Hello there. I am a 2.9k MMR player and it’s been a couple of months since I last played. I’m a university student so I placed a greater emphasis on my studies than dota and next year I’ll be starting medical school hence probably no more dota until the holidays and breaks throughout my course. During this summer (Australia, southern hemisphere, opposite seasons to the northern hemisphere) my objective is to improve my gameplay and focus more on my mistakes and flaws in game to improve. In games I generally try to call the ganks, shots and when we should not fight or when we should. There are games people listen, or ignore. I would prefer if there were more players who debate against my choices as this would be more beneficial for myself and for the team as a whole. This blog will be dedicated to analysing my ranked games to the best of my knowledge and of course serve as a clowny reminder to everyone of what it is like here. Furthermore, I would like some harsh criticisms from anyone who is willing to read. This is intended to force myself to watch my replays and record my thoughts on how poorly I am playing.
***SCREENSHOTS LOW QUALITY. My computer is bad.***
Ranked Game 1: I am so bad as a support
All-pick phase with three heroes chosen and I think the team looks decent. However, I fear their witch doctor – faceless void combo so I acknowledge that in team fights, it is my duty to cast silence on the witch doctor if possible and nuke when I can. With gyrocopter & invoker, I feel we have okay team fight presence if invoker decides for a QW build for mid game. I do not feel gyrocopter can carry us to the late game against their sniper & faceless void, so I think we need to finish early and snowball from there.
Medusa pick. I don’t understand; this hero is late game heavy. And a centaur pick. What? Okay, so with this draft, in hindsight, I would probably run the invoker mid definitely, skywrath and gyrocopter are capable of supporting, centaur solo offlane, medusa hard carry tri-lane it. But unfortunately this is a 2.9k MMR game and no one ever listens to my suggestions. Oh well. The remainder of this blog will be focused entirely on my own gameplay and my mistakes, what I could do better and what I should be doing.
Gyrocopter safe lane, dual lane centaur with medusa. Oh well. What can I do is the question now. How can my in game impact potentially enable our team to snowball and farm way ahead of the other team. This is my job this game; to secure our carry’s farm, to gank and shut down whoever I can and to obviously serve as the poor 5th position support. I just want levels; I don’t think skywrath needs many items to function. A force staff later on will be nice and arcane boots to keep the push sustain for the team. I thought about a bottle but … we have to see how the game goes.
Observation: tidehunter has no items. Time to harass and chase him out of lane. I’m a skywrath mage with a nuke and gyrocopter can definitely zone him out. This was an easy lane that was automatically won if gyrocopter gets free farm and I get the pulls going. I think my ward positioning was not needed and was a big mistake. I should have anticipated the possibility of the enemy team tri-laning and gave both wards to the centaur in order to block their pull camp. Furthermore, my pulls were a bit mis-timed this game leading to inefficiencies. During the minutes where I could not pull because there was no spawn, I should have went to the jungle and focused on stacking 2 camps at once in dire. This is an unforgiveable mistake as a support player who has a ranged-carry like gyrocopter free in lane with free farm. I should have used this opportunity to stack a lot of camps and later on have the gyrocopter clear it with flak cannon to snowball his farm even harder. I will need to remember this in future games.
Assistance with invoker mid – this is a crucial aspect of supporting I feel I could also improve on. I rarely do walk over to runes to secure it for my mid player. It’s a bad habit I’ve gotten into due to the fact that if I leave my core in lane, they generally are incapable of holding their own and die for playing too greedily. This is a risk I always bear in mind but when I’m playing with friends, this bad habit continues. This needs working on.
So this is my gank attempt mid. I understood the potential for wards in the river spawn, so I walked to the small camp of the dire, towards the medium and down into the steps directly into mid lane, I rotated towards the river where the ward couldn’t see me, and used my Concussive shot, followed by Arcane Bolts with Invoker’s cold snap. Now, the sniper got away with only 1 more auto attack. I think in hindsight, I should have taken the risk to dive and get the kill because I have boots, he does not. This gives me a distinct advantage when chasing and I failed to capitalise on this. Secondly, the clarity I had earlier in game was used; if I had saved in and planned this gank ahead of time (to a certain extent) I would have had another arcane bolt and that would have been a guaranteed kill given its low cooldown. Thirdly, I was arcane bolting creeps because I like gold; this greedy play hurt me in this gank. I think this play emphasises my need to utilise my down time more effectively and check the items on sniper; I did not do that and did not capitalise on my boots. Goddamnit. So to summarize this gank: WHY YOU SO PUSSY SKYWRATH?
Also, gloves of haste invoker – interesting.
Gyrocopter freefarm. 5 minutes in. 8 x 5 = 40. Missed 15 last hits. Oh and the catapults. Can’t forget Carty. I think I can say that a few were definitely lost because of my pulls. Nothing I can do here. What I should be doing is focusing my efforts at bot lane. That tri-lane is atrocious but at the same time lion and witch doctor with a void is scary. A centaur and medusa is weird.
Time to fuck up void. Lion player on the other team; clutch. He hexed centaur mid-animation of stun on void. Otherwise that void would have ate our nukes and died. Centaur followed up on my concussive shot onto the void. I felt this was a massive risky play given void can just leap out but this void did not do that. We got lucky that he was … not thinking. He lived thanks to the lion who remedied his crucial mistake otherwise he was a dead man.
A double kill. Clean. Thanks to invoker’s sunstrike, centaur’s stun, arcane bolts and medusa’s mystic snake. We needed this. A significant problem here is yes, gyrocopter is getting free farm but my instincts thought if medusa was up there instead of gyrocopter, this game would look better. Gyrocopter + centaur offlane would have been okay. Especially if I trilaned with them. But that’s in the past now, on to what I can do.
Net worth wise, we’re doing okay. I’m ahead of lion! That’s what happens with no pulls in a tri-lane!
This was the opportunity to kill sniper. Centaur invisibility with no wards on the map because they timed out. Problem: gyrocopter got jumped on by lion & tidehunter. Seriously, why was he even near them with 60% HP in the first place so I TPed up there and did nothing. He got away because lion fucked up and didn’t chain stun him. Tidehunter also fucked up and missed his ravage. Invoker dies mid because he walks towards sniper who just ultis and auto attacks him. Now, in hindsight, I should have said “Gyrocopter is dead” assuming tide just ravages him straight up and doesn’t miss. Even if I did TP in, it would be too late and he was too far from the T1; he was bloody near to the enemy T1. Secondly, I should have stayed mid, there was a potential successful gank with a slow, stun, cold snap etc. We just had to execute right. This was my mistake and my blunder that cost the invoker his life.
More problems: my down time was spent camping lanes. What I should be doing is STACK STACK STACK. I think it’s because I fear my cores will get dove on but obviously if I thought about the map more, it’s clear they should be fine. Another reason behind this is I want to kill the enemy to not only get my team farm but shut them down. I think the safer play would be to stack camps and enable our carries to snowball. Oh and a minor complaint: medusa, stop afking in your lane and learn to rotate to another lane to get farm. Take over the gyrocopter’s lane while he comes with us to kill things.
Successful smoke gank from centaur and I. Well, in hindsight I think this was overdoing it but oh well, he is finally dead. Medusa got killed bottom. I think what needed to happen here was medusa and gyrocopter rotated lanes. Gyrocopter has a midas now. Medusa is our ticket to late game but I don’t think we can even win this game given how far behind she is. She is nothing more than a walking creep on our team. Centaur and I have to roam as a pair and kill the other 2 lanes a lot so that space is created for the medusa. Or she just trades spots with gyrocopter; how hard can that be right?
Stacking ancients. A bit too late I suppose. But better than nothing. No stacks in our jungle; my mistake. I failed to do that.
Another smoke gank. Void broke it. We couldn’t find him as he timewalked out and their entire team was nearby. This is a big thing in my level of pubs; 5 man all the time mid game. So our smoke gank failed, and we’re fucked 3v5. Pretty much I can say that my timing was dumb. I had a feeling we could have gotten void in the jungle as he was on the map and definitely there, but I did not consider that all the other lanes were missing. Our medusa is at base not utilising this space; go safe lane and farm please. Copter is nearby but I don’t think this is a good idea.
This entire fight was a failure. I understood that tidehunter was going to ravage. Witch doctor was doing to kill us with his death ward and if void ultis us, we’re dead. Centaur needs to get the hell out. I silenced the tidehunter, we need to kill him immediately. But invoker decides to meatball the witch doctor. We did not coordinate in this fight; obviously we all died. Fun. My smoke gank was a mistake and I did not consider the variables in front of me. I think in hindsight the best outcome here was we trade 2 for 1. We did get the witch doctor. Nothing else I could have done here. Void is outfarming our gyrocopter. We did not shut down the void enough. This is where everything goes to hell.
The rest of the game is quite clear cut; we lose all team fights, we cannot get pick offs. I’m wasting time, not stacking, I can’t do much anymore and it was up to the team to carry. I tried my best to keep up with the vision we had with wards. Team doesn’t communicate or coordinate well. Medusa sits in one lane. All game. I end up 0 11 7 this game. I felt quite limited in what I could do but I think if I had stacked, pulled and made more effective smoke ganks, and rotated to the dying offlane, I could have made bigger impacts early game and enabled our team to snowball. Gyrocopter kept up with the void but medusa… well, you can’t really support someone who refuses to rotate to other lanes or even jungle and farm.
Summary
So this game came down to me controlling the early game. That was where skywrath mage shines the most. The list of things I should have done better are
1. More effective smoke ganks.
I need to consider the presence of heroes on the map, predict where they are, including non-targets, and execute. I need to communicate with the team for this, especially heroes like invoker and centaur with a blink. They’re the stuns or global presence I need for these ganks to work.
2. Early game pulling and efficiency in stacking.
I needed to stack. Suppose I stacked the large and medium camp near the T2 dire several times. Suppose it was a stacked 5 times each. That’s a bucketload of gold for the gyrocopter through the use of flak cannon. Average large camp is 124 gold. Multiply that by 5 and you have 620 gold. Medium camp on average is 102 gold. Multiply that by 5 and you have 510. Ancient stacking too. I did do that but too little too late. Idle time throughout the game is too much.
3. Warding
I think this game, if I thought a little harder and knew it was going to be a tri-lane, OR even said “potential is there” and played safer by giving the wards to the offlane, it would have been safer for them and they would not have died.
4. Rune control
Not doing it. Then again invoker didn’t even have a bottle. Weird. Should be doing it anyway. Double damage runes win games.
5. Team fighting
I just gave up at a certain point and tried to kill anything or anyone hence died a lot more than I needed to. I needed better positioning. I needed to be far back and wait for centaur to initiate then blow someone up with my ultimate. Instead I was in around the front or middle of the pack in team fights. I played like a suicide bomber.
6. Prioritize which lane needs the most help
Our offlane was dying. I did not do enough for it. I needed to be there more often and try make plays happen. Safe lane was fine. Mid was okay if the invoker had a bottle and rune controlled.
Interesting moments of the game
Oh yeah. I’m level 2. Gyrocopter has his Homing missile and Rocket Barrage. Tidehunter overextends and walks towards our small camp due to my pull; ward vision gave us this information. This was the perfect opportunity to kill him; a tide with no boots, a ring of health and a magic stick. Concussive shot into Homing missile and chase him leading to an easy kill. I’m pinging and saying go. Gyrocopter is jerking off in lane. It was not guaranteed but I think it was worth a try.