Balance is awful in this game.

[breadboxesinboxes]

The items arent properly priced(extremely useful items being on the cheapest tier, nearly useless items being at the the most expensive one). The abilities having totally different functions with upgrades and items having such huge passives /actives means the game is decided in the first 5 minutes but it goes on for another 20-30. Some characters with high health and high damage while some are squishy with low damage and minimal utility, some characters can 3v1 while others cannot even participate in team fights because of how much AOE is in everyones kit. Anyone can do team or self heal builds, making tanks the undisputed meta. On the flipside of that you have DPS characters with near unlimited mobility and high damage at range making characters who are utility based obsolete. Even if this was an indie dev's first shot at making a game like this it would be a little embarrassing. Valve has been making games for decades and should have known better. Early access or not this is just down right amateur.

[Bug Guy]

I have only seen 1 game decided in the first 5 minutes out of my 100 games played. It was a game where 2 players in a lane each died 5 times at 5 minutes, to a Vindicta's Ult for most of them. So she became so ridiculously farmed (and the other lanes were not doing well either) that it truly was lost by minute 5. Game ended at 15 minutes, and probably could have ended 3 minutes sooner.

This game lends itself to comebacks. towers are ridiculously easy to destroy, so a single bad teamfight can lead to your base being taken if you havent been pushing out your lanes. This in itself should change, somewhat I think. Just a bit more backdoor protection and health on Towers, so that you cant take a walker, double gaurdians, both shrines, and kill patron all within 35 seconds.

Hero balance is one of the most difficult things to do in games like these. You can never ever look at just raw numbers of what Heroes do and predict how they will actually play with a live audience, even if you do internal testing. So as an EA title, Hero balance will probably be pretty rough for the first several patches (though honestly I dont think its even that horrible. Very very rarely have I felt like im losing a game because of a specific character being too strong)

Only conclusion I can really add is to give this game some time in the oven. I think its pretty great and hope they iron out all the jank