The art of... creeping? A farming guide for DotA.

Let's face it:

You don't know how to jungle.
Your lane staying skills are terrible.
You can only deny some of your creeps, when they move along after they've killed an enemy creep wave.

Well, luckily enough, you've stumbled upon this page, and I have some really awesome farming tricks for you!

Observe the creeps' habits.
When two creep waves meet, they act quite smart - three creeps pick a target enemy creep and try to kill it, so finish the creep that they are attacking first. After that it becomes easier as they split.

The opponents creeps can help you - or attack you, if you are too aggressive.
If you attack a hero, try to remember the range from which the creeps go to help your opponent.

This isn't exactly about creeping - but still a worthy trick - when you attack a tower, and it strikes back, you can "attack" another target, for example, a friendly creep or hero, to make the tower "think" that you aren't attacking it.

Some more insight :

1. DotA is all about farming until everyone gets to level 7-10.
Then come the ganks, and even if you are very successful in ganking, you still need to farm, otherwise your game will fail.

2. The more you suck at farming, the more your opponent overruns you.
Oh, you don't believe me? Well, think this : a mediocre farmer would have about 1000 gold at the ~8:00 mark. This is 60*6, 360 gold from the counter, and about 600 from creep killing - about 10-12 creeps. If you miss them, you couldn't even afford Boots of Speed! I'm not theorycrafting here, really.

3. Ask for lane swaps, if you are, for example, a melee hero against an army of ranged harassers.


Watch and analyze professional replays if you can't farm well! You can download them from the gosugamers.net DotA replay section.

DotA - do you guys have any manners?

Played three games today. You know what? I can't say anything besides this :

I hate the Warcraft nerds.



The first game was okay, but then two people from the opposing team discovered that they were from the same country and started typing each other in their language.
The result was terrifying - one of them kept feeding, getting ganked while typing. A guy from our team left and the game was over.

Lesson Number one :
Don't play with people from small countries.

The second game was worse.
Two clanmates played for Scourge, in which, I unfortunately always play.
They, of course, got ganked and couldn't do anything with their SK+Lina lane combo (My guess - they watched a VP replay, but still sucked). Then, they tried to do a combo by quitting together. But it failed, just like their relationship, life, job, and wives will - the other guy quit 1 second later. The game, of course, ended violently.

Lesson Number two :
Don't play with people who have identical prefixes/suffixes to their nicknames (read: clanmates). You either will get pwned hard and your team will leave, or they both'll leave.

And what with the third game?
The third game deserves another post for it.
However, to keep you interested, here's something for you.

Lesson Number Three :
NEVER PLAY DOTA!

Blade Mail - is it worth shit?

Let me guess - you have never used Blade Mail before in DotA, since you
1) Haven't seen the pros using it,
2) Haven't played heroes on which Blade Mail is actually worth something,
3) Don't know what is it really made for

1. The pros will never go BM. Really. In good games, people will actually have good itembuilds - you won't see a super-DPS-riki with no HP items, which you can counter with 2BMs, or a team, consisting of 5 meelee players with no good nukes.
Although just a little bit more priced than mithril hammer, mainly it still fails as an item slot, because the damage it gives is weak and doesn't counter ranged heroes (lolol!)

2. Those are tank heroes - and again, highly situational. For example, BM would be a good idea with centaur against 5 meelee heroes, since BM doesn't counter ranged attacks and is useless, if you can't live long enough for BM to do something worthy.

3. BM is made for countering lifesteal heroes. Lifesteal heroes mainly rely on their high DPS to kill you, but if you buy a Mail, you have a) a damage returner, which, unlike their damage, is reduced only by magic resistance, and counters at least Vlad's/HoD/MoM b) an armor boost (+5) armor, for their damage to get reduced.

Since the damage done by the mail is magic, the real percentage of return is 15%(not 20%), however, the damage return calculus in made on the incoming damage and not after the armor reduction is applied.

How do you counter it? Any ranged attack, HoD, dagon, nukes, whatever will surely kill the hated user of the Mails.

Also - Black King Bar disables it completely, so dont go for it against sven/barathrum/whichever BKB user.

Rattletrap - The Goblin Clockwerk

The Clockwerk Goblin

There has been some talking around the balance of the new hero of DotA - The Goblin Clockwerk in some online boards. I did, from the start, believe that the hero is balanced, however, some whiners just don't get it, just didn't have time to discuss it with others, probably because of my lack of communications. But hey - others did!

A post worth mentioning was made in the official dota forums, by a dude named Fellower of Odin. I'll go as far as quoting him, since he has really got a point here and there.

"Clockwerk Goblin is a tank, not more, not less. A tank is supposed to receive a lot of damage, but deal minor damage in return. Furthermore, a tank should have one or more skills that support his team. A tank is a meat shield and his main purpose is to save and support your fellow teammembers."

I'd like to add to that - one may argue that he is a DPS tank, since he has a pretty good start AS, but that was probably added for compensating his agility flaws.

"c) Rocket Flare is imbalanced, it deals too much damage -

Rocket Flare deals 200 damage at level 4. That's 150 damage to heroes. Yes, the skill has a low cooldown. Yes, it has low manacost. But still - 150 damage is far away from being strong. The nuke is comparable to any level 2.5 nuke, e.g. Lightning Bolt. Of course, it has unlimited range, but the delay is pretty long if you decide shooting over the whole map. Furthermore, Clockwerk Goblin has a crappy manapool that does not allow him spamming his skills until midgame. And once you reached midgame, Rocket Flare's damage is hardly important any longer."

An overall great post to shut up the whiners, trolls, etc etc.

Raigor Stonehoof - The Earthshaker itembuilds

Spellspam












Necromicro

What'll be new in 6.53?

Here is a changelog in dota-allstars.com - as you can see, there are going to be some nerfs and a lot of buffs to change the style of the game completely, for example.

- Infest now works on Int heroes
- Made new visual effect for Pudge that makes him bigger each time he kills something and has Flesh heap. To prevent abuse of wholescreen Pudgeing, limit was added and after Pudge reaches that limit, he implodes and becomes a black hole. Black hole can be controlled to come near heroes and suck them in.
- Made Lina hotter
- Added a huge sign "PRO" which flashes over hero that buys wards.
- bug fix to Scream of Pain dealing damage to units without ears

How do I know this is true? I'm a DotA beta tester, lol!
Also, I'd like to see some changes, which I hope Icefrog will implement in future versions of DotA :

- If you use bottle at the fountain, the fountain turns green and stops healing. If you don't stop using bottle, it kills you.
- Lothar's edge now has a 15% chance of not stopping invisibility, and denying you the possibility to attack.
- A cosmetic effect to Techies' Suicide - They turn into a Goblin Zep and two towers show up at the place where they're going to blow up. May include a sound animation.
- Mirana's skill keys are as follows now : p, l, o, n, to help Mirana players' to further increase their microing
- The final nerf for BristleBack. He now can't enter the jungle, so no one has to nerf him. Instead, he has a terrace at his base that only he can walk. The terrace gives him +15MS and a shiny look.

Please, post any ideas of what you want to see in future updates. It'll really help

In depth - how to counter Omniknight's ultimate?

We all hate his ultimate - physically speaking, it makes him nearly invulnerable (98% damage reduction, 1000 armor for a short time).
Magically speaking - we can still pwn his ass! But wait, he has another spell -
What now?
I'll be as short as I can in telling you what now.


Battlefurry (hihi). You may ask "wtf?", but cleaving damage doesn't get reduced by armor!
You just don't have to hit him directly! Also Sven and Magnutaur can counter his ulti by hitting units around the guy who has Guardian Angel on.

Impale of Lion, and other stuns - pretty smart, huh? Just as Linken's doesn't block them, spell immunity CERTAINLY doesn't block 'em.


Orchid Malevolence!
You can use after/before he had used his ulti, to silence him, or don't let him use Repel.