Just the other day I saw a dying Techies try to suicide bomb a low Hp Void....which was backtracked. It was the funniest moment I've ever seen in my own DOTA games. Bullshit countering bullshit. The centre of the Venn Diagram of bullshit. And Techies pissed and moaned and it was glorious.
There is no better lategame support than Omniknight, his ult is incredible and he can give your carry practically constant disable immunity. The only reason he isn't seen in competitive is because his early game is trash.
Well that and you can purge his ult and repel with a diffusal blade.
There is no better lategame support than Omniknight, his ult is incredible and he can give your carry practically constant disable immunity. The only reason he isn't seen in competitive is because his early game is trash.
Well that and you can purge his ult and repel with a diffusal blade.
Diffusal is still not a standard pickup in most games. It's a lot better then it used to be not being a UAM.
Reborn is broken for me. I played NP and they always seem to come get me... I thought they had great warding but apparently I always shop up on the minimap.... Even when we smoked.
Guys. I think I'm done with DOTA for a while. A good long while. I'm even thinking of uninstalling the thing. I don't want to hurt your eyes with any more lamentations but I just have to vent somewhere so it's spoilered.
So to begin with, I've taken a pretty strong fall in MMR from the bottom 20th percentile of all players worldwide...to the below the bottom 10th. I know that shouldn't matter. I know videogames should just be for fun, but I like to improve at things and I've spent 1000 hours in the DOTA client and I have basically zero to show for it in terms of improvement.
Then last night I played with a friend who used to play DOTA but hasn't played more than once or twice in years. I don't think he was ever a great DOTA player, but anyway, he plays LoL now. So he jumped on...and even though his itemisation was terrible and years out of date, and even though he made horrific mistakes that hurt me to watch, he was noticably, obviously better at DOTA than I am. And it really hurt that someone could just waltz into DOTA with only the briefest brushing-up and be so much better at it than me.
So the second to last game for me tonight was as Gyro. We lost because a mid Pudge snowballed into something like 5300 HP. I did alright in my scrubby way in the early to mid game, but it went pretty sharply downhill when they started high grounding. But I took one small ray of hope from the game. Aha! I thought. The key isn't just to pick snowball heroes, but to pick heroes that can INFINITELY scale, at least in theory, so that no matter how long the game drags on, no matter how bad your team is at pushing towers, taking advantages, teamfighting, ganking, whatever - and at this MMR bracket no matter how bad you are or your team is, as long as you start snowballing just a little then maybe you cannot help but continue to do so.
So in my last game I picked Legion Commander. Things started well. I got to a spiffing start. But then my team just couldn't or wouldn't push. We had a Techies, an AA, a Lion and a soon-to-abandon LS, against Tinker, Dark Seer, Sven, Bloodseeker. My point is they had a huge amount of split push and global presence. From the mid game onwards it was basically my team huddled up in base and our jungle, and me solo pushing towers when I could And I could never take a rax because there was always a Sven and a Tinker and a Spirit Breaker and a Bloodseeker for me to solo. So I focused on getting Duel victories.
Ohhhhhh, the Duel victories. Now I'm not saying I didn't feed. Oh God did I make some bad mistakes. But by the end of the game I had THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX bonus Duel damage. I was fully 6-slotted. Even despite Reborn's best attempts to deny me (the double item buying glitch actually screwed me out of having buyback at a key moment, and it was only because the other team refused to actually push while I was dead that we got through that) I was basically the carry to end all carries. But I could not do anything with it. Whoever I went on, SOMEONE had stuns and lockdown for me. I pondered buying Abyssal, but considering I was frequently 1v3 or 4ing, I figured that locking down one target was less important than having a Satanic's worth of lifesteal, and hoping my BKB rode out the stuns. I don't know, probably a mistake but at that point I had enough time to get one last item and I was noticing that I was dangerously low on HP by the time I killed the first non-Duel target I went on. I gambled on a few glorious seconds of Satanic.
And even despite ALL THAT, I couldn't fucking wipe them. I couldn't kill more than two of them before the stuns and the lockdown and the BS ulti and the kiting wore me down.
So now I know. After over a thousand hours in the DOTA client. After 812 matches of DOTA. After picking the snowballiest of snowball heroes and snowballing as hard as I could snowball...I still suck at this game. And I don't think I want to spend another thousand hours being shit. I can't take it anymore. I'm tired of it, and I could do something more productive with my life, like finish my degree or learn a language. I'm seriously exhausted and I think I just need to uninstall DOTA and never play it again.
It always helps to put the game down for a while. You obviously aren't the worst dota player in the world, everyone has these ruts. So much of the game is mental, if you go into a new game carrying the frustrations from your last game you've already set yourself for failure. I have to admit, I'm not very good at this, but try to only play ranked games when you are feeling close to your "a-game", in other words, if you are tilting, tired, hungry, drunk, stoned etc. DON'T PLAY RANKED GAMES.
Jared Tendler is a sports psychologist who works with professional poker players, he wrote a great book on Tilt and improvement called "The Mental Game of Poker". There are a lot of crossovers between poker and DOTA , many aspects of the game aren't in your control, and controlling your emotions is key to making consistent decisions.
"There will be times when it feels like you have taken a huge step backward, not progressed at all, or fallen back into old habits. When this happens, think back to this section.
Understanding the concept of inchworm starts by looking more closely at the natural range that exists in the quality of your DOTA or mental game. Think for a moment about the quality of your dota decisions when playing your absolute best and when playing at your worst. In other words, how bad does it get when you're playing poorly?
Let's say you rated the quality of every decision you've made in DOTA games over the last 6-12 months on a scale of 1(worst) to 100(best) and plotted them on a graph. What you'd see on that graph is a bell curve.
This bell curve shows the natural range that exists in your game and the game of every DOTA player on the planet (Even techies players, although theirs is the narrowest). As long as you're playing DOTA, you'll always have aspects of your game that represent the peak of your ability; and the flip side, your worst. Always. Perfect DOTA isn't possible over a large number of games. There are times you play perfectly and other times that you don't. Dota is a dynamic game that is becoming more competitive. This means that the definition of perfection, even solid play, is a moving target. As long as your game evolves, that means you're learning. If you're learning that means there's range in the quality of your decision making. [...]
The concept of inchworm comes in when you look at how the range of your DOTA game improves over time. A bell curve is the given example, while improvement is the the movement of that curve over time; Something an actual inchworm illustrates perfectly in the way it moves. If you've never seen the way an inchworm moves, it starts by stretching its body straight, anchors the front "foot", then lifts up from the back end, bends at the middle to bring the two ends closer together, anchors the back foot, then stretches its body straight again, and takes another step forward.
When you reach a new peak in your ability, the front end of your range takes a step forward. Your best just became better, which also means that your range has widened because the worst part of your game hasn't moved yet. The most efficient way to move forward again is to turn your focus to the back end of your range and make improvements to your greatest weaknesses. By eliminating what is currently the worst part of your game, your bell curve takes a step forward from the back end, and now it's easier to take another step forward from the front.
The inchworm concept illustrates how consistent improvement happens by taking one step forward from the front of your bell curve followed by another step from the back. The implications of this concept are that:
1. Improvement happens from two sides; improving weaknesses and improving your best.
2. Playing your best is a moving target, because it's always relative to the current range in your game.
3. You create the potential for an even greater A-game when you eliminate your mental and DOTA C-games because mental space is freed up to learn new things.
So definitely take a break for a few days, then come back to it when you feel a bit fresh. You won't win every game, and it's really easy to feel like your team cheated you out of a victory when you put on a good performance as a carry.
What aspects of the game do you struggle with most right now? I could always pick a few of your replays at random and give you my perspective.
Dota takes forever to learn. I played 3000+ games of HoN and I'm approaching 4500 games of Dota and I'm still not as good as I want to be.
I firmly believe that the best way to learn and improve is to master a single hero as best you can. Playing the same hero in a vast variety of situations gives you experience that you can use in your decision making later on. "Can I kill this guy if he's alone?" "Is he likely to actually be alone?" "Is the proper line of play here to farm, fight with the team, or push?" are all the sort of questions that are best answered by playing, choosing to go with one of them, either succeeding or failing, and then using that knowledge in the future to make better choices.
I take a few minutes and analyze what i did right. I have been playing like shit lately but have started to always stack the closest camps around me at the minute mark whenever possible and buying 1 x smoke per game. But i'm tired of reborn bugs so will be putting some gaming into the Witcher for a week or two and hopefully come back refreshed and bug free!
Yilias makes a great point. While I've never had the dedication required to fully commit myself to one hero, I tend to focus on only a few heroes at a time. I have played a silly amount of Anti-Mage and Weaver games and while I won't pretend to be the best player ever on either hero, I'm comfortable playing them from almost any game state. Even when I get completely shut out of lane, barely get XP, my team is all arguing with each other, I still feel comfortable and have a good idea how I should play the character.
Never forget, there are so many different ways you can improve your game. Grinding games is only one of them. Playing a few casual 1v1s with friends (hint hint), working on your ability to control lane equilibrium in an empty lobby without opposition, practicing your pull throughs as a support... these will all help you fix weaknesses in your game.
For example, if you never practice pulling through on your own, you are absolutely going to fuck it up in a game where it matters. If you can't freeze the lane in an empty uncontested lane, good luck trying to make it happen when opponents are messing with it.
Yeah if you're tilting you're going to be playing worse. All the above advice is great but when you go into a game thinking "I know how to win 100%, without possibility of failure", you're going to be disappointed around 50% of the time. Maybe 40-45% if you are really correct and play well.
Legion snowballing is pretty meh, despite "infinite scaling". Even a pudge with infinite HP could lose a game of dota (not a fight) vs 3,4 or 5 people.
You don't actually need infinite scaling from LC/Pudge/Silencer since everyone else is capped at 6 slots + moon shards as well. You might just need to be the greatest scaler. Sure legion with +1000 dmg will maybe be enough at that point but it's still a melee hero. I wouldn't call snowballing scaling into the late game but more "I am stomping anyone I meet into a paste" from minute 5-10, anywhere on the map. Storm spirit with a near-perfect creep score + a few kills for a fast bloodstone has the potential to snowball really hard. Imagine 30 bloodstone charges, flying everywhere constantly, killing all heroes that show themselves in a lane.
I don't think Legion can 1v3 with a 5 second BKB reliably. You can pick off 1 duel but then you could get eul'd, your target could eul themselves or use ghost scepter. Abyssal was probably a good choice if they were kiting you, duel+abyssal could maybe have been 2 sure kills. Hard either way.
I mean maybe an unwinnable situation there musicool I get how you feel: I also feel like I have gotten worse lately--and this is after investing considerably more time in DotA than you have.
I'm curious what you guys think the optimal 6 slot for an LC in that situation is. Daedalus is fantastic when your damage is that high. MKB against evasion as needed. Abyssal for lockdown is probably a must for after the duel. If you can't fit a linkens your allies needed to get one and throw that on you.
Keep blink to get the duel off?
Silver edge for passive removal and more initiation? I feel like a smoke/invis pickoff breaks the game open in a situation like this...
Maybe a Lotus Orb? Trust in your duel damage and drop a DPS item for more anti-cc?
Very tough to say without knowing what your allies brought to the table, the items the enemy had etc.
I'd probably roll BoT/Daedalus/BKB/Satanic/Silver Edge + Moon Shards with MKB/AC/Abyssal as needed.
BoT + Silver Edge gives you high mobility ganking potential, BKB and Satanic give team fight survivability, and Daedalus is the strongest right click scaling you can buy.
So to begin with, I've taken a pretty strong fall in MMR from the bottom 20th percentile of all players worldwide...to the below the bottom 10th.
Me, and just about all of my friends are currently doing terribly. I have less than 30% win rate with my last 20 matches, just dipped below 2k mmr. I don't know if people have gotten better, there are lots of smurf accounts, lots of good players from other MOBA games attracted by the prize pool, or more cheaters... or if I'm actually getting worse. I only have time to play a couple of matches a week. I know accusing good players of cheating is a thing most noobs do, but lately just about every Earthshaker I meet seem to to land every single fissure perfectly, including clipping me with the last pixels on the edge of it after I swoop away as Phoenix. And there is always an Earthshaker.
So anyway, with your LC match, it sounds like you did good but your team didn't, so don't beat yourself up over that loss. You can't win 1 v 5 no matter how good you are if the other team has loads of stun but your team doesn't (or won't use them to help you). Even if you are a 6 slotted hard carry.
Edit: Yikes, big bug, the stuff VishNub was referring. Heroes stopped responding to input. New Dota hot fix one hour ago.
Is there a way to see match history other than my last 20 games in Reborn? I wanted to look up a game from a few weeks ago but I don't know how to find it.
Guys. I think I'm done with DOTA for a while. A good long while. I'm even thinking of uninstalling the thing. I don't want to hurt your eyes with any more lamentations but I just have to vent somewhere so it's spoilered.
So to begin with, I've taken a pretty strong fall in MMR from the bottom 20th percentile of all players worldwide...to the below the bottom 10th. I know that shouldn't matter. I know videogames should just be for fun, but I like to improve at things and I've spent 1000 hours in the DOTA client and I have basically zero to show for it in terms of improvement.
Then last night I played with a friend who used to play DOTA but hasn't played more than once or twice in years. I don't think he was ever a great DOTA player, but anyway, he plays LoL now. So he jumped on...and even though his itemisation was terrible and years out of date, and even though he made horrific mistakes that hurt me to watch, he was noticably, obviously better at DOTA than I am. And it really hurt that someone could just waltz into DOTA with only the briefest brushing-up and be so much better at it than me.
So the second to last game for me tonight was as Gyro. We lost because a mid Pudge snowballed into something like 5300 HP. I did alright in my scrubby way in the early to mid game, but it went pretty sharply downhill when they started high grounding. But I took one small ray of hope from the game. Aha! I thought. The key isn't just to pick snowball heroes, but to pick heroes that can INFINITELY scale, at least in theory, so that no matter how long the game drags on, no matter how bad your team is at pushing towers, taking advantages, teamfighting, ganking, whatever - and at this MMR bracket no matter how bad you are or your team is, as long as you start snowballing just a little then maybe you cannot help but continue to do so.
So in my last game I picked Legion Commander. Things started well. I got to a spiffing start. But then my team just couldn't or wouldn't push. We had a Techies, an AA, a Lion and a soon-to-abandon LS, against Tinker, Dark Seer, Sven, Bloodseeker. My point is they had a huge amount of split push and global presence. From the mid game onwards it was basically my team huddled up in base and our jungle, and me solo pushing towers when I could And I could never take a rax because there was always a Sven and a Tinker and a Spirit Breaker and a Bloodseeker for me to solo. So I focused on getting Duel victories.
Ohhhhhh, the Duel victories. Now I'm not saying I didn't feed. Oh God did I make some bad mistakes. But by the end of the game I had THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX bonus Duel damage. I was fully 6-slotted. Even despite Reborn's best attempts to deny me (the double item buying glitch actually screwed me out of having buyback at a key moment, and it was only because the other team refused to actually push while I was dead that we got through that) I was basically the carry to end all carries. But I could not do anything with it. Whoever I went on, SOMEONE had stuns and lockdown for me. I pondered buying Abyssal, but considering I was frequently 1v3 or 4ing, I figured that locking down one target was less important than having a Satanic's worth of lifesteal, and hoping my BKB rode out the stuns. I don't know, probably a mistake but at that point I had enough time to get one last item and I was noticing that I was dangerously low on HP by the time I killed the first non-Duel target I went on. I gambled on a few glorious seconds of Satanic.
And even despite ALL THAT, I couldn't fucking wipe them. I couldn't kill more than two of them before the stuns and the lockdown and the BS ulti and the kiting wore me down.
So now I know. After over a thousand hours in the DOTA client. After 812 matches of DOTA. After picking the snowballiest of snowball heroes and snowballing as hard as I could snowball...I still suck at this game. And I don't think I want to spend another thousand hours being shit. I can't take it anymore. I'm tired of it, and I could do something more productive with my life, like finish my degree or learn a language. I'm seriously exhausted and I think I just need to uninstall DOTA and never play it again.
Wow, I'm super late to respond to this, and for that, I'm sorry.
1. You lost because DOTA is a team game, and one man can't win a game of DOTA on their own. A stomping team can have a guy who's so stompy that nobody can touch him, that's true. But one guy can't win a game of DOTA on their own. Your teammates have to be able to support you, fight with you, and if they can't, you won't get through those fights. Especially not with a melee carry. The mudhole-stomping that we've all been through can only happen when the team supports the stomping. Everything that I read in your post sounds like you took on the other team by yourself. Which, without being in that game, I can't ascribe blame, but that's really the story I'm seeing, here. You shouldn't walk away from that saying "I suck." Your take-away should be that the other team was coordinated enough to deal with an LC that none of them could man-fight. You only learn from losing, and all that.
2. You shouldn't necessarily quit DOTA forever, but you also shouldn't let it get in the way of finishing your degree, learning a language, and having fun. I enjoy DOTA quite a bit, but I'm arguably worse at it than you. I'm playing board games and PnP RPG's most evenings, and tinkering with new Linux distros and other crap like that. I take long 2-3 week breaks from the game at times for games like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, This War of Mine, and most recently, Shadowrun Hong Kong (which is amazeballs). I don't feel like I've really lost anything when I come back to the game. I might need to read some patch notes, but that's about it.
3. Every online game I've ever played, and this includes DOTA, tends to reward me for taking a break. I'll blunder into new strategies due to rust, or I'll just be less "in" the game and have better perspective, whatever the reason is, there's definitely benefits of taking breaks from these sorts of games. I remember (this was a long time ago) taking a 2-month hiatus from night after night of Halo 2, and then I came back and gained a ton of ranks, because things just "clicked" better for me. I came back from a 2-month DOTA hiatus, and started winning games left and right. It started what became a 20-game winning streak. There are benefits from taking breaks. We know this from test-taking, studying, working, everything. It applies to vidya games too.
If your a fan of odd tournament systems then you should check out the Elimination tournament being run by MoonDuck studios that's starting today.
Basic idea of it is that in each bo3/bo5(finals) series any hero that is picked/banned is unavailable for the next games in that series. So for a bo3 if you go to a game 3 then your down to a pool of 72 for that last game. If the bo5 finals go to a game 5, that last game will have a pool of 32.
If your a fan of odd tournament systems then you should check out the Elimination tournament being run by MoonDuck studios that's starting today.
Basic idea of it is that in each bo3/bo5(finals) series any hero that is picked/banned is unavailable for the next games in that series. So for a bo3 if you go to a game 3 then your down to a pool of 72 for that last game. If the bo5 finals go to a game 5, that last game will have a pool of 32.
Elimination mode has been fun, but haven't seen anything super wacky. Maybe Warlock mid has been the most off the wall thing. Which goes to show this meta is pretty balanced: lots of viable heroes.
Seeing heroes you haven't seen in a while reminds you that dota is a flat circle: aside from perpetual dumpster tier heroes like huskar (who was OP during ghost scepter days) and bloodseeker (who is good *now*), almost every hero has had their time in the sun. ET, who was the casters' target of derision during one of the series, used to be nearly OP. Bat, who is a joke now, was once considered unnerfable. Lina, who is everywhere now, has been receiving constant buffs for ages because for ages noone would fuckin pick her. I saw some Brew and Tide during elimination mode! Remember them? Hell I saw an Octarine Core Death Prophet! And we all remember hoho haha, who is nowhere to be found.
The problem is, game one can still be played using current meta heroes, and two of the series so far only went two games. Not much opportunity for shenanigans. I think Captain's Draft was a better opportunity to see off-the-wall picks.
1) Silence 2) Books must be returned by the last date shown 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality
I'm wondering if Storm and AM are going to get some nerfs. Storm is weird, he's only 49% winrate right now, but every game I play with him, whether he's on my team or not, he snowballs into an unkillable ganking carry. AM..I don't know..he just feels really powerful in this meta.
Posts
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Well that and you can purge his ult and repel with a diffusal blade.
Diffusal is still not a standard pickup in most games. It's a lot better then it used to be not being a UAM.
Reborn is broken for me. I played NP and they always seem to come get me... I thought they had great warding but apparently I always shop up on the minimap.... Even when we smoked.
Perfect.
Then last night I played with a friend who used to play DOTA but hasn't played more than once or twice in years. I don't think he was ever a great DOTA player, but anyway, he plays LoL now. So he jumped on...and even though his itemisation was terrible and years out of date, and even though he made horrific mistakes that hurt me to watch, he was noticably, obviously better at DOTA than I am. And it really hurt that someone could just waltz into DOTA with only the briefest brushing-up and be so much better at it than me.
So the second to last game for me tonight was as Gyro. We lost because a mid Pudge snowballed into something like 5300 HP. I did alright in my scrubby way in the early to mid game, but it went pretty sharply downhill when they started high grounding. But I took one small ray of hope from the game. Aha! I thought. The key isn't just to pick snowball heroes, but to pick heroes that can INFINITELY scale, at least in theory, so that no matter how long the game drags on, no matter how bad your team is at pushing towers, taking advantages, teamfighting, ganking, whatever - and at this MMR bracket no matter how bad you are or your team is, as long as you start snowballing just a little then maybe you cannot help but continue to do so.
So in my last game I picked Legion Commander. Things started well. I got to a spiffing start. But then my team just couldn't or wouldn't push. We had a Techies, an AA, a Lion and a soon-to-abandon LS, against Tinker, Dark Seer, Sven, Bloodseeker. My point is they had a huge amount of split push and global presence. From the mid game onwards it was basically my team huddled up in base and our jungle, and me solo pushing towers when I could And I could never take a rax because there was always a Sven and a Tinker and a Spirit Breaker and a Bloodseeker for me to solo. So I focused on getting Duel victories.
Ohhhhhh, the Duel victories. Now I'm not saying I didn't feed. Oh God did I make some bad mistakes. But by the end of the game I had THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX bonus Duel damage. I was fully 6-slotted. Even despite Reborn's best attempts to deny me (the double item buying glitch actually screwed me out of having buyback at a key moment, and it was only because the other team refused to actually push while I was dead that we got through that) I was basically the carry to end all carries. But I could not do anything with it. Whoever I went on, SOMEONE had stuns and lockdown for me. I pondered buying Abyssal, but considering I was frequently 1v3 or 4ing, I figured that locking down one target was less important than having a Satanic's worth of lifesteal, and hoping my BKB rode out the stuns. I don't know, probably a mistake but at that point I had enough time to get one last item and I was noticing that I was dangerously low on HP by the time I killed the first non-Duel target I went on. I gambled on a few glorious seconds of Satanic.
And even despite ALL THAT, I couldn't fucking wipe them. I couldn't kill more than two of them before the stuns and the lockdown and the BS ulti and the kiting wore me down.
So now I know. After over a thousand hours in the DOTA client. After 812 matches of DOTA. After picking the snowballiest of snowball heroes and snowballing as hard as I could snowball...I still suck at this game. And I don't think I want to spend another thousand hours being shit. I can't take it anymore. I'm tired of it, and I could do something more productive with my life, like finish my degree or learn a language. I'm seriously exhausted and I think I just need to uninstall DOTA and never play it again.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Jared Tendler is a sports psychologist who works with professional poker players, he wrote a great book on Tilt and improvement called "The Mental Game of Poker". There are a lot of crossovers between poker and DOTA , many aspects of the game aren't in your control, and controlling your emotions is key to making consistent decisions.
A quick excerpt, full chapter available here.
So definitely take a break for a few days, then come back to it when you feel a bit fresh. You won't win every game, and it's really easy to feel like your team cheated you out of a victory when you put on a good performance as a carry.
What aspects of the game do you struggle with most right now? I could always pick a few of your replays at random and give you my perspective.
I firmly believe that the best way to learn and improve is to master a single hero as best you can. Playing the same hero in a vast variety of situations gives you experience that you can use in your decision making later on. "Can I kill this guy if he's alone?" "Is he likely to actually be alone?" "Is the proper line of play here to farm, fight with the team, or push?" are all the sort of questions that are best answered by playing, choosing to go with one of them, either succeeding or failing, and then using that knowledge in the future to make better choices.
Never forget, there are so many different ways you can improve your game. Grinding games is only one of them. Playing a few casual 1v1s with friends (hint hint), working on your ability to control lane equilibrium in an empty lobby without opposition, practicing your pull throughs as a support... these will all help you fix weaknesses in your game.
For example, if you never practice pulling through on your own, you are absolutely going to fuck it up in a game where it matters. If you can't freeze the lane in an empty uncontested lane, good luck trying to make it happen when opponents are messing with it.
Legion snowballing is pretty meh, despite "infinite scaling". Even a pudge with infinite HP could lose a game of dota (not a fight) vs 3,4 or 5 people.
You don't actually need infinite scaling from LC/Pudge/Silencer since everyone else is capped at 6 slots + moon shards as well. You might just need to be the greatest scaler. Sure legion with +1000 dmg will maybe be enough at that point but it's still a melee hero. I wouldn't call snowballing scaling into the late game but more "I am stomping anyone I meet into a paste" from minute 5-10, anywhere on the map. Storm spirit with a near-perfect creep score + a few kills for a fast bloodstone has the potential to snowball really hard. Imagine 30 bloodstone charges, flying everywhere constantly, killing all heroes that show themselves in a lane.
I don't think Legion can 1v3 with a 5 second BKB reliably. You can pick off 1 duel but then you could get eul'd, your target could eul themselves or use ghost scepter. Abyssal was probably a good choice if they were kiting you, duel+abyssal could maybe have been 2 sure kills. Hard either way.
I'm curious what you guys think the optimal 6 slot for an LC in that situation is. Daedalus is fantastic when your damage is that high. MKB against evasion as needed. Abyssal for lockdown is probably a must for after the duel. If you can't fit a linkens your allies needed to get one and throw that on you.
Keep blink to get the duel off?
Silver edge for passive removal and more initiation? I feel like a smoke/invis pickoff breaks the game open in a situation like this...
Maybe a Lotus Orb? Trust in your duel damage and drop a DPS item for more anti-cc?
Very tough to say without knowing what your allies brought to the table, the items the enemy had etc.
BoT + Silver Edge gives you high mobility ganking potential, BKB and Satanic give team fight survivability, and Daedalus is the strongest right click scaling you can buy.
No Dota patch
There was that bugfix yesterday. My guess is the patch if it comes will be Thursday. Sooner would be better though.
You were saying?
New hero for league, new hitboxes for CSGO, BUT THE DOUBLE CLICK BUG IS PROBABLY FIXED TIME TO PARTY IT UP
Me, and just about all of my friends are currently doing terribly. I have less than 30% win rate with my last 20 matches, just dipped below 2k mmr. I don't know if people have gotten better, there are lots of smurf accounts, lots of good players from other MOBA games attracted by the prize pool, or more cheaters... or if I'm actually getting worse. I only have time to play a couple of matches a week. I know accusing good players of cheating is a thing most noobs do, but lately just about every Earthshaker I meet seem to to land every single fissure perfectly, including clipping me with the last pixels on the edge of it after I swoop away as Phoenix. And there is always an Earthshaker.
So anyway, with your LC match, it sounds like you did good but your team didn't, so don't beat yourself up over that loss. You can't win 1 v 5 no matter how good you are if the other team has loads of stun but your team doesn't (or won't use them to help you). Even if you are a 6 slotted hard carry.
Edit: Yikes, big bug, the stuff VishNub was referring. Heroes stopped responding to input. New Dota hot fix one hour ago.
Wow, I'm super late to respond to this, and for that, I'm sorry.
1. You lost because DOTA is a team game, and one man can't win a game of DOTA on their own. A stomping team can have a guy who's so stompy that nobody can touch him, that's true. But one guy can't win a game of DOTA on their own. Your teammates have to be able to support you, fight with you, and if they can't, you won't get through those fights. Especially not with a melee carry. The mudhole-stomping that we've all been through can only happen when the team supports the stomping. Everything that I read in your post sounds like you took on the other team by yourself. Which, without being in that game, I can't ascribe blame, but that's really the story I'm seeing, here. You shouldn't walk away from that saying "I suck." Your take-away should be that the other team was coordinated enough to deal with an LC that none of them could man-fight. You only learn from losing, and all that.
2. You shouldn't necessarily quit DOTA forever, but you also shouldn't let it get in the way of finishing your degree, learning a language, and having fun. I enjoy DOTA quite a bit, but I'm arguably worse at it than you. I'm playing board games and PnP RPG's most evenings, and tinkering with new Linux distros and other crap like that. I take long 2-3 week breaks from the game at times for games like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, This War of Mine, and most recently, Shadowrun Hong Kong (which is amazeballs). I don't feel like I've really lost anything when I come back to the game. I might need to read some patch notes, but that's about it.
3. Every online game I've ever played, and this includes DOTA, tends to reward me for taking a break. I'll blunder into new strategies due to rust, or I'll just be less "in" the game and have better perspective, whatever the reason is, there's definitely benefits of taking breaks from these sorts of games. I remember (this was a long time ago) taking a 2-month hiatus from night after night of Halo 2, and then I came back and gained a ton of ranks, because things just "clicked" better for me. I came back from a 2-month DOTA hiatus, and started winning games left and right. It started what became a 20-game winning streak. There are benefits from taking breaks. We know this from test-taking, studying, working, everything. It applies to vidya games too.
Basic idea of it is that in each bo3/bo5(finals) series any hero that is picked/banned is unavailable for the next games in that series. So for a bo3 if you go to a game 3 then your down to a pool of 72 for that last game. If the bo5 finals go to a game 5, that last game will have a pool of 32.
Definitely have to keep an eye on that.
its all pick essentially.
Elimination mode has been fun, but haven't seen anything super wacky. Maybe Warlock mid has been the most off the wall thing. Which goes to show this meta is pretty balanced: lots of viable heroes.
Seeing heroes you haven't seen in a while reminds you that dota is a flat circle: aside from perpetual dumpster tier heroes like huskar (who was OP during ghost scepter days) and bloodseeker (who is good *now*), almost every hero has had their time in the sun. ET, who was the casters' target of derision during one of the series, used to be nearly OP. Bat, who is a joke now, was once considered unnerfable. Lina, who is everywhere now, has been receiving constant buffs for ages because for ages noone would fuckin pick her. I saw some Brew and Tide during elimination mode! Remember them? Hell I saw an Octarine Core Death Prophet! And we all remember hoho haha, who is nowhere to be found.
definitely. but Game 1 Alliance vs 4CL is right now!
and Ta is popular again in NA. with a deso rush. blink after. woo!
The game 3's have been great, and I can't wait/hope for a game 4/5 in the finals.
If they do it again maybe having bo5 for all games would make more sense, get more games with the severely reduced hero pool.
Only other game mode I would love to see a tourney for would be a 5v5 overthrow with drafting.
And promptly given to the one player who hasn't played a single Oracle game ever before.
I'm wondering if Storm and AM are going to get some nerfs. Storm is weird, he's only 49% winrate right now, but every game I play with him, whether he's on my team or not, he snowballs into an unkillable ganking carry. AM..I don't know..he just feels really powerful in this meta.
AM is disgusting as well, but that might just be that a lot of the best heroes around right now are mana heavy int heroes and AM feasts on those.