakers into not being able to make certain maps. For example, a map was created during the early days of StarCraft II that contained the idea of destructible Xel'Naga Towers. Nobody ever figured out why that's a bad idea, but the map never saw play because people simply assumed that destructible towers could be abused by Terran more than the other races.

Like Invoker, I am not saying that Terran is overpowered. I am saying that the game design, which gives them an absurd amount of options, makes them not fun to play against and difficult for the community to build around.

How would you solve this problem? Well, its different in each case study because MOBAs and RTS games are different. As for Invoker, the hero is inherently broken because the idea of the hero completely breaks how MOBA heroes are supposed to feel. However, it might make sense to keep the hero in the game simply to force the second team to waste a ban; otherwise, they might have a large advantage because picking second allows you to counter the opponent better.

As for Terran, I actually really like the idea of having a lot of options. Otherwise, the game devolves into the same game every time, for both sides, like in Broodwar PvT, or a rock-paper-scissors game like Broodwar ZvZ. But I don't like that only Terran has these options. Protoss and Zerg should have these early-game options as well. The (tentative) expansion units don't really solve this problem, as the proposed units are lategame units that won't see play until quite a bit into the game. I don't pretend that I understand the game well enough to propose a solution, but Protoss needs a little more early game power, perhaps at the cost of lategame units. Zerg already has a decent amount of early game power, but the problem is that Zerg rushes are easily scouted. This would completely change how the game is played, but I feel that it is necessary because otherwise future metagame shifts in PvT and ZvT are going to get ugly.