DOTA 2: Thanks volvo

[Julian]

I just got two "Dota 2 gifts" if anybody wants this shit.

There's a google docs list on the first page. For all the people asking, use that!

(or be cool and just give it to me!)

[Rivero]

Read this: http://www.welcometodota2.com/2012/0...noobs-aka.html



I disagree with the majority of these recommendations. He is basically recommending you start with farmer style carry heroes, which I think is a terrible idea. I agree that Intelligence heroes are the most difficult heroes to master, but I also think they have the lowest barrier of entry and they minimize the impact of your mistakes for the team.

Carries are defined by their ability to scale. Your job as a carry is to get kills and farm so that you have items to fuel whatever skill you have that scales well. If you play too aggressive, you lose all your gold and feed the other team. If you play too passive, you won't get all the kills you need and you will be weak and unable to do your job. It's not just about knowing your hero, it's about knowing all the heroes so you know what will happen in response to your actions. If you dive that tower, do they have a snare or a slow or a stun? How long can your hero take tower damage, is it enough to kill? Have you developed a good innate understanding of armor to know how much damage you actually have to do to kill them accounting for reduction? You can practice last hitting all you want with AI, but against players they will adapt with items and skills to harass you. What do you do when they rotate an Obsidian down there whose sole job is to Imprison you constantly so you physically can't last hit? Or a heavy harass orb walker like Huskar or Viper?

You need to have enough experience to be able to make the right play, and quite frankly I'll bet money that you need a lot more time invested before you are at that stage. You have to have good instincts. I've played DotA (WC3 DotA to HoN, then to Dota 2) for over ten years and my instincts and awareness are far from perfect. I actually generally don't play hard carries for this reason. The carry is NOT the most important role on a team nor is it the hardest; but it is the easiest to screw up. A team only needs one carry (although many teams end up with more because bad people will pick without regards to good strategy, or people won't trust their teammates); you don't want the carry to be a clueless player because it's like having a -1 on your team.

Conversely nukers and supports don't have abilities that scale, but that means they will always be able to make a set amount of impact. It's just that the efficacy wanes the longer the game goes on. The best supports are the ones whose abilities stay effective at the end even if they don't do lots of damage (Tidehunter's Ravage, Venomancer Poison Ring/Nova, Enigma's Black Hole, Rhasta/Lion Hex, Invoker EMP, Silencer Global Silence, Omniknight Repel/Guardian Angel). That frees up farm for the carry without hurting the team fight potential.

Out of those, I would recommend playing Lich, Venomancer, Vengeful Spirit, Warlock. I really think it's easier to start playing with range heroes, but after a few games it's probably okay to play Tidehunter and Skeleton King because they come built in with lots of survivability and have relatively few skills you have to manage in a fight. Sven is also low management, but he's relatively squishy compared to Tidehunter and Skeleton.

Also, don't play invis heroes (Clinkz, Rikimaru, Bounty Hunter; more otw). The invisibility is very useful for newbie players for escaping and compensating for mistakes, but the invisibility becomes a crutch that fosters bad habits. Dying and getting yelled at by your team when you make mistakes is important so that you realize you shouldn't be doing whatever the hell you were doing when you died. When I started with my friends we played retarded heroes and I very strongly believe that it stunted our growth. Years later my friends still play poorly because they kept their bad habits and their best heroes are still those invis heroes which get countered so hardly at high skill games. I only got better than them is while they went off and fucked around in LoL, I tried to play super seriously in HoN and part of that was learning never to pick invis and learning how easy it was to counter invis.

You're also exaggerating by how hard he needs to be playing, he doesn't need to be farming 100 creeps per 20 minutes to be doing his job properly. Last hitting is a pretty fundamental concept and I honestly think it's better learned on heroes that don't have insane low base damage or poor attack animations. Also half the heroes I listed don't exactly require massive farm to be useful, hell some of them can even be considered supports or at the very least played like roamers/gankers.

I think it's easier to give a new player a simple concept such as learning how to start last hitting and trying to grasp one or two spells at a time rather than trying to make him learn all the nitpicks behind Jakiro, or how to avoid getting instantly blown up as CM by making one simple mistake. Most of those heroes can easily bounce back into the late game with some decent farming, while if you fuck up with INT heroes in the beginning, you've already thrown the game essentially.

[synistar]

Learning item independent heroes (lich, dazzle, lion, VS, warlock to name a few) is a whole lot easier than learning a farm dependent hero. Now if there were an -em mode I would say learn a carry on there, but in this hostile community, you would get discouraged so fast for derping on a carry or a snowball semi (see tiny, who i still can't play worth crap after 5 years, or PotM/Mirana, who has a skillshot that I fail at so hard). If anything, it's better to highlight learning skills like map awareness/vision, supporting, and ganking.

Course I threw my face into the grinder back in ver 5.something doing -ar games and sucking badly for about a year lol.

[Tyr]

got a beta key today - Which heroe should i start playing with?

I asked the same question a little while back -- Gred gave me a pretty solid response/review of some heroes (thread's not that hot, should be all within the last 5 or so pages).

I'd definitely echo that you should NOT start with a character like Lycan, Anti-mage, Void, etc. They're "cool" and really fun, but again, dota is a team game. Play against bots to practice if you really want, but again, bots are NOT people, and people are not kind/welcoming...especially if they are relying on you and you're not helping.

These are the steps I took:
1) Playdota.com --> You must read up on the mechanics before you start. It's too important. The one bad thing though is that the icons/heros don't match the exact picture of Dota2, but you can find your way around easily. LEARN ITEMS!
Side note: Dota is extremely deep and will reward you for your efforts if you try to learn. If you don't, it will eat your soul (until you quit or flame it as a "bad" game). Again, it's a very deep game. The learning curve is steep. Thankfully, Dota2 has under half the heroes that were in Dota1, and they're not in yet, so you get a huge break.
2) Play against bots (Create lobby -> Settings -> Empty slots = Fill with bots, easy medium or hard whichever) WITH EVERY HERO AT LEAST ONCE. I'd say even twice. Learn the mechanics, how to move around, and the like. For the first few games, play easy I'd say (esp if you're completely new).
3) Every time you select a hero, look up the corresponding playdota.com hero page and look up a guide.
4) Learn how to last-hit comfortably with/without a bot around. It will take some getting use to.
5) Start narrowing down heroes that you like/can be effective with, and generally, they'll be INT or some STR heroes. My suggestions are (in no order) characters like Sven, Skeleton King, Slardar, Axe, Omniknight in the STR column, and Zeus, Crystal Maiden, Lich, Dazzle, Leshrac, Bane, Lion in INT. As well, Sniper (AGI hero), he's a common pick because he is the longest ranged hero in the game.
6) Most of the characters I mentioned, particularly in the INT column are responsible for "warding" -- plenty of guides, read up. They're generally the support class. You're thinking, bullshit why do I have to support I want to get the most kills! Well, having gone that route, its the best way to learn the game's mechanics, and you learn how to play in general (regardless of hero) by seeing how good teammates play, and how opponents play against you.
7) Don't go near Invoker. Just. Don't. He's awesome but, no.
8) Rinse & Repeat


I personally played v. bots exclusively for almost 3 weeks (no internet). I played anyone and everyone. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to playdota with exception to a few guides I saved. It made a HUGE difference, and I knew how to build items better than some of my friends that had been playing for a while. Thankfully, you don't need to know recipes in dota2 as much, but you need to still learn how to space yourself, how and when to be aggressive/defensive, and when to move with your team.

All that last stuff can only be taught playing against people. Play a handful of times against bots to get the feel of the game, then decide if you want to keep wading in the shallows or if you want to jump into the deep end.


EDIT: How can I forget Shadow Shaman in the list of heroes to play!? Especially because I've played 70% of my games as him....He's been my go-to pick as I'm still learning how to play

[Rivero]

You will have to learn how to last hit eventually, might as well kill two birds with one stone. But maybe that's just my POV. Shadow Shaman is actually quite difficult though, you'd be surprised as how easily you can fuck it up with him.

Either way, the only real way you're ever going to get good at this game is by constantly failing over and over for 1-6 months depending on how long it takes you to grasp all the concepts, and honestly in the end it's really irrelevant who you pick and you should rather just look at all the heroes and pick them based off which ones appeal to your own personal style.

[supercoco]

Been playing as Zeus and didnt have any problem so far , ending always with more kills and assists than deads - i need to learn what items to buy , having mana issues some times -

[Blackice]

Bottle + Arcane boots on Zeus is a must.

[Tyr]

Been playing as Zeus and didnt have any problem so far , ending always with more kills and assists than deads - i need to learn what items to buy , having mana issues some times -

Arcane boots & Scepter for sure. Also: http://www.playdota.com/guides/most-...-guide-to-zeus

[Gredival]

You're also exaggerating by how hard he needs to be playing, he doesn't need to be farming 100 creeps per 20 minutes to be doing his job properly. Last hitting is a pretty fundamental concept and I honestly think it's better learned on heroes that don't have insane low base damage or poor attack animations. Also half the heroes I listed don't exactly require massive farm to be useful, hell some of them can even be considered supports or at the very least played like roamers/gankers.

Carrying is essentially a dual layered competition.

On top it's a direct competition between you and the enemy carry about who played better: who farmed more efficiently, who had better decision making in terms of stopping farm to come out for a team fight and get all the XP/gold from that, who chose better items, and at some level who chose a better hero.

On the bottom, it's about the supports going head to head. Which team picked the best balance between disables and DPS, which team has better synergy, which team had people farming sheeps and useful items instead of dumb crap.

It's really hard for a team to win when either of those fights is a complete curbstomp. And when you're new, you're probably going to get curb stomped on the carry vs. carry duel.

Dota has gotten incredibly bad reviews from magazines and news outlets not dedicated to Dota because the learning curve is intense; it's requires hundreds more hours of initial investment in Dota to get a good grasp of the game than it requires for your standard games that come out.

New players stick out like sore thumbs, even if they are dedicated gamers outside the genre. You have to take it for granted that the enemy team will exploit the weakest link.

That's precisely why you want them having a hero that has impact on the match without farm, because a newbie will not likely not get significant farm. Think Maelk's 0-20 Veno. Even though he was getting absolutely destroyed he had a hero that could do 90% of its full potential in a fight within 3 seconds before he got shredded. It was the perfect hero for him to use in a match where he wasn't on top of his game.

Nearly all the AGI heroes you listed require farm in order to have high impact. Anti-mage? Sniper? Void? Juggernaut? Drow? Ursa? Those are all farm carries. Bounty Hunter and Bloodseeker aren't pure carries but they are item intensive non-supports.

The same goes for almost all your STRs. Rogue Knight and Skeleton King are justifiable because of their few skills and Leoric's ult, but they need items to have significant impact. If you just want their stuns, then it's better to pick Tidehunter (one hero I did agree with out of the STRs). Spirit Breaker and Balanar are heroes designed to exercise map control through ganks; something that a new person doesn't really have the awareness to do well. Lycan and Naix are extremely farm intensive hero. Axe requires a Vanguard and Blink to do his job. Huskar does have a high impact regardless of farm if you can ult the right person, but ideally Huskar needs to be strong enough to take one person out immediately when he initiates.

The one INT you recommended is one of the most farm intensive heroes too. DP requires tankability to maximize the potential of her ult so the enemy team can't just focus fire her down. That's pretty hard to do on an INT hero. It's far better to have an INT hero with high impact regardless of farm.

You need to learn how to last hit, but it's far better to learn in a situation where your failure doesn't cascade into a skull crushing for a team. We aren't recommending this guy learns Invoker, we're saying heroes like Veno and Lich. Those heroes may be fragile, but a noob dying is taken for granted. A noob Skeleton King will die regardless of the ult. Nothing can protect you from yourself in this game.

[Maguspk]

It's definitely more considerate to your team to pick hero that doesn't need items but in the end you will lose it for you team, just random, pull up guide, lose, rinse, repeat. Picking the same hero over and over will give you a false sense of progress and you won't truly understand the game until you understand every hero. You pick up the basics as you read through guides and learn each hero as you random. Plus, random gives you bonus gold so it gives you a bit of an advantage in buying starting items.

[synistar]

And if all else fails and you have 200 gold to spare and your team has no map vision, buy an obs ward. Place them at a rune spawn, and you probably helped your team a whole lot there. Information is probably the best weapon you have, especially when you hit the time where a semi carry/initiator gets a dagger and can potentially snowball carry the game.

[Gredival]

It's definitely more considerate to your team to pick hero that doesn't need items but in the end you will lose it for you team, just random, pull up guide, lose, rinse, repeat. Picking the same hero over and over will give you a false sense of progress and you won't truly understand the game until you understand every hero. You pick up the basics as you read through guides and learn each hero as you random. Plus, random gives you bonus gold so it gives you a bit of an advantage in buying starting items.

It's not a false sense of progress. While getting good at one hero doesn't make you good at the game, if he legitimately masters the attack animations and skills for one hero then you can expect him to do relatively better with that hero compared to others. Mastering a high impact support like Venomancer or Lich gives you a go-to option that will never hurt your team (support almost never hurts). Learning these heroes first gives your team's better players a chance to carry you rather than having them support you as you crumble.

Randoming is unnecessary and harmful to your team as it can burden the team with a misfit hero. Playing every hero at least once to understand realistic use of skills is helpful, but you can and should do that in bot games before you start matchmaking. I've never played Batrider and Invoker in real games but I still watch enough and play enough to understand how they influence the game.

[Rivero]

I mean that's the thing Gredival, either way you put it, you're still going to be constantly losing games as a newbie. I'm sure you just like all of us, sucked complete dick your first few months of playing, that's just part of the learning experience. Regardless of Lich or Anti-mage if you play bad most of the time, you still will lose games so I feel like it's really irrelevant, the best thing you can get out of your games should be learning Map Awareness/Last hitting/Evaluating how much damage things deal/Learning all the nitpicks behind the laning phase and those are all skills you can pick up by playing anything hero I listed there. The only thing you can hope for as a new player is that the match making system tries to pair complete newbies vs newbies when the game comes out.

And the heroes I listed are still GENERALLY quite easy for a newbie to pick up. All those heroes really revolve around one to two core items, and I can assure you once those items are bought it's pretty much an onslaught when most team fights start. It's also quite nice since some of those heroes I listed are junglers and you can get complete free farm in the jungle almost all the time.

Lycan - Can jungle (removes your battling for last hits/denies) Only really needs BKB to effectively run in and start killing everything with max movespeed/free crits.

Ursa - Another right click jungle hero, very simple hero that revolves around getting near your opponent and hitting Q + right clicking him to death. Only needs Vlads/Blink or Lothars

Anti-Mage Free blinks essentially ensuring you will never die, his ultimate is nice but you don't even really need it half the time, two other passives. Stupidly broken and only needs Manta Style to win you games from your 3x Mana Burn on everything.

Drow - Another retardedly easy hero, just toggle your Q whenever you're fighting a hero, although I really recommend you at least try to learn how to move and Q, move and Q for the early game since it does more damage and gives you more mobility. That's it, that's her only real skill ceiling, learning how to Q and move. Items are whatever since this hero gains DAMAGE by LEVELING UP. Can't get easier than that. Also 6s AoE silence for funzies.

Void - Backtrack, ensuring you will never die to shit. Timewalk, also ensuring you will never die to shit assuming your Backtrack hasn't saved you already. Bash is just there to help you lock them into place every now and then and the coup de gra, Chrono Sphere, where every 100-120 seconds you can secure yourself free kills assuming they are low enough from trying to kill you, which they will be contemplating since again Backtrack/Timewalk. Mask of Madness and you've already finished your core honestly.

Barathrum - Same shit as above, two passives with a pretty simple concept. Find people you want to kill, Q them from where ever you want and watch as you let go of your mouse, activate your Mask of Madness and just chain bash the shit out of your opponent before he even gets a chance to even respond to your attacks. Simple stuff.

Axe - Jungler, basically jungle until you get your Vanguard/Blink and then just run around spamming your E on people and occasionally using R to kill steal, that's about it. You reaaaally can't fuck it up with Axe.

Sven - Theoretically mostly played as a support/roamer so I guess he falls under your "does not need items to help impact team" and I'll leave it at that.

Tidehunter - Same deal as Sven.

Bloodseeker - Two passives, this trend is getting pretty noticeable, you only really have to worry about finding someone who is full health, getting level 6 easily through your ridiculous Blood Bath passive and then hitting R and watch the opponent kill himself for you since god knows how hard it is to walk up and right click him to death with 50% movespeed.

Viper - Drow on crack, two passives again, except now you have Q and R and if you manage to land both, and they are alone, GG you win over and over.

Balanar - Go middle and try to play as passively as you can until night time shows up, feel free to nuke your opponent a few times with your Q if you want. (there's a clock in the middle of the score but the most obvious sign is that it gets dark and your vision is reduced (not for Bala though?) Anyways, when it gets night time, take a 3 sided dice. 1 is Top, 2 is Middle, 3 is Bottom, give that bad boy a toss, whatever number it falls on is whatever lane just signed their death wish. Run over to that lane with your free haste rune, get in there and silence and or kill the shit out of any hero you want while he cries slowly and wishes you'd die of cancer or w/e sickness he has concocted in his mind.

I'll remove Huskar/Leoric/DP/Sniper/Juggernaut/Gondar/Naix since they do take a lot more than some simple right clicks or have a hard time farming sometimes due to lack of escapes, no survivability from skills or a moderately high skill ceiling.

[Gredival]

I mean that's the thing Gredival, either way you put it, you're still going to be constantly losing games as a newbie. I'm sure you just like all of us, sucked complete dick your first few months of playing, that's just part of the learning experience. Regardless of Lich or Anti-mage if you play bad most of the time, you still will lose games so I feel like it's really irrelevant, the best thing you can get out of your games should be learning Map Awareness/Last hitting/Evaluating how much damage things deal/Learning all the nitpicks behind the laning phase and those are all skills you can pick up by playing anything hero I listed there. The only thing you can hope for as a new player is that the match making system tries to pair complete newbies vs newbies when the game comes out.

Newbies are a burden on their team, but the team can carry you a lot better if you are a support that blasts out all your important spells before you blow up vs. a hero that is supposed to carry the team but is getting carried.

It's also about thinking for the future. All those skills you listed can be learned on a support, or in bot games. The point of learning high impact support heroes is that it means in the future you can always contribute and you don't screw your team by only being able to play the least versatile role in the game.

[TacoTaru]

Checked back about 5 pages and didn't see anything, but sorry if this is a repost. This is a pretty interesting price model and I'll be curious to see how it works. Don't know anything about the game so I'm not sure if it's set up for rampant trolling or not.

The folks over at Valve have cooked up a novel pricing model for the upcoming Defense of the Ancients 2. Managing director Gabe Newell says that players will be charged based on what they bring to the community. Team players might get a free ride whereas jerks are going to have to pay cold hard cash.

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?” Newell told Develop magazine.

If you are the kind of player who helps newbies find their footing, releases cool mods, and reports bugs in a timely manner, you might find yourself playing for free. If you’re a troll who picks on new players, exploits flaws in the game mechanics, and generally makes things less fun for everyone else, expect to pony up quite a bit.

“So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Defense of the Ancients 2 for free because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone; they can still play, but a game is full price, and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice,” Newell told Develop.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/24/va...aWfc1g.twitter

[Vandole]

I just got a writing job at ESFI's dota 2 department. now what should i write about? lol

[Blackice]

How top tier Sniper is, go!

[Gredival]

http://stats.dota2.be/

[Maguspk]

Checked back about 5 pages and didn't see anything, but sorry if this is a repost. This is a pretty interesting price model and I'll be curious to see how it works. Don't know anything about the game so I'm not sure if it's set up for rampant trolling or not.


http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/24/va...aWfc1g.twitter

There is no way this could be true, what kind of carebear bullshit system would this be and how would you even implement it.

Nice site Gredival, didn't know there were unique player IDs so they could prevent name collisions, that's fortunate.

[BlackMoomba]

Very nice site Gred, bookmarked.