So I recently started playing role queue ranked, and I have no idea how I can get better, or whats the difference between lower and upper MMR players.
I used to play Starcraft, and I always knew in each league what was my problems, what went wrong in the game, and what I could do better in the next one.
In guardian level games I can see players stopping spirit breaker using charge of darkness with rod of atos in the blink of an eye, using tinker perfectly, starting and finishing every teamfight perfectly, and other plays that I don’t know how can get better. And still its only guardian, and can’t imagine what they do better in immortal.
But dota has so much more factors, like games can get decided during picking heroes, there are 4 other players in the team that I don’t always watch / know what they are doing. Is it even possible to judge a players skill correctly in dota?
In my current league (around guardian 2) 90% of the games are about one team absolutely destroying the other. I feel like whatever I do is pointless, because either the team is doing fine without me, or can’t do anything that will turn the game around, because of bad picks or that 1 or 2 players with 0-9-1 at 8 minutes.
I prefer to play soft / hard support. Not sure how much this sound like “everybody is bad except me”, but I’m totally open to the idea, that I’m just bad. But as I said, I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.
So I was wondering what could I do to get involved in better games. I don’t even dream of getting a high MMR (though it would be pleasing), I only want to play fun and close games where the team works as a team. My only guess / hope is that at higher levels games will get better.
https://stratz.com/players/1547984348 Steam says I played ~250 hours (but that counts the game running not matches I guess), dota says 251 games, my favorite heros are hoodwink, techies and undying. But I don’t usually pick them, I try to play other heroes depending on what I think would counter / help opponents / allies better. Also playing a few set of heroes can be boring to me, so that’s why I try to be diverse.
My guesses about which hero is to pick is usually based on stuff I make up (i guess incorrectly) like lion vs heroes with important channeling abilities and if team doesn’t have many stuns, keeper of light with heroes that need a lot of manna, natures prophet if team lacks pushing abilities, crystal maiden if my supported teammates hero likes people stuck in one place, undying if team lacks “tank”. I also try to watch pro games. By “try” I mean that I don’t always feel that I 100% understand whats going on, but at least I learn something
For 250 hours you’re already pretty good. There are people with 10k+ hours ranked lower than you :)
Pro matches are actually playing a kind of different game, in my other message I was more talking about pro players in public matches, like what is found in https://dota2protracker.com.
Actual tournament matches are hard to impossible to learn from, since they’re so extremely different from pub matches. Having 5 people all on the same page against another set of 5 people that all communicate with each other, all understanding the game to a level as to play theoretically perfectly.
That opens up a whole new level of play in that they are predicting all the time what the others will do and thus countering that in a very specific way. But this is only really possible because they all know what the “perfect” play is, and the countering they’re doing is only possible because they all know what to do. A lot of this doesn’t work in pub matches, because if the opponent (or your teammates) do not know the optimal play, then you can’t predict what they do, and the counters you might try to do in an actual pro match might actually not make very much sense in such a scenario.
The way you win in pub matches (as long as not too much other pros are also involved) is by simply doing the optimal thing, not worrying too much about countering, since you likely won’t be countered, and counter-play itself is mostly not the optimal play, only in combination with stopping what the others are doing, which you don’t if they’re not trying to play optimally.
Idk this was probably a bit confusing :D anyway what I wanted to basically say is that actual pro matches are amazing because it actually shows the potential of how beautiful Dota can be, but they’re so far removed from pub play that they’re not very useful to learn from.
Do you want me to have a look at one of your matches and give you some feedback?
Sure if you have time and don’t mind, in my last 3 losses I have no idea what could I have done better (https://stratz.com/players/1547984348)
I’ll take a look later :) I love giving advice to people like you with a good mindset that want to learn, love spending my time like this :)
Not sure when you get the time to look at them, might play some more till then, so I meant these 3 games: 7262980053, 7263202132 and 7263284766.
Take your time, up to you which one and when you look at. Thanks again!
Just attempted to watch one of the Undying games, 7263284766:
-2:00 - Why did you start with Wind Lace? It’s honestly one of the worst starting items for Undying because Undying is all about fighting early and establishing lane dominance. Wind Lace is 250 gold, almost half your starting gold, and gives you exactly 0 fighting power. An enemy that is usually weaker than you, can, with those 250 gold in actual fighting items, be stronger than you. Instead get some Blood Grenade action going on there.
Also, Sentries are really important in the offlane because you really want to pull your large if possible or block the enemy pulling small, so it’s always useful.
0:48 - The enemy just made the fatal mistake of letting your wave go into their tower. You’re Undying with +8 Strength already, you’re incredibly strong, you can literally bully them out of the lane now. Just wrap around those trees to your left and get them from behind if they want to farm the wave. Instead, you retreat some more. stand around a bit, let yourself get hit by techies, and don’t even try to run at him.
1:07 - The fuck dude! You have +24 Strength, you’re a literal raid boss, you have 1176 hp, the enemy has 318 and 406, you alone have literally 1.6 times as much HP as both of the enemies combined, with your Legion you have 2.7 times as much HP on your side as the enemy. RUN AT THEM! They should be doing literally nothing right now except running from you. But you run back and let yourself get hit some more. You’re even at 100% HP the whole time!
I’m sorry, I have to stop watching here. You’re completely unaware of your early strength as Undying, which is basically the whole concept of why the hero is any good. The next time when you play Undying, you should run at them and don’t stop until they are dead or cowering in fear under their tower. If you had one or two Blood Grenades as well. you could have easily gotten a double kill at 1:00 in and then with the lane so far back kept denying them everything. Really, just try running at them always, if you die, it’s fine, then you can learn why in this particular situation Undying was not a raid boss. But it should be your default at least 90% of the time.
Of course, this doesn’t always work as Undying, but like 80% of the time. If the enemy here would have kept the creeps at their tower and stood under the tower, then you wouldn’t have been able to do much. That’s why Undying is almost exclusively played in safe lane, since there the creeps are at your tower and the enemy is by default far from their tower, giving you lots of room to run them down. You also have very little mana and as soon as you used your Decays and don’t have mana for them anymore, you’re like a fish on land. Of course there are also some enemy heroes where the early game is not completely free, but Techies & SF are incredibly bad against you.
I expect the other Undying game to be similar since you really seem to be unaware of his strength, so I don’t think it makes sense to look at that.
Remember my other comment where I said that it’s harder to learn since heroes play so differently? That’s basically what I meant. You play like a Crystal Maiden but you are an Undying. Playing like a scared Crystal Maiden as an almighty Undying is one of the worst things you can do to that poor killing machine.
Thanks for the detailed analysis :) I don’t have much to say about the CM game. You are right about me not using undying as I should have, but I’ll try next time.
I watched few of BSJ-s coach videos, and thought that I’ll try windlace first, because of the mobility it provides, because supports move a lot. Maybe would have been good if I actually ran at them. I know he coaches pos5, and I played 4 here, but still wanted to try new things.
Yeah I mean Wind Lace is good, just not as a starting item. By choosing that item, you’re basically saying “I expect to need perfect positioning to survive this lane”, which is just not Undying. As a Crystal Maiden Wind Lace is much better, but you still only want it as a starting item if you don’t/can’t fight, since it’s 250 gold into only positioning, not your strength as a hero.
But as Undying you want to just run at people, while that is “running” as well, it’s more about area control. If you run at them and they run away, it doesn’t matter if you catch them or not, they’re not farming during that time, which is already a win for you.
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This is for the CM game 7262980053:
1:15 - should have pulled small camp
1:50 - should have stacked small camp
2:00 - there’s rarely a reason to skill mana aura 2nd point, as you can just buy more mana regen. Having nova + frostbite lvl 2 is an incredible power-spike, more damage/control than almost any other hero in the game at that point in time, and you just wasted this timing. Skilling it at lvl 3 or 4 is almost always better.
3:25 - should have pulled large camp
3:30 - should have checked lotus (small pull would not have been necessary since you pulled large)
3:50 - pulling small would have 1. not been necessary because you pulled large at 3:25, and 2. is not necessary anyway since creeps are pushing into enemy tower, which means afterwards, since you’re in safe lane, the creeps will meet at your tower again (you actually see this at 4:00, where the enemy creeps are walking into your tower because you pulled). Instead, you shoud have used the creeps to put some pressure on the tower. Also, as you noticed, you can’t really leave Riki alone in this lane.
3:59 - you’re very bold warding the exact same spot that just got dewarded again, especially while you’re under vision where everyone can see you warding.
4:00 - should have moved your lane creeps either to the still living range creeps or into your small camp to your other creeps, not into tower. Now you’ve got a double wave pushing out again.
4:15 - use your spells to lasthit if you are full mana (or learn to lasthit better). Any gold you can get is incredibly important on supports.
4:38 - should have pulled large camp
4:50 - you have very weird camera movement. do you press some kind of “center on hero” button all the time? Idk if that is the cause or whatever, but you could have attacked like 2 or 3 times more if you actually attacked on your attack cooldown, which would have definitely killed SF.
5:10 - PLEASE lasthit the creeps. You can’t waste easy gold on the map. Collecting gold is the most important thing in dota.
5:45 - always try to hit as many enemies as possible with frost nova, would have been no problem here.
6:10 - you just killed both enemy heroes. There’s nothing dangerous here for you anymore. You can do what you want. Pull large camp immediately & farm it. Get the 6 min lotus. Use your healing salve immediately on yourself. Rotate mid or bot through twin gates with your full hp + full mana. Even steal the enemy XP rune at 7:00. Instead, you do essentially nothing until 7:05. Riki could have pulled himself and was under no threat since he had a ward, you would have likely been able to TP back by this time after your rotation or whatever you decided to do.
7:06 - Your ward that was just dewarded earlier at this spot is dewarded again. Surprise ;)
7:10 - lasthit. don’t. waste. gold. your riki wasn’t going to get it.
7:42 - no reason to push the wave in even further with your nova. keeping the wave at your tower is the most important thing against kill lanes.
8:11 - and you actually ward the same spot AGAIN :D
9:10 - could have easily frostbitten SF
9:15 - SF just TP’d out, he’s not coming back for at least 30 secs. Why do you back off against a single pudge? Pressure him, the tower, lasthit + deny everything. Instead you just let him farm and walk in circles a bit.
9:55 - should have pulled large
10:00 - if this move came 20 seconds earlier in time for the rune it would have been really fucking good. Like this you should not have bothered, and at least immediately went back to top. Your riki can do effectively nothing when you’re gone, but with you, you actually have a fighting chance. I mean Pudge+SF are terrible so Riki gets a solo kill anyway, but you see as you rotated back, that kill would have worked against better players as well, not just against terrible ones.
11:50 - Riki is terrible for leaving top, but again, you can’t waste gold on the map. Either you try & tell him “riki farm top” or you should go yourself to farm it. You skilled 1/3/1 which is suboptimal for this, so it’s not terrible that you went bot with your stupid team. But if you had gone like 2/2/1 into more points in nova later, you could farm & push all these waves much easier. Honestly, frostbite’s value decreases the lower in MMR you go, because people are just so absolutely terrible at farming & pushing creep waves so you will always have to be the one to do it. It’s almost always better to skill more nova than frostbite. At higher MMR it’s more of a choice which one you want to go, since your cores don’t leave gold laying around the map as much.
12:30 - absolute number #1 priority, nothing is more important than this, ever, it’s almost worth dieing for this: DEWARD THE ENEMY WARDS IN A FIGHT. Vision is the most important thing to win fights. Who has vision almost always wins against whoever does not have vision. The enemy is also bad at this, but you could have dewarded at the very beginning of the fight easily. Also yeah, you can’t stand this far forward as you noticed. You always have to have your team between yourself and the enemy team at all times as CM. Split second decisions matter a lot in fights.
13:20 - Should have went top or bot, waves are pushing in and can be farmed. Likely bot best because of 14 min XP rune. Could have stacked ancients as well at 14:00.
16:09 - you would’ve been just as fast walking ;)
16:25 - sentry first (almost) always
16:45 - that’s what tranquil’s are for, go stack ancients and let them regen you
I zoomed through the rest a bit more roughly:
~18:00 - You don’t have anyone that can farm massive stacks well. Should have pushed top instead or farmed something else yourself or whatever.
~19:30 - Stacking is more of a downtime activity. You need to play with your team if possible, Riki got a solo kill, but if you had followed him and dewarded it’d have been better.
20:50 - Should have pushed the wave if no one else is doing it.
21:00 - You basically stand around for ~60 secs. Already stacked a bajillion times and no one wants to farm it. Time to go push top instead or farm some with your ult or sth.
25:00 - Always have a ward with you when you smoke. Smoke=Ward, almost always. you could have warded deep at 25:20 in their jungle with that.
26:40 - Push out the wave with a nova. You put too little emphasis on pushing waves out. Pushing waves is incredibly important since it gives vision
31:40 - No reason to keep pushing 4v4 with your carry dead and theirs alive. Split up and farm. Mid and top both need pushing. Predictably, you lose the fight without your carry. Set up for Rosh as soon as your carry is back.
36:00 - Still no one has pushed top, as a result SF gets T2 for free. And 50% dmg on T3.
38:40 - Perfect time for Rosh. Most important objective on the map. No one cares. No one pushing out bottom.
42:30 - Radiant takes Rosh and they win the game. Another surprised Pikachu face ;)
You should have won with Pudge abandon. You lose because Viper+Riki are useless and build shit items and PA is not. Viper should have gone Bloodthorne and Riki should have gone MKB. You have to counter PA with items otherwise she’s unstoppable.
Key takeaways:
I thought that using booth abilities at lvl 2 depletes my manna pool pretty fast, so there is no point having two abilities if I can’t use them, so better have a manna regen
It definitely does deplete your mana pool fast. It’s fine to skill Arcane Aura at lvl 2 if you don’t expect there to be any fights to the death, if the lane is about out-regening the opponent.
However, this was with Riki (a good kill hero) against SF + Pudge (Pudge is the definition of a kill hero). SF (and Pudge) are easily killable by you and Pudge + SF want to kill you if possible, because they’re not going to out-harass you.
You can easily see this by how the lane went: you almost never slowly whittled each other down, pretty much each engagement was going until one side was dead.
The fights lasted what, 5-10 seconds? Any such fight is essentially a race between both teams on who can get the HP number of the enemy to 0 faster. If you only have Frostbite, you can maaaybe cast it twice if the fight is long. Or you could cast Frostbite and Crystal Nova and then later cast Frost Bite again by using a Mango. Which one does more damage in these 10 seconds? Obviously the 110-220(if you hit both) extra damage you get from the extra Crystal Nova you wouldn’t otherwise have. Almost no other hero can match that early damage. But many heroes have at least one spell as good as Frostbite or Crystal Nova, so then you’re just equal. So if you get lvl 2 Frostbite + Crystal Nova, you will very likely win the race to get the enemy to 0 hp.
Sure, after that fight, it’ll take longer for you to get that mana back, but that’s what Clarities and Mangos are for. Like in Starcraft, you’re supposed to keep your resources low: use your gold to get an instant advantage. Mana/health regen is a very cheap way to gain a quick advantage in lane. You’re basically saying “I don’t want to spend my gold on regen, instead I want to sacrifice some of my potential DPS”. That’s only good if you can’t pressure the enemy and have to play very passively, but again, that’s not what the lane was. If you’d play against an IO+Necro, sure, skill Arcane Aura level 2.
And yeah, you want to save for Boots or whatever, but remember, the game is about your team getting more gold than the enemy team. Kills give ~300 gold early, and then you also get to freefarm and the enemy doesn’t get to farm at all while they’re dead, so more like 400-500. You can buy a lot of regen with that. The enemy gets free regen once when they die, but that’s it. It’s incredibly good to kill the enemy in lane, and with Crystal Maiden and a decent 2nd you can very often do that.
Ah thanks for the infos. Yeah, I definitely need to learn more about heroes
Thank you :)
Honestly, at lower levels, counters and synergies between heroes aren’t very important. While they definitely have an impact, just playing better can easily overcome this small dis/advantage. It becomes more important on higher skill levels, but also the way picks are done is usually that the supports pick first, or at most second, so the most you see is ether nothing or 2 enemy/ally heroes, which is not much info to go on. Also, like you already say, you’re guessing more than knowing what to pick, and your guesses are based on your skill level, which heroes are good varies vastly between skill levels, so learning that now will not help you too much later.
Also, many of the heroes you mentioned play very differently. If you like doing that, I don’t want to discourage you, but theoretically, sticking with 1-3 heroes is better for learning, since playing your hero well is one of the skills in dota, and when you’re practicing that skill all the time since you switch between heroes, you only slowly get to practice the general skills, since you’re distracted by all the differences between heroes.
It’s like playing random as your StarCraft race when starting out, it’s much harder to practice and learn 9 different (one for each race combination) build orders than just focusing on 3 (one against each race). Of course it’s possible but it’s harder and slower.
So I don’t want to discourage you, I just want you to be aware of it. An undying plays very differently from a crystal maiden plays very differently from a lion, and you need to be aware of that and not try to mix&match what you learned in one to apply to the other, except of course if it’s general stuff.
I kinda like that, not sure I’m the best at it though :) But it can be fun at least
Definitely :) I also like playing lots of different things.