Unlabelled Learn Dota 2 - DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!) (2/3)

1/23/2018 11:11:00 am
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Learn Dota 2 - DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!) (2/3)

DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!) (2/3)

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 12:48 PM PST

(Part 1/3 here)

As with the previous section this one will deal with the PvE aspects of playing support. We'll start with Position 5. First I'll talk about safelane pulls. There are multiple pulls you can do that have different purposes. The first is a single (non-stacked) pull to the small camp. You can do this at x:13/x:43. You don't want to do this pull 99% of the time because the small camp isn't strong enough to kill the wave, and creating a double wave will make the enemy offlaner level 4 billion, lose your carry cs and make him very sad. If you want to push however, it's great. If you have a strong tower hitter like Terrorblade, the offlane NP has fucked off to gank somewhere and it's a siege wave (every 5 minutes), then double wave away. The single pull also transitions into the best pull there is, the one you want to do a whole lot and the one 90% of supports don't know exists, the pull through. If you aggro the nearby large camp towards the small camp as the creeps die, they'll get cleaned up by it and won't create that dreaded double wave. The timing for this varies depending on which small camp spawn it is, but generally you start the connection pull when the camp is at around 50% health. That one camp with the healing creep is noticeably later then that because it heals up. It's also a lot harder on Dire, but is still doable. The reason this pull is so good is because it enables supports to get gold and XP independent from the lane. Not only does this give all the lane resources to the core, it allows you to hit power spikes you couldn't normally hit. For example, if you just sit around leeching XP generally you'll both be level 2 when the offlaner gets to level 3, but if you get the small camp XP you can hit a timing where your core is 3 and you're 2, sometimes even before the offlaner is 3! Plus it turns out that wards cost gold, who knew. It's gotta come from somewhere! Sometimes however, the offlaner will come and interrupt the connection, taking the creep wave and being a big jerk. If you know this is going to happen, doing a double stacked small camp pull is better. You don't get the XP and gold from clearing the camp, but it's a lot harder to interrupt because it's physically further away from the lane. You stack at x:54 and use the single pull timings listed above after that. You have to plan ahead more for this pull because it takes two separate actions, the stacking part and the pulling part. This is the safest way to deny XP to the offlaner if you can't murder them or shoo them away. The last pull is the hard camp side pull. This is the one from the freefarming part of the cores section. As noted there this pull has changed recently, you used to be able to drag the hard camp diagonally towards the tower and it would connect but now you can't, you have to do it straight sideways for it to connect and this means the lane has to be really pushed in for it to work. Pull timings are x:24/x:54 with the 54 variant automatically stacking at the same time as the pull. With there being a lot of "fighting" offlaners these days because of the deny XP changes like Tide and Brew, this pull is a lot less common (it probably was OP before). The benefit this pull has is that a double stacked variant nukes the wave extremely fast (When camps that were last hit by creeps gave 0% XP this was kinda good). Also you can nuke a wave in 1 action with the combined stack/pull instead of the 2 actions required for the small camp one. Being as it is that time is money, having more time is good. Other then that, this pull is the "farming pull" for cores to supplement their farm by clearing the camp. Important note: all the pull timings listed here are for before 7:30 on the clock. This is because the safelane creeps have a movement speed buff on them for the first 7 minutes of the game, to make the wave go further so the offlaner doesn't have such a hard time. After 7:30, you need to add 2 seconds to all safelane pull timings. That's pretty much all there is to know about PvE babysitting outside of camp stacking timings, and if you want to know that type "7.06 camp stacking" into YouTube cuz I ain't going over that jazz :P. Or just turn on "hold alt to show camp spawns/tower range" if you haven't already (which you should) and just guesstimate it, it's not that hard. One small tip about stacking ancients: If you directly attack the big Thunderhide (the dino) it'll use its buff on itself any time it's aggroed after that until it dies, making stacking impossible. You have to attack the little one or aggro it with your body.

Now for Position 4. What PvE aspect could there possibly to talk about for a roaming role you ask? Well I'm going to cheat a bit and say that killing the courier qualifies, even if someone needs to be using it for you to be able to kill it. It's part of the environment after all. A lot of people don't understand how important killing the courier is. It gives your entire team 150 gold each, which if you remember my gold section is 150x5=750/10000 = 7.5% of the total gold you need to have an "unbeatable" advantage. And you can have this by the time the 1st creep wave meets. Just having that early gold infusion can be the catalyst that starts your snowball of unfairness(tm). So how do you get it? Well, for starters you've only got a strict 3 minute time limit to kill the loot piñata. After that it gets more health, goes faster and gets an invincibility shield. So you ain't gonna be getting your 7.5% after that. You can always pick Riki or BH and just sit invisible behind the T2 tower waiting for it to come. But if you don't kill it your team will be playing 4v5 for 3 minutes and you'll be level 1. So it's best to be able to make an educated guess about where the courier is going to be. In pro games, the pos4 will block the mid creep wave while the mid player gets the 1st bounty rune. This is so they can instantly buy a salve on top of their starting items so they have lots of regen to sustain during laning. If you scout the enemy mid doing this, then you know when and where the chicken will be. Any hero with a smoke and decent base damage can take it out. After this you gotta figure out where it's gonna go based on the enemy's starting items and how much lane CS they get. You can tell if someone is about pick up an item. If you see a Zeus with an empty inventory mid, guess what he's going to buy and when? If you said a bottle and right now, congrats you won the prize. If a lane runs out of regen you'll know they'll either need to leave or fly some out. If their safelane doesn't have detection and you harass the shit out of them as an invis hero, they might fly out a sentry. It'd be a shame if you were standing between the T1 and T2 at that exact moment. Things of this nature are a lot better then just waiting and hoping it happens to come by. The various contingencies that will happen are highly dependent on your skill bracket. It's really hard to snipe a courier that doesn't exist :P.

Warding is another PvE thing that supports primarily do, but in reality anyone can do. I'm not going to go over the extreme intricacies of how to ward and deward, just the basics. The more you're winning the game, the deeper your wards should be. This allows you to find pickoffs. The inverse is true as well, the harder you're losing the further back they should be, to give vision of the area you're trying to farm. If you're warding an area like the runes where both teams want to see, try to make sure you replace your wards exactly as they die, not 1 minute later. It's a lot easier to deward when you see the ward being placed down. The big thing that low level players don't do is they don't use wards offensively while they're pushing a tower. You can place wards behind literally every tower, even to both sides of the T3s on the high ground (except the radiant offlane T3 for whatever reason, that one you can only place the ward to the right side). Doing this lets you see if the enemy is mounting a defense, or if there's a straggler hanging around that you can kill.

8. Communication

Dota is a team game. At some point in time, for some reason, you're going to need someone on your team to do something for or with you. The first thing that needs to be said is that voice chat is mandatory if you're playing the game to win. Don't have a mic? Buy one. You can get a functional desk mic or a clip on one for less then 10 bucks. The ability to communicate quickly is essential in a game where a millisecond is the difference between success and failure.

Slack's guide to communication is the best. Slacks is a smart guy, he has a degree in neuroscience I think? Anyway, everyone should watch this. The reason this section exists is to post a link to this video. Just watch it. It talks about being the pub commander, or as I like to call it, the captain of the S.S Dumbfuck. If you've read this guide and therefore are smarter and better then any of the 4 chromosome collectors on your team, putting yourself in the pub commander role can help you direct your teammates into doing The Needful in order to get that sweet +25. The biggest thing that stuck with me from the video is how just by changing tiny, tiny things in the way you interact with players you can have a big effect. Like if you give the offlaner a ward, instead of saying "Here's a ward for the pull camp", you say "Hey LC, if I give you this ward can you block the pull camp for me please?" it changes things. The second one has you asking for a favor, and if they say sure no problem and you say great thanks, you've made it seem like they're deciding to help you. It subconsciously trains them to respond to your commands in the future, and also sets the tone of the game towards you being the director of authority. Even if you want to skip the physiological manipulation, there's a big difference between saying "stun" and "Hey CM run up and stun Jugg and then I'll stun him". Who's supposed to get stunned? Who's doing the stunning. Who knows! Being clear and precise with how you say things is important.

The way in which you choose to interact with your teammates is extremely important. You aren't allowed to flame your team. Ever. This is because as Purge's MMR videos say, flaming your teammates lowers their effective MMR, the MMR they are playing at right now. If you have a 2.5k player on your team and you tell them they're a piece of shit, they might play more like a 2.0k player. Think about how hard it is to win just one +25. If you'd do anything to get it, then you'll never ever bring your own team down. The secret to Dota is that it's not that the best player who wins the game, it's the smartest retard. You can be that retard. If you're getting mad about a stupid thing your team is doing, just vent about it out loud not over the game comms. Do not do anything that will drag your team's morale down, ever.

Personal anecdote time: One time I was playing a game and we were doing extremely well. Our offlane enigma was stomping and we were snowballing our strong earlygame into a deathball. But then, oh no, the enigma made a mistake, probably literally his first mistake of the game, and whiffed a black hole. He then got so mad he instantly blew the refresher he just picked to double black hole the ground in a fit of rage while all chatting GG END (and no, he wasn't being sarcastic). I instantly jumped to my microphone, and told this special snowflake everything his sweet little ears wanted to hear. That it's ok, that it was actually my fault for whatever reason, that he's amazing and perfect in every way and that he most certainly does not need to sell all his items as he said he would because I need his amazing muscles and skills to beat the enemy because my tiny weak brain could never handle doing it by myself. He snapped out of his sperglord fit long enough to finish ending and I got my +25 5 minutes later. It didn't matter that he was a complete retard, what mattered is that I needed to do whatever had to be done to secure this game, and telling him he was a retard might have made him chain feed 10 times. It's like carrying a concealed weapon. In CCW courses they'll teach you that if you're carrying a gun, you're the loser of every argument and are wrong no matter what. This is because if you escalate a situation and you've got a gun, someone's gonna end up dead. Being the Moral Support (on top of the actual support I usually am) of the game has salvaged me so many wins. If psychologically babysitting my team is what it takes to win, the doctor is in session.

9. Laning

So you've followed every step in this guide up until this point. You have a positive mental attitude. You've outdrafted the enemy and have a clear path to your win condition. You've studied the itemization that will take you to it. You've practiced and cemented your PvE gameplay. Your steam name is no longer Liquid.Miracle. Good stuff. It's been a long journey to get to this point. This is where the rubber meets the road. We're finally going to talk about playing against other people, and how to beat them!

I'm going to open this section up with a question: Why is it that you don't send all 5 heroes to a single lane at the start of the game? Have you ever really thought about it? The answer is because you'll be losing out on 2/3rds of the gold and XP from the lanes. Even if you do kill whoever is in the lane you're in 5 times in 3 minutes, it won't be mathematically worth it if the rest of the team just calmly collects resources and comes and fights you with two level 6 cores while your entire team is level 3. The reason I'm going over this is to drive home this simple point: Laning doesn't exist in a vacuum. The game of Dota itself doesn't exist in a vacuum. The things that are happening where you aren't are just as important as the things that are happening where you are. As your MMR raises and players (including yourself) become more efficient, they'll be more capable of taking advantage of weaknesses that arise on the map. Let's say you're a safelane carry and you're getting slammed by Axe and BH. BH being in your lane means he isn't somewhere else. Maybe this means your pos4 is pounding their mid and your offlane is laughing all the way to the bank. In this case, you don't have to be mega super concerned that your farm is getting slowed down. Your team overall is getting more out of the map then their team. If you scrape some farm out of the lane and most importantly DON'T DIE, your team will come out ahead overall. It's especially juicy when the enemy picks a 4th core instead of a supporting pos4 and goes dual off, and you crush them with your 2 supports. Now instead of 1 useless hero, they have two!

The first thing that will happen during the laning phase (if you arent 5 man smoke ganking the runes or something) is the 1st creep wave will need to be blocked. Safe/Offlaners are just trying to get the lane as close to their side as possible, whereas midlaners want the block to end so their creeps are at the top of the ramp while the enemy's are in the river, so the enemy mid can't see you uphill (this absolutely fucks the enemy mid if they don't have a ward to see high ground). Section 2 of ChaQ's midlane guide covers it in extreme detail. The entire guide is filled with good stuff, but a lot of the numbers are out of date. I'll be referencing it for mechanics details throughout this entire section, so you should probably just read it. Blocking is the difference between winning and losing a lane, especially mid. The snowball of unfairness begins with the creep block.

In the first 5 minutes of the game, your cores are mostly going to be static. That is, of course, if you haven't drafted yourself into an unwinnable lane. Yes, they exist. An example would be the dreaded 5th pick Broodmother. Any core without wave clear like Invoker literally cannot win a lane vs her. Another example would be a strong aggro tri vs a weak safelaner like Spectre. If this happens to you, there's only one thing you can do. You get to play musical lanes! Musical lanes is fairly uncommon, and is more common at higher skill levels, but it's existence needs to be mentioned. You have to attempt to get to a lane that doesn't have the person you can't lane against in it. This is really hard, if you try to TP there they can just follow you with their own TP and then you're either stuck there with them, or forced to wander the map aimlessly. This deeply favors the team that did the outdrafting, expecially in uncoordinated pub games. The best way to successfully play musical lanes is to wait for whoever you're trying to avoid to show up in a lane, and then walk to another one. Preventative care is the best solution to the entire thing, with good drafting being key.

Moving on. So you aren't playing musical lanes and you have 3 cores who will be hitting creeps for the next 5 minutes. Good. So now we finally have to talk about creeps. We'll start with creep aggro. It cannot be overstated how important manipulating creep aggro is. Everything that was in the other 8 sections before this one has led up to this one bullet point. Abusing creep aggro is the #1 skill you need to master as a core player in order to up your game. Section 4 of ChaQ's guide covers it in incredibly deep detail The numerous examples of how manipulating creep aggro can give you advantages listed in ChaQ's guide are the bread and butter of PvP gaming. Players who know how to peel a creep away from the wave so you can CS it away from danger, how to mess up the enemy's CS by forcing creeps to hit you instead of the creep they were hitting, how to harass the enemy while standing direct under a creepwave without drawing aggro... these are the people who routinely get 80, 90, 100%+ of the lane gold. It will take a lot of games vs other players to master abusing creep aggro, because other players will be trying to use it against you as much as you're trying to use it against them.

This isn't the only thing you need to know about creeps though, you also need to know about creep equilibrium. I'll start with the safelane/offlane. Generally, you want to have the creeps as close to your tower as possible. This is because the entirety of the safelane is past the river. That's why it's the safelane, or if you're on the other end of it, the suicide lane. As an offlaner, you're forced to be in the enemy's territory at all times to get CS, unless you have some sort of spell that manipulates the creep's position like Earthshaker or Clockwerk, or you pull the very effective and fashionable "drag the 1st wave from behind their T1 to between your T1 and T2" technique that's the rage these days. Not only does keeping the lane close to your tower protect you, it increases your chances of catching the offlaner out of position and killing them. Midlane is another story. It's totally possible to play in the same way as the side lanes, but there's another philosophy that can only work mid due to the map's geography. This philosophy is "If you nuke the wave and the enemy doesn't, you get to harass the enemy hero for free and they can't harass you back without taking a billion damage from creeps". It's explained really well in this video about crushing mid with Blitz and Day9. The reason this only works mid is because it's pretty much impossible to zone a midlaner out of CSing range outside of lowering his health to a very low percentage, 25% or less, due to the fact that the two mid T1s are extremely close to each other. This isn't true in the sidelanes, because the amount of time it takes to walk from the creepwave to your tower if the creeps are hugging the safelane T1 is extremely long. You can be in danger of dying at 90% HP if you're deep in enemy territory. Therefore, doing this technique in the safelane is generally a worse choice then just zoning the offlaner in a traditional way, it's not that hard to get them out of both CSing range and XP leeching range at the same time. So now that I've covered what you want to do, it's time to talk about how to do it. If you don't hit the creeps at all, they'll pretty much stay in the same place every wave. Every time you hit a creep, you're pushing the wave. This means that every time you get a last hit, you have to hit one of your own creeps at least once in order to maintain this "static" state. You don't have to wait until your creep is almost dead to hit it, you can start denying your own creeps at 50% health. In fact, the higher the HP remaining when you last hit/deny a creep, the harder you'll push/pull the wave. If you're trying to pull the wave close to your tower, hit your own creeps as much as possible. The objective is to make it so the enemy ranged creep will do at least 50% damage to your ranged creep every wave so you can deny it. If you create a double ranged creep wave, you're fucked. The ranged creep does over 50% of the total damage to every wave, so having two will make the wave push uncontrollably. You can also pull your wave back by blocking your melee creeps and allowing the ranged one to run forward and die, or by using creep aggro tricks to change the target of the creeps from the melee ones to your ranged one, but this isn't always good because losing the bulk of your creep DPS means you'll have to put out your own DPS for the wave to not ram into your tower, and you'll probably be harassed for free a ton while you're doing it like in the "If you nuke the wave and the enemy doesn't, you get to harass the enemy hero for free and they can't harass you back without taking a billion damage from creeps" situation from above. You never want be CSing under your tower if at all possible. It's a really good way to lose CS to tower shots. If the enemy isn't around, you can kite the wave back and forth outside of tower range until the next one arrives. You can even use tower shots to soften up the wave, then pull it back outside of tower range to finish it off.

Sometimes, the creepwave being under the tower is unavoidable. They might have a duo offlane that you can't possibly match in wave clear, or maybe your support is pulling to deny XP or something. So how do you CS when this happens? Do you just spray and pray? Nope. Some smart person figured out there's a way to have a better chance at CSing under towers. It's called the 6 7 8 Rule (Warning: MATH). Essentially what it says is that if your base damage is in the 60s, you prehit the creep once, if it's in the 70s, you maybe prehit it, and if it's in the 80s, you don't prehit it. If you understand this rule, you can abuse it. For example, let's say you're an agi hero with a base damage of 72 and you're trying to CS under the tower. The 6 7 8 rule says you should maybe prehit the creep. However, if you drop your Wraith Band on the ground before you do it, you've lowered your base damage from 72 to 65, which puts you firmly in the "yes" category for prehitting. Note that these calculations are for undamaged creeps only, so half damaged waves kind of are spray and pray lol.

Knowing all this stuff about creeps is required in order to be able to actually fight the enemy who you're laning against. Trading is a crucial concept. The objective is to hit them as many times as possible without getting hit yourself. If the enemy hits you and you haven't either gotten a last hit, deny, or hit them back, you probably fucked up. You just gave them free money. Regen doesn't grow on trees, and going to the base takes time which is also money. If you manipulate the wave so you've gotten your last hit before the equivalent enemy creep dies, then you get to whack them while they CS. Gradually outplaying your opponent is how you set up solo kills, or force them to spend extra gold on regen or flat out leave the lane. The Purge teaches Day9 series has an extremely in depth guide to trading, but it's 80 minutes long. The entire series is excellent, but is over 12 hours long. It has to be, because if you aren't doing what I'm doing and just covering the bare base of what the subjects are, the game has immense depth. I mean, this guide itself is over 10k words lol.

It's finally time to talk about support play at the pre-5 minute mark. Support is my main role, the one I climbed to 5k with, and boy is this part of the conversation a doozy. The reason that I mostly talked about hitting creeps in the core section is because generally, supports are the catalysts who make the kills happen. Earlygame is when they're kings of the game, and outside of strong outplays or misplays, often good cores simply won't die in 1v1 matchups. No one is going to die in a DK versus Timbersaw 1v1. We finally get to talk about that infamous question, the one that has a million answers because it changes every game, the one that noobs can't even believe it's possible to figure out, the classic "How do I know what to do?". And yes, there is a right answer.

So all that stuff regarding creep aggro, lane equilibrium... forget it. None of that shit matters. I'm going to tell you want to do when you're a support. You Just Fucking Kill Them. Let's say you're a safelane Ogre Magi. You're in a lane with a Juggernaut and a Vengeful Spirit, and a solo offlane Pugna shows up to the first creep wave. What do you do? If you answered JFKT (TM), you're correct! The benefits of JFKT are many, as previously discussed in the gold section. You get gold, they lose gold, you get XP, you get to farm gold and XP that they don't because they're dead, you get an extra 150 gold for first blood, and you build your kill streak that gives you extra gold per kill once you've got 3 of them. All very good things. If you miss a full 4 creeps to pick up that kill, it's still worth it in the big picture of things. So what is it exactly that enables you to kill Pugna? Well, you've got 2 nuking stuns and your core has a nuke as well, on top of Pugna having no escape. These would be examples of power spikes. I've thrown around the phrase earlier in the guide as I hope that most people have a general idea as to what it means, hopefully it wasn't too obscure. It's a spike of power that enables you to accomplish something you couldn't without it, be it killing someone or taking an objective. In this case it's having 2 stuns and 3 nukes. Power spikes come from gold, XP, and teamfighting, and are the recipe that allows you to bake the cake of JFKT. "But DONGPOCALYPSE", you ask "It's one thing to have a power spike, but how do you know when to use it?". Well Billy, a lot of the time you can tell who is going to show up to what lane based on the draft. Most people understand that Invoker and Tinker go mid, Spectre goes safelane, Tidehunter goes offlane, etc. But here's the kicker. It's the answer to the question of how do you know what to do. It's the Holy Bible that will guide you to success in Dota 2. THE CLOCK WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO DO. It's just a raw, PvE fact that the first creep wave meets at 0:15 on the clock. Every wave that meets in the exact center of the map meets at X:15/X:45. So duh, the offlaner is going to be there for his scheduled murdering if he wants lane gold and XP, which pretty much all of them do. But this isn't exactly right. Think about it, when exactly did you get your Level 1 power spike? The answer of course is at -1:30 on the clock. The clock is trying to tell you that you should take a smoke, invade the enemy's rune and murder them before the horn blows. The fact that you have a strong level 1 fighting potential didn't happen when the creeps met, it happened at the start of the game. This is what I mean when I say that THE CLOCK WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO DO. It's just sitting there, screaming at you that you have a strong power spike and should get to JFKTing. But can you hear what the clock is trying to tell you? Killing Pugna at the rune AND when he shows up to the first wave is even better then killing him once. More is always more then less, of course. Listening to the clock requires knowing as many power spikes as possible, and the thing about that is that the hundreds of heroes and items combined together make it so there's roughly a quadrillion of them. Here's an example: let's say you don't smoke invade and just try for the 1st creep wave kill for whatever reason. But oh no, you stacked your stuns and fucked up in some way or another and now he's under his tower with 15% HP. Does this mean that you failed at your power spike? Not necessarily. Did you know that tower shots don't cancel salves? Jugg can dive the tower, spin Pugna while salving up and finish the kill and be perfectly fine. A salve is a power spike. That's 110 gold. A Faerie Fire is a power spike. A freaking iron branch is a power spike. The only hit point that matters is the last one. Your ability to decipher what the clock is saying is a result of how many power spikes you can see, on top of your ability to execute cleanly.

So all that's great and all, but the problem is that JFKT doesn't always so easily present itself. Maybe the Pugna started with boots and is Sanic fast. Maybe he's a tanky Tidehunter instead. Maybe he switched lanes with the safelaners and the people you thought were going to show up to the lane didn't. Who knows. How does the clock tell me what to do when this happens? Well, this is the part of the conversation where it gets... difficult...

No matter who you are, you can only do one thing at once (Unless you're support Naga. Or SD. Or you got an illusion rune. You know what I mean). 10k MMR players don't have a magic way to do more things then you can. My example of having 2 disables and 3 nukes in the same lane at the start of the game vs 1 hero with no escape was deliberately constructed so that even an amateur player would be able to deduce that there is a near 100% chance of success for that kill to go down. But what if it wasn't that easy? What would it take to lower that to 95%, 50%, 1% or 0%? Not every power spike is equal. There is always an opportunity cost for failing a kill; e.g. Your core missed the first 4 lane creeps while Pugna got away with 1% health (The only hit point that matters is the last one! I said that already but I'm saying it again!). Good players are capable of figuring out what their chance of success is before they even try. If a Lifestealer with a TP scroll sees you coming, you don't have a BKB piercing disable, and he's fast on his fingers, that's a 0% success chance play you just tried to make (Unless you're strong enough to simply click him to death in 1.5 seconds). Bad move. The cost of failure can be much higher then missing 4 CS, if he rages and his entire team comes out of the woods and murders you they've executed JFKT on you, lol. So here's the deal basically: As a support, expecially as a position 4 roamer who's primary purpose is to JFKT, you have to be able to figure out what the play with the highest success rate on the map is. Like I said, good players can't do more things then you can. The difference between them and you is that they can do this. This is why the roaming position 4 role is so goddamn hard. Your ability to kill is determined by the power spikes of 10 different heroes, in a game where there are quadrillions of possible hero combinations. You have to mentally crunch the numbers and go to the lane that has a 70% chance over the one that has a 65% chance. Easier said then done. But here's the thing: the fact that THE CLOCK TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO hasn't changed. When I say that the clock tells you what to do, what I really mean is that there are PvE power spike timings that can be understood before the game even starts. The clock tells you when these power spikes are. Here's an example: A hero that is getting solo XP will generally hit level 3 around ~2 minutes in the game, depending on how good their laning is going. It's way better to show up to that lane exactly at that time rather then 30 seconds too early or too late. Another example would be the duration of observer wards. Wards last 6 minutes, that's never going to change. If the enemy plants a ward at 0:00, it'll go away at 6:00. If you rotate at this exact time, you won't be spotted (or just use a smoke lol). Runes, Items, Level Ups... There are so many things the clock will tell you. Being a good listener is the key to winning all 3 lanes by yourself as a roaming support. Now here's where it gets fucked: what if I told you that not all gold is created equal, and that some gold is worth more... gold then other gold? This isn't that foreign when you think about it. When AM gets 4k gold to complete his battlefury, his gold acquisition abilities increase exponentially. Therefore, killing him and slowing down this exponential growth is actually worth a lot more money then the amount you receive from it. It works in the opposite way too, killing an offlane Centaur 3 times won't stop him from being able to globally give his team max move speed by hitting R. Let's say that you've listened to the clock, and you're able to fairly accurately assess your chances of successfully getting a kill. Is it better to spend your time on a gank that has a 75% chance to kill Centaur, or one that has a 25% chance to kill AM? What if on top of this, you have a 85% chance of killing the courier and a 50% of killing the midlane Puck. What if on top of all this, your own team has heroes that greatly benefit from exponential farm acceleration. What if Alchemist would be part of the Puck kill? See how complicated this all just got? What should you do? Well, there's a right answer to this too, and guess what, it depends on listening to the clock. It all falls back to all the mumbo jumbo about drafting and win conditions I spent so much time going on about before. I had to talk about that stuff because it's completely relevant to how you should play the laning phase. If the enemy is running 4 earlygame heroes and Meepo, and you have a good scaling lategame draft, executing power spikes on Meepo that have a 20% chance of working are a lot better then they normally would be. If they work out and you cripple their main win condition, you've pretty much won the game right then and there outside of throwing. It's just a fact that "The Thing That Meepo Does" is get to level 25 faster then anyone else in the game and pushes to end with aegis / BoTs + buyback at 20-25~ minutes into the game. That's never going to change. So in essence, sometimes attempting a gank that has a lower chance of succeeding is better, depending on the draft. That's what the clock is trying to tell you here.

So now it's time to talk about babysitting supports, aka position 5. Good news though, all the hard stuff I just went through regarding listening to the clock, power spikes, JFKT, etc... is generally a lot simpler for position 5. All the same stuff applies, but the very nature of babysitting duties means that you don't have to crunch the numbers for all 3 lanes, just the safelane that you're in. Sometimes, power spikes just simply don't exist where you are. You're a Rubick babysitting an AM versus a LC. LC is never going to die, ever. When you have zero power spikes, all you can do is just deny as much XP to the offlaner as possible, using the pulls described in the support section earlier. You get the bounties, you replace wards, you have a chill time. If it's a weaker offlaner that you have a realistic chance of actually killing like Pugna or something you have to figure out if your XX% chance of killing them is better then pulling, or taking bounty runes, or whatever. Way easier then doing it across 3 lanes, for sure. One thing to note is that simply trading all your regen with the offlaner is often a good plan, especially if you're a support who hits like a truck like Shadow Shaman or Treant Protector. Even if you trade evenly, your core will still have all their regen and the enemy will have none. This is better then pulling because pulling only denies one wave, making them run out of HP denies many waves. Pulling is the secondary option; Rubick will never out trade LC, so a pulling you will go. A big difference between position 4 and 5 is that position 5 often only rotates to save one of the cores in other lanes from dying. If your position 4 starts a kill on the enemy safelane at the exact same time their position 4 starts one on your mid, you're the only hero on the map available who can respond. Make sure your TP is always on deck and that you always have enough mana to cast your disable at least once. You don't have to stay glued to your safelaner though, especially if you get a few kills on the offlaner and have gotten strong enough to be fine on their own. Depends on the draft obviously. You can stack, or replace wards, or join your position 4, or whatever.

So that's pretty much the first 5 minutes of the laning phase. The next 5 are pretty much the same, but with one major difference: cores will potentially rotate now. Note that I didn't say midlane, I said cores. Any core from any lane can potentially go to another one. Figuring out whether it's a good idea or not is pretty much identical to my giant speel about how to figure out what to do as position 4, but with a few key differences. The first major thing to note is that if a core leaves a lane from which they are the only hero in it, they're creating a major inefficiency on the map. You're sending 1/3rd of the gold and XP available into the toilet. This additional cost is a really big deal, it means that failing at a rotation as a core is extra bad. This has a few implications. For one, you only want to offensively rotate if you know you have a really high chance of getting something out of it. You're a level 7 midlane Puck with a smoke and a haste rune rotating top to kill AM at 7 minutes into the game, sure go nuts. If you're a DK instead, you should probably stay home. The inefficiency of leaving a lane open can actually become a benefit for your team if you play it right, if you know that Puck is going to pick up that kill for sure and doesn't need help to get it, you can park a support in that empty lane to pick up some resources. This is actually a critical way in which position 5 heroes get their money, and often more importantly, hit their level 6 power spike.

(Part 3/3 here)

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DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!) (1/3)

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 12:46 PM PST

DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!)

Table of Contents:

  1. Prologue - Why I wrote this guide and how to use it
  2. Who am I?
  3. Step Zero: Having the mindset of a champion
  4. Understanding MMR
  5. Drafting, Farm Priority, Hero Roles and Win Conditions
  6. Understanding Gold and Items
  7. Playing Cores
  8. Playing Supports
  9. Communication
  10. Laning
  11. The Midgame
  12. The Lategame and Ending the game
  13. The Ultra-Lategame
  14. Final Thoughts

0. Prologue - Why I wrote this guide and how to use it

Dota is hard. Really hard. On my own personal journey to improve, I sought after resources that could answer complicated questions that I had. What exactly is it that separates good and bad Dota players? What do you need to know and do in order to improve? How can I, as 1/5th of a team, consistently cause my team to win, even as a position 5 support? I found the answers I sought, scattered throughout various videos, guides, and reddit posts. But one thing bothers me - now that I understand the game much better, it's apparent to me that there isn't a solidarity resource that explains all these things. It's a cryptic web of folklore, nestled between tons of garbage. This is why I wrote this guide. It's an attempt to explain what exactly it takes to be good at the game, all in one package.

With that said, there are some really important things I need to point out. This guide doesn't contain the sum of human knowledge about Dota. That's impossible. Really specific things like what all 115 heroes do and how to skill/build them, what every item does, etc... that's not here. It has more of a "teach a man to fish" approach. Also, some portions of the guide will be more or less important to different people of different skill levels. If I put it in here, it's important, but at the same time some things are more important than others for different people. At any point you could ask yourself, "What's the single most important thing I need to know, that I don't know right now, in order to be better?" If you're a 1k player, the section about the basics of playing core or support are almost certainly more relevent to you then the section about how to draft. For 4k players, it could be the opposite. One final thing: It'll take you a long time to read this if you go down the rabbit hole of following every single link in it. You don't have to fully read any esoteric articles about math or watch hour long YouTube videos if you don't want to, they're just there to show my sources. Generally when I link stuff like that I paraphrase the good stuff, and I note when you should actually read the whole thing.

1. Who Am I?

I'm an average 5k player who's been in love with eSports for over 10 years. From a beginning of watching Korean Brood War live at 4 AM, to fighting games, to, Dota, I just think that eSports are the best and most interesting thing on earth. The goal of this guide is for it to have a foundation based on facts, numbers, and statistics, but not to overlook the human factor. If I do it right, then it won't matter who I am, because the words in this guide will ring true no matter who says them.

2. Step Zero: Having the mindset of a champion

Every day all around the world, hundreds of thousands of people click the find match button. From millionaire TI winners, to the worst 1 MMR player, they're all doing the exact same thing. Clearly there is a difference between the two, and the entire point of this guide is to help you move further away from the latter and closer to the former. However, the very first thing that needs to be said is that there's something you can do, no, something you must do before you click find match. You must have the mindset of a champion, and not that of a loser. It's absolutely free to do this, and is 100% essential to success. So what does this mean exactly? Well essentially, you need to have a mindset of growth, and you need to check your ego at the door. A loser blames his team when he loses. A champion realizes that even if his team didn't exactly carry their weight, that he didn't exactly play 100% perfectly and could have done better. A loser flames his team when they make mistakes and creates a negative environment. A champion knows that you can only change the future, not the past and that people play worse when they're flamed. A loser gives up when something goes wrong and AFKs in the well. A champion never gives up until the ancient explodes. If you choose to be a champion and not a loser, you will actually gain MMR from it. This is because the enemy team has 5 other people, whereas yours only has 4. This isn't some sort of positive mental attitude speech, it's actually factually true. If you never rage and never abandon a game, it is statistically likely over a long enough period of time that the enemy will give you a free +25 more often then your team will give them - 25, because 5 is bigger then 4. This is on top of the personal growth you'll experience from focusing on only the things you can change, like your own actions, and ignoring the things you can't change. If you want MMR, you want to be a champion. It's free. And it gives you MMR. You want free MMR, right? Be a champion.

3. Understanding MMR

So if I'm going to write thousands of words about MMR it'd be silly to fail to talk about what MMR actually is. MMR in Dota is a based on chess's Elo rating system, which in essence is a mathematical formula which predicts which player will most likely win a game based on their past performances, the past performances of their opponent, and an uncertainty factor. The stronger your past performances are and the weaker your opponents are, the lower the uncertainty factor is. This is why you sometimes gain +28 MMR or only lose -23, because the more certain the game is that you should win or lose, the more or less of a gain in points you receive if the teams are less balanced. Purge's 4 part series explaining what MMR is, is an excellent watch if you've got an hour to get through it. I'll be paraphrasing the main points from it in this section. In fact, the "never abandon games and you'll get free MMR from it" from the previous section was taken from it already, so thanks Purge.

No one knows the exact formula Dota uses for MMR, it's hidden to prevent abuse. This doesn't mean that conclusions can't be drawn from the data we do have on it. For example, people have figured out that A team that has an average MMR of 83.3 higher then their opponents has a 60% chance to win compared to the 50% chance of equal teams (This is a source purge uses in his MMR video series). This means that every time you win 3 games of Dota, the game gets roughly 10% harder. Keep in mind that this applies to 99% of players, and that players with 6k+ MMR are statistical outliers. We know they are outliers because we know the statistical breakdown of MMR percentiles, (pre reset anyway) and that they very closely followed the official distribution that Valve released in a blog post 4 years ago. The 50th percentile being 2250 matches up, but there's differentiation at the 90th percentile of 3200 official / 3900 gathered, and at the 99th percentile of 4100/5000. Whether or not the 90th and 99th percentiles are closer to the measured values or valve's released values is anyone's guess at this point. A lot of players used to hit milestones of 3k / 4k / 5k and proceed to never play ranked ever again, so maybe the reset lowered the higher percentiles; this is just conjecture it's not particularly important. The important thing is that hitting the milestones of 4k or 5k is actually a significant accomplishment, despite only being half of Reddit's MMR. Also, anyone who is 6k+ is basically the same, statistically speaking.

Anyone who says MMR is just a number is technically correct in that it is indeed a numerical value, but in a much broader and more accurate sense they are completely wrong. It is intellectually dishonest to pretend that MMR is just a fleeting, wild guesstimate that has no real ability to measure your skill, and I can prove it. MMR essentially is your "score" that predicts how good you are at certain specific key aspects that are needed to be successful. These things are: being efficient (playing the game at a high speed) and being consistent (consistently good obviously, aka having a positive net impact on the game's outcome the majority of the time). Your strength in regards to these factors determines your MMR. There are four permutations of people that arise from this. There are poeple that get 200 GPM every game and have no idea what to do to win. These are your sub 1k players. There are people who can lane well, they get 700 GPM but can't end the game via throwing or not pushing fast enough or being bad at team fighting or some other issue. On the opposite side of them are people that suck at laning and positioning but at the same time are very wise, they have a colossal repertoire of game knowledge and a general idea as to what the next thing that has to happen in the game needs to be in order to be successful. These two groups are your 2k-4k crowd, and there as many intertwined balances of the two as there are players. Finally there are your players who will excel at both. These are your 4k to 5k+ crowd, and the people that you want to be.

This post is one of my favourite posts of all time. It's about the quantifiable, statistical, measured differences between sub 2k players and 5k players, including how much gold and XP they get, how often they die, and how much tower damage they do (aka how fast they push). The numbers are slightly outdated for the current 7.07 patch, but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't change the overall message of the post, which is that high MMR players are playing the game at an entirely different speed then everyone else. I highly recommend everyone read it in its entirety. As the post states, the "trench" actually is a core failure to play the game efficiently, and only through rectifying your own slow and suboptimal play can you escape it.

4. Drafting, Farm Priority, Hero Roles, and Win Conditions

Dota is like golf. The objective of the game is to play as little of it as possible.

The way in which you do this is by making the game as unfair as possible. You want to be a level 25 Medusa with 6 divine rapiers one shotting a level 1 Crystal Maiden. Old man story time: When I first started playing Starcraft in 1998, a common lobby name when playing online was the "nr20", or "no rushing for 20 minutes". This way, you had time to build up a colossal army of super cool ultra powerful units and have gigantic epic battles with them without the threat of dying early. The problem with that is that it turns out that building a colossal amount of cheap units and just going over and murdering your enemy is highly effective (kekekeke zerg rush _). Dota is the same way. Time is money, and if you haven't ended the game when you have the power to you're giving your enemy free time aka free money (more on this in the gold section later). You want to draft unfair heroes and put them in unfair lane matchups so you can get an unfair amount of gold and XP so you can hit unfair power spikes which lets you get unfair kills which transition into unfair 5v4 pushes that get you unfair objectives that give you an unfair amount of map control and extra gold which further amplifies your unfair earlygame advantage which allows you to take an unfair Roshan timing which allows you to do an unfair highground push timing which transitions into mega creeps which are specifically designed to be unfair, which makes you win the game. Did I say the word unfair enough? Drafting is really important. Unranked all pick used to have the format of "You have 60 seconds total and both teams pick all 5 heroes at the same time". This seems like it might be alright for a more casual atmosphere where everyone just wants to pick a hero and play it, but people figured out that the best strategy in this mode was to simply wait until everyone else had already picked before picking your hero, trying to get the best counterpick or least-countered hero possible. You would even wait until time ran out and just accept the starting gold penalty to get a better pick. The 25 gold tax you would pay was a pittance compared to how much you would gain from having the right hero. Every game would have 10 people just sitting there losing penalty gold, waiting until the last possible moment before they were forced to random to pick. This is why it was replaced with the standard pick order.

So now that it's been firmly established that drafting is important, we finally get to talk about how to do it. This segues into the rest of the topics of this segment, which as the title states are farm priority, hero roles and win conditions. Most people are probably familiar with the 1-5 farm priority system, where each hero on the team is assigned a number from 1 to 5 where 1 means you get the most gold and 5 means you get the least. As a general rule, 1 is your safelane, 2 is your mid, 3 is your offlane, 4 is your roaming support and 5 is your safelaner support. This isn't set in stone though. For example, mids like Meepo and Alch are your pos1 by default due to their extreme gold acquisition abilities. And your 4 doesn't have to roam, he can be a 2nd safelane support, a 2nd offlane core or the dreaded jungler. Although farm priority is indicative of some hero roles, such as pos1 and 2 being carries and Pos5 being support, it isn't fully indicative of all of them. Roles that can be accomplished by heroes of any farm priority include initiation, disabling enemies, pushing, doing damage, nuking, escaping, and ganking. There are also more esoteric roles, such as giving flying vision, giving map vision, controlling the tempo of the game, and ratting/split pushing. There are some things that every draft needs, like stuns, but other things you'll only get some of the time. The objective of drafting is to pick 5 heroes that compliment each other and allow you to reach the final point of this section, your win condition!

A win condition is pretty self explanatory, it's the condition that you have to meet to win the game. Shocking, I know. A draft's win condition is dependent on a few things. These are hitting a power spike, getting Roshan, and pushing high ground. Most people understand the concept of power spikes, the most basic ones being when you first get your ultimate or whatnot. A power spike in the context of a win condition is one that is large enough to enable you to push high ground and destroy barracks. A good example is the classic Drow Ranger draft. Drow's precision aura globally increases the damage of every ranged hero on your team by 10%/18%/26%/34% of Drow's agility. This bonus not only helps ranged heroes significantly during the laning phase, but it gives your team a colossal midgame power spike if Drow has a good laning phase. This allows your team to group up, deathball, kill Rosh quickly and begin your high ground siege as early as 15-20 minutes into the game. A note on Rosh: 99.5% of all win conditions involve having the aegis of the immortal. This is because aegis of the immoral is innately unfair, turns out that 6>5, who knew. The thing about doing this kind of draft however, is that you're putting yourself "on the clock". This means that you have a time limit in which you need to inflict critical damage onto the enemy (usually at least 2 lanes of rax is the minimum requirements, because 2 auto-pushing lanes is a huge handicap but 1 can be reasonably dealt with), or else they'll eventually get too powerful to deal with if they have a standard core like Juggernaut, who scales a lot better in the lategame then Drow. The opposite of this, putting yourself off the clock, is a concept that most people are familiar with. We've all seen an Anti-Mage who does nothing for 30 minutes but then shows up out of nowhere and gets a rampage. The tradeoff for drafting a draft that's off the clock is that heroes that are really strong lategame are usually really weak during the laning phase, and this kinda goes against the "make the game as unfair as possible" mantra. However, if you can successfully survive when you're weak and farm up, the reward is that you usually get some sort of obscene power for your trouble, so in a way you are making the game as unfair as possible. Putting yourself on the clock is usually the only way to beat opponents who are much much better than you, because their ability to be efficient will eventually just overcome you if they have enough time to use it. Putting yourself off the clock is usually way stronger at lower MMRs, because once again, being low MMR means you are inefficient, so in general no one will be good enough to end the game at 20 minutes. A general rule for sub 2k is "the team with the most cores will win".

It's also possible to make a draft that has a secondary backup win condition. For instance, in my Drow draft example, if you pick a mid Medusa to go with it, that gives you a lot of late game power and makes the draft less "all-in", but the tradeoff is that you dont get to pick someone like a Viper or someone else that would add to your midgame power spike. Another thing that can also happen in drafts is that heroes' farm priority can be raised or lowered depending on what the enemy picks. For example, let's say that you 4th pick a Juggernaut to be your Position 1. The enemy then 4th picks Medusa. In response, you can demote your Jugg to position 2 and pick a safelane Anti-mage to counterpick the Medusa. This is much more common in professional games and high MMR games, you'll probably never see it in your 2k games but it's worth noting that it's an option.

Going into specific drafts isn't something I'll be doing. For one, there are quadrillions of possible drafts. That's what makes the game interesting. Secondly, the metagame changes with each patch, so drafts change as well. Thirdly, it's just way too much to explain the strengths, weaknesses and power spikes of 115 heroes in a guide that is already turning out to be extremely long. (Turns out you have to say a lot of things if you want to explain every aspect of how to git gud). In general I will say watching pro games generally gives a lot of insight as to what's strong in the current patch. As a final note, it's much more important to be proficient on the hero you're playing then it is to pick a hero that you know would be a good counterpick and/or isn't countered by the enemy. Sure, Slark is pretty good at laning vs Batrider due to his ability to purge napalm stacks, but if instead of living on the edge of life and death in the midgame and abusing Shadow Dance you repeatedly explode and die, you should probably pick a comfort hero instead.

5. Understanding Gold and Items

"Steel wins battles, gold wins wars" - Dragon Knight

Just like in real life, having more money gives you an unfair advantage. The general benchmark for having a insurmountable advantage in a straight up 5v5 fight if your drafts are about "even" is having a 10k gold lead. Every last hit counts, and there's no such thing as having "enough" gold (unless the enemy's ancient is destroyed/is capable of being destroyed). More is always more then less. There is always something that you can buy that will make you stronger, even beyond your 6 item slots. You can buy refresher to make a CD dependent hero like CK stay relevent, or to refresh your BKB and active items in the lategame (Nothing like a 10 second BKB, 2 satanics and 2 abyssals at 60 minutes!). You can buy an item with better stats than BKB to swap out once you've used the active. You can buy BoTs 2, or you can replace your boots altogether on some heroes. You can buy two rapiers, and then buy 2 more to put in your stash in case you lose them. You can have a Necro 3 for ratting and push power. You can buy your entire team moon shard. The list goes on and on.

It doesn't actually take all that much gold to be strong enough to destroy towers quickly. Most cores with a net worth of 10k gold (500 GPM over 20 minutes) can destroy a tower by themselves in 15 seconds, or even faster if they are a hero that specializes in pushing like TA or Clinkz. That's just for 1 hero, if you've got 2 or 3 cores with decent items and you're grouped up, towers can melt extremely quickly. That's if there isn't anyone in the way, obviously. The extra power being 6 slotted gives you is to deal with those pesky jerks that tend to get between you and right clicking the ancient. As a general rule, having 800+ GPM is enough to solve every problem that exists in the game. This isn't always true though, especially if you're ricing the jungle while your team is getting obliterated. Being on a killing spree gives you bonus gold for each kill you get, as well as dying while on one. If your godlike mid dies to the enemy safelane, who then proceeds to go godlike himself, you've got a situation on your hands.

The more gold something costs in Dota, the less cost efficient it generally is. A basic example is comparing an Iron Branch to an Ultimate Orb. Ultimate Orb is exactly 10x better then branch, (+10 all stats compared to +1 all stats), but it's 43 times the cost (2150g vs 50g). +43 to all stats for that cost would be absurd, Skadi gives +25 to all stats and it costs 5500g. The item slot system obviously is the limiting factor, otherwise everyone would just buy as many branches as possible. In exchange for their inefficient cost, expensive items often allow you to do something you couldn't before. Magic immunity, a magic immunity piercing disable, colossal critical hit damage, colossal healing ability, illusion generation... all of these are are granted from the inefficiency tax (in the case of items with a recipe it's a literal tax).

Money is time and time is money. It's not just a cliché saying, it's factually true. GPM itself is a measure of the rate from which time is converted into money. Understanding this lets you understand various things about the game. For example, when deciding how to itemize, it can be helpful to think of items in their time cost as opposed to their gold cost. It's not too hard to figure out your GPM in game, all you have to do is look at how much gold you made in the last 60 seconds. If you're making 300 GPM a blink will cost you ~7 minutes of time, but doubling your GPM to 600 makes that same blink cost only 3.5 minutes, half of that. An item's time cost and your GPM are inversely proportional. Another important point is that items are defined by the time at which you obtain them at. A 50 minute mek won't be that impactful, but an 8 minute mek can be a game-winning tool. If it's 22 minutes into the game and you know you won't get your blink until minute 29 (if nothing goes wrong), you might want to buy something that costs less then 7 minutes of time instead. Remember that gold you haven't spent is identical to gold you don't have; it has the exact same effect. In a similar train of thought, all items you do have have the exact same thing as the gold you haven't spent when you're dead: nothing. This is why itemizing defensively is extremely important, on top of spending your gold on value items. If you lose your kill streak, you not only lose your bonus gold from getting kills, you give a gold injection to the enemy. Remember that your net worth/DPS when you're dead is zero. Speaking of itemization, there are some items that have a "time limit". As in, if you don't have this item at a certain time, you're going to have a bad time. If you're Ursa, it's 45 minutes into the game and you don't have a BKB, you're going to be kited into oblivion and not be able to do anything. So quiz time: it's 30 minutes into the game, you're making 500 GPM and you're thinking of picking up a basher before your BKB. How long will this delay your BKB? Well, a BKB costs 3975/500 = ~8 minutes, and a basher costs 2700/600 = ~6 minutes of time, so your 38 minute BKB just because a 42 minute one. You should probably skip it so you can actually hit people without being locked down. As time goes on and the game slogs through the midgame and the lategame, the responsibility to convert your net worth into damage to the enemy is directly proportional to how much gold you have. If you itemize poorly or die without buyback, your poor choices can be game losing.

By using the principle of thinking about items in terms of time, you can figure out what to buy. As with drafting, specific itemization on a per hero basis is too complicated to cover in full here. However, I can talk about the items in a generalized way. Items are divided into 4 tiers, just like towers. Keep in mind this is a rough outline and there is some overlap at the edges.

Tier 1: 0-1k gold

Here are your regen items and highly efficient stat items. These are the items you need to master in order to improve. Buying the right tier 1 items at the right time will allow you to exponentially increase your power and income.

Examples include Tango, Salve, Boots of Speed, Ring of Aquila, Soul Ring, Urn of Shadows, Magic Wand and Infused Raindrop.

Tier 2: 1k - 3k gold

Here is where a lot of utility items are that can offer huge power spikes when picked up at early timings. Everyone knows the power of a Blink or Mek reveal. A notable T2 item is Armlet, on heroes that can negate the downside like Naix it gives you a T4 item's power at a T2 item's cost. Blade mail has a similar power level on heroes with the right kit for it.

Examples include Blink Dagger, Mekanism, Force Staff, Shadow Blade, and the aforementioned Armlet and Blade Mail

Tier 3: 3k - 4.5k gold

This is where you'll find a lot of items that have good buildups from T1 and T2 items. As with armlet, there are T3 items with T4 power levels at early timings, like Desolator or SnY. There are also a lot of "utility" items here, items that are powerful and useful, but you wouldn't want taking up a slot on a right clicking core in the late game most of the time.

Examples include Pipe of Insight, Lotus Orb, Crimson Guard, and the aforementioned Desolator and Sange & Yasha

Tier 4: 4.5k+ gold

These are your game breaking, game winning, game changing lategame items. Even just one of these items can turn a lost game into a won one. Sometimes rushing one of these can accelerate your power, but most of the time gradually building value items is the way to go

Examples include Radiance, Butterfly, Linkens, Abyssal Blade and of course, Divine Rapier.

A small section of itemization I will talk about is starting gold. You have 625 gold to spend. As a general rule, you should spend as much of your starting gold as possible, the gold you haven't spent is gold you don't have concept still applies. Mid players are the most static, most ranged mids just raise their base damage as much as possible with null/wraith and branches + pooled tangos. Melee mids are slightly different with Stout being needed and QB being an option. A general rule is that if you're a melee core, you HAVE to start with stout shield. It's impossible to trade efficiently with ranged heroes without it because you'll get hit by creeps and they won't and you'll take a billion damage. This is literally why the item exists. Supports are pretty static as well, with Tango/courier/x2 obs/x1 sent being pretty standard. Sentries are mandatory every game, dewarding is really good. Pos5 takes the burden of support items so the pos4 can get either boots or OoV to start the game, so they can effectively do their job. They get tango and whatever else is needed, be it clarities, smokes, or more sentries. Pos3 varies widely based on the hero, you can either start boots like pos4 to have the mobility advantage and do zany 1st wave pulls, or start with 2 or even 3 sets of regen to sustain in the lane. Pos1 generally has to start Tango+Salve to sustain because mid gets courier priority, with the rest being highly hero dependent. Faerie Fire is an extremely notable item, it's 75 gold for 2 base damage (twice as good as Iron Branch) and can be the difference between feeding first blood and getting it yourself. Although some roles and heroes are more static then others, it's really important to note that you should never just blindly follow a guide to itemize, both with your starting 625 or as the game goes on. For example if the enemy has a mid Zeus, it's probably worth it to buy a magic stick and some other stuff instead of your null talisman for those sweet stick charges.

Efficiently converting your time into the most power possible is a critical aspect of winning the game. You might even call it... being efficient. If it feels like you're reading the same thing over and over again, it's because it's so important it needs to be repeated. Now it's time to leave the theorycrafting behind and talk about being efficient in the actual game.

6. Playing Cores

So you want to play a core. You've changed your steam name to Liquid.Miracle and practiced your Invoker level 25 refresher orb combos in demo mode for hours on end. You're ready to go! Not so fast there champ. Remember, we want the game to be as unfair as it can be as early as possible. The way this is accomplished is by getting as much gold as possible during the first 10 minutes of the game. 80% of the game is decided in the first 10 minutes, the rest is simply not throwing and executing cleanly. This is because Dota is a game of exponentials. A small amount of gold can snowball into a large amount of power. Getting 1 CS can give you enough gold to get your boots which lets you get first blood which lets you crush the lane which lets you get your ult fast which lets you get another kill which lets you buy a farm acceleration item like blink or battlefury which lets you get your level 2 ult fast which lets you get another kill which gives you kill streak bonus gold which lets you get an objective etcetcetc, it's simply the mechanism in which my "unfair" speech is executed.

Your job as a core is actually relatively simple compared to supports in the earlygame, all you have to do is collect currency and not die. We'll talk about things like playing against other players and killing them in the laning section to come, but for now we're simply going to talk about the PvE aspect of it. It's incredibly simple: How much gold can you get in the first 10 minutes of the game? That's literally the only thing that matters. A world champion like Miracle gets 76% of the lane gold on AVERAGE, while frequently getting over 100%. Keep in mind this isn't your 2k pubs, this is versus the best players in the world. You can look up your first 10 minutes efficiently in any game on [Opendota](opendota.com) under the laning tab. A good place to start is by opening up a lobby and seeing how many CS you can get versus nothing. The only thing you have to do to set it up is turn on cheats and give yourself 200 gold so you can have a courier, you don't have do it without buying items or anything silly. Simply pick your hero, play like you normally world and see how you do. If you only get 60 CS, that means you're losing over 25% of the 82 lane CS to literally nothing. You're losing more money to nothing then Miracle does to the world's best players. That's bad. It shouldn't be hard to get close to all of the lane gold even as Crystal Maiden. A big part of this is spending the gold you get on efficient earlygame items. Items like quelling blade, ring of aquila and phase boots are very good at raising your base damage at an extremely efficient cost. Having a high base damage makes last hitting much, much easier. In terms of the mechanics of actually getting a CS, the first thing is that you want to be as close to the creep as possible, even on ranged cores. Use the attack of the ranged creep as a metronome. Sometimes you'll hit the creep right after the ranged creep hits so you'll get it before the creep dies to melee creeps, other times you'll hit right before the ranged attack hits, so the melee creeps have as much time as possible to whittle it down to death range. If you have auto attack on like me, you can spam the stop key (default S) to repeatedly cancel your autoattack before the time is right . The catapult wave has its own rules, it's like having two metronomes, with one being on its own really long rhythm that does a colossal burst of damage. It's really easy to lose CS to a catapult blast, generally you don't want to to be involved in the equation if you can avoid it. There's also an entire aspect of managing the creepwave so you don't get a buildup of ranged creeps, I cover this in the "laning" section.

Once you can reliably get 95%+ of the lane gold (78/82 cs), it's time to work on supplementing that income with neutral creeps while laning. This section is mainly applicable to safelane and mid cores, if you can get to 100% of the lane gold as a suicide laner, well you're doing something extremely right. We'll start with this video by TI winner Aui2000 about farming efficiency in a free farm lane. An important note before you watch it is that the video is dated and the pull is no longer identical to the one in the video, you have to make the connection further away from the tower for it to work. This is the optimal technique to maximize the amount of gold extracted from the lane. Essentially, you use your lane creeps to tank the hard camp as you clear it between waves. This is a lot easier and faster on cores with wave clear like the example morphing, but isn't impossible for non wave clear cores. For midlane however, having wave clearing abilities is the only way to achieve over 100% of the lane gold due to your lack of a pull camp. The only way to get to runes and/or jungle camps without losing lane gold is to nuke the wave, finish whatever it is you're doing and get back to the lane before the enemy creeps eat your gold. This is highly hero dependent. A hero like Meepo, Terrorblade or Naga can jungle and lane at the same time. Some heroes actually hit timings where they will get more income from the jungle over the lane before the laning phase even ends. A hero like Alchemist gets a flat amount of bonus gold per creep kill, so once he gets some XP to level it up and clear camps fast, killing jungle creeps will net him more gold overall. There's only 4 creeps per wave, but a couple stacked camps have a lot more then 4 creeps. Also, there are heroes that excel at clearing stacks of ancients early in the game, like Sven or TA. Clearing a quad ancient stack at minute 9 is a huge gold boost. It's possible to put up huge numbers like 120 or 130%+ of the first 10 minutes lane gold if you're good enough.

7. Playing Supports

Supports are trickier to explain than cores, but the general principle behind the game remains the same. It's still a game of exponential growth where the first 10 minutes is 80% of the work. The difference is that supports are at their peak strength during this time, with the roaming position 4 support being the most important and impactful role in high level play. Your success at playing support can be measured in the lane efficiency of your cores, and in the lack of lane efficiency of the enemy cores.

As I mentioned during the drafting section there is a lot more variation in what supports do on a game to game basis. Generally position 4 is synonymous with 'roamer' and position 5 is synonymous with "lane babysitter" but it doesn't have to be that way. You can turn your pos4 into a 2nd babysitter or your Pos5 into a 2nd roamer in your draft, with the likelihood of it being good depending on what heroes your core players pick. For the sake of simplicity any references to pos4 here will mean roamer, and Pos5 babysitter. I have to touch on an important point that I've been glossing over up until this point, which is that the position 5 role doesn't really function the way it should at a low enough MMR (somewhere between 0 and 1.5k, don't ask me exactly where). This is because low MMR cores would miss 50% of CS against a block of swiss cheese. You can zone the enemy offlaner and babysit your AM all you want, but the game is probably going to be 55 minutes long unless you play more like a position 4 and just murder everyone. You really only have two choices if you're playing support in this type of game. You can play position 4, or, you can farm your butt off, playing as greedily as possible to prepare for the inevitable late game nightmare that is to come. Being a roamer is probably objectively better.

(Part 2/3 here)

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DONGPOCALYPSE's ultimate guide to becoming a 5k+ player, aka how to escape the (non-existent) trench (as any role!) (3/3)

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 12:54 PM PST

(Part 2/3 here)

The second implication is that even if you do get something out of it, sometimes it will still be a net loss. You took your offlane Void to the safelane and killed a Tidehunter, good for you. Meanwhile the enemy safelane is freefarming and all the lane gold and XP is evaporating. But you got that 250 gold kill! Not good. Often times, rotating a core will only be worth it if the rotation both gets a kill and prevents the enemy from getting a kill on one of your cores at the same time. If Tide is diving your T1 with Bane to kill your Luna and you stop her from dying and get a double, that's excellent. Luna didn't lose gold and she can farm the entire time she would have been dead, you should know how it goes by this point. The big kicker about rotating cores is that outside of killing high value targets or saving your team, you want to be able to transition your kill into an objective, aka a T1 tower. The ideal sequence of events that you want to happen in every single Dota game ever is this: You hit a power spike that changes the enemy's status from being in position to out of position > you use said power spike to kill them > you utilize the 5v4 "Power Play" you've created to take an objective. This is the true power of Just Fucking Kill Them, if you hit a 8 minute Enigma blink dagger power spike and get a 5 man black hole and kill them all, there won't be anyone in the way to stop you from hitting their buildings, aka the thing you need to do to win the game. The thing is though, it doesn't take all 5 heroes being dead to enable you to get 1 tower. Just 1 is often enough. There's a thing you can do where you take all 5 of your heroes and you stand on top of the tower you're trying to kill. You don't have your TP standing by in case a fight breaks out, you show up and you stand there. What this does is it shuts down the ability of the enemy to group and defend. Every TP to a tower takes extra time to complete, specifically to prevent the ability of summoning 5 heroes somewhere at once. If you're controlling the space that the tower exists in, it's really hard to muster a legitimate defense for it. A lot of the time what will happen if they try the defense is something that I've personally dubbed the "Shitty Chinese Kung-Fu Movie". One guy will go in and explode, then the next guy does the same, and so on. It's not until people get more powerful and you have 3 heroes in the game with blinks and other stuff does it become easier to stop this tactic. Securing towers controls the map, gives your entire team gold and is the thing you need to do to win the game, so you should probably do it if you have the chance.

10. The Midgame

Whew, we made it through the laning section. Don't worry, that's the hardest part of the entire game. 80% of the work towards winning the game is in that crucial 10 minutes, like I said before. But it isn't the end all be all. You have to convert your earlygame success into crushing the midgame. How do you do that? Let's find out.

When you reach the midgame, your team's power spikes will generally become a lot more spread out compared to the laning phase. Cheap items like boots and healing salves can get you kills while laning, but often times in the midgame a single power spike will require you to buy a 2k+ gold item, or get a large amount of experience to get to levels 12/18. Note that I said generally, because as usual it's highly hero dependent. Assassin heroes like TA, Ursa and Timbersaw will be a lot more active then Spectre or AM. What this means is there's going to be a lot of creep hitting going on. So we need to talk about map control and farming patterns, aka the mechanisms in which creeps are hit during the midgame.

Map control is really important. The essence of map control is that it's about control of the area you can farm in, and fighting for that control. Think of the river separating the map being the 50/50 divide. If both teams keep to their side all of the time, no one can really get an advantage. However, if one team farms out the enemy jungle, that's like a 75/25 split in that team's advantage. But obviously if you do this, someone is probably going to want to kill you. Just Fucking Killing an enemy who is out of position allows you to complete the kill someone > make a 5v4 "power play" > take an objective sequence of events I described in the laning phase. The reason that completing this sequence of events of transitioning kills into objectives is so important is because objectives themselves control space around the map. If you get the kill but don't complete the transition into an objective, you aren't shifting the default 50/50 balance of map control that allows you to gain a gradual lead. In essence, map control and the ENTIRE GAME OF DOTA can be boiled down to "knowing if someone is out of position before they themselves know". The thing about being out of position though, is that there is reward to be gained by taking the risk to put yourself in that position. If you can hold a 60/40 map control position and efficiently extract gold from it as a team, then gradually you will pull ahead. There's a concept in map control that goes something roughly along the line of "heroes that are elusive and/or durable should farm gold on the map that is in higher risk locations like the enemy's side of the map, because they are less likely to die from it and it frees up the easy farm for weaker heroes". If you do this, you are controlling more of the map, and remember that a 10k gold lead is the general benchmark for an "unbeatable" lead in a straight up 5v5 fight. Warding, dewarding, and using smoke of deceit to subvert vision and challenge the enemy for map control is crucially important.

Your map control determines what your farming patterns are. I was thinking of putting this section in the PvE core play section, but I wanted to really emphasize the laning phase, so it's here. To understand farming patterns you have to understand two things: The gold bounty of both lane and jungle creeps, and of course, what the clock is telling you. You don't have to memorize the bounty numbers, what's more important is the ratios between them. For example, you should know that an ancient camp gives roughly the same bounty of 1 creep wave (~180g vs ~176g), but a large camp gives only 56% of this (~101g). This doesn't mean ancient creeps and lane creeps are equal though, because geneally it takes a lot more time to clear out the ancients due to their high HP. Farming patterns only care about one thing: you want to convert the least amount of time into the most amount of gold possible. You should know the PvE stats of the jungle creeps that influence how fast you can clear them; things like the Ancient Granite Golem having a 15% max HP aura, the Ancient Black Dragon having an armor aura, the small centaur giving AoE magic resistance, the high magic resistance of every ancient camp creep except the small dragons and the entire prowler camp and the medium camp mud golems (those things have a TERRIBLE gold to HP ratio compared to the rest of the medium camps)... the list goes on. You should also know the PvE techniques your hero uses to maximize their efficiency. A good example is Weaver, he has a nuke that is also a mobility spell. Using your nuke to clear a camp and then walking to the next one is bad. Using your nuke to last hit a camp and then using the movement speed from it to go to the next camp and nuke it in the same action is good. All 115 heroes have their own techniques. A farming pattern is done in 60 second intervals, because that's when the jungle creeps respawn. You want to be able to mentally path out your movements around the map in your head for a 60 second interval before you do it. There are some rules for planning your pathing in order to maximize the amount of gold you can get. For one, you can obviously stack jungle camps. Clearing a jungle camp before the X:00 mark so you can clear it again when it respawns is good, but arriving at X:55, stacking it, and double clearing it is even better (if you have AoE/cleave obviously). Also, you have to consider where the lane creeps are physically going to be, because you know, they move. They'll generally be at the same place at the same time, just listen to the clock to tell where they'll be. X:00/X:30 is spawning time obviously and X:15/X:45 is when they meet in the middle of the map. You don't have to wait until they meet if you're farming out the enemy's side of the map, it's very easy to show up between the T2/T3 at X:03/X:33 and cut the wave. Following these steps, you should be capable of forming a concise blueprint for the next 60 seconds, where you can say that I'm going to get 2 ancient camps, 3 creep waves, 1 medium camp, 1 hard camp, and I'm going to stack a 3rd ancient camp, especially on a hyper mobile flash farming core like AM.

Supports are going to be controlling the map control via warding/dewarding, and doing a little farming of their own during this time. The single most important thing for supports during the midgame is to not die, and here's why: You get bonus XP for getting assists on heroes that are higher level then you. If you survive a fight with 10 HP and get 3 assists as opposed to exploding instantly at the start of a fight, you'll get a shitload of XP and gold. You'll never be able to keep up in gold and XP to a core, so this is really important. The trick is to spend your gold on as many value items as possible such as wind lace/wand/raindrop. It's a myth that supports are allowed to die. It's actually the opposite, the only way supports can stay relevant is to not die.

So you flash farm for 5 or 10 or 20 minutes or whatever, and you've finally hit your power spike. Good. Time to fight, right? Maybe not. Here's the difference between fighting during the laning phase and fighting in the midgame: During the laning phase, you know that the mega weak Invoker isn't going to show up to a fight, because even he did he wouldn't be able to do shit. During the midgame, however... anyone and everyone will show up. When you're trying to figure out the chances of your midgame power spike being successful before you do it, you have to plan for the absolute worst case scenario, aka 5 heroes teleporting to where you are. You want to play Sesame Street Dota, aka "Which number is bigger then the other number?" If two heroes are hitting your safelane T2, the other three heroes are on the map and none of them have BoTs, guess what, 5 > 2. JFKT. This is the power of taking fights on your side of the map, your team is the only one who can instantly summon reinforcement. You might say "OK then no problem, we'll just take all 5 heroes to their side of the map when we hit our power spike", which can potentially work, but the thing is you're not farming anything if you do this. You absolutely need a kill that transitions into an objective for this to be financially worth it a lot of the time. Often times it's a lot better to only take 2 or 3 heroes while the rest of your team farms to make it a "lower risk" play. On top of that, you can often know that the worst case scenario is lower then all 5 heroes showing up. If you see the enemy TP to a lane or see them not carrying a TP scroll, you can know that the worst cast scenario is only a 3v4 which is a lot less bad then a 3v5. Furthermore, the enemy might call your hand and actually bring all of their heroes to meet you. Then you have... a teamfight!

Teamfighting is bad. Really bad. You don't want to teamfight almost all of the time. This is because it goes against the core principle of making the game unfair. 5v1 is unfair. 5v5 is equal. You don't want things to be equal. If you have all 5 of your heroes in one place and you're fighting, you better damn well win and what you're fighting for better damn well be worth it. As a general rule, the only things worth straight up teamfighting for are T3 towers and Roshan. Everything else, meh. You can often avoid teamfights in the midgame by split pushing. Let's say 5 heroes are coming to hit your safelane T2. Sure, you could fight them, but it's almost impossible to do the calculus required to know your chances of winning that teamfight before it goes down. If you wipe 5 for 0, they're going to continue pushing and you're probably going to lose rax. Bad move. Instead, simply take your highest networth core and push out the opposite sidelane to their T2 while the rest of your team farms out the rest of the map. Worst case, you lose a tower without getting one. Medium case, you trade objectives while being more efficient at farming then the enemy. Not too bad. Best case, you force someone on the enemy team to come back and defend. NOW if you group up and defend, you've made it unfair because 5 > 4. This can lead to both defending your tower and getting 4 kills at the same time, on top of all the extra gold you got from split farming while they were grouped. That's really, really good. It's actually specifically one person on the team's job to push one of the sidelanes hard in an attempt to create these imbalanced situations. You can use it for guaranteeing your jungle invasions will be 5v4 as well, all from forcing one TP.

So now that I've covered when to teamfight, it's time to talk about actually doing it. This is another one of those times where I can't cover all 400 quadrillion possible scenarios, but that's OK because you can learn how to think the right way about it. Teamfights very often boil down to initiation. The team that starts the fight on their own terms will often win. This is why the Rosh pit is a deathtrap, it puts you in a tiny area where it's very easy to get to get blown up by any sort of AoE disable. The way you make an honest 5v5 teamfight into an unfair one is to jump on and delete someone before the fight even starts. If you kill Dazzle before he casts one spell, it's pretty much the same as taking a 5v4 fight. Very often the person you'll want to burst down will be some sort of squishy support with a strong spell hiding in the back. You can't just run into the enemy like two 19th century armies lining up to fire at each other, you have to maneuver to get the best possible angle for your initiation. Very often there will be two fronts to a teamfight, the front end and the back end. Durable fighters like Bristleback will be on the front end battling the big strong cores, while initiators and assassins will attempt to get to the back end to kill annoying squishy supports. As players use their abilities and change positions, the primary person you'll be focusing on killing will change. Good positioning is the key to success. Look at a hero like Lich. He has a 200 magic damage nuke with a 150 damage AoE and a 30% slow on a 4 second cooldown (with talent). If you manage to stay alive for 30 seconds instead of dying instantly, that's THOUSANDS of damage you can rack up. The key to positioning in teamfight is a concept called zone control. This video is 5 years old with less then 200k views and I have yet to find another resource that adequately explains the concept. By maintaining a safe zone of space between you and the enemy you can maximize your teamfight impact by staying alive and dipping in to cast critical spells at the right time.

11. The lategame and ending the game

You've successfully used the concepts in the past two sections to gain a sizeable gold lead. Great! Time to get the ancient to 0 HP.

The lategame is largely decided by who controls the Aegis of the Immortal. Having the aegis is the only way you can make a straight up 5v5 unfair from the get go, because 6>5. If you try to push the high ground without the aegis, often what will happen is whoever is hitting the T3 will get picked off by 5 heroes, and the rest of your team won't be able to help them because it's deep in enemy territory. Then you won't be able to continue into the 5v4 advantage, and you'll be forced to disperse. Having the Aegis on one of your cores makes pushing high ground much more realistic. So how do you kill Rosh? There's two ways. The first is to solo Rosh in secret with a hero that can quickly kill him. Ursa is the classic, but TA, Clinkz, or any sufficiently farmed core with a DD rune can make mincemeat of him. Armor reduction in general is the most powerful tool for speed killing Rosh, with items like Desolater and Medallion/Solar Crest being invaluable. Make sure you smoke before you go in to avoid being detected. The downside of this method is that if you're caught out, your team won't be around to help you. If they kill you and Rosh is at 10%, you just gave them a free aegis. Not good. The other method and the generally safer one is just to kill it as a standard "power play" objective when 2 enemies are dead. It is almost always a terrible idea to try to 5 man Rosh while the entire enemy team is alive, the Rosh pit is a death trap for ravages, black holes and the like.

So once you get your Aegis you're ready to push highground as 5. You need to make sure that all lanes are pushed as far as possible before you do this. If a side lane is at your T3 and an enemy cores comes up and starts wailing on it, you're probably going to lose it before you can get theirs. You need to avoid this potential scenario, you don't want the enemy to engage you as 5 once someone has TP'd back to deal with it. Don't commit to the push until all of your lanes are at least past the river. Obviously you'd like to be ok a power play while doing this push as well, but the reward of getting rax is well worth the risk of taking a semi-honest 5v5 (because of the aegis). A good strategy for pushing highground is to have your aegis carrier siege the tower while the rest of your team stands behind them, ready to counter initiate if they get jumped on. This works better with a ranged core, but isn't impossible to do with a melee one. If they initiate and kill your core it's okay, because they'll come back to life shortly anyway. Any big spells that are blown to kill them just make it that much easier to mop up the mess, and anyone you kill in the mop up won't be coming back unless they pay for it. Remember that the only buildings that heal are the melee rax and the ancient unless there's a Treant Protector or a level 25 Lich in the game, so every building hit counts. The idea is to threaten an objective hard enough to force the enemy's hand, and then counter initiate hard to destroy them. You don't have to do it this way though, you can always dive and kill them before you get the tower. Unless your draft's teamfight is insane I wouldn't recommend it generally though, just hit the building. Diving is a 1 way trip to throwsville.

Just because you have the aegis doesn't mean you necessarily have to force the high ground fight right away though. You've got an entire 5 minutes to make your move. You can camp the enemy's side of the map while they stay cooped up in their base, getting even richer then you already are. This gives you more windows to catch out someone who dares leave their base to farm, and create that all-important power play. Don't wait too long though, or it might expire at an inopportune time. Another benefit of delaying your engagement is the next Rosh will spawn faster. Instead of the 8-11 minute window, you'll have a 3-6 minute window instead. Chaining aegises can keep the pressure up on a hard to breech high ground. The drawback of doing this is it gives the enemy free time, and time is money. Allowing them enough time to pick up a critical BKB might change the tide of battle. It also might not be you who controls the next aegis, so be wary.

Once you've defeated the enemy, you can claim the barracks as your prize. Killing all 6 is equivalent to destroying the ancient 99.9% of the time, unless you throw or the enemy is really rich with a strong draft, or both. If you can just end the game without opposition, do it. A lot of the time this isn't possible, so going for the barracks to get those lanes auto pushing is way better. The ranged barracks has less HP and armor then the melee rax, and doesn't regenerate health. The melee barracks does. If you're unsure if you're 100% capable of destroying the barracks you're hitting, going for the ranged barracks is better because it can set up a future play if you fail. The tradeoff is the ranged barracks is the 'weaker" barracks in terms of how fast the lane will auto push when it's destroyed. It has more to do with the uncertainty factor of whether or not you can do it rather then the time it takes, if you 100% know you can get it you'll go for the melee every time. This is a really important piece of decision making that a lot of people miss.

You need to be able to figure out your draft's relative strength compared to the enemy's in order to know whether it's go time or not. Sometimes, you only get 1 aegis to do critical damage to the enemy. Lose it, and it's game over. Some heroes are just better then others as time goes on. There's a general clock that runs in the game of "Heroes that can only hit 1 thing at a time vs heroes that can hit lots of things at once". Sure there are AoE spells, but outside of Medusa, DK, Magnus and battlefury, there isn't a way to right click more then one thing at once. If your cores are Weaver, Ursa and Viper and you're fighting a PL, eventually you're going to have a bad time. Illusion based heroes are particularly nefarious, not only because they can hit more then one thing at once, but because every illusion they generate is more HP that you'll need DPS to match. If you're on the clock, you need to hit your Rosh timing and convert it into barracks very cleanly or the game will become very hard for you.

12. The Ultra-Lategame

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the ultra lategame other then to say that it's a thing that exists. The reason I'm skimping over it is because you'll only ever get to it in about 1 in every 100 games (or much, much more often if you're a sub 2k player who isn't improving). It's an outlier on the general road of climbing MMR. These are the games you hope you get to play, a back and forth slogfest in which both teams haven't been able to gain a significant advantage over a grueling 60+ minute marathon of action (or in the case of sub 2k, where no one has hit a building for the last 45 minutes), and are both only 1 miraculous play or 1 heartbreaking mistake away from putting the final nail in the coffin. The most important thing to note about the ultra-lategame that the fabric of reality, time, and space start to break down when you're at this point in the game. When there are six+ heroes that are 6 slotted in the game, nothing makes sense any more. For example, if you only have one set of rax left and a fight breaks out on top of them, those rax are going to die. This is because it only takes one mega-farmed core to delete those buildings in less then 10 seconds while the other two make space for them. Every single engagement will be a extended, 60+ second long clusterfuck. If you want to defend your base, you pretty much have to start a fight in the middle of the map somewhere, and that can be hard. On top of that, backdoor protection starts to become a surmountable barrier, so watch out for those dirty rats who get megas out of nowhere (or worse end the game). Also getting megas at this point isn't even the "you can't win no matter what" condition it usually is against some drafts. You want to avoid being here if at all possible, because it essentially turns the outcome of the game into a coin flip. All it takes is one player to be dead without buyback and all of a sudden you've got a game-ending 5v4 ancient push on your hands. A good example of a pro game that went to the ultra lategame would be EG vs EHOME at TI6

13. Final Thoughts

Wow, what a writeup this turned out to be. I believe I've covered or at least described all of the information you'll need to know to improve. Remember that competency is a marathon, not a sprint, and that people have been mastering this game for over a decade. Like I said, there's a lot of things in this wall of text that I was merely able to say "this is a thing that exists" about them, because there's just so damn much complexity to this game. Getting to the point where you not only know what these things are but also understand them deeply will take a long time. It's also important to know that literally everyone has unwinnable games. A single game doesn't matter in the long run, only your consistent habits of play over time do. Don't let those games where someone on your team goes 0-10 drag you down, sometimes you just have a bad game for whatever reason, it happens. Keep your chin up, keep striving to improve, and above all else, GLHF.

submitted by /u/DONGPOCALYPSE
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Funny interaction between AA, Oracle, and Venomancer

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:21 AM PST

Last night I was playing AA and launched a blast at their well. An Elder Titan was hit with Venomancer's Nova + Gale. Right after my blast hits (as in a frame or two after) his Oracle uses his E which deals damage and heals. This wouldn't usually be enough to kill the ET but it causes him to shatter. Because Oracle's damage caused him to shatter while ET was affected by Gale though, he gets the deny. Gotta love the weird eccentricities of this great game.

submitted by /u/Phritz777
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Complicated, deep games need organized practice

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 04:46 AM PST

Dota is a beautiful, complex, subtle clusterf**ck. There's so much to learn to play the game well, and yet there's nothing more satisfying when you're in the zone steamrolling the other team.

But because it's so complex, improving your play can be a tricky affair. My previous efforts at improvement were half-baked at best, and my MMR quickly stagnated.

And since I don't have a lot of free time, and I split my time between games, I wanted to improve as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort.

So I sat down one day and developed a practice method that I'd like to share with all of you. At its core, this method can be applied to learning all sorts of skills, but I've customized it specifically for Dota. The method focuses on two things:

  • Developing a better practice mindset
  • Splitting your time between research, deliberate practice, and watching pro-level players

It automatically adjusts to how much time you have to spend on improving, and caters to all skill levels because it forces you to confront your personal weaknesses in play.

The practice method can be found here. It is on a task/habit tracker mixed with a MMORPG that I'm building, and is completely free.

P.S. I truly hope this is as useful for you as it was for me. Any feedback on the method would be greatly appreciated, as I'd like to keep improving it as a resource.

submitted by /u/Pianoismyforte
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Can someone tell me how i cpuld have won this SK game?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:57 PM PST

Match ID: 3694427217

Hello r/learndota2 Is anyone of you guys willing to look at this replay and tell me what I could do to win as Sand King? I had an amazing laning phase but I'm sure I made many mistakes during the mid and late game. Anyone can tell what I should have done? Thanks in advance!

submitted by /u/SuperPingu
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Learning PL Mid

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:52 PM PST

anyone care to share the builds the use/tips they have for the hero? also any lanes to stay away from when picking pl mid? thanks in advance guys/girls.

submitted by /u/NerdRageDawg
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What heroes do I learn?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:06 PM PST

Hi, as a relatively new player(<500 games), I would like to restrict the pool of heroes which I should learn. I don't have too much time to play so I want to get decently proficient with a couple of heroes. However, I don't know how I should go about choosing those heroes? Do I focus on a specific role/lane or do I try to make an even spread among all roles?

submitted by /u/acoustic_autist
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What situations would AM go BKB?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:01 PM PST

Hey everyone, AMA regarding dota

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 05:37 PM PST

I posted earlier about starting up a educational stream for dota today. Unfortunately an emergency came up that I have to address so I'll start the stream tomorrow. However, I can answer any questions you guys might have about dota. Anything on mechanics, what to improve on, what you could have done differently in a particular game, etc. I'll answer everything to the best of my knowledge. So come ask!

submitted by /u/Kidwonderful
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Offlaner that can deal with troll warlord

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 04:29 AM PST

Currently spamming offlane at ~3k and I usually do fine in lane and sometimes even outrigt win 1v2, mostly playing bristle / dk / tide / ud. But troll warlord gives me nightmares, is there any offlaner who can handle laning vs him? Usually my opponents support runs off after 2/3 mins cause he doesnt even need them as he feels completly untouchable. And dont get me started on how it feels like when he gets supported by shadow shaman.

Any creative Ideas on heroes that can actually bully him in some form? Maybe ench or wr?

submitted by /u/-y0shi-
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Help me decide on a team-fight orientated carry

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 06:36 AM PST

So for my last 20 or so games I have narrowed my hero pool down and it's had a good effect. My safelane 3 heroes were Jugg (safe to play in a hard lane, can fight early), Spectre (if the lane is easy or we need a late game carry) and Void (team fight carry). However, I have been struggling with void and have awful winrate on him. I have tried gyro who is a similar team fight hero, and I think I have the same problems there. Could someone recommend any other team fight orientated carries?

submitted by /u/KappaLion
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1 vs 1 Heroes

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 05:34 AM PST

Hey there!

I just started a 1 vs 1 "League" with about 8 friens. Im a bad mid player, i always was, and i think its a good idea to become better for everyone involved.

Im now looking for 1 v 1 Heroes, maybe Heroes that people dont really see coming. For example: All of my friends have a really hard time playing against my Brewmaster. Im not really good with heroes like lina or storm spirit. Do you think Tinker is worth looking to? Underlord and Broodmother seem strong too. I appreciate every idea :)

submitted by /u/xFckthwrld
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I found a hero great with Meteor Hammer!

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 03:08 PM PST

I just wanted to share this because I know there are very few heroes who can legitimately buy Meteor Hammer and not feel guilty about it.

To get to the point, its Underlord. I was in the drafting phase and our team decided to go a push strat with Rhasta/TB/PhysSF. And I was thinking of an offlaner that might be able to commit to that but is also really durable because we lacked any frontliner for highground. So I thought, Hammer Underlord. The thought process was that I knew Underlord had a pretty good +100 Cast Range talent and it might actually work.

So about Meteor Hammer: the item's actual effect is really good. Very high damage over time, less on structures, a stun and a slow. All for around 2,6k gold, and gives int and strength and mana regen and hp regen. All good stuff.

The fundamental issue with it is two things. For one, its an early-game item that would benefit less greedy cores or supports, but those heroes tend to start the early game with utility items like Blink or Force and such. The other is how uncomfortable it is to use: insanely short initial cast range, and a 2.5 second channeling - making it really hard to actually cast on heroes and dangerous to cast on towers.

But Underlord doesn't care too much about those. Other than Mekansm there really isn't anything specific Underlord needs, he usually just builds to counter the enemy lineup with Pipe/Crimson and stuff. So I could easily flex my builds. I went Arcanes -> Mekansm -> Meteor into Aether lens. With the Aether lens alongside the lvl. 15 +100 cast range talent, I could cast it from a massive distance (longer than Nether Blast even), and generally benefits my hero too because casting Pit of Malice from insane ranges was really really good for catching people. Did I hit people with it? Rarely. I'd Pit the enemy team and channel it on top of them but it would only hit 20% of the time. But nevertheless it worked because it gave me a tool to push with that previously I didn't have. And that 20% was also a very dope 20%.

Just wanted to share this because I find it really hard to make Meteor Hammer work and I was really excited that it was a very legitimate pickup here.

Thanks for reading.

match https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/3694285881

submitted by /u/trimmbor
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Starting today

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 11:19 AM PST

Hey everyone!

So I've been getting burnt on dota lately after I reached my goal of 6k and haven't really played much ever since. So I've been thinking of ways I can have fun again with a purpose/goal and at the same time maybe help others. I been seeing a lot of posts on reddit lately asking for help/advice on dota. So I got the idea of basically playing with the sole purpose of teaching people, while improving my communication at the same time, because I always want to improve as a streamer.

So here's my idea,

I will stream every weekday, every week for 3-4 hours teaching/coaching in a "classroom" type of style. Each stream will include things such as: basic mechanics, advanced mechanics, lane equilibrium, how to counter pick, how to deal with being counter picked, how to farm efficiently, when to fight, when to push, etc. Here is what the schedule would be like:

Mondays - Mid Mondays; I will teach the important things you should know about the midlane. Rune control, harass, zoning, etc.
Tuesday - Team "Solo" Tuesday; Playing pos 1 to carry the whole team "solo." How to farm the efficiently, last hitting, stacking for yourself, etc.
Wednesday - Warder Wednesday; I will play only pos 5 ward b**ch and demonstrate zoning opposing offlane, pulling, not leeching xp from core, etc.
Thursday - Thirsty Thursday; I'll be playing pos 4, roaming for ganks, showing how to smoke, etc.
Friday - Offlane Friday; How to not feed, gain experience while applying pressure to keep supports from roaming other lanes, etc.
Each week of the month, I will stream a different MMR, week 1=1k, Week 2=2k; Week 3=3k, and week 4=4k. I'm choosing to do it this way because the vast majority of our playerbase is within these brackets and not at 5k+. Additionally, because at 5k+, I tend to focus more on the game and can't interact/teach the chat.

So why am I doing this? The main reason is because I plan on becoming a teacher in the near future and I want to work on my communication skills while being a more understanding individual. So by helping you guys, you guys are also helping me in return! What seperates this from other places? It's in real time and I will be guiding I will start this today and stream at 5pm PST @ https://www.twitch.tv/kidwonderful

Please let me know what you guys think and hope to see you there!

submitted by /u/Kidwonderful
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How does clock pos 4 work?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 07:05 AM PST

Hello, I havent played in quite some time and Ive been hearing about a clockwerk played on position 4. Is he played as a lane support, a roamer with the cogs or what? How do this work?

submitted by /u/garbage_player798
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Misconception counters

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 04:42 AM PST

When people ask for X hero tips in a post, I see some misconception counters. Recently I learned that shaker isnt a that counter pl, titan is the hard counter and things like sven vs pl and other things. Comment the things you think people think is a counter to a hero but its not.

submitted by /u/ninjack_45
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how to jungle with axe

Posted: 21 Jan 2018 10:40 PM PST

to be more specific, how to jungle with axe when your carry is safe and you don't want to leech xp and gold from the lane?

played an axe last night against bb and pango. denying them from csing is easy with me and kunkka, but the lane will get push easily due to lack of last hit from opponent. i have tried my best to not aggro creep unless i can call the enemy, only focusing on zoning/scaring opponent.

anyway the lane is safe for my partner and it was pushed. i'm bored, not wanting to stand there do nothing. can't leave too far either to give kunkka some support if needed. the only thing i can do is jungle. i've tried googling it, but most article just say "no" to axe jungling. is there some tips for an axe to jungle effectively, when there isn't much you can do in the lane?

submitted by /u/katabana02
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What nice control/hotkey customization can you recommend?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 01:09 AM PST

I personally have my camera set on WASD and skills on 1-6 respectively. Allows me for more convenient and precise mouse movements instead of frantically dragging cursor from edge to edge. And I've played a lot of FPS so hotkeys around WASD is not an issue for me.

Also I've set my directional movement (which disables pathfinding and makes a character run towards cursor location until first obstacle) on thumb mouse button. Must have for accurate Force staff movement.

edit: grammar

submitted by /u/Telefragg
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Echo vs BF on jugg?

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 09:06 AM PST

Am I crazy or is this actually viable option? The passive of echo of the double attack and slow helps with early game kills, and his mana issue. Or is it always better to for RoQ/BF?

submitted by /u/jiuced
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help with pudge

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 09:01 AM PST

hello, these last days I tried to use pudge in Turbo games, and now my hook skills is getting really better.

I've two main doubts:

1) when I play with pudge my farm is always ridiculous (i.e. last hits) , in fact I'm so often hiding in tree and roaming, so I am rarely in lane getting some gold from creeps. Is this right? or I need to farm gold from creeps? What's a decent number of last hits i should get with Pudge in the first 20 minutes of game?

2) Hook+Dismember, when I hook successfully a hero like Ember Spirit (or some common hero having a force staff) they are able to escape before I use dismember on them. Is this normal or is there a way to be faster in using dismember?

thanks

submitted by /u/zulured
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Force attack to cs-ing

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 08:11 AM PST

I see some dota streamer using force attack not only to deny but also to cs-ing...
Is that common among high level player? And what the benefit to do that..?
Ps: I'm lowly herald here...

submitted by /u/z4raki
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Itemization for Anti-mage game

Posted: 21 Jan 2018 11:01 PM PST

We won the game, but I wanted to make sure my item progression was good. Played against Tinker, Nyx, Luna, Lion, and Slark. I went treads>BF>Yasha>Manta>Skull Basher>BKB>Butterfly>Abyssal Blade. Match ID:3692963214 Dotabuff: https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/3692963214

submitted by /u/hereforredditjokes
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XP vs. impact

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 03:55 AM PST

Hey guys, 3k dude here. I currently focus on support and I've issues with getting xp and stacking camps at the same time. When I'm low xp I feel like I'm just a lunch for the enemy cores and when I go gank early or stack camps I feel like the missing xp does fuck me. I'm not that kind of support who doesn't do anything but leech xp like a dog. I'm actively warding/dewarding and pulling camps. But especially stacks and non-successfull ganks feel like such a big waste of time. Do I underestimate the value of early ganks (min 4-6)? And is stacking 2-3 camps worth my time as a support? Note: I do stack if it's on my way.

submitted by /u/bratenbro
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Diconnects

Posted: 22 Jan 2018 07:28 AM PST

What to do when our team waited for an enemy player to reconnect and said player later on immediately unpauses the game all the time when we have someone disconnect? Are reports of any use there? I had this occur to me far too often in the last few days and I am getting sick of it.

submitted by /u/Maxoh24
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