Medallion cost 1200 gold and is built from some pretty reasonable items. I'd go there beore eul's, typically. Also, don't forget you can cast it on allies to grant them armor.
The greatest reason you should almost always consider medallion early on Dazzle is because all of Dazzle's spells are physical damage. And he's a fairly potent right clicker on top of that.
I would say I buy a magic stick in well over 80% of my games, and in at least 10% of the games I don't get it I regret it. I don't upgrade it to the full wand all that often, since I seem to get less iron branches at the start of the game these days, but I never regret picking up the flat stick.
The greatest reason you should almost always consider medallion early on Dazzle is because all of Dazzle's spells are physical damage. And he's a fairly potent right clicker on top of that.
I was bloodseaker and laned with dazzle yesterday. I would blood rage him to increase his harass. He hit's like a truck early.
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Random thought: Is blood raging a ranged creep a good way to afk push a lane? (I guess the idea being Bloodseeker is going to gank and figures it'll be off CD by the time he gets to the other lane, so you do it to push a bit and get chip damage on the tower, and possibly mess up the other guy's farm if he's not good at timing last hits with the tower shots)
(of course I might be completely wrong in how lane control works 'cause I'm nub but iunno)
The greatest reason you should almost always consider medallion early on Dazzle is because all of Dazzle's spells are physical damage. And he's a fairly potent right clicker on top of that.
The potent right-click I noticed, but that all his spells did physical damage, I did not. That's.....game-changing information.
Random thought: Is blood raging a ranged creep a good way to afk push a lane? (I guess the idea being Bloodseeker is going to gank and figures it'll be off CD by the time he gets to the other lane, so you do it to push a bit and get chip damage on the tower, and possibly mess up the other guy's farm if he's not good at timing last hits with the tower shots)
(of course I might be completely wrong in how lane control works 'cause I'm nub but iunno)
And that is just an interesting idea, I'm also curious as to the answer.
Of course, according to dotabuff, I have about 24 Heroes I haven't really played with yet, so I still have work to do in Single Draft and Random Draft before I'm fully satisfied with who I like and don't like, and start regularly playing any Hero.
Random thought: Is blood raging a ranged creep a good way to afk push a lane? (I guess the idea being Bloodseeker is going to gank and figures it'll be off CD by the time he gets to the other lane, so you do it to push a bit and get chip damage on the tower, and possibly mess up the other guy's farm if he's not good at timing last hits with the tower shots)
(of course I might be completely wrong in how lane control works 'cause I'm nub but iunno)
The effect is probably negligible, and not worth having the spell on cooldown.
Dazzle also has a lot of fun synergies. Illusion heroes like SD, naga, PL let you do huge burst damage with easy setup. Brood/dazzle is another good one.
Random thought: Is blood raging a ranged creep a good way to afk push a lane? (I guess the idea being Bloodseeker is going to gank and figures it'll be off CD by the time he gets to the other lane, so you do it to push a bit and get chip damage on the tower, and possibly mess up the other guy's farm if he's not good at timing last hits with the tower shots)
(of course I might be completely wrong in how lane control works 'cause I'm nub but iunno)
The effect is probably negligible, and not worth having the spell on cooldown.
Dazzle also has a lot of fun synergies. Illusion heroes like SD, naga, PL let you do huge burst damage with easy setup. Brood/dazzle is another good one.
Dazzle with any minus armor is great. Slarder is particularly great, he's tanky enough to blink in and initiate and survive until you're in range to heal, benefits greatly from your bonus armor, and amplify damage makes dazzles spells do ridiculous damage.
Thanks, was fun. I really struggled in the first 5-10 minutes thanks to keyboard input not working until I bounced the game, and just generally being off my game for a while.
Our team had a LOT of synergy, it was kinda ridiculous whenever two or more of us worked together.
Man, I've climbed from 900 to 1200 MMR off the back of a couple of simple policies:
1) Pick Strength heroes. The health pool saves me from so many of my scrub positioning errors. And my opponents aren't practiced enough in chainstunning or ganking to punish it. Bristleback in particular is my go to core hero. Just last game a Spirit Breaker tried three separate timesin about 15 minutes to gank me. I just ran back to tower and he was left with nothing.
2) Pick supports with a heal and a kickass ultimate. Witch Doctor. Omniknight. Warlock. I guess Dazzle for the crazy people like @Thawmus. The point is to win the lane for your carry by just healing them up and making all their mistakes better. Getting them a surprise kill. At this low MMR Omni is a monster laner because players don't know how to deal with Purify. But because you're playing with pubs you can't afford to trust your team to take the early advantage. So you still need an ultimate that kicks ass and takes names with or without team coordination. This is why again Omni is a monster. I've played one game where someone knew to silence me early. This is why Treant Protector is only ok for me, even though I love him. His heals are good, but his ulti is an initation tool that requires more team follow up than a good WD Cask/Maledict/Death Ward combo. Though I'm thinking at my level, winning the laning phase then farming for Agh's might work for Tree. The game will last that long down here in the trench, and then the other team will never see rax again.
Though I'm thinking at my level, winning the laning phase then farming for Agh's might work for Tree
At least as long as I've played, Tree has always been a hero whose goal is to win all the lanes for his team. The tradeoff is that you need to win the lanes with him because he falls off pretty hard as the game goes late. It used to be a whole lot easier when he had a global regen passive, but those days are long gone. I have to say though, that in my experience aghs just isn't worth it, your cash is better spent on aura items and a blink dagger.
Everyone loves Tree Agh's, but the fact of the matter is that if you're going to be playing him as a support, it will take far too much of your time and attention away from your other supporting responsibilities. On some teams, a treant with a blink dagger is much more frightening than a late Aghs.
I absolutely agree with you guys that blink Tree seems like the better kit overall.
But.
I'm at 1200 MMR here. Players don't know how to push against Tree's tower healing. They leave so much farm begging that even a support Tree can farm relatively quickly for an Aghs. They often struggle to really abuse Treant's blink-ulti initiation. Once you DO have Agh's online they SUPER struggle to make all the lanes stop pushing because that involves silly things like detection and quelling blades. And once all the lanes are pushed against them it's a coinflip whether they even have the teamwork together to stop fucking farming and throne-push when they win a late game teamfight.
A couple of games ago we won partly because a Lion went full carry mode with Sange and Yasha and all kinds of dps nonsense. Last game I was playing with a Sand King who bought Veil before Blink and then farmed to the exclusion of helping us throne push for the win so he could get his Radiance.
I'm not totally sure I'm right here - it'll take more testing. I'm just saying that the meta that exists is, to my understanding, basically the pro meta. That's not the meta I'm in right now, and I've started to realise this lately. The best way to climb MMR is to play MY meta, not some imaginary mirage meta in the distance. Maybe Tree Agh's won't work. But even if it doesn't I'll dust myself off and look for more sub-optimal noob strats that totally work at my level. I'll learn to play properly when I'm against players who know what they're doing - who force me to improve.
I agree that high tier meta doesn't necessarily translate a 100%, but I still think it's important to consider over all effectiveness, and tree aghs, to me, isn't that effective for the money and time investment. I think you'll have much better results with blink into refresher, with the caveat that proper blink initiation is a skill that takes time to develop. When you're a newer player it's sometimes best just to hold onto your blink+ult combo to save your team when they get into trouble.
I agree that high tier meta doesn't necessarily translate a 100%, but I still think it's important to consider over all effectiveness, and tree aghs, to me, isn't that effective for the money and time investment. I think you'll have much better results with blink into refresher, with the caveat that proper blink initiation is a skill that takes time to develop. When you're a newer player it's sometimes best just to hold onto your blink+ult combo to save your team when they get into trouble.
Thanks for the advice. I'll consider that for future Tree games.
Having said that, I played once already and the result was pretty positive. I crushed a brood lane with some help from Slark and then held off the brood/SF split push at the T2s with Living Armour until the Aghs got online. Then the map started glowing green. I rarely bothered to turn up for teamfights at all: I just ulti'd when the fight was near one of my trees and I armoured up someone who needed it. Then I went right back to farming and pushing lanes back. They never caught sight of our T2 towers again.
In honesty, if I'd farmed for blink instead we could probably have closed out the game with a throne push way earlier. But that's probably. I've seen so many 'probablys' fall apart at this bracket that I went for the sure thing.
Oh, and something I realised that's probably a 'duh' moment for the rest of you: to speed up the Agh's rush you can buy mana boots so you keep yourself active and topped up, and then disassemble and sell the mana booster for a cheaper Aghs and then before you know it your ulti will farm you back the mana boots or a bottle or what have you.
Aghs Tree is strong in pubs because the tree provides all the warding that your team isn't buying, and farms all the camps that neither team is efficiently farming. By all means, get a blink dagger first. AOE blink initiation should never be underestimated in any level of play. But the availability of money in pub games is very, very different from the availability of money in pro games. Unlike in pro games, in pub games a lot of gold is just left on the table at all phases of the game: gold that isn't there for pros to get the Aghs unless they build the team around helping the Tree get that, is there in pubs. Consider that at low level games, you can't even count on your teammates to last hit consistently early game, to say nothing of the efficiency at which either team is harvesting the rest of the gold on the map.
While he doesn't seem to fit your criteria, Pugna's pretty good lower brackets.
Bonus is he farms quite quickly and can solo push lanes/towers fast.
In lower brackets, players don't kill his ward and quite happily fight under it.
edit: He does have a heal though.
Hmmm, that's interesting. I've played him and liked him, but in the end I gave him up because people seemed to think he was a subpar support and had to go mid. I generally don't like taking mid or safelane farm. Maybe I'll give him another try though...
Why did no one tell me Elder Titan was so fun? Purge put up a video recently, and he said that ET was sort of like a fisherman: he lays out his line and waits for something to bite in a teamfight. Which sounded really fun and relaxing in the same way that I like playing Pudge support: no pressure, just wait at the back for a good opportunity. We lost, but I had so much fun doing crazy stuff like amping our Crystal Maiden's ulti to insane levels, saving teammates from safety with Astral Spirit-Stomp, and hitting crazy Earth Splits.
The other benefit I found with ET is that no one at my level knows what the hell he does. I can't blame them because neither did I. So they stood still for my Earth Splits, bunched up for my Spirit Stomps, and walked right into CM's amped ultis.
I don't know why, but there's something about playing with those big plodding bruiser types - the ones who look like they're plodding everywhere: Pudge, Treant, Elder Titan, to some extent Earth Shaker - that keeps me happy and relaxed even while we're losing. It's also nice that their playstyle encourages patience and really calm, safe positioning before you strike.
Why did no one tell me Elder Titan was so fun? Purge put up a video recently, and he said that ET was sort of like a fisherman: he lays out his line and waits for something to bite in a teamfight. Which sounded really fun and relaxing in the same way that I like playing Pudge support: no pressure, just wait at the back for a good opportunity. We lost, but I had so much fun doing crazy stuff like amping our Crystal Maiden's ulti to insane levels, saving teammates from safety with Astral Spirit-Stomp, and hitting crazy Earth Splits.
The other benefit I found with ET is that no one at my level knows what the hell he does. I can't blame them because neither did I. So they stood still for my Earth Splits, bunched up for my Spirit Stomps, and walked right into CM's amped ultis.
I don't know why, but there's something about playing with those big plodding bruiser types - the ones who look like they're plodding everywhere: Pudge, Treant, Elder Titan, to some extent Earth Shaker - that keeps me happy and relaxed even while we're losing. It's also nice that their playstyle encourages patience and really calm, safe positioning before you strike.
I think Elder Titan is fun, but he requires a small amount of micro to be good, and it's split-second micro. I tend to be standing around like a dumbass in the wrong position, and become food.
Kinda the same problem I have with Lycan or any other micro Hero, really. Even with Warlock, easily my most played Hero, I tend to have Golems standing around with their thumbs up their asses, or I'm standing around with my thumb up my ass while I truck the golems. And it's irritating to me because I have put tens of thousands of hours into RTS's, telling someone to attack to location, using control groups, saving map positions, should all be second nature to me, but I get trapped in DOTA's single-track mentality of playing a top-down shooter.
In other news, I think the last 5 or 6 games I've been in, I've had a Weaver on my team, and he's been the MVP each time. During one game, when we lost a teamfight at about 45:00, and 4 dead, the opposing team spent the entire revive time trying to kill Weaver while he juked them throughout Dire's jungles.
my biggest issue with ET is that his spirit doesn't really count as a unit. I wish you could assign a persistent hotkey to it. it would make him so much easier to use and I think would alleviate some of the standing around like a dumbass that happens with him
Why did no one tell me Elder Titan was so fun? Purge put up a video recently, and he said that ET was sort of like a fisherman: he lays out his line and waits for something to bite in a teamfight. Which sounded really fun and relaxing in the same way that I like playing Pudge support: no pressure, just wait at the back for a good opportunity. We lost, but I had so much fun doing crazy stuff like amping our Crystal Maiden's ulti to insane levels, saving teammates from safety with Astral Spirit-Stomp, and hitting crazy Earth Splits.
The other benefit I found with ET is that no one at my level knows what the hell he does. I can't blame them because neither did I. So they stood still for my Earth Splits, bunched up for my Spirit Stomps, and walked right into CM's amped ultis.
I don't know why, but there's something about playing with those big plodding bruiser types - the ones who look like they're plodding everywhere: Pudge, Treant, Elder Titan, to some extent Earth Shaker - that keeps me happy and relaxed even while we're losing. It's also nice that their playstyle encourages patience and really calm, safe positioning before you strike.
I think Elder Titan is fun, but he requires a small amount of micro to be good, and it's split-second micro. I tend to be standing around like a dumbass in the wrong position, and become food.
Kinda the same problem I have with Lycan or any other micro Hero, really. Even with Warlock, easily my most played Hero, I tend to have Golems standing around with their thumbs up their asses, or I'm standing around with my thumb up my ass while I truck the golems. And it's irritating to me because I have put tens of thousands of hours into RTS's, telling someone to attack to location, using control groups, saving map positions, should all be second nature to me, but I get trapped in DOTA's single-track mentality of playing a top-down shooter.
In other news, I think the last 5 or 6 games I've been in, I've had a Weaver on my team, and he's been the MVP each time. During one game, when we lost a teamfight at about 45:00, and 4 dead, the opposing team spent the entire revive time trying to kill Weaver while he juked them throughout Dire's jungles.
ET is funnily enough the only micro hero that I don't struggle so much with. I agree with you he's there, but so far I've found that having one micro unit that literally cannot die means the priority is always to keep your main dude alive. Also, since your spirit is so integral to your combos I tend to remember to micro him as well. I'm like "I'd like to land a good Earth Split. Oh, to do that I need to control my spirit right now! Stomp into Fissure. Cool." Now it's fine that I forget about the Astral SPirit because him being there for the Fissure only amps my damage, and if I forget to move him any more he'll come join me in a second anyway!
While he doesn't seem to fit your criteria, Pugna's pretty good lower brackets.
Bonus is he farms quite quickly and can solo push lanes/towers fast.
In lower brackets, players don't kill his ward and quite happily fight under it.
edit: He does have a heal though.
Hmmm, that's interesting. I've played him and liked him, but in the end I gave him up because people seemed to think he was a subpar support and had to go mid. I generally don't like taking mid or safelane farm. Maybe I'll give him another try though...
I think one of my issues lately is that I'm more comfortable in mid than anywhere else. I have bad games where I mid, sure, but most every game I've been in mid, I tend to do very well, and we usually win. Zeus, Axe, Viper, and Sniper tend to get picked if I can help it, and if I get them, and I get mid, the game goes pretty damn well for me. Zeus and Axe have been especially good for me, lately, with Axe giving me one of my only Rampages while I blink-called everyone and played Culling Blade Whack-a-mole.
I still really struggle with stacking, my timing is way way off, and I think a lot of that has to do with not maining any Heroes yet, not having the timing down for their attack, their turn speed, etc. So if I end up being lane support, that's fine, I like doing that, but I try to do the hard lane.
EDIT: I also have had problems with lane partners when I do try and stack camps. Despite my warning them I'm doing this, they decide to be aggressive, and bitch about how I was out of position or not helping. There is no winning when playing support for low tier.
The biggest trick to getting better at stacking/pulling etc. is to keep your eyes on the clock. If I'm not supporting, but I find myself passing through the jungle, I will make sure to stack whatever I can (preferably the hard camps). Almost all camps stack if you aggro them at :53s, with the exception of the Radiant medium camp by the tier 1 mid tower and the Dire medium camp to the left of the far right hard camp, which both stack at :55s.
As far as I know, it is now possible to stack almost every camp by auto-attacking them to draw aggro. The exception would be the Thunderhides (the dinosaurs) that spawn at the Ancient camp. When attacked the Ancient Thunderhide (the big dinosaur) procs his Frenzy ability which causes a roaring animation that can mess up the timing. It gets really bad when you're dealing with more one stack, sometimes the Ancient Thunderhide will get stuck on the other creeps and lose aggro after the animation. So the key to stacking the dinosaurs is to aggro the camp by walking into it, rather than attacking it.
While he doesn't seem to fit your criteria, Pugna's pretty good lower brackets.
Bonus is he farms quite quickly and can solo push lanes/towers fast.
In lower brackets, players don't kill his ward and quite happily fight under it.
edit: He does have a heal though.
Hmmm, that's interesting. I've played him and liked him, but in the end I gave him up because people seemed to think he was a subpar support and had to go mid. I generally don't like taking mid or safelane farm. Maybe I'll give him another try though...
I think one of my issues lately is that I'm more comfortable in mid than anywhere else. I have bad games where I mid, sure, but most every game I've been in mid, I tend to do very well, and we usually win. Zeus, Axe, Viper, and Sniper tend to get picked if I can help it, and if I get them, and I get mid, the game goes pretty damn well for me. Zeus and Axe have been especially good for me, lately, with Axe giving me one of my only Rampages while I blink-called everyone and played Culling Blade Whack-a-mole.
I still really struggle with stacking, my timing is way way off, and I think a lot of that has to do with not maining any Heroes yet, not having the timing down for their attack, their turn speed, etc. So if I end up being lane support, that's fine, I like doing that, but I try to do the hard lane.
EDIT: I also have had problems with lane partners when I do try and stack camps. Despite my warning them I'm doing this, they decide to be aggressive, and bitch about how I was out of position or not helping. There is no winning when playing support for low tier.
This is another case of the pro meta being unhelpful. A lot of pro guides are written with the intermediate player in mind - or they just don't understand what will and won't help utter noobs like us in the potato bracket. Pulling only helps if your carry knows what to do with it - play safe for a few seconds, tank the wave outside tower, etc. At my MMR and maybe yours too I doubt most players have even heard of lane equilibrium, let alone know what it is and how to maintain it. Fuck, I struggle at the barest facsimile of lane equilibrium. I fuck it up all the time. So I've stopped pulling except in extreme situations where it couldn't possibly fuck up. Now I focus on playing a lane support. In a sense, those whining carries were right: you and I were out of position. We were pulling a tactic that just isn't worthwhile at our MMR. I've had much better success playing a solid laning support keeping my carry alive and setting up kills.
It's also why I think offlane is an underrated role in the potato bracket. All the disadvantages of the offlane are nullified by enemies who don't know what to do with it. And even if all else fails by just following the advice "don't die, just sap XP; last hit when absolutely safe" you are immediately a better offlaner than half the players at your MMR. And because players here can't farm efficiently, you can still absolutely catch up on farm and become the team's carry. Hence why my bristleback does so well.
As for playing mid, awesome! Some players back themselves to make things happen with all that farm. I don't personally. I tend to be an ok ganking mid like NS, but then I and my team fail to capitalise or I dive too hard and give away gold. For some reason, while I tend to do better with pushing mids I haven't found one yet (except Pugna) that I can play well. So I just stay away from mid and leave it to a player who backs themselves at mid. If it turns out a disaster there's always the option to help them out with a gank.
I find I often am pulling when either my lane support, or my carry (if i'm supporting) has grossly pushed the lane. At that point they've basically told me that they don't understand or simply don't care about creep equilibrium. I also know that if we both stand so far out past tower protection we're gonna give up a double kill. So I will go pull. I will ping it, and I will even announce in chat that I'm doing it. Truth is, if they die as a result of pulling, they were gonna die in that lane anyway. At least I can get some xp and gold out of the deal. If they gripe, I mute them.
While he doesn't seem to fit your criteria, Pugna's pretty good lower brackets.
Bonus is he farms quite quickly and can solo push lanes/towers fast.
In lower brackets, players don't kill his ward and quite happily fight under it.
edit: He does have a heal though.
Hmmm, that's interesting. I've played him and liked him, but in the end I gave him up because people seemed to think he was a subpar support and had to go mid. I generally don't like taking mid or safelane farm. Maybe I'll give him another try though...
I think one of my issues lately is that I'm more comfortable in mid than anywhere else. I have bad games where I mid, sure, but most every game I've been in mid, I tend to do very well, and we usually win. Zeus, Axe, Viper, and Sniper tend to get picked if I can help it, and if I get them, and I get mid, the game goes pretty damn well for me. Zeus and Axe have been especially good for me, lately, with Axe giving me one of my only Rampages while I blink-called everyone and played Culling Blade Whack-a-mole.
I still really struggle with stacking, my timing is way way off, and I think a lot of that has to do with not maining any Heroes yet, not having the timing down for their attack, their turn speed, etc. So if I end up being lane support, that's fine, I like doing that, but I try to do the hard lane.
EDIT: I also have had problems with lane partners when I do try and stack camps. Despite my warning them I'm doing this, they decide to be aggressive, and bitch about how I was out of position or not helping. There is no winning when playing support for low tier.
This is another case of the pro meta being unhelpful. A lot of pro guides are written with the intermediate player in mind - or they just don't understand what will and won't help utter noobs like us in the potato bracket. Pulling only helps if your carry knows what to do with it - play safe for a few seconds, tank the wave outside tower, etc. At my MMR and maybe yours too I doubt most players have even heard of lane equilibrium, let alone know what it is and how to maintain it. Fuck, I struggle at the barest facsimile of lane equilibrium. I fuck it up all the time. So I've stopped pulling except in extreme situations where it couldn't possibly fuck up. Now I focus on playing a lane support. In a sense, those whining carries were right: you and I were out of position. We were pulling a tactic that just isn't worthwhile at our MMR. I've had much better success playing a solid laning support keeping my carry alive and setting up kills.
It's also why I think offlane is an underrated role in the potato bracket. All the disadvantages of the offlane are nullified by enemies who don't know what to do with it. And even if all else fails by just following the advice "don't die, just sap XP; last hit when absolutely safe" you are immediately a better offlaner than half the players at your MMR. And because players here can't farm efficiently, you can still absolutely catch up on farm and become the team's carry. Hence why my bristleback does so well.
As for playing mid, awesome! Some players back themselves to make things happen with all that farm. I don't personally. I tend to be an ok ganking mid like NS, but then I and my team fail to capitalise or I dive too hard and give away gold. For some reason, while I tend to do better with pushing mids I haven't found one yet (except Pugna) that I can play well. So I just stay away from mid and leave it to a player who backs themselves at mid. If it turns out a disaster there's always the option to help them out with a gank.
I agree with most all your points on this.
Though I will say there is a reason I've been able to play Axe, Warlock, and Zeus well, and that basically boils down to getting pro-meta advice, and watching pro matches (though I think that boils down to pro meta translating well in those Heroes' cases).
I've been doing a lot of Zeus bottle BS during the laning phase that I learned from watching Dendi and Sumail, pushing the lane with chain lightning while simultaneously aggravating my lane opponent (and I mean, I've made a Bloodseeker sit with a CS of 5 or less at the 10 minute mark), then running over to the mid jungle and getting some quick gold, grabbing runes, while I wait for the enemy tower to fix the lane again. I do things like body-block my own creeps in mid (something I see the pros do all the time) to keep the creep line closer to my stairs, etc.
I bitched about Axe on here, and got wonderful advice on how to facilitate a First Blood in mid, and have been doing that trick successfully, regardless of lane. Even when I'm Support Axe, hey buddy, you shouldn't get so close to your own creeps, now you're dead! Learning that Culling Blade goes through various anti-death measures has let me utterly piss off an enemy Dazzle. And hey, I'm not saying his complaint is invalid, but I got warm fuzzies out of his pain.
On the flip side, I don't find Tree playable at my tier, whatsoever. There is no pro-meta (or low-meta) advice that can fix him for me. Teammates expect him to be their party Cleric and start diving towers at level 1, and it drives me out of my mind when I'm mana tapped from helping everyone else out, and they leave me to die. I might just start rushing Eul's if I draft him again, but I really try hard not to play him at all. But if my team comp has no support, and he's the only support I have....
Muting everyone once teams start getting bitchy and putting on loud, 70's James Brown has helped me enjoy this game so much more.
Yeah. I go into every game hoping for the best, but Dota 2 does a very good job of showing how important it is to realize there is a definite cut your losses and go farm items point, even as a support.
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I was bloodseaker and laned with dazzle yesterday. I would blood rage him to increase his harass. He hit's like a truck early.
(of course I might be completely wrong in how lane control works 'cause I'm nub but iunno)
The potent right-click I noticed, but that all his spells did physical damage, I did not. That's.....game-changing information.
And that is just an interesting idea, I'm also curious as to the answer.
http://www.dotabuff.com/players/13651068/heroes
The effect is probably negligible, and not worth having the spell on cooldown.
Dazzle also has a lot of fun synergies. Illusion heroes like SD, naga, PL let you do huge burst damage with easy setup. Brood/dazzle is another good one.
You talk clean and bomb hospitals, so I speak with the foulest mouth possible
Dazzle with any minus armor is great. Slarder is particularly great, he's tanky enough to blink in and initiate and survive until you're in range to heal, benefits greatly from your bonus armor, and amplify damage makes dazzles spells do ridiculous damage.
Some Templar Assassin action.
Note the 4/20 start date and Witch Doctor set complete with blunt in mouth #yolo #mlg #noscope #blazeit
(I actually bought it - MLG Dota 2 events have been excellent so far and the set/courier are both gr8)
You talk clean and bomb hospitals, so I speak with the foulest mouth possible
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1410187932
GG @Thawmus @Buster Blade
Our team had a LOT of synergy, it was kinda ridiculous whenever two or more of us worked together.
1) Pick Strength heroes. The health pool saves me from so many of my scrub positioning errors. And my opponents aren't practiced enough in chainstunning or ganking to punish it. Bristleback in particular is my go to core hero. Just last game a Spirit Breaker tried three separate timesin about 15 minutes to gank me. I just ran back to tower and he was left with nothing.
2) Pick supports with a heal and a kickass ultimate. Witch Doctor. Omniknight. Warlock. I guess Dazzle for the crazy people like @Thawmus. The point is to win the lane for your carry by just healing them up and making all their mistakes better. Getting them a surprise kill. At this low MMR Omni is a monster laner because players don't know how to deal with Purify. But because you're playing with pubs you can't afford to trust your team to take the early advantage. So you still need an ultimate that kicks ass and takes names with or without team coordination. This is why again Omni is a monster. I've played one game where someone knew to silence me early. This is why Treant Protector is only ok for me, even though I love him. His heals are good, but his ulti is an initation tool that requires more team follow up than a good WD Cask/Maledict/Death Ward combo. Though I'm thinking at my level, winning the laning phase then farming for Agh's might work for Tree. The game will last that long down here in the trench, and then the other team will never see rax again.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
At least as long as I've played, Tree has always been a hero whose goal is to win all the lanes for his team. The tradeoff is that you need to win the lanes with him because he falls off pretty hard as the game goes late. It used to be a whole lot easier when he had a global regen passive, but those days are long gone. I have to say though, that in my experience aghs just isn't worth it, your cash is better spent on aura items and a blink dagger.
But.
I'm at 1200 MMR here. Players don't know how to push against Tree's tower healing. They leave so much farm begging that even a support Tree can farm relatively quickly for an Aghs. They often struggle to really abuse Treant's blink-ulti initiation. Once you DO have Agh's online they SUPER struggle to make all the lanes stop pushing because that involves silly things like detection and quelling blades. And once all the lanes are pushed against them it's a coinflip whether they even have the teamwork together to stop fucking farming and throne-push when they win a late game teamfight.
A couple of games ago we won partly because a Lion went full carry mode with Sange and Yasha and all kinds of dps nonsense. Last game I was playing with a Sand King who bought Veil before Blink and then farmed to the exclusion of helping us throne push for the win so he could get his Radiance.
I'm not totally sure I'm right here - it'll take more testing. I'm just saying that the meta that exists is, to my understanding, basically the pro meta. That's not the meta I'm in right now, and I've started to realise this lately. The best way to climb MMR is to play MY meta, not some imaginary mirage meta in the distance. Maybe Tree Agh's won't work. But even if it doesn't I'll dust myself off and look for more sub-optimal noob strats that totally work at my level. I'll learn to play properly when I'm against players who know what they're doing - who force me to improve.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Thanks for the advice. I'll consider that for future Tree games.
Having said that, I played once already and the result was pretty positive. I crushed a brood lane with some help from Slark and then held off the brood/SF split push at the T2s with Living Armour until the Aghs got online. Then the map started glowing green. I rarely bothered to turn up for teamfights at all: I just ulti'd when the fight was near one of my trees and I armoured up someone who needed it. Then I went right back to farming and pushing lanes back. They never caught sight of our T2 towers again.
In honesty, if I'd farmed for blink instead we could probably have closed out the game with a throne push way earlier. But that's probably. I've seen so many 'probablys' fall apart at this bracket that I went for the sure thing.
Oh, and something I realised that's probably a 'duh' moment for the rest of you: to speed up the Agh's rush you can buy mana boots so you keep yourself active and topped up, and then disassemble and sell the mana booster for a cheaper Aghs and then before you know it your ulti will farm you back the mana boots or a bottle or what have you.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
edit:bbcode!!!!!! 7th time is a charm.
Bonus is he farms quite quickly and can solo push lanes/towers fast.
In lower brackets, players don't kill his ward and quite happily fight under it.
edit: He does have a heal though.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Hmmm, that's interesting. I've played him and liked him, but in the end I gave him up because people seemed to think he was a subpar support and had to go mid. I generally don't like taking mid or safelane farm. Maybe I'll give him another try though...
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
The other benefit I found with ET is that no one at my level knows what the hell he does. I can't blame them because neither did I. So they stood still for my Earth Splits, bunched up for my Spirit Stomps, and walked right into CM's amped ultis.
I don't know why, but there's something about playing with those big plodding bruiser types - the ones who look like they're plodding everywhere: Pudge, Treant, Elder Titan, to some extent Earth Shaker - that keeps me happy and relaxed even while we're losing. It's also nice that their playstyle encourages patience and really calm, safe positioning before you strike.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I think Elder Titan is fun, but he requires a small amount of micro to be good, and it's split-second micro. I tend to be standing around like a dumbass in the wrong position, and become food.
Kinda the same problem I have with Lycan or any other micro Hero, really. Even with Warlock, easily my most played Hero, I tend to have Golems standing around with their thumbs up their asses, or I'm standing around with my thumb up my ass while I truck the golems. And it's irritating to me because I have put tens of thousands of hours into RTS's, telling someone to attack to location, using control groups, saving map positions, should all be second nature to me, but I get trapped in DOTA's single-track mentality of playing a top-down shooter.
In other news, I think the last 5 or 6 games I've been in, I've had a Weaver on my team, and he's been the MVP each time. During one game, when we lost a teamfight at about 45:00, and 4 dead, the opposing team spent the entire revive time trying to kill Weaver while he juked them throughout Dire's jungles.
You can keybind his spirit. I have mine on 3 in fact.
ET is funnily enough the only micro hero that I don't struggle so much with. I agree with you he's there, but so far I've found that having one micro unit that literally cannot die means the priority is always to keep your main dude alive. Also, since your spirit is so integral to your combos I tend to remember to micro him as well. I'm like "I'd like to land a good Earth Split. Oh, to do that I need to control my spirit right now! Stomp into Fissure. Cool." Now it's fine that I forget about the Astral SPirit because him being there for the Fissure only amps my damage, and if I forget to move him any more he'll come join me in a second anyway!
It just kind of works with me.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I think one of my issues lately is that I'm more comfortable in mid than anywhere else. I have bad games where I mid, sure, but most every game I've been in mid, I tend to do very well, and we usually win. Zeus, Axe, Viper, and Sniper tend to get picked if I can help it, and if I get them, and I get mid, the game goes pretty damn well for me. Zeus and Axe have been especially good for me, lately, with Axe giving me one of my only Rampages while I blink-called everyone and played Culling Blade Whack-a-mole.
I still really struggle with stacking, my timing is way way off, and I think a lot of that has to do with not maining any Heroes yet, not having the timing down for their attack, their turn speed, etc. So if I end up being lane support, that's fine, I like doing that, but I try to do the hard lane.
EDIT: I also have had problems with lane partners when I do try and stack camps. Despite my warning them I'm doing this, they decide to be aggressive, and bitch about how I was out of position or not helping. There is no winning when playing support for low tier.
As far as I know, it is now possible to stack almost every camp by auto-attacking them to draw aggro. The exception would be the Thunderhides (the dinosaurs) that spawn at the Ancient camp. When attacked the Ancient Thunderhide (the big dinosaur) procs his Frenzy ability which causes a roaring animation that can mess up the timing. It gets really bad when you're dealing with more one stack, sometimes the Ancient Thunderhide will get stuck on the other creeps and lose aggro after the animation. So the key to stacking the dinosaurs is to aggro the camp by walking into it, rather than attacking it.
This is another case of the pro meta being unhelpful. A lot of pro guides are written with the intermediate player in mind - or they just don't understand what will and won't help utter noobs like us in the potato bracket. Pulling only helps if your carry knows what to do with it - play safe for a few seconds, tank the wave outside tower, etc. At my MMR and maybe yours too I doubt most players have even heard of lane equilibrium, let alone know what it is and how to maintain it. Fuck, I struggle at the barest facsimile of lane equilibrium. I fuck it up all the time. So I've stopped pulling except in extreme situations where it couldn't possibly fuck up. Now I focus on playing a lane support. In a sense, those whining carries were right: you and I were out of position. We were pulling a tactic that just isn't worthwhile at our MMR. I've had much better success playing a solid laning support keeping my carry alive and setting up kills.
It's also why I think offlane is an underrated role in the potato bracket. All the disadvantages of the offlane are nullified by enemies who don't know what to do with it. And even if all else fails by just following the advice "don't die, just sap XP; last hit when absolutely safe" you are immediately a better offlaner than half the players at your MMR. And because players here can't farm efficiently, you can still absolutely catch up on farm and become the team's carry. Hence why my bristleback does so well.
As for playing mid, awesome! Some players back themselves to make things happen with all that farm. I don't personally. I tend to be an ok ganking mid like NS, but then I and my team fail to capitalise or I dive too hard and give away gold. For some reason, while I tend to do better with pushing mids I haven't found one yet (except Pugna) that I can play well. So I just stay away from mid and leave it to a player who backs themselves at mid. If it turns out a disaster there's always the option to help them out with a gank.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I agree with most all your points on this.
Though I will say there is a reason I've been able to play Axe, Warlock, and Zeus well, and that basically boils down to getting pro-meta advice, and watching pro matches (though I think that boils down to pro meta translating well in those Heroes' cases).
I've been doing a lot of Zeus bottle BS during the laning phase that I learned from watching Dendi and Sumail, pushing the lane with chain lightning while simultaneously aggravating my lane opponent (and I mean, I've made a Bloodseeker sit with a CS of 5 or less at the 10 minute mark), then running over to the mid jungle and getting some quick gold, grabbing runes, while I wait for the enemy tower to fix the lane again. I do things like body-block my own creeps in mid (something I see the pros do all the time) to keep the creep line closer to my stairs, etc.
I bitched about Axe on here, and got wonderful advice on how to facilitate a First Blood in mid, and have been doing that trick successfully, regardless of lane. Even when I'm Support Axe, hey buddy, you shouldn't get so close to your own creeps, now you're dead! Learning that Culling Blade goes through various anti-death measures has let me utterly piss off an enemy Dazzle. And hey, I'm not saying his complaint is invalid, but I got warm fuzzies out of his pain.
On the flip side, I don't find Tree playable at my tier, whatsoever. There is no pro-meta (or low-meta) advice that can fix him for me. Teammates expect him to be their party Cleric and start diving towers at level 1, and it drives me out of my mind when I'm mana tapped from helping everyone else out, and they leave me to die. I might just start rushing Eul's if I draft him again, but I really try hard not to play him at all. But if my team comp has no support, and he's the only support I have....
I'm in Australia. I'd get some hella lag but I don't mind if you guys don't.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Yeah. I go into every game hoping for the best, but Dota 2 does a very good job of showing how important it is to realize there is a definite cut your losses and go farm items point, even as a support.