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Hey guys.
So I am currently "stuck" in just over 4k (actually close to dropping due to a losing streak)...
I dont have time to play huge sessions every 2 days, but I decided I wanna try getting a tad better once more (playing since dota1) with watching replays!
I still havent started but the thing that keeps on crossing my mind: how do you watch replays in a constructive way?
i mostly know my mistakes when i play or shortly afterwards and i have the feeling you have to have insane overall game sense to analyse a situation in a game properly and get an idea oif what wouldve been the better call (in my head at least)
So what aspects oif a replay are important for you? HOW do you watch replays practically?
Edit: oh yeah, I play mostly supp
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I'm no pro, but these are a few things I do when I watch my replays:
-Every time I see myself, I try to ask myself what was the cause of my death and how can I avoid it. Nearly all deaths in-game are completely avoidable.
-Since you're a support, ask yourself, did I ward properly? Given my vision and what was happening at the time, were the wards that I had placed provide good and/or necessary information on the enemy movements?
-Find your mistakes. A lot of times, bad plays can be linked to constant bad positioning, not prioritizing farming, engaging with no vision, and things like that.
I'm sure I'm missing something or another, but this is what I do.
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Pay attention to where the other team placed their wards.
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If you're mostly playing support I'd suggest focusing on the first 8 minutes.
Usually before the first night you want to have crippled the enemy offlaner and secured farm for your carry.
Then between 4 and 8 minutes you want to have made some impactful rotations during the night.
Compare your impact to that of your counterpart on the other team.
Compare against your other recent games.
Compare against a high mmr player (lots of good replays from TI you can surely find something there).
Look at the big team fights, take note of your positioning and spell/item usage.
Look for the swings in the graphs, explain to yourself why that swing happened.
If the swing is not if your favor think if there is anything you would do differently if you replayed that game.
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If you're playing support, one thing which is very valuable is changing perspective to the other team and see how often you show on the map. Good supports show on the map very rarely, which makes the other team play more scared and not know when you are ganking.
See whenever you died and work out how you could have avoided the death.
Note how long after 3 minutes courier wasn't upgraded, how many smokes and yellow wards are un-bought in the store, how often you didn't have a TP scroll to respond to a gank.
Team fight positioning is super hard particularly for supports, so I would also spend a lot of time studying fights in 0.5x speed and thinking about where to stand and what vision the other team has. A large part of what supports do is providing and denying vision for the other team. Also make sure all your spells get used in fights; a lot of people don't cast their spells enough or correctly.
Think about how the other team is moving and practicing predicting where they will move next, by pausing the replay, making a prediction, then seeing if you're correct. You want to get into people's heads so that when you're working with limited vision and knowledge, you still know what they are trying to do.
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People above have covered most of the important tips.
With regards to teamfight tho, pay attention to camera work. Good camera movement is important often your team or heroes have vision of enemy movement but poor camera work fails to pick it up etc., so u lose track of spells used/incoming threats. (Think about daytime vision range and a big ult like blink blackhole, you have like 2-3 seconds before blink range to reposition before he can blink in.)
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I don't think watching your own replays is very productive. If you die in stupid ways or make mechanical errors you were probably aware of it when you played the game, watching the replay won't help at all. The more subtle stuff like farming patterns and decision making is very difficult to learn from your own replays. If you had all the information available to you in the game and you made the wrong decision, how are you going to realize this when going over your own replay?
I think a better way to improve is to watch other (good) players replays, especially high mmr pub players. I find competitive replays aren't very valuable as the game they play is very different and lots of decision making they make is obviously based on reliable teamwork and co-ordination which you won't ever get in your solo queue pubs. Watch from their perspective and constantly think to yourself what you would do next, almost as if you are playing the game yourself. What is going to happen very often is they will do something that you wouldn't have done, maybe they took a different farming pattern, maybe they tped to a fight you would have skipped or vice versa. Once this happens immediately pause and try and reason why they made a different decision to the one you would have made. Same goes for item and skill build choices.
I find this helps you improve a lot more than watching your own replays and just picking up glaringly obvious mechanical mistakes and blatantly poor decisions, as you will catch heaps of subtle stuff that you will never pick up watching your own replay. If you want to analyze your own replays get a high mmr friend or coach to do it, it is very difficult to self-analyze subtle decision making errors as you obviously believed they were the correct decision at the time, else you never would have made them in the first place.
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yeah, i agree with Clarty on that one.
for support i just chose some random games to watch and studied what they do with their time.
i was learning lion at the time because i felt the hero was pretty impactful if you get to do what you want, and cherry picked some lion games to see how they can consistently get a fast blink.
if you ask yourself these questions going into a replay, you will seek and find the answers you want.
however for core there are some early game stuff that affects the rest of the game. easiest sort of comparison i can think of that most people can relate to is battlefury timing for antimage. it's very telling of how laning went, and how the rest of the game will probably go.
there's a bit more depth that goes into that, so like taking reference material, you need to look at your own play while comparing yourself to your source (replays of better players).
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as for picking out replays of other players this can get tricky. first step is to look on dotabuff or similar and find some games that interest you. most likely you won't know any players by name so stats are what you need to go through.
- hero spammers who stick to one build and consistently do well.
- standout games where a particular hero you're interested does relatively well
- hero combinations that are quite generic but result in a win despite what would be a parity matchup of drafts.
i think it's important to watch the stomps but usually it happens because there's a mismatch in lane matchups and people keep feeding it. these can be important because you need to know how to run with a lead, but the results and stats get skewed. what you need to see is how they put themselves in that lopsided situation from the start of the game.
this ended up pretty long but my first paragraph is really what i mean.
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Thanks for the response guys. I think Clarty covered many of my doubts concerning watching my replays.
- if I watch a certain situation in my games, and I think its the wrong decision and shouldve made decision X, i cant even be sure that this wouldve been the correct one
- I am not sure about the point of watching the other teams warding spots.. I often thought about that one, but every game is different, i think if you start studying the enemies warding spots, you start overthinking it. I have a pretty broad span of good warding places myself, adding additional ones, while the enemy most of the times uses more standard ones anyway just makes it over complicated
The part with the first 8 minutes is new i guess ill try that out. :D
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On August 19 2016 17:11 Clarty wrote:
I don't think watching your own replays is very productive. If you die in stupid ways or make mechanical errors you were probably aware of it when you played the game, watching the replay won't help at all. The more subtle stuff like farming patterns and decision making is very difficult to learn from your own replays. If you had all the information available to you in the game and you made the wrong decision, how are you going to realize this when going over your own replay?
I think a better way to improve is to watch other (good) players replays, especially high mmr pub players. I find competitive replays aren't very valuable as the game they play is very different and lots of decision making they make is obviously based on reliable teamwork and co-ordination which you won't ever get in your solo queue pubs. Watch from their perspective and constantly think to yourself what you would do next, almost as if you are playing the game yourself. What is going to happen very often is they will do something that you wouldn't have done, maybe they took a different farming pattern, maybe they tped to a fight you would have skipped or vice versa. Once this happens immediately pause and try and reason why they made a different decision to the one you would have made. Same goes for item and skill build choices.
I find this helps you improve a lot more than watching your own replays and just picking up glaringly obvious mechanical mistakes and blatantly poor decisions, as you will catch heaps of subtle stuff that you will never pick up watching your own replay. If you want to analyze your own replays get a high mmr friend or coach to do it, it is very difficult to self-analyze subtle decision making errors as you obviously believed they were the correct decision at the time, else you never would have made them in the first place.
Such a simple and magnificent idea. I have never considered digging up pub replays of pros to watch how they play in the uh... "natural environment". Totally doing that when I get home.
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I like to primarily focus on efficiency during downtime. It's all the little things that add up that can make you a bigger player. you need to know EXACTLY what to look for though. Ex:
Laning phase:
If you're in the safelane, did you scout to see if the enemy offlaner placed a ward?
Did you try to creep block in a lane? How good was your block?
(As a safelane support) Did you stack the small camp at 0:53?
(As a safelane support) Did you pull (chain pull/stack and pull) when appropriate?
If you're near a camp at 0:45 that you can expect to take soon, did you stack it?
If you're in the safelane, did you make good use of the large camp?
Did you make use of the side shop as much as possible and ONLY send out the courier when necessary?
Did you use the courier as efficiently as possible? Get your items every time it's in base. If someone else is also using it and has a more important item then tell them to reuse. (If you don't ACTIVELY look out for this, chances are you're not using the courier properly -- I see 6k+ players who don't all get their items on the courier whenever it's in base)
Mid/late game stuff:
Are you still using the courier as efficiently as possible?
Do you get tomes every time they're available?
If you're moving into contested territory (deep ward/gank/roshan/cut wave) did you smoke?
Aegis is taken. Did you make note of the time (ping/chat wheel)?
Then there's hero-specific "next-level" stuff that you want to implement, like micro tricks. For me, that's using naga siren illusions to stack and pull camps during laning phase while still keeping up last hitting/denying efficiency on my main hero.
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EPT
