EPT"Hey Link. I am new to dota, which hero should I practice?"
At first I was actually amused by this question because I thought that the question was pretty stupid since in dota you need to be able to play a large number of heroes. After I had given the question some thought I found to be a very topical question since a lot of people who never played DotA is starting along with the release of DotA 2 and they need some guidelines to get started!
I wanted to give a specific and direct answer and therefor gave the question days of thought and finally coming up with my conclusion: If you are playing competitive DotA your opponents have 5 bans, split up into 3 bans after 2 bans afterwards. Let us imagine a team consisting for 5 lazy persons, who want to see results as fast as possible, how many heroes do they need to practice each? As you only have 3 bans before you do the first 3 picks in dota, theorically three players from your team only have to master 4 heroes! Going down this road of thinking I would suggest it to be the utility/iniciator-player, the support-player and the offlane-player, since the heroepool for theese types of roles are not as big as for carry/solo mid in my oppinion. Keep in mind that this particulary team is only playing 1-1-3 strategies to simplify it. Being one hero in the offlane, one hero solomid, and last three heroes as a safelane trilane. Let us keep digging down this path and bring up some examples. Let us imagine that theese guys were pretty smart, and they chose the support-player, the offlane-player and the utility-player to be the ones that only practiced 4 heroes each. Which heroes should they choose? For claryfying matters let us summon the letters of a possible herochoice:
The offlaneplayer could choose: Puck - Windrunner - Broodmother - Potm
The supportplayer could choose: Crystal Maiden - Venge - Chen - Lich
The utilityplayer could choose: Earthshaker - Tidehunter - Enigma - Darkseer
Now theese 3 players have chosen which heroes they want to practice in order for their team to be succesful as fast as possbile.
So what about the remaining solomid-player and carryplayer? Yes, their road will be a bit tougher! The first 3 heroes are already picked and the opponent now have 2 additional bans. That means that both the carryplayer and the solomid-player from the team have to practice a minimum of 6 heroes in total each to make sure that they have a hero, which they master, in every single game, no matter what.
Let us again summon the letters of a possible choice of heroes, in order to fully understand the geniousness about this strategy:
The solomid-player could choose: Storm spirit - Furion - Lion - Ancient Apparition - Beastmaster - Omni
The carryplayer could choose: Anti-mage - Morph - Void - Spectre - Balanar - Slardar
Now all 5 players from team-lazy have chosen enough heroes so each one of them have a hero, they master, which they can get no matter which heroes are banned from the opposing team. This is as soon as the three first picks are reserved for the offlane-, the utility- and the support-player. (which is reasonable).
So lets pick two random lineups that could occur choosing theese 24 heroes in total, places down upon 5 players the way as we described earlier. Would the lineups be any good? To answer this question I will pick two testlineups that could occur in a very real game cosisting of theese 24 heroes, places down upon 5 players with 5 different roles.
Testlineup 1, I pick the first hero I wrote down for each player:
Puck - Crystal Maiden - Earthshaker - Storm Spirit - Antimage
Pretty scary lineup eh? Still not convinced? Okay let us try it again.
Testlineup 2, this time we pick backwards, first player we take the last one, second player we take the second last one and so forth and we end up with:
Potm - Chen - Tidehunter - Lion - Morph
Again a lineup with a lot of options!
Now try to create a lineup yourself!
Yesterday my team and I officially became members of the organisation, SK-gaming* and we cannot wait to attend to our first lan under the organisation.
We are going to drive to the land of swedes by car, and therefor the trip will be the first DotA 2 SK-gaming ROADTRIP!
I hope I can somehow lend an iphone by a friend so I can take a lot of pictures and blog about the roadtrip on the way as well as the event when we arrive! :-P
I have been streaming some other games than DotA 2 along the way and yesterday I decided from now on I will ONLY stream DotA 2 so everyone can expect what to see when they tune in on my stream! If you do not like this decision, or more like, if many people do not like this decision (including you!) drop a comment about it and I might take it back!
I have renewed most of my link's (haha) from my previous post and I will therefor post them again:
facebook: www.facebook.com/LINKDotA
twitter: www.twitter.com/LINKDotA
stream: www.own3d.tv/LINKDotA
Sincerly, SK.Link
