Simple Questions, Simple Answers - Page 9

On August 21 2011 10:06 Horse...falcon wrote:
If a doombringer casts doom on antimage, does it remove his spell shield passive ability?

On August 21 2011 05:27 Yurie wrote:


Any new order cancels the current animation (unless I am wrong). Though I think you can activate/change some items without it causing an animation break.

On August 21 2011 10:06 Horse...falcon wrote:
If a doombringer casts doom on antimage, does it remove his spell shield passive ability?

On August 21 2011 10:12 SKC wrote:


Doom disables most passives, I'm not sure if it also affects Spell Shiled, but I think it's likely. I'm pretty sure it disables Mana Break.

On August 21 2011 10:17 5-s wrote:

Here you go:
http://www.playdota.com/forums/210306/questions-doom-reaction-passive-item/#post981074
TL;DR, no, it doesn't disable Spell Shield.

On August 21 2011 05:10 red_b wrote:


yes, this.

I am moving. I have to stop moving to start the attack animation:

my query: if I a-move or right click, is this actually slower than hitting stop to stop moving, THEN attacking?

reasoning: if I am moving and want to last hit a creep, it definitely feels faster to hit stop then right click as opposed to attack moving while I am moving.

On August 21 2011 09:22 Kipsate wrote:
How is Omniknight fairing in the Dota metagame right now?

On August 21 2011 10:37 mordk wrote:


Hmmm... I guess I'll just talk about animation cancelling maybe it'll answer your questions.

First, attack animation is basically composed of the part before the attack and the part after the attack, the one you want to avoid is the latter, why?, because it's "wasted time" you could be using on other things, most importantly, moving.

So, if you autoattack and hit stop before the attack happens, nothing happens. You don't attack, you don't deal damage, and you can attack when you want since you don't trigger the attack speed delay, this is important when lasthitting creeps, so you can time it appropriately and take the gold.

If you attack, then hit stop or move, you will cancel the second part of the animation, and proceed to another action immediately. In DotA 1 there where some heroes with which this effect was absolutely ridiculous. The original CM would swing her staff in the air for what seemed like an hour, wasting precious time. This also applies to spell casting, in the same example, the original CM would swing her staff around even longer when casting a frost nova, so doing like Nova - Frostbite combo would take so long you'd die before casting frostbite, which is why you HAVE to imput some command between the two. This is very important when chasing heroes, since you can keep up with them much better if you cancel animations correctly, when a hero just stutters without attacking, well, you're doing it wrong (Happened to me with Akasha all the time LOL).

There are some more things that are important about this whole issue:

-Animation cancelling does NOT increase your attack speed, it just lets you use the time between attacks in a more effective way. This means that eventually it becomes nearly impossible and certainly useless to try to do it, when AS is too high.
-When applied to heroes with skills which have very low mana cost and cooldown (sometimes 0), which modify the base attack (so called orbs), this becomes orb-walking. This is extremely important and is a very useful skill toi have, if you can't orb-walk you better not play viper, silencer, drow or other such heroes.

On August 21 2011 11:04 Manit0u wrote:


Not really sure if I agree with this (although I can't disagree).
Basically, animation cancelling has 2 purposes:
1. Mindgames: Where you fake using a certain skill to see an opponent's reaction, force certain reaction and so on.
2. Gaining time (mentioned before): The best example here is CM's frostbite in original DotA where the casting animation would last long after the spell has actually landed. You would then either press "stop" or order your hero to "move" to cancel the animation and be able to do other things this 1 second or 2 earlier.
It's especially useful when using spells with long cast animations, otherwise gain is negligible.

+ Show Spoiler [animation cancelling] +

Orbwalking is a bit different thing. Some heroes have special attacks that provide you with extra effect (orb effect usually, hence the name). The idea behind it is to not use it wastefully.
Example: Viper in DotA and Arachna in HoN have a special attack (it's only orb in DotA, they had to make different attack enhancements fit into different non-stacking categories to prevent abuse, but the name stuck) that slows enemy down (in Viper's case it's also a DoT but that's irrelevant for this case) and can either be put on auto-cast (triggering with each attack) or used manually.
Most people will use slowing attacks to just continuously pummel the enemy until he drops since he can't get away. This is wrong. Even if the enemy is slowed down and you can catch up to him, your hero is always going to attack him at the max distance and if enemy is moving your hero is going to stand there and attack him until he goes out of range and only then follow him.
The idea of orb walking is to use your skil (usually in manual mode), walk up to enemy, use it again and repeat. This way you get several advantages:
1. You're always close to the enemy, which makes it harder for him to escape even if for some reason you're unable to use your special attack.
2. Enemy has harder time escaping you via juking (using FoW and obstacles to get away).
3. Your ranged attacks need less travel time (leaving your enemy less time to react to them if he can).

+ Show Spoiler [orb walking] +

On August 21 2011 14:17 TheRealPaciFist wrote:
Um... so orb walking is basically stutter step, like you would use with marauders? So the only new technique for SC2 people is the animation cancelling?

On August 21 2011 14:22 Kishin2 wrote:
What is the longest game of professional DotA ever played?

On August 21 2011 14:47 Horse...falcon wrote:
How many times have Chinese teams and European teams met in tournaments? What was the record?

On August 21 2011 11:32 Manit0u wrote:
I was trying to give pub-level examples here
And as far as regular attack animation cancelling goes, while it's true for original DotA, I believe that most of the modern games (HoN, DotA2, LoL) have smooth and good enough attack animations to not actually require it most of the time (I mean, CM in DotA was just atrocious when it comes to attack/cast animations).
Of course, there's a whole another level to it when you look at the competetive scene and people even take into account things like hero turn speed.