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[Dota 2] Nyx Assassin, Keeper of the Light, and Visage this week, and straight to CM.
Posts
damn you WMG
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I haven't, but I've wanted to try Venommancer.
Other heroes are fun, too.
I pretty much only play Doom solo if I have a Crystal Maiden on the team. I just find myself unable to compete with a long ranged enemy that focuses on harassment since all my mana goes to devour. Having CM around allows me to use death a bit, which usually makes them back off since it kills them in two shots at the right level.
One of the people I was with said "I hope you're not one of the dual midas lone druids".
I don't know whether that set him off or not, but he got midas on both himself and bear and farmed for 50 minutes straight.
We won the game 4v5.
He ended 3-7-3.
If he had just showed up ever we could've won the game 15-20 minutes earlier.
Also fell short of 600gpm with all our tower kills, 50 minutes freefarm and 2 midas.
I've decided that in pubs I just have to play viper because that gives me a strong lane no matter what.
I am finally starting to feel like I am getting this a little bit. I might even try and hook up with some of you guys and play a game against real people soon. Do you guys use voice comms when you play? Just the built in ones, or some kind of mumble/vent server?
also, rockets
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Adds random draft, but other than that it's mostly fixes.
Lich is great for newbies, IMO.
CM is... a weak hero IMO, at least with aura at 3,4,5,7. You have two level 1 nukes and an ult all through early game? not good. I guess maybe its enough to babysit, but I'm always underwhelmed with her. Maybe leveling her nukes and buying early HP is a better build? Maybe page- or someone who follows competitive dota can comment
As someone also new to AA I agree he takes a bit to learn, but its also a matter of perception. That "conditional stun" is also a 300 damage DOT. Just spam it to win your lane and forgot about "wasting" the conditional stun part. Then run around ganking. Like Lina, you basically need an initiator stun for your conditional stun, so if you have some stuns in the side lanes you can be pretty brutal.
Tuskarr is the other ice hero, but he's not in this yet and I know nothing about him. THD is half ice. Drow too!
TEAM ICE: lich, CM, drow, AA, THD
TEM WATER: Morph, Naga, Slar, Dusa, Kunkka and Tide are all water.
For TEAM FIRE there's: phoenix, fire panda, batrider, lina, jakiro
then less so: huskar, skeleton king, clinx, dragon knight, pit lord
TEAM LIGHTNING: razor, zeus, storm, thrall
less so: leshrac
Who wants to do a theme team tonight?
TEAM Captain Planet: Earthshaker/Pebbles/Sandking, Lina/Batrider, Morphling, Invoker?
I'd prefer to do it with some PA'ers, so when I screw it all up and lose horribly, we can all have a laugh.
There are 3 situations in which an AA must make a decision about how to use cold feet.
The first is laning, and that's the easiest. You hit someone with cold feet in lane and they are forced to back off, giving you (and your lane partner, if you're not solo) some free time.
The second is during ganks, counter-ganks, and other small scale fights early on. If someone else on your team has a disable then you want to combo with them, which is when he's most dangerous. Cold feet + frostbite, cold feet + venomous gale, cold feet + fissure, and so on.
The third use is for fights later in the game, especially team fights. This is when cold feet becomes an anti-carry skill. You identify their heaviest right click hero and cold feet them in the fight. Because their entire job is to stand around and do as much physical damage they're the ones who will be moving the least and also the ones who will be hurt most by a stun. You see their Void coming in and you manage to avoid the ult, well you cold feet that Void and now he can stay in his ult and get stunned or run away and waste it. You see their AM trying to right click your team down, you cold feet him and now he can keep attacking and get stunned, or blink away. Works pretty much the same for other carries.
His ult is the same way. It has 3 distinct uses.
The first is a long range initiation tool. This will be how you use it early to help other lanes. As soon as you get it you can check the other lanes and see how vulnerable they are. Then you throw your ult at them and give them a ping or something so they know it's coming. In the early game it's really easy to get kills with simple burst damage and AA's ult. Say you're top lane and in the bottom you've got a Riki and Veno. You throw your ult down there, the Veno hits a gale, and the Riki blink strikes. That's at least 1 kill every time. You can use the minimap to time the second stage, and keep in mind that the further away you are the larger the aoe will be.
The second use is for farming and counter-pushing. Once AA is level 11 and you've got lvl 2 ult it will kill ranged creeps, so you can just throw it out at any lane that's being pushed and get free gold.
The third use is during team fights later in the game. At this point the most important thing about AA's ult is that it prevents all healing, including lifesteal. Carries that depend on lifesteal to stay alive in team fights will crumble, and it's a great counter to Chen, mek, and other heals. At this stage you want to land it as early as possible, preferably along with your team's initiation. That way your team can use all their heavy burst damage without worrying about mek and whatever healing it all back.
You can also use it to snipe low hp heroes that are getting away. That's fun as well.
A fun thing to think when I recommended Tinker as noob hero a few posts ago, but when you think about it the little guy got a ton of survivability of the "this fucking hero keeps warping all about the place" kind.
People just need to slow their roll with Lich's ult early on. Your ideal use for his ult outside of a team fight is a gank or counter-gank with 2 or 3 enemy heroes and no creeps. In fact, there's really no reason to ever use his ult when there are creeps around unless it will guarantee you a kill. And you want to save it until the enemy has committed, otherwise they'll just scatter and heal.
The real issue here is this: Your Lich has no farm and dies in every fight, but it doesn't matter as long as he gets his ult off. Your Tide has zero farm and dies in every fight, well that actually does matter, especially since he's priority target #1 on the opposing team's kill list. Now Tide ain't exactly rocket science, either, but a Tide with no farm 35 minutes into the game is pretty useless and can easily be killed before he can do anything--or be forced to use his ult to escape instead of initiating, which is almost as bad--while a Lich can just hang out in the back. Of course, Lich becomes less important as an offensive tool the longer the game goes, and has run his course by the time they get a pipe, but frost armour is always good, especially if they have melee heroes.
I follow competitive DotA, and you're completely correct about CM....if you build her that way. However, she's the top support pick in competitive DotA 2 right now because they just ignore her aura altogether. They also ignore her ultimate until level 9 or 10, giving them insane nuking and disabling power, as well as counterpush. She's really, really good if you ignore her aura.
wasting all your cc on tide just to have him ult anyway leads to a bad time.
ignoring cm's aura means ignoring the reason to pick her. if you want a babysitter with two disables you're better off with someone like lion or even jakiro, imo. i know teams think her aura is worthless because of arcane boots, but that's retarded. you get cm's aura to make you win every lane with spell spam - before you have mana boots on the heroes who generally 'need' them.
I'm not claiming to be a pro here, I'm just relaying information about what every pro support who picks CM has been doing for the past few weeks. I think I saw one game where they leveled her aura early, and they only put one point in it and everyone on their team was heavily reliant on mana.
competitive players do stupid stuff all the time (herp derp solo mid SK maxing caustic being so popular in HoN they nerfed it)
I don't know how else to say it without being rude to you, but I think your theorycrafting may be a bit flawed.
they win because they practice doing coordinated strats and have really good communication and teamwork
dota is not a game where doing an inefficient or sub optimal build is likely to influence the game if your teams overall strategy is solid.
sorry if this comes as a shock to you but people put pro players on way too much of a pedestal
/edit: also, you are misunderstanding what I am saying. dual disable cm isn't 'bad', but I would never pick her over other dual disablers like Lion, Jakiro or Rhasta because her disables are weak compared to the disables those other heroes have (a slow and a snare vs 2 stuns / stun + slow). also when they do dual nuke cm I assume they gank with her / pair her with a hero who she can set up kills for. which is fine, and I'm sure it works, but I don't see why you'd use CM for that instead of one of the other heroes (only argument is "zomg such long range on crystal nova", but I don't feel that makes up for the fact that imprison isn't a real stun)
And more people should realize that the true purpose of CM's ult is to force the other team into wasting a stun on her. Or for just steamrolling when you're ahead.
considering HoN pre-MMR compression, like literally any player over 1900 had comparable mechanics. which is still a small pool, but a larger pool than 'pro players'
I got my ass handed to me mid vs. a Tinker last night. I was playing Viper and he shat all over me. Killed me twice back to back in the lane. As he had won the lane at that point he left me to try and farm while he roamed around killing the rest of my team.
I realized after it was just a bad matchup, as Viper's kit is sustained damage while Tinker's is a front loaded burst. And I like to harass when I play Viper.
Eww, no. Eul's is prettier
Also, this week rd (still no swap), but no hero. Oh well.
There was at least 1 dota pub league that had a really neat solution to the rd pick problem. When players joined the game they could reserve their preferred picking slot, but if multiple players tried for the same slot the one with the highest elo would get it. Playing a random rd game and getting last pick and not having a swap option can suck almost as bad as getting 3 heroes you hate in sd with no swap. :<
But after that we just stopped getting caught out in bad positions and won practically every teamfight, still took us 25 minutes to win the game because all the lanes were pushed towards out base all the time so our wins didn't give us any ground before they respawned.
Actually had great teammates in all my games today.
>2012
ISHYGDDT
Point invalidated, I suppose.
I agree with you
now that you mention it, however, I would probably have said "people put pro players on way too high a pedestal"
the point still stands unchanged though
I wouldn't expect GnomeTank to understand or agree if I were you, because he's from the SC2 threads and when they aren't sucking pro players' dicks, they're taking the game far too seriously
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>2012
ISHYGDDT
10848639
If anyone wants to watch a long ass replay.
Spirit Breaker, Anti-Mage, Shaman, Seer and Kunkka
vs
Lina, Bane, Dragon Knight, Veno and Tide