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Going back to the discussion about improvement a few posts above, I'd like to ask: how exactly do you practice this game?
What I have in mind is deliberate practice (which some people alluded to above). I've been having a hard time figuring out how to apply this to Dota, especially on heroes that don't have heavy mechanical requirements (e.g., many support heroes). I've been in the upper-3K range for like two years now, and it's very frustrating to me because I've played many other competitive games in different genres and I've never felt so stuck in any of them.
I watch my replays and it's easy for me to find mistakes, but I don't get how to apply this information to the next game because everything in Dota is so situational. I can find many cases where I should've cast a certain spell earlier or later, or targeted a different enemy hero, or built a different item, or miscalculated the enemies' damage potential. But every game, hell, every team fight within a game is different and these situations almost never appear again. How do I find general things to work on that apply to all games, all roles, all heroes? And how do I then practice these things?
Last hitting is the obvious example of something that you can easily practice on your own. But how do you practice map awareness? Farming efficiently without dying? Coming back from a difficult laning phase? Effective ganking? Team fighting? When every game you'll have a different set of allies, a different set of enemies, a different laning stage, a different level of map control and vision, and even different styles of play on the same hero (cliff-jungling Nature's Prophet vs. useful Nature's Prophet)?
I really want to improve at Dota. I'm tired of my current skill level and, frankly, kind of embarrassed by it given how long I've been playing. However, I only have time to play like 10–20 games a week (on top of maybe reviewing one replay per night Monday through Friday) and I need to find a way to do it efficiently. I simply cannot grind out like 15 games a day, and, to be honest, given all that I've read about deliberate practice and my experience with other competitive games, I don't believe that that would be the best approach anyway. What are your thoughts? Thanks.
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Northern Ireland22208 Posts
i think map awareness is one of those things that you start to improve on when ur at a comfortable level in other aspects of ur play. for example, if ur focused hard on last hitting because ur not confident in ur ability, ur gonna tunnel in on the creeps in ur lane, and not the rest of the map. u won't be glancing at the minimap to note that a certain hero is missing. u wont be clicking on heroes in other lanes and checking their items. same if ur doing support things, if ur on autopilot and kno exactly what to do (ok im gonna stack this camp and go camp rune), that leaves u time to look around the map.
the stuff about farming efficiently without dying, coming back from a bad lane etc...that cant rly be practiced. thats all experience in knowing what u can get away with, how the enemy is typically going to behave, how strong ur team is relative to the enemy.....
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On February 16 2016 22:10 Eclipsing Binary wrote:Going back to the discussion about improvement a few posts above, I'd like to ask: how exactly do you practice this game? What I have in mind is deliberate practice (which some people alluded to above). I've been having a hard time figuring out how to apply this to Dota, especially on heroes that don't have heavy mechanical requirements (e.g., many support heroes). I've been in the upper-3K range for like two years now, and it's very frustrating to me because I've played many other competitive games in different genres and I've never felt so stuck in any of them. I watch my replays and it's easy for me to find mistakes, but I don't get how to apply this information to the next game because everything in Dota is so situational. I can find many cases where I should've cast a certain spell earlier or later, or targeted a different enemy hero, or built a different item, or miscalculated the enemies' damage potential. But every game, hell, every team fight within a game is different and these situations almost never appear again. How do I find general things to work on that apply to all games, all roles, all heroes? And how do I then practice these things? Last hitting is the obvious example of something that you can easily practice on your own. But how do you practice map awareness? Farming efficiently without dying? Coming back from a difficult laning phase? Effective ganking? Team fighting? When every game you'll have a different set of allies, a different set of enemies, a different laning stage, a different level of map control and vision, and even different styles of play on the same hero (cliff-jungling Nature's Prophet vs. useful Nature's Prophet)? I really want to improve at Dota. I'm tired of my current skill level and, frankly, kind of embarrassed by it given how long I've been playing. However, I only have time to play like 10–20 games a week (on top of maybe reviewing one replay per night Monday through Friday) and I need to find a way to do it efficiently. I simply cannot grind out like 15 games a day, and, to be honest, given all that I've read about deliberate practice and my experience with other competitive games, I don't believe that that would be the best approach anyway. What are your thoughts? Thanks.
My 2 cents, as someone who played more than 5000 games and is in the upper 4k range:
There's 2 different kind of skills in DOTO in my opinion. Being good in solo matchmaking, and being good in a team. And those 2 are very different, and require different set of skills. And of course, expect your solo MMR to reflect yourskills in the first one and your group MMR to reflect your skills in the second one. Ohh and by the way, don't practice in unranked when you want to progress, always practice against the most tryhards of opponents, the ones your likely to encounter in ranked game. Sure you'll lose some points when practicing a new hero but it's worthy practice, unlike stomping an unranked pub in your first game of TerroBlade (for example).
So getting better in solo requires 1 fundamental thing in my opinion: the "It's My fault / Do it yourself" mindset.
Easy example, you're mid and you're constantly ganked by 2 supports, get your own ward where you need it, you need stacks, make them. You die from a 2 man rotation gank, don't blame the support who didn't TP to help (sure he could have, and him alone might have made a difference) but focus on what you could have done to survive, even if it's far fetched and not remotely close to what you've seen Sumail or Miracle do in a similar situation at the last Major (they've got PPD and Fly to back them up ... you don't) . FOCUS ON YOU AND YOU ONLY. Don't expect help, survive on your own. That's the general thing.
Now as far as roles in the game go, my advice is that you find 1 hero for each position you want to play, and keep playing with it until you feel good with it at every stage of the game. My example with the carry role was AM, a very standard hero that everyone plays ... I played it over and over and that's where I developped my map awareness from because guess what, AM is a greedy carry who profits a lot from agressively pushing lane. And the first skill to be able to push agresssively is ... map awareness.
And that's my last point as far as progressing alone goes. As soon as you start playing a hero decently, you start to notice what his specificities are, what he can do that other heroes of the same role can't. And from there on, you start focusing more on the skills and mechanics that go along with this hero's specificities. Another personnal example I could give you is when I started playing Storm Spirit mid a lot, it helped me developp my anticipation of ennemy movements within a small area, coz that's what I needed to be warry of in order to make efficient jumps and initiations (you wanna hit the ennemy when you jump with storm, not just jump next to him).
On the long run, all these skills developped with individual heroes translate to other heroes, being more warry of my opponents movements at close range because of the storm practice suddenly became usefull with every blink hero I played for example.
EDIT: 1 last point I would add goes along with the "FOCUS ON YOU AND YOU ONLY" part, and it's a bit at the opposite (but I think it makes sense). Don't expect anything from the others but be sure to give them everything you can (without hurting yourself). You'd be surprised to how much a support is likely to TP help you if you did the same to save the carry on his lane earlier in the game. Sure you want to be able to survive alone but don't pass on establishing yourself as a teamplayer (eventhough you're not ...). 1 good TP at the right time can make a lot for your image during that game and if your teammates see you as a teamplayer, they're suddenly much more willing to be teamplayers too  Somehow, DOTA is a lot about managing your image, the annoying part is everything is reset after each game.
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yea i think pub mm games r like 50% on team morale
map awareness u can practice by simply staring at the minimap more.
efficient farming just try to hit item timings and compare with high mmr players. if ur not reaching the timings figure out why (mana usage, inefficient jungle rotations, bad rotations, etc) and fix it
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Don't really have a way for "how" to practice, but a big thing that goes along with map awareness that a lot of people seem to forget is clock awareness. Too often people walk past a jungle camp at X:5X and don't stack, simply because they don't know the time. Too often they're late to arriving at the rune and let the other mid get free bottle charges. Too often supports will try and make a gank 10 seconds before night time falls and they gain the advantage.
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Maybe not a strategy question but is there any weekly free to play tournaments? Wanted to play one or two with friends for fun. Havn't kept up to date since 2013 regarding this.
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When I was coaching a guy here who said his map awareness was pretty bad, we talked about it and between questions I asked if he had a metronome, or some sort of thing like that, and i told him to go and play an unranked game and set it so every 3s the metronome would make a noise and he would watch the minimap.
After he got used to watch it solo, then came the part when you have to use the information you are given in that minimap, and think about what heroes you see, you dont, where could they be, what could the be doing etc.
It kinda worked for him, so there's taht for map awareness.
about picking certain things to practice, it depends on your level and how much you can improve by it.
I'd say at 3k you are still mostly "average" at best at lasthitting and should practice that a lot, it has to be a muscle memory so you can think about hte lane, the creep equilibruim and how to win that. When you get most trivial things into muscle memory or wihthout thinking about htem, you can focus on the "aknowledging" part of the game, which is the part that takes you from 5k to 6-7k and you improve greatly.
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On February 16 2016 22:10 Eclipsing Binary wrote:
I watch my replays and it's easy for me to find mistakes, but I don't get how to apply this information to the next game because everything in Dota is so situational. I can find many cases where I should've cast a certain spell earlier or later, or targeted a different enemy hero, or built a different item, or miscalculated the enemies' damage potential. But every game, hell, every team fight within a game is different and these situations almost never appear again. How do I find general things to work on that apply to all games, all roles, all heroes? And how do I then practice these things?
dont watch your own replays. a lot of people suggest this as a method of improving but its a waste of time and shouldnt be used in dota. anything you see in a replay is all in hindsight. applying something you saw in hindsight in your next game is next to impossible so all youre going to do is repeat this process over and over without any improvement. also there is no point analysing your own games because your analysis is based on your current knowledge of how to play the game. a 3k player analysing a replay is not going to find things that a 6k player will. therefore how can you trust that your own analysis is correct and attempt to improve your game based on your own observations? the best way to improve is to analyse what pros do in general and then try to REPLICATE what they do in game. this way, youre not trying to fix your mistakes, youre just taking in new credible information and actively trying to apply it in your games. replicating pros is much easier than recognising a mistake WHILE its happening and trying to prevent/fix it.
Last hitting is the obvious example of something that you can easily practice on your own. But how do you practice map awareness? Farming efficiently without dying? Coming back from a difficult laning phase? Effective ganking? Team fighting? When every game you'll have a different set of allies, a different set of enemies, a different laning stage, a different level of map control and vision, and even different styles of play on the same hero (cliff-jungling Nature's Prophet vs. useful Nature's Prophet)?
all of these things come from experience. the only thing you can really try to practice is the mechanics related to them. make a habit of looking at the minimap every few seconds, even if it means youre just moving your eyes to that location and youre not actually taking in information. simply getting in the habit of looking at the minimap frequently will later allow you to take in more information without it distracting you from what youre doing on the rest of the screen. how comfortably you can do this will also translate to how well you can interpret the given information on the minimap at any certain time.
effective ganking and farming efficiency can be practiced in 2 ways. the first one is to watch pros and study/play a lot of heroes. knowing the capabilities of the heroes in your team will allow you to recognise whether you can kill someone with just 2 people or if you need 3 or 4. farming patterns/routes, when to tp to lane etc can also be seen just by watching pros. again, replicate what they do. sometimes the decision to replicate them may be incorrect, but if you get in the habit of doing these things then later on when your decision making gets better you will already find that when you make the correct decision you are already doing things more efficiently. the 2nd way to practice that would be the mechanics aspect. being able to hit and move properly makes a massive difference in 2 man ganks and being able to last hit and use skills appropriately to farm obviously will make you a better farmer
tl;dr
watch pros a lot and replicate everything they do. literally every small action pros do has a reason behind it, so try and work out what that reason is and copy them. find a pro that you think fits your style well and just study him intensively. sometimes you will make the wrong decision, but if you get in the habit of doing things the way pros do then your overall game will still improve as you get more experience and your decision making etc gets better
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I'm sure watching your own replays is a useful way to improve, you notice a lot of mistakes and can analyse your own play more effectively than you can while playing, and you can definitely apply what you learn from each mistake to future games. Just because "every game is different" doesn't mean you can't work out that your GPM dropped at 10-17 minutes because you roamed with team and achieved nothing when you could have farmed a different lane, which is a COMMON situation, even if not a definite situation every game.
You need to think about WHY pros do stuff, not just blindly copy it without thought.
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realising that grouping up was a shit choice in your previous game doesnt mean you will recognise its a shit choice in your next game. you will most likely group up again because you think its the right decision at the time and then go back and watch the replay and realise in hindsight that it was a poor decision. analysis of your own replays doesnt teach you to make correct decisions on the spot. instead youre basically trying to teach yourself what to do when the exact scenario occurs again but no 2 games of dota will ever be the same so youre teaching yourself nothing.
watching your own replays probably became a thing because thats what pros do in other games like starcraft for example. but in those games it is perfectly reasonable to assume that some games WILL play out exactly the same for a while. then you can say "last time this happened, i did this and it was the wrong decision, so this time ill try something else". in dota you need to improve your ability to interpret information and make decisions literally on the spot, and watching past games of yourself isnt the way to improve that. watching pros (not first person btw. first person vids are bad for beginners for multiple reasons which ill get into if someone wants) is the best way to improve because you can compare your interpretations of whats happening in the game to pros' interpretations and then find the reasoning behind it and apply it in your games.
also, as i said already, analysing your own games is flawed because you dont have any guarantee that your own analysis is even correct. you could be watching everything happen on a replay but still interpret everything wrong and make all the wrong conclusions, because your analysis is limited to your skill level.
watching pros takes away that uncertainty. make the assumption that the pros are always making the right decisions (theyre not, but for the purposes of improvement as a 3k player the few incorrect decisions they make are negligible), and then you have a reference point to which you can compare yourself and what you need to focus on.
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I dunno, there are useful questions you can answer given a replay of the game, like noticing information you could have gotten in game if you were watching the fucking minimap, noting where the fuck the wards were when they seemed to always have vision of you and you weren't sure why, what the actual values of you feeling like you're farming well and denying the offlane farm well look like...
It's not like replays are totally useless.
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On February 17 2016 13:59 evilfatsh1t wrote:
realising that grouping up was a shit choice in your previous game doesnt mean you will recognise its a shit choice in your next game. you will most likely group up again because you think its the right decision at the time and then go back and watch the replay and realise in hindsight that it was a poor decision. analysis of your own replays doesnt teach you to make correct decisions on the spot. instead youre basically trying to teach yourself what to do when the exact scenario occurs again but no 2 games of dota will ever be the same so youre teaching yourself nothing.
watching your own replays probably became a thing because thats what pros do in other games like starcraft for example. but in those games it is perfectly reasonable to assume that some games WILL play out exactly the same for a while. then you can say "last time this happened, i did this and it was the wrong decision, so this time ill try something else". in dota you need to improve your ability to interpret information and make decisions literally on the spot, and watching past games of yourself isnt the way to improve that. watching pros (not first person btw. first person vids are bad for beginners for multiple reasons which ill get into if someone wants) is the best way to improve because you can compare your interpretations of whats happening in the game to pros' interpretations and then find the reasoning behind it and apply it in your games.
also, as i said already, analysing your own games is flawed because you dont have any guarantee that your own analysis is even correct. you could be watching everything happen on a replay but still interpret everything wrong and make all the wrong conclusions, because your analysis is limited to your skill level.
watching pros takes away that uncertainty. make the assumption that the pros are always making the right decisions (theyre not, but for the purposes of improvement as a 3k player the few incorrect decisions they make are negligible), and then you have a reference point to which you can compare yourself and what you need to focus on.
I disagree, by analyzing your gameplay you are teaching yourself to THINK about the game, instead of blindly playing without thought. These thoughts about how the game works don't go away just because you start the next game.
You don't even need to be 100% correct about your analysis, you just have to be more correct than what you previously thought/did. It's certainly useful to watch pro players, but if all you do is that then you're never going to see your own glaring mistakes because you don't notice in the game that you do them, but when watching a replay it's much more obvious.
As an example, I watched some of my replays and noticed I rotated to push a tower without checking its HP in two different games; both times it was nearly dead and I didn't get to the tower in time for the last hit, making my rotation completely useless. Now I always check tower HP before rotating. Nothing in a pro game would have shown me that I was making that mistake, and without watching the replay I wouldn't have noticed my consistency in doing it.
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On February 17 2016 15:36 Birdie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2016 13:59 evilfatsh1t wrote:
realising that grouping up was a shit choice in your previous game doesnt mean you will recognise its a shit choice in your next game. you will most likely group up again because you think its the right decision at the time and then go back and watch the replay and realise in hindsight that it was a poor decision. analysis of your own replays doesnt teach you to make correct decisions on the spot. instead youre basically trying to teach yourself what to do when the exact scenario occurs again but no 2 games of dota will ever be the same so youre teaching yourself nothing.
watching your own replays probably became a thing because thats what pros do in other games like starcraft for example. but in those games it is perfectly reasonable to assume that some games WILL play out exactly the same for a while. then you can say "last time this happened, i did this and it was the wrong decision, so this time ill try something else". in dota you need to improve your ability to interpret information and make decisions literally on the spot, and watching past games of yourself isnt the way to improve that. watching pros (not first person btw. first person vids are bad for beginners for multiple reasons which ill get into if someone wants) is the best way to improve because you can compare your interpretations of whats happening in the game to pros' interpretations and then find the reasoning behind it and apply it in your games.
also, as i said already, analysing your own games is flawed because you dont have any guarantee that your own analysis is even correct. you could be watching everything happen on a replay but still interpret everything wrong and make all the wrong conclusions, because your analysis is limited to your skill level.
watching pros takes away that uncertainty. make the assumption that the pros are always making the right decisions (theyre not, but for the purposes of improvement as a 3k player the few incorrect decisions they make are negligible), and then you have a reference point to which you can compare yourself and what you need to focus on. I disagree, by analyzing your gameplay you are teaching yourself to THINK about the game, instead of blindly playing without thought. These thoughts about how the game works don't go away just because you start the next game. You don't even need to be 100% correct about your analysis, you just have to be more correct than what you previously thought/did. It's certainly useful to watch pro players, but if all you do is that then you're never going to see your own glaring mistakes because you don't notice in the game that you do them, but when watching a replay it's much more obvious. As an example, I watched some of my replays and noticed I rotated to push a tower without checking its HP in two different games; both times it was nearly dead and I didn't get to the tower in time for the last hit, making my rotation completely useless. Now I always check tower HP before rotating. Nothing in a pro game would have shown me that I was making that mistake, and without watching the replay I wouldn't have noticed my consistency in doing it.
analysing pro games is forcing you to think about the game so your argument doesnt make sense. the main difference is analysing what pros do lets you know what the correct decision is and what isnt.
also, if youre analysing your own replays youre looking for things like how to be more efficient or trying to gauge the status of the game in hindsight when you couldnt clearly determine it in game (gold/xp advantages etc). if youre relying on replays to tell you that you were too late to last hit a tower from a failed tp rotation, then theres something wrong, because you should be realising that that was a mistake during the game when you tped and found there was no tower to destroy.
i dunno. maybe its just me, but i know what my mistakes are the moment or immediately after i make them because the results of your actions show in game pretty much straight away. i dont need to watch a replay of myself again to tell me that what i did was a mistake. instead i used to watch pros to see what they were doing different to me so i can apply it to my future games.
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The thing is, you're usually going to be pretty biased while you're in game and you also miss a lot; watching a replay shows you stuff you missed. IDK about you but when I'm in game I assume I'm playing really well until I die, and even then I can just blame team half the time because they probably could have helped me if they were better players. But when I watch a replay it shows me my mistakes much more clearly than when I'm in the game. Watching a pro replay shows optimal ways to play, sure. But you need something to compare it to; I feel like I'm RTZ every game but then I watch my replay and see I'm very much not.
w/e though it's your improvement in the end, do whatever works best for you. Spending my out-of-game time doing a mix of watching pro games and watching my own replays works best for me.
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I don't really like it when people say "the same situation will not happen again". A lot of concepts in dota are the same even if the heroes are different. Looking at things in hindsight improves your intuitive understanding of how a certain situation is likely to play out. It doesn't have to be even with the same heroes next time, similar situations will come up with different heroes too.
For example if you are thinking about how to farm efficiently and how to pressure lanes, the thinking process is about the same no matter what heroes are on each team. How do I need to use my hero to farm fast? How do I move from camp to camp or lane? How and when do I use spells to speed up my farming? What heroes of the enemy team can kill me? How can they kill me? Where are they now, where will they likely be in the next minute? Sure, the answers to these sorts of questions vary depending on the game, but figuring most of it out is not difficult at all on the fly (hindsight helps in figuring out some hero specific things). You just have to learn to be aware during a game and not play with blindfolds on. Improving on this is similar to just looking at the minimap I feel. Play a lot and repeatedly try to think about certain things that need to be thought about. After you do it enough it becomes sort of 2nd nature and you don't have to make an effort to remember it.
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When you study replays you just look at how efficient you are, nothing else. It's that simple.
It helps if you watch your replays.
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easiest way to learn is to watch the best players (rtz/sumail/s4) play heroes you are interested in (so watch s4 if you want to become better at puck), and then try to truly understand the nuances and factors behind every decision they make
once you can do that efficiently, you quickly catch up on all the little things that they do that would never normally occur to you
farming patterns. how they approach a teamfight (ie what spells they wait out). how aggressively they push/force objectives depending on vision of enemy heroes.
etc.
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SoCal8910 Posts
yeah the tldr version is to play games and be aware of the things you could have improved to change the outcome of a game
if you won, how could you have improved your play to win sooner/stomped harder?
if you lost, how could you have prevented that from happening? could you have made a play or picked up an item that would have helped you come back?
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There was a very interesting post about how to get better at sc2:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/253300-the-starcraft-pyramid
It would be great if someone who is suited for it could do an adpation for dota 2.
tldr (as far as I remember): the lower your skill is the more different things you can do to improve. But the best/most efficient way to improve depends a lot on your actual skilllevel.
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EPT
