The Fundamentals of DOTA

A recent game got me thinking about stuff I could consistently point out that everyone messes up from time to time and none of them involve tread swapping. You all probably know all of this already, but some things are worth repeating.

1. Unwillingness to trade objectives – Too many times I’ve seen people give up on a guaranteed tier 3/rax/rosh to instead defend against someone taking a tier 2 or even a tier 1.
2. Fighting for every single objective – Sometimes you have a late game hero that needs time to farm and the enemy team punishes that by grouping early and rotating to different lanes taking different towers. You are most likely expected to lose those towers. Stop porting into them and feeding the enemy team. You will never lose a game off the enemy team taking t1s and t2s but you will certainly lose the game if you die pointlessly defending them, propelling the enemy even further along. Get other heroes farming other lanes and jungle areas. With luck, your enemy team might lose focus of their objective and port out to defend towers they shouldn’t, stopping the deathball (point 1).
3. Not buying a stick/upgrading to a wand – Even divine players are guilty of this far too often. Best item in the sideshop that gets ignored far too often. Depending on the matchup you can justify certain other items first (quelling blade or boots) but 99% of the time you will want this item fairly quickly in the lane (this does not mean take the courier at the first min to fly your wand recipe out when your midlaner needs their salve).
4. Raindrops – Same as above. Just buy them when you can. They’ll pay for themselves nearly every match. Upgrades into an urn as well. Sometimes I buy them a second time. Not dying once means it’s worth it.
5. Pay attention to the numbers – When you’re waiting on bounties to spawn look around at people’s attack damage, armor, hp and movement speed. You’ll start to feel a lot more confident about taking early fights and skirmishes once you’ve got ideas on which heroes have low armor and which don’t. Also, if your hero has some fixed spell damage you can do some quick math (spell damage * .75) to figure out how much right clicking you need to do to get kills.
6. Adult daycare – Stop responding to people who have no intention of making peace with you or someone else on your team. Maybe they lost their lane, maybe they’re having a bad day or maybe they’re just a troll. It doesn’t matter. If someone doesn’t accept that you didn’t have the mana as to why you didn’t cast that spell that would have totally changed them from being beat down by four players then it’s not worth going in circles with them. You have dota to play and someone is distracting you from doing your best. Mute and move on.
7. Not valuing the ranged creep – Mid players prep the ranged creep before nuking the wave. I’ll deny it everytime if you don’t. Supports and cores, try to coordinate the denies if you can. If your carry looks like he can’t get to the ranged in time and you have a nuke, just take the creep.
8. Farming towards a goal – Basically applicable to all roles. Please tell your team that you are farming specifically so you can then go do a thing (push, rosh, fight, gank, w.e).
9. Backpack your smokes – I’m extremely guilty of this myself but as you rank up in dota things become more and more time sensitive. Sometimes your window to do certain things lasts only a matter of seconds. Just put your damn smokes in your backpack so you don’t have to tell your team to wait for the courier to ferry it out to you. You might lose some vital opportunities because it took 40 mins for you to remember that the item exists.
10. Coordinate courier usage in the laning phase – It has 9 slots. Use them. One of my pet peeves is a sidelane using a courier to deliver stuff to one hero, then going back to the base and coming back to the same lane to deliver stuff to the other hero.