I say this everytime, but it's really true: the first thing you should do is try to find a friend who already plays Dota and get them to teach you. Failing that, I'm sure there's a couple of friendly people here who wouldn't mind showing you the ropes either.
P4G was my only other Persona experience before this, and I've never played any of the Shin Megami Tensei games. I do like a lot of the improvements to the dungeons, but more so than in P4 I felt like a lot of times it was hard for me to plan out how to make the most of the amount of free time I had. Case in point: I rented out a DVD, they said "return in a week please" but after 2 days the game locks me into a sequence that sucks up more than a week (exams, story events etc) so I end up having to return it late. (Thankfully they waive the first late fee, but that meant I never rented another DVD again)
At least it seems vastly easier to max out the social links this time; my first play through I had 1 confidant at rank 7 (Tower) and 2 at 9 (Fortune, Devil), and maxed out the rest, whereas with P4 there were several that were stuck at 4s (Death, Devil and Moon I think?)
Yeah Persona always seems hardest to me early on when you don't have any way to effectively gain SP, which is at odds with the battle system heavily pressuring you to just keep using your spells to strike at the enemy's weak points. I don't remember P4 having the thing where if your main character died it was game over, so that seems like a step back to me. I did die several times to enemies basically deciding they wanted to hit my main character's weak points and dump all their damage into him :/ Maybe reduce the difficulty and see if that's enough to get you back into the game?
