The DotA 2 Iceberg Explained

ah what have we here is that a seeker of knowledge I spy beyond the screen it is indeed welcome my friend to the Dota 2 Iceberg video this Nifty little chart was lovingly crafted by Phil 2244 on Reddit and I have the privilege of making a video about it oh my goodness okay let's get into it this will work like other Iceberg videos you might have seen elsewhere and that we start from the top where the more Broad known subjects are and we go down to the depths where the esoteric knowledge lays each object on the iceberg will be colorcoded as follows white is for gameplay green is for lore red is for miscellaneous and purple is for DOTA one this video is going to be a lot of yapping and not a lot of editing so if you want to pop up a game or do some chores while you listen to me carry on about obscure do effects uh be my guest um explicitly NSFW entries will not be discussed if you want the answers for those you can go looking I also linked the iceberg in the description if you want to Gander at it closely for yourself now we begin with the Harold tier Bass Hunter DOTA DOTA by Bass Hunter is an iconic song among internet culture it's most famously been used in the Ricardo meme among others and has a ton of covers and remixes everywhere the song is about well playing DOTA DOTA 1 specifically as the song was produced in 2007 free to playay free toplay is a documentary made by Valve and released in 2014 the documentary covers the stories of three players namely dendi fear and hiigh it's a pretty decent watch giving viewers a perspective into how crazy this tournament and dota's origin was in general it's free on YouTube I think and you can definitely watch it on Steam both for absolutely free I definitely recommend it even if you're not a DOTA fan it still has value as a piece of Esports history the international the international is the yearly biggest Tournament of the year it usually has a massive prize pool and accumulates a massive amount of viewers both live and on stream it includes content like skits Dota 2 history new hero reveals and of course the actual Games the actual tournament the international is always a banger but if you ask me nothing has even come close to topping the international 6 ti6 uh cannot be topped and I don't think it ever will be true sight true sight is a series of documentaries that focuses on the grand finals of the international they're a sizable duration and they feature neat little animations of key plays that took place during the games these animations get better and better each year and even though we haven't gotten one in a while I'd love to see how high quality these cinematics could get dragon's blood dragon blood is the Netflix Dota 2 anime series that features Dragonite Morana and Marcy through the adventures in the Dota 2 world and Beyond it's got three seasons and it received mixed responses from fans the general consensus is that the seasons get worse progressively but I recommend you watch it for yourself and make up your mind about it now we're moving on to the guardian tier artifact artifact was a digital card game released by Valve in November of 2018 it took place in the Dota 2 universe and is Infamous for flopping hard you may have seen the infamous reveal of this game during its official announcement at ti7 to the sound of groans all [Music] around there was a time on Twitch where people were streaming fullon movies in the artifact section because absolutely nobody including twitch mods ever watched artifact its main problems were frustrating RNG and a $20 price on top of having to buy even more cards meanwhile games like Hearthstone and legends of Runa did fine due to the fact that they are also card games but they are free to play useless skills useless skills as a reference to abilities that do absolutely nothing in a vacuum if you're playing Earth Shaker and you skill Aftershock level one that's pretty useless uh for other examples look at Luna's ultimate without any points in Lucent beam or leveling lenus passive level one without any other spells they do absolutely nothing culling blade counters shallow grave for those not in the know culling blade is a skill that kills anything you dunk a low Health guy he dies now shallow grave is a spell that stops people from dying now what would be stronger the Mystic power of the nol realm channeled into a blessing right of immortality or a big red fella who looks at heads like firewood you guessed right it's the big red fella and his piece of metal on a stick ice Frog ice frog is the lead gameplay developer of Dota 2 and was a developer for DOTA Allstar since 2005 his true identity has never really been revealed to the public but people have their theories as to who it is most of them think that it's Bruno which is a pretty pretty uh reasonable guess due to that one clip this was back here during the game just telling Bruno hey you know what' be great if there was a hero that could Gap close that was still in the meta that could deal with that could deal with Tinker and Bruno and Bruno just looks at Blitz and he's like sorry sorry about storm it's not happening yeah storms are heard here at balance though old techies Fountain hook Fountain hook has a bit of a long explanation so follow me here for a second Chen used to have this ability called test of faith if you used it on an ally it would uh delay a few seconds and then it would teleport them back to the Fountain the other part of this Fountain hook shic Canary was Pudge and Pudge has an ability called meat hook for those non DOTA enthusiasts in the crowd think like you know roadhog anyways the way it was programmed made it so the hook Target would be carried away to pudge's current location so during the international 3 where it was infamously showed off na'vi was on The Chopping Block against tofu and they were about to lose until some devious Antics arose support player puppy would cast test of Fate on his mid player dendi who was playing Pudge dendi would land a hook and drag some unlucky sucker back to his Fountain and kill him after doing this over and over again na'vi eventually won the game and avoided elimination much to the dismay of L valve soon reprogrammed me hook so that the hook Target would travel to the location where Pudge casted the hook rather than to Pudge himself stacking boots this is a reference to the fact that new players would sometimes buy two boots under the philosophy that my hero has two feet so I must need two boots it's led me to believe that Val should change all the boot Arts so that there are two boots shown instead of one but I guess that still wouldn't stop new broodmother players from pulling the Newbie classic Crystal maiden and Lena are sisters this one's just self-explanatory uh they're sisters silence SL meet m this is talking about the sound effects that play when you try to use a spell while silenced silence and the sound effect that happens when you try to right click a building that you're not able to love these little sound effects but I think they should do one for being muted as well jungler roll back in ye olden days people used to Jungle in Dota there were very few Heroes that could actually pull this off and it usually required some form of summons or life steal I had a phase where I lock in Nature's profit queue up aidas and just go ham for 10 minutes in the jungle I didn't win a lot of games like that but hey it was fun this role gained INF for me when iron Talon rolled around and games were filled with position fours and fives picking Legion Commander to Jungle level one it griefed a lot of games and over time valve nerfed the jungle option out of existence for the benefit of all 322 322 is a reference to Alexi solo barin's bet that his own team would lose it was only on one match during starladder star series season 6 where his team Rox kis was against Z rage solo placed $322 against his own team through the game but never received that money afterwards this led to a huge debacle where valve had to write up a bunch of new rules regarding throwing and gambling and this also rippled across the community where if someone makes a throw or does something really dumb in a professional match people call it a 322 as to say say that they're intentionally throwing as a as a joke Doom is Satan in the lore Doom's name is revealed to be Lucifer he rules dota's version of hell and he was kicked out of DOTA Heaven needless to say it's it's pretty obvious if you just take a glance at his lore tide Hunter conka rivalry through their voice lines and biographies it's evident that conka and Tide Hunter are Rivals they fought each other in a huge battle which killed conka question mark it it's unknown who won the battle but it's implied kka was Victorious considering his calm cocky attitude towards tide Hunter and Tide Hunter's bitter resentment and obsession with kka Dota 2 song parodies to end off tier one we have Dota 2 song parodies which spread like wildfire in 2014 to 2016 there were a few significant musicians in the DOTA two community that made a lot of these namely flash refresher parodies and relax with me per and flax also made a few and honestly they're pretty all right I'm tell you I'm you that [Music] weay Crusader tier shrines shrines were a gameplay element that used to be around the map and and in the base they were like a mini fountain you click on them and they heal a good chunk of health and Mana over the course of fiveish seconds um they made going high ground impossible and people would accidentally activate them all the time they were a neat little experiment um but believe you me they had mixed results and even more mixed opinions Tusk bristleback rivalry this is a reference to a connection made in the L of both Heroes one day during bristle Beck's regular shift as security at a bar he got a little tipsy and said your tusks offend me sir to one large fellow from the northern wastes the fellow from the northern wasts kicks Bristol's teeth in this event is also mentioned in Tusk lore they have voice lines for each other when they're on the same team or killing each other that reference the event no need for a rematch let's put all differences Beyond us what do you say a rematch with me was a bad idea we should Spar when the this is over model glitches this refers to the fact that sometimes replays will bug and sometimes the heroes will just have missing body parts or a missing Mount or more commonly no hair dota's replay system is infamously buggy and these problems have been happening for years I still remember when Dota 2 reborn first launched and there was this one glitch where Tiny's passive would just causes model to stretch instead of switching to a different model shopkeepers quiz the shopkeepers quiz was a little miname that valve made to pass the time during Q back in the old compendiums like 2015 it would give the player an item then a host of other ingredients and they had to assemble all the ingredients of the item to get the question right this was available on the Dota 2 website for years after its implementation in the compendiums it's not particularly available on the Dota 2 website right now but I believe there is a redditor that recreated it it's not updated at all mind you so uh make that make that what you will buying The Courier you doto Zoomers don't know how good you have it back in the day you had to buy The Courier at the start of the game and the whole team had to share one and even after that you had to purchase an upgrade to make it fly there would be so many instances of people fighting over the Courier because it was a unit that everyone could control usually the duty of buying The Courier fell to one of the supports but sometimes they just wouldn't and people would go several minutes without having a courier at all the 2019 update that gave everyone their own career was the best quality Life Update ever it will not be topped ability draft combos this is talking about the insane overpowered kits you can make with ability draft some that come to mind are sticky naal and any damage over time spell urs's overpower and sardar's Bash the list goes on ability draft as a game mode doesn't get the love it should I think um I remember League of Legends even tried to do something with it like uh with ultimate spell book in 2021 and that pales in comparison with what you get to do with ability draft rubic morphling coding every time a new hero or a new ability is introduced into the game there's always some coding chicanery involving rubic and Morphin replicate and spell steel are very interesting spells and who knew that just giving a new hero a few new abilities to use could cause this many problems I can't think of any examples off the top of my head and they're usually patched pretty quickly but I'm sure if you dug deep enough on the DOTA two Reddit you'd find some in no time Clockwork is not a robot it's true he's just a keen folk in a metal suit back in Dota 1 though Clockwork actually really was a robot and Clockwork references this um in a voice line that he has bleep bloop I am a robot yeah just kidding blizzard lawsuit when Dota 2 was being made there was a bit of an issue with some of the hero names as they were ripped straight from Warcraft 3 the most notable change was The Wraith King change um for those that don't know wraith King used to be called leoric the Skeleton King but the problem of that title um was that it was a blizzard character there was a blizzard character literally called leoric the Skeleton King so Val had to change the hero completely and came up with the Green Ghoul Governor that we know and love today level one Ro level one Ro is talking about a strategy in which a team drafts hero specifically for the move of killing Roshan at the start of the game this involved Heroes like Ursa for the damage Nature's profit so his Triant could tank the hits and vengeful Spirit to reduce his armor this strategy had varying degrees of su success um but finding clips of it failing were easy as breathing lad normalin normal this is the most famous Caster voice line ever no contest even outside of the Dota 2 Community most people who generally follow Esports will know about this one during esl1 in Kata Kata I think I'm pronouncing that right um anyways esl1 csts back in 2018 secret and fanatic were playing against each other in the group stage it was a close game three and the legendary team fight commenced Filipino casters Lan and dunu uttered their famous words normally normally the meaning of lad matatag means walk strong or walk sturdy but more like Walk Like a Boss this was referring to how F on Razer walked up with bkb and normaline means normal it referring to like normal attack or an auto attack it grew to insane popularity in the Dota 2 community and was even said by Gabe Newell during the opening ceremony for Tia coming from 64 different nations is really challenging so lad Mar to Canada one of the casters of the famous line andren Paulo danu pangan tragically passed away in 2021 due to complications with covid-19 rest in peace unique attack modifiers unique attack modifiers is an old game mechanic that slowly got patched out of the game in the mid to late 2010s some items and empowered Auto attack spells would be classified as unique attack modifiers meaning that they didn't stack with other unique attack modifiers so essentially you could only choose one attack modifier per game or one unique attack modifier per game I don't remember this mechanic being all that frustrating but now that it's gone I couldn't even imagine playing without it you'd have games where you're debating over choosing life steal or desolator or Scotty not to mention Heroes like Dro or Viper were completely shafted because um their Auto attack and Powers were both unique attack modifiers DOTA underlords DOTA underlords was valve's official autochess game this was made off of the hype from the original custom game mode autochess autochess was developed by a a group of Chinese modders the game mode itself became immensely popular um and there were people downloading Dota 2 just to play autochess eventually this game mode spurt off um into a bunch of other games like team fight tactics and DOTA underlords DOTA underlords itself had a cinematic and some goofy lore behind it it had a pretty small player base and it eventually withered away like all DOTA projects that aren't Dota 2 themselves archon tier Valve game references within Dota 2 it's not that hard at all to find references to other valve games tinker's whole lore is about what happened at black Mesa in the halflife series and he even has the same voice actor as Dr Kleiner sniper Meo and techies all share multiple voice lines with the sniper Scout and demoan from Team Fortress 2 respectively additionally there are GLaDOS Cave Johnson and Dr Kleiner announcer packs as well as wheatly Wards undying voice lines also reference the Left 4 Dead franchise quite a bit uh this might sound like copium but I really hope that we get some Team Fortress 2 content in Dota 2 like a I don't know a scout announcer pack something like that blink dagger extra cast range blink dagger has a hidden mechanic where if you use the Ability past the cast range your hero will not blink to the full range but if you cast it to the very edge of the cast range you'll get the distance you cast it at it's a neat little mechanic that rewards Precision even though it's not mentioned anywhere in the items description at all um you just kind of have to learn about it old steam Avatar combinations before dota2 reborn launched the loading screens used to look like this um so seeing this some five Stacks got creative and made some masterpieces with the way that the avatars all lined up together od's name changes outworld Destroyer has been through multiple changes throughout the years and sort of developed as a meme among the Dota 2 Community first od's name was obsidian Destroyer but that got to outworld destroyer and then it became outworld devour and then later it became outworld Destroyer again and at one point it was outworld Demolisher but not many people remember that this led to genius Community created titles like ouse decorator or outright defecator mua's lore comic references artifact um mua's lore comic states that she gained her powers and her guns when she beat Death in a game of artifact not really much else to be said on on the matter resource SL CDR SL respawn time talents when the new Journey update dropped in 2016 a lot of Heroes had talents that affected things like their XP per minute or their gold per minute um some gave cooldown reductions and others just flat out lowered your respawn time these were all generally seen as broken and over the months they were patched out uh for good in favor of ability Focus talents reworked hero models a lot of Dota 2 heroes don't look like they originally did to name a few Shadow fiend Viper Faceless Void and jakiro have all updated models they all have been generally received as amazing my personal favorite is slardar and I wish they kept doing them because well uh there's a few who need it kind of badly rubic is agony's son when Rubik buys Agony scepter sometimes he'll say father's Masterpiece now I don't know if you've ever seen agim but he uh he looks like this now if you've ever seen Rubik you might say hang on a second those two aren't similar at all who is the mother well people suspect that rubic was some sort of puppet made by Agony due to Rubik's jerky movements and his unstable posture I personally subscribe to this Theory but I don't subscribe to how Agony is characterized and a little tangent here Val really dropped the ball of this guy they set up this mysterious super powerful wizard who is the most like powerful Artisan of his craft making a scepter that altered the abilities of anyone who wielded it and they characterized him as this wacky goofball who's not really meant to be taken seriously yeah it was a subversion of expectations but the wrong kind Chinese hero models Chinese DOTA players are subject to China's censorship of bones and blood and other spooky things I'm not going to pretend to understand the Chinese culture or their taboos they censor spooky and gory imagery and I'll leave it at that so so Dota 2 which has multiple skeletons in various Ghouls and Gremlins needed to change some models and ability icons in the Chinese version of the game every appearance of blood is replaced with black goo and anything that looks remotely bone likee is covered up with masks and metal I actually think the low violence version of Life stealer looks pretty epic style compared to his Western default pen Dragon controversy this one yeah this one's going to take a bit to chew through pen dragon was the creator of the DOTA Allstars website and managed the website and interacted with the community and whatnot anyways one day he sees all of his DOTA buddies working on this League of Legends game and decides to join them so what he does is he shuts down the entire DOTA Allstar website and replaces it with a League of Legends advertisement all the forums guides newsletters gone in an instant because pen Dragon just assumed that League of Legends was going to be the new DOTA and just went ahead and deleted everything eventually the website was restored and some of the lost data was returned but that's not where this ends on the DOTA Allstar website there was a page where people could suggest hero Concepts now what I'm about to say allegedly happened but it is foggy as to whether or not pen Dragon personally did this a good chunk of the suggested heroes from that website were used for champions in League of Legends the guy who conceptualized Ramis was particularly peeved about his creation just straight up being stolen for League of Legends now of course there's no legal action to be taken since it was an idea without any copyright or anything but I think we can all agree that it was a pretty scummy move this means that we could have possibly had Fiddlesticks in Dota 2 and that's a really hard fact to live with for me Legend tier any hero can play any role this refers to the classic motto of no tale during an old interview where he said everything can work referring to the flexibility of Dota 2 every strategy can work if done properly L every hero can fit in every role given the situation inconsistent root mechanics back in the day the root status effect used to cancel certain abilities While others didn't some Roots disabled certain movement abilities While others didn't uh you just kind of had to figure it out from experience back in the day this still somewhat exists today as Crystal maiden's route still doesn't let you attack but other Roots do Spectre is Phantom Assassin from the future this is referring to an old lore Theory from sration slack the theory goes like this the Oracle tasked Phantom assassin with killing everyone who threatened his life in all universes since there are infinite universes Phantom assassins started going mad and forgetting her name and softly fading away until she was nothing but an apparition a spectre if you will coddle committed genocide against nightstalker people in Keeper of the lights lore he was the first being to bring light into the universe but when he did this night stalker's people were driven back and nearly went extinct due to the presence of such a powerful light balonar who is nightstalker is the last of them and we can only assume his kind are elvisly Immortal because he's existed for possibly hundreds of thousands if not maybe millions of years radiant dire hero allegiances this was something that carried over to Dota 2 from DOTA 1 where Heroes would have Cannon sides or allegiances just as they were divided by Scourge heroes or Sentinel heroes in Dota 1 valve used to separate Heroes by radiant and dire up until they revamped their website back in 2021 looking at this image the top half was the radiant side and the bottom half was the dire side there are some outliers here as to who you'd expect to be on which side for instance I always thought timers saww would be on the dire side considering his hatred and fear of trees though I guess the dire side also has trees as well reing bkb and recipes back in the day I know I've been saying that a lot you used to be able to sell bkb and buy another one to refresh the diminishing returns this has been removed for obvious reasons um you could also do something similar to items that had charges if you wanted to refresh the charges on drums all you had to do was buy another and it restored to full chilling touch debuffing allies chilling touch wasn't always the straightforward Auto attack and power that it is today far back in dota's history it used to be an AOE spell that buffed the auto attacks of your allies it would grant them bonus magic damage on their attacks but it would decrease their attack speed in the process it was kind of a wonky spell and I'm more than glad they changed it to something useful giant hero models in Dota 2 there are many ways to increase the size of one's model bkb ogre magi's blood lust uh and giant ring are the usual methods that people go with this could also be talking about the fact that if you put some of the hero models next to other Valve game models in sfm they look way bigger than they should IO 0 point turn rate he's a ball of light an actual orb he he shouldn't need a turn rate I don't know why he has one forced 50% sometimes called losers Q This is a conspiracy theory that valve fixes matches so you'll always be close to a 50% win rate there's been studies done to show that if players just win all the time their gaming sessions won't be as long as they are usually so to profit off of that they throw in some guaranteed losses to try and get players to rage and play more it's tough to say whether this is real or not and since valve's matchmaking algorithms aren't public knowledge there's no real way of knowing but some games definitely make it feel like the fourth 50% is real the four fundamental heroes are based on quantum mechanics this one's going to be a long one to explain okay here we go for those not in the knowhow in doore there are four fundamental Heroes Gods essentially of the forces of the universe these four heroes are Enigma IO chaos Knight and Keeper of the light now in quantum physics there are four fundamental forces gravity electromagnetism the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force now I'm no Quantum physicist but I'll try to explain this the best I can um I recommend researching this topic on your own if you're if you're interested Enigma is gravity for obvious reasons IO is electromagnet ISM because electromagnetism has to do something with light and tether is kind of like an electromagnetic interaction that's my best guess at least chaos Knight is the strong nuclear force because like the strong nuclear force bringing quarks together to form an atom chaos Knight's reality Rift brings its Target and clumps it all up with chaos Knight and his clones Keeper of the light is the weak nuclear force because the weak nuclear force helps in the forming of stars which if you didn't know give up off light who have th this decision to make gods that relate to quantum physics is wicked cool and this won't be the last time we talk about this on the iceberg chain frost on Ancient creeps this refers to an old cheese Strat that exploited the fact that ancient creeps wouldn't take damage from lich's Ultimate this resulted in Lich players buying agms which used to give his old infinite bounces instead of the talent um and they would spam their chain Frost off cool down on the ancient creep Camp any enemy that walked by would be deleted by the four chain frosts just bouncing around in there Heroes of new Worth to end off the Legends tier we have Heroes of new Earth another MOA that unfortunately fell by the wayside while DOTA and League conquered most corners of the internet its original idea was to be a port for a lot of DOTA one Heroes it had an Esports scene and was largely played by DOTA 1 players while they waited for Dota 2 and ultimately died out when its servers went down in 2022 I I never played hero of newth but I heard a lot of good things about it and it will indeed be missed ancient tier gab's favorite hero Gabe Newell revealed back in like 2014 or something that his favorite hero is sand King I have no idea if this information is still up toate but as far as I know Gabe is a scorpion enjoyer Viper was pugna's pet Viper's bio is about how he was once The Familiar of a wizard in the nether reaches pugna also happens to be from the nether reaches and is a wizard uh this is further confirmed in Viper and pugna's voice lines towards each other a Viper my Earth wild pet Ark Warden is an ancient at the beginning of reality in the DOTA Universe there was a primordial mind that began a debate with itself whether it's better to act or to think this one mind got so in- depth with this argument that it split up into a bunch of fragments this is the origin for the radiant and the dire but there was a third fragment that split which was Arc Warden who want wanted to stop the bickering of radiant and dire and trapped them possibly multiple times in moons and other celestial bodies but it usually never ended well Monkey King changed voice actor if you watch Monkey King's reveal trailer you'll notice that it doesn't sound like Monkey King in the game at all that's because originally Monkey King was going to be voiced by Matthew Mercer the legend himself but valve decided that he didn't sound mischievous enough and they called in Bill Milsap to record his voice lines ancient Apparition is entropy this is where the Spacey science comes back into this video I guess everyone at valve is a bunch of science nerds cuz aa's lore talks about how inevitably he will freeze everything over and with time gets bigger and bigger this is a reference to the theory of entropy and the heat death of the universe the theory states that as the universe expands atoms will get farther and farther apart and particles will react less with other particles until eventually the universe iers cools down for good and everything just sort of stops freezes if you will Lion's ult tries to turn the target inside out if you read the ability description of finger of death it'll mention that the objective of the spell is to turn your target inside out I like to imagine that when you un alive someone with fod that the spell actually succeeds which is cool and horrifying at the same time Monkey King broodmother romance in Monkey King's release comic while he's signing autographs rude mother comes up to him mocking him and taunting him hinting that they were a couple once and now are bitter exes I also find it funny how everyone in the crowd is just okay with this giant spider just you know kind of being there anyways it's hinted that their relationship began back when Monkey King was imprisoned under a mountain and brood mother coincidentally also lived inside a mountain at one point and that is how the two met headshot Monkey King bar Min stun back in the day Monkey King bar used to have a passive that when it proed it also produced a quick little mini stun and even farther back sniper headshot used to do the same thing which was just just so much fun it was just great renamed Heroes this is somewhat part of the same story as the blizzard lawsuit from a couple tiers ago valve changed a lot of hero names to avoid enraging blizzard even further uh for some examples wind ranger used to be wind Runner necros used to be necrite and furion used to be malfurion uh which were all names of existing Warcraft characters Legion Commander gender swap in Dota one Legion Commander was a male character I'm not entirely sure why valve made this decision but I find it interesting that they did shiver ravage a Sher ravage refers to a tide hunter that hits absolutely nobody this became a meme when legendary caster and analyst Sher was streaming one fateful day it was actually sing sing who was streaming but shiver was uh was with him she was playing tide Hunter and pressed R and nobody got hit man they're saving him I'm running in no he's going take I've got ravage in 7 Seconds 5 4 3 2 1 no there was nobody there anymore oh there's one the clip blew up on Reddit and it became a staple of the community ever since the great Confluence this is something you hear in void Spirits voice lines he's always yapping about this great Confluence this is supposedly an event that happens after the war of the Ancients some people theorize its all Dimensions collapsing into one others think it could be a future update in which all the unique heroes from Heroes of new Earth get ported over to Dota 2 seeing as how we're getting Heroes like ring Master tells me this isn't the case and these Heroes of newart fellas are going to be slowly integrated into Dota 2 over time Camp stacking exploits at the end of the ancient tier we have have a very funny interaction with a dark Sear's vacuum and a few other position manipulating spells people would grab a creep Camp then vacuum it up a cliff then rinse and repeat indefinitely it made a ton of cash but it was eventually patched out the Divine tier shopkeepers are more powerful than Heroes this refers to a neat bit of lore about shopkeepers in the Dota 2 Universe shopkeepers are charged with holding on to powerful magical artifacts and giving them to Heroes worthy enough through the trade of gold to keep from thieves getting their hands on Godlike Powers the gods of the dodu universe made a PCT with shopkeepers if anyone steals from or kills a shopkeeper that individual will be under the wrath of every God ever uh which is most likely a Bad Thing Ricky was here this refers to a little spot on Triant protector's model where you can find the text Ricky was here carved into his bark Roshan is a smeil this Theory it's probably true stems from the fact that Sean's horns look very much like a smeal's horns even though smil only have three fingers and no wings this could still be possible see Roshan's story is that he was once a shopkeeper's assistant when one day his shopkeeper was tasked with keeping hold of the agis of immortality whoever possessed it would come back to life after dying and thus it was a pretty powerful artifact Roshan was tempted to steal it and eventually caved killing his shopkeeper so that he might claim immortality but but since the gods have the shopkeeper backs Roshan underwent a heavy punishment he would be locked to a Tarn or two tarns now where he'd have to be killed for this Aegis over and over again Roshan did get immortality in the end but at a very heavy price I imagine Roshan underwent a transformation when he was cursed giving him a more monstrous stronger appearance since smil in the DOTA to Universe are slightly bigger than a cat toss buyback glitch this refers to a glit glitch where if tiny tossed someone into the air then the person died while in the air and bought back before their corpse landed they would respawn right where they were killed it took an embarrassingly long time for valve to fix this and it ruined a lot of games every week there'd be a new clip of this glitch circulating around thank God it's patched late game visual bugs I'm not too sure what this one is talking about but it sounds relatively self-explanatory it's patched out but if GES went really late there would be visual bugs like radiant or dire particle effects appearing everywhere like the northern lights or something hero teasers in promotional images valve loves their teasers in Easter eggs and they still do this to this day in promotional art valve would hide upcoming heroes in the background or off to the side or something notable instances of this are nx's assassin in the shadows of disruptor Art and ring Master Circus ticket on the New Frontiers Map Legion Commander is racist this refers to the voice lines Legion Commander has when she kills specific types of heroes she'll say never trust a blank and the blank would be filled in with whatever it was she just killed never trust a fish never trust a tree never trust it what are you anyway this also refers to Legion Commander from DOTA one who had a lot of voice lines like dirty Orcs And filthy trolls brew master Elemental damage back in the day brew master used to have this one mechanic on his Cinder Brew where if his W was splashed on someone any fire spell would light it and give them a DOT status effect this was a really cool addition to the game maybe it wasn't balanced but it's such a shame they gave up on a mechanic like this shitty wizard every single hero has a voice line where they say shitty Wizard and crummy wizard this is an inside joke at valve headquarters where they place all the blame for the game's bugs on one fictional person Adrien finel a senior programmer at valve is supposedly the inspiration for this bug causing wizard uh this wizard fella named Dolph rap is seen everywhere in the game from couriers to the tutorial for years and years I've wondered why all the heroes had this voice line and after researching this video I'm finally finding out the Mad Moon The Mad moon is or was the moon of Rue the planet Dota 2 takes place on it was the Moon that Arc Warden stuffed the two Waring ancients inside of before they broke out via fighting too hard when the moon exploded the shards came down and crashed onto the planet and those shards of moonrock became the Ancients that we know and defend today invoker's real name is Carl this is a reference to invoker's DOTA 1 name kale which kind of sounds like Carl this is even a voice line you can get in invoker's Dota plus progression throughout the eons I have been known by many names but my true name of power is Carl pocket Ricky pocket Ricky Used to Be an old meme on the dota2 subreddit it was kind of like how how Ricky could come out of nowhere as if he jumped from someone's pocket or something like that it had a bit of a comeback when valve actually made pocket Ricky a real thing with his agonum scepter it's still in the game to this day as a matter of fact Tinker is dota's version of a black Mesa scientist if you've ever read tinker's lore it talks about an event at purple Plateau which is a dead giveaway that he's just Kleiner in in Dota 2 same voice actor lots of voice line references The Works ovos ovos is a demonic language in Dota 2 all of the demon characters speak it except queen of pain Underlord and warlock Golem additionally Legion Commander Arana has a few voice lines in ovos these voice lines can be translated on the wiki if you're curious different ples slrms after playing a few of the neon colored characters you'll begin to realize that there are a lot of dimensions in the DOTA Universe obviously you have hell and its seven circles then you have the nether reaches where pugna and Viper are from then you have Karim faithless voids Dimension which exists out of time and the uncap where razor and Visage can be found the immortal tier coddle is a pervert this refers to the fact that keeper of delight has a voice line for every female character outside of the recent ones where he complement them on their beauty or what have you personally I don't think there grounds for calling someone a pervert just the dude likes women who can blame him troll warlord's lore is about internet trolls a Brisk readr of troll Warlords lore will reveal that it's pretty clearly talking about internet trolls in real life it talks about how trolls spend their developmental years tucked away in their mother's cave contributing nothing to society and about how trolls will never shy away to voice their opinions in disputes this is also something I never really thought about until now but it does call it the question if which doctor and Dazzle and huskar grew up in similar cultures as well as since they are all trolls Sven is half fish technically not half fish but half moranth moranth are the sea peoples that nagas siren slark and Tide Hunter all fall under anyways uh Sven lore mentions how his mother was a moranth and that he is a bastard child personally I speculate those weird protrusions on his helmet is where he keeps his fins folded up but who knows Bane blinks dagger response blink dagger that's really all you need to know Dazzle inverted ability colors this refers to the fact that if you invert the colors of Dazzle ability icons they all seem to be a fitting color all the purple pink colors become green which is associated with healing in most video games including Dota 2 this implies that the nol realm a sacred Dimension that Dazzle visited is the inverse of ours uh this is my head Cannon but I think the Noel realm could be the nether reaches since the two heroes from there use green magic that hurts instead of heals undying loves gummy vitamins this is a reference to a string of undying voice lines most of which are unused in which undying Rambles on about his need for gummy vitamins and how they're much healthier than gummies and much better tasting than regular vitamins I need gummy vitamins gummy would a lot like the gummy worms you get in Halloween this is different though it's healthy what I like about them is they're chewy and they have a berry taste invoker had 27 spells back in Dota 1 the order in which you invoked your quas wax and exor orbs mattered this resulted in the additional 17 spells being added to his Arsenal I think it'd be cool to at least try this but it would probably be an absolute nightmare to balance kka is dead K's lore states that it's not clear as to whether kka is actually alive or just a ghost from a battle wandering around I personally believe him to be a ghost because how else would he have all this weird water magic and whatever x marks the spot is not to mention the ability to summon The Apparition of his crashing ship sasser's way slauer is a Doty YouTuber who is still active today his content consists of wacky borderline griefing builds that somehow work his most infamous strategy involved support Faceless Void which was chono everyone effectively to pause the team fight and use healing items on his team in the meantime placeholder ability icons a lot of the placeholder ability icons used during the development of Dota 2 are memy little Doodles that were often puns on the ability name or something goofy like that going through these is a very enjoyable experience and I really wish that Val would put a little option in the menu that let you swap all the ability icons for their placeholders removed Heroes some Heroes that appeared in Dota 1 didn't make it to Dota 2 either because of their imbalanced gameplay or they were just a meme The Gambler is the most famous example of this he was a hero that dealt a lot with gold and RNG and the whole thing was just a bit of a mess to balance so he didn't get ported bananas dropping from trees to tease the release of Monkey King valve did a sneaky little thing where in custom lobbies with cheats enable trees had a small chance to drop bananas from them it was an incredibly small thing but it's always neat how valve teases things like that Chen is evil this relates to the fact that Chen literally hypnotizes innocent campers on the battlefield to kill their own relatives and do his bidding enchantress does this too uh it's kind of messed up now that I think about it item name references a good chunk of item names are references to other Media or in a specific case a DOTA one developer this is the case case with Ule scepter of divinity Ule was the username of the guy who made the original DOTA one map that's right the classic square with towers and lanes that you see in most mobas nowadays was designed by Ule back in like 2003 I think other references include the octarine core referring to the color octarine from the disc World Series by Terry pret which is described as a weird purple greenish color that has a lot to do with magic then there's references to mythologies like ey of Scotty milir and GL from Norse mythology and armlet of Mor digian from lovecraftian Mythos rank 1,000 tier Ricky death Ward back in Dota 1 Ricky's ultimate used to be witch doctor's current ultimate that's really all there is to say on the matter Crystal Maiden is a psycho in the crystal Maiden winter wyvern comic Crystal Maiden is depicted as unhinged a bit the locals refer to her as a lunatic she sends death threats to her sister Lena and has worryingly neat handwriting not a lot of these aspects of her character show up in game except for maybe that one voice line about blood freezing First Blood and it's already icing over Earth Shaker is fused with DOTA one Earth Shaker in his Arcana this Theory exists due to the fact that in his Arcana Earth Shaker carries his totem in a similar way to his DOTA one version and how the arcana's lore mentions how he fused with a fragment of himself from another world void spirit is Templar assassin's Master this was speculated But ultimately confirmed when void Spirit released upon his release Templar Assassin was given new voice lines where she refers to voids Spirit as her master destroying the fountain in Dota 1 it was possible to destroy the enemy Fountain this would lead to some very unfun interactions if there was one particularly malicious team who enjoyed the suffering of others this somewhat lives on in teams that just wait outside a fountain to spawn kill instead of ending the game vengeful Spirit throwing herself as a projectile back in the DOTA 1 days vengeful spirit's Auto attack would be her throwing her own model as as a projectile corpse mechanic back in Dota 1 certain Heroes had abilities that utilized slain creeps or Heroes this somewhat carried over to Dota 2 really early on Nick's assassin had an ability that worked with a corpse mechanic and for the longest time the troll creep in the big Camp would only summon skeletons if there was a slain unit or corpse nearby slark is a virgin this refers to the one voice line slark says when he's un alived but I hadn't spawned yet spawning is how fish breeding is referred to um don't ask me how or why but that's where the term originated from sans's undertale reference during the sil breaker event there was an item called oblivion's locket that had the flavor text as follows a skeleton's charm used to prevent having a bad time the reference to the bad time is an obvious call back to the encounter with sand from undertale in which he tells you that you're about to have a bad time there is another sans's undertale reference Hidden Away In The Faceless Void Arcana when starting the game sometimes he'll say you're going to have a bad time you play as the Ancients this refers to the fact that the Ancients dire and radiant mind control the heroes to do the bidding but you as the player are controlling the heroes so that can only mean that you are the Ancients telling the heroes what to do I always think of this when my teammates start fighting it's like a Minds divided against itself no spell Strat the no spell Strat was popularized by Purge Gamers and Co when they were up against AR rubic their whole strategy revolved around never casting or even leveling their spells so rubic wouldn't have anything to steal in the end they ended up winning top 100 tier every DOTA match is canon when artifact was released there was a lore comic that came along with it that stated how the main goal of these card Mages were to try every possible timeline of events to try to get the Ancients to destroy each other at the same time it's later revealed that just before an ancient is destroyed it winds Back Time back to the beginning and tries again influencing the planet in different ways or that one hero performs better or that there are entirely different Heroes participating in the fight in the first place even different cosmetic combinations are taken into effect that's right that one time where your viper mid started running it down after getting ganked yeah that happened in the Dota 2 Universe canonically the river's name uh just a heads up this entry on the iceberg contains a slur I won't discuss it here but if you follow the link to the iceberg there's a direct link to the source of where the river's name came from necros voice glitch this is talking about a glitch with necros where sometimes his voice would be incredibly low pitched and slow it's fixed now but this kind of funny this crashed oh of DOTA one is Canon to Dota 2 this calls back to the earlier entry on the iceberg about Earth shakers Arcana basically the theory goes that since Earth shakers Arcana is his DOTA 1 and Dota 2 inations fused together from different timelines means that DOTA 1 is to Dota 2 I personally don't subscribe to this Theory really I mean if valve actually made this cannon I think blizzard would have a thing or two to say about it terrorblade is an anti-hero terrorblade as a character is a demon feared by other demons additionally he mostly targets other demons and those that He deems as false gods he's friendly with enchantress and actually seems like a moral guy when you think about it useless item in Dota 1 there existed a useless item it was eventually removed but if you had it it gave No Effects no actives and you couldn't sell it or drop it from your inventory if I had to guess this was maybe a placeholder I'm leaning towards this more being a a small troll from Ice frog though Timbers saww has PTSD and isn't crazy in timers Saw's lore his hometown was the victim of a Triant attack some Eisen guard type Shenanigans anyways timbersaw was the only Survivor and within the depth of his Warehouse he stowed away working on a weapon that would get him out out of this pickle he built his Mech and the rest is history but seeing your hometown torn and destroyed and your loved ones killed definitely has its effects on the mind not to mention this is a universe where trees most definitely 100% confirmed come to life and attack things so no tiersa isn't crazy for having a fear of trees and definitely has some form of PTSD cancel DOTA RPG valve once had plans to make an RPG game about axe's Journey Through the world of Dota 2 unfortunately it was sheld it was supposedly influenced by big name games like Elder Scrolls and Monster Hunter but it probably won't ever see the light of day unfortunately a shame to be sure top rank one tier toss Avalanche bonus damage originated from a glitch in Dota 1 there was a glitch in the code that made Avalanche deal more damage if a unit was being tossed this was originally not ported over to Dota 2 but after fans demanded it be brought back it was eventually ported over and is in the game to this day Arrested Development Bot names a few of the default names in the game share the same names as characters in the show Arrested Development um these Bot names are Kitty Tobias Gob Lupe Marta and maybe so if you ever see those names in your Bot games you know where they're from Hood Wink's ability art references fan-made hero Dano the dolphin Dano the dolphin was a fan-made hero created by we play Esports the ability icons of Dano have some shocking similarities to hood Wink's icon abilities if this has been confirmed to be a reference by Valve is unknown to me but I really do hope it is the case and not just a coincidence Dota 2 flash game definitely the most obscure item on the iceberg this was a flash game posted on Reddit in 2013 it's not playable anymore and I couldn't find any footage of it unfortunately but from what I read in the comments on the Reddit post it was pretty difficult I believe the main reason it went out uh was to flash shutting down in 2020 and that's it that's the iceberg done and done thank you for making it this far in the video it really means a lot that you stuck around to listen to me Yap about my favorite game for what is it like an hour at this point um so yeah I really hope you enjoyed the content um stick a comment in the comment section if you have any questions or feedback uh make sure to leave a like And subscribe um God bless and until next time [Music]

Channel: Wilsonsticks

Views: 54,859

Keywords: dota, dota2, iceberg

Id: oyibbOO5NYE

Length: 55min 8sec (3308 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024