The game I’ve played that most lends itself to theorycrafting, by orders of magnitude more compared to anything else I’ve played is Heroes of the Storm. Many times over the years it’s been condescendingly referred to as “baby’s first MOBA” because it streamlines a lot of the legacy crap of MOBAs, but people saying stuff like that don’t get what avenues the streamlining opens. I preferred the line Tim had about HotS at one point – it was something to the effect of, “The greatest MOBA, that no one wanted to play.” MOBAs lend themselves to theorycrafting because of the huge rosters that have countless team permutations, with various match up counters and synergies and varying builds for characters that just introduce that many more possibilities.
MOBAs like League of Legends and DotA have such ingrained metas that are further reinforced by the game having queues for set positions that they don’t lend themselves to much experimentation with team compositions. Two little changes to the MOBA formula in HotS completely upended the possibility of stale team configurations, the removal of the last-hitting mechanic and the addition of completely shared team experience. MOBAs traditionally tied players down to lanes for long stretches because your character’s strength is directly tied to how many minions they were near by that died and how many of those minions you last hit to accrue gold. In HotS someone simply has to pick up experience orbs that are dropped by minions within so many seconds after they die, freeing up characters to have all kinds of interesting maneuvering they can do across the map. This lax form of accruing experience that leads to greater map mobility also opens the door for a wild amount of team compositions because there aren’t as many expectations of positions.
To give an example a typical lane setup in League of Legends looks like this:
Top Lane: Solo Lane(typically bruiser)
Mid Lane: Mid Lane DPS(typically ability damage)
Bottom Lane: Bot Lane DPS(typically attack damage) and a support character
Jungle: Character types can vary wildly
A typical lane setup in HotS might look something like this:
Top Lane: Solo Lane(typically bruiser)
Mid Lane: The solo laner or “off laner” in HotS is also collecting this
Bottom Lane: All 4 other members cover the bottom lane and rotate across the map as they see fit to do a myriad of things such as gank an enemy player, siege, team fight, jungle, progress the map objective, etc.
Jungle: A collective effort of all team members clears the jungle as they rotate across the map
All of these lanes change contextually too, any knowledgeable player will know if it is X time on Y map I should generally be at this location because the map objective dictates it.
Also worth mentioning is that there are several characters that completely change the dynamic of the entire game for both teams, like The Lost Vikings completely change the way any match they’re in is played because it’s one person whose character is three individual characters. A typical TLV configuration might look like this:
Top Lane: Erik(TLV)
Mid Lane: Olaf(TLV)
Bot Lane: Baelog(TLV)
Jungle: A good TLV can even handle this as well at times
Rest of the Team: Do whatever the hell you want on the map
Because of the flexibility of lanes team compositions are wildly opened up. One tank, one bruiser, one healer, one auto attack DPS and one ability DPS is standard team composition, but with a strategy and coordination, seemingly goofy team compositions can be extremely potent. Want to play five supports? Pick the right combination with some waveclear for minion waves and you can make it work. No healer? You can make that work too in certain scenarios, you’ll probably want an Abathur on your team though. No tank, three bruisers, a DPS and a healer? Sure, there’s plenty of strong combinations of that.
All of this and I haven’t even mentioned that the game has a dozen or so different maps that can vary greatly in play styles and how competent each character is can vary from map to map. Just further multiplying the permutations of setups.
None of this isn’t to say there isn’t experimentation in League or DotA, but things have broadly calcified in those games at most levels. As someone who has been playing these types of games since Starcraft and Warcraft III I’d say HotS has the most interesting meta, because as you play enough or get high enough rank you quickly realize there’s no true meta style of gameplay there’s just standard configurations and whatever works, works.