EPT![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Bumblebee/dotablog/another/dota2.jpg)
As some of you may know, yesterday I wrote my first blog about DotA and my experience in the beta. Today I will try to bring light over parts of the more gameplay related things; roles, heroes, warding and something alike. I have a few things in mind as I'm starting to write this blog, but I haven't decided where it has to end yet, so let the fun begin. Oh yeah, so if you haven't read the previous blog. Go do that first! :-)
But before I'm starting with the DotA things, when I woke up this morning, I felt I wanted to give a little shoutout and say thanks to someone for a very special gift, I received only a few weeks ago. As some of you also may know before I joined Team Liquid acting as the manager taking care of the players, the tournaments, schedules and what may come my way, I was a part of mouz. During my stay in mouz, I got to know some of the guys very well and made great friends, but Strelok and I became great friends and talk to eachother a lot. It was sad to part ways with him back then, but things go and things come. Earlier this year one of the biggest transfers happened: HuK went to EG from being Liquid for almost a full year. Some of you might also remember that in the announcement of him leaving, it was mentioned that HuK bought had been out shopping and finding goodbye gifts for everybody. For this he teamed up with Strelok who wanted to say thanks and that he's appreciating my help. And my gift from them just came a few weeks ago. I was expecting my new Liquid shirts to arrive, but to my big surprise when I opened the package I found a San Diego Chargers Jersey with my number from when I played myself, #28, and my name above it. Amazing gift, it means a great deal. Thanks Chris and Ievgen!
What role does my hero serve?
In any lineup the five heroes on each team serves a different role. In order to win the game, you must strive to live up to the expectations of your role, whether it may be farming, babysitting or roaming. While it's important to fulfil your role, it's just as important to understand that there's not an absolute way of playing this role. There are tons of way to come about it and how you strategize your play. This is also the reason that you've sometimes seen on streams that top players are trashing each other and calling each other bad. One have a certain way of playing something and when the other guy plays it differently, and it doesn't work together, they just end up the other player is bad.
But before we get into what roles there are in the game, I want to determine that a lot of the heroes serve a multi-purpose and there is absolutely no way that I can come about everything or explain it perfectly in one blog; things like these come with experience.
- A carry. A carry is the hero you rely on in the later stages of the game. Often times it's a hero that is very reliant on items and they're the ones, you want to protect and care about as much as if it was your own child. Usually the carries are weak without items and doesn't really have strong individual spells, but their carry potential will come through various items and how they scale into the lategame with those spells. Carries are often also agility heroes as they scale the best into the lategame statwise because agility gives you attack speed and armor, and if you're an agility hero, you also gain damage from it.
Within the group of carries, there is also different types of carries that excels at different times and what they carry through. In the common tongue they're mostly referred to as hard carries and carries. The hard carries are the ones that "beats" the other carries the later the game goes.
A classic example of a carry would be Antimage, Spectre, Razor, Sniper and Morphling. But they're very different types of carries. Antimage, Spectre and Razor often times end up carrying through tanking.
Antimage is a hero that have some amazing passive spells which makes him steal mana on hits and do extra damage depending on their mana. Also he has a blink ability which is amazing for mobility, escaping and hunting people down. Usually you'd start out with a Vanguard and follow it up with Manta, then Heart/Butterfly depending on the game.
Spectre's passive spells makes him reflect a percentage of the damage taken in an area around him. Also his ultimate creates illusions of himself at every enemy hero and he's able to teleport himself to either one of them as long as they're still alive. Again you'd most likely start with a Vanguard, but you will probably go into a Radiance to get some better farming ability and then into a heart. Blade Mail is a must have on this hero in the later stage of the game too.
Razor has a passive spell that makes him faster. He has a decent AoE nuke and he has a target spell that makes him steal the attack damage of the opposing hero as long as he's in the range of them. This is why you can build tanking items on him and he can still get an unbelievably amount of damage. His ultimate spits out small electricity jolts to the target with the lowest current health in an area around him reducing their armor. You'd probably build this guy as a full-on tank with Vanguard and Hood of Defiance, Manta and a Heart.
Morphling and Sniper are different from the three other carries. They carry through pure damage. Morphling has an ability that makes him morph all his strength into agility or the other way around. This spell makes him either do a lot of damage or have a lot of hp, or you can of course also go the middle way with a decent amount of damage and a decent amount of hp. The point being that you will mostly have a lot of damage, but when you're being focused or gank, you will turn it on and morph your agility into strength to gain more hp as they're attacking you and you can escape. His first spell is a great escape mechanism as it charges away or towards something with great speed. One of the things that make Morphling incredibly strong is his ultimate. His ultimate creates an illusion of one of the other teams heroes and it brings the orb effects with them, plus a lot of the damage. This means that if he creates an illusion of Antimage, then the illusion he created actually burns mana too. A great tool in any teamfight or 1v1 while getting ganked. On Morphling you'd most games build a Linkens Sphere and then go into a lot agility items to make him do more damage and gain attack speed (also you're able to morph agi into strength if needed).
I'm going to say it again: There's not only one item-build to each hero, they can be played in many ways and it's situational. But these suggestions are some common builds. - A ganker. A ganker is basically just a hero that in the early or mid stage of the game, walks around the map with 1-2 heroes and tries to keep the other heroes down; make them not have free reign in the game. But there's also something called a roamer which is kind of a subtitle to being a ganker. A roamer is a hero that is not very dependant on his items and can often times be sacrificed a bit in the early game to walk around the map and help the other lanes; make the opposing team uncomfortable and force them to not play too aggressive. It's important and a massive boost for your midhero, if you can help him get some early kills and a big advantage into the next stage of the game. Gankers n' roamers often time serves a multi-purpose in the game; being initiators, support or semi-carry heroes too.
Gankers/roamers could be Earthshaker, Pudge, Blood Seeker. These are 3 different types of gankers. Earthshaker is a roamer that uses his fissure to stun and block opponents off, so you can easily kill them. Pudge has an amazing hook that, funny enough, hooks people to him. He has a slow with magic damage in an area around him, and his ultimate is an immobilize that does a bit of damage too. His passive skill gains him strength and magic resistance the more kills he gets. He act as a roamer through the whole game and as a tank/crowd control guy in team fights.
Blood Seeker, which happens to be Liquid`Nazguls ultimately favorite hero, is a hunting hero. It seeks for blood. It's a hero that can become a carry in the mid and a part of the lategame if he gets really fat. He has a passive that makes him gain an insane amount of movement speed and vision of an opponent if they're beneath a certain percentage of health. He has a silence, but the silence also increases your attack damage, so it can be used both on yourself but also on the opponent depending on the situation. But where it becomes really fun is his ultimate. His ultimate is a rupture that is put on an enemy hero which inflicts some damage on hit, but the rupture does so that for X seconds, if the target moves, he will take a percentage of the distance moved as damage. - An initiator. An initiator is often times also one of those heroes who serves a multipurpose. Initiators are heroes that have great ways of making a good entrance to the fight, either dealing a lot of damage, picking off an important hero or stunning a great deal of them. A general item that you build on many initiators is the Blink Dagger. These heroes is a must-have in any team. If you don't have any initiation or counter-initiation, you will lose almost every decently set up teamfight by the other team.
Three of the most used and prominent initiators in the game are Sand King, Tidehunter and Earthshaker. All of them which you build a dagger on. Sand Kings ultimate is channeling and when it goes off, it goes off in waves around him and deals a ton of magic damage. What you do is you hide a little bit away from the where the fight is about to begin, when you see your shot, you channel your ultimate and the second it goes off, you blink into the middle of them and uses his first spell to stun multiple of their heroes. If this succeeds the team fight is almost already won because of the massive damage he will inflict to many heroes.
Tidehunter's ultimate is a big, very big, stun around him. One of the best initiating spells in the game with a dagger because it allows for the rest of your heroes to set themselves up in the positions the way to in the teamfight; maybe you can even get to nuke their important heroes down before the stun is over. A lot of people even call Tidehunter the walking ultimate.
Earthshaker is one of the most played heroes in this game because it has an amazing stun which is landed in front of him as a big fissure. His 3rd spell is a passive that makes all his other spells do a ministun and a little damage. This is why his 2nd also gives a little stun and do little damage. It's kind of a warstomp in a little area around him and he will do some extra damage on his autoattack. But his ultimate is where starts to get fun - and this is why the dagger is so essential on him. His ultimate is a big AoE nuke that scales with how many creeps/heroes it hits. The more people there, the more damage it does. It also stuns because of the 3rd. If you ever play against ES, don't clump up. - A pusher. A pusher is pretty straight forward and simple. It's a hero that has a strength in pushing towers in a phase of the game where it can be difficult for certain lineups to defend. Pushing heroes are often time heroes with strong nukes, you can get rid of creep waves fast, but also some that has spells that damages towers. For instance Shadow Shamans ultimate is a set of snakes that spawns and can hit the tower. Leshraqs second spell can focus down a tower very well with a constant, high damage. Furion the Nature's Prophet can spawn minions, so you have extra minions to take down towers. Chen can dominate creeps, so he can dominate some of the neutral creeps and have very powerful damage and pushing capability with them, also he has a global heal. In a pushing strategy, you generally want some good auras or aoe effects that your heroes can take advantage of. You can buy Arcane Boots which replenishes 135 mana for all the heroes around the hero that uses it every 35th second. You can buy a Ring of Basilius (common tongue Basi) which gives you a mana regen and armor increase aura and other things like that.
- A support. A support hero is basically a hero that spends his whole game making the team happy and making sure, they get what they want. In the laning phase you babysit them, make sure they don't die and they get their farm. You buy a courier at the beginning of the game and another support hero buys the wards. It's important to keep having vision of the key points on the map through the whole game, such as Roshan access, runes and good pathingspots where people often run when they gank, etc. Vision is knowledge, knowledge is power, power is wins. Support heroes often time ends up playing the games without any real items; they may have upgraded boots and in the best case scenario they have a cheap item too, like Force Staff, Urn of Shadows or Drum of Endurance.
Classic support heroes are Vengeful Spirit, Crystal Maiden, Lion, Witch Doctor and Lich.
That's about it. In future blogs or in the discussion beneath, we can get into something more specific on the roles. I could imagine I would go through supporting in a blog and how you go about being a support hero.
What do I want implemented on short term?
..since yesterday! Haha. There's always things that you kind of forget and new things come to mind, so for every blog, I will make this little thing and write some of the things that I'd like to see in the not too distant future.
- A forfeit button. Doesn't have to be 15 or 20 minutes as in Heroes of Newerth or League of Legends. It could be after 30 minutes. I just want it to be there, so we don't have to sit in these pro-longed games.
- A more specified MMR and it to be official.
- A remake function in the game if someone leaves within the first 5 minutes.
Interested in getting access to the DotA2 beta?
Congratulations to ruXxar and Nalesnik! Thanks for some good posts, they were all enjoyable. But don't worry, I will do another giveaway in the not too far distant future. Follow me on Twitter to see when!
I guess I like him because he is so fast and good at hunting down enemies.
). I love swapping people into the middle of my team xD, her stun, her aura, and her aoe debuff are really helpful in teamfights as well. Shes just an overall a good addition to the team and an excellent support
