Life Outside PLT1

Teamwork, communication and building a better future

January 19, 2007 on 8:08 pm | In Dota | | Jeremy Read

So you’ve been playing DotA for a bit, and you’re no longer dying having read Simon’s guide. However that guide will keep you alive, it will not make you a useful member of the team.

You want to win. If you don’t, you can be on the other team.

First thing. Starting items.

• Ring of Regeneration (375)
• Sobi Mask (325)
• Ring of Protection (175)

This is my primary build for all heroes, some people will disagree with me, but it is my belief that this will offer the most utility to you in the majority of cases. It increases your health and mana regeneration rates, allowing you to recover from damage faster and to use your abilities to hold your lane. If you can argue why these aren’t good starting items for the hero you’re playing than reading this guide is pointless…
From now on there are three things you need to focus on

1. Communication
2. Teamwork
3. Building items

Communication
The first topic will be rather brief. There’s a Ventrilo server. Even if you aren’t going to talk then login just to listen. People can yell at you a lot faster than they can type about incoming ganks. If you know something that your team doesn’t then tell them, the ping tool is your friend.

A final note on typing that should be obvious. If you’re typing and enemy heroes come up to you just hit enter and deal with that first. Don’t die to your own typing, that’s just retarded.

Teamwork

Now that the game has begun from this point on everything revolves around teamwork. Discuss which lanes you are going to take.

The middle lane is both difficult to hold and to push. You have to worry about being attacked from all sides. Both teams tend to put their best players in this lane. Also in case you hadn’t noticed the map isn’t square. The horizontal lanes are longer, than the vertical lanes! This means you’ll have a longer walk back to the fountain if you choose a horizontal lane, also you’ll need to be careful as it is relatively easy to get behind your first tower from the forest so be careful how much damage you take.
Early game the only thing you need to worry about is harassing people in your own lane, and accumulating the gold you require for your mid-game items. Unless you are completely certain that you can kill the opposing hero(es) in your lane do not take the risk of doing so. This can easily backfire. Potentially badly enough to cause a irreversible cascade effect. Supposing you’re holding the top lane for scourge against two heroes on the left. You get greedy and die, and don’t respawn for thirty seconds. Due to your death they gain both money and level up further than you do, take out your first and partially damage the second tower. Now they only bother keeping one hero in your lane as due to the additional resources that hero can easily counter you. Thus they send a third hero to the middle lane. Which is now under the brunt of three heroes and crumbles, and so forth. You may never be able to stabilize from this situation, so don’t cause it.

Mid-game you’ll start to organize ganks, the key to these is to be discreet so the other team doesn’t notice. You usually do not need to use all five players on your side to kill someone at this stage so don’t bother. Keep a hero in each of your lanes so that you appear to be busy, and the remaining two heroes AND the hero in the lane you are trying to perform the gank will do the job. You need to think about your skills when choosing who do this. If you’re going against Sandking or any hero which can cause high damage to all of you make sure you’re packing disablers. If the gankers get ganked I will laugh .
During the gank worry about the hero, the creeps aren’t important. You should be able to do enough damage to kill the enemy and escape relatively unscathed. Note you should also be looking out for this yourself, if you notice that a set of heroes that can kill you is missing than be extremely cautious (if you can’t be, than run).
Avoiding ganks.

Venomancer can use wards to increase the area visible (yes I know Vlad’s doesn’t work on Veno).

Broodmother is particularly useful for team members with her webs, as the enemy team cannot even get rid of them. Great for giving visibility of the river to protect against back ambushes while pushing mid.

Obviously not all heroes have built in protection, but there’s nothing stopping you from buying the cheap wards as they last for ages, or acquiring Lothar’s Edge for windwalk.

If you’re on the sentinel side here is where you worry. Red is worse then yellow. And gray/white splotches are where they will come from. If you have some way of making the gray areas visible than you’ll have far more warning. Note the yellow spots on your own side! Especially the bottom right tower, once that is gone it is is exceptionally unsafe to be there, as for all you know their entire team is in the forest above you. Also don’t dawdle in the secret shops of either side you never know who else is going shopping. Notice the grayed out icon that looks similar to a dartboard or a flag stuck in the ground. It’s the ping tool if you didn’t know where it was.
Obviously for Scourge the danger spots are similar, there’s a few slight differences for either side but roughly speaking it’s about a mirror image.

There is one interesting thing to note, I’m unsure why but it seems that scourge doesn’t notice top being pushed as much as sentinel does bottom, possibly because it’s at the top of the mini-map.

Pushing requires teamwork!

Unless the game has gone haywire and players have been fed it should be impossible for a single player to push mid. Your average life expectancy near the second tower is about 2 seconds by yourself.

It’s significantly harder to push than it is to defend. Don’t do it alone, either take a trout or a couple of mates with you. If you have escape methods the minimum number of heroes needed to push each lane is two for the sides and at least three for middle, more likely four once you hit the second tower.

You can use this to your advantage though, while the opposing team is all mid if your team is competent you should be able to hold with only three or four. So while they’re wasting time you can be clearing the towers top. There’s a high chance that you can see all of their heroes while you’re doing this, giving you ample warning of when they’re coming to get you. Not only that but if any of their guys teleport back you’re relieving some of the pressure mid.

Only do this if you have an escape mechanism for the five pissed off heroes coming to get you, and if your team has agreed to it. This is solely because the most precious thing in the game is the barracks (rax) in each lane. Once the difference in number of barracks becomes more than one it’s extremely unlikely you can make a comeback. As you will end up having to dedicate a hero to each lane just to hold it.

Build orders
By popular demand and so I don’t have to type it out each match.

I like to use Tangos to eat trees early game, they’re tasty and let me stay in my lane for longer. Argue about my builds all you want, people on the DotA forums don’t agree so I certainly don’t expect we will either. If you want some more ideas go read some of the premium guides, just remember that nothing is absolute. Finally I believe that blink dagger is an exceptionally useful item for escaping ganks, more so than Boots of Travel. So if you’ve got the cash and slots for both and have to go rambo than get it.

If you’ve learnt just one thing from this guide than it has fulfilled it’s purpose, feel free to rant in the comments.