Dota 2

Dark Seer is a great support hero, though. >_>


Also that tournament can go piss off. Do people seriously like watching other people play video games so much that valve's taking a hiatus from finishing the heroes so they can work on pennants?
 
So the International is now over, and I'm a sad panda. Valve did an extremely good job with the event as a whole, and the games were amazing. Now hopefully their documentary won't take long to be released...=]
 
2.5 weeks later: Meepo is awesome. Been practicing microing him and aiming Earthbind in bot matches and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.
 
6.75 is out! Rumor has it that the latest patch had no content because they were preparing for the changes in 6.75.

I'm really looking forward to how these changes will affect the game. Every underused hero practically got buffed, and big heroes--like Morphling and Leshrac--got nerfed heavily.
 
Oh awesome, a lot of my favorite heroes are getting buffs.

-Alchemist gets a decent numbers buff to Goblin's Greed and an even faster base attack speed during rage
-Batrider gets a big boost to his Strength growth
-All four of Drow's abilities are buffed (Marksmanship rescaled from +15/30/45 to +15/30/60)
-Ezalor's chakra magic's manacost reduced, Illuminate range gets even longer
-Lifestealer rages for longer
-Phantom Assassin crits even harder
-Phantom Lancer now has the highest mainstat growth in the game
--Pugna gets pissed off about being in second and starts jogging faster
-Shadow Fiend nerfs more armor than before, Requiem also passively activates when you die and half your souls are released (the active skill still remains)
 
So I hear the new Arc Warden is more broken than any hero on this page. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a newish player who doesn't even have Warcraft 3, but from my understanding even the Terminator doesn't look like he could backdoor a third tower and both barracks in ten seconds fifteen minutes in.
 
I recently got into this game with a couple of friends. I haven't had this much fun in a very, very long time. We're all still extremely new (though I've already read the whole Welcome to Dota, You Suck piece) but I'm trying to get better with Broodmother. Any tips for this baby spider?
 

xenu

Banned deucer.
- Level Death bonus damage now deals 20% of Max HP instead of a fixed amount

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa no more nukem r.i.p doombringer
 

TAY

You and I Know
is a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
I recently got into this game with a couple of friends. I haven't had this much fun in a very, very long time. We're all still extremely new (though I've already read the whole Welcome to Dota, You Suck piece) but I'm trying to get better with Broodmother. Any tips for this baby spider?
My own broodmother is mediocre, but i can give some tips as someone who has seen a lot of brood play and who often plays hard lane solo.


  1. As soon as your game loads, buy your items quickly and run down to the hard lane. On both dire and radiant sides there is a big bunch of trees immediately after the river. Destroy that bunch of trees with a web. Even if you are going to a different lane it will give your hard lane a lot of extra vision. You have time to go back to fountain and heal if you wish, though it probably doesn't matter.
  2. Since it seems like you're playing with people you can coordinate with, you should try to lane brood against heroes that are terrible at destroying the spiders. If their lanes are obvious, try to avoid going against sand king, kotl, tide, etc and try to put yourself against single target heroes. In pubs however you will almost always be forced into hard lane solo.
  3. As soon as you see your lane opponents, check their inventories for sentry wards. Don't just run out and assume they cannot see you. Frequently check their inventories after that.
  4. You can buy your own sentry wards and kill theirs with spiders at little risk to yourself, though often you will be OK without doing this.
  5. You can farm the jungle with spiders while you gain exp in lane
  6. You can last hit from range with your Q
  7. Max your Q first. You shouldn't get your E until level 8 at the earliest and often should get it later.
  8. Once your Q is level 4 you can spam it against even moderately squishy opponents to force them from the lane (assuming you already have soul ring, which you should). Just don't get behind on your last hits.
  9. As soon as your lane opponent leaves for any reason, grab your spiders and push their tower. Even if you just force a tp, they just wasted 135g and fucked their lanes. Occasionally you may need to leave your lane to help in a teamfight, but in general you will be on the same lane for the whole game.
  10. As for playing hard lane solo in general, a big mistake that new players make is assuming they need to be getting farm. If you're solo lane against a trilane (including 2 + 1 in jungle) or even a particularly hard dual lane (e.g. shadow demon + leshrac/kunkka) you can expect to be behind in levels. It's not a big deal. Since you are taking on 2-3 by yourself, your team will have an advantage on the rest of the map. At least one of your opponent's lanes should be farming just as badly as you, as long as the rest of your team is doing their job. Your job as a hard lane solo is to scrape up whatever exp/gold you can without dying. Often that means just staying by your tower.
  11. Don't take dumb risks, but be aware if the lanes support has left and you can move in to grab some farm.
  12. If you get a few spiders, you can pull your opponent's creep wave you your tower by intercepting it between their t1 and t2. This will allow you to get farm even against a trilane, which is a huge win for your team. Every popular hard lane solo is used because it can get some bit of farm. If you're the hard lane solo player among your friends, you can also try Lone Druid, Nature's Prophet (both can pull opponent's creep wave to tower), Windrunner (great escape, farms from distance with powershot), Beastmaster (stacks ancients with boar and kills them later with axes), and Dark Seer (pushes lane hard with his W, then intercepts opposing creep wave himself and escapes with E), though Dark Seer is frequently banned in captains mode.
Honestly it isnt even a bad strategy to buy 6 tangos and use a couple to eat your way into the trees. Then you just stand there and gain exp. This is a good thing to do if you need to solo a hard lane tidehunter or sand king, where you're basically just waiting for level 6 and then you get free kills.


Good Luck!
 
Oh wow, I wasn't expecting such an in-depth reply. Thanks a lot! I went and watched some videos of more experienced players and I noticed the guy jungling (dunno if I'm using it correctly; he was sending his spiderlings to go fight the boss-like mobs?) with his spiderlings. Is there a way to select all your spiders but not yourself? I did shift + drag but sometimes the corner of the selection will grab me too.
 

TAY

You and I Know
is a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
Oh wow, I wasn't expecting such an in-depth reply. Thanks a lot! I went and watched some videos of more experienced players and I noticed the guy jungling (dunno if I'm using it correctly; he was sending his spiderlings to go fight the boss-like mobs?) with his spiderlings. Is there a way to select all your spiders but not yourself? I did shift + drag but sometimes the corner of the selection will grab me too.
Yeah you want to send the spiders to farm the jungle while you stay in the lane. It's very risky to go into your opponents jungle yourself, so it's best to stay with your webs in the lane. There is a key for "select all non-hero units i control" which you can change to whatever you want. Mine is set to the tilde (~) key, but I don't remember if that is the default. You can change all your keybinds in the game options.

Since you are apparently even newer than i thought, if you haven't done it already you should really change your hotkeys to be something comfortable. I think the default item use hotkeys are the keypad numbers, which is obviously terrible. I wound up setting items to F1/F2/Z/X/C/Space with D and F set to skill 1 and skill 2 (used for characters that can gain extra skills such as Invoker, Rubick, and Lone Druid). I use 1 for select hero and 2,3,4 etc for hotkey groups for use with Chen and Bestmaster. This all made sense to me since I came from an SC2 background, but you can set to whatever feels most comfortable. I know some people will even just change their hotkeys depending on what hero they are.

Oh and you need to set hotkeys for selecting the courier and bringing up the shop. I use the side mouse buttons for that but you can easily set them to keyboard binds as well.

Also if you want to play let me know, my name in dota is Winterminute. I've been playing guild wars 2 recently but I still play a fair bit of dota, so hit me up if you see me on!
 

Royal Flush

in brazil rain
is a Past WCoP Champion
Funny to see IceFrog desperately nerfing the popular competitive combos (DS/Naga/Morph/Lycan), but I kinda agree with most of it.
I just wanna believe that the 4,2 agi gain from PL is a typo. Seriously that's freaking too much... speaking of PL, looking forward to see Pit Lord in action, he's prolly the hero I miss the most and his new changes looks promising (non-channeling firestorm, yay).


Ethereal Blade using the primary atribute looks funny, we might see some joke builds actually working (Destroyer maybe?). Also something reeeeally big is the wards costing only 150 gold now; as a support-lover, that's a huge improvement I always wanted.
 
Ethereal Blade using the primary atribute looks funny, we might see some joke builds actually working (Destroyer maybe?)
Eth Blade OD looks like a pretty legitimate build now honestly.

I'm interested in this Shadow Amulet item too. CM would really like it for Freezing Field (especially as Freezing Field is 7 seconds now!)
 
I just wanna believe that the 4,2 agi gain from PL is a typo. Seriously that's freaking too much...
Not really. PL doesn't offer anything to a team except for Spirit Lance harass until late game when he gets super farmed. Heroes like Anti-mage farm and lane much better, so they can start helping out around 20 minutes.
 

TAY

You and I Know
is a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
Funny to see IceFrog desperately nerfing the popular competitive combos (DS/Naga/Morph/Lycan), but I kinda agree with most of it.
I just wanna believe that the 4,2 agi gain from PL is a typo. Seriously that's freaking too much... speaking of PL, looking forward to see Pit Lord in action, he's prolly the hero I miss the most and his new changes looks promising (non-channeling firestorm, yay).


Ethereal Blade using the primary atribute looks funny, we might see some joke builds actually working (Destroyer maybe?). Also something reeeeally big is the wards costing only 150 gold now; as a support-lover, that's a huge improvement I always wanted.
Well he isn't really nerfing popular combos in the sense that DS, Naga, and Lycan pretty much never make it past the first ban stage. I think it's a good step to take to move the game more towards "what should we ban to make our strategy work" and further away from "second pick needs to ban naga/lycan or they probably lose". I really would have liked a bigger hit on Morph though, namely the completely ridiculous fact that he can activate strength morph while stunned.

I do like that the carries with no/bad escapes got huge buffs to their dps. Forces players to choose between a carry that can be easily kept alive and a carry with more killing power (though I still doubt antimage and morphling will be replaced).

Also:
Panda Brewmaster
- Primal Split units are now affected by Black Hole

thank you so much
 

Royal Flush

in brazil rain
is a Past WCoP Champion
Not really. PL doesn't offer anything to a team except for Spirit Lance harass until late game when he gets super farmed. Heroes like Anti-mage farm and lane much better, so they can start helping out around 20 minutes.
I don't feel like playing the original DotA after touching Dota 2 to test the new PL, but I'll wait some feedback/updates going to dota 2. Atm I just feel that something around 3,6~3,8 agi gain would be enough for him, but yea what you said makes sense and might throw him into the meta.

Well he isn't really nerfing popular combos in the sense that DS, Naga, and Lycan pretty much never make it past the first ban stage. I think it's a good step to take to move the game more towards "what should we ban to make our strategy work" and further away from "second pick needs to ban naga/lycan or they probably lose". I really would have liked a bigger hit on Morph though, namely the completely ridiculous fact that he can activate strength morph while stunned.

I do like that the carries with no/bad escapes got huge buffs to their dps. Forces players to choose between a carry that can be easily kept alive and a carry with more killing power (though I still doubt antimage and morphling will be replaced).

Also:
Panda Brewmaster
- Primal Split units are now affected by Black Hole

thank you so much
Yea the games are getting boring in the way they are either instabanned or instapicked, I agree it's a necessary thing to make the meta shift into something new, I just feel Icefrog didn't really make the underused carries that better, maybe Alchemist/PL/Necrolyte will have a shot, but stuff like Bloodseeker/Drow are still outclassed, Nevermore still needs more buffs imo and Sniper still sucks. I believe those heroes need some skill rework to fit into the meta, not a shitload of buffs.
 

TAY

You and I Know
is a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
Yea the games are getting boring in the way they are either instabanned or instapicked, I agree it's a necessary thing to make the meta shift into something new, I just feel Icefrog didn't really make the underused carries that better, maybe Alchemist/PL/Necrolyte will have a shot, but stuff like Bloodseeker/Drow are still outclassed, Nevermore still needs more buffs imo and Sniper still sucks. I believe those heroes need some skill rework to fit into the meta, not a shitload of buffs.
I don't think drow and sf are really outclassed, just that their skillsets aren't in high demand. Though I do agree with you in that I doubt drow and sf will become even remotely commonly used carries. Drow was already able to outcarry morphling; her dps wasn't the issue.

The simple truth is that it is extremely unpopular to use carries that have no escape skill. The way to give more usage to the less common carries would have been to make the common carries easier to kill, such as a cd increase on am's blink, the strength morph change that I mentioned in the last post, or a speed reduction on CK. I don't think anything short of a major rework will make naga siren anything but top tier - her ult and illusion skill are just too good.

Bloodseeker I agree with you is generally bad and is almost always a worse pick than nightstalker.
 

RODAN

Banned deucer.
so im loving kunkka, any tips n tricks for him other than x -> torrent or something


also landing ghostship
 

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