5punky omgnoob's guide to Dota 2

[Dog Pants]

Good answers Grimmie. I forgot how fucking obtuse the items system seemed to me when I started playing. I was constantly buying duplicate items. It's much easier for me to get Grimmie's hatcape pyramid and buy the components. It marks ones you have with a little tick (and ones from the Secret Shop with a little red S). Also regarding items, I think all of us tend to avoid active items (i.e hit a number key to use) for the most part because we forget to use them and you have to take your fingers off the QWER keys. I set one to SPACE personally for easy access.

Just a minor correction for Grimmie - when you put levels into your stats it puts them all up, you don't need to choose Str/Dex/Int. Just click on the stats box.

FJ - At least you can be heartened by the fact that you were certainly getting battered because of lack of items rather than lack of skill.

[Mr. Johnson]

The second game last night was a meatgrinder for us anyway, but I have to commend Bali for making a valiant effort to lead our team. Even when they showed up in our base and we didn't knock down a single one of their towers he refused to give up. Next time I might be sober enough to listen to your advice Bali.

And good answers there Grimmie, couldn't have put it better myself. Literally, because I'm terrible at explaining things like some sort of Ross Noble of explanations.

[Dog Pants]

It's hard work when you just bet thrashed all game. Until last night I don't think I'd won a game in two weeks.

[shot2bits]

As I've learned, I try to keep close behind the creeps (is that the right word?), and only attack the ones about to die. I save my magicks for opportunistic hits on enemy players. I stay clear of the enemy towers and let the creeps attack them. I try to leg it as soon as an enemy player starts hurting me

these are all really good habits to get into while your learning the game, unfortunately there are a lot of nuances to the game, like just knowing the map, how the different roles work, building items that are suited to your hero/role, and without having a basic grasp on those its very difficult to understand why you might be losing in fights or just having a tough time in a lane, let alone fight back.

I haven't tried the recommended build thingy aforementioned in these posts, so will have to look out for that next time - I just click randomly on a power upgrade. Where is the option to upgrade your 'stats' though?

As grimmie said before the recommended builds are a god send when you are trying to learn the basics, especially if there are tooltips that explain the best ways to use skills and items and how they synergise with your other skills. it can be a bit awkward trying to read them in the middle of a game though but if your playing with 5punkers i cant see any of us raging because you've spend a couple minutes reading the info on your hero

As Mr B noted, I don't spend my gold. What the shit do I spend my gold on though? I've bought the six newbie items recommended (and of course never bothered using them because they're all shit anyway and I didn't really pay that much attention to what they did) but then what? I have all six slots filled, so I can't buy anything else can I?

When you are near a shop you can right click any item in your inventory and sell it for about half what you paid (unless you sell it straight after buying it in which case you get it all back) and as grimmie said as well a lot of items build into bigger items. For example the magic wand you can make with 3 iron branches, a magic stick, and a recipe. once you have all these in your inventory they merge into 1 new item. if your inventory is full and you don't want to sell anything you have a "stash" which is an overflow for your items, so you can buy basic items away from the shop and they will go into your item stash, so if we go back to the magic wand example if you have 3 iron branches in your inventory and the magic stick and the recipe back in your stash then when you go back to base it will all merge together as soon as you are close enough to the base to take the items, or you can get the teams courier to pick them up and bring them to you so you dont have to leave the lane (there is a couple of buttons in the bottom right of the UI, to the right of your inventory, one with a picture of the couriers face (usually a donkey unless someone has a custom courier) which when pressed will get the courier to pick up items from your stash and bring them to you, and the other button will appear when the courier is upgraded that gives it a boost of speed. you can take direct control of the courier by clicked on them and you can then move around with right click, there is also a selection of buttons where your skills would be for things like return items to stash (handy if you died while the courier is on its way to you) and send the courier to the secret shop (more in this in a sec)

Its worth noting the courier has 6 inventory slots and you have 6 slots in your "stash"

So besides the shop in your base there is a shop in the top left and bottom right of the map which you can purchase a limited selection of items from, such as boots, and there is two secret shop, for the radiant side it is in the forest in between the middle lane and the top lane, and for the dire it is in the opposite spot in between the middle and bottom lanes, these are marked on the minimap by a little brown dot.

There are certain (usually quite expensive) items that can only be purchased from the secret shop, and are required for a lot of the mid to late game items that will really make your character powerful.

A lot of the guides talk about about knowing what your role is. Um, how? Is it like Pokémon where you basically have to learn what type each hero is by reading up on them, or is there some visual indicator? I get what the roles are, support, damage and so on - but didn't spot anything that tells me what I should be doing.

as grimmie said in the character selection on the card for each character are little icons which if you hover over will say things like, support, carry, jungler, nuker, tank etc. this can give you a rough idea on how to expect a character to play and feel but its not set in stone, and this changes a lot with the meta game (of which you don't need to worry about with 5punky games as none of us have a clue, expect maybe bali) there are characters who where originally designed to be support characters that are almost exclusively played solo in the mid lane. unfortunately not all the guides say what role they intended for it actually is but after a while it will just kind of start to click once you understand more of the mechanics and recognize more of the characters

while talking about different characters it can be good to know that the differences between them go beyond just the skills they have, they all start with different attack speeds and damages to one another, some will start with more stats in str, agi, or int than others, so going between lots of characters can be quite disorienting

so while we are talking abouts stats, there are 3 different stats, strength, agility and intelligence, all the characters will have on of those as their primary attribute (in character select this will be above those icons for the roles, if its a green blob its agility, a red blob and its strength and blue is intelligence) and that is the attribute you want to make the biggest. if you hover over the attributes next to your character portrait in a game it will give you a rundown on exactly what increasing each of them does.

So the primary attribute for your hero will give you more damage for every point you have in it, along with 2 other bonuses, so if you are playing a strength hero and you increase that attribute your attack damage will go up, you will get more health and you will get more health regeneration per second. whereas if as an intelligence hero and you increase the strength attribute you will only get the health and health regeneration.

i think for the intelligence attribute its more mana and mana regen and for agility it is attack speed and armour.

So increasing your heroes primary attribute will give you more damage but you still get the two standard bonuses for the other two attributes.

Right thats probably a horribly huge wall of text so i will stop there for now, i will say aswell though i have to commend you for sticking through what must have been pretty gruelling games and managing to come out of it still wanted to learn rather than just deciding its not a game for you

But just remember that we aren't really competitive in our games and that even if we are on the opposite team if you ask us anything we will try and help.

It might be worth trying to get on with a couple of us to just play a couple of games against bots as they are usually pretty relaxed and can give us the time to explain bits without actually worrying about whats really happening in the game

[FatherJack]

you have to take your fingers off the QWER keys.

Huh? My fingers aren't on the QWER keys - have I got some weird control scheme activated? WASD moves the view around (although I frequently have a bit of trouble with that and can't find myself and/or people sneak up on me) and I just click on the buttons to use the skills.

[Grimmie]

I think there's an option to have your skills bound to the 1,2,3,4,5 keys, or the q,w,e,r,t keys.

[shot2bits]

Yeah the traditional control scheme for dota is QWER for your skills and right click for movement/attacking (or A and left click to attack) and i personally use the mouse to pan around the camera. i cant imagine clicking the skill buttons to be very effective as your mouse would constantly be going all over the place and you would be trying to do too much with just your right hand.

also im pretty sure F1 is set by default to focus the camera on your character, and with the traditional control scheme that's never too far from your fingers anyway

[Dog Pants]

I wonder how many other people click on the skills. It's a massive disadvantage. I remember when I first started doing dungeons in WoW and I was clicking on buttons. I got absolutely smeared until I forced myself to use the keys. A lot of tactics need you to be watching the action and firing off skills in quick succession. It's not necessarily complicated (if it was I wouldn't be able to do it) but it can make the half-second difference between getting the jump on someone and getting stunned by them and killed to death.

[FatherJack]

Hmm, I'm not really using skills that much - I thought I was supposed to save mana. I'll have a look at the options, F1 sounds like a good one to know. I always clicked the buttons in WoW as well.

Thanks for all the replies, guys - a lot of great info there, though I imagine I will be crap for a while yet it's very useful to have a few pointers.

I'll have to look out for those indicators on the character select screen as I'm not sure they're there after you clicked Random and effectively already selected. Are there any good concise item guide sites I can open in a browser on my second screen? It sounds like it's going to be tricky selecting items when at the moment I have my hands full just staying behind the creeps.

[Dog Pants]

Saving your mana at the beginning is fine, but you can't use it when you're dead. I'll spaff mine if I think I can get a kill, but I never use it on creeps until mid-late game pushes (if at all). I'm pretty sure you don't get indicators once you've selected a character, which includes randoming. I have that problem too, but the guides should give you a pretty good idea.

Incidentally, we're all still crap too.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Mana is something you kinda have to balance, but generally you (mostly) want to save your skills for proper fights and generally fucking with other players, but equally, it doesn't hurt to use a bit to keep creeps down.

The in game guides add a sidebar to the shop, and you can alt + click (I think) to add them to a quick shop thing. (it's prudent to spend money as soon as you can, as you can lose a fair chunk from dying)


Also, I'm not sure it's been mentioned, but play around with a few different characters until you find something you get on with, and will inevitably be banned from, on the grounds of fairness, Sniper and bloodseeker are both quite simple to master and insanely high damage in end game.

[Baliame]

A few points of my own to chip in on this.

Laning Phase (from Level 1 until the lanes break up)
Laning phase is not primarily about killing the opposing team or grinding down that creep wave into dust. It's about sustaining a steady income of cash and XP until you feel you can comfortably take care of the match-up against you in your own lane. There are a few things which could use improvement.

First off, by attacking the opposing creeps you are weakening your position - every point of damage a hero does to an enemy creep will push the lane closer to the opposing tower, thus giving the opponents more options to gank you from behind and your laning opponents a safer position to farm from. You absolutely want to avoid this, thus the best thing you can do is nothing in this respect. Keep your distance from the enemy creeps to make sure they are attacking your creeps and not your heroes, and only last hit them to minimize the push you exert on the lane. Your own creeps, on the other hand, are fair game - the moment any of them goes below 50% HP they become deniable, and you should immediately do this as it will bring the lane closer to your own safe place. Remember to use your H key frequently. It orders your hero to Hold Position (stand still without attacking), a thing which frequently should be done during laning.

While keeping your improvement safe and steady you should also aim for minimizing the growth for the opponents. Melee heroes are usually not suited for this task, however ranged support heroes are perfect for this task. If you find yourself to be a ranged support in the lane of a melee carry, you should sacrifice your own farm to allow the carry to take as many last hits as possible. Use the extra attacks you are liberated from by this to harass the opposing melee hero in the lane, but only with auto attacks. It might seem like you're not doing any damage to them, but it all adds up if they're too cocky. This might not sound like very fun, however on the long run it will benefit the team to the point where you will earn so much assist gold out of a fed carry that you're much further ahead than if you took all those last hits you could. On the flipside, be careful, as AI units adhere to a strict aggro priority (attack dudes who attack heroes > attack dudes who attack towers > attack dudes who attack creeps > attack dudes standing still) and there is nothing more dangerous on levels 1-6 in your lane than being attacked by a bunch of creeps.

Another thing about lanes, and this is rather important as this is another thing that makes or breaks a lane: do not waste mana on harassing opponents, only ever waste mana on going in for the kill. This is especially noticable in the first few levels - most people will burn all their mana on repeatedly hitting that dude with their level 1 skill. It only tickles them but you're going to be out of mana for a while - so do not do it unless you are positive it will end up with the other dude dying. But when should you go in for the kill?

• Middle comes to gank and is going to arrive shortly behind the enemies.
• You are two versus a single hero of equal or lower level to both of you if strength, perhaps a few levels higher if melee agility or intelligence and he has no escapes or area stuns and you have at least two stuns or a stun and a slow available, with some high damage nukes except if it's Roman or Bits unless he is............. Yes. There are a lot of factors.

Or in other words, when it feels like that you are going to be able to kill the enemy or at the very least horse him to go home and recuperate. Any time he is forced to spend out of the lane is good.
The more important case is when not to go in for a kill. Trying for a kill has a lot of factors to observe, not trying for one has at least a million reasons to bring up though. Some of the more outstanding ones:

• Again. Super important. You are level 1. As much as it looks like you're going to go right ahead and just kill him, it won't happen, 90% of the time you will end up dying, losing first blood to the other team. Do not hang around near your enemy and absolutely don't waste mana on that sweet level 1 skill that does up to 50 damage for 33% of your mana pool.
• Middle is missing. If you find yourself in a position where you're winning the lane (getting far more gold and XP out of it than your opponents), it is the obligation of the middle hero to gank said lane. Thus you should not attempt to go in for the kill in these cases because while you are focused on the fight you are more than likely to be ganked from behind by a hero who is much higher level than you are.
• You are middle. In the 1v1 of middle, the balance is more delicate and there is nobody to pull you out of the shit there. On the other hand, there is nobody to pull your opponent out of the shit there either, however, unless he is making obvious mistakes, it is never, ever warranted to go two towers deep for killing something, especially in middle. Focus instead on hitting 6 before your opponent, which gives you a huge advantage over him for the matter of a minute, and either attempt to kill at that point, or save it for a gank.

Finally, some words about the role of middle. The middle hero can make or break a game in a number of ways. As middle, you should keep an eye on both lanes at all time - how they're doing, if there is an important carry on your team dying or an important carry on their team getting freefarm (an absolutely unobstructed flow of creeps and thus cash). In most balanced games, a carry will be on the long lane getting relatively good farm - as mid, it is your job to upset this balance and set him back by a few minutes in his farm, which is enough to get the edge over them. The best opportunity to gank a sidelane is right after grabbing a newly spawned rune. Note that rune spots are commonly warded and thus you should take alternate routes to sidelanes unless you want to be noticed.

Who should be middle?
The order of middle heroes can more or less be explicitly defined. There are three categories of heroes that should be middle if any of them are available in the game - high attack damage melee gankers or low attack damage ranged gankers who depend on getting levels much faster than side heroes (such as Tiny, Bloodseeker, Nyx Assassin, Spiritbreaker, Queen of Pain), very good pushers (such as Death Prophet) and heroes whose unique dynamics and low base damage make it difficult for them to play against two heroes (Shadow Fiend). Sending a carry or damage sink tank middle will probably benefit him a bit but on the long run it hurts the team as there is nobody to assist if the sidelanes suffer.

Hero roles
A few pointers to the playstyles of different hero roles. Loosely following these guidelines when you are of one of these roles will both make team dynamics better and should push you towards winning. Roles are given to heroes because it suits them, not because someone felt it should be that way.

• Ranged Support: (Notable examples: Shadow Shaman, Dazzle, Witch Doctor, Lich, Zeus, Warlock, Venomancer, Vengeful Spirit)
  Ranged support heroes are almost always the best babysitters. Babysitters generally inhabit the same lane as a carry, taking minimal creep kills and keeping the enemy heroes from harassing the carry at all costs. Supports are not only responsible for buying the courier, but also a thing I rarely, if ever saw in our games - warding. Vision is almost the most important information a person may have about the game. The lack of thereof makes you susceptible to ganks, random Roshan kills by the other team, and a carry who you've never seen before farming for 20 minutes without interruption and now he utterly demolishes your team singlehandedly. If another support is handling warding, you should instead do the counter-warding: use sentry wards to find enemy observer wards and destroy them. Common ward spots are on the image at the end of this post.
• Melee Support: (Abaddon, Earthshaker, Ogre Magi, Omniknight)
  A small category, melee support heroes are usually known for being very durable, high utility heroes with little to no ability to solo kill a hero of equal farm. Melee supports are usually much less expected to ward or buy the courier, unless there is no ranged support available on the team. They are also unable to babysit the way a ranged support hero does.
• Ganker/Nuker (Tiny, Lina, Lion, Luna, Queen of Pain, and a LOT more)
  Gankers are characterized by either having a combo of abilities which can be used to do a metric shitton of damage to a single target under a very short period of time or a single ultimate that does the same thing, or any linear combination of the two. Gankers which do not double as support (such as Queen of Pain, Nyx, Bloodseeker, Tiny) should primarily be the ones to take the middle lane, as a high level ganker makes a huge difference in sidelanes.
• Initiator (Enigma, Axe, Earthshaker, Sven, etc.)
  Initiators should, as the name suggests, initiate teamfights because they have a skill appropriate to do this. For example, Enigma's ultimate (Black Hole) can be used to collect a group of enemy heroes and stun them for up to 4 seconds, Axe's taunt disables anyone it affects from using skills for a while and contribute to his spinning, and Earthshaker has three AOE stuns at his disposal which he can fire off in quick succession. Initiators are not only heroes which can jump enemies, but also heroes who can horse a teamfight by dragging an enemy into an unwanted position, such as Vengeful's ultimate the hero swap. Initiators are universally known to be made better by buying a Blink Dagger. There is no initiator which does not benefit from it.
• Disabler (Shadow Shaman, Lion, Earthshaker, etc.)
  Disablers are a secondary role which must meet a single criteria: be able to take one or more enemy heroes out of a fight for a prolonged duration. This includes heroes with ridiculously long single target disables, such as Shadow Shaman, or multiple multi-target stuns (Earthshaker) which cumulatively add up to a lot of disable time, or the ability to manipulate pathing (Earthshaker again). In the case of these heroes, you are also encouraged to obtain a Blink Dagger, as you can jump in and disable a dangerous enemy hero until your team's heroes with serious killing power (carries, gankers) arrive.
• Semi-Carry (Shadow Fiend, Mirana, Venomancer, Bloodseeker)
  Semi-carries are, as the name suggests, not real carries. They are characterized by dealing an unusually high damage through auto-attacks, however they fall just short of the carry status usually because of the lack of an ability that scales perfectly with a primary attack attribute (damage or attack speed). This does not mean they are unable to carry, it just means they will need to have a lot more serious farm than a proper carry to be able to do it. Most semi-carries are known to benefit from a similar set of items - Sange & Yasha or Desolator, Mjollnir, Black King Bar. Semi-carries are usually ranged agility heroes (with some notable exceptions) or heroes which otherwise primarily qualify as gankers.
• Carry (Faceless Void, Naix, Riki, Anti-Mage, Razor, Clinkz, Weaver, and a lot more)
  Carries are heroes who have a skill (such as a chance-based stun or critical strike) which benefits from a primary attack attribute (damage or attack speed) or primary attribute (strength/agility/intelligence), or otherwise the ability to overwhelmingly reduce the physical defense of an opponent while not completely inept at dealing damage (Razor & his ultimate). Carries make or break the game past 35 minutes, so if you don't have one, you better be finished or overwhelmingly winning by then. They are characterized by an ability to devastate an enemy team with support from disablers if left unchecked and to farm. Carries are generally melee agility heroes with no other notable role, and are known to be close to useless if they are denied from farming. A notable shortcoming of carries is that they are inevitably focused in a teamfight and thus spend most of a teamfight disabled. It is absolutely essential to rectify that with a Black King Bar.

Key:
Magenta is jungle ward, used to observe one or more jungle creep camps. Green is jungle spawn blocker, used to prevent a creep camp from spawning creeps for the duration of the ward - a very common laning phase tactic is to block the pull camp (the camp with the two green spots) of the opponent's long lane to prevent creep denying by pulling neutral creeps. Yellow is rune ward, commonly throughout the game - in early game, the non-hybrid spots are used as those spots are also good for seeing if middle is coming your way, and in late game usually the hybrid spots are used as they have an extra function (such as seeing the enemy big creeps and/or Roshan). The two teal spots are the most common ward spots used to observe the enemy ancient creeps. They are both also rune ward spots. Finally, the red spots are forward wards on the enemy short lane, usually used by teams of roaming gankers for better vision. These are two high ground spots and thus have a large vision range, but what also makes them special is that they have vision of a common juking spot of their respective opposing sides.
(Juking: Using the enemy's lack of vision to your advantage. There are a large amount of long, narrow, low vision routes among the trees. Knowing these and their intersections is a great advantage because at each intersection if you go the way your opponent wouldn't expect you to, it might help you escape a gank.)
Two other things to note about the map: the yellow-teal hybrid spot at the bottom rune is the single best place to observe Roshan, the Dire ancient creeps and the bottom rune spot. It is important to keep a ward up here. The yellow-magenta hybrid at the top rune is notable because it is a jungle ward with high flexibility. The adjacent creep camp's ward checking range actually extends to the high ground where you place the ward, so if you place it "to the right but not too to the right", you can both see the rune from that ward and block creeps from spawning in that camp.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Yesterday, Me, Roman and Wifey did 3 games against bots, with random fleshbags.

Game 1: Fleshbags are Drow and Zeus, Total 5 kills between themselves, utterly, painfully incompetent. I died a few times watching aghast as they did insanely stupid things. Actual candidates for the Dotawin award (uninstall, noob)

Game 2: Sacks of ham are Faceless void (Well played!) and Pudge, Pudge is fine, plain old competent player. Faceless void (RIKI RUN!) is an utter and complete knobjockey, waits for other people to initiate, pops his ultimate either after his teammates have died, or have done enough for him to kill the enemies easily, then wanks himself off on voice because he's 12.

Game 3: Utterly unremarkable, I can't even remember what the other guys played, they were relatively competent, maybe not quite keeping up with us, but certainly not embarrassing themselves