EPTMy Dota 2 Journal - Page 2
| Blogs > pullarius1 |
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SKC
Brazil18828 Posts
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Nub4ever
Canada1981 Posts
But in any case, GL! DotA's a great game albeit I'm sure you've discovered hard to get into >_< PS. IMO Lich > Treant as first hero. Faster, less reliant on harder things like global awareness and an understanding on when people would dive, easier to make good things happen. | ||
Nyovne
Netherlands19135 Posts
On April 02 2013 08:39 Mandini wrote: Nyovne would be proud He is! | ||
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-Celestial-
United Kingdom3867 Posts
I finished 5-5-16 with Wand/Drums/TP/Mana Boots/Oblivion Staff/Heart. Frankly I remember thinking "wow this guy is so OP!" Basically perma-invis plus spellcasting through invisibility. And on top of that I managed to land several awesome ultimates just by invis walking into the enemy team and hitting R. Had so much fun that game and as we all know invisibility = invincibility in pubs. I was this gigantic unkillable ninja who would just wander out of the forest and lock down the whole opposing team and then punch them for hundreds of damage whilst they ineffectually attack back. So strong. With that in mind I picked him up again a while later when we needed a support/intiator. It...didn't go so well the second time. Or the third. Or the fourth. In fact I THINK I managed my lowest GPM ever with him (89 GPM, so pro). I've not played him since. >_> | ||
Firebolt145
Lalalaland34490 Posts
How many games of treant do YOU have? | ||
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Nyovne
Netherlands19135 Posts
Edit: TECHIES NAOW, need to get rid of this rubik in my 3 most succesfull heros. | ||
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
Chapter 2: The Blue Period- Visage,Gyrocopter, Spirit Breaker, Luna ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/epgDM8S.png?2) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EuQvYQv.png?1) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CcPFfe5.png?1) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VVCimXH.png?1) By the 50 game mark I was pretty burnt out on Treant. Still, I was determined to play him until I got the (old) performance bar to a 3, which ended up taking 55 games. Finally it was time to branch out. Here is where I formulated the strategy I have stuck to up until this point. Fifty games was way too much, but I did like learning a hero fairly deeply. I decided I would play heroes in chunks so that I could learn heroes well but still have a bit of variety and flexibility. This first chunk will be the subject of my next entry: Visage, Gyrocopter, Spirit Breaker, Luna. My “Blue Period” if you will. So I finally left Treant behind and formulated my new plan: ‘pods’ of four to five heroes each; play 10 straight with each; then ten more with each but all mixed up. How would I pick my first batch? Easy: awesomeness. I pretty much just chose the heroes who seemed the coolest to me. I had loved Treant’s voice-acting, so that became a pretty high priority, but things like lore and skill-names were also pretty important. I picked Visage because he was a huge bat-thing with chains. I remember deciding on Sprit Breaker specifically for his orgasmic level-up scream. Gyrocopter made the cut because he reminded me of Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast along with the fact that three of his spell names reminded me of Unreal Tournament weapons. I picked Luna because she rode a big cat and Mirana didn't didn't have an attack in common with mutalisks. All of these extremely were extremely important to me. + Show Spoiler [Lunalisk] + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1ORrDnk.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/94jnlSw.jpg) Da ba dee da ba die (da ba deeeeeeeee da ba die) The 10 straight to start was a hard and fast rule then. I felt like I was starting to understand basic mechanics and strategy, so team composition became my focus. Forcing myself to pick the same hero in 10 games no matter how dumb it seemed forced me to analyse why some teams worked and others didn’t. Also, laning is such a clusterfuck at that level I pretty much got to play each of these heroes in every position, no matter how random. When I got to chose I would try to pick the best hero for my team, although I still has only vague ideas about what it meant to be a “support” or “carry. Visage ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/epgDM8S.png) From one almost unplayed hero to another. This was before Team Liquid started running Visage so often, and I think when I started playing him he was around third from the bottom on the DotaBuff match list. Funny thing though: I LOVED him. Where I went 17-93-43 in my first 10 games with Treant, I went 96-52-96 with Visage! I got more kills in my first 5 games with Visage than my first 17 with Treant. I think what clicked with me and Visage was how clear the roles for his abilities were. Slow, nuke, tank, stun. It made so much sense! Treant’s skill set was so strange and diverse,, it was hard to know when to use what on whom. Do I cloak then heal? Heal then cloak? Nuke, cloak, heal? Cloak A and heal B? The other way around. Visage’s slow, stun, nukenukenukenuke slow, stun, nukenukenukenuke was a snap by comparison. + Show Spoiler [Quite a sharp improvement] + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/95Q5Epp.png?2) The first signs that I had started to outpace my MMR. Another big step forward for me with Visage was item choice. I started thinking about the role I was playing in the game rather than just going for the coolest item on the recommended list. Yes, I did build three ACs and two Mjolnirs in my first four games, but in my last six I discovered the beauty of mekansm. It was a be a fateful purchase considering how many have bought since. I just couldn’t believe how good it was for its price, yet I never seemed to see it in pubs. Hmmmmm... ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Yp0ZTGE.png?1) Wait... are these builds starting to... make sense? The biggest difference with Visage is that I could actually kill people, and it felt awesome. The most kills I have ever had in a game is still from one of my first Visage games. You can see how fresh I still am with my 45 last hits and my 16k gold bank, but I felt like I was quickly improving. My “hero performance” bar after ten games was almost a five, but even more importantly I was having a lot more fun and feeling much more confident in my skills, a trend that continued throughout this batch. Gyrocopter ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EuQvYQv.png) In a lot of ways Gyrocopter was a breakthrough hero for me. He was the first hero I played who didn’t have a really obvious skill build, and he was the first that could very easily play multiple roles on a team. Little did I know it, but I was slowly dipping my toes into the Dota 2 metagame. Like most noobs, my first games as Gyrocopter were all about the explosions. Max homing missile first, rush Aghanims. Every. Single game. Rocket barrage seemed lame. Sometimes it did a lot of damage, sometimes barely any. It worked well if you caught someone alone, but how often did that happen? I got shadow blade most games because it was listed as core, but I mostly used it for the bonus damage and escaping bad team fights. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7uu50Yu.png) Adventures in itemization But then one game my team told me I was the carry. I protested.Couldn’t they see the character card? "Nuker, intiator, disabler." NOT SUPPORT. Nope, they said I was the carry. I wasn’t ready for this. I had only ever observed carries, watched them from afar as I healed them and and put down my coat so they could cross the river without getting their feet wet. I didn't know what to do. I had always leveled up missile/rocket barrage first as a support/roaming Gyro, so it made sense to me to do the opposite and max flak cannon first. When I inevitably pushed my lane to hell, I went into the dark scary place called the jungle and killed stuff there. When people tried to kill me there, I could just turn on my rocket barrage and suddenly I was all alone again. I was farming. I got 274 last hits that game, probably over double of anything I had ever gotten before. I bought a butterfly, I bought a Linken’s. Suddenly I understood what made Gyrocopter a carry despite Valve’s classifications. I killed shit quick, and it didn't take some sort of amazing skill or talent, I was just that much stronger than the other team due to my items. It all made sense now, which was good, considering my next pickup. + Show Spoiler [How could Valve lie to me like this?] + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/BsWruj4.png?1) IS IT TRUE GABEN? IS IT TRUE?!?! Spirit Breaker ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7aHvMTX.png) Back to melee again. I was nervous picking up my first true carry, since so many of my teammates seemed to resent me for it. My second game as SB my teammates were Slardar, Anti-Mage, Dragon Knight, and Rubick. My third game featured the balanced team of SB, Templar Assassin, Huskar, Bloodseeker, and Sven. I was still at the MMR where rage quitting was very common and in fact every one of my first 5 games as Spirit Breaker had an abandon, giving me a rough 1-4 start. It was strangely lucky though, since it meant that there was plenty of farm to go around and that I got my first last-hitting practice in relatively low-stress circumstances. I loved playing Spirit Breaker, and he is still one of the few carries I am comfortable playing. Hurling myself across the map and just waling on people was so much fun. Having such ridiculous movement speed really suited my play style, and his beefiness, two passives, and random bashes made him my first “dumb” hero that you just send into battle and hope for the best. He was the first hero to join my “60%” club, and the first hero I had a long win streak with. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/PvZjrx2.png) Pro low level team comps. These were back-to-back and All-Pick, by the way. There are two big things I took away from my time with the cow. Lane control. I learned that farming is much more than just last hitting. I had mostly avoided consumables and early survival items before, but playing a melee carry finally broke me of that habit. Stout shield, tangoes, salve suddenly became top tier items in my mind. You can’t farm if you’re not in the lane, and every second spent going to or from base was essentially wasted. Also I realized that farming is much easier if your opponents aren’t. This taught me the value of harassment and bullying. I learned to constantly charge and bluff-charge my lane rivals to give myself space, even if I had no intention of engaging. At the low skill level I was at, it was extremely effective, since a stun and a few bashes are more than enough to scare most new players away. Even more importantly, I bought my first BKB, which wasn’t even an item I fully understood before. Now I knew why I sometimes couldn’t target people with spells, and why heroes randomly seemed bigger in team fights. 4200 is a steep price for a defensive ability in a noob’s mind, but I quickly figured how essential it was to winning a game. Luna ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RbkQQpT.png) I don’t know what it was about Luna. Maybe her skill set just matches my disposition. Maybe my MMR was too slow to catch up with my improving skills. Maybe she’s just a BS OP hero that any noob can use. Whatever it was, I destroyed with her. I won 12 in a row as Luna, finishing at 16-4 in my first 20 games. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1mgAaJP.png) Yet somehow the old performance bar didn't think I was very good at her. I think what actually set me up for my success with Luna was the previous three heroes planting the seeds of several fundamental concepts that germinated all at once. Gyro and Visage being such strong gankers instilled the importance of map control and vision. Because I had never been able to kill heroes 1v1 before, I didn’t really know what sort of openings and patterns gankers looked for. After having gone on the ganking trail myself, I now knew when and where to start looking for enemies in my jungle. I don’t know when I bought my first pair of wards, but the first time I died with wards in my inventory was with Luna. I was dying much less and, even though I was a carry buying and placing wards for myself, because neither my teammates nor my opponents wards the map, it translated to a lot of won team fights. The important lesson that SB and Gyro combined to teach me was the value of the split push. Games at my MMR then reminded me a lot of elementary school soccer games. They start out with all the kids playing their positions and doing their jobs, but they quickly devolve into giant blobs of kids furiously kicking each others shins while the goalies use orange slices to lure cool bugs off the cross bar. How do my early entomological adventures relate to Dota? I realized that a huge chunk of each game was spent with 10 heroes clustered around the mid towers just looking at each other with neither team earning any gold or xp. Since Spirit Breaker could be anywhere on the map pretty quickly, I learned to avoid these standoffs and use the time to farm. Similarly, as Gyrocopter I eventually realized the power of flak cannon to farm entire lanes on my way to my team’s clunky, awkward engagements, something which Luna’s glaives easily mimicked. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Z9kbjdz.jpg) Ohhhhhhh, now I understand. Eventually, I came to see in Dota 2 the thing that underlies almost every good strategy game: resource management. I saw how there were four major sources of income on the map: the three lanes and the jungle, and that the reason every team HAS to have a support is that there just isn’t enough farm to go around. I began to see how punishing the positive feedback loops are, and how the point of having a carry is essentially just taking advantage of them. The fact that these ideas all coalesced at such a low MMR combined with my general RTS experience and the fact that I was playing such a good hero are what allowed me to do so bizarrely well. I started playing much better than the people I was matched against, and I could feel my MMR slowly rising. I still was really lacking in general game knowledge though. I think it was around this point I discovered the shop had a search bar, which really helped me venture away from the recommended item list. One particularly harsh lesson was when I was experimenting with farming methods and I tried to use Eclipse to farm the ancients. It is hard to hide a mistake like that when the sky goes dark over the entire map and then you get killed by a neutral. If only I had known about denying kills using creeps maybe I could have fibbed my way out of the embarrassment and cries of intentional feeding. Awkward. Next up: I decide to play some OP heroes- Jakiro, Faceless Void, Windrunner, Sand King, and Sven. Also, my MMR finally catches up to me :-( | ||
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Carbonyl
United States334 Posts
I love how you are able to piece together your understanding of the game and different roles. I have always wondered what it would be like to have the patience to string together 10-15 games in a row of the same hero of every hero. I feel like by the time you finish this (if you are going to do it with every hero) then you'll be better than me. Which would be highly embarrassing. How often do you play dota? I'm curious. I would even like to copy your exact format, but from an experienced player's perspective. | ||
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shizaep
Canada2920 Posts
And, no joke, that last sentence has me dying in suspense for part 3.  On April 03 2013 13:13 Carbonyl wrote: How often do you play dota? I'm curious. I would even like to copy your exact format, but from an experienced player's perspective. http://dotabuff.com/players/11871696 This guy's dotabuff. | ||
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
On April 03 2013 13:13 Carbonyl wrote: These are awesome, I have to say. It's fun watching as an experience player. I love how you are able to piece together your understanding of the game and different roles. I have always wondered what it would be like to have the patience to string together 10-15 games in a row of the same hero of every hero. I feel like by the time you finish this (if you are going to do it with every hero) then you'll be better than me. Which would be highly embarrassing. How often do you play dota? I'm curious. I would even like to copy your exact format, but from an experienced player's perspective. I've been playing a good amount recently because my real-life situation is kind of in limbo at the moment as I wait to hear back from law schools. You definitely don't have to worry about my skill though. I just played my first 10 games with KotL and I went 2-8 :-( I must be the worst player in history lol Also, copy the format! It can be frustrating but very rewarding. I haven't got to any of my big "turn around" heroes yet, but a good example for me was Pugna. I went on a 1-7 streak with him starting out and thought he/I was terrible. Then something clicked- mostly that he was not nearly has "hard" of a support as I was trying to play him. Since then I am 10-3 with Pugna and he is probably one of my top-three favorite heroes. I'm sure I would have just given up on him if I hadn't forced myself to suffer through. | ||
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Malecious
Finland167 Posts
On April 04 2013 01:41 pullarius1 wrote: I've been playing a good amount recently because my real-life situation is kind of in limbo at the moment as I wait to hear back from law schools. You definitely don't have to worry about my skill though. I just played my first 10 games with KotL and I went 2-8 :-( I must be the worst player in history lol Also, copy the format! It can be frustrating but very rewarding. I haven't got to any of my big "turn around" heroes yet, but a good example for me was Pugna. I went on a 1-7 streak with him starting out and thought he/I was terrible. Then something clicked- mostly that he was not nearly has "hard" of a support as I was trying to play him. Since then I am 10-3 with Pugna and he is probably one of my top-three favorite heroes. I'm sure I would have just given up on him if I hadn't forced myself to suffer through. You are actually pretty decent player, atleast based on the stuff I have read. Not many people that just start playing the game realise by themselfs to get wards, how OP mek is etc. I think you are doing pretty good for new player. | ||
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fishbowl
United States1575 Posts
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
Chapter 3: Tier Whoring ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kXyU7Fes.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ig12Q1Bs.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1y0rN68s.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/aocAJnis.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KLPXGqts.png) It was around this time that I started watching competitive Dota 2 somewhat regularly and began paying attention to what the pros do. DreamHack Winter was the first tournament I watched where I had any idea what was going on. Throughout the weekend, I realized that I enjoyed spectating much much more when a hero I “knew” was being played, which at that point was pretty much only Luna (Gyrocopter was still under the radar it seemed). To fix this, I decided to tier whore a little bit and play some of the heroes I saw most often in matches. It was a tough decision to make, since tier-whoring goes really hard against my natural gaming instincts. I am very much the sort of player that values creativity and clever solutions over mimicry of others’ success. (If you are familiar with the MTG pyschographic profiles, I am very much a Johnny-Spike, with a good dash of Vorthos as well.) This has caused a very frustrating trend: I tend to underperform with “good” heroes that have very firmly established roles or builds. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/vxJRTIQ.png) Jakiro ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kXyU7Fe.png) Jakiro was the hero that most responsible for making me the player I am today. He (they?) made fall in love with playing support, and since this somewhat disastrous batch of heroes I haven’t played anything else. Before playing Jakiro I, like most new (and many experienced) players viewed having to play support as drawing the short end of the magic branch. You don’t get any fun items, you are constantly dying, and the whole game revolves around... well... supporting the other players on your team. At this MMR I was still playing games that went to 20 minutes with no courier and entire games without wards. As I learned to play Jakiro, though, my perspective totally changed. I figured out that the thing that defines a good support hero is that you don’t NEED farm to be effective, precisely because your spells are naturally so powerful. At level 1, Jakiro can stun an entire team. At level 2, he can easily bully someone out of a lane with flame breath. At level 3 entire lanes and towers start to melt... all with just brown boots and a ring of basilius. One funny thing: the ice path nerf, which came smack in the middle of my time with him, actually made me like Jakiro more. With the reduced damage, spamming it in lane became a much less efficient use of mana and farm. This allowed me to focus less on maxing my mana regen as soon as possible and allowed for a little bit more diversity in builds since all of his skills now scaled significantly with each level. Playing such a strong support meant that the early game got much more interesting. The first eight or so levels could play out so differently depending on how the game was going. Do I need stuns to protect my carry? Do I need slow/damage to harass the enemy’s carry? Can we/should we take an early tower? Is the laning phase breaking own especially early or late? The limited resources that supports have make decision-making feel much more important and challenging, since every point of mana and hp is so precious and every tiny advantage feels like a huge boon. For instance, Jakiro was the first hero I delayed my ultimate on, which felt like a big step at the time. I also had to think very carefully about my items. Figuring out pipe/Shiva’s/Eul’s/force staff forced me to envision what my team needed to happen in order to win and evaluate how I could best contribute to that. Thus: wards, tps, branches, and couriers began to look like amazing deals rather than frustrating obligations. To sum up, the thing about Jakiro that clicked with me was that playing him well depended so much on game-state analysis and short/long-term prediction. Especially his stun and ultimate, with their significant casting delay and long persistence on the battlefield, essentially required thinking 1-5 whole seconds ahead in a team fight as well as extreme patience to wait for just the right angle to maximize their effects. This felt much more “me” than Overgrowth/Call Down/ Eclipse/Nether Strike/Familiar Stuns which were very much blunt, twitchy weapons with very straightforward uses. Faceless Void ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ig12Q1B.png) Just as Jakiro made me love playing support, Faceless Void made me absolutely loathe playing carry. My first few games with him were awful. Even aside from the fact that players at my level then very rarely let a hard carry just farm in peace, I soon figured out that I just don’t have the proper disposition. Just like I had misinterpreted what it was to be a support, I also had a very skewed idea of what it was to play a true carry. Spirit Breaker, Gyro, and Luna all could make up lost farm easily through split pushing, were relatively difficult to gank even alone, and had very powerful level-one ults. Each of them could jump into teamfights no problem. Because I associated “carry=strong,” when I first started playing Faceless Void, I always wanted to jump into team fights or help gank or tp to defend towers. It didn’t take me long to realize that it doesn’t work like that with most carries. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Xd2zzcul.png) The counterpoint to my support revelation was that most carries are inherently weak without items. The entire purpose of a carry is that it scales very well with levels and gold. This means that the skills that make a carry strong late game, in FV’s case bash, evasion, and a damageless disable, are relatively useless in the early game. Dodging a 60 damage autoattack 10% of the time just isn’t that meaningful, nor is a random 1-second stun, since all it gives you is a single extra 60 damage autoattack of your own. This all took a while to sink in. It mostly had to be forcefully pounded into my skull as I got 4-man chronospheres at level six, proceeded to bring one hero down to 40% life with my wand and treads, and then just died over and over and over again. But I slowly learned the keys to playing carry for real: always farm, always retreat, always farm, let your supports die, always farm, and never put yourself in any danger unless you specifically will benefit from it. And always farm. The realization did not make playing FV any more fun for me. Even when I was succeeding at playing my role, the rest of the team would spend most of the game bitching that I wasn’t helping with team fights. And when I gave in and helped with teamfights, they would end up bitching that I didn’t have any items. It was infuriating, and it hurt me so much to feel like such a non-team-player. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/gGnL1Yz.png) One thing that I did learn well from Faceless Void was the importance of survival. Evasion, armor, time walk, blocking, consumables... I finally started doing research into game mechanics and reading guides, which is always the first sign for me of starting to get really into a game. Windrunner ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1y0rN68.png) Windrunner was a strange hero for me. I still have unfinished business with her, since there was a huge discrepancy between how good I felt I was with her and how well I actually performed in terms of my win/loss rate. At the time I first wrote down these notes, Windrunner was second from the top of my Dotabuff “Game Impact” list, but was close to the bottom in both the (old) hero performance chart and my win percentage. I think part of this was self-selecting though. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hCCTbQ5l.png) Since I was finally starting to understand hero roles, and since I had suffered so much as Faceless Void when I didn’t have good supports, (or a good mid, or if their carry got free farm), I became very sensitive to roles while laning. What I loved so much about Windtunner was that she could play literally any role in the standard pub 2-1-2 setup. Because of this flexibility I tended to pick her mostly when I had no idea what my team was thinking for lanes. Everyone on my team randoms? Pick Windrunner. Team full of Cyrillic and people are already shouting during hero selection? Pick Windrunner. Someone calls mid with Ogre Magi? Windrunner. As a result I found that I was usually picking Windrunner in games that I had already given up on. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZOAClIm.png) I never learned how to play Windrunner that well in any specific role. Sometimes I was mid, sometimes semi-carry, sometimes solo offlane, sometimes hard support. Often my role would even switch midgame, as it often does in lower level pubs, as supports would get frustrated and start farming, or carries give up entirely on their lane to go ganking. Despite all this there were a few things I took away from Windrunner. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XxiTzris.png) Always skill your escape until you aren’t dying anymore. Because Faceless Void had such a clunky escape mechanism and because he could always throw out the lazy defensive ult, I got used to putting a single point into Windrun and then forgetting about it. This very predictably led to me dying a lot, often because I felt so safe. Also, Windrun made me think about the split between magic and physical damage I was taking. I had made BKB’s before, but that was almost entirely to avoid stuns and other CC. Being immune to physical damage took a lot of time getting used to, as some heroes you would be completely protected from but others didn’t mind your physical immunity at all. Windrun.jprg ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VOsNymks.png) Positioning, positioning, positioning. I started to play more games with my ESFI friends again since I began to feel like I could hang with them at around our combined MMR. This was great because there were a lot of good Dota players who I could ask stuff of without feeling too dumb. One time I asked “Why is force staff a recommended item on Windrunner?” After an incredulous pause I got the answer “to hit your shackles better.” Oh. Duh. I had always thought of force staff as an escape item, which Windrunner doesn’t really need. Now instead of windrunning my way into position only to have have my targets move and screw things up in the duration, I could catapault myself to the edges of the fight and get off the perfect shots. How had I not thought of that? ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/W8NrVWys.png) It’s never worth it. Along with Windrun, Powershot is a huge trap that got me killed quite often at first. It’s sooooo tempting to stay for that next cooldown to hit the perfect skill shot, or to last hit that one ranged creep. No. Don’t do it. They know you want to, and they are waiting for you. Always. powershot.jpeg Sand King ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/aocAJni.png) Sand King was the first hero I made a complete turnaround with. When I first played him I felt completely lost. His skills were so strange and he didn’t really fit into the support or the carry role. He seemed to need a bunch of farm early to get his ult, some mana, and his blink dagger, but after that everything else was extraneous. Like a support he is useful mainly for his abilities, but like a carry it is very difficult for him to do damage without a certain level of experience and gold. I got off to a very depressing 1-4 start, but then I had a revelation. I was playing an ESFI in-house game and ended up as a solo Windrunner against my first ever tri-lane. I had played in them before but never soloed against one. I asked our team captain what exactly I should look to accomplish playing 1v3. He said, “Nothing, just sit in lane, leech XP and don’t die.” Oh for fuck’s sake, really? That’s the secret I was missing? It was infuriating to find out that I was making it so hard on myself. I had thought that the off-laner was supposed to be contesting farm and denying xp. Nope. “The most you should be farming is maybe one creep per powershot... if you’re lucky.” That was the day I learned the power of doing nothing. It’s funny because it is some sort of zen lesson that I have to relearn in every game I play: sometimes the best course of action is inaction, no matter how useless or painful it feels. It is a lesson that I still need to reteach myself in Dota 2 whenever I die trying to sneak an aggressive ward or farm a little bit too far away from the tower. Sometimes you attack, sometimes you defend, but sometimes you just have to wait. Anyway, that was my huge breakthrough with Sand King. After seeing how many levels I gained compared to the opposing supports in the tri-lane I realized how much easier Sand King could be. I didn’t need to last hit with burrow strikes or keep darting in to cause caustic finale damage or try to farm the enemy jungle with Sand Storm. All I had to do was stay safe, get my ult, and then run around the map and cause havoc. And above all don’t die. Once I figured out that should always save my mana for defensive sand storms and escaping burrow strikes, Blink Dagger started coming a lot earlier and I was able to have a much bigger impact in my games. After my 1-4 start I ended up going 14-4 for the rest of my games with SK, and finished on an 8-game win streak with him. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/QcRJbTq.png) And so I went from Aghanim’s/Veil of Discord sort of Sand King to a double-bracer/Blade Mail sort of Sand King and ended up really liking him. I also learned the ways of the blink initiator for the first time, which was a somewhat difficult process. Here are all the ways I remember screwing up: *Blink-epicenter-cancel-into-burrowstrike *Burrowstrike-epicenter-blink, causing every wave to miss *Blink-epicenter-OOM-waddle slowly after the retreating enemies. *Blink-epicenter-misclick sandstorm-spend the entire ult just to the right of the fight realigning hands *Blink-epicenter-omg I’m not close enough-burrow strike away. . Eventually the combination of shift-queuing and muscle memory made these failures somewhat more rare. Sven ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KLPXGqt.png) I was not planning for this “pod” to be five heroes, but after the teamwipe cleave at Dreamhack Winter I had to try him. Besides, who doesn’t love tall Swedish men with huge... swords and horny... hats who you can hire to... kill people? By this point I knew carrying wasn’t for me, but hey, Sven is listed as a support hero too, how bad could it be? Wrong. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/p9rntcNl.png) If you take all the problems I had with Windrunner and combine them with the ones I had as Faceless Void, you pretty much get the issues I had with Sven. I was all over the place with my builds, I had no idea when I should start teamfighting, I would consistently overestimate my warcry’s escape value and my red barbarian strength and underestimate my opponents’ ability to fight. Half the time I thought I could own some dude I would end up failing miserably, and half the time I thought attacking was certain death my lane-mate would say “wtf u watin for.. go in noob.” and it would be an easy kill. Overall I just sucked it up and died. A lot. This “don’t die” lesson is probably getting a bit repetitive, but it is something I have a hard time with. In pretty much every game I play, I am an attrition player. I like wearing opponents down with long, frustrating grinds and constantly trying to force mistakes through constant interaction. In the FPS genre, for instance, It is why I am pretty bad at realistic shooters like CounterStrike but fairly good Unreal Tournament and Tribes. I like having lots of kills and lots of deaths and constantly probing for weaknesses. This is an extremely detrimental habit in Dota. A kill is very often not worth a death, and while I may learn from each skirmish, by the time I figure something out things may have already snowballed out of control. At this point I was also getting pretty frustrated with how little I felt I knew about the vast array of heroes and items in the game. One of my biggest weaknesses as Sven was my difficulty in predicting which fights were winnable, even 1v1 duels where I knew all of the items on both sides. This, plus the fact that I had loved Jakiro so much, pushed me to focus my strategy. Kind of. From this point on I would only play support. This brings the journal somewhat into the “modern” era of me playing. I had finally plateau’d in terms of MMR, I had overcome my first big slumps, and I now had a solid grasp of most of the fundamentals of the game.The quest to learn all the supports is still going on. Also, now there are only three more batches (15 heroes) to go to catch this journal up to the present! Up next: Support Smorgasbord- Lina, Tidehunter, Leshrac, Earthshaker, and Venomancer | ||
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Malecious
Finland167 Posts
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
Chapter 4: Support Smorgasbord In the last batch I had decided that I was a support player at heart, but I still wasn’t 100% sure what that meant. I had learned the fundamental differences between support and carry, but I still wasn’t entirely sure what made a support hero good or what skills a good support player should work on. This is the batch where I started to figure out some of these concepts. To help figure things out I tried to pick the most diverse set of heroes I possibly could. I wanted common heroes, uncommon heroes, strength, agility, and intelligence heroes, big ults, bad ults- for pretty much every quality I could think of I wanted a spectrum of it. It makes sense, then, that this batch was a wild ride for me. I had the most frustrating slumps I’ve ever had but also some of the best winning streaks. It didn’t help that I was home for the holidays over a chunk of this period, meaning family stresses, the Greeviling, and the G-League all had strange effects on my play. The first meant I never felt 100% comfortable playing, since I never knew when some family obligation would interrupt or if I would be made to feel guilty about “hiding in my room” later. The second was of course just a source of endless frustration since the Greeviling somehow brought out people’s rage a 1000 times more than normal games, and I never learned that it was a terrible idea to play a game to “wind down” or “warm up.” The G-League, which was the first league I followed regularly, further quickened my support disposition. When I saw the top tier supports with just brown boots and a few branches at 15:00 in, I thought it was amazing, and that level of dedication to the position kind of became my goal, which I slowly learned was not the best idea in pub games with very little communication. Lina ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3HWsvrf.png) Lina was the most standard support hero in this batch, and in some ways was the first ‘normal” support I played. Her skills are all very support-y: AOE nuke, AOE stun, giganto-nuke, and a passive you ignore. She is a great hero to learn support on because there are many supportitudes that become obvious fast... mostly by necessity.
Tidehunter ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/nvb3Qns.png) In some ways Tidehunter has even more of a limited roll late game than Lina. Not because his other spells are that weak, but because the most useful thing you can do is ALWAYS to get off a big ravage. Period. Everything you do or build or skill needs to be 100% dedicated to accomplishing that goal. Blink is a must, and my first games with Tide were very vexing for me as I tried to reconcile the fact that I was a support, and so shouldn’t be farming, with the fact that I needed blink dagger so badly. It is actually an issue that I still don’t entirely know how to deal with, especially in pubs. + Show Spoiler [Off-topic rant] + For instance, the other day in an all-random game I was laning as an SD with an Ogre Magi because we had only one carry on our team. He got dived and killed, but I managed to get first blood and two more kills off of it, putting me really close to mana boots even after upgrading the courier and buying fresh wards. So I thought, ok, I’ll just grab a couple more creep kills (I was ~300g away) so Magi and I can have a mana party in bot lane. He got FURIOUS that I would steal his farm, especially when I tried to explain that me having mana boots would help HIM farm better. This is actually something that really annoys me in pubs. Carries always seem to think that I am somehow conspiring to steal their farm, like it is inconceivable that someone would actually play their role. Not that I blame them, since I’ve had to play with bad supports before, but I just wish they’d give me the benefit of the doubt before insisting on going solo safe lane with PL and then just dying over and over. It is especially bad because 2150 is SO MUCH GOLD for a support, and even one death feels like a kick to the face, meaning I tried so hard to NEVER DIE. And of course Refresher Orb is pretty much an insta-gg on Tidehunter, but that is something of a win-more item, and even though I yearned for it, I realized that it was not a super-efficient use of gold in terms of increasing the percentage of actually winning a match. In fact, I never managed to get a Refresher in the first X games I played with him, I only managed to experience the wonderfulness of Refresher Ravage a few days ago, and man was it glorious. Tide’s other abilities are great too, although it took some time before I learned to appreciate them, mainly because they represented a bunch of core mechanics that I hadn’t encountered before: slow, negative armor, %damage reduction, block, and purge. Oh wow, I just realized how diverse Tide’s abilities really are. Anchor smash is outrageously efficient in terms of potential dps/mana in the early game, and even late game a straight 40% damage reduction can easily turn a fight around. Gush’s slow stays relevant all game, and 5 armor reduction is nothing to scoff at either. Kraken Shell is an odd one to me still, though. It is very difficult for me to put an accurate value on blocking, and the the purge component of it is still a bit over my head in that I am completely unaware of when it activates and what it gets rid of. That is definitely a part of theory-crafting I could use some work on. Leshrac ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/lALiAkD.png) Ohhhh Leshrac. Leshy is one of my favorite heroes even now, and the first times I played with him I was completely in love. He is just so outrageously flexible and interesting to play. His three different skills all offer such utility in so many circumstances. He can farm, he can hard support, he can gank, he can mid, I have even played him solo offlane using lightning and split earth to last hit. Almost every possible skill build could be useful in some conceivable situation, which makes for a lot of replayablility and strategy. Leshrac was also the first hero I played mid with regularly, which was a very... educational experience for me since it was the only role I had not yet had much experience with. Playing “support mid” was great because it meant I got to rack up those support items so fast, but I often wound up going for a more carry build with bloodstone because I saw how much more it affected the game. This was an odd realization for me- that the best way I could “support” my team was to buy such an expensive item, but it wasn’t hard to notice that having an always-on ultimate was much more useful in most teamfights than mek/pipe, plus the giant heal if I happen to die. Along with Bloodstone, Leshrac was one of the first heroes I regularly built Urn and Phase Boots on. This gave rise to an odd roll that I hadn’t played before: the survivor. Whereas with Lina and Tidehunter you could get off your big spells, die, and not feel too bad, with Bloodstone/ Edict/Urn/ and Pulse Nova, along with his high mana pool and extremely low cooldown stun, Leshrac is highly incentivized to NEVER DIE, a theme in this blog by now. I think it would be interesting, by the way, if Leshrac could release his Bloodstone heal at will with a cooldown, kind of like Shadow Fiend’s ultimate, maybe even with a suicide death as a cost. Oh! Or maybe it drains 1600 hp from you like a reverse Soul Rip. Anyway, I was very confused why phase boots were even recommended on Leshrac, but I was soon convinced after learning the power of Edict and the importance of being able to dart around fights to keep key heroes in range. Venomancer and Earthshaker: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/aP01Skz.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pNgXw1g.png) I’m doing these two together because they combined to form my worst slump to date in Dota 2. I still feel uneasy when I play these two heroes, and have an immense mental block with them. As mentioned before, I was at home for these two heroes, stressing about my family, my future, and feeling really bad about life in general. I think this sort of personal turmoil really hurt my play with these two heroes, who are all about confidence and assertion, which caused me to spiral into a nasty feedback loop. These two heroes are similar in that they have very difficult skill shots, can affect terrain in teamfights, and have devastating low-radius ultimates. Earthshaker’s Fissure is probably the highest-impact spell in the game for its mana cost, maybe second to Clockwerk’s cogs. It can turn fights around in either direction and gives ES huge power to intiate, counterinitate, uninitiate, cover a retreat, or block an enemy’s escape. The problem is that it has an outrageously long cast time and a very particular hitbox, meaning that you will often go astray and misjudge a situation, misanticipate the flow of the fight, misplace which side someone will end up on, or just miss your target altogether, often with disastrous consequences. These incredibly slight errors will turn a fleeing teammate into a trapped victim, a 4v3 teamfight into a 2v3 with two teammates stuck as helpless bystanders, or a doomed enemy into a thankful survivor with just a couple pixels’ error. The worst part of it is that poor play is totally self-perpetuating. A mediocre fissure leads to a missed kill leads to hesitation leads to a bad fissure leads to a dead ally leads to a horrible fissure leads to a raging team leads to omgIamtheworstDotaplayerevermyteamliterallywouldhavebeenbetteroff4v5Illbeinthebathtubcrying. It didn’t help any that I had committed myself to playing 20 games with him, the last half of which felt like pure agony. The case with Venomancer is similar but less extreme. Gale is a really slow and short-ranged projectile, and since you are expected to initiate with it so often, missed ones are always noticed and ridiculed, which leads to the same Earthshaker feedback loop, since the thing you need to hit a slow-moving skillshot is not MORE hesitation and LESS confidence. Also, plague wards, which seem like the easiest of all skills, takes a lot of resolve to use well because it is so momentum based. First, 15g is no small sum on a 5s cooldown. Giving away plague wards for free is an easy way to lose a lane. Also, plague wards are usless in small numbers for anything but scouting, meaning that hitting a critical mass is extremely important. But you will never hit that threshold if you are constantly worrying “Can we push/hold this? Should I just retreat? I’ll never get enough down. This probably a bad idea.” I so often ended up with only a couple wards down at any one time because I was so paranoid of giving away free farm. Also, Plague Wards itself is a heavily scaling ability, mostly useful at level 3 and 4. But so is Gale. If you decide to go max Wards or max Gale and then change your mind to other, you could end up level 2-1-2-1 at level 6, making you pretty much a creep that can slow. (I now know that max-ward is really the only sensible build in most situations, but at the time I thought Gale ticked every second instead of every three :-/ so I really overestimated how much Gale scaled. I’m keeping this in because it reflects my thought processes at the time.) Another way I misplayed these two heroes is that I put far too high a premium on Blink Dagger in order to get off Poison Nova/Echo Slam. After playing with Tidehunter I got so used to relying on Blink for AOE ultimates that I felt helpless without it. I would always be so trepidatious about running in, and I would just hang out on the periphery of teamfights until I thought it was safe. On the flip side when I finally got blink dagger, I was far too adventurous with it, blinking in and ulting like I had a team-disabling Ravage, rather than just a high-dps Call Down. This was a problem because both Earthshaker and Venomancer have uses in fights beyond the initial ultimate. Earthshaker’s Totem/Aftershock combo is a 1.5 second stun on a FIVE SECOND COOLDOWN. Combined with Fissure that’s 3 seconds of AOE disable every eight seconds. Venomancer can slow heroes for 9 seconds with every attack and be constantly laying down wards, gumming up the enemy worse than a Shiva’s blast, especially if the fight goes long. But you can’t do any of that stuff if you just commit yourself to dying instantly because you think you’re terrible. You become a liability instead of an asset. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/R5FcRVh.png) Not even the prestigious Team MAC could save me from the most deaths in my Dota career. I set my Most Deaths record as an Earthshaker, going 5-19-8 in a true stomping. He tops my Deaths/Game on Dotabuff and actually has fewer kills/game than my Treant Protector. Venomancer is up there too, with a measly 3.3 kills/game despite being one of the first-bloodiest, gankiest heroes there is. I really feel like I have unfinished business with these two, and I want to get back to them sometime. Actually, as I’m writing this I have put my new-hero program on hold so I can catch the journal up, and one of the things I’m doing is playing old heroes I never got a grip on. Perhaps I will continue that goal once I “finish” the supports. A good, if unreasonable, goal would be to have at least a 50% winrate with every hero I’ve learned, although that might take quite a while. Up next: Evil Supports, or Why Voice Acting is the Best Part of a Hero: Bane, Disruptor, Dark Seer, Shadow Demon, Pugna | ||
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
This is a little thing I typed up after a particularly frustrating game. Figured it was pretty journal like, so I decided to stick it in here. It frustrates me so much more to play as a carry with bad supports than it does a support with a bad carry. Supports are the structural base of a team, and when they don’t do their job everything starts to fall apart. Yes, it is a very hopeless feeling when the enemy’s carry outfarms your carry and you eventually just become food for him, but that is pretty much what happens in every game of Dota anyway- either your carry becomes unstoppable, or theirs does. It’s just part of the game (which, by the way, is why I often end up feeling more kinship with the opposing supports than I do my own team). And yes, you may disagree with your carry’s choice of items or his skill build, but everyone plays the game differently and has their own ideas about what strategy. However, if a support doesn’t buy wards, or upgrade a courier, or yield last hits, those are all intentional neglects of their roles in the game. That isn’t just playing poorly, it is playing ignorantly, and it drives me crazy. The other day I played a random draft and got to pick first. I grabbed Luna because she seemed to be the best carry in the pool and immediately typed in chat “I’ll swap for a support if nobody likes playing it.” Of course, nobody ends up picking a hard support, and I immediately know that we are in trouble. Obviously nobody buys wards and the courier stayed landbound for quite a while. The Windrunner I’m sharing a lane with keeps auto-attacking the lane and trying to steal my CS. When she sees that she won’t be able to swipe enough farm, she just leaves and starts pulling the creep wave without denying or stacking, meaning the lane is constantly pushed across the river. The build she needed all that gold for? Energy booster FIRST into arcane boots. When our tier one inevitably falls, she just leaves the lane, leaving me wide open to ganks, which happen often since we are still wardless. When we lose, of course, she rags on our Slark for feeding. I very calmly point out “No, we lost because nobody was playing support.” It wouldn’t usually anger me so much, but I even said that I would swap for a support if nobody wanted to play it. This is why I play support. Not because of some sort of altruism or nourishing personality, but because I can’t fucking stand playing a game where the supports don’t do their jobs, and I end up playing so much worse for it. | ||
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owd3HpCl46M Definitely a rough first go, but let me know what parts of it were good or bad. | ||
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Nalmissra
4 Posts
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pullarius1
United States522 Posts
Evil Supports: Bane, Disruptor, Dark Seer, Shadow Demon, Pugna ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/c2u0tHts.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CtcHgjis.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7niccpws.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kSiLWWKs.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CHhu1eos.png) After having so much trouble with Venomancer and Earthshaker, I decided that my next batch should just be heroes I wanted to play for whatever reason. I had gotten the chance to sample a lot of heroes during Diretide/Frostivus and there were a bunch of heroes I had been wanting to play from seeing them in tournaments, so instead of meticulously planning this group, I just went ahead and played the heroes that most interested me. It probably says a lot about my personality that the common theme was bizarrely evil supports with very frustrating abilities. Bane ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/c2u0tHt.png) I choose Bane primarily because of his voice-acting. His laughs and slurps and maniacal chattering meant that even when I was losing I was enjoying the game. He is also one of the few heroes that seems to be genuinely having a good time in the game. So it ended up being a happy surprise that he is also an extremely powerful support that suits my playstyle. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a support really top tier. Obviously the primary attribute of a good support is having spells that stay relevant throughout the game with little-to-no farm. Disables are the most basic such spell, and BKB-disables are even better. Bane has a crazy THREE disables, and even though two of them are a bit atypical, when taken as a barrage of spells they really can cripple a team. The general pattern I fell into was 1)sleep the tank, 2)enfeeble the dps 3)grip the squishy stunner. Obviously it not always as clean as that, but any team fight where Bane can get all three of those spells off on good targets is bound to go wll for his team. The fact that Enfeeble persists through BKB and that Grip can lock a BKB’d hero down for most of a magic-immune charge is icing on the nightmare cake. This vast array of skills means Bane has a huge skill ceiling, and I am constantly wondering at the pros who seem to use him perfectly. Sleep, for instance, is such a tricky skill to use correctly. When I first started playing Bane I was constantly casting it on the wrong heroes at bad times and causing tons of very deserved rage from my teammates. I remember when I first realized that you could defensively sleep teammates for the brief second of immunity. I was so proud of my new insight that I would just sleep my teammates at the first hint of danger and then die or get stunned before I could wake him up. Even more common was accidentally saving an enemy by sleeping him when my carry was whaling on him, sleeping my teammate in the process. Also, one important lesson was that, if you have to sleep a hero to give your team a chance to get to you, chances are the other team is on their way as well. A lot of ugly teamfights can result from a hero slept in an inopportune place. On the plus side, learning to sleep at the right times meant I had to learn a lot about other heroes and the interactions between abilities. Another good thing for a support to have is some sort of survivability. Bane’s 2.1 strength AND agility gain help a lot with this. Also, he is a good hero for placing risky wards, because if you get caught but not disabled you can sleep one target and enfeeble another, meaning you can often escape to safety. My biggest reservation about bane is his lackluster intelligence gain (the worst of all intelligence heroes), especially considering the high mana costs and low cool-down of his spells. He needs a certain level of farm that isn’t always there for a true support. At level 16 his base mana pool is 715, but the sum mana cost of his spells is 1090. Even at level 25 he still only has 1200 mana to work with. It feels so essential to get those early brain sap kills in order to justify the amount of farm you need, and if your team isn’t cooperative you can easily end up starved for mana, and it can be difficult to make up for a bad start since Bane has almost no jungling or flash farming potential. Disruptor ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CtcHgji.png) This is the one non-evil hero lore-wise in this batch, which is funny because he is probably one of the evilest in terms of gameplay. A good Disruptor can be so frustrating to play against, and he is maybe the best hero for punishing an indecisive or overly aggressive team in the mid-game. I wish I had some more interesting insights or struggles with Disruptor, but once you get down the rhythm of Glimpse, Field, Storm, the hero is pretty straightforward. I actually really wish you could glimpse allies just to give Disruptor a few more tactical options, but I’m sure that would be even more of a shitshow in pubs than Bane’s sleep. A sweet Disruptor ultimate The biggest problem with Disruptor, though, is that he sometimes feels like a win-more hero. He is brutal if your team gets ahead because suddenly nowhere on the map is safe anymore and retreating is never a reliable option. But if your team starts to fall behind, Disruptor can start to feel really weak if the opposing team isn’t making any mistakes. If the enemy team is running at you and you can’t fight, you glimpse away their carry or initiator, but you’re just buying a few seconds until he’s back. Except for the rare times when a hero is about to respawn or a tower fall, those extra seconds usually won’t change the outcome of a fight unless the enemy team makes some terrible mistake. So they engage on your team and you manage to force field their carry and Static Storm him. Well it’s an agility carry with more than enough HP and no real killer spells, so they either just wait until they are released or even fight in the field itself. So many times I’ve seen my carry die to the enemy carry in the middle of a Static Storm because he simply was behind on farm and could out-DPS him. Unless you manage to cast it just as the initiator is coming in, or unless all the opponents’ damage is spell-based, there just isn’t much a disruptor can do in a losing teamfight. As a result, I never felt like I was having a huge impact on my team’s chances of winning. One of the few times a Glimpse can help a bad team fight Dark Seer ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7niccpw.png) Dark Seer marked a slow change in the way I was approaching learning heroes. Up until this point, I would play 10 games in a row with a hero no matter what. Even if there was no synergy with teammates and the lanes made no sense and I was specifically asked not to pick a hero, I would. I did this in part because I hate when four players all rush to hit random and then leave you to pick up the pieces, but also because I was still trying to get a feel for why different lanes or hero combinations worked or failed. Dark Seer was the end of that. Dark Seer desperately wants to solo off-lane, or at least jungle. He wants to push the off lane right up carry’s ass and do everything he can to make the opponent's safe lane a living hell. But so often I would end up playing off-lane support in the standard 2-1-2 pub lanes, and it was so frustrating to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I would try cheeky plays like putting an ion shell on the opposing ranged creep to harass the carry, or using vacuum to mess up last hitting, or trying to bully the opposing heroes with Orb of Venom taps + self-cast ion shells. But any decent team easily finds a way around all that, and I usually end up distracting my own carry just as much as the enemy. I eventually learned that the best thing was usually just to farm the opponent’s jungle, and then surge over to help when I felt like trouble was looming. A terrible Vacuum The feeling of being alone in the suicide lane was so different. I was free to run around annoying people and grabbing up as much farm as I could. I loved my different “super support” builds of mek/pipe/shiva or drums/vlads/necro. In big teamfights I was able to tank so much damage and act like a little healing station running around the fight providing an arsenal of passive buffs to my entire team. And in smaller fights I felt like an annoying wedding photographer, using my abilities to shape the battlefield exactly how I wanted. “Oh Jakiro honey, could you move a little bit closer to our Antimage. Oh thanks, you’re a doll. And then we’ll let our Tidehunter escape like this and give our little Centaur a smidge more melee DPS riiiiiiight here, and, voila! A teamwipe.” But all of that power is predicated on getting the levels, survivability, and mana pool to sustain constant casting for entire fights, and you just don’t get that anywhere but the offlane, alone. I originally had a fairly bad losing record with Dark Seer precisely because I had been trying to force him into team compositions that didn’t make sense. Once I “finished” him, though, and I was learning a new hero that couldn’t really offlane but would have to, I would substitute Dark Seer in and be able to play a “real” game with him. Once I started that, I quickly redeemed my record with him. Also, in contrast to Disruptor, a good Dark Seer can have a huge impact on a losing game. Even if your carry is getting bad farm, Dark Seer can keep the opposing carry down too. Dark Seer can very quickly split push without getting caught to buy time for your team, and is slippery enough to place crucial wards in spots that other supports wouldn’t be safe approaching. Also, the vacuum/wall initiation is so powerful not only on its own but especially with other huge AOE spells that are so common in pubs. And, of course, aghs/refresher wall is the perfect combo to “punish” an opposing team for getting too far ahead. I think it is the only ability in the game that makes illusions that do more damage than the originals... and can copy all five opponents... and can remake copies that are killed. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wjR7Kwbl.jpg) The crown jewel of comeback spells One last thought, just because it took me awhile to appreciate: Vaccum itself is an extremely strong ability. Even ignoring its friend Wall of Replica and its combo potential with other heroes, the ability to reposition multiple heroes to a precise point on the map over a 550 radius while stunning them for .3 seconds is off-the-wall crazy, which is why it has been hit with so many nerfs. Since patch 6.60, Vaccuum has had: its cast range nerfed, its damage nerfed, its magic immunity effect nerfed, its AOE nerfed, its cast range nerfed AGAIN, and its cooldown nerfed a whopping three times from 16 to 19 to 22 to 24. Before playing Dark Seer, I had always thought of Vacuum as “that thing you pull people into walls with”, but now it is just as signature a spell to me as Ion Shell or Surge. Shadow Demon ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kSiLWWK.png) I had avoided playing Shadow Demon up until this point for two big reasons.FIrst- all of his skills seemed very wordy and complicated, and I didn’t feel like taking the time to really figure them out. Second- his model on the map looks like a dude in a bad rubber suit from an old-school Godzilla movie. Or maybe one of the embiggened villains from the original Power Rangers. I managed to get over the first point, but the second still bothers me. In fact, I probably still wouldn’t have played Shadow Demon if it weren’t for how effectively the pros played him in tournaments. Shadow Demon was also one of the first heroes where I start blindly copying builds from pro players without knowing why they were good. For the first many games, being the scrub that I am, I maxed Shadow Poison first, since spamming it wildly at my opposing lanemates was obviously the best thing I could be doing for my team. I mean come on, 720 damage for four stacks is awesome! Oh, of course I will hit the enemies every time and not nuke down entire creep waves for like 100 damage at level one. And, yes, I promise I will always keep mana open for Disruption in case you get ganked, and never will I ever spend every last mana point I have by level two in desperate attempts at harassment, 70 one-stack damage bursts at a time. But then I noticed pros seemed to prioritize Soul Catcher, the hmmmm-do-I-max-this-or-get-stats ability that was impossible to hit and made barely any difference anyway. But I was struggling with the hero so I thought I might as well just try it out. And of course I quickly learned that Soul Catcher was a huge part of Shadow Demon’s arsenal. It seems so obvious now, but if you are doing 20%-40% extra damage at levels 2-5, you just win fights. It is simple math. And once I realized this, the spell that was impossible to hit started to become the spell that always seemed to find openings. Heroes can’t be with their creep wave 100% of the time, and when you have an ability that can hold them still for 2.5 seconds, they always need to be afraid of you. I got off to a rough start with Shadow Demon, mostly because I was playing him entirely wrong. First off, I viewed Disruption as a primarily offensive spell rather than a defensive one, which I now understand is completely backwards. I would use Disruption to initiate on a hero, thinking that it was a good set up for body blocks, shadow poison stacks, and stuns, but in a normal pub game I usually just ended up canceling out a stun and giving the gankee’s teammates time to come to his rescue. Of course, through my teammate’s constant rebukes about how I had “saved” my opponent, I eventually came to realize that where disruption really shines is as a defensive spell, and now I use it almost exclusively as anti-stun. Yes, it is the perfect set-up for template stuns like Light Strike Array and Split Earth, but unless I feel really in tune with my teammates I find I can much more consistent value out of it defensively. I learned a lot about teamfights just from playing with Disruption. It has an extremely high skill ceiling as the game goes on, and I still constantly question whether I use it correctly. It forces you to examine who is doing what in teamfights and the likelihood that they will survive to contribute it. For instance, a Venomancer blinks into a fight, ults, gales, and then gets stunned. Do I disrupt him and hope there isn’t a more pressing use within the 16 second cooldown window, or do I let him die knowing that he has done his part in the fight? Or maybe my carry is about half health when he gets stunned and the enemy carry is at full health. All of the nukes have been spent, meaning that my carry is taking damage mostly from the enemy carry. My first instinct is to disrupt my carry so he doesn’t take damage while he’s helpless, but maybe it’s better to disrupt the enemy carry, who is the primary source of damage, so that we will have two full-health illusion-carries to help in the fight rather than two half-health illusions-carries. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0TIvVFJl.jpg) SD and "Friends" All of these considerations make me feel like I am constantly improving my play and understanding of the game when I play Shadow Demon, which allows me to overlook the fact that he looks like the bastard child of Barney and Dormammu. Pugna ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CHhu1eo.png) Oh my pretty little precious Pugna. How I love to dress you up in phase boots and drums and watch you prance around the battlefield bringing violence to all the good little heroes and heroines. I got so jealous when Skywrath Mage came out and I had to share you with the masses, but now you are all mine again. Sidenote: I just looked up the winrates for this month on Dota 2 Buff. Strangely, the supports with the lowest winrates are Shadow Demon, Pugna, Io, Chen, and Enchantress. The other four heroes are picked/banned in the vast majority of pro games. Obviously this is a huge hint on how good my lovely little Pugalug is. I didn’t always love Pugna so much. I went 4-8 in my initial games with the little guy, and was starting to despair ever having a winning record with him. I just didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with him as a support. Nether Blast does crazy damage, but it is so hard to hit without either nuking the creep wave or putting yourself in danger. Decrepify seems like a great spell, but the carry you are supporting probably doesn’t have great magic damage... which is why he’s not a support. Life Drain is a flashy spell, but it’s no Macropyre or Laguna Blade, and chances are you’ll die mid-cast anyway. So what was it that let me turn my Pugna play around and unlock his potential? 1) Nether Ward. Like most other pubbers, I thought Nether Ward was the only-slightly-better-than-stats skill that you leveled only after everything else, and sometimes in place of the last couple levels of decrepify if team-fighting broke out early. Wrongwrongwrong. Netherward is an insanely powerful spell in the laning phase, in pretty much any lane. At just level 1, it drains for an insane 1.5 mana/second, which is equivalent to the mana regen of 37.5 intelligence. This is higher than the base intelligence of EVERY HERO until level 4, and the only hero that surpasses that is, surprise!, Pugna himself. So for every other hero, they actually LOSE MANA by staying in the lane. At level two, the mana drain is already more than arcane boots used on cooldown, and almost equivalent to a negative clarity. At level three, you are already draining 112.5 mana from a single hero over the full duration, and up to 337.5 mana if you get a good placement in a trilane. At max level, the 6 mana drain is equivalent to a whopping 150 intelligence, which is more than any hero’s base intelligence at level 25. All this in a 1600 range, for 25 seconds, for just 80 mana on a 35 second cooldown. All of this is on top of the absurd amount of damage it can put out. In the early laning phase, Nether Ward can shut down a lot of the most annoying heroes. An offlane Windrunner has a lot more trouble making her quick escapes when Windrun costs 100 of her 435 HP at level one. All the frustrating Soul Ring and Tranquil Boot heroes are so much easier to handle when it’s costing them 300+ HP to cast their spells, and trying to use Tranquil boots within the radius of the ward immediately negates cancels the healing. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iFDXDsXl.jpg) Unfortunately, Pugna doesn’t have the right body type for most mass market princess clothing. 2) Once I started prioritizing Nether Ward, I realized that Pugna is a great counter to a lot of the heroes I hated most. Phantom Lancer, for instance, relies on on his Dopplewalk to get out of bad situations, hoping to fool you into chasing a copy. But with a Netherward down, PL gets hit for 150 damage, and then you know to immediately drop a blast to finish him off. It works the same against heroes like Broodmother or Bounty Hunter or Clinkz. You always know when they use a spell nearby, and you can drop area-of-effect nukes on them without being about to see them. By the time they catch on, they mostly end up using their stealth specifically to destroy the wards, which is worth it in and of itself. Also, a fully leveled Nether Blast works wonders against summoning heroes. Nature’s Prophet, Chen, Broodmother (again)... any hero that likes to have swarms of units becomes an excellent source of farm for Pugna. I once got 200+ gold from a single Broodmother swarm, and she kept sending them in for me to slurp up all game. If only PL illusions gave farm, Pugna would probably be able to rush Aghanims/BKB every game. 3) Boots. Figuring out what I was doing wrong with Pugna forced me to think about boot selection more deeply than I ever had before. I was building everything on him. At first I built mana boots because he is such a mana-hungry little guy. But then I realized how amazing Pugna’s intelligence gain is (the highest in the game by a long shot), and that if I could just not die I would eventually have enough mana. But I was dying a lot, so I tried building Tranquils. Then I realized that it’s not long-term damage Pugna has to worry about- it’s burst damage. I even considered getting Power Treads, just so I could have HP when I needed it and mana when I needed it. That’s when I finally realized the power of Phase Boots. Pugna has a movespeed of 315, which is surpassed by only four other heroes. With the phase boost, he is able to simply not be in places where he shouldn’t. With drums on top of that, Pugna become an adorable little bundle of evil that can dart in and out of fights as he wishes. This is great for baiting out stuns or other big abilities, since you can run up and ultimate a hero, which forces them to stun you, then you decrepify them and run away cackling as your carry jumps in to finish him off. It’s exactly the sort of guerilla fighting that can make roaming supports so useful even late into the game. | ||
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