Tips on how to improve micro skills

 

Depends on which hero and what you are doing with them.

Meepo

You have 1-5 heroes with the same exact abilities (minus items). So you need to first decide how you want to organize and control them in terms of group. Different players have different methods of doing this.

• Main Meepo in 1 control group, 2-5 in another, All Meepos in a 3rd group
• Each Meepo in its own control group

You can also leverage the "tab", to cycle through your Meepos in the current group, or even through all your units if only 1 Meepo is selected. This is often how you'll find yourself "perma-Earthbind".

You will also need to learn the "trick" of how to do the blink insta poof of a Meepo.

All these things should be and are best practiced in a lobby with repetition over and over until perfected.

Otherwise you need to worry about how to quickly select the exact Meepo you want, and manipulating that Meepo however you see fit, but not ignoring your other Meepos for too long. Try practicing in a lobby where you just jungle over and over with 5 Meepos. But kill separate jungle camps at the same time by splitting Meepos into groups. Move these smaller groups from camp to camp and use a combination of auto attacks and poofs to kill off the camps. When one Meepo is low make sure to back him up so the other Meepo(s) tank. It will require you to keep track of all your Meepos, and making decisions for them all individually, and then executing that using things like your control groups, tabbing, clicking on the Meepo, boxing, etc.

There are a ton more specific tips on how to do different things mechanically, but you need to worry about your basic "micro skills" first, which is really just the ability to split your focus on multiple things and manipulate what you have select and are looking at quickly enough to control them all separately.

Chen and Enchantress

These heroes are complicated like Meepo in that all their units have active abilities, but you can't get away with quickly tabbing between them because the different creeps will have different hotkeys and abilities to use.

You first need to learn each neutral and what I can do, and what abilities it has on which hotkeys. Then you can play it similar to how you'd play Meepo, with the added challenge of when all together you can't just grab "any unit" to do what you want, you have to get the exact one. This will be easy for you once you've masted your Meepo skills of using the closest Meepo to Earthbind, or backing hurt Meepos from fights. Alternatively you could pracitce with Chen/Enchantress to perfect your skills at choosing and using 1 unit at a time quickly and translate that over to your Meepo play.

Lycan, Nature's Prophet, Enigma, Broodmother, Anyone with images

These guys all have boring summons that don't do anything but attack.

The key here is just learning to control them separately. This will be extremely simple for you if you just practice playing Meepo where there is more to worry about. But if Meepo is to intense to start on, then this is an easier jump off point.

You can practice by just playing jungle Enigma and/or Nature's Prophet. (In a practice game) you can just kill of the jungle camps repeatedly, making sure you always back up hurt summons, and bouncing argo to your full health ones, but then being hurt ones back in to continue DPS. This is easiest in this context by just clicking onto the until, or box selecting them all and clicking on the portrait of the desired unit (often easier as the 3d element of dota makes it difficult to click things sometimes).

Tab will be useless when you have a group selected because the units don't have any abilities. But you can still use tab to cycle through them one by one if you have only 1 unit selected.

You can use control groups to specify your summons, and another for your summons and your hero (and the default F1 for your hero). You might find it useful to split your summons into seperate control groups (one for each wolf for lycan for example, or 2 sets of 2-3 trees for Nature's Prophet). To help you switch between them when you want to control them to do separate tasks.

Again this is all about selecting the unit your want to do stuff with and quickly making it do the stuff you want to do. When you can use the same command to do it for multiple units at once it makes it easier. Other times you'll want to do different things with separate units requiring you to split your focus and quickly switch between, issue orders, and keep your camera one the action all at the same time.

General Things to remember

Shift queuing

Use shift queued commands so you can not have to revisit the same group of units as often, allowing you more realtime control of other units. This is good for using some Meepos to jungle by shift queuing attack commands around the jungle. While you last hit with your main Meepo in a lane.

Minimap

Use your minimap to keep track of your own units, and to issue commands to them when you just need to move them to general locations. This saves you time from having to move your camera around (at the loss of detail of information).

Control groups

Don't forget to use control groups, and keep reseting them and exploring different control group set ups until you can select and control everything you need, exactly how you want to, in any and every given situation. Learn how to use the shift and ctrl key to manipulate your groups and set control groups. You can double click the control group hotkey to focus your camera on the group. Same with teh F1 key and your hero.

Boxing

Get good at quickly boxing your units on screen, this is good for in the moment unit selection, as well as initially selecting the units you want for a group. Practice summoning Nature's Prophet treants, selecting them all and putting them in one ctrl group, then quickly boxing and splitting out half to send one way (and ctrl group) and then box the rest and send them another way (and ctrl group).

Manually clicking on portraits or models of the unit you want (best for getting that low hp unit to back). This requires click accuracy and speed.

Tab

Use that tab key to cycle between units quickly. The "global tab" that lets you cycle between all your units when just one is selected is extremely useful for a hero like Lone Druid, who you really just want to switch between the hero and bear.

Create your own "drills to do"

Really just open up a practice lobby, grab a hero like Chen, Meepo, or Nature's Prophet and put on WTF mode. Make some units and practice quickly selecting ones you want, and moving them around, issuing specific orders. Create your own "drills to do", like the summon treants and quickly make control groups and split them to move in 2 directions. Practice, practice, practice. Once you can select and control the units (mostly selecting, moving the camera around to see them, then issuing commands like normal), coming up with "what to do" is just a matter of in the moment creativity. Like using a Chen creep to body block a retreating enemy hero, while moving your centuar creep in range to stun, all while having Chen auto attack the enemy.