Dota 2 Thoughts

Dota 2 Things to Think about.

Watching replays - What do we pay attention to?

The enemy dives a tower: Should we have TP'd in or did I TP in and die?
Teamfights:
-Did the right hero initiate?
-Were we able to take the fight?
-What was our positioning prior to the fight and after initiation?
-Did we focus the right heroes?
-Deaths: What was the cause?
-Bad positioning
-Initiating at bad timing
-Over extending
-Bad map awareness
-When did we go aggressive and why? When did we go defensive and why? Were these the right decision

During the game

General

Can I get the kill? Will I die in the process? Is it worth it?
-Whenever you decide to show yourself, pay attention to the enemies positioning on the map.
-Always expect the worst: 1 enemy visible but 4 missing from the map? Expect 5 of them together.
-Should we go aggressive or defensive? Initiate from the right angle depending on whether you have the upper hand.
-Someone needs to be the guy that notes the time of Rosh (support)
-Someone needs to be the guy that stacks ancients with the creep (Offlane / Support / Jungle) because the carry needs to get the lasthits.
-Captain has to call the shots often and in detail
-Generally you don't want to gank a sidelane hero that is 1v2 or 1v3 anyway. He'll play safe in most cases and will be hard to gank. -Also pay attention to what hero is in that solo lane (easy escape?)
-Dropping tower aggro: Attack command an allied unit
-Whenever you get a last hit, quickly look at your mini map. A great tip to practice map awareness.
-Dying? Quick buy 1 or 2 TP's
-Always check your opponents' items and skills before going into a fight. You wouldn't want to have a situation where you miss the fact that one of them has a BKB, Abyssal Blade, or most importantly a gem.
-Check your opponent's items and mana. If you see a quelling blade on an enemy hero, that means you might can probably be more aggressive. Especially look out for key items like blink/sheep/force/mek
-Be careful what trees you do or don't eat. Learn paths through the trees near side shop, secret shop, ganking spots, etc.
-If you can spend all your unreliable gold and want to go back to base, do so and suicide to neutrals. It's quicker.

Support

Are you losing the lane?
-Leave. The worst thing you can do as a support if you're in an unwinnable lane is stay there and soak up xp while doing nothing. Let him get solo xp so he's at least overleveled and underfarmed instead of underleveled and underfarmed. Oh, I should mention I'm assuming he knows how to play and doesn't over extend and die to get 2 creeps per minute and just sits back and soaks xp to get overleveled, you might have to mention that to him if he's bad.
Now that you've left, what do you do?
Protect runes for mid
-Gank mid with good rune
-Smoke gank mid
-Gank opponent safe lane
-Go to different lane and stay there to push forcing pressure off your safe lane (often called "making space")
-Hate on mid again
-Ward aggressively instead of defensively. People often think when they're behind they have to play defensive. However, warding opponent jungle and running at their AM while he's trying to farm can slow him down/get a tp reaction from the axe/wd and they waste time chasing you (again, making space)
-Smoke gank again
-You should have a level advantage on your cores from 2 solo lanes and you protecting mid, use it mid game to kill people and turn xp into gold
-See who's doing well on your team, follow them around (if they need +1 to kill, if they don't let them do what they're doing and just sit far behind them in case of ganks) and help them kill people so you get assist xp/gold and they're safer cause you can sacrifice yourself to make sure the person doing well doesn't die
-Hope your carry isn't full retard and can make use of solo xp
-Farm jungle yourself. It might actually be better your carry gets solo xp and you get jungle farm from pulls, but that's a judgement call.
-Stack ancients/large camp. Use judgement though, if your mid is getting pushed down at 5 minutes you're probably not going to get to farm those ancients. You can hang out while your carry kills it for some levels.
Basically, there's tons of things to do when you lose laning phase unless you get crushed and die 3 times each. Then the game might just be over.
-Other things you need to pay attention on:
-Don't stare at the cliff while you're warding. When warding, shift queue. Place the ward and Shift click somewhere else so the motion is fluid. Want to make this worse for your opponent? Stare at a cliff you're NOT warding while you know they have vision of you.
-If you feel you're getting yourself into a warding war, stop dropping obs there. Maybe you can drop another sentry if you have a way to get vision of the cliff ward, but that's about it.
-If you have the room to carry a stick and 3 branches, keep it that way instead of upgrading into a wand.
After you upgrade the courier, your next item should ALWAYS be a TP scroll. Suddenly being on the other side of the map is a strong surprise and easy kills. Even easier is TP'ing when someone is tower diving. Free double kill for you.
-Even if you're a support, don't let last hits go to waste. When pushing, try to be the first to kill the ranged creep When pulling, last hit those neutrals
-Fight the urge to TP to a lane when you're in the fountain. Keep the cooldown fresh and save gold for when you're actually needed.
The scoreboard assist counter means NOTHING. What matters for kills is that you're around them. Assist gold is always evenly split among heroes in a 1300 radius of the kill, even if they didn't damage them. When you narrowly survived a dive, mind your position, but don't run back yet. If your team turns the fight you can maybe throw out another spell and in the worst case benefit from assist gold.
Ask yourself this one question all the time: "Am I safe?" Always travel with someone else, even when warding. Looking for some farm? Take farm close to where your team is or a tower of yours. Are you going to initiate? Make sure your team is ready to follow up so you don't die.
-Always carry a TP from min 5-6 onward.
-If you are babysitting, focus on denying creeps.
-Don't single pull unless you want to push the lane.
-Always consider buying a smoke at the start of the game.
-Try your best not to pull at 1 Min game time as your carry usually does not have enough damage or experience to last hit under tower. -Wait until the 3rd wave to pull and while waiting you can harass the enemy offlaner so that you carry can get some last hits and either get a quelling blade or his boots!
-Take opportunities for solo xp when you can get them. If your mid leaves the lane you can take the lane during their absence. Some heroes like Maiden or Sand King can also make use of jungle on their own. Don't be too greedy doing this though and always have a TP scroll on you.
-Play from the fog as much as possible. Doing this, you deny information to the opposing team. Seeing a support hero in lane makes the other lanes feel safe and comfortable. Support hero that's off the enemy radar is a threat anywhere on the map.
-General starting items for supports are
-Support 1: Obs, courier, tango, salve, clarity
-Support 2: dust/sentries, smoke, tango, salve, clarity
-In a tri lane the first item you buy is a magic stick. Otherwise get a TP or save for the courier upgrade.
-Make sure you use that little bit of early gold you have all the time.
-If both you and your carry are low, give him your salve, suicide to neutrals (after spending unreliable gold) and walk back to lane.
-Initiation is ok if you are ganking WITH VISION. It's not ok when 4 are off of the map and you see 1 in jungle. Otherwise, please let your offlane or mid initiate.
-Everytime you want to cast a spell cast it at max range away from the teamfight.
-Supports should ALWAYS have 1 eye on the lane, 1 eye on the minimap and another eye on the ward CD.
-Don’t just randomly go around the forest cause you might get screwed over by a possible agrotrilane.
-After a pull is the best time to smoke gank. The enemy offlaner will report missing but tell his teammates you are pulling.
-If you want to get a kill but don't see an opportunity yet, don't harass the enemy laner. Stay close and let him think he can safely lane.
-Try to always gank with your fellow support player.
-A support without mana is often useless. Walk back to base to get mana.
-Later in the game if you want to smoke, deward the area where you're smoking first or make sure it's not warded.

Mindset

-Be positive. Don't question other people's decisions, rather say what you think would be best. E.g: "Luna, I think a BKB would be good for you here." is better than "Luna, why are you not getting a BKB?"
-History is irrelevant. There's no point in talking about something that happened 10,5 or even 2 minutes ago while the game is still in progress. It is however relevant when watching replays.
-NEVER point out what someone did wrong. There's very little chance they will take into account what you, a random pub, said, let alone apply it to that exact game.
-What can truly help is to warn your team of things that may happen or are happening, not things that have happened, those are for the replays.
-"Because Rhasta died so many times, this Slark is now super fat." are some of the worst things you can say. Instead you should be asking yourself what you and your team can do to stop him now. Can you outfarm him, can you gank him, how strong is he, etc.
-"We lost". No you didn't. "ff plz" is something you should NEVER be saying. People that give up when they fall behind, will never learn to play from behind and thus will never be able to turn around a game. A lot of pub players will start to get arrogant and overextend and/or start buying things like rapier when they are ahead, this is your chance to strike back. Don't queue up if you can't focus on an entire game without giving up on it.
Don't play when you're tired.
-Take a break after a loss
-Switch between unranked and ranked if you get some losses in ranked
-Play heroes with a big impact. Avoid passive farmers, especially junglers.
-Communicate with you team. It increases teamwork and reduces flame.
-It's all about confidence in your team and not being greedy yourself.
-Mute the damned. There is no helping certain people, and fighting them will not help at all. Mute them the second you are certain they will have nothing of value to say in the match and forget they exist.

Farming

-The lane is generally more profitable to farm than the jungle. However, last hits in lane are not guaranteed.
-The best lvl 1 junglers are not carries but heroes like enigma, batrider, axe, enchantress and chen
-As a carry, don't come over to farm the neutrals your support has pulled to.
-Later on, when you have a farming item or are high enough level, you need to start using the jungle, but don't forget the lane.
-If you are a hero that can farm ancients, do it! It leaves room in the jungle for allies that can't do so.
-As a carry, you want to jungle aggressively if you are ahead. Occupy their jungle and ancients. It helps you to be closer to fights and it starves the enemy for farm. If you are behind, farm close to your allies and/or towers.
-Pay attention to the enemy heroes and items to know when or where you can farm. Enemy axe has a blink and you are a glass cannon carry? Don't farm alone. Enemy axe has no blink and you are a glass cannon carry? Don't stand near the trees if you farm.
-If you are behind and you see 5 enemy heroes on one lane, go and farm and push another lane. When enemies are coming to you, TP out to another lane (preferably) or to base if you are low.
-Earlier in the game you want to kill the big neutrals first to take as little damage as possible. Later priorities change:
-Kill the bird with armor aura first
-kill the satyr giving HP regen first
-kill the troll healer first
-kill ghost reducing attack speed first
-kill the troll summoner last so you can get gold from the skeletons.
-With Maelstrom/Mjollnir or Radiance you want to already be leaving the camp when you know the lightning strike or burn damage will kill them.
-Basically only illusion based heroes benefit a lot from radiance. Apart from that you should only get radiance on heroes that are naturally very tanky (radiance gives no survivability) like Bristle and WK.
-With battlefury, always try to kill all creeps with your last hit and switch targets accordingly. Remember the creep order mentioned above though, these are exceptions.
-Battlefury is basically core on AM and Ember and situational on PA, Void and Jugger.
-In most cases supports should stack camps, but as a farmer you can still do this when passing by or when you have illusions, etc.
-Share your HotD creep so supports can use it to stack ancients for you
-Also pay attention to the stack timing when you're farming. If your camp is half dead at :53, pull it out so you have a camp and a half at the minute mark instead of none at all.
-When your primary concern is not taking a lot of damage when jungling you can pull the creeps out and hit them on the way back.
-When pushing the lane always kill the ranged creep first and tank the wave if you can handle it. Don't forget to last hit when pushing!
-If a huge creep wave is coming and you have a good AOE spell, run ahead and draw all the creeps to you so you can hit them all with your nuke.
-To create creep equilibrium you need to get all creeps at the same health and same amount of creeps (by tanking them, hitting your own creeps more, etc) Once you've done that you need to make sure to hit your creep once for each last hit you take.
-Don't TP to a lane unless there's a big wave you'll miss when you don't. Try to anticipate that wave coming in and get there on time by foot. Also be careful not to have wasted your TP to farm somewhere and then not being able to help your team in a fight or being ganked and not being able to TP out. If you've died early on, you can TP back to lane because you can't miss out on the XP.
-If you're against an aggressive tri lane, get a magic stick from the side shop as soon as the creep equilibrium allows it.
As a ranged carry, finish your basilius (you get a ring of protection as a starting item) asap.
As a melee carry, consider a PMS or go straight to boots.
-If you're not against a tri lane, consider midas. If you're not getting midas when against a single offlaner, get phase boots.
Consider who you buy midas on. One of the more important things of midas that is often forgotten is the xp gain. When used on big creeps it gives you a huge boost. Consider getting a midas on heroes like weaver who do a lot with XP as well as gold instead of heroes like Void who primarily need the gold.