DotA 2 (Purgegamers Guide)

DOTA 2 Guide

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Welcome to Dota, You Suck
Welcome to Dota, you su... well actually you guys have gotten a lot better.

I've been happily forced to rewrite my guide because the problems of the new Dota 2 player are very different from the problems of the DotA 1 player when I originally wrote the guide in 2011. In short, the tools that Valve provided and the learning resources that the community has created are very different than they were in the past. I also think that I can write a better guide now than I could then.

Before we start, I just want to thank you for taking a chance on this game. It takes a long time to refine your skills and learn, but that's often the most rewarding part about playing Dota 2. If you're here because your friends want you to play with them, then the social aspect makes learning easier as friends fix your new player mistakes, or at least give you a foundation that will help you see and correct your errors. Lets see if we can keep those to a minimum.

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Dota Basics
Dota 2 is a team-oriented game pitting two teams of five players against each other. You win the game by destroying the enemy's Ancient building before they destroy yours. The Ancient is the largest building and is centrally located in each team's main base.



At the start of the game every hero is weak, with no experience (exp) and little gold. Experience gives you additional levels, allowing you to unlock or upgrade your skills and build a Talent Tree. Gold buys you items that improve your hero in a variety of ways, like running faster, dealing more damage, and gaining the ability to cast unique spells.

Your goal is to spend your time gaining exp and gold as fast as possible, or assisting your team in doing so, while limiting and reducing your opponents' exp and gold gain. If you gain a significant exp and gold advantage by the later stages of the game it usually allows your team to destroy all heroes in your path, followed by their defensive towers and buildings, and ultimately killing the enemy Ancient, winning you the game. How you go about doing this is playing Dota.

Lets start off with some more basics.



Heroes

Each player controls a unique Hero out of a pool of 113. Unlike many other similar games, Dota 2 only allows there to be 1 of a specific hero in a game. Each hero has unique stats, Spells, and Talent Trees.  Heroes start at level 1 and max out at level 25. Every level until 19 grants a Skill Point which can be used to unlock or upgrade spells or add a branch to your Talent Tree.

A hero's stats include all basic elements of a hero and its attributes. The elements are the base: attack time, damage, HP, mana, armor, magic resistance, attributes, and move speed.  Attributes are the Strength, Agility, and Intelligence of the hero. Each hero has its own base attributes and attribute gain per level, and each attribute provides certain bonuses. Strength is HP and HP regen, Agility is attack speed and armor, and Intelligence is mana pool and mana regen. Heroes are divided into overarching categories based on their "Primary Attribute." Heroes usually gain more of their primary attribute than the others, and each point of the primary attribute also gives the hero 1 attack damage. These factors means that Strength heroes are usually better at surviving damage (are tanky), Intelligence heroes are more able to keep casting spells, and Agility heroes have great attack speed and armor.

A hero's spells (aka skills or abilities) are the biggest part of its strengths and weaknesses, each with its own mana cost, cooldown, and effects. Most heroes has three basic spells and one Ultimate. As mentioned before, these spells are upgraded by skill points gained on level. Ultimate abilities, being the most powerful, can only be learned at level 6 and upgraded at levels 12 and 18 (in most cases).

Each hero also has a unique Talent Tree. At levels 10, 15, 20, and 25, two branches of the tree will unlock. When you choose one of the talents with a skill point, you gain its effects but miss out on the other talent. Effects vary widely, with some heroes able to pick up attack damage, HP, cast range, or even unique upgrades to their spells.  The talent tree is used to adapt to the way each specific game is going.

The combination of a hero's stats, attributes, spells, and talent tree gives that hero unique strengths, weaknesses, and optimal item choices. A good team composition has heroes that cover each other's weaknesses and complement each other's strengths, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this guide.



Buildings

Aside from the Ancient, there are four kinds of buildings: Effigies, Barracks, Shrines, and Towers. Three towers are placed along each of the three "lanes" of the Dota map, with two outside the base and one defending the Barracks. These towers are differentiated by tiers--the Tier 1 (T1) tower is furthest from the base, the Barracks tower is Tier 3, and two Tier 4 towers defend the Ancient. Higher tier means more armor, hp, and damage. In order to attack a tower or barracks, the previous tower must be destroyed first. Additionally, buildings aside from T1s gain "Backdoor Protection" while there are no enemy creeps (see below) nearby, granting them bonus armor and regenerating damage they take while in that state. This adds structure to pushing, as players will need creeps nearby to push.

Shrines are buidings that can be activated 5 minutes into each match, to restore mana and HP to nearby heroes on a 5 minute cooldown. Two are located outside the base for each team and three are inside the base. The two outside the base are invulnerable until a T3 tower has fallen.

Effigies are nonfunctional towers that surround the Ancient, slowing down creeps and looking cool.

Barracks will be discussed in a later section.


Creeps

There are three lanes--top, middle, and bottom--that spawn "lane creeps" every 30 seconds at the xx:00 and xx:30 mark for the entire game. These creeps run down each lane for both teams towards the enemy's Ancient, attacking any enemy unit they find. The creeps of each team will cancel each other out, killing each other off in equilibrium. Without player intervention, nothing happens on the map.  Lane creeps are the main way to gain resources (exp and gold) in the early game, creating conflict as players from both teams face each other off.



If you are the hero that does the final damaging blow to kill a creep (called the last hit), then you also get gold! If you do not get the last hit, you only get experience, assuming that you are close enough. This is the first thing that you will have to practice to improve as a Dota player. Learn to get the last hit on a creep so that you get gold in addition to exp. Aside from last hitting, every player gets 91 gold every minute just by being in the game. However, last hitting is still extremely important because if you can last hit more often than your opponents, you will help your team get the gold advantage that allows you to buy the items that win you the fights that wins you the game.

Laning
Being in one of the 3 lanes in the early game is important because of the gold and exp gain, but there is another place you can farm: The Jungle. Neutral creeps spawn at predetermined locations (camps) in the jungle and stay there until killed by either team. There are very few heroes in Dota 2 that can effectively gain gold and experience in the jungle at the start of the game due to the strength of the neutral creeps, but having such a hero can help out your team by more effectively farming the whole map.

To move your hero to go to these lanes, you select your hero by left clicking on your hero with your mouse and then right click the ground to move your hero to that position. If there is an enemy where you right click, you will issue an attack command, which means your hero will move to that target and attack when in range. All heroes have a basic attack that is often called a right click or right clicking. This is the main way that you do damage, especially in the early game, because it doesn't cost you any resources other than time. Most heroes do a low amount of right click damage in the early game because their levels are low and you don't yet have gold to purchase the costly items that make your right click's stronger.



To sum up the very beginning of the game, heroes are distributed to each lane depending on their role and then do their best to get last hits and exp while limiting their opponents' last hits through denying, harassment, and other advanced methods.

Laning is not quite as simple as just last hitting, as your opponent can attack their allied creeps when they get below half of their Health Points (HP) by pressing the 'A' key for attack and then left clicking their low HP creeps. If they last hit one of their creeps instead of you, it's called a deny and an exclamation ( ! ) point will appear over  the creep's head, showing that the creep was denied. When a creep is denied, the enemy only receives 70% of the experience, with the remaining 30% going to the team that denied the creep. Denying a creep will not grant you any gold, but prevents your enemy from getting any either.



This creates a scenario where the player who is better at last hitting will get more gold and experience than their opponents, so focusing on last hitting or denying every creep will allow you to get the first advantage in the game.



My favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Kill Them.

You will get opportunities to attack enemy heroes (called harassing) while you are laning, but that mostly depends on the hero matchups. Matchups in reference to the laning stage (early game) means what heroes you are playing, and what heroes your opponents decided to put in a lane against you.

If your opponent is playing a melee hero (a hero whose right click is very short range) and you are playing a ranged hero (a hero whose right click is a long ranged projectile like an arrow) then you have many opportunities to harass your opponent when they go for last hits. If you harass your opponent enough and his HP becomes too low, it may give you an opportunity to use your skills to slow, damage, or stun (preventing any action) your opponent and Kill Them. If you are the one getting harassed, make sure that you use your consumable HP regeneration items that you purchased at the start of the game to keep your hp full after you take damage so that the damage required to kill you is increased.  I’ll tell you which ones to buy later.

If you kill your opponent in lane or throughout the game, you accomplish a few things. First, your opponent isn't in lane anymore because all dead heroes are removed from the map for a set time depending on their level, and after they respawn, they have to walk back to the lane from base. Any exp and gold from creeps that die while they're gone is wasted. Second, you gain exp and gold for being present at their death, and that should make you a higher level, making your skills and right click stronger than your opponent.

With that advantage you just got, it becomes easier to kill them again, and again. This is called snowballing. You gain a small advantage, and you use that to take another advantage, and another advantage. One way to stop snowballs is by killing the player who is snowballing since you get extra gold from a wealthy hero, or a hero who is on a kill streak!

Keep in mind that snowballing might be because of you. If you repeatedly die (also known as 'Feeding' your opponent gold) then you are allowing your opponents to get an advantage and snowball. DO NOT FEED. You want to maximize kills on your opponents, get last hits and exp from creeps and in the meantime minimize your deaths. To avoid feeding, if your opponents are trying to kill you and you think you will lose the fight, it's generally best to throw your stun or slow (if you have one) and IMMEDIATELY run straight towards the nearest tower.

My second favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Almost Kill Them.

By Almost Killing Them, you put their life at such a low point that they will be forced to run back to their fountain (which regenerates your health points (HP) and mana points (MP)). They will only go back if they are out of regen items, so it's much better if you kill them instead. If they do run back to their fountain they are wasting time, as creeps are dying without giving exp, creeps are not being last hit, and no one is around to deny you while you are last hitting. This is not nearly as good as when you Kill Them, but it's better than nothing.

Look How Far They Have to Run Back When You Harass Them



The best way to harass your opponents is to attack them if you have a ranged advantage, or use your spells to do damage while you get last hits. If you do disable them with a slow or stun, it’s important that you also right click them while they are disabled so you get free damage in.

Another version of this is called zoning, or in a sentence, 'go zone that offlane hero'. What that means is you put yourself between your opponent and the creep wave to make sure that they stay out of exp range. This is a bit advanced for a new player because you don't know the strength of their and your hero as well, but feeding should better teach you your hero's limits, 40+ minutes of pain at a time. At lower levels of play there are also often 2 heroes in the offlane, preventing you from doing this effectively, but the principle stands and should be learned.

You should attempt this the first few minutes when you are equal levels, which is why the zoning is so important. If done correctly, this will often turn into your two heroes auto attacking one another with some movement between attacks, but as long as you both use regen like a Tango you are gaining advantage as the support because you keep them from experience.

Here is an example video showing this. Spending mana is often worth it to zone as well:

Before I throw more words at you to describe lanes, here are the generic descriptions of places on the map. Things that I didn't point out that are worth recognizing, are the super strong Roshan and his icon near the Dire offlane, who can be accessed through the river, the Radiant(green) jungle which is between their Safe Lane and their Mid, and the Dire(red) jungle, which is between their Safe Lane and Mid.



The option to zone your opponent is mostly dependent on the position of your creep equilibrium, which is where the two spawning creeps on each side of the map meet to fight. Creeps do a very consistent amount of damage, so if no one does any outside damage, it takes a very long time to upset the creep equilibrium.

If your wave is in a good place for your team, such as close to your tower, then it's very important you don't do extra damage to the wave. If you do extra damage to a wave, then some of their creeps will die before yours, allowing your creeps to attack more before their deaths, killing theirs creeps faster, which results in your wave building up creeps into a push. Unless you are trying to take a tower with extra creeps, you do NOT want to push a wave, ESPECIALLY in the early game. You should NEVER auto attack (constantly attack) the creep wave in the first 5 minutes of the game in the safe lanes. You should only be attacking their creeps when you are last hitting, and occasionally attacking yours (when they are below 50% hp) to offset your last hit damage. Try to keep the same amount of creeps on your side of the wave and try to ensure both sides lose a creep around the same time.

The reason creep equilibrium is so important for each  is because keeping the wave closer to your tower gives you some huge advantages. It's safer for you because your tower is safety early, it's more space to chase down offlane heroes which forces them to play less aggressive, and that helps your support to prevent the enemy Offlane from collecting easy experience. We'll get more into that interaction later for each role.

Ganking

Sometimes Killing Them and Almost Killing Them comes unpredictably, like when one of your allies walks over to your lane from a different lane and helps to kill your opponent. That's called a gank, and it's even easier if your opponent is far from their tower next to your well controlled creep wave.

Someone setting up a gank is ganking, or is described as a ganker. Ganking is integral to games because it allows you to throw imbalance to lanes, or to hurt your opponents' ability to predict where heroes are. If you show up mid briefly with two extra heroes to gank the enemy mid, this gives your mid hero an advantage that will allow him to lane better because his opponent dies, or almost dies. Ganking is one of the ways a player can control where the game is going. You want to ensure your lanes are collecting more gold and experience, and sometimes that's done by killing enemy heroes and creating pressure on the map. After they die they'll be less willing to make an aggressive move, farm in place that seemed safe a moment before, and these should all lead to you getting more advantage.

If your ally on the mid lane plays terrible and has a bad laning stage, you can help him by ganking the enemy mid. Sort of like teaming up on him. Bring lots of allies if one of your opponents is snowballing and strong so that they don't get out of control. Always remember that two to three weak heroes is almost always stronger in the early game than one fed or snowballing hero because 3 heroes is far more effective, especially with stuns.

And that's why ganking is so important. It gives you a way to outsmart your opponent and offset some of the laning advantages they created either with hero picks or the way they played. If you're ever losing a game the best way to get some of that advantage back is to gank your opponents or win teamfights. There is a comeback mechanic in Dota that gives you more gold for enemy kills if you're behind in the game, so very often ganking will change the game in huge ways that farming, even at a fast pace, will not.

Pulling
The last advanced method is called pulling. To pull, you attack a group of neutral creeps and then run away so they follow you (this is called pulling aggro). While they are following you, they run into YOUR lane creeps, who have no brain, will see the enemy, and follow them back into the jungle to attack them. When you do this, the lane creeps are helping you kill the neutrals, and the neutrals are helping you kill the lane creeps. When the neutrals die, you and anyone nearby get experience. If your lane creeps end up dying to the neutral creeps, then the enemy doesn't get exp for them! If you get the last hit on the neutrals, you ALSO get gold!

I'm sure that was a little confusing, so watch this quick clip for a demonstration of pulling on each side of the map.

Radiant Single Pull:

To expand on pulling a bit, a regular pull camp will not be enough to clear your wave. In fact, it usually takes 2 neutral camps. You can get your creeps to fight more neutral camps , but first let me explain how neutral creeps come into the game.

At the :00 second mark of every minute (with the exception of the first minute of the game), the game checks to see if there are any neutrals in their spawns. If there are no neutrals in their spawns, a new set of neutrals is spawned. To trick the game, all you have to do is pull the neutrals at the perfect time and run away (:53) and by the time the clock hits :00 a new set of neutrals will spawn, and the previous set will walk home to realize they have neighbors. This is called stacking, and this is one of the ways you can get your creeps to fight extra creeps. Keep in mind that stacking camps also makes farming gold and exp much faster for heroes with strong Area of Effect (aoe), so if you're ever running by a camp on your side of the map, make sure to attack the camp at :53 and run away!

Back to pulling, if you stack your pull camp so that a second camp spawns, you now have two times as many creeps attacking your pull camp. This is by far the easiest way to pull safely, but it isn't the fastest way for your hero to gain levels. The reason is because two camps attacking your creeps at the same time is too much damage. If you use this method for pulling you'll deny your enemy's exp, but you won't get very much exp yourself because few neutrals will be dying each wave. You'll get more or less depending on which creeps spawn because they do different amounts of damage. When you stack pull, I recommend auto attacking so that you can clear more creeps, unlike I did in this clip.

Stack and Pull

The better way to pull, though more difficult, is to CONNECT the pull. To connect a pull, you're imitating how you originally got your lane creeps there in the first place. Once the neutral camp is almost finished, you need to have already pulled a different close-by neutral camp into the previous one. If you can accomplish this, then you can clear about two full neutral camps with every creep wave. The time to start the pull is at the :13 second mark or the :43 second mark for both sides of the map, but you may need to adjust the time slightly if you are early or late. Connecting the pull is much harder and will require some eyeballing and practice. Usually when 1 full hp creep and 1 half hp creep are alive is when you should start to pull the second camp down. Each neutral camp is slightly different, so practice on this will make perfect!

Here is a video of a connected pull on both sides of the map. You can practice this in an empty game, if you're afraid to try it in a real game.

Radiant Pull Through

Dire Pull Through

Make sure that you don't mess up your pull connect! If you do, your lane will push, which messes up the lane equilibrium. Messing up the lane equilibrium will give your opponents more exp, more chances at last hits, and it makes it harder for you to gank them.  It's much harder to connect the pull on the dire side, so be extra careful on dire.

If you DO want to push, doing a single pull without stacking or pulling through is fine, but it's rare that you do this on purpose.

Make sure that you keep an eye on the enemy offlane's position during the laning stage since they are also able to pull with the large camp, disrupting your carry's farm and the creep equilibrium.

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Phases of the Game
By this point of the guide I've written a lot about "the laning stage".

No game of Dota 2 is the same as another, but each game can be referred to by how far it has progressed. There are three general "phases" of the game, and I'm going to outline how you should generally play them. As you play more Dota, you should and will think less about what phase you are in, and more about how each game feels. That's how you'll learn to make decisions in game.

Laning Stage
Somewhere between minute 0 and 15 is defined as the "laning" stage. As you may have guessed, laning means that you spend a lot of your time in one of the three lanes in close proximity to your enemies gaining gold and exp since you are still very weak in levels and items. Make sure that you stick to a variety of the advanced methods I outlined above.

Remember that you are trying to maximize your and your team's experience and gold gain while limiting your opponents'! That means pulling, getting experience and last hits from each of the three lanes, sometimes ganking, zoning your opponents when possible and sometimes pushing towers. Also, a bit more bluntly, this means NOT FEEDING.

For new players, the Laning Stage often goes on a bit longer because the players don't move around the map as much to gank, they are less likely to group up and push towers efficiently; they also don't understand the strengths and abilities of their heroes, as well. You will get better at doing this as you improve in skill level and play more games.

The laning stage is so integral to how you play the later stages of the game because it sets tempo and gold advantage. If one team has better hero picks, good lane setup (what heroes go where) or just plays better, they will "win" the early game, which should reward them with more map control, gold advantage, and experience advantage.

Map control is an important concept when we talk about the next phases of the game.

Mid Game
Mid game is defined as the part of the game where teams move around the map and begin to push and destroy towers. Most heroes will be between level 6 and 11 and have access to their ultimates (at level 6). If we just reference pub games, there won't be a lot of coordination, but some of your players will start moving where the fights are, or moving where the best place to get last hits, or farm is.

This stage of the game is going to be completely weird for new players because their sense of teamwork and game direction is terrible. Everyone on your team is going to do what they think is best, and usually best for their gold and experience intake, rather than the team's as a whole. To make things worse, organizing them for something different than their plan can be difficult as well. The mid game is the part in the game where playing with friends who are willing to work together makes the game a lot more fun.

Again, this stage is generally categorized by pushing. Pushing towers is important for two reasons: the first is that your team gets a lot of gold when a tower dies. When your team destroys an enemy tier 1 tower (the first ring of towers), everyone gains 120 gold. If the tower gets denied (towers can only be denied if they are below 10% hp), then your team only gets 80 gold. Higher tier towers are worth more gold, but that's still an 800 gold advantage for your team if you get the last hit! It's extremely important that your opponents don't deny your tower, since it's equivalent to 1-2 hero kills in terms of gold!

In addition, if you are the hero to get the last hit on the enemy tower, you get an EXTRA 150-250 gold on top of the 120 from the bounty, which means you can get a massive gold advantage (equivalent to 1-2 kills) from getting the last hit on the tower, rather than it being denied. Towers give your team a BIG gold advantage.

The second advantage that pushing towers gives you is map control. Map control is your ability to see your opponents' movement, move undetected where you want, and use that tactical information to influence the game in your favor. With the towers in the lanes, they not only provide resistance to pushing, they also provide true sight (to see invisible things) and vision of your opponents. When towers are up, there are simply less paths to walk without being seen. Most importantly, towers provide a team a place where they can use Teleport Scrolls (or TP scrolls) to teleport to.

A Teleport Scroll costs 50 gold to purchase, and 75 mana to use. You can use them to teleport to a building your team controls, which helps you adjust to your opponents' tactical maneuvers and set up some of your own. It's one of the most important items in the game and you should ALWAYS carry one once you reach about 8 minutes into the game, though sometimes earlier.

Great uses of TP Scrolls:

If your mid hero gets ganked, you can teleport into the lane and back him up with a stun or a slow, and maybe turn the kill around.
If you respawn in your base and your team is pushing top lane, you can teleport to top lane so that you can get there faster and waste less time walking.
If you barely survive a teamfight, you can immediately teleport home to your fountain so that you can start healing faster.
If you find a strong enemy hero with good chase but no stun, you can simply teleport home to survive.
Activating a Black King Bar before you begin to teleport will prevent most spells and abilities from cancelling the completion of your teleportation.
If you have few towers, half of those tactical options that TP scrolls provide for you aren't available anymore.

Another way that towers being dead helps you is it gives you more space to place aggressive Observer Wards, and makes it harder for your opponents to place Observer Wards since there are more paths you can travel now.

An Observer Ward (or obs ward) is an item that has limited availability that you can place on the ground or cliffs that gives you vision for 6 minutes. It's invisible to enemies (unless they have truesight/invis detection), and helps you track your opponent's movements and make decisions based on that.

Placing Observer Wards is an essential part of the game that gives you big advantages. Your team should be placing them throughout the game in locations that:

you expect your opponents to move through, areas that give you a tactical advantage to have vision of such as outside towers
up high ground since you can't see up hill
by the Roshan pit
Sometimes you even want to place wards deep in enemy territory so that when you move into their territory to gank, your ganks become easier.

In the Laning Stage you should be placing Observer wards in lane to see enemy heroes ganking by walking through the lane or at the river rune spots to see rune spawns and help your mid get them.

In the mid and late game, you should be warding based on how the game is going, like where you expect the enemy to be, or where the fights will be. If you are behind, the enemy will be close to your towers. If there is no clear advantage, perhaps wards across the middle of the map is safe. If you are ahead, you should be warding closer to their towers where you plan to start fights. Here are some examples.

Example of Even Game Warding



Example of Losing Game Warding



Example of Winning Game Warding



Another early use of wards is to block the enemy jungle camps. Warding the pull camp operates on the same principle as stacking. If there is something in the camp, the camp will not respawn at the :00 mark, and wards count as something in the camp. If you then ward the pull camp, creeps will not spawn there, and that prevents your opponents from pulling! You will often block the enemy pull camps to prevent supports from pulling against you.



The last aspect that defines the mid game is that there will be a lot of ganks. At low levels ganking will be very prone to mistakes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't practice it. The best ganks often involve one to three heroes depending on how many stuns and how much damage you need to get a kill.

Dota is about efficiency so it's important that you move as groups of two or three to get ganks off while your other 2 players are farming elsewhere on the map. It makes it harder to predict the ganks in addition to allowing your team to profit heavily instead of just a moderate amount.

Late Game
The last stage of a Dota game has by far the most teamwork, the most organization and the most team fighting, which means fighting five heroes versus five heroes. Where these fights happen changes due to a few factors, but generally the last fight involves destroying the enemy throne.

The easiest way to throne an enemy (though not required) is to first "Rax" them, or kill at least one set of barracks.

Each lane has a melee and ranged barracks. When you destroy an enemy barracks it actually makes YOUR creeps in that lane stronger. If you destroyed the melee barracks, your melee creeps are stronger. If you destroy the ranged, your ranged creeps in that lane get stronger. The upgraded creeps get more damage, more HP, and they give less gold and experience, which over the course of the game disadvantages your opponents' income. It also constantly pushes in that lane towards the enemy base since the lane equilibrium is messed up.



Before we talked how lane equilibrium was something you wanted to keep neutral, but in the late game pushing is the better strategy. That's because it leads to a conflict of interest for the enemy team. If you have been Raxed, and you want to leave the base, you have to first make sure that the creep wave is pushed far out of your base because otherwise the strong enemy creeps will enter your base and do more damage to your structures, eventually leading to getting Throned.

All of this pressure that Raxing your opponents creates makes it easier to Rax a second time in a different lane, and once you have 2-Raxed your opponents, the victory is almost completely assured because it becomes far too hard for your opponents to defend due to the lanes always pushing in.

Once you get all three sets Raxes, you have a 99% assured victory, as your creeps get a final huge upgrade and become almost unbeatable. I have played Dota close to 10,000 games, and I've only won against a triple rax less than 20 times. It is possible to come back from that kind of a disadvantage, but it has to be late game, and you have to have the right heroes for it, so do your best to Rax your opponents, and don't get Raxed yourself.

It's clear that Raxing is the best way to win the game, but the important part is that you do it safely. To approach up the hill into the enemy's tier 3 towers and barracks requires you to go uphill where you can't see, and you'll be standing in a clumped up group which makes your opponents' area of effect spells much more effective, as they'll hit more of your heroes.

When attempting to rax there is often a team fight, which leads to chasing their heroes back to fountain, which can mean overextending, or getting too far into dangerous territory. If you overextend deep into their base and then feed your lives away, the push is usually stopped. If you push high ground and FEED your lives without taking the barracks, you are throwing the game away.

"Throwing" means that you had an advantage and you should have taken an objective, but you did something stupid and lost your chance to do it then. You threw ownership of the win to your opponents. Don't be stupid. Take the barracks and get out of their base immediately afterward. If you don't have a lot of time, just take one barracks, preferably the melee barracks, since it makes your creeps much stronger than the ranged barracks.

There are some situations where you would rather attack the ranged barracks. The ranged ones have 300 less hp, 5 less armor, but most importantly don’t regenerate health. This means in a slow siege where your team can’t obtain control of the high ground, you can do chip damage and slowly destroy the ranged barracks. The most important consideration, is focusing on the same barracks as your team, especially in cases where you can benefit from teamfight damage enhancers like the Desolator.

Everything I just told you about Raxing left out one important part; Raxing is easiest when your opponents are dead.

To kill the enemy heroes, you need to have to be stronger than them. Strength in Dota can be outlined in four generic ways, some of which I've talked about already: gold advantage which leads to item advantages, Exp advantage which leads to more stats and more skill points (so more damage and utility), tactical advantage like fighting by your barracks where your towers are, and outplaying your opponents.

The possibility to outplay your opponents is what swings games in many different ways and ALWAYS allows you to win fights even if you have less gold and experience. One of your allies might completely screw up his ultimate which makes your team fight weaker than it should have been. Perhaps one of your important heroes might get bursted down at the start of the fight, without even using his spells. Maybe your enemies got a little too lucky with their crits and killed you faster than planned.

There are a lot of ways that your opponents can outplay you, or you can make mistakes allowing your opponents to outplay you, so the safest way to take a barracks, or attempt to take a barracks is to do a Gank and Push.

Gank and Push Strategy

When you do a gank and push, you generally grab an item called a Smoke of Deceit which makes your team invisible to enemy wards and creeps (but nearby enemy heroes and towers will reveal you).  You push your lanes away from your base, smoke your team, jump on whatever hero you see on the map, and all of the sudden you have their death timer in time to force a team fight where it's 5 v 4.

When you have a hero advantage like that there's a really good chance that you also have a gold and experience advantage in that team fight as well, since some of the enemy team's gold is now sitting around waiting to respawn.

A gank and push is a very standard method to give you an advantage when pushing that gives you a better chance to take an enemy barracks even if you're behind in gold and experience.  If you are in any way worried about winning the teamfight, attempt to gank and push.

Another basic version of this is to kill Roshan, which drops an Aegis of the Immortal, which your carry should usually pick up. If you die with Aegis, you are only dead for 5 seconds, upon which you respawn at full HP and mana where you died. When you push with Aegis, you essentially have six heroes instead of five, which in a way also gives you a gold and experience advantage. These are the two safest ways to push! Use one of them when you're preparing to take an enemy barracks to increase your chance of winning.

Five-manning Strategy

Five-manning is the counter to the gank and push. When your team 5 mans, you are moving around the map in a group of five in case a teamfight starts. It counters gank and push because you wait for you opponents to start a 5 vs 1 fight, but in reality it's a 5 vs 5. If your team has better teamfight heroes, or you think you have the gold advantage, then you will usually five-man to protect your heroes from getting ganked, and the enemy team performing a gank and push.

Five-man strategies can be very frustrating to deal with especially if you're playing a ganking hero like Slark, Bounty Hunter or Riki. Those heroes strive on killing heroes that are by themselves, so if your opponents are five-manning it's difficult to kill someone without being punished.

The counter to five-manning is to split farm and split push. To explain this, lets talk about farming efficiency.

The fastest way to farm the map is to have five heroes in different places on the map killing jungle camps. One can be farming each lane, two heroes can farm each jungle, or a variation like that. This isn't very safe because it gives your opponents many choices for ganks, but it gets your team a LOT of gold.

If a team is five manning, they can't farm very rapidly because they are moving in a very small clump which has the farming efficiency of about two heroes.

To counter this, as boring as it is, you need to spread across the map (with good ward vision), and farm random places on the map where the enemy five heroes aren't farming. If you do this without getting killed (due to seeing where their clump is moving because of your wards), you will be gaining more gold and experience than your opponents.

They want to force a fight because they have gold advantage and good teamfight heroes (hence why they five man), and you want to out-farm them by split farming until your team is strong enough to fight them.

Their counter to your split farming is to push with their gold advantage. If they push all of your towers while you split farm, they easily get more gold advantage if they do it fast since towers give a lot of gold advantage. If they push your high ground and take a Barracks, it also doesn't matter if you've been split farming. Raxes are far too important to let fall, so they force you to teamfight, which gives them an advantage.

To counter their push, you either need to endlessly counter-push by spamming ranged skills that kill their creeps, and prevent their push, or you need to split-push, which is often called Rat Dota.

Split Pushing Strategy

Split pushing is best explained by using a vermin or rat analogy. Lets say you are one person in a large room and there are rats around the room that you're trying to kill because they are eating your cheese spread across the floor of the room. When you go to chase one rat away in one corner, that rat escapes into a hole and the other rats in the room are in the mean time eating cheese. You then run to the other side of the room to stop those rats, but the rat that you first chased away has reappeared.

To defeat five man, you have to channel your inner rat, and to do this you have to push all of the lanes that your opponents aren't pushing. For example, there are a couple heroes that are good at split pushing, and they usually have units they can summon to tank damage, and they have high physical or tower damage.



While your opponents five man and attempt to push towers, you are threatening to take a tower by yourself, just one hero. It usually takes a little longer than when five heroes do it, but if their towers are constantly threatened with split push, it becomes very dangerous to push because they are likely to gain no more than your opponents, and while using less hero resources.

Split pushing heroes will often be able to kill a single hero. To prevent an even trade, the enemy will need to teleport either two heroes or a core back to defend, and then the push usually can't continue because they no longer have five heroes to properly teamfight. If they do, the split pusher can teleport back and defend with a numbers advantage. By split pushing and split farming, you are delaying their way to take advantage (pushing due to 5 man) until your team is farmed enough to win a fight.

That may be a bit over your head if you are brand new to Dota, but I figured that some groundwork of what to do in the late game would be useful.

Just remember, the late game of Dota involves people farming items across the map, trying to avoid ganks which lead to pushes, controlling Roshan and his Aegis so that they can't push with that, and sometimes strategies of split push and five-manning.

At lower levels you will mainly see five people farming the entire game until team fights happen and a gank and push becomes easy, but don't be afraid to start thinking about how to counter those kinds of strategies.

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Hero Selection
Now that you've read about general strategy for many pages lets talk about something easier to absorb, like what heroes are good for new players.

All heroes in Dota take a lot of finesse to play them well, but some have very straight forward abilities and play styles that will help a new player play them well.

This first group of heroes are loosely defined as carries. They are strong in the mid and late game due to high damage output from items and skill synergy, but they are somewhat weak in the early game.

CARRY HEROES

           SVEN

           WRAITH KING

           JUGGERNAUT

           SNIPER

           RAZOR

           PHANTOM ASSASSIN

           VIPER

This next group of heroes are pretty easy to play, and most of them are played in a solo role since they become strong once they get their ultimate's at level 6. It's fine to dual lane these too if you have to.

SOLO HEROES

           BLOODSEEKER

           CENTAUR

           AXE

           PUDGE

           TIDEHUNTER

           ZEUS

           SPIRIT BREAKER

This last batch of heroes are the easiest to play support heroes in the game. They have very straight forward abilities that won't take you long to understand when playing them for your first time.

SUPPORT HEROES

           VENGEFUL SPIRIT

           CRYSTAL MAIDEN

           OGRE MAGI

           WITCH DOCTOR

           LICH

           LION

           WARLOCK

There are also a couple heroes in Dota 2 that I think are too complicated for a brand new player to attempt, unless obscurity suits the way that you like to express yourself in video games. Most of these heroes take a LOT of practice to play because of they don't have the typical skill layout.

Invoker, for example, uses a combination of three buttons called orbs to prepare a spell to be cast, so to cast Tornado, you have to first press Q, then W, then W, and then R, which prepares you to use Tornado. He has 8 other spells with button combinations, and it's easy to forget them in battle.

Another example is Meepo, and Chen. These heroes control more than 3 units on average, and each one can move by themselves which is very overwhelming for all players if you don't practice it.

And finally, some of these heroes just require a large amount of game knowledge to play properly. If you don't have that game knowledge yet, the heroes are going to feel underpowered, so I'd recommend steering clear until you feel a little comfortable with the game.

For that reason, I don't recommend starting Dota on any of these heroes, but once you have the basics of the game, poke your head through and see if they sound fun.

AVOID IF YOU SUCK AT DOTA, MICRO, OR PRESSING BUTTONS RAPIDLY

           EARTH SPIRIT

           LONE DRUID

           BROODMOTHER

           MEEPO

           TINKER

           ENCHANTRESS

           CHEN

           ORACLE

           IO

           SHADOW DEMON

           INVOKER

           WINTER WYVERN

           VISAGE

           NAGA SIREN

           TERRORBLADE

           TECHIES

If you want to read about any of these heroes and their skills or stats, go to www.dota2.com/heroes

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Hero Roles
Now that you know what heroes to pick, I'll tell you what their roles are, and how you should play them.

The most basic way to describe the roles that each of the five heroes in the game play in the professional scene is by numbering them from 1 through 5. What this denotes is the farm priority, or what hero gets the most resources on the team. The 1 through 3 positions are referred to as "Cores", or the "core farming roles".

Carry
Mid
Offlane
Jungle/Support
Support
The roles here are a vague fit since all Dota games are different, especially at low levels. The best guideline to follow for a new player is that three heroes on your team should be the ones getting the last hits in the lane, and two heroes are supports.

This usually results in "2-1-2 lanes", or two heroes (one farming and one support) in your offlane, one hero soloing the mid lane, and two heroes in your safe lane (one farming and one support).



Another typical laning strategy is to do a 2-1-1-1 setup, or two in your safe lane (one farming and one support) one mid hero, one offlane hero, and one hero (your 4 position) in the jungle farming.

There are very few heroes in Dota 2 that can jungle, so this setup is a bit rare, but it can happen. Just make sure you have at least one hero in every lane! Once in a while you might even encounter an aggressive trilane which is good at shutting down enemy carries, but I don't recommend that if you're new.



The most typical setup at high levels to have is the safe trilane, or to have three heroes in your safe lane. The ideal distribution of roles is to have the carry farming, one support zoning the offlane hero, and one support pulling continuously to keep the enemy offlaner from getting experience.

Later, the two supports can group together to gank other lanes. This strategy is a bit harder to execute at many skill levels because it's difficult to recognize what you should be doing at all times and adjusting to it correctly. If you perform a safe trilane incorrectly it'll often result in you losing more farm and experience than you would have if you did a 2-1-2 lane, but can profit much more if you execute it correctly.

The main benefits are that a 3-1-1 lane can counter a 2-1-2 lane. If your Carry gets pressured a lot by an aggressive dual lane, do a safe trilane and kill them multiple times with your hero advantage!

To break down playstyles simply for new players, the generic roles are Carries, Supports, Junglers, Offlaners, Roamers and Mids. Lets talk about what each of these heroes usually do in the laning stage, mid game, and late game.

Carries
A carry is a hero that requires a lot of farm and levels to be strong because of the ways their skills synergize with their items, usually enhancing them or allowing you to gain levels and gold more rapidly than other heroes.

Once carries collect the farm and levels, they can very often kill 2-3 enemy heroes by themselves, but in the early game carries are often weaker than supports in fights, and they are certainly weaker than a typical support hero would be if he has little farm. To collect the farm and levels, he usually needs to be protected by all of the other heroes on his team for the first 10 minutes, and generally they need to create distractions on the map and gank enemy heroes so that the carry can farm at maximum efficiency until they are strong enough to participate.

In low level games, you will sometimes see multiple carries in the same lane. THIS IS A MISTAKE. You should generally have a maximum of two carries per team in a game. Like I mentioned before, at lower levels you will see a 2-1-2 laning setup. In these setups, it's fine to put one carry in each of your two-man lanes with a support to protect them.

Focusing on farming efficiently

In the early game, a carry should focus almost entirely on getting every last hit in his lane while controlling the creep equilibrium to ensure it's easy to keep the offlane zoned away from last hits and experience. You should stop last hitting if you see an opportunity to save your support ally from death, or kill your opponent, since kills give you and your support a lot of gold and experience advantage!

After the end of the Laning stage you should sometimes gank if you see a kill opportunity that can be executed rapidly and with a high chance of success, but your general game plan is to continue farming, usually integrating more of the jungle into your farming.

Jungle becomes efficient around 8-10 minutes in, despite the lower gold bounties of the jungle creeps. Once you purchase a Quelling Blade on melee heroes you do more damage to neutrals and you can kill each camp more rapidly, increasing your farm rate. Often ranged carries will purchase something like a Morbid Mask so that the life-steal will sustain their continuous jungle, despite taking some damage.

However your farm patterns aren't just dictated by your ability to collect resources. It also depends on doing it safely since most heroes will be above level 6 at this mark, producing many more threads on your life. That's why jungling is effective, because your opponents are unlikely to know where you are due to jungle wards being less common, but also because you're often jungling camps near your towers which allows your allies to teleport and back you up if you run into trouble nearby.

Using the jungle

To fully maximize your farm if it's safe is to auto attack or push a creep wave then move into the jungle for a camp before the next wave arrives 30 seconds later, increasing your overall gold gain. And by being "hidden" in the jungle for part of that time, sometimes enemy heroes will come to the lane that you're near, allowing you to pop out and gank them for additional gold.

You should also always carry a Teleport Scroll so that if a fight does happen somewhere on the map while you're farming, you can arrive at the fight and help contribute. After all, a won, one-sided teamfight does far more to secure your team an advantage than farming two neutral camps for 250 gold does. Every kill would likely net you 200-300 gold in a teamfight, and just being in the area for each kill would ensure you 50-100 gold for each enemy dead, not to mention a potential multiple levels of experience gain.

Even keeping your allies alive makes a big impact. Turning a two-for-two hero fight into a three-for-one fight swings advantage around, saving some of your support's gold and taking some of theirs. All of these gold advantages create an opportunity for your now living support to snowball that fight's advantage until the game ends.

However, this doesn't mean you should always go to every fight. Learning Dota and becoming a good carry has to do a lot with understanding your hero's limitations at all stages of the game. If 2 of your heroes are already dead before you finish your teleport, it's unlikely it's a good fight to arrive to, so your general principle is continue farming until it's time to show up to a fight, and try to limit the amount of time you're not farming.

Balancing this mix of safely farming, ganking and sometimes teamfighting will set the tone of the rest of the match since few deaths, farm and a handful of kills will allow you to eventually dominate teamfights in ways your opponents can't stop.

Mid
Mid heroes can be very diverse. When you solo a lane, you get much more experience than other lanes because you are the only hero in the lane to receive it. Any dual or tri lane splits their exp equally to whoever is there, so the strength in soloing mid is that you get level 6 very fast. This means that mid heroes who are good at teamfighting or ganking are often picked. To help stay in your lane longer, many mid heroes purchase a Bottle, which is a refillable consumable regen item. It comes with 3 bottle charges, and each bottle charge refils 90 hp and 60 mana. Once it's empty, you can return to your fountain to refill it, or to save time, you can travel to a rune spot to pick up the rune which refills your bottle while storing the rune for later use.



Runes are buffs that spawn every two minutes in the game starting at 2:00. The best runes that can spawn are:

Double Damage ("DD") - Doubles your base damage, a major component of your right-click attacks for 45 seconds while active. Again, this does not affect damage you get from items, only your base; it does not double spell damage, either.

Invisibility - You become invisible until you cast a spell, use an item, for 45 seconds. When you activate it, you fade out after 2 seconds.

Illusion - Spawns two illusions that look like you, take 200%/300% more damage than you (depending on if you are melee/ranged), do 35% of your hero's base damage, and last for 75 seconds.

Haste - Makes your hero run 550 Movement Speed (MS) and become immune to slows for 22 secs. Most heroes run ~300 MS so this is a huge speed boost.

Regeneration ("Regen") - Refills your HP up to 3000 and your mana to 2010. Stops if you become full or you take damage from an enemy player or Roshan. It is not cancelled by jungle or lane creeps.

Arcane - Reduces the mana cost of spells and items by 40% and reduces the cooldown for spells used during the runes effect by 30%. Lasts 50 seconds.

Bounty: After the 2:00 mark, Bounty Runes give you 50 + (5 * minute) experience and 50 + (2 * minute) gold). The first runes of the match (the ones that spawn at 00:00) give you 100 base gold and no experience.

Bounty Runes are special, as they spawn at different points of the map than the others. You can find them below: there are two on each side of the river, in the top and bottom jungle for each team.



The reason runes are so important for mid heroes is because the refilled bottle allows you to stay in lane longer while picking up rune benefits. Since the distance to a rune is MUCH closer than going back to base, you can increase your efficiency by grabbing runes every two even minutes. It is important to note that Bounty Runes only give you 2/3 of the available Bottle charges.

You don't want to walk to grab runes when your wave is dying because you'll miss the gold and experience, so it's best to auto attack or use spells to kill the wave about 10 seconds before the rune spawns. Walk to the rune spot to grab it then head back to the mid lane before the next creep wave meets.

Using runes effectively

If you get a strong rune like Double Damage, Haste, or Invisibility, it's sometimes smart to gank a lane with these runes, since it's easier to execute the gank being fast, invisible, or having double the damage with your right-click.

Generally the mid hero is more expected to execute ganks or react to ganks on the map. If one of your lanes isn't doing so well, showing up bottom for a moment and killing the enemies will give your carry more gold, experience, and space to farm.

However, in all other moments not grabbing runes, or ganking, you should be getting as many last hits as possible, while denying the enemy mid as much as possible. By doing this you ensure your hero can continue to scale in the game with items and even create the possibility that you carry the game through farm or good teamfight performance.

Blocking a Creep Wave

The last mid tip I'll give is that you should block your first creep wave as well as you can to give you a better position in the mid lane. Blocking your creeps means to impede their full movement by standing in front of them. This is a topic similar to creep equilibrium because one of the benefits is that your creep wave will be closer to your tower, making it harder for you to get ganked.

The main benefit, however, is that your opponent will be on the lower ground, which means if he attacks up to last hit and deny, he'll have to deal with the 25% miss chance that happens with auto attacks when you attack from the low ground to the high ground. This mostly comes into play in the mid lane, so do your best to keep the creep wave close to your tower until it's time to nuke the creep wave and go secure the rune.

Offlaners
Having a solo offlane is going to be rare with a group of new players, but if you find yourself able to solo the offlane against a dual or trilane, your strategy should be to sap experience. Gold is great to get as well, but it forces you to be in a dangerous position for most offlane heroes, and often you gain advantage from getting a fast level 6 then using that to gank or teamfight.

If the enemy supports are playing correctly, they will approach and attack you to keep you out of experience range, but you have a few tricks you can employ.

Normally you should have more survivability than them. More base hp, more base armor, or an item like Stout Shield to damage block some of the harass. You should also have more regen than them. If they start hitting you, hit them back. If you can do more damage than they do to you, then it will cost him more regen to heal, which will eventually prevent him from zoning you, or maybe even allow you a kill. Always check how much regen enemy supports have since you can abuse this in lanes to ensure he can't zone you any more.

Getting access to creeps

Try to mess up the creep equilibrium! The easiest way to do this is to block only your melee creeps and allow the ranged to go first. It does the most damage by far, so if it dies first their creep wave will push towards your tower where you can safely get experience. Another way to mess up the creep equilibrium is to push yourself with auto attacks or spells. If your wave pushes, it will eventually reach the enemy tower, which will blast away and upset the equilibrium in the opposite direction, eventually giving you experience.

Another trick you can use while trading is to try to get your opponent to throw an auto attack at you that you can drag into your oncoming creep wave. When that happens, your creeps will aggro to them and they will have to retreat back towards their wave and carry, giving you time to chase and collect experience. If they don't retreat in this way, some of your creeps would help you fight them, winning you the regen war, and most importantly not make it to the wave to fight, messing up creep equilibrium.

Pulling

The easiest way to fix or adjust equilibrium is pulls, both for the supports and offlaner.

It's often better for a offlane to prevent pulling by blocking the small pull camp with an Observer or Sentry Ward as it will limit the enemy support's gold gain and ability to control equilibrium advantages, but with the availability of two pull camps and Sentry Wards to deward your block, you should learn how do deal with pulls and pull yourself.

Because a pull often results in the death of lane creeps to Neutrals, the other team's lane often pushes forward since there is one less wave to fight. It also leads to less experience and gold gain for your opponents, so preventing pulls or ensuring your opponent doesn't pull against you is important.

Disrupting enemy pulls

As an offlaner, you can disrupt the pulls in different ways. You should know your opponents are pulling if an expected creep wave never arrives or if a support disappears for a while. If it's safe for you to move into that position, say if the carry is busy last hitting under tower, then you should contest every pull. If the support pulls into a small camp and plans to pull through by connecting the large camp nearby, you can grab aggro from the large camp to prevent the connect. If you prevent the creeps from connecting to a different camp, it'll likely create a stacked wave of eight creeps with the next spawn, easily messing up creep equilibrium and giving you free experience under your tower.

If they stack their small camp before pulling it's best to get as many last hits as you can and ideally clear the camp with AOE spells or nukes. You can also pull the neutral camp away at the time the support would normally want to begin the pull. With this pull method the support won't get themselves much gold and experience, often only denying the offlaner gold and experience, but every bit can affect the game.

Another solution to a support who pulls is to pull yourself. On both Radiant and Dire sides both teams can pull the Large camp towards the lane to aggro your creep wave to it. This only works if the enemy wave position isn't also there, as they'll often aggro to lane creeps fighting over neutrals, but if you're stacking the large camp by pulling at X:53 on even-minutes (for example, 00:53, 2:53, 4:53) while doing this, a stacked large camp will easily kill an entire creep wave, allowing their next wave to approach your tower and you standing under it.

Heading to the jungle and dealing with supports

If you don't like dealing with or learning any of this you can buy an Iron Talon if you're a melee hero, and hit up the jungle to ensure you get some levels and farm. But keep in mind what kinds of advantage differences it'll give you.

Yes, you'll generally ensure you hit a certain level at the right time, but against a good support duo, they'll likely pressure the map effectively while you're off sitting in the jungle farming at a moderate pace. If they can pull effectively while ganking your mid and sometimes even invading your jungle to pressure you while farming, jungling while ignoring your lane can become a huge detriment to your team.

If you instead went to lane, you can force two enemy heroes to keep you zoned or if things go well allow you to outplay three heroes and severely limit their early game effectiveness, almost guaranteeing your team a win.

Or perhaps a mix of both is better. Rather than try to fight that support at Level 1 for regen item trades, head to the jungle with Iron Talon, guarantee you get Level 2 or 3, then head to the offlane better equipped to deal with those pesky zoning supports.

Finding the balance

Though an Offlaner doesn't often focus as much on gold compared to other roles, hitting an effective balance between your gains and limiting your opponents can have huge impacts on the game through ganks and teamfights.

The laning stage of Offlaners is the one consistent aspect of the role. Like most heroes, the strengths, weaknesses, and goals of the hero changes dramatically between each of them.

Some offlaners like Tidehunter or Clockwerk try to prioritize a fast level 6 so they can get active in a big way on the map. Other offlaners like Batrider or Centaur Warrunner might pressure the lane and try to get kills, but are often farming to finish their Blink Dagger at a good timing so they can better utilize their skills in the way they are strong.

Understanding those intricacies becomes more about watching and learning from hero guides, but the laning principles are often the same, though affected by the hero's strengths.

In the mid-late game most offlane heroes will continue farming and building items as needed, but it's important to farm in a place that allows you to start fights with nearby heroes, or backup allies that might get engaged on.

Supports
Playing support is one of the most complicated roles in Dota because it requires a lot of self sacrifice, good decision-making, prediction, and time management.

The supports are the players that control the early game the best because they move around the map to set up ganks, they help protect the carries from offlane heroes, they pull and push lanes and they help the mid players get runes. They do all of this without getting much in terms of experience and gold, and spend a chunk of their money on items that help protect their teammates, and help them perform better.

The first sacrifice you make is that every team needs to purchase an Animal Courier at the start of the game for 100 gold, and every team should purchase their first two Observer Wards, which when placed, become invisible, and give vision to your team in a large area. It's the supports job to purchase these items at the start of the game. At the very least, purchase the Animal Courier!

In the early game, a support splits their time between trying to zone offlane heroes out of experience range, setting up ganks around the map, controlling runes to help their mid player Bottle them, and most importantly, pulling.

I already talked about the importance of pulling, and it's the supports job to pull creep camps. This is because the biggest gold/experience gain is in the lane, and you want your carry to have that while you get scraps from the jungle.

Let's go over the proper times to pull.

The worst time to pull is when your enemy offlane is pressuring your carry. Your role as a support in the first 4 minutes of the game is to let your carry get uncontested last hits while keeping the offlaner out of experience range of your dying creeps.

This helps your carry get ahead while keeping the offlaner behind and limiting his impact later in the game.  It's okay to sacrifice your time, gold and experience gain to hurt their time, gold, and experience gain, so don't be afraid to spend a few minutes chasing them from experience range!

Example of Zoning the Offlane as a Support

As you may have noticed in the video, I made sure that I wasn't standing extremely close to the enemy creep wave while I harassed my opponent. That's because if I get within 500 range of them while right clicking my opponent, the creeps will attack me instead, which is also called drawing aggro.

Therefore, if you do zone the offlane hero, make sure that you put space between the creeps and your hero when you fight them, and then run away to the side when the next new wave comes in. If you draw aggro, the creeps will do damage to you that they don't do to your creep wave, and it messes up the creep equilibrium which results in their offlane hero getting more experience than they should.

500 Range, or the Aggro Range of Creeps



The best time to pull is when your creep wave is pushed so close to the offlane tower that it's impossible to keep them out of range of experience. To pull back the wave, you pull the creep wave (and, importantly, "pull through" by connecting it to another camp) to deny your creep wave while farming the jungle for gold and experience, and then the creep equilibrium will be much closer to your tower.

If you think it's impossible to zone the offlane hero regardless of where the creep wave is, it's great to simply pull to deny your opponents of experience while getting yourself some gold/experience. Make sure that your carry won't get solo killed while you are off in the jungle, and that you don't get killed while pulling if their offlane heroes rotate over!

Vision items: Observer and Sentry Wards

Throughout the entire game, supports should be buying and placing Observer Wards at important locations around the map. The locations change depending on many factors, but the general idea you should have is to keep wards on the perimeter of your towers and keep them in areas of the map where you expect your opponents to pass through.

If you see your enemy hero movements, you can better predict what they are doing, and take action to counter that.

For example, if you see two heroes run through the river towards your carry farming in the safe lane, you can teleport to that lane to anticipate the gank. If you come from the fog and initiate on the enemy heroes as they go on your carry, you can turn their 3 vs 1 gank into a 3 vs 2 gank, which can sometimes turn things around resulting in your kill, or AT LEAST keep your carry alive.

The best time to place Observer Wards is when there is downtime (no ganks, or pushes), immediately after you win teamfights, or while you are preparing to gank. Vision is extremely valuable in Dota 2 because it provides information, so make sure that you ensure that wards continue to be placed on the map.

Try to place wards in places where you expect their function on the map to do what you need it to do, such as giving you vision for ganks, or behind towers that you want to push, which should help you initiate. If you are behind, you can protect the common entrances to your jungle that your carry will be farming in, or protecting Roshan so that you can see when the enemy starts it, and hopefully interrupt.

You should be thinking about these things when you are placing your wards once you get a better grasp of Dota and predicting how the game will develop.

The metagame surrounding warding is often changing as well, at least at higher levels. If you stick to the same predictable spots, which are often the ones that do the most, your opponents will be able to predict your wards and counter them, so try to be slightly unpredictable when you place Observer Wards.

The other "'vision' type item that you will often purchase as a support is truesight, or invisibility detection. You can use Sentry Wards to place on the ground and give your team vision against invisible things like enemy wards, or invisible heroes. Use this to deward your opponents Observer Wards to give you a vision advantage on the map, or use it to gank invisible heroes, or to protect against ganking invisible heroes.

More vision: Dust and Smokes

The other detection item you can purchase is a Dust of Appearance, which you activate when you are close to enemy heroes. It applies a buff to enemies that keeps them visible to opponents for 12 seconds. As a support, you should be carrying detection most of the game if the enemy team has invisible heroes. If you don't purchase detection, it becomes VERY easy for any player to get kills and stay alive by abusing invisibility, so if you are having trouble playing against invisible heroes, start buying Sentry Wards or Dust to secure kills against those heroes.

The last support item that you should be purchasing is a Smoke of Deceit. When you use a Smoke, it makes you and nearby allies invisible to enemy wards and enemy creeps. If you get close to an enemy hero or tower, you become visible again, so Smokes are best used to move across the map stealthily through wards for ganks, or to initiate teamfights since your opponents won't see you coming. These have a very long restock time and cost 50 gold, so make sure that you get value out of them when you use them!

Contribute without feeding

In the late game, supports operate with few items, yet have to continue operating under the mantra, "Contribute Without Feeding". To Contribute Without Feeding, you need to be able to cast your spells, such as nuking or disabling enemy heroes, or healing and saving your allies without being killed by your opponents. Most of your teamfight will be casting your spells and then trying to stay alive until your spells are off cooldown again so that you get double the spell impact.

There are some occasions where dying in exchange for your carries and higher farm priority heroes is important, but when you're new to the game you should focus on not feeding your life away despite your low farm.

The best way to prevent your feeding is through the purchase of the correct items. Knowing which items to buy comes down to your hero and its weaknesses, but more importantly what opponents you're facing.

The most common way to do that is by spending most of your leftover support money on items that give a lot of value for the gold. Magic Wand is a cheap item that generates charges for healing and giving burst mana that you'll want on almost every support, and items like Tranquil Boots, Infused Raindrop for their early tankyness (especially against magic damage heroes) and mana gain can also be game changers for the early to mid game transition to bigger survivability items.

Staying alive with movement, immunity and invisibility

One of the best items for reducing your feeding is Force Staff, which allow you to push yourself or an ally away from danger (or into danger if you want to start a fight). Force Staff is best used against enemies who have weak disables or chase since it allows you to always stay at a farther distance from them, often trading cooldowns between their weak disable skill and your Force Staff.

Ghost Scepter is another great item for supports to purchase to stay alive for the first few seconds of a fight. It makes you Ethereal for 4 seconds, preventing any physical attacks, but amplifying magic damage taken; this counters heroes who have strong right click and gap closing skills but often have to do hit and runs and escape immediately after. Much like Force Staff, Ghost Scepter buys you the 4 seconds for your teammates to cover you, and prevent that hero from snowballing from your repeated deaths in the early-to-mid game.

One of the best items for surviving on supports lately is the Glimmer Cape. When used on yourself or an ally, it makes the target invisible after a 0.6 second delay for up to 5 seconds if they don't cast spells or attack, also granting them 45% magic resistance while invisible. Against heroes that have more predictable magic nukes, or heroes with similar strengths as the Ghost Scepter case, Glimmer can help you or your allies avoid feeding, at least until your opponents finally wise up and buy detection.

Check your item build on whatever heroes you're playing, but consider picking up one of these items to cover your hero weaknesses and prevent your opponents from snowballing from your deaths.

The best protection against feeding

The best protection against feeding, however, is your positioning. Positioning is the most important resource after gold/exp because it changes so many small factors.

For example, if a super fed carry is out of position far away from their team, it means your team can fight him 5 vs 1 for 5 seconds until his allies join the fight, which means you should be able to do a massive amount of damage to the enemy carry, or even kill him before his team can react.

If you as a squishy support are in a safe position behind your team, then an enemy carry has to put himself in a dangerous position (in the middle of your team) to attempt to kill you. It's for this reason that most supports, especially ones with defensive skill sets, want to stay behind their cores.

However, if your positioning is TOO safe, then you will be too far away to defend your allies when the enemy initiates. Finding the perfect balance between this means you should be very often adjusting your positioning.

That's why Force Staff is such a strong item. It allows you to rapidly move your hero, either to a safer position if you make a mistake, or to a more aggressive one if you see an opportunity. A similar item is the Blink Dagger, which allows you to do a short range teleport, but its weakness is you can't use it if you take player based damage, so it's often better as an offensive item.

The last positioning aspect to keep in mind is that you don't group too closely. There are many AOE (area of effect) disables in the game, and if your team becomes too clumped, it allows your opponents to multiply the effectiveness of their aoe nukes and disables by 5, which if executed properly gives them a massive advantage in the fight.

Clumping can be done more or less depending on the heroes that your opponents are using, so familiarity with all heroes in Dota 2 will help you know what is safe positioning.

Junglers
Jungle heroes are usually a hybrid between Support and a core role (meaning a farming role), or they are an Offlaner afraid to be in their lane.

It really depends which Jungle hero you are playing, but most Jungle heroes play more of a support role in that they help with purchasing Observer Wards, Sentry Wards, and upgrading and purchasing couriers.

The reason that Jungling can be effective is that it gives you four places to get farm on the map, instead of just the three lanes.

Most junglers spend about 70% of their time farming, 20% of their time ganking, and 10% of their time helping to secure runes for their mid player. If your support and carry lane are having trouble, and ESPECIALLY if they are against a dual lane, it's extremely important that you rotate from the jungle and attempt to kill the dual lane once in a while.

DO NOT just sit in jungle and endlessly attack creeps for 10 minutes. If you do this, you are ensuring your marginal gold gain, while hurting your carry and support's gold gain if they have a weak matchup or are weaker players.

If you don't help impact the tempo of the game by moving around the map and occasionally ganking, your opponents will be playing 5 vs 4 and it'll often be to your team's detriment. It helps if you pick jungling heroes that have skill sets that allow them to contribute to the game before they hit Level 6, or your lanes are strong enough to handle your delayed impact. If it does require you to hit Level 6, immediately gank after hitting Level 6, and use your ultimate to get a kill and create map pressure.

One strategy that you should do as a jungling hero that also applies to supports is stacking the jungle. I explained stacking jungle camps in an earlier part of the guide in regards to pulling, but you can stack all of the jungle camps by attacking or aggroing the camp at the :53 second mark of every even minute (00:53, 2:53, 4:53, etc), and running away to allow a camp to respawn on the even minute (1:00, 3:00, 5:00, etc).

Even if your hero is too weak to clear the stacked camps, it will help your team to farm more efficiently later, which helps them carry harder. If you are playing a support or jungle hero and it's approaching :53 seconds, make sure that you stack a nearby camp to increase your rate of farm or help your allies!

Jungling is pretty easily countered by a strong roaming hero (ideally an invisible one like Riki or Bounty Hunter) because any experience gained will be split two ways, further reducing the jungler's impact. They can even attempt to steal the last hits on the neutral, giving the experience thief all of the gold and half of the experience.

If you are one of the supports you can transition your build depending on how your game has gone, but it's very helpful to purchase wards or detection some times if your other support is having trouble keeping up.

Roamers
Roaming is a version of supporting where you play by running around the map pressuring lanes and attempting ganks, often with no way to jungle in down time. It takes a higher level of skill to understand maximizing your value while getting little experience because if you roam poorly you'll often be underleveled and with less benefit than if you'd just played support in the safe lane pulling for gold and levels.

However, when done well, roaming can drastically affect multiple lanes and match ups.

Many roamers, especially melee ones, will purchase an Orb of Venom which gives a 12% slow and small damage on enemies they hit, giving them mobility advantage over whoever they attack.

You could spend one minute in the mid lane spamming your skill on the enemy mid, attacking them with Orb of Venom and effectively zoning them from last hitting. You can then sit in the enemy jungle and try to kill their courier as it crosses between the Tier 2 andTtier 1 towers to deliver or return an item. If you do kill an enemy courier, it gives +150 gold to every person on your team and prevents them from ferrying items for two minutes.

You could try to find an enemy jungling and try to steal their last hits before they can finish the creep and split all experience with them while they do the hard work. Or maybe if you're lucky you'll find them when they have less than 200 hp. They wouldn't die to the last two creeps, but your Level 1 spell and 4 right clicks with Orb of Venom slow would, and you get a free kill and set them back.

Creating chaos

Roamers are essentially creating chaos, and sometimes even if you're bad at roaming, chaos can win you games. That's because it presents a brand new situation that players might not be used to. Would you react perfectly to a carry running around at the start of the game with a Orb of Venom? Likely not, and that chaos sometimes creates mistakes that wouldn't have happened because a player got pushed out of their comfort zone, you find a way to punish that, and all of the sudden your roaming, normally carry hero, gets four kills in the first four minutes and you transition into an actual carry with real items and levels.

I don't recommend roaming on a carry unless you know how to abuse the hero's strengths, but chaos is extremely powerful in Dota. Your opponents will have a harder time anticipating your ganks if you don't have a set game plan! If you do gank, they may teleport two heroes to defend, so you can walk away instead of committing to the gank, and now the offlane is against a single carry hero instead of a trilane, and each of their supports wasted 50 gold and are sitting mid lane for no reason.

If you do get behind, or cause a lot of economical damage to the game but have few levels, the best way to catch up is to participate in a teamfight or gank. The key is staying alive for the deaths. If enemies die and you're standing in experience range, you'll get awarded more experience for each of their levels, and way more gold if they are beating you in farm.

Coordinated ganks, even with Smoke and lots of heroes can allow you to fight your way back into a gold advantage and the levels that often accompany it.

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Mechanics
Now that you know the general guidelines about how to play Dota effectively, lets fill in the blanks about mechanics, items, and some nuances in those.

Stats
There are three basic stat types in Dota 2: Strength (STR), Agility (AGI), and Intelligence (INT). Every hero has a primary stat type that benefit them more than the others. The heroes on the character select screen are grouped by what their primary stat is.


Your hero gains more of these stats by leveling up, or by purchasing items that give them stats.

1 point of Strength (STR) gives you:

+20 health points
+Increase your health regen by 0.03/sec
+1 Damage if you are a Strength Hero
1 point of Agility (AGI) gives you:

+1 Attack Speed
+1/7th's armor
+1 Damage if you are an Agility Hero
1 point of Intelligence (INT) gives you:

+12 Mana
+0.04 Mana/sec
+1 Damage if you are an Intelligence Hero
+0.0625% spell damage (every 16 points of Int increase spell damage by 1%)
A couple things about stats to note:

Most heroes gain their primary stat faster than their other stats, but not always.
Strength heroes are often the hardest to kill due to gaining more Strength on average, but keep an eye on armor levels, since some heroes have more base armor and agility gain than others.
Agility heroes often do the most DPS (damage per second) with their right clicks. This is because 1 point of Agility gives them 1 damage while also increasing their attack speed. Attacking faster while hitting harder makes their points more valuable for damage, and means that Agility heroes are often able to be carries. There are carries in all stat types due to their skills, but many carries are Agility heroes.
Intelligence heroes are often the easiest to kill because of low HP and armor, but have high damage through spells since their mana pool is larger. Most Intelligence heroes are supports, but not all.

Damage Types
There are three damage types in Dota 2.

Physical Damage

Physical Damage is the most common type of damage because every hero has a right-click attack that does physical damage, in addition to a few spells that do it as well

Physical damage can be reduced a few different ways in Dota 2, and the most common way is armor. The way armor effectiveness is calculated is a bit complicated but you can check your hero's physical resistance by hovering your mouse over their stat area.



In this example, the Morphling has 48% damage resistance because of his 15.6 armor, 13.6 of it from base armor and agility, and 2 from his Ring of Aquilla aura. If you purchase a Platemail, +10 to armor, the Morphling's Physical Damage Resistance becomes 60.56%, but exactly how much more is that? You can do a little more math, but it's easier to visualize it in another way.

Assuming your hero takes only physical damage from full life until death, 1 extra point of armor will provide you ~6% more health points. This extrapolates out at the same rate for each point of armor. When buying a Platemail, your health goes ~60% farther against physical damage, if you only take physical damage from full to death.

So if you have 1000 hp and 0 armor and purchase a Platemail, you have 1600 Effective HP against physical. If you purchase an additional Platemail then you have 2200 Effective HP against only physical. If any of the damage you take is the other 2 kinds, then your Effective HP isn't as high.

Remember that you can also increase armor by purchasing an Agility item, but the main reason to buy them is to increase damage and attack speed on an Agility Hero, since it takes 7 Agility to give 1 armor.

The second way to reduce physical damage is damage block. Damage block can be obtained a few different ways such as a Stout Shield, Vanguard, or Crimson Guard, and the way that it works is it shaves the amount of damage your opponents do from the top before armor reduction.

That means that if your opponent tries to do 50 damage to you and your stout shield blocks 16 damage, then the 34 damage that goes past the shield gets reduced by your armor and then dealt to you. If we take this principle into the late game, such as reducing 100 by 16, it means that damage block blocks a larger percentage of damage in the early game compared to the late game. It's a great early game choice against physical, but not as good late game.

The third way to reduce physical damage is to purchase a Ghost Scepter, which makes you Ethereal for 4 seconds. The Ethereal effect makes you incapable of being attacked by enemy heroes, providing you a sort of physical immunity.

There are even more ways to reduce physical damage. You can buy an evasion item so your opponents miss some of their attacks on you. You can buy a Glimmer Cape to go invisible when they try to attack you. You can use attack speed-reducing spells or items so they can't attack you as rapidly. You could even purchase a Heaven's Halberd to disarm them to prevent them from attacking, or draft a lineup with lots of stuns so they never get a chance to attempt an attack in the first place.

A blend of all of these options and a better knowledge of how the mechanics work can give you an edge over your opponents and keep you alive in late game fights.

If you're a carry and want to INCREASE the physical damage that you're doing, then you have lots of item options.

Purchase a damage item such as a Broadsword or a stat item that matches your hero type (like Gauntlet for a strength hero).
Increase your attack speed with an item like Gloves of Haste, or an Agility Item to increase your attack speed so you attack more often in a short period.
Reduce your opponents armor with an item like Medallion of Courage.
Do a hybrid of these things like Purchasing a Desolator to give you increased damage AND lower their armor, or purchase an Assault Cuirass to lower their armor AND increase your attack speed.
Upgrade your Broadsword to an item like Daedalus that gives you a chance to critical strike in addition to the additional damage it provides.
Use a hero skill like Slardar's Amplify Damage to reduce your opponents armor.
Use a hero skill like Shadow Demon's Soul Catcher to amplify all damage an enemy hero takes, including physical.
Magic Damage

The second damage type in Dota 2 is Magic damage. Magic damage is also common because most spells in the game do it.

To reduce magic damage, you need Magic Resistance.

Almost all heroes have a built in Magic Resistance of 25%, which means that a 100 magic damage spell will do 75 damage after being reduced. Most creeps have a magic resistance of 0%, while catapults have 80% resistance. However, a few Neutral creeps in the jungle provide a magic resistance aura to the creeps in an area nearby, so if you want to use spells to farm jungle camps that you kill those ones first.

To use this new mechanics to our advantage, you can pause the game and pull out your calculator to figure out how much it takes to kill opponents. If your Finger of Death does 600 damage at level 1, and your target has 25% magic resistance, that means it does 450 damage after reduction, so you can check to ensure your opponent's health is below 450 before you use Finger of Death on him. Nice! You got a kill and your opponents think you're an asshole for pausing now!

To reduce magic damage done to you, you can purchase items that increase your magic resistance, such as a Cloak, or a Hood of Defiance.

These two items have a magic block active ability which will block up to 325 magic damage for a Hood of Defiance and 400 magic damage for you and your team. Once the barriers are broken, both items offer you increased magic resistance, taking less each time you get hit with a spell.

The most common way for a core hero to reduce magic damage during a teamfight is by purchasing a Black King Bar (BKB) which grants you Spell Immunity. Spell Immunity prevents most spells in the game from affecting you either in disable or damage so if you're against heroes with lots of spells that also disable, Black King Bar is often a better choice over Pipe of Insight, especially if you're a carry.  However, some heroes have abilities, often their ultimate skills, that are so powerful that some of their effects go through Black King Bar's spell immunity, but they are quite rare.

To deal with those, it might be better to purchase a Linken's Sphere which blocks certain spells directed towards you every 13 seconds, a Lotus Orb to reflect spells back to your opponent after you're disabled, or have an ally buy a glimmer cape to protect you from follow up damage after a strong ultimate is used on you.

Increasing the magic damage that you do is a bit trickier than it is for Physical damage because there are very few ways to increase the initial damage number once the skill has maximum points in it. There are some hero abilities and a few items that can increase your magic damage, but for the most part skills that do magic damage do NOT scale into the late game once you have maximum skill points in them. Even collecting lots of Intelligence stats do little to increase the Spell damage done, as most Intelligence items give you little more than 25 INT, ~1.56% spell damage increase.

You can also buy an Aether Lens, which increases your cast range by 200 and spell damage by 5%, but that's still a  very marginal for 2300 gold.

For this reason, most heroes that rely on casting spells for damage do not turn into carries in the late game.

The best ways to increase the magic damage you do is:

When possible purchase an Aghanims Scepter (Aghs) that increases your damage (not all heroes can purchase Aghs, and many times it just affects utility of your ult, not the damage). To know if your hero has an ultimate that is affected by Aghs, or what the upgrade does, hover the mouse over the ultimate to check.
Purchase a Veil of Discord or Ethereal Blade to reduce your opponent's magic resistance temporarily while using your spells.
Use a hero ability that lowers your opponent's magic resistance, such as Skywrath's Ancient Seal or Pugna's Decrepify.
Purchase a Refresher Orb to refresh the cooldown of your skills so that you can use a strong spell two times in one teamfight.
Purchase an item that does magic damage when used like Dagon and use that with your abilities.
Purchase Octarine Core to reduce the cooldown of your spells, subsequently increasing your spell and damage output during a fight.
Pure

The last damage type is Pure damage. Pure damage is neither reduced by Armor or Magic resistance, so it's difficult to decrease or increase. It's the rarest of the damage types and is very effective because it does damage regardless of high armor or magic resistance.

Pure damage does get increased by your spell damage increasing, such as through Aether Lens and increasing your Int, but it's not much worth mentioning unless those items also fit your build.

The best way to block pure damage is usually by using a Black King Bar, since most spells and attacks that have pure damage components require that your opponents aren't magic immune for them to be casted. There are a handful of pure damage spells and abilities that do work and damage through magic immunity and they are Doom, Sonic Wave, Rupture, Midnight Pulse, Black Hole, Counter Helix, Meat Hook, Sun Strike, Impetus and Laguna Blade (only after being upgraded by Aghanim's Scepter).

Because Armor and Magic Resistance don't block pure damage, one of the only ways to defend against it is by purchasing items that give you more Health Points.

Some of those pure damage sources are based on an auto attack landing, so having Evasion against auto attacks can cause those to miss, saving you from the pure damage. You can also do the usual Glimmer Cape/Force Staff/Blink Dagger to dodge the projectile in some cases, or — my favorite method — kill them before they cast it.

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How to Reduce Damage Done to Your Hero
I just explained how to reduce damage to all 3 sources, but in virtually every engagement in Dota you will take a mix of damage, so it's very important that you spend your gold on efficient items. If you are more efficient than your opponents, you will have an advantage that can easily lead to a kill or not dying. That small edge in a teamfight or gank will change the game drastically.

Lets use an example, and lets try not to use too much math, since it's a bit confusing here. JUST KIDDING WE HAVE TO MATH TO GET REFINED DOTA SKILLS.



Here is the damage calculation for Magic Resistance:

Actual damage = magical damage × (1 + magic amplification) × (1 + second source of magic amplification ) × (1 − natural resistance) × (1 − magic resistance of item) × (1 − magic resistance of first ability) × (1 − magic resistance of second ability)
If we simplify this to ignore magic resistance reduction and 2 sources of magic resistance(which is rare anyways), we have something easy:

Actual damage = magical damage × (1 − natural resistance) × (1 − magic resistance of item)
We're simply multiplying the damage of the nuke by the base resistance of the hero, and then again if they have a hood or other form of magic resistance.

So lets say we have a 1000 damage nuke. Natural Resistance is 25% for most heroes, and the magic resistance of a hood is 30%.

Actual Damage = 1000 x (1 - .25) x (1 - .3)
Actual Damage = 1000 x .75 x .7
Actual Damage = 525
This shows that a hood reduces the damage your opponents do to you by a further 30% in magic, since a 1000 damage nuke would normally do 750 damage (1000 x .75). In this case it's a further 225 damage, which works out to an extra 225 hp for every 1000 hp you have.

Now that we know exactly how much survivability all of our purchases can give us, we can make smarter item decisions about survivability.

For example:

If we have 3000 hp in the late game and we're taking 2000 points magic damage, is it better to spend 1100 gold on a vitality booster, which increases our hp by 250 and protects against magic AND physical, or is it better to purchase a cloak for 550 gold, which gives you 15% magic resistance?

If we run the calculation again, our equation will be:

Actual Damage = 2000 x (1 - .25) x (1 - .15)
Actual Damage = 2000 x (.75) x (.85)
Actual Damage = 1275
Since a normal 25% resistance leaves us with 1500 hp (2000 x .75), that means that a cloak is giving us an Estimated Health Points (EHP) increase of 225 hp!

That means that a Vitality booster actually gives us more hp, but it costs 2 times as much, so you can just purchase a cloak for half the money and get almost entirely the same value.

Keep in mind that all of these damage calculations are entirely reliant on the type of damage being done to you. In the example above, if we take 1000 points physical and 1000 points magic, then the cloak ends up only blocking half of the damage that it did in the calculation, and the cost efficiency between vitality booster and cloak gives an advantage to the booster instead.

The important thing to remember is that for your magic resistance and your armor to mean a lot, you have to have a high hp pool in the first place. For this reason, you should almost always focus on purchasing items that increase your HP in the early game, and when in the late game, purchasing magic resistance and armor items, depending on the heroes you are playing against.

It is extremely rare that any hero will purchase the same items every game. You will almost always have slight variation because of the heroes on your team, but most importantly, because of the heroes that you are playing against. They all have small strength and weakness differences but the main thing you should be worried about is their strengths. Do they have more physical damage that might require you to purchase armor hybrid damage items like Armlet, or Assault Cuirass? Do they have a lot of magic nukes and stuns that will require you purchase a Black King Bar so that you can fight them unimpeded in the teamfight? This are the questions that you should be asking yourself every Dota game that you play, and making the correct item choices will give you an edge over your opponents.

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How to do Max Damage to Their Heroes
The best way to do damage to your opponents is for them to be away from their computer while you are attacking them.

Of course, that isn't very honorable, so the next best thing is to chain stun them for so long that they may as well be getting their mail instead of watching their hero die.

Chain Stunning
Disabling your opponent for a long amount of time through the careful chaining of crowd control (or "chain stunning") is one of the most important things to learn when you first play Dota.

A really strong laning setup is one where all of the heroes in your lane can contribute to killing the enemy heroes either through a slow or a stun. For this example, lets keep it simple by using stuns.

Lets say you have a Sven and a Lina as your dual lane. Sven has Storm Hammer which provides a 2 second stun, and Lina has a 1.6 second stun at level 1. Both of these stuns do damage, and if we add the two numbers together, we have a total of 3.6 seconds of stun.

When you are attempting to kill a hero, especially in the early game, Sven will stun for 2 seconds, then as that 2 seconds is ending, the Lina will then stun the enemy to get the maximum amount of disable. This also happens as both of your heroes are attacking the entire time.

It's important that you communicate with your ally who will be stunning first, or there is a chance that you will accidentally stack your stuns as you both disable at the same time.

If you overlap your stuns, that stun duration will be wasted, and that might the difference of attacking one less time during your kill attempt, which might result in that hero living. It's very important that you do not stack your stuns.

In some situations, it's also important that there is never a point when your opponent isn't stunned. Heroes like Anti-Mage can use Blink to do a short range teleport out of combat, but ONLY when they aren't stunned. Against mobile heroes like Anti-Mage, it's extra important that you chain stun them continuously.

Attack Moving and Animation Canceling
The second component of doing maximum damage in a short duration is attack moving. Virtually half of all Dota players ignore this principle, but it's extremely important. To explain how to attack move, it's first to explain why it's possible.

Almost all heroes in the game have built in animations for their attacks and for their spells. An animation is the amount of time that it takes your character to cast a spell, or throw an attack. For spells, this is referred to as a "cast point."

Lets say that it takes Crystal Maiden 0.7 seconds to wind her staff up, swing her staff toward her opponent, and then follow through with the swing to perform an attack.

The important parts are how much time it takes to wind up her staff, and the time that her projectile releases from her staff. We don't care at all about the follow through because we can cancel that part of the animation and do other important things like moving or casting a spell.

So if it takes Crystal Maiden 0.7 seconds to throw an entire attack, but we can cancel her animation AFTER we threw the attack at 0.5 seconds, then we have an entire 0.2 seconds earlier that we can move.

To cancel an attack, you just need to give your hero an overriding command like a new move command, a new attack command on a different target, casting a spell, or pressing the "S" key to tell your hero to Stop (assuming your hotkey for Stop is on "S").

In combination with canceling your attack, most heroes don't attack at the same rate as their animation. Most heroes in the early game can only attack about once every 1.3 seconds. That means even if you cancel your attack at 0.5 seconds, you actually have 0.8 seconds to chase after your opponent before you can begin to throw another attack.

To properly attack move in the early game as you are chasing someone, you should spend 0.5 second to throw an attack, then cancel your animation by moving in your opponent's escape direction for the other 0.8 seconds.

If you time this correctly, you will end up attacking your opponent many more times, which can result in a kill.

This is especially important for ranged heroes, because they don’t automatically run after opponents unless your opponents leave your range — you want to stay within range as long as possible. Attack moving is important for melee heroes, but their low range means your hero will often automatically chase your opponent. If your opponent leaves your range, your hero will automatically follow them.

Here is a video depicting the amount of extra attacks you can get by attack moving:

If you want to practice how to attack move properly, you're in luck, as you should be attacking a LOT of creeps, heroes and towers in every single game of Dota.

Practice canceling your animations against towers, creeps, and neutrals, but be a little more careful against heroes. While canceling your animations will increase the amount of attacks that you get in, if you cancel your animation before your attack comes out, you'll limit the amount of damage that you could have been doing, so be careful.

Animation Canceling

The other important piece of the puzzle is Animation Canceling. Almost all heroes have cast animations in addition to their attack animations. It's important to cancel the leftover time on those animations as well, or you'd waste time standing still.

Here is a video comparing the time to cycle through both of Crystal Maiden's Skills if you don't cancel the animations, and then if you do cancel them.



And finally, to put both Stun Stacking, Animation Canceling, and Attack Moving together, we can compare doing none of those things with all three of those efficiency increases:



Illusion Damage
Illusion heroes are extremely common in Dota and they are very often carries, so it's important to know how to increase their damage.

Illusions base their strengths on the hero they come from, but only for some aspects. Their movement speed and HP are a reflection of the hero they came from, but the only way to increase illusion damage is by purchasing stat items. Items that add Damage do nothing to increase the strength of your illusions. For example, your Battle Fury or your Divine Rapier (whose stats have +Damage) do nothing to make your illusions stronger.

This is why Manta Style, which creates illusions of your hero, provides +10 Strength, +26 Agility, and +10 Intelligence, among other stats. If Manta Style instead gave your hero +40 Damage, the +40 Damage wouldn't benefit the illusions that it also creates.

The only +Damage item that does make your illusions significantly stronger is Daedalus, which gives +81 Damage and a 25% chance to critical for 240%. While your illusions don't get the +81 damage, they do give your illusions the 25% chance to critical for 240%.

Another way to make your illusions strong is to purchase a Diffusal Blade. Diffusal Blade applies an effect to your attacks called Manabreak that drains mana from them in addition to your regular attack; that mana drain also damages them for 80% of the mana burned as Physical damage.

Manabreak applies to your illusions only if you're a melee hero, so if you're playing an illusion hero who has a lot of spawns like Phantom Lancer, it’s recommended that you get a Diffusal Blade.

The trap that some players fall into is purchasing a Manta Style when they have a large amount of +Damage items. Manta Style is really useful to remove silences and some debuffs from your hero and it's nice to have the illusions to confuse your opponents, but without damage items, it loses synergy that can really make it shine.

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What to Buy with Starting Gold
At the start of the game you start with 625 gold, and 825 if you random. What you spend this money on is entirely dependent on the hero you are playing, where they are going, the role they're performing, and who their opponents are.

Predicting the heroes that will end up in your lane is very difficult at low levels because your opponents likely won't know themselves due to inexperience; you should just probably focus on generic items.

Every team should have an Animal Courier and a set of Observer Wards at the start of every game purchased by the supports. One Observer Ward should be given to the offlane hero(es) to ward the pull camp of the enemy safe lane so they can't pull; they can also give vision to prevent wrap around attacks. The other Observer Ward should be placed with vision of the rune spots in the river so that your mid player has help knowing where it has spawned.

After that, items should be purchased from a mix of these:

Iron Branches



Iron branches are the best way to give your hero more mana and health in the early game for a low cost. Most heroes will purchase Branches at the start of the game, and turn them into some other simple items later. You can use your Iron Branch to plant a tree in the ground that, if eaten with Tango, provides twice the regeneration duration as a normally-eaten tree.

Tango (Comes with 4 per pack)



Every player in the game (with the exception of mid heroes sometimes) should purchase a set of Tangos at the start of the game to ensure that their HP stays full enough until the buy a bigger regen item. You can give some your Tangos to other people (called "pooling") which lets them use it at a much reduced rate, so it's always fine to have extra Tangos in a lane. You can use them to instantly deward a Sentry or Observer Ward (useful if you don't have a ranged attack!); this also gives you twice the regeneration duration as a normally-eaten tree.

Healing Salve



Healing Salves will usually be purchased by offlane heroes and carries. Supports rarely buy them. If you take damage from heroes or Roshan while the Salve is healing you, the regeneration is cancelled.

Faerie Fire



Faerie Fire grants 2 damage while it's in your inventory, but when used, instantly heals you for 75 HP. It shouldn't be used as regen, but it's very useful to keep you alive from a burst of damage or surprise your opponent in an early duel in lane.

Enchanted Mango



Enchanted Mango provides 1 HP regen per second while in your inventory. If needed, you can activate the item to consume it, which provides you an instant 150 mana. Heroes with low mana pools will often purchase one Mango just in case they need more mana in a short time period. You can also feed your Mango's to nearby allied heroes.

Clarity Potion



Claritys are largely purchased by supports and some offlane heroes. Supports are often valued more for their ability to cast spells to harass, so I purchase at least one as a support. If you take damage from heroes or Roshan while the Clarity is refilling your mana, it will cancel the effect.

Stout Shield



Stout Shield should be purchased by almost every melee carry, and often as a melee offlane hero. It helps you take less damage as it blocks a portion of it from enemy creeps and heroes. You will almost never need one as a ranged hero since its effect is lessened. Some heroes upgrade the Stout Shield to the stronger Poor Man's Shield later on.

Ring of Protection



Ring of Protection is a nice alternative to a Stout Shield as a carry because it gives physical survivability and easily builds into a few different early game items, like Ring of Basilius. If they have extra money, supports can purchase a Ring of Protection early to help them build Tranquil Boots.

Quelling Blade



Quelling Blade can be purchased by melee carries if they have trouble last hitting creeps, as the gold you gain from the last hits will pay for the item, and you can jungle more rapidly later. Usually I don't purchase Quelling Blade, because Stout Shield is more important immediately; if I'm going to buy one, I usually do minutes later.

Smoke of Deceit



If I am playing support and I have extra money I'll purchase one Smoke of Deceit in case I want to gank. It makes you invisible to creeps and wards, so it helps guarantee that you aren't spotted moving around the map to gank. While under its effect, you also move faster; however, when you enter into range of a hero (whether you have vision of them or not), the effect breaks and you become visible again.

Sentry Wards



I will rarely purchase Sentry Wards, but they are useful to help me find enemy Observer Wards and spot invisible heroes. I will definitely purchase them if I'm against a Broodmother, Riki, or Bounty Hunter in my lane. While 100 gold for a ward may seem expensive, enemy Observer Wards will give you 100 gold for destroying them, and preventing yourself or another allied hero from dying can make it worth it.
If you are playing in the mid lane, you will often purchase one of these items:

Null Talisman



Null Talisman is useful on Intelligence heroes soloing mid because it provides you +9 damage (and other stats) which helps in last hitting versus your opponent.

Wraith Band



Wraith Band is useful on Agility Heroes soloing mid because it provides you +9 damage (and other stats) which helps in last hitting versus your opponent.
While the choice might be simple based on the logic above, DO NOT GET BRACER IF YOU ARE A STRENGTH HERO. You cannot afford Tangos and a Bracer, and forgoing regen in lane is extremely risky.

If you are playing in the Offlane, you will sometimes purchase:

Boots of Speed



Boots are sometimes okay for an offlane hero because it gives you a tactical escape advantage over your opponents, who often have more damage and disable than you do; this allows you to be able to escape bad situations with multiple heroes. You will sometimes see supports purchase a boots so that they can bully offlane heroes or roam around the map, but I don't recommend that for new players.

Iron Talon



Iron Talon is often seen as more of a jungling item since it lets you remove 40% of the remaining health of a creep as well as boosting your attack damage against them. However, these qualities are why it's often so effective on an offlane hero. If you're against supports with a lot of kill potential who can zone you, it's much better to head to the jungle at the start of the game so that you can gain a moderate amount of levels and farm. Naturally, Iron Talon also makes many Melee heroes more proficient at jungling, but that doesn't always mean that you should jungle with those heroes.
If we summarize all of our early item purchases, we are purchasing stat items that give us slightly more HP, Mana, armor, and damage at the start of the game. We're purchasing regen items that help us stay in the lane longer, and we're buying some items that will help us build into items later in lane (Ring of Protection).

Here are some example starting item builds for each role in the game:

Carry:



Stout Shield
Tango
Healing Salve
Iron Branch
Iron Branch
Mid:



Wraith Band
Tango
Offlane:



Stout Shield
Tango
Healing Salve
Iron Branch
Clarity
Support 1:



Animal Courier
Observer Ward x2
Clarity x2
Iron Branch
Tango
Healing Salve

Support 2 (if roaming support):



Sentry Ward
Smoke of Deceit
Tango
Iron Branch (x2)
Clarity
Support 2 (if melee jungler):

 OR

Stout Shield
Ring of Protection (or Quelling Blade)
Tango
               OR

Iron Talon (this is an upgrade Quelling Blade)
Tango
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What To Buy After Starting Gold
The items we purchase with our first gold once we start farming is a bit more diversified so I'll break it down by the role.

Carry
Carries will usually spend their first bit of gold on boots, finishing their Ring of Basilius, which gives them and their allies an armor and mana aura, purchasing Phase Boots or Treads after their initial boots, or Magic Sticks to help them get burst health and mana against offlane heroes. They can also purchase a regen item from the side shop like a Ring of Health, Helm of Iron Will, or Morbid Mask if it builds into an item that they need later.

Mid
Mid heroes very often will spend their first 660 gold on a Bottle since it gives them a huge amount of sustain in the mid lane due to runes. Afterward they will purchase a Boots of Speed and a Teleport Scroll so that they can gank to other lanes if needed, or teleport back to base in a dangerous situation.

Offlane
Offlane heroes purchase differently depending on how their lane is going. The first most important item is either boots or regen, depending on which one you need first.

For example, if you go to the offlane with a stout shield and 2 sets of regen (tango AND Salve), then you should be able to farm 400 gold for boots before you run out of regen. If you go to lane with Boots and 1 set of Tango, then you will probably need to purchase Tranquil Boots asap, which requires 500 gold[Ring of Protection (175), and Ring of Regen (325)]. You can also purchase a bottle as an offlane hero (660 gold), which is refillable at runes or base, if you have no desire to purchase Tranquil Boots on that hero.

Support
Support heroes will spend their first bit of money on a Flying Courier at 3:00 (when it's first available), getting TP scrolls to teleport to other lanes if needed, the next  Observer wards, which spawns every 150 seconds, and Boots when they get the farm. Other items they can purchase if they are doing extremely well are Arcane Boots, Tranquil Boots, Medallion, or pieces of an Urn of Shadows. All of those items have very inexpensive components that are useful early.



Ring of Basilius and Aura items
The last thing I want to mention within the sphere of items is the Ring of Basilius.

Ring of Basilius (RoB or Basi) is an aura based item that is often purchased in the early game, and it's important to realize a few nuances.

The item itself gives you +7 damage, but all of the other benefits are aura based. For the aura you get +0.65 mana per second for you and your allies and +2 armor. If 2 heroes in your lane both have a RoB, then the aura components are wasted when you are near each other since auras of the same kind do not stack in Dota 2.

The final point to make about Ring of Basilius is that it's important to turn off the aura in the early game. If you leave the aura on, it provides a 2 armor aura to your creeps. If you turn off the aura, the armor and mana aura only affects your allied heroes! To turn off the aura, just left click the item in your inventory, or press the hotkey associated with it.

If you give your creeps 2 extra armor, it becomes very difficult to keep your creep equilibrium static, so make sure that the aura is turned off until you want to push your wave.

A couple examples of other items you should not duplicate are Mekansm, an aoe heal that cannot be used by 2 different heroes in 1 teamfight, and Vladmir's Offering or ring of aquila, which are upgradeded versions of Ring of Basilius.

Try not to have multiples of these items in a lane, and in the late game make sure that multiple heroes don't build the same aura item.

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Where Do I Buy This Item?
One unfortunate consequence of playing Dota 2 is that you have to learn where to purchase items. The first barrier to this is finding the items in the shop interface.

The shop in Dota 2 is organized by category such as damage items, defensive items, or support items. These categories are all on a different tab. My first recommendation is to change the shop to the grid view instead of the line view. In the upper left corner of the shop (click on the shop button to open the shop) you can switch between each view. This will help you see all of the items at the same time.

In Dota 2, there are two kinds of items. There are basic components, which are the items that can be bought directly from the shop.  From these basic items you can make upgraded items, which take a predefined mix of basic items to create an item that has more power than its components combined. You can view these completed items in the Upgrades tab of the shop.




The Basics tab has 4 columns as follows:

Consumable items such as regen, Tp scrolls, Couriers, and Observer Wards/Sentry Wards.
All of the basic and medium level stat items. That includes all of the +3 stat, +6 stat, +10 stat, and the +1 to all, and +2 to all stat stat items.
Armor, Damage, Damage prevention and attack modifying items.
Regen items, simple components, Boots of Speed and random standalone items.
All of the items that you can see in the shop here in the Basics section can be purchased in the team's base shop.  However, there are a few items not located there.

The other shop is called the Secret Shop. There are two secret shops on the map, one for each team.




The secret shop sells the most powerful of every item type such as +25 to stat items, +60 damage Sacred Relic, and the Hyperstone, which gives +55 AS.



The last shop in the game is called the Side Shop. The purpose of the side shop is to provide most of the items that heroes will purchase in the early game. These shops are there so that your hero spends less time running back and forth to base or using the team's courier.




You will see a mixture of regular shop items, and a few secret shop items that are common in the early game.



The most important item in the side shop that isn't here is the Ring of Protection, and as such is the only item you have to really plan ahead for in the early game. The Ring of protection is required for you to build a Ring of Basilius or Tranquil Boots, so you will have to ferry it out in the early game using a courier or headed back to base.

Some common items that you can make and buy entirely at the Side shop are:

Poor Man's Shield
Phase Boots
Power Treads
Arcane Boots
Oblivion Staff
Ring of Health
Orb of Venom
Blink Dagger
Quelling Blade
Stout Shield
TP Scroll
Hood of Defiance
Blademail
Medallion of Courage
Helm of the Dominator
Now that you've seen where and what you can buy in the game, let's talk about upgrading your component items into even better items.

Every Upgraded item has a combination of items that creates a better item. If all of those items are together in your inventory, they automatically become a new item. To check what the requirements are, click the upgrades tab of the shop and left click on the item you want to build. It will show what items build into it.




In the case of the Shivas above, we have 2 components that go into it. The first item is the Platemail, and the second is the Mystic Staff. The piece of paper that shows with the item is called a recipe. A recipe is unique to each item that requires it, and it serves the purpose of balancing the item's price. In the case of Shivas, I need a Shivas recipe to complete the item.

Keep in mind that recipes do nothing for you until the item is built, unlike components, so this should almost always be the last item that you purchase when building an upgraded item.

However, not all items need recipes. To make an Oblivion Staff, you need a Quarterstaff, a Robe of the Magi, and a Sage's Mask.



Now that you know how to make Upgraded items, click over to the Upgrade tab and we can see the categories.



All of the basic stat items, some boot upgrades and a few items that don't fit other categories.
All of the support themed items. This means items that can apply auras, heals, or buffs to allies.
Offensive/utility Int based items. They all have very different uses, so make sure that they are synergistic with your hero and what you need for the game.
Major damage items. These items are largely used to increase your killing potential through basic attacks. Some also have utility with their damage, such as a chance to stun your opponents on attack.
Most of these items are defensive in nature but some also have offensive or utility properties in addition.
Most  of these items have unusual effects that don't all stack together like lifesteal, Desolate orb, or Skadi slow. Be careful when buying multiples of these. You can usually only have 1 UAM item or skill in the game, so read carefully when you plan out your item builds and make sure they don't interact negatively with your hero's skills, or you will waste some of your gold.
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The Biggest Hurdle In Dota 2
The hardest part about getting better at Dota 2 is learning to focus on yourself more than on your teammates.

When Match Making Rating (MMR) went public, players became very focused on raising a number linked to their profile. When things go bad and you lose games, all players look for the reason they lost — and it's human nature to look at your allies' mistakes first before you look at yourself.

The biggest misconception in communities of all matchmaking video games is the fake principle of "MMR Hell". The idea is that you are unlucky and get worse than average teammates which result in you not advancing in MMR. This simply doesn’t exist.

The reality is that being good at Dota is extremely multidimensional, as you've probably figured out from this guide.

For example, it’s easy to look at your Kill/Death/Assist ratio and notice that yours is better than your teammates'. This leads you to think that your teammates obviously died too many times and that you played better, but perhaps you didn’t back them up enough. Maybe you didn’t do a good enough job zoning the offlaner, pulling, ganking, or last hitting.

There are MANY reasons that games are lost, but the chances of you getting unlucky with allies is the least likely.

To raise your MMR, you need to get better at Dota, and you are the player that you have the most impact on. If getting better at Dota is your goal, focusing on fixing your mistakes game to game is the most productive way to do it: otherwise you'll likely grow more frustrated, continue to stagnate in skill, and stop having fun.

Maybe getting really good at Dota isn’t your goal, though — maybe you just came here to learn a few things so that playing Dota casually is a bit easier.

Regardless of your intentions, you are going to run into players that are angry and mean. They might believe in MMR Hell, they might be taking their frustrations out on you when they make mistakes, or they might just genuinely be assholes and taunt you whenever they can. If you encounter anyone in Dota 2 that is mean to you, I recommend that you immediately mute them.

To mute a player in Dota 2, open the scoreboard in the upper left, find the person that you don’t want to hear from, and click either the "T" button (for text chat), the Speaker icon (for voice), or both. The safest way to protect your enjoyment of the game is to mute them immediately.



If they were being extra mean to you or someone else, you get bonus points from me if you defend the other players in chat and use the report function to report them for communication abuse, this is the proper way of saying "this guy is using his words to hurt people for some reason."

I believe that games like Dota 2 can take normal competitive people and turn them mean because of under-performing allies, disappointment in themselves, and the general frustration that comes from losing; this doesn’t make it okay to spread that anger to other people. It isn't just social courtesy, though — it significantly impacts how well your team plays.

Morale is not the easiest thing for the average player to improve on since a lot of it comes from outside of the game. However, it is the biggest non game-world effect on your performance.

Do not flame or criticize your allies when they make mistakes. Don’t call them idiots, and don’t talk down to your allies as if you’re superior (your MMR is likely similar). Say good job when they get a solo kill, or win a teamfight. Even if you think they are playing terribly, some false encouragement will make your allies play with less stress, they will feel less pressure, and their increased morale will help them play better than usual.  Even saying negative things with a positive tone (aka, constructive criticism) can vastly change the responses you get — even if most people don't respond to any kind of criticism well.

By definition, MMR is a measurement of how much impact you have on a Dota 2 game.

That includes how well you last hit, how efficient your farming patterns are, how good you are at attack moving, calculating chain stunning, how good your map awareness is, how well you place wards, how well you teamfight and how well you itemize. Can you pull without missing the connect? Is your late game decision making correct? Does your negative attitude affect the rest of your team, lowering their ability to perform at their MMR?

All of these things matter in every single Dota game. Don’t assume that you are superior to one of your teammates just because they did a few extremely stupid things that you never would. There was probably an error that you made that they wouldn’t have.

It’s also important to remember that you can raise your MMR with any position in Dota. For a safe estimate, until you reach the 5,000 MMR range, it’s very possible to even play support and to support so well that you consistently increase your rank.

Don’t look to your allies as the excuse of why you aren’t winning — you are the only player you always play with. Don’t look to the role you are playing as to why you aren’t winning (unless you are better at other roles, then blame yourself), and make sure that your attitude doesn’t prove toxic to your allies, since them playing worse can easily affect your team’s chance of winning.

Focus on your mistakes. If you have trouble seeing your mistakes, ask a friend who is better, watch your own replays, watch a pro player stream a game, or watch a pro game to see top level performance and emulate what they do.

Or, you know, I make a lot of instructional content on my YouTube and stream to help you guys get better. You can follow me here to receive email notifications of new content and when I am streaming.

If you guys have any questions about Dota, you can also tweet at me anytime (@PurgeGamers) . I often reply to questions there. Or even post in the strategy forums here to ask a wider audience.

And remember, MMR Hell isn't out in the ladder--it's in your head.

Thanks for reading the substantially longer and revised Welcome to Dota, You Suck guide. Good luck on your grind to collect MMR.