Drafting Tips | Dota 2 Tips and Tricks

 

Have an Idea of How Your Lineup Will Play Out

You need to visualize your strategy and what it's going to do.

• Is offlane going to rotate when they hit 6?
• Is your plan to get kills in the lane, then rotate the supports?
• How much support does your carry need?
• What is mid's role in this? (e.g. farm/semi-carry, push, get an advantage and then gank, etc.)
• Where will your supports need to be to make your lineup work? (e.g. gank mid early and often? Kill the offlane and guarantee carry farm? Pressure the enemy carry?)

You also should have a backup plan.

• What happens if the aggro trilane fails?
• What happens if the carry can't farm well?
• What happens if mid gets killed early?
• What happens if offlane feeds?

Having a plan makes a good drafter. You need to share this plan with the team so they know what their job is.
Being able to manage that plan in-game makes a good captain or shot caller.

Know Mechanics, Matchups, and Heroes

This should be fairly obvious to have to know, but there is a huge amount of information needed to do this well.
Like, let's say you pick up Shadow Demon. Here are things you should know:

• He sets up Mirana arrow
• He works well against Anti-Mage (2 clones that have his stats and can bankrupt his mana pool), Phantom Lancer (able to spawn illusions off the clones he makes)
• He is good for catching heroes out of position
• He is good for counter-initiation
• In lane, he has very little damage, so you cannot pick up another support like Shadow Shaman or Rubick. You need someone with lots of damage. Same goes for the carry. One, the other, or both.
• Poison is good for scouting
• His ult is good against heroes that can be kited and/or get Black King Bar(e.g. Lifestealer)

Some pick-ups are considered greedy. Usually this means they need a higher amount of XP or Gold than normal supports. Greed pays off if it goes unpunished. That happens when the other team plays passively, or if your team can play defensively until you gain the advantage.
Examples of "greedy" picks:

• Enigma--> he's a hero that jungles (i.e. more xp and gold for your 2 in lane), but he tends to farm a lot before coming online unlike Enchantress.
• Nyx Assassin Support --> he's a hero that does OK in lane, but isn't a great lane support (especially after he lost his reliable stun - which is kind of what you rely on melee supports for), he also NEEDs level 6 as fast as possible. The levels is what makes him greedy. If your lane is pressured and he hits level 6 late, he won't do much. If they play passive and he hits level 6 quick, then you're going to be far ahead.

Matchups are the last part here. A lot of this is shown at mid:

• Puck wins vs. Queen of Pain --> Puck can  Phase Shift her spells
• Templar Assassin wins vs. Puck --> Puck loses to consistent damage where you cannot phase shift all of it. A good Puck can still outplay a Templar Assassin, but equal skill - Templar Assassin wins.
• Batrider wins vs. Templar Assassin --> Templar Assassin loses to heroes that can take off Refraction charges and deal high damage to her (e.g. Sticky Napalm Stacks). Again, you can outplay a Batrider, but in general Batrider will win.

This carries over to 1v1 offlanes too. For instance:

• Bounty Hunter generally beats Weaver --> high physical burst damage
• Lone Druid will also beat Weaver if pooled Sentries
• Timbersaw beats most STR heroes (due to 15% primary stat reduction on whirling death)

However, to draft well, knowing 3v1, 3v3, etc. is necessary too.

• Nyx Assassin offlane is good vs. burst and slow projectile stuns, but weaker vs. slows
• Timbersaw crushes 2v1 matchups (usually)
• Aggro trilane will beat greedy defensive trilanes

Picking Phase

When you pick, you want to:

1. Have an idea in mind
2. Try to hide your idea, or throw them off
3. Respond to their draft in ways that won't hurt yours

You also want to look at things like:

• How strong your team is at level 1 (a lot means you should try for first blood, smoke gank, etc.)
• How much magic damage vs. physical damage you have
• Initiation --- this is huge. Have multiple ways to start fights if possible
• Mobility -- this is becoming more important in 6.80
• When your heroes come online
• Crowd Control --- sometimes you can get away with less, but you still need some
  • Also watch for things like Weaver picks when you lack crowd control
• Push -- this is necessary to end the game. You don't NEED push, but you need to have some way to get to the point where you can take a tower
• Farm Dependency
• Level Dependency -- especially if you get heroes like Visage or Ancient Apparition for support; sometimes it's good to pick another hero that rotates to gank or jungle at a certain point and then give them priority in lane to hit lvl 6

There is probably more that I'm leaving out as well.
One way to think about it is with 3 categories of lineup strength. NOTE this is highly abstracted/dumbed-down:

1. Push
2. Teamfight
3. Gank

Personally, I try to have at least two of these elements. Having a backup plan is good, it's also good not to be overly focused because that's easier to shut down. If you're pure push, they just need to turtle.
There also used to be a rule of thumb like: Push > Turtle > Gank > Push; but that's not entirely true either.

Opening Picks

These should usually be vague picks. For instance:

• Mirana - she can mid, support, carry, offlane, you name it.
• Crystal Maiden - she fits in a lot of lineups, she can aggro or defensive, even jungle
• Visage - good both defensive and aggro. Also makes it harder to aggro against him.

If you pick up a hero like Chen or Faceless Void too early, they know you're going to Defensive Trilane (unless you have some wacky strat). Then they'll probably shift toward aggro tri because they can put a lot of pressure on you.
You can also open with heroes that are hard to shut down or very strong like:

• Clockwerk - overall pretty solid laner. He will generally be offlane and they know that, but he's hard to deal with anyway.
• Invoker - you basically know he's going mid, but you don't know what build he'll use and he's still hard to shut down because of Quas regen.

Aggro or Defensive

There is some debate over when to do what, but generally you want to aggro when you need to shut down their carry. Like if they get Faceless Void, you want to punish his weak laning phase. You can't play passive against that. If you shut him down early, he won't ever come online.

Pros of Aggro:

• Don't need to know advanced mechanics like pulling
• Easy to gank jungle/mid
• Helps with rune control

Cons of Aggro:

• Need the right heroes
• Need good positioning and controlled aggression