Opening the Dawngate: Good, Bad, And Ugly

-Two lanes.
Words cannot describe how different this makes the game feel, especially alongside the rest of the good stuff. It also greatly diversifies the lane setups you can run, with double jungle or a trilane with a solo being possible choices (though almost never the best idea in random matchmaking). You end up with less lane saccing than DotA and brusier-can't-kill-each-other-lanes a la LoL have yet to make an appearance. There is always, always action, again partly due to this and partly due to the rest of "good."

-A unique approach to hero roles.
While they mention it in almost every single one of their promo materials and constantly reiterate it on their stream, there's a reason they do that: it's pretty cool. Basically, during character selection you choose both a hero/champion/shaper/god/champion/smashmouth (pick your term), as well as both a loadout (which provides a bonus to stats and, in many cases, unique abilities) and a role each with different passives that alter both how they play and how you gain vim, the games currency.

There are currently four roles: Gladiator, Tactician, Predator, and Hunter. Each corresponds, roughly, with farmer, lane support, ganker, and jungler. Picking Gladiator gives you Greevil's Greed as a passive, giving you more vim the longer you can chain lane minion kills together. Picking Tactician gives you bonus gold whenever a lane creep dies in the area around you and rewards you with vim for dealing damage to enemy shapers on a 5 second cooldown that varies by attack type. Predators receive bonus movespeed when a nearby enemy is low on health and receive bonus kill for killing spirit well minions, as well as gaining bonus vim and xp for slaying enemy shapers. Junglers deal more damage to jungle creeps and gain health whenever they slay one, and have a PRNG chance to gain a flat vim amount on jungle minion kill.

These roles make it far easier to fill in gaps in the team composition while being able to pick a hero you want, since nobody ends up with 0 farm unable to buy anything but wards.

-No mana.
Oh yeah. That's right. No mana. Well, there's one shaper that basically has mana (called spirit), but even she is far more limited by cooldowns than she is by her resources. A large number of the characters are "pure shapers," which means that they can cast their abilities at any time they are off cooldown. Many of the others have unique resource systems that generally also grant them league-style passive abilities, but rest assured: you will not be unable to cast an ability for long in this game.

At first when I heard about this, I was dubious. It sounded silly. But once you play with it...oh boy. I never thought "this character would be more fun to play with mana or resources," and that's good enough for me.

-Free wards.
Every gets one ward for free. If you place your ward, it expires in 3 minutes and you get a new one. You receive a debuff on your character that lets others see whether you placed it. No more complaining, everyone! It doesn't stop conflict as much as you might think, too.

-The ancient/whatever is cool.
It shoots laser beams, heals your team, and makes a great big line or ring of fire at the time the enemy finally starts trying to kill it. And it gets really, really sad if you surrender.

-Passive income? You can interact with it.
Dawngate doesn't have gp/5 items. And it will probably never have a hand of midas item. What it does have, though, are nodes at the four corners of the map called spirit wells that generate passive vim over time as workers gather it. These workers possess a vim bounty for the other team, and these wells can be captured, king of the hill style. They lock at the beginning of the game and for 5 minutes once captured.

-The Shapers are fun. And they're called Shapers.
This is obviously highly subjective, but I enjoy several shapers despite there being almost no one in the pool at the moment. And if you call them heroes or champions? No one really cares. That's automatic points in my book.

-Respeccable summoners.
These become available at level 1, 10, and 20. They include blink (which is trash in this game), smite, and most of the other League summoners, but they're free. I'm a big fan of Tailwind, and it's always nice to have a BKB skill in the game (minus magic immunity, but I'll take what I can get). You can pay 400 vim to respec them at any time.

-Keys are given out...well.
If you can't get a Dawngate key, you probably aren't trying hard enough unlike a certain card game out there (Hearthstone COUGH COUGH). As far as I can tell they do their best to prevent bots from stealing them (posting them physically ON a twitch stream) and make them multi-use so that about a quarter of viewers can get in on any given giveaway, and your chances are probably better than that since many people with keys watch the screens.

-Mirror matches stink.
They're awful. Mirror matches in normal queue were one of the things I hated most about League, and I played when there were far more champions than Dawngate has shapers right now. They do an okay job differentiating effects, but I hate it. Hard to put my finger on why, but ugh. It also constrains their design, I think, but it's a necessity for now and I think many players will be too used to it for it to every go away. What a shame.

-There's a surrender option.
I hate surrenders. Luckily, very few people actually do it in the beta (I suspect many don't know how), but I've already won games after my team tried to surrender. I admit a lot of people are also used to this and it's probably never going away.

-Itemization is mediocre.
No active items is kind of sad. Also, the item cost-effectiveness varies hugely amongst tiers for the different "sets" of items. It's fairly intuitive, but a few items shine so much more than the others that I often feel like I'm building the same thing every game. I never liked that feeling in League or DotA. They claim to be working on it, but I'm fairly skeptical.

-A few shapers are really, really good.
This is true in every game like this, but like many of these there's an issue due to the small hero pool. Raina is probably the best example of this. You can pretty much afk and do absolutely awful skill builds on her, but the things she brings to the table are too good to screw up. Also her skillshot looks pretty weak /rant.

-Limited server uptime.
I want to play. T_T

-Matchmaking and the community.
Everyone's new. Some people aren't as new as others, and get really frustrated when players are really, really new. Still much nicer than LoL or DotA ever were (and let's forget HoN). Matchmaking is really hit and miss, of course, but what can you do with so few people?

-The older (male) character portraits.


Personally, I think Fenmore became evil in the hopes of slaying the photographer that took this picture.


Varion harbored a deep anger towards his parents for not telling him his face would stick that way.


I think I only make this face if I really need to use the restroom.

My solution? Don't play any of these characters and try to convince your teammates not to so you don't have them staring at you all game. It's surprisingly effective.