DOTA 2

In other, non-prophet (heh) related news, I got tapped as one of 2 or 3 people casting a tournament coming up in the next few months. No details till it's final, but I'm excited.

nite1_sl said:

So any chance some of our resident skilled players could take a look at a couple of my games and offer some advice because i'd like to get better at this game but feel like i'm kind of stuck and I'm hoping a different perspective could help me.

278309827 <-- Anti mage game ( i know probably shouldn't be playing him but i randomed him and it was one of a few games that went late enough that my decision making is evident)

275218753 <-- Earth shaker ( only support game i've played that went longer then 20 minutes...)

I was trying to pick games that went late enough and were balanced enough to see what im doing with out it being a stomp one way or another

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AM game:
- if you're being harassed as hard as you were, get a poorman's shield
- learn to last hit under the tower because it happens a lot when people pull
- don't be scared to go in for last hits, lots of times no one is near creeps
- don't max mana break before blink, get a point in spellshield (heroes have 25% magic resistance innate, 1 point in spell shield brings it up to 44%)
- don't be afraid to buy a quelling blade, it's core on antimage anyways
- when building a battlefury get the ring of health first, so you don't have to keep buying potions
- you're spending way too much buying regen because you don't know how to last hit yet
- practice last hitting before playing a carry again, you should have at least 300 creep kills by 40 minutes as AM

stopped watching this game after 25 minutes, there's a lot of fundamentals you still need to learn before receiving some of the more advanced tips


es game:
- there's no point sitting in lane when you don't have mana to fissure
- lots of times you ditched your sf to die instead of saving him because you didn't have fissure mana
- you're spending way too long laning as a support, es is very powerful in early levels when moving around the map
- you had a blink dagger pretty early, use it to stun or block opponents from very far away, or just initiate with echo slam (which you did later one, but missed lots of easy early game pressure/kills)
- just lots of game sense things that come over time

Both games:
- carry a tp with you always
- watch your minimap closely for enemy movement and where you need to be

nite1_sl said:

So any chance some of our resident skilled players could take a look at a couple of my games and offer some advice because i'd like to get better at this game but feel like i'm kind of stuck and I'm hoping a different perspective could help me.

278309827 <-- Anti mage game ( i know probably shouldn't be playing him but i randomed him and it was one of a few games that went late enough that my decision making is evident)

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So a few things to add to what was posted, Think of your starting items are your gateway to lane sustainability especially as a carry, and your first item buys were completely detrimental to you staying in your lane. You decided to buy brown boots, followed by a belt of giant strength. At this point in the lane you have no regen left. The 900 gold that you've spent at 4:36 into the game could have been a ring of health. At 5 health/second that's worth 300hp/minute About 50 hp shy of a stack of tango's. Additionally at 5 minutes in warlock and omni end up low but you continue to trade blows with them and no one dies. However you have 180 health, 1.3 regen/sec and you either have to spend 100 gold you don't have on a potion to sort of keep you in lane, or you have to head to the fountain and tp back which is going to cost you more time and money than the potion would.

Your pugna did you no favors when he was in lane blasting the entire wave auto attacking at times, but either way. Those first 10 minutes as a carry are the most important 10 minutes, You should focus 100% on getting every CS you can squeeze out of the regen that you bring to lane, because once it is gone you need a solution. Those solutions are ring of health, tranquil boots, and in some cases a lifesteal. If you don't manage one of those solutions before your regen run out you head into an extremely ineffective stretch of laning.

10 minutes into the game you have 8 cs. There is I think around 83 CS possible at the 10 minute mark assuming no jungle but counting the catapults that will have spawned. Your mark of 8 is just 10% of perfect. Now you can deduct things like the pugna wasn't helping, perhaps the enemy lane was aggressive and you had to maneuver and miss a CS here or there. But even assuming a 25% efficiency in spite of all the other shit in that lane that would still be around 20 CS.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...sWlV1VHc#gid=0

This spreadsheet I think is accurate but I didn't make it, it shows you at least roughly how many creeps have been to your lane at a given point in time and gives you a rough gauge of what kind of gold you could have been working with, the important thing to realize here is just how much improvement you can make in just raw CS'ing ability in the first 10 minutes. Imagine if you had those 12 extra CS, that's almost 530 extra gold to work with, you could have had a ring of health and brown boots with just 25% efficiency of last hits. That ring of health at the 4:36 mark would have been worth around 1600 health assuming none of the regen was wasted (i.e you were never at full hp).

When working to get better at dota, realize that your progress is relative to your skill level. 1 CS a minute will win you the game if you are playing with and against people who are brand spanking new. 3 CS a minute puts you into the lower parts of the high bracket lets say, and 6 would get you into a vhigh (these numbers just pulled out of my ass). So its not so much about the fact you only had 10% of the possible CS, its that if you improve even just 15% your results will change massively compared to the way that game was experienced.

Just quickly imagine the game if you had ring of health and power treads in 10 minutes? not only are you more durable, but perhaps you have one of the largest item advantages in the game given your skill bracket. That means you not only will CS faster and more safely, but you're less easily killed by ganks, you're more likely to contribute to any fights you might find yourself in, and finally you begin to make yourself dangerous enough that any one hero can't effectively bully you out of continuing to farm more gold because you're lane sustainable against basic harassment.

I would also say the first 10 minutes arent the most important for a carry, the last 10 are

I've come back countless times from a hopeless game because I went ultra manmode farm dominating that jungle as much as a mexican pinata dressed like a school boy at a priest convention.

Start makes it easier to stay in it, no doubt, but dont stop believing

If you have brown boots at 10 minutes, its hard to manmode farm anything. CS leads to more CS as item acquisition accelerates future farm. The last 10 are hopefully the most influential, but they only happen from all the time spent getting to that power point. Obviously farming has its up and downs, lane ganks, or rotations, or flat out shitty matchups. But getting better at CS'ing in Dota is all about the first 10 minutes. Anyone can farm the jungle rapidly with a battlefury or last hit when you have 200 damage in items, but CSingg well in the first 10 minutes under lane duress and under your own tower are both much harder to do perfectly than aforementioned jungle farming.

Right, obviously a game of dota is a lot more complicated than 10 minutes of PvCreeping, but more improvement can be gained in those 10 minutes because its the only time in the game generally where the lanes remain semi-static for at least the first few minutes. Understanding how to maximize the relative situation you find yourself in is the entire underlying point of dota, and a bit more meta than the advice best suited to teaching a low bracket/new player. Its hard to make those meta decisions when you have a hard time escaping the lane phase in reasonable shape. Maximizing the first 10 minutes lets the possibilities of the next 20-50 minutes to unfold. Cripplingly bad early games almost always snowball out of control in a bad way when talking about the very hardest farm dependent carries.

So can somebody explain what the difference between a 4, and a 5 role are?

Also the terms solo safe and solo hard as well as aggressive tri and defensive tri. Is aggressive tri have to do with the make up of the lane? Or where the lane is positioned (not next to the pulling stacks or against another tri).

Does solo safe mean your going up against another solo?

Solo safe lane would be solo'ing the lane with the jungle pulls native to your side, solo hard is the lane without the friendly jungle. Offensive trilane would just be a trilane in the hard lane - i.e without jungle advantage. Defensive trilane is just opposite. They have these names because of the asyemtric nature of the top/bottom lanes in dota depending on your side.

5 would basically be the ultra ward sentry gem - and only has brown boots bitch, the 4 role is the support that is perhaps cs'ing the pull camp - and while they do purchase some of the support items they attempt to perhaps complete an item more regularly. 4 is just support with slightly more farm and slightly less consumable

Ask him to quit last hitting and hope he obliges.

nite1_sl said:

First of all thank all of you for taking the time to watch those games and post your comments I appreciate any and all help. I know watching that level of bad was probably really painful.

Accordion: when you say I'm missing fundamentals im assuming your referring to last hitting and proper item orders are there other principles im missing?

As to the support game I see what you mean about wasting fissures looking back I see a few times I basically wasted one just to do damage. When as a support is it a good time to start roaming pressuring? Level 6? Or in the case of es when I got the blink dagger?

Dandain:

I never thought about what to do after my starting regen was up and what you said makes a huge difference in terms of how to go about laning... I had it in my head that you should start on your boots while your in lane and never thought about regen afterwards....

as to last hitting. Its really obvious how important a skill it is. You guys have any advice or little tricks that have made it easier for you? Or how do you guys handle that pugna I was In a lane with?

Again thank you and im sorry for how bad watching those games had to be. I really appreciate the feedback

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practice is the onyl thing that will do it. Gotta know every hero' attack animationn and correlate what the lil green bar on the ennemy creep means for hp.

also the first 10 minutes will make your last 10 minutes easier, but the last 10 are the most important by far, so dont give up if you get dominated in lane first 6 minutes, find a awy to make it work. Countless times I've abandoned lane and team just to go farm and have come back to win the game because I farmed like a bitch. That will come with experience and game sense.

One tip you might not know about last hitting is animation canceling - and animation canceling is a useful skill period. But in regards to last hitting if you wind your hero up to hit a creep or launch a projectile (or cast a spell) if you hit the S key mid swing your hero will instantly stop the attack. This skill is part of last hitting because you can stall out the strike if you make the assessment that it wouldn't actually get you the last hit. so say you go to cs - mid swing you realize its not gonna happen so you hit the s key and instantly restart the animation. When you see people doing that wind up shit - or faking spells - they are using the animation canceling technique.

Additionally early game last hitting under tower with most heroes in most situations is as follows (dota damage is random within a range even if your hero has a flat number that's the average). So a few things about last hitting under a Tier 1 Tower early game. The ranged creep takes 3 tower shots to die, but most heroes cannot deal that remaining amount of damage in one auto attack early on. So a ranged creep must be preped by one attack, then 2 tower strikes, then a follow up last hit. Melee creeps tend to take one preping strike as well and 4 or 5 tower shots tend to put it right in last hit range. Without the prep hit you end up in the same position many times as the ranged creep - you don't have enough damage to secure the LH. Catapults die with 3 or 4 tower strikes it is random, if it survives 3 strikes its in prime last hit range, so the best bet on full health catapults is let the tower strike 3 time then LH. If the catapult is taking any extra damage or has taken extra damage before the tower targets it - it will not survive the third strike - so if you can get it low enough to secure the last hit between the second and third tower hits you can sometimes get catapults that way but given hero damage and health of the cats its hard to guarantee that type of catapult LH.

Like nutron says, practice makes perfect in last hitting, but if there is a set of heroes that you really enjoy or you just want to practice the entire notion of last hitting. Don't be afraid to start up a lobby and just take yourself mid or bot and go at it for the first 10 minutes of the game. See how close you can get to 82 CS in 10 minutes of clock time think of such a lobby as a game where you have perfect freefarm. Another last hitting "practice" mode that the dota community suggests is the SF mid practice, you pick SF because he has such low base damage. You buy no items and you place no points in any of your skills. You go mid, and you attempt to get as many last hits and denies as you can and add the total together after 10 minutes of game time. Numbers over 100 will be in the realm where you have become very good at both controlling the lane and understanding the really fine details of last hitting. So this is just a method by which you can benchmark yourself. Like pyros said above though, if you create an empty lobby, and you go to a lane with items and progress your build and control a courier - you should be achieving 90%~ last hits in a free farm setting when you've really mastered it.

Obviously you don't always farm under free farm conditions, so when you take this practice into the game you begin to learn how the same last hitting practice functions against enemy players with them competing for and denying some of your opportunity through harassment or direct denies.

nite1_sl said:

First of all thank all of you for taking the time to watch those games and post your comments I appreciate any and all help. I know watching that level of bad was probably really painful.

Accordion: when you say I'm missing fundamentals im assuming your referring to last hitting and proper item orders are there other principles im missing?

As to the support game I see what you mean about wasting fissures looking back I see a few times I basically wasted one just to do damage. When as a support is it a good time to start roaming pressuring? Level 6? Or in the case of es when I got the blink dagger?


as to last hitting. Its really obvious how important a skill it is. You guys have any advice or little tricks that have made it easier for you?

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Item choices, last hitting, movement, decision making, hero knowledge and general awareness. It's a lot of stuff that comes together over time, but you need to actively try to be aware of it all. Honestly as an ES, you can start roaming whenever... it highly depends what your other lanes are (and what they're up against) and whether you can help contribute to a kill or not.

Last hitting, load up a private game, pick SF, don't skill up, don't buy items. Go to mid and last hit/deny for 10 minutes. Combine last hits and denies. When you get 80+ you'll be a last hitting champ in pub games.

In case you don't want to fuck around with custom games: write "dota_tutorial_start lasthit" into console, it's still a bit rough, but much better than solo games. At least you don't waste the time at the start.

How you talk about high/low points in variances and leave out my Wakandan Nessaj? His damage range is 49-79 (the worst in the game).