But he's so fun in pubs. Laning with a soul ring, then popping out with his ridiculous move speed and grabbing some fool while his team goes to work on them.
If he had any aoe presence, not horrible cooldowns, and an ult that didn't require him to stand around like an idiot then he'd be good in team fights and a great hero.
I've been playing a bit of Death Prophet, but I'm not sure I enjoy rushing bloodstone like a lot of people suggest. It's a long bad build-up (I guess you can go arcane boots and later disassemble but still..), and it leaves me without any escape in teamfights. I tried building a combination of force staff and rod of atos one game, which seemingly worked pretty well - it allowed me to stay alive longer in the teamfights, since I could get out of the inevitable focus fire with force, and escape chasers with atos. The build also allowed for some stupidly fun chasing, where I'd force staff myself into atos range, then letting my nukes/ghosts do the rest.
I guess a good DP would just be more aware of proper positioning, making the forcestaff obsolete (I really love the item though, build it on a lot of heroes - it's both versatile, fun and effective and helps with my poor positioning). Maybe someone can enlighten me on good DP builds and strats?
Watching Premier League reminds me of why I love Na'vi so much.
ARS-ART going for his patented CM build of dual nukes and stats, no ult, no aura, then stacking hp with bracers and a vanguard. Suddenly CM isn't food and the other team can't figure out why! Plus, she's got decent nukes, so surviving the team fight is really helpful.
That is awesome. I've always wanted to do this, but I get scared my team will rage and yell because no aura. This was standard before the aura was global way back, right?
Again unsure of the current dota metgame, but at least in HoN I feel like the proliferation of easy mana devalues aura and makes a build like that worthwhile.
pub cms almost never get aura anyway, because they are garbage players. no one will care if you max nova/bite
I would never recommend picking cm over any other support if you weren't planning on getting aura. nova and frostbite are good, but not good enough compared to the other supports you could have
Shameful pursuits and utterly stupid opinions
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Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
I've been playing a bit of Death Prophet, but I'm not sure I enjoy rushing bloodstone like a lot of people suggest. It's a long bad build-up (I guess you can go arcane boots and later disassemble but still..), and it leaves me without any escape in teamfights. I tried building a combination of force staff and rod of atos one game, which seemingly worked pretty well - it allowed me to stay alive longer in the teamfights, since I could get out of the inevitable focus fire with force, and escape chasers with atos. The build also allowed for some stupidly fun chasing, where I'd force staff myself into atos range, then letting my nukes/ghosts do the rest.
I guess a good DP would just be more aware of proper positioning, making the forcestaff obsolete (I really love the item though, build it on a lot of heroes - it's both versatile, fun and effective and helps with my poor positioning). Maybe someone can enlighten me on good DP builds and strats?
I've personally had great success rushing out a Eul's Divine Scepter. The core of my items is Phase Boots + Eul's, which gives you ~500 movement speed when phase boots is active. The speed, mana regeneration, and health regeneration of your ultimate make sure that you can keep active on all parts of the map. Death Prophet is pretty dangerous early game. The whirlwind lets you catch people, activate your ultimate, silence them upon landing and begin beating them into submission with Carrion Swarm and auto attacks.
Late game, Euls has a double purpose of crowd control and defense. Throwing yourself into the air when focused is a double threat for the enemy; not only does it save you but your ghosts continue to fight while you are mid air. In a 1v1 scenario that is close, the 2.5 seconds of free focused ghost damage is easily enough to turn a battle. In a team fight it allows to you enter the battle and dodge the most dangerous focus. 2.5 seconds of invulnerability buys you most of carrion swarm's cooldown and for your ultimate to near it's conclusion (healing you to full). I more often use Eul's on myself than enemies.1
500 movement speed is a defense of it's own as well.
Usually I begin working to a soulbooster->Bloodstone immediately after Euls. A mekanism can be good as well if no one else is using one. I don't quite prefer it though. Mana can get pretty tight with two fairly expensive active items and your spammable spells unless you have that bloodstone. Bloodstone is better defensively as well. Plus it heals too! A bit trickier to use perhaps! Trouble is that Mekanism has great power early game so I don't really know about getting it after your Bloodstone. It drops off a bit late game. For defensive purposes at that point a Shiva's Guard might be better- but they're really not similar in price so a direct comparison isn't really fair.
On a different topic I think I'm going through a bit of a Dagon phase right now. It all started with watching mTw Tulex running this absolutely silly Necrolyte build where he rushed out a Dagon and leveled it up fast. He would just zap someone for half of their health and then slam them with Reapers Scythe, instantly killing them. He even got Ethereal Blade and scaled it into the late game. No one survives Eth. Blade->Level 5 Dagon->Reapers Scythe. Of course, Tulex is a sick farmer so I never get past say level 4 Dagon (and I'm absolutely terrible at Necrolyte). It was still really fun though.
Then I started trying to learn Puck. Itemization for Puck is utterly baffling to me beyond two bracers and (arcane?) boots. Nothing scales and you're not really an auto-attacker, so what do you build? Many items like Shivas seem like they would be quite nice but her low health makes mitigation defenses seem really underwhelming. Radiance, while hilarious, is also wasteful. Blink dagger's obviously good but I'm still trying to handle Puck's very fragile play without the dagger, so I was mostly ignoring it. I ended up getting Dagon on her for three games straight and it actually working rather well. Turns her into a super ganker. It's pretty great but after using it on people like Necrolyte and Pugna I felt like it was really lacking on Puck by comparison. No synergy with her skills.
Does anyone here play Puck? Should I just buckle down and try and farm those expensive mitigation items (Shiva/Pipe)? Scepter? Just aim for dagger?
Watching Premier League reminds me of why I love Na'vi so much.
ARS-ART going for his patented CM build of dual nukes and stats, no ult, no aura, then stacking hp with bracers and a vanguard. Suddenly CM isn't food and the other team can't figure out why! Plus, she's got decent nukes, so surviving the team fight is really helpful.
That is awesome. I've always wanted to do this, but I get scared my team will rage and yell because no aura. This was standard before the aura was global way back, right?
Again unsure of the current dota metgame, but at least in HoN I feel like the proliferation of easy mana devalues aura and makes a build like that worthwhile.
It was specifically a case of proper team construction and good communication. They got the CM probably as a denial, she didn't fit with their team but would have been great with the other team and they were out of bans. The thing is, they already had at least 2 heroes that were going arcane boots and they were a heavy on pushing and team fights. So it wasn't a case where CM would spend the first half of the game across the map trying to babysit someone. They were always close by, and 2 arcane boots means the aura isn't as important as CM not being a free kill before every fight. In fact, after the mid game CM was the tankiest hero in the game and finished her build off with a yasha just because they were winning by so much.
Re: Death Prophet.
What you build will depend on how you want to play her. Early game she needs a lot of mana or regen. If you get it then you can farm really, really fast with her nuke, even if you don't get a lot of towers. She also doesn't need to be right in the middle of a team fight in order to use her ult. She just has to be there. If you've got proper initiation on your team and good positioning you can make it so the other team has to charge into her nukes, ult, and silence just to get at her, and usually that means they're going to die. Never forget that she has a 5 second aoe nuke and a huge aoe silence, so she needs mana. You could try void stone into either ultimate orb or point booster. That gives you regen, hp, mana, and options. If you farm well enough to get the bloodstone early then it's alright, but you can easily transition into a sheepstick or rod. I love force staff on her and there's no reason not to get it. You can use it on enemies to put them out of position or on your team to help them initiate or escape. It's a great item.
Re: Puck.
Puck's primary roll is initiation and chasing or escaping. Puck has a huge mid-game presence and isn't supposed to scale into the late game. The reason you get blink dagger is because it makes Puck impossible to kill and way easier to play. Instead of trying to orb in real slow and obvious like, you can just blink in, silence, ult, then throw your orb back as a safety net. If you get focused you just phase and then jaunt after your orb. By that time your team should be there anyway. The other use is that whenever you're in trouble you can phase out and wait for blink to come off cooldown then immediately blink away, making Puck really hard to chase (much harder than with orb, since they can see which way the orb is going and often outrun later in the game). Puck has 3 good nukes, 2 of them are disables, and 2 of them have short cooldowns. As long as you can keep spamming those and force the other team to waste their nukes and disables while you dodge them with phase and blink then your team should have no problem cleaning up. You just have to play aggressively and be aware of what your opponents can throw at you.
So I learned tonight that my Asus netbook does not have the video capacity to play Dota 2. So I'm back to trying to fix my desktop in order to get my fix.....
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TannerMS "I'm confidence cause I'm zerg!"Registered Userregular
edited March 2012
fuckkkk deleted shit I'm gonna get baned
but sincerest apologies, if I wanted to disagree with mods, I'd totaly make a case about how the three games in which this may have been posted share a similar desire to seek publiucityn at the expense of anything from the same fenral audience but I totally agreew with your ability (and right) to tell me to stfu, if thwere was an optiopn, I would.)
You probably ought to ignore this, it's not worht it
because it;s against rules that were put in place for a reason, there is no problem from my end
Yeah, I gave that a watch before playing. I've also watched a fair bit of streams, which I thought was going prepare me more than it actually did.
Yeah, as a brand new player there's a shitload of information you need to process and remember, which will take some time - "who is that little stone dude, and how did he just kill me from 80% health?". Try having a look at this guide . You should probably also install this script, so all the DOTA1 icons on playdota.com will be made into DOTA2 icons, making the playdota guides readable for those of us who don't know the dota icons by heart.
A bit later, you should take a look at some of Purge's videos. While he's definitely an advanced player, he does a good job of explaining the basics to new players in some of the videos as well. He's got a couple of videos covering the fundamentals (items, laning, etc.), as well as videos showing off different heroes.
As a new player I found that having auto-attack enabled would get me killed a lot, since my hero would just run into terrible situations when I didn't pay enough attention (constantly). Consider disabling it in options if you're having the same issues, just remember you can still make the hero autoattack with a "A+left click"-move, as in most RTS games.
While bot games might be the safest way to learn, it's also quite frustrating and boring if you're alone - the bots WILL 5 man jump on you with perfect timing, and your allied bots WILL run around like idiots while this happens. When you feel like you understand the basics, consider just jumping in a matchmade, all-pick game and doing your best. The new players at low skill are often significantly worse than the bots (max difficulty bots, at least), or at the least less coordinated. Preferably queue with friends if possible. Don't let the insane learning curve get to you, the game is so immensely rewarding once you understand what's going on
Feel free to add me on steam, if you want to ask other simple questions. I've only been playing for around 3-4 months though, so I won't be of much help past the initial learning curve :P
Edit: updated the link to the "welcome to dota guide", thanks to Peewi for linking the DOTA2 version below. Also holy shit these new smilies are ugly
OR just play some games with a PA premade and we'll show you the ropes.
Or he could do both? It might not be a bad idea to get a feeling for last hitting, animations and abilities versus bots, before he's got to face a real enemy that may or may not know what he's doing. It's definitely a matter of preference, but I don't think "reading guides", "try shit in bot games" and "play with PA premades" are mutually exclusive - in fact all three activities should complement each other quite well.
No one had said it yet, I wasn't saying the other ideas were invalid, good sir.
Edit: Though I do believe live tutoring is the best of the choices. I also believe a PA premade wouldn't care about possibly losing to give a new player a crash course in DOTA2.
No worries, I am just trying to make sure new players aren't scared off by people telling them they have to do all this leg-work before actually playing a real game. If it sounds like work, I think less people will be interested in giving the game a chance.
I would much rather invite people to play with a premade since (i think) it would feel more welcoming than "Do all this homework before you can even play"
The idea is: Whatever you think would make you most comfortable.
Man, thanks for the help. Definitely going to read over the guide and play some bot matches before anything else. First game I played I didn't even know how to buy an item from the store.
Oh, and thanks for the tip about auto-attacking, Gnome. When I was messing around it definitely got me hit a lot.
Never played Tiny but I have gotten killed by him in awesome ways. Me and a teammate are running away behind a tower and soaring through the air comes Ancient Apparition, lands on us and takes us both down. I like to imagine he had ice daggers for hands and stabbed us both in the back as he landed.
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
Had probably my biggest roflstomp today, with a 27-2 performance as Gondar. Couldn't resist a rapier-laden fountain dive at the end. One shotted Windrunner, Warlock, and almost Sand King.
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SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
every time someone mentions sand king I feel a bizarre need to boot dota 2 and play a game as him
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SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
It's hilarious how you can heal through three people's damage and kill the enemy Dazzle with a Scepter'd Pugna ultimate
Dota 2 bots are pretty bad for comparing to general pubs. They're way too passive in lane and just roll over and die when you start being aggressive.
You can practice last hitting and denying against them, I guess.
just got my beta invite last week and that's what i've been doing. just playing bot games learning the champs, how to last hit with them and deny, and (slowly) learning the item shop and builds, and learning how to traverse through the jungle to try and gank. still suck at this game, but i'm getting better at it.
Dota 2 bots are pretty bad for comparing to general pubs. They're way too passive in lane and just roll over and die when you start being aggressive.
You can practice last hitting and denying against them, I guess.
I think you're overestimating the skills of people who've never played dota before. The game is so far from being "intuitive" that many newcomers do a lot of really counter-productive stuff that seems right (pushing/towerdiving from the get-go etc.), and the bots will indeed completely dominate them. I had a decent idea of the theory behind the game when I started (read a lot of stuff and watched streams before), but I still got completely wrecked by the bots at the start because the difference between "good positioning" and "huge overextension" is so relatively small to the untrained eye (and dependant on knowing the abilities of the heroes as well). But yeah, after learning those basic things and getting used to the interface, the bots lose almost all their usefulness. They are still nice to have when you just need 2 minutes to get a grip on a new hero, though.
edit: not saying people MUST PLAY BOTS FOR 2 WEEKS or some shit like that, but for those of us who like to take it slow, they're a decent option (just don't overdo it, bot games are really boring compared to the real deal of course). Other players may prefer jumping into the fray and hoping for the best, which is equally valid of course
Na'Vi vs Quantic Gaming GRAND FINAL will be up within less than 2 hours, going to be good! I'm really enjoying Tobi and Synderen casting together, they complimentcomplement each other very well. GO QUANTIC
I think you're overestimating the skills of people who've never played dota before. The game is so far from being "intuitive" that most newcomers do a lot of really counter-productive stuff that seems right (pushing from the get-go, etc.), and the bots will indeed completely dominate them. I had a decent idea of the theory behind the game when I started (read a lot of stuff and watched streams before), but I still got completely wrecked by the bots at the start because the difference between "good positioning" and "huge overextension" is so relatively small to the untrained eye (and dependant on knowing the abilities of the heroes as well). But yeah, after learning those basic things, the bots lose almost all their usefulness.
As a complete noob to dota (I've played LoL but i know there's a vast difference between LoL and DotA2) i can say this is 100% correct. These bots are teaching the value of positioning and not to overextend myself
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But he's so fun in pubs. Laning with a soul ring, then popping out with his ridiculous move speed and grabbing some fool while his team goes to work on them.
If he had any aoe presence, not horrible cooldowns, and an ult that didn't require him to stand around like an idiot then he'd be good in team fights and a great hero.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Are there three bans in the first ban phase or the second? I'm really hoping first so we stop seeing Nature's Prophet in every pro game.
I guess a good DP would just be more aware of proper positioning, making the forcestaff obsolete (I really love the item though, build it on a lot of heroes - it's both versatile, fun and effective and helps with my poor positioning). Maybe someone can enlighten me on good DP builds and strats?
That is awesome. I've always wanted to do this, but I get scared my team will rage and yell because no aura. This was standard before the aura was global way back, right?
Again unsure of the current dota metgame, but at least in HoN I feel like the proliferation of easy mana devalues aura and makes a build like that worthwhile.
I would never recommend picking cm over any other support if you weren't planning on getting aura. nova and frostbite are good, but not good enough compared to the other supports you could have
think of all the mana
I've personally had great success rushing out a Eul's Divine Scepter. The core of my items is Phase Boots + Eul's, which gives you ~500 movement speed when phase boots is active. The speed, mana regeneration, and health regeneration of your ultimate make sure that you can keep active on all parts of the map. Death Prophet is pretty dangerous early game. The whirlwind lets you catch people, activate your ultimate, silence them upon landing and begin beating them into submission with Carrion Swarm and auto attacks.
Late game, Euls has a double purpose of crowd control and defense. Throwing yourself into the air when focused is a double threat for the enemy; not only does it save you but your ghosts continue to fight while you are mid air. In a 1v1 scenario that is close, the 2.5 seconds of free focused ghost damage is easily enough to turn a battle. In a team fight it allows to you enter the battle and dodge the most dangerous focus. 2.5 seconds of invulnerability buys you most of carrion swarm's cooldown and for your ultimate to near it's conclusion (healing you to full). I more often use Eul's on myself than enemies.1
500 movement speed is a defense of it's own as well.
Usually I begin working to a soulbooster->Bloodstone immediately after Euls. A mekanism can be good as well if no one else is using one. I don't quite prefer it though. Mana can get pretty tight with two fairly expensive active items and your spammable spells unless you have that bloodstone. Bloodstone is better defensively as well. Plus it heals too! A bit trickier to use perhaps! Trouble is that Mekanism has great power early game so I don't really know about getting it after your Bloodstone. It drops off a bit late game. For defensive purposes at that point a Shiva's Guard might be better- but they're really not similar in price so a direct comparison isn't really fair.
On a different topic I think I'm going through a bit of a Dagon phase right now. It all started with watching mTw Tulex running this absolutely silly Necrolyte build where he rushed out a Dagon and leveled it up fast. He would just zap someone for half of their health and then slam them with Reapers Scythe, instantly killing them. He even got Ethereal Blade and scaled it into the late game. No one survives Eth. Blade->Level 5 Dagon->Reapers Scythe. Of course, Tulex is a sick farmer so I never get past say level 4 Dagon (and I'm absolutely terrible at Necrolyte). It was still really fun though.
Then I started trying to learn Puck. Itemization for Puck is utterly baffling to me beyond two bracers and (arcane?) boots. Nothing scales and you're not really an auto-attacker, so what do you build? Many items like Shivas seem like they would be quite nice but her low health makes mitigation defenses seem really underwhelming. Radiance, while hilarious, is also wasteful. Blink dagger's obviously good but I'm still trying to handle Puck's very fragile play without the dagger, so I was mostly ignoring it. I ended up getting Dagon on her for three games straight and it actually working rather well. Turns her into a super ganker. It's pretty great but after using it on people like Necrolyte and Pugna I felt like it was really lacking on Puck by comparison. No synergy with her skills.
Does anyone here play Puck? Should I just buckle down and try and farm those expensive mitigation items (Shiva/Pipe)? Scepter? Just aim for dagger?
It was specifically a case of proper team construction and good communication. They got the CM probably as a denial, she didn't fit with their team but would have been great with the other team and they were out of bans. The thing is, they already had at least 2 heroes that were going arcane boots and they were a heavy on pushing and team fights. So it wasn't a case where CM would spend the first half of the game across the map trying to babysit someone. They were always close by, and 2 arcane boots means the aura isn't as important as CM not being a free kill before every fight. In fact, after the mid game CM was the tankiest hero in the game and finished her build off with a yasha just because they were winning by so much.
Re: Death Prophet.
What you build will depend on how you want to play her. Early game she needs a lot of mana or regen. If you get it then you can farm really, really fast with her nuke, even if you don't get a lot of towers. She also doesn't need to be right in the middle of a team fight in order to use her ult. She just has to be there. If you've got proper initiation on your team and good positioning you can make it so the other team has to charge into her nukes, ult, and silence just to get at her, and usually that means they're going to die. Never forget that she has a 5 second aoe nuke and a huge aoe silence, so she needs mana. You could try void stone into either ultimate orb or point booster. That gives you regen, hp, mana, and options. If you farm well enough to get the bloodstone early then it's alright, but you can easily transition into a sheepstick or rod. I love force staff on her and there's no reason not to get it. You can use it on enemies to put them out of position or on your team to help them initiate or escape. It's a great item.
Re: Puck.
Puck's primary roll is initiation and chasing or escaping. Puck has a huge mid-game presence and isn't supposed to scale into the late game. The reason you get blink dagger is because it makes Puck impossible to kill and way easier to play. Instead of trying to orb in real slow and obvious like, you can just blink in, silence, ult, then throw your orb back as a safety net. If you get focused you just phase and then jaunt after your orb. By that time your team should be there anyway. The other use is that whenever you're in trouble you can phase out and wait for blink to come off cooldown then immediately blink away, making Puck really hard to chase (much harder than with orb, since they can see which way the orb is going and often outrun later in the game). Puck has 3 good nukes, 2 of them are disables, and 2 of them have short cooldowns. As long as you can keep spamming those and force the other team to waste their nukes and disables while you dodge them with phase and blink then your team should have no problem cleaning up. You just have to play aggressively and be aware of what your opponents can throw at you.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
I don't know what to do.
Another good starting point could be this 4 minute video, depending on your familiarity with the genre/dota.
Thanks for the death prophet advice, good stuff!
Mostly because one of them got sent to me. This almost NEVER happens, what the hell.
Just because the chocolate Pudge is so cute.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
They'll make one eventually. In the meantime, watch this:
because it;s against rules that were put in place for a reason, there is no problem from my end
Don't advertise stuff for an entirely different game in this thread.
I went something ridiculous like 13/4/12, but couldn't carry the team hard enough
Jugg feels overdue for a buff or overhaul...and this is coming from a Jugg enthusiast since 5.36
the art and voiceacting in dota2 is so cool though that I can't be mad
I see ones that people are making where you can watch, but cannot join those either.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, I guess it's down.
Yeah, as a brand new player there's a shitload of information you need to process and remember, which will take some time - "who is that little stone dude, and how did he just kill me from 80% health?". Try having a look at this guide . You should probably also install this script, so all the DOTA1 icons on playdota.com will be made into DOTA2 icons, making the playdota guides readable for those of us who don't know the dota icons by heart.
A bit later, you should take a look at some of Purge's videos. While he's definitely an advanced player, he does a good job of explaining the basics to new players in some of the videos as well. He's got a couple of videos covering the fundamentals (items, laning, etc.), as well as videos showing off different heroes.
As a new player I found that having auto-attack enabled would get me killed a lot, since my hero would just run into terrible situations when I didn't pay enough attention (constantly). Consider disabling it in options if you're having the same issues, just remember you can still make the hero autoattack with a "A+left click"-move, as in most RTS games.
While bot games might be the safest way to learn, it's also quite frustrating and boring if you're alone - the bots WILL 5 man jump on you with perfect timing, and your allied bots WILL run around like idiots while this happens. When you feel like you understand the basics, consider just jumping in a matchmade, all-pick game and doing your best. The new players at low skill are often significantly worse than the bots (max difficulty bots, at least), or at the least less coordinated. Preferably queue with friends if possible. Don't let the insane learning curve get to you, the game is so immensely rewarding once you understand what's going on
Feel free to add me on steam, if you want to ask other simple questions. I've only been playing for around 3-4 months though, so I won't be of much help past the initial learning curve :P
Edit: updated the link to the "welcome to dota guide", thanks to Peewi for linking the DOTA2 version below. Also holy shit these new smilies are ugly
Or he could do both? It might not be a bad idea to get a feeling for last hitting, animations and abilities versus bots, before he's got to face a real enemy that may or may not know what he's doing. It's definitely a matter of preference, but I don't think "reading guides", "try shit in bot games" and "play with PA premades" are mutually exclusive - in fact all three activities should complement each other quite well.
Edit: Though I do believe live tutoring is the best of the choices. I also believe a PA premade wouldn't care about possibly losing to give a new player a crash course in DOTA2.
I would much rather invite people to play with a premade since (i think) it would feel more welcoming than "Do all this homework before you can even play"
The idea is: Whatever you think would make you most comfortable.
Oh, and thanks for the tip about auto-attacking, Gnome. When I was messing around it definitely got me hit a lot.
You can practice last hitting and denying against them, I guess.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
just got my beta invite last week and that's what i've been doing. just playing bot games learning the champs, how to last hit with them and deny, and (slowly) learning the item shop and builds, and learning how to traverse through the jungle to try and gank. still suck at this game, but i'm getting better at it.
I think you're overestimating the skills of people who've never played dota before. The game is so far from being "intuitive" that many newcomers do a lot of really counter-productive stuff that seems right (pushing/towerdiving from the get-go etc.), and the bots will indeed completely dominate them. I had a decent idea of the theory behind the game when I started (read a lot of stuff and watched streams before), but I still got completely wrecked by the bots at the start because the difference between "good positioning" and "huge overextension" is so relatively small to the untrained eye (and dependant on knowing the abilities of the heroes as well). But yeah, after learning those basic things and getting used to the interface, the bots lose almost all their usefulness. They are still nice to have when you just need 2 minutes to get a grip on a new hero, though.
edit: not saying people MUST PLAY BOTS FOR 2 WEEKS or some shit like that, but for those of us who like to take it slow, they're a decent option (just don't overdo it, bot games are really boring compared to the real deal of course). Other players may prefer jumping into the fray and hoping for the best, which is equally valid of course
Na'Vi vs Quantic Gaming GRAND FINAL will be up within less than 2 hours, going to be good! I'm really enjoying Tobi and Synderen casting together, they complimentcomplement each other very well. GO QUANTIC
As a complete noob to dota (I've played LoL but i know there's a vast difference between LoL and DotA2) i can say this is 100% correct. These bots are teaching the value of positioning and not to overextend myself