Ability Draft Thread - Page 20

On February 05 2014 13:44 levelping wrote:
If anyone wants a guide, there are really just 3 things to take note of:

1) Be familiar with your basic hero stats

Some heroes are butt awful without their iconic skills. So if you get Weaver but can't get any of his skills, he is most probably going to suck. Same with alchey without his ulti, Night stalker without his passive, etc. On the other hand, some heroes have great stat growths and you should bear these in mind (e.g. Punga with any int scaling spell).

If you have shitty hero, don't wory. Go support. Normally in AD no one wards so you'll be contributing to your team a lot more than trying to gank with lousy stats. You should also try to block the opponent's draft by taking skills they want. When blocking skills, remember you don't need to take the whole combo to block, just the key skill. This allows you to block more stuff by selectively taking skills.

2) Skills generally: mobility>initiation/stuns/disables>farming>passives

Public AD games are usually decided in the first 30 minutes. If your build takes level 12 and 2 expensive items to get online, you're probably useless. Also, focus on skills that have great gains for 1 skill point. That way you can start being active as soon as possible. If in public games, picking a huge amount of passives is almost a sure way to lose because you never get to the point where all your auras come online AND you will need a team mate/item to hold someone in place so you can kill them.

If you have the luxury of playing with friends, then having one farmer/carry (again figure out who has the best stat growth) would be good. Warning though, EVERYONE is going to try and take the carry passives, which makes building a good set difficult.

Specific Skills that are great:

I just want to highlight two that most people don't talk about:

Borrow Strike. This is a blink AND a stun AND a nuke, and it is a great initation skill. Pair it with another or nuke and you're good to go.



3) Roles

Generally, play aggressively and try to gank as much as possible. This is why initation and mobility skills are so great.

Keep in mind that focusing on particular roles is generally going to get you no where. For exmaple, lots of people think that they are going to build a hero that is tanky as shit, and so pick a skill set like reactive armour, dragons blood, bristleback, or evasion. Sure you'll be super hard to kill, but you also contribute nearly nothing to fights (unless you can farm up items). So what is going to happen is that people will just ignore you since there is no need to kill you. Similarly focusing on being super DPS is uselss if you don't have a stun or disable, since everyone will just run away from you.

On February 05 2014 16:54 WakaDoDo wrote:
This game mode caught my interest by a far larger amount then I expected. As someone whos only been playing for 6months it is quite the learning experience feeling different heroes stat gains and how important some of their skills really are to them. I also found that I can't find a taste for dexterity heroes in this mode.

1st Pick is almost always a skill on the board that just look too good to pass up and/or too good to give to the opposistion. Perm invis/grow/chemical rage/living armour/reactive armour/take aim.
2nd 90% of the time a projectile stun, unless I took the only one as 1st pick. Then this is probably an OP passive.
3rd Would be a passive, some sort of low-cost aoe nuke or more lockdown.
4th Is almost always one of the leftover ultimates. I've found that most are situational utility, but no matter which one I get it's easy to put it to good use.

If im one of 4 last ones picking then I get all stuns/lockdown and push skills.
How do you draft?

On February 05 2014 14:39 Staboteur wrote:


That last paragraph seems so backwards. Drafting for a specific role seems like -exactly- what you want to be doing. The problem arises when there are holes in your team's skillset overall - For example, if three of your teammates all drafted "Passive-heavy farm-dependent carries" Then you're kind of fucked. Even if none of their builds are individually bad, the fact that you've now got to fit three essentially position-one cores into three lanes leaves extremely little space for your remaining two members to draft, and -chances are- at least one of the remaining two drafted more nukes and spells than their set can contain, so they -also- need farm to get themselves online.

So you end up with awkward greedy teams that can't get the money they need and end up with a bunch of shitty timings.

So it isn't that you shouldn't draft for a specific role, it's more that you should lean away from drafting a skillset that requires farm most of the time, because most of the time you're not going to be able to rely on getting it.

There -really- needs to be a way to communicate before / during drafting, so you can give your allies some idea of what you're going to try and do, so you can coordinate.

On February 05 2014 17:02 Tobberoth wrote:

I usually try to look for combos which look interesting (two ability combos, I think it's unreasonable to expect getting the really ridiculous 4 ability combos people like to theorycraft). After that, I look at what hero I got. If I get an int hero, I will almost always go for stun combos, so I can stunlock and gank a lot early. If I'm strength, I try to go for annoying initiation/tank style. If I'm agility, I start looking at carry passives.

If there is a good ultimate I want, I will usually go for it second pick, first pick is almost always a stun, regardless of my hero, stuns are just so god damn good in Dota. Otherwise, I do like you and just last pick a remaining ulti, I feel like the strength of ability draft comes more from your combination of normal skills than ultimates anyway.

On February 05 2014 18:40 levelping wrote:


I'd have to disagree. My point is that three-passive-and-ult-carry builds are horrible because it is too specialised and depends on all kinds of stuff that won't happen. You will be entirely dependent on your team mates to stun, intitate and chase, and you can't do any of that because you want to be a DPS god. If you look at normal dota, the good carries will have utility spells that help them initiate, avoid damge, or chase.

Same for tanky heros - they have annoying abilities that make you need to kill them, isntead of ignoring them.