Infinite Crisis has shut down.
With its departure, Dawnbase will be going into permanent read-only mode and will remain as both an archive of information about Infinite Crisis, and a reminder of the times we all had with the game.
Hats off to you all. It was a pleasure, ladies and gentlemen.
Sacrilege
@SacrilegeGG
Language and Skills: A Guide to Understanding MOBAs
A General guide by RavenousReptarLast updated: Mar 31st, 2014
Link to guide: www.dawnbase.com/guides/zbT8ola4
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Intro:
So, one of the biggest problems with MOBAs is the extremely harsh learning curve. Take a game that has strong and essential strategic elements that punish bad play, add in an extremely competitive environment, make games un-quitable (unless you wish to receive a penalty), and tie that with the added stress of learning the 5 abilities of every character, as well as essentially learning a new language; and you have a typical MOBA. Now, take in consideration that most important battles take place in less then 20 seconds. It's alot to deal with. For new players, it is often too much. This guide is going to cover all the "Basics" and give a quick way for new players to understand the intense mechanics of MOBAs, as well as learn the new language they need to understand for more competitive play. If you already know some of this information, feel free to skip around, but to be safe I'm going to attempt to cover every detail I can.
What is a MOBA?:
MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Although most mobas are alot more about strategic map objectives, as opposed to just brawling it out against other players.
The Lingo:
Here I'm going to break down most of the terms you'll want a grasp of. You can use the "ctrl+f" command to open a search bar if you're looking for something specific.
Basics:
[list]
​Credits: This is your resource in Infinite Crisis, and is like gold in other mobas. You can earn credits by killing minions or monsters, or destroying turrets, as well as enemy champion kills or assists. You will gain credits passively over time as well, although this amount is very low. Some items also give passive credit generation, here is a list of them: 
Atlantis Gambit (2), 
Oa Gambit (2), 
Olympus Gambit (2), and 
Qward Gambit (2).
Drones: Drones are the "minions" of Infinite Crisis, and help move your position closer to your enemies towers. The are useful for tanking turret blasts while you attack enemy turrets.
Control Points: These are the main types of map objectives in Infinite Crisis right now. They are circular pads, and they will slowly turn the color of whatever team you are on. On the Gotham Heights map, controlling them is the key to winning. On Coast City, they are placed in the neutral jungle territory between lanes, and give your team advantages for holding them.
Turrets: Turrets are large towers that will shoot the champions and minions they are not aligned with. On Gotham Heights, they are placed on control points and will give their alignment to whichever team controls the point. On Coast City, they are placed within lanes can not be won over, but must be destroyed by opposing teams.
Artifact Foundry: This is the in-game store that allows you to buy "Artifacts" or items for your champion. Items are the main way to increase your champions stats, and are purchased with you in game credits.
Farm: Farming is the action of making sure you land the last hits on enemy drones and collecting the credits. A Well farmed champion can buy more items, and then becomes a bigger threat.
[/list]
Stats:
These are the in game stats you can buy and upgrade your champion with.
[list]
Health: or HP, for health points. Pretty self-explanatory. Run out of this and you die. The bar is the first and largest above your champion.
Health Regeneration: Usually called Health Regen, or sometimes referred to as Hp5 or Hp10. This stands for Health per "the amount of time the item builds". For example, an item may give 15 health regeneration per 10 seconds, which would be 15 Hp10, or 7.5 Hp5
Power Damage: or PD ( sometimes referred to as AP by League of Legends players due to it's similarity to their in game Ability Power). This stats give bonus damage to abilities. You will notice a % number that tells you how much of your PD will be added as damage to a particular skill, and the text is colored dark blue in game.
Attack Damage: or AD, this adds damage to a champions auto-attacks ( which is the attack achieved by right clicking on an enemy). Also, some champions will scale with AD, and will have a % added to their abilities. This scaling can be read on the ability and is colored orange in game.
Will: Will is the resource that most champions use to cast their abilities, and is seen on the blue bar beneath a champions health bar. This is called Mana in most other games, and is usually still called mana by experienced MOBA players, out of habit. May lead to the expression OOM, meaning out of mana.
Will Regeneration: or Will Regen. This has the same Wp5 or Wp10 abbreviations that health regen does. Some experienced MOBA players may abbreviate it Mp5 or Mp10 due to the name mana from other MOBAs.
Attack Armor: This builds a percentage resistance against abilities that deal physical damage, and against enemy auto-attacks from champions and drones alike.
Power Armor: This builds a percent resistance against enemy champion abilities that deal power damage.
Armor Penetration: or Armor Pen for short, is a percentage of armor that you will ignore on your opponents, and it applies to auto-attacks, and abilities that deal physical damage.
Power Penetration: or Power Pen for short, is the percentage of Power Armor that you will ignore on your opponents, and it applies to abilities that deal Power Damage.
Attack Lifesteal: or just lifesteal for short, is a percentage of health that you will heal upon auto-attacking an enemy. It is a percentage of the damage you deal, so the best way to increase its effectiveness is to increase Attack Damage, as well as the amount of Lifesteal.
Power Lifesteal: is lifesteal that specifically applies to ability use, and will not work on auto-attacks. Similar to lifesteal, it is best increased by building Power Damage, as well as Power Lifesteal.
Attack Speed: or AS. This is a percentage increase to the rate that your champion auto-attacks.
Critical Strike Chance: or Crit Chance. This is the chance that your champion's auto-attack will critically strike an opponent, dealing 150% of your champions attack damage, instead of 100%. This is of course lowered by an opponents Attack Armor stat.
Movement Speed: or MS. This is simply the speed at which your champion moves.
Cool Down Reduction: Often abbreviated as CDR, this is a percentage of time that is removed form the cool-downs of your abilities. This stat has a maximum cap, so you can not get 100% CDR.
[/list]
Less Basic:
These terms are more learned by playing, and become more useful as you play more competitively.
[list]
Kiting: Kiting is the act of maintaining movement while also attacking. Most times kiting is done by backing away from an enemy champion and landing damaging ranged attacks or abilities, while simultaneously dodging enemy abilities. Most champions that need to kite are considered to be a "Carry".
Carry: A Carry is a type of champion whom is considered to deal extremely high damage, and is usually very weak or "Squishy". Carries are sometimes referred to as "Glass-Cannons" and can deal extreme damage if left un-targeted, but can die very easily if focused at all.
Peeling: Peeling is when you use your abilities that apply Crowd Control to enemy champions in order to save one of your squishier allies. Usually a tanky champion will peel for a carry.
Feeding: Feeding is when a player intentionally dies repeatedly to give the opposing team an advantage. It is what angry players will sometimes to do out of frustration to end a game, and is always a shame to watch.
Fed: Being "Fed" is what happens when a champion gets a high number of kills early, or achieves most of their "Core" items very early. This can lead to a champion becoming unstoppable and can often end a game very quickly if certain champions, mainly "Carries", are fed.
KS or Kill Stealing: This is what happens when one player does 90% of the damage to an enemy player, and then a teammate comes up and gets the final hit on the champion, resulting in a kill for someone who did not deserve it. HOWEVER, KSing is not always a bad thing. If a tanky champion is about to land a kill, and you know you are playing a "Carry" champion who can snowball, sometimes it's better for the team to steal the kill and get the snowball started.
Snowballing: This is what happens when a champion begins to get out of control with items. The effect of one items, leading to more kills, leading to more items, leading to a ridiculous advantage. Some very good "Snowball Items" are : [[Joker's Crowbar (2)]], 
The Crime Bible (2), and [[Two Face's Coin (2)]]. These items all provided bonuses over time and on kills or assists, making them great if you anticipate having a high kill or assist count.
Instagib: This is what happens when an assassin type champion shows up and immediately kills a "squishy" champion, with little or no retaliation, in one quick combo. Often this is considered to have happened when someone's health is brought from 100% to 0 quickly.
Squishy: A champion with a low health pool.
Pushing: Pushing is what happens when you help move your drone wave further away from your own turrets, and closer to the enemy turrets. This is usually the way to take down a turret.
Back Dooring: Back Dooring is what happens when one champion on a team does not participate in a fight, and usually goes unnoticed as he takes out turrets while the teams are busy fighting and distracted. It often feels cheap to lose to a Back Door effort, but a win is a win.
Turret Diving: This is what happens when a champion attempts to fight underneath an enemy turret, and usually sustains serious damage from the turret. It is usually not a good idea to do alone, and almost always ends in death fro the person diving. If you outnumber the enemies under the tower, and they are already damaged, sometimes a dive can be successful. Take great consideration when diving during the early game.
Calling MIAs: MIA is short for "Missing In Action" and in MOBAs is usually typed into the chat to tell your teammates when an enemy has disappeared from his receptive lane. For example, if you're in lane with 1 ally and the enemy Cyborg disappears; then you should type "mia cyborg" into the chat, that way your allies know to be weary of a gank from cyborg.
Gank: A gank is when a player ambushes an unsuspecting enemy. Gank's can be avoided by playing close to your turret, using the 
Surveillance Camera stolen power, having strong map awareness, and by watching for allied mia calls.
Map Awareness: This is a trait that is important to develop in MOBAs. It is the ability to watch the minimap periodically while you play, and being able to quickly asses where the enemies are located. Strong Map Awareness can cut down on the amount of deadly ganks on you and your lane partner, as well as lead you to land successful ganks on enemies.
Lane Freezing: This is a strategy where a player will stand in the way of an enemy minion wave just outside of his own turret range, and will tank the drone damage while he waits for his own wave to come and block the enemy wave. This is usually done by a tankier champion that won't take significant damage. This is done for 2 reasons. 1- It allows you to make sure you land the lats hit on the drone, instead of the tower, and grants you more credits. 2- It will take longer to kill all the drones, which will lead to your enemies losing experience and credits while they cant get close enough to farm for themselves.
[/list]
This guide will continually be updated as I find the time. Please upvote if you find any of the information to be useful. Also, I will answer any question left in the comments, and will add the answer to the guide for other players. I'll try to check daily for comments.
So, one of the biggest problems with MOBAs is the extremely harsh learning curve. Take a game that has strong and essential strategic elements that punish bad play, add in an extremely competitive environment, make games un-quitable (unless you wish to receive a penalty), and tie that with the added stress of learning the 5 abilities of every character, as well as essentially learning a new language; and you have a typical MOBA. Now, take in consideration that most important battles take place in less then 20 seconds. It's alot to deal with. For new players, it is often too much. This guide is going to cover all the "Basics" and give a quick way for new players to understand the intense mechanics of MOBAs, as well as learn the new language they need to understand for more competitive play. If you already know some of this information, feel free to skip around, but to be safe I'm going to attempt to cover every detail I can.
What is a MOBA?:
MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Although most mobas are alot more about strategic map objectives, as opposed to just brawling it out against other players.
The Lingo:
Here I'm going to break down most of the terms you'll want a grasp of. You can use the "ctrl+f" command to open a search bar if you're looking for something specific.
Basics:
[list]
Atlantis Gambit (2), Oa Gambit (2), Olympus Gambit (2), and Qward Gambit (2).[/list]
Stats:
These are the in game stats you can buy and upgrade your champion with.
[list]
[/list]
Less Basic:
These terms are more learned by playing, and become more useful as you play more competitively.
[list]
The Crime Bible (2), and [[Two Face's Coin (2)]]. These items all provided bonuses over time and on kills or assists, making them great if you anticipate having a high kill or assist count. Surveillance Camera stolen power, having strong map awareness, and by watching for allied mia calls.[/list]
This guide will continually be updated as I find the time. Please upvote if you find any of the information to be useful. Also, I will answer any question left in the comments, and will add the answer to the guide for other players. I'll try to check daily for comments.
Latest comments
This is rather useful. I would suggest adding Attack and Power Reflect, since those are other stats that you can have.
This is rather useful. I would suggest adding Attack and Power Reflect, since those are other stats that you can have.
12:59 pm, Sep 10th, 2014
SS is Skill Shot, its an ablity which needs to be aimed.
7:59 pm, Apr 18th, 2014
Awesome ty. So is that a person's way of saying they have a shot charged (Like Cyborgs 4th shot)?
2:50 pm, Apr 19th, 2014
SS is actually Stay Safe, it's an another way to say MIA, but is less popular from my experience. I'll add it to the guide though.
1:48 pm, Apr 28th, 2014
There's a few more acronyms I'm seeing that I don't know. I'll keep posting here as I see them or remember them but the biggest one I see often is 'ss'.
I have no idea what it means
4:59 pm, Apr 18th, 2014
in this page "ss" stands for miss or missing.
http://clgaming.net/forums/board3-league-of-legends/board4-general/8351-understanding-moba-s-terms/
11:13 am, Apr 20th, 2014
Looks really good so far, good luck with the guide :)
There is a lot to cover in 1 guide :P
8:16 am, Apr 1st, 2014
Yeah it is haha, and thanks for the ikind words :)
I plan on keeping up with updating; but school, work, family, a steady relationship, and playing mobas is a tough juggle.
1:50 pm, Apr 28th, 2014
where the FUCK is the 'guide'? 