For people in the 2k bracket having trouble winning games; pick offlaners who can roam and deny in lane. Viper (against heavy magic damage), Enchantress (for heavy rightclick), Nightstalker (if their safelane is weak), Sandking (you need stuns or are against solo melee), Axe (against melee). Focus on denying the ranged creep, as in actually getting the ! deny; it's the same experience loss as not being in range for a melee creep. Get a level advantage, keep him low and unable to contribute to fights (or kill him!). Roam around the map, get kills for your carry. This is the easiest way to win games at this level.
If you're offlaning in a dual lane, which is no where near as bad as people make it out to be, you need to focus on murder or farming hard for yourself. If you're not doing either of those, buy a talon and start jungling. If you can get a Midas before 14 minutes, you should buy it on most heroes. People will say "hurr durr games don't last long enough hurr durr deathball", but with the addition of talents, Midas basically pulls double duty now. Getting your level 10 and 15 talents two-three minutes early can easily swing games and fights, as many talents are worth 1000+ gold in stats.
Helm of the Dominator is extremely OP, even if you can't micro. Get an Alpha Wolf, select it, hit M and left click your hero. The Alpha will now follow you around with zero microing. If you accidentally reselect him in a fight, CTRL+Right Click will move ALL units to that point. Zero micro. The Troll Warlord is great for farming lanes while dead and pushing towers with skellys; net goes through BKB. Frost Ogre is like having a max rank Lich following you around. Golems are a 125 nuke with a stun. Red Satyr gives gives an addition 6 hp regen aura (bringing you up to 14hp/sec) and a 160 nuke. White Satyr gives purge.
Necrophos is the most OP thing on Elder Titan's green earth. Carry, mid, offlane, support, it's all going to win games, and he's piss easy to farm with and play. Blink+Anything and Phase/Treads will work; dagon, atos, veil, etc. Lina also works as a lane dominator against most mids that aren't Ember Spirit. Get an early veil and transition into a rightclick carry with phase+orchid, I even prefer to max Fiery Soul over LSA.
Almost everyone is running pure tank lineups, and everyone who isn't tank buys Linkens. Hard carries like Naga and TB take too long to be useful and low damage/burst damage cores like Mirana, WR, Razor, Lesh, Gyro and Troll are very difficult to carry with. Lunas are going around with 3k health, Bfly, and 30 armor; you only winning option is have more armor or better initiation. Chaos Knight, Lone Druid, Weaver, Sniper, and carry Venge are the best carry picks amongst the gamut of tanks. Dragon Knight with SB is also an option IF you're able to farm in lane, and Viper with maxed Nethertoxin can chew through tanks through simple attrition.
Your supports need to be either high movement, extremely tanky, or able to build forcestaff/blink ASAP. There's too many long range stuns and too many blink initiators to pick up AA, KotL, or Lina early. You need to pick support to win lane, roam, or transition into the late game. If you're not winning lane with kills or getting mid fat with smokes or whatever, you're pretty much worthless.
Just lost two matches in a row as Ancient Apparition. The second game was back and forth but we had superior team fight. We got megas but couldn't finish it so we went back and were just going to wait for them to come to us. Then CK and WK get caught out of base unnecessarily farming and the game is overs.
I really dislike AA but silly game of the day bonus so one more game tomorrow. At least it's not Arc Warden or Meepo.
0
Options
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
so @Yilias I've heard tell of a new bear-less Lone Druid build. Have you heard anything about that?
I don't see how bearless would work, esp. with talents so you can't even take +stats. More levels in savage roar don't seem worth it all compared to the chance of entangles, utility of recall bear->roar when you get stunned by something, utility of giving vision for your absurd range when farming jungle.
0
Options
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I don't see how bearless would work, esp. with talents so you can't even take +stats. More levels in savage roar don't seem worth it all compared to the chance of entangles, utility of recall bear->roar when you get stunned by something, utility of giving vision for your absurd range when farming jungle.
It seemed like the crux of the build was abusing his level 20 -50s respawn timer talent
"Bearless" is misnomer. You still have the bear, you still level it first, you're just buying items for the Druid instead of the bear. It's basically about becoming a better sniper than Sniper, you get a Dragon Lance and a Maelstrom and take his talent that gives you an absurd +attack range and chill in your ranged form.
I am 22-10 with ranged Lone Druid this patch. He's analogous to Sniper but comes with his own front liner, better stat gains, 2 disables, a better steroid skill, essentially perma-haste, and a free Bloodstone at level 20.
Level 10: +200 attack range; for 750 attack range or 890 with Dragon Lance. You can outrange any hero except Sniper.
Level 15: +65 damage; one of the strongest +damage talents in the game, only surpassed by it being a meme talent on heroes like Lich or Dark Seer
Level 20: -50 seconds on death timer; easily one of the best talents in the game. Once you hit level 20 you are essentially never dead for the next 10-15 minutes. They could gank you in the river and by the time they reach your base you are alive.
Level 25: Root duration from 3 seconds to 4.5 or Savage Roar cooldown from 20 seconds to 10. Both are phenomenal, which you get depends on whether you need superior lockdown for blink reliant heroes or better peel for kiting.
Typical build is Aquila (skip if you have a CM) and Treads, with brown boots an OoV and Blightstone on the bear, into Maelstrom and Dragon Lance, followed by whatever is appropriate. Midas is doable if you expect the game to go late but it is unnecessary in most games. Starting at level 10 you can aggressively chase and dive people. With nearly 500 movement speed you can easily disengage from tp responses and often times both kill the person you are diving and still casually escape. Once you have the aforementioned core and your level 15 talent you are free to five man. Position like you are Sniper/Drow and keep your bear away from you. If you are blink initiated on you can recall the bear and fear them off of you. Otherwise just stand back and machine gun your ridiculous dps into people. You will frequently be able to pick up double/triple kills just by right clicking into a teamfight.
I expect Icefrog to shift the talents around in the next patch. As it stands ranged LD is superior to babysitter LD in every scenario except an all-in push strat. A reduction to the range/dmg/death timer talents and an increase to the bear dmg/armor talents would go a long way toward shifting the hero into a more balanced position both in general and between builds. Greatly buffing the bear armor talent (7 armor is nothing, give it like 30 or something) would help tremendously with the build's issues against heroes like PA and Slardar. Or go fucking ham and make one of the level 25 talents 2 bears.
Speaking of talent changes:
Lone Druid:
* Level 10 Talent from +200 Attack Range to +175
* Level 15 Talent from +65 Damage to +55
* Level 20 Talent from +7 Spirit Bear Armor to +12
* Level 20 Talent from -50s Respawn Time to -40s
Ok, I get that I'm a 2k shitter and I'm about to suggest a 2k shitter build but....
The new WR talent changes have given me an IDEA.
Powershot damage from 120/220/320/420 to 180/260/340/420
Powershot cooldown from 9 to 12/11/10/9
Windrun slow AoE from 300 to 325
Windrun manacost from 100 to 75
Level 10 Talent from +15 Damage to +25% Windrun Slow
Level 15 Talent from +16 Intelligence to +20 Intelligence
Level 15 Talent from +200 Health to +40 Movement Speed
Level 20 Talent from +12% Magic Resistance to +20%
Level 20 Talent from +12% Spell Amplification to +15%
Level 25 Talent from -5s Powershot Cooldown to -6s
I mean, it seems like with the new Level 10 talent Windrun is a pretty badass slow. The problem being its short range and WR's general squishiness. BUT, if I bought an early Glimmer Cape? Max Powershot first, Windrun second. I get that it'd be a waste on a mid or safe WR, and offlane WR is allegedly bad because of reasons, but I'm wondering if a massive, 6 second AoE slow, with 50% uptime, and a 420 damage nuke - plus shackle - on a spellcasting nuking maybe-offlane WR would be a thing? I dunno, imma try it and let you guys know that it's totally not a thing and I'm an idiot. :P
If you are relying on WR's slow you are aggressively using your escape move to stay in melee range.
The slow amp makes it even better as a disengage if you get jumped but I seriously doubt it's worth to use it offensively, though maybe it will remind people to get close if chasing with windrun.
I played dota wayyyy back in the day (I remember I was fairly new when they added phase boots) and played LoL for a while but then stopped playing any moba for a few years. I recently have been getting into dota2 after day9 made purge stuff start showing up in my youtube feed, so now I'm playing it.
I'm starting to get reacquainted with the heroes and items (though honestly back when I played I just went phantom lancer and built sange and yasha in 99% of games anyway) and I'm starting to have a lot of fun, sometimes.
Like this time
I still haven't played a bunch of heroes, which I am trying to rectify by putting singledraft/randomdraft/least played in my queue but I seem to end up in all pick most games anyway. I basically just want to get to the point where I can start playing ability draft all the time without having to try to read each ability before picking and hoping I can figure out which hero I have.
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (It has free demo)
I just finished a game where I went mid as Lina, and was told by my team to buy courier. And when I did not, I was blamed for them losing their lanes. I'm not crazy, I was just matched with garbage players, right? I'm still kind of new to this, but I've never heard of gimping your mid player by asking them to buy support items.
I just finished a game where I went mid as Lina, and was told by my team to buy courier. And when I did not, I was blamed for them losing their lanes. I'm not crazy, I was just matched with garbage players, right? I'm still kind of new to this, but I've never heard of gimping your mid player by asking them to buy support items.
You're not crazy. Lower level players have a classification system inside their heads for which heroes are supports and which aren't, and if you fuck with that system they react badly. It's why it took so long for Pudge mid to die out for instance (though I've noticed it's dying REALLY fast now pros are showing he's a 4).
The best you can do is to realise when your pick might throw out your team's mental maths and inform them before they pick heroes and lanes and such. Like if you want to play Venge carry for instance, you gotta let people know. It also (still) helps to say that as Pudge you're NOT taking mid.
I highly recommend it. And one of the players in the post-game interview thinks it's sort of fitting that the tournament is taking place in China because of circumstances in the U.S., and name drops Trump. My jaw frickin' dropped when I saw it. It was great.
AoE hero kill Gold and XP bounties reduced by 10% (including comeback gold and XP)
Tier 1 Team Bounty reduced from 160 to 120
Passive gold income reduced by 10%
Reduced lane melee creeps base gold bounties by 2
Increased lane melee creeps gold bounty per upgrade cycle by 1
Reduced lane range creeps gold bounty per upgrade cycle by 1
We had it good for too long.
This is cool
Moon Shard:
Can now be cast on allied heroes
This is exactly right, IMO
Centaur Warrunner:
Base armor reduced by 1
Scepter Stampede damage reduction reduced from 60% to 50%
Slight nerfs to caster ember build.
KOTL not really nerfed (mana leak wasn't the issue).
Good nerfs to Lone Druid.
Holy crap. I didn't even see this before, but that's so much money...
Level 25 Talent increased from +300 Gold/Min to +420
shadow shaman gets 18 more base damage fucking pogchamp
At the cost of 100 range, though. He's like luna now.
I dunno how to feel about this. His laning is better? An early level in Hex now lets him hit like a truck 2 or 3 times, I guess. OTOH, it does nothing for you while you Shackle. I guess it helps his split/pushing too? Kinda? And his solo-kill potential a bit?
I dunno guys. I dunno the DOTA things to say what this really means.
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
edited March 2017
I don't play Dota anymore mainly because there's just too many games out right now and one had to go. I just wanted to pop in and say that the Jugg Arcana looks fucking ill, but I can't justify myself paying $30 $35 for a skin in a game I haven't opened in 2 months.
Also casting moon shards on allies is silly. Chef Support Alchemist just got a huge buff.
In principle, yeah. But in reality moon shards on supports wouldn't do shit. The vision, rather than attack speed, is probably more important for many of them.
It's good for the safelane carry, for sure. I think it'll actually be more important for other cores that get overfarmed late game, like naga and AM. But probably never really important.
they reduced his jingo time, which seemed like his biggest problem.
I think pretty much all of his biggest problems were fixed like a week after launch when Icefrog was like "D'oh, I should make more than one of his abilities actually scale with ranks!"
A lot of the characters I enjoy playing in newbie scrub-tier are getting buffs so I'm happy. I just started playing death prophet the other day and had a ton of fun
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (It has free demo)
they reduced his jingo time, which seemed like his biggest problem.
I think pretty much all of his biggest problems were fixed like a week after launch when Icefrog was like "D'oh, I should make more than one of his abilities actually scale with ranks!"
I've played against him a bunch, though never as him. I'm always caught off guard when he starts doing a billion damage for no apparent reason and life stealing faster than I DPS.
Though chopping down his trees in the early game is always hilarious. They never expect that (at 3.5k).
Posts
If you're offlaning in a dual lane, which is no where near as bad as people make it out to be, you need to focus on murder or farming hard for yourself. If you're not doing either of those, buy a talon and start jungling. If you can get a Midas before 14 minutes, you should buy it on most heroes. People will say "hurr durr games don't last long enough hurr durr deathball", but with the addition of talents, Midas basically pulls double duty now. Getting your level 10 and 15 talents two-three minutes early can easily swing games and fights, as many talents are worth 1000+ gold in stats.
Helm of the Dominator is extremely OP, even if you can't micro. Get an Alpha Wolf, select it, hit M and left click your hero. The Alpha will now follow you around with zero microing. If you accidentally reselect him in a fight, CTRL+Right Click will move ALL units to that point. Zero micro. The Troll Warlord is great for farming lanes while dead and pushing towers with skellys; net goes through BKB. Frost Ogre is like having a max rank Lich following you around. Golems are a 125 nuke with a stun. Red Satyr gives gives an addition 6 hp regen aura (bringing you up to 14hp/sec) and a 160 nuke. White Satyr gives purge.
Necrophos is the most OP thing on Elder Titan's green earth. Carry, mid, offlane, support, it's all going to win games, and he's piss easy to farm with and play. Blink+Anything and Phase/Treads will work; dagon, atos, veil, etc. Lina also works as a lane dominator against most mids that aren't Ember Spirit. Get an early veil and transition into a rightclick carry with phase+orchid, I even prefer to max Fiery Soul over LSA.
Almost everyone is running pure tank lineups, and everyone who isn't tank buys Linkens. Hard carries like Naga and TB take too long to be useful and low damage/burst damage cores like Mirana, WR, Razor, Lesh, Gyro and Troll are very difficult to carry with. Lunas are going around with 3k health, Bfly, and 30 armor; you only winning option is have more armor or better initiation. Chaos Knight, Lone Druid, Weaver, Sniper, and carry Venge are the best carry picks amongst the gamut of tanks. Dragon Knight with SB is also an option IF you're able to farm in lane, and Viper with maxed Nethertoxin can chew through tanks through simple attrition.
Your supports need to be either high movement, extremely tanky, or able to build forcestaff/blink ASAP. There's too many long range stuns and too many blink initiators to pick up AA, KotL, or Lina early. You need to pick support to win lane, roam, or transition into the late game. If you're not winning lane with kills or getting mid fat with smokes or whatever, you're pretty much worthless.
I really dislike AA but silly game of the day bonus so one more game tomorrow. At least it's not Arc Warden or Meepo.
It seemed like the crux of the build was abusing his level 20 -50s respawn timer talent
Level 10: +200 attack range; for 750 attack range or 890 with Dragon Lance. You can outrange any hero except Sniper.
Level 15: +65 damage; one of the strongest +damage talents in the game, only surpassed by it being a meme talent on heroes like Lich or Dark Seer
Level 20: -50 seconds on death timer; easily one of the best talents in the game. Once you hit level 20 you are essentially never dead for the next 10-15 minutes. They could gank you in the river and by the time they reach your base you are alive.
Level 25: Root duration from 3 seconds to 4.5 or Savage Roar cooldown from 20 seconds to 10. Both are phenomenal, which you get depends on whether you need superior lockdown for blink reliant heroes or better peel for kiting.
Typical build is Aquila (skip if you have a CM) and Treads, with brown boots an OoV and Blightstone on the bear, into Maelstrom and Dragon Lance, followed by whatever is appropriate. Midas is doable if you expect the game to go late but it is unnecessary in most games. Starting at level 10 you can aggressively chase and dive people. With nearly 500 movement speed you can easily disengage from tp responses and often times both kill the person you are diving and still casually escape. Once you have the aforementioned core and your level 15 talent you are free to five man. Position like you are Sniper/Drow and keep your bear away from you. If you are blink initiated on you can recall the bear and fear them off of you. Otherwise just stand back and machine gun your ridiculous dps into people. You will frequently be able to pick up double/triple kills just by right clicking into a teamfight.
I expect Icefrog to shift the talents around in the next patch. As it stands ranged LD is superior to babysitter LD in every scenario except an all-in push strat. A reduction to the range/dmg/death timer talents and an increase to the bear dmg/armor talents would go a long way toward shifting the hero into a more balanced position both in general and between builds. Greatly buffing the bear armor talent (7 armor is nothing, give it like 30 or something) would help tremendously with the build's issues against heroes like PA and Slardar. Or go fucking ham and make one of the level 25 talents 2 bears.
Oh god....noooooooo, killing one bear in the late game is hard enough thank you.
7.02 is out btw: http://store.steampowered.com/news/27381
Speaking of talent changes:
Lone Druid:
* Level 10 Talent from +200 Attack Range to +175
* Level 15 Talent from +65 Damage to +55
* Level 20 Talent from +7 Spirit Bear Armor to +12
* Level 20 Talent from -50s Respawn Time to -40s
The new WR talent changes have given me an IDEA.
Powershot damage from 120/220/320/420 to 180/260/340/420
Powershot cooldown from 9 to 12/11/10/9
Windrun slow AoE from 300 to 325
Windrun manacost from 100 to 75
Level 10 Talent from +15 Damage to +25% Windrun Slow
Level 15 Talent from +16 Intelligence to +20 Intelligence
Level 15 Talent from +200 Health to +40 Movement Speed
Level 20 Talent from +12% Magic Resistance to +20%
Level 20 Talent from +12% Spell Amplification to +15%
Level 25 Talent from -5s Powershot Cooldown to -6s
I mean, it seems like with the new Level 10 talent Windrun is a pretty badass slow. The problem being its short range and WR's general squishiness. BUT, if I bought an early Glimmer Cape? Max Powershot first, Windrun second. I get that it'd be a waste on a mid or safe WR, and offlane WR is allegedly bad because of reasons, but I'm wondering if a massive, 6 second AoE slow, with 50% uptime, and a 420 damage nuke - plus shackle - on a spellcasting nuking maybe-offlane WR would be a thing? I dunno, imma try it and let you guys know that it's totally not a thing and I'm an idiot. :P
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
The slow amp makes it even better as a disengage if you get jumped but I seriously doubt it's worth to use it offensively, though maybe it will remind people to get close if chasing with windrun.
I'm starting to get reacquainted with the heroes and items (though honestly back when I played I just went phantom lancer and built sange and yasha in 99% of games anyway) and I'm starting to have a lot of fun, sometimes.
Like this time
I still haven't played a bunch of heroes, which I am trying to rectify by putting singledraft/randomdraft/least played in my queue but I seem to end up in all pick most games anyway. I basically just want to get to the point where I can start playing ability draft all the time without having to try to read each ability before picking and hoping I can figure out which hero I have.
They're winning. This makes me so sad.
Edit: 4 man RP into 5 man MK ult into techies spam. Yikes.
National Geographic presents: DotA.
Couldn't even buy TPs, literally finished the game with 10k gold that I couldn't spend.
You're not crazy. Lower level players have a classification system inside their heads for which heroes are supports and which aren't, and if you fuck with that system they react badly. It's why it took so long for Pudge mid to die out for instance (though I've noticed it's dying REALLY fast now pros are showing he's a 4).
The best you can do is to realise when your pick might throw out your team's mental maths and inform them before they pick heroes and lanes and such. Like if you want to play Venge carry for instance, you gotta let people know. It also (still) helps to say that as Pudge you're NOT taking mid.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
My reaction while I watched:
I highly recommend it. And one of the players in the post-game interview thinks it's sort of fitting that the tournament is taking place in China because of circumstances in the U.S., and name drops Trump. My jaw frickin' dropped when I saw it. It was great.
Kiev major qualifiers starting tonight (CN/SEA)/tomorrow(CIS/EU/NA/SA). A couple of 24h streams covering.
dota2.com/bladeformlegacy
7.03, jugg arcana and jakiro model update!
also that splash art of the split mask is dope
feels kinda silly that he has a dragon-infused blade tho, shades of genji
Wasn't he SS the only hero not picked in the qualifiers?
We had it good for too long.
This is cool
This is exactly right, IMO
Slight nerfs to caster ember build.
KOTL not really nerfed (mana leak wasn't the issue).
Good nerfs to Lone Druid.
Holy crap. I didn't even see this before, but that's so much money...
At the cost of 100 range, though. He's like luna now.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Also casting moon shards on allies is silly. Chef Support Alchemist just got a huge buff.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
It's good for the safelane carry, for sure. I think it'll actually be more important for other cores that get overfarmed late game, like naga and AM. But probably never really important.
That could be interesting.
He was in a few elimination mode matches and seemed very strong there as an offlaner and as a carry.
I think pretty much all of his biggest problems were fixed like a week after launch when Icefrog was like "D'oh, I should make more than one of his abilities actually scale with ranks!"
I've played against him a bunch, though never as him. I'm always caught off guard when he starts doing a billion damage for no apparent reason and life stealing faster than I DPS.
Though chopping down his trees in the early game is always hilarious. They never expect that (at 3.5k).