Here is a laundry of list of things you should be doing if you want to make sure you’re playing well.

1). Ganking:

1). TP COUNTER GANK/GANK- TP once you see a dive happening and help out.  For ganking, first, remove yourself from vision of the opponent. If they see you tp’ing, they’ll call it. On arrival at the tower, make sure the creep wave is not at the tower and you have a way to ambush the enemy opponents.

2). ROAMING- Warding and counter-warding is heavily used in this strategy, mostly used with heroes that have a long duration level 1 slow/stun (Venomancer/Slither) (VS/Andro)

3). THEY HAVE WARD WTF- Okay don’t be a fucking moron and walk through wards and get counter-ganked. If you’re on Scourge side, and you want to gank woods, go through bottom tower and enter the woods that way instead of river. Use your brain

4).OVER-EXTENDING: If you pick VS and roam all game, ward and chicken, you’re going to be level 4 about 15 minutes into the game and just feed. While you do gank more, don’t hesitate to take middle lane solo when your solo goes to roam. Finding opportune times to leech EXP is very important.

5). THE NERD RICER – After a big fight, the nerd ricer player will go to the neuts after the fight is over. Go find the nerd ricer at the nearest creep camp (he’ll have lifesteal most likely) and just rape him. I’ve gotten hundreds of kills this way.

6). KILLING THE JUNGLE: Make sure you do it.  A lot. A good jungle player will farm more than you could every imagine.

7). PAY ATTENTION – Really, this seems so simple but it’s so rare someone pays attention to ganks. Say you’ll gank, and then the guy goes “Didn’t see you coming” and 2 kills are lost.  Make sure you ping and explain it to them what is about to happen.  You’re only as good as your team.

2). Skirmishes (small fights between few heroes with running).

8). DON’T GET NEEDLESSLY AGGRESSIVE WHEN THE OTHER PLAYER SHOWS UP AND THEY CANNOT SEE THEM – Just play cool in the lane like you teammate hasn’t shown up and is hiding to gank. If you play up, good players will assume someone has an invis rune from middle (if the whole lane is there and starts to play super aggressive, this is a give away), or someone is there to gank.

1). NEVER LEAVE -  If you notice, some players will initially use their skills and let his or her teammates help. If you are weak and took considerable damage, stay back and let your skills cooldown, go back into the fight with 25% hp but stay back and get a stun/disable off. If you have no mana/hp, just get the fuck out, do leave.

2). BLOCKING – If you have a good portion of HP or need to wait for a stunner that’s barely out of stunning range, block the opponent so they can catch up. Good opponents will know how to walk around you or use phase boots, but this is especially good early game.

3). BLOCKING DAMAGE – In this case, if you have a good amount of HP, try to get between the damage dealer and the person he is attacking if they are weak (i.e. if void goes in, break the two up with a lot of clicking between him and the hero to block his hero model so he cannot bash the shit out of someone).

3). Big Fights (5v5 tower pushes)

1). POSITIONING: KotL/Nymphora do not go in the front. You sit in the back and support. #1 reason of unnecessary deaths is positioning. Good players know where their hero stands in fights.  However, if you prove to be a big enough asshole, they’ll kill you anyway, but just hope your team cleans up.

2). ROLE: Sandking/Magmus and ES/Behemoth always go in first unless there is a special circumstance. You can go in a bit after the fight to clutter people too, but it’s up to you to learn when to go and when to stay. This takes hundreds of initiations to perfect it.  TheKing’s initiation with heroes like Enigma is so highly esteemed in the community that I cannot share you the secret (it’s use your brain).

4). Farming (easiest part of HoN/DotA).

1). Carry 2-3 Tps- You’ll need to bounce around lanes.

2). Ask team to support you – Asking a team nicely to get wards works sometimes. If your team is warding, life will be a lot better

3). Last hit – Duh

4). Gank if you’re solo – helps a ton. A small gank early game with 1 death is AMAZING. That hero will be considerably gimped for sometime to come.

Tags: Blocking, Dota, Farming, Tactics, TP'ing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 5:49 PM by KingRaven and is filed under Guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.