[DotA] Back to Basics

Runes
At the beginning of every game and every second minute (00:00, 02:00, 04:00, etc.), there will spawn one rune in one of the two rune locations. There's 5 different kind of runes in the game. It's random if they spawn in the top or bottom location, and it's random what rune will spawn.

Double damage runes increase base damage by 100% for 45 seconds
Invisibility runes cause a hero to become invisible for up to 45 seconds (invisibility is broken if the hero makes an attack or activates a spell)
Haste runes allow a hero to run at maximum movespeed (522) for 30 seconds, and while Hasted that hero cannot be slowed
Regeneration runes very quickly heal a hero back up to full HP and MP. Like a salve or clarity, these break upon receiving any damage.
Illusion runes create two illusions of a hero that can be used for scouting, extra damage, or simply confusing the enemy

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Lanes
There are three lanes on DotA and there are more than one way to go about the lanes. Laning and how to lane a lineup is very complicated and you need a deep understand of the game to actually do this properly, so that is something we'll go into some other time. Maybe flamewheel will write a blog about laning, maybe I will. Who knows.

Anyway we have the three lanes. There's the top lane, middle lane and bottom lane. The most common way to do your laning is having a solo middle and two heroes in each of the other lanes. Middle lane is sort of even between the two sides, but the bottom lane favors the Radiant side and the top lane favors the Dire. People might even argue that the top lane favors the Dire more than the bottom lane favors the Radiant. Why? Well for starters let's talk about why one side is favored in one lane over the other.

The capability of creep pulling.
The safety due to being close to your tower (anti-gank, easier to play defensive).
The architecture of the forest.
The distance between your enemy and their tower can be utilized for killing easier.

Those are kind of the four aspects of why one lane is being favored over the other. However people might argue that the architecture of the Dire forest is a lot better and nice than the Radiant forest. Also as you can see in a video further below, there are more creep pulls from the Dire forest than from the Radiant.
But doing a 2-1-2 set up with the solomiddle is not the only way to do it. There are heroes in the game that can utilize the jungle very efficiently and create sort of a 1-1-2 scenario where you have to solo lanes. You could also be tri-laning a hero to get two solo lanes too, which would be a 1-1-3 scenario.

Tri-laning is the most difficult way to run your setup. Tri-laning requires a tremendous amount of game understanding as it is most oftenly not just three heroes sitting in the lane at all times. One or two heroes often stand out of experience range early on, but the threat of them being there forces the enemy to play defensively, may even force them out of experience range. Also you have a good opportunity of ganking middle lane a lot while still maintaining total domination of the lane where you've been trilaning. But it's a difficult thing to do as the supports come out underleveled and kind of plays with their back against the wall, so you need to be able to recover without compromising other heroes or your job as a support (which is wards, ganking and making sure the others in your team are having the time they want to be having).

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The Time of Day
DotA is much like real life. There's a day and night too. It's a fairly simple concept, but a lot of people don't think about it nor do they act differently in the given time of day it is. But it is actual one of the core and most important features of the game. The difference between day- and nighttime is the vision that's provided to you (pictures further down will show you the difference).

The difference in sight has a huge impact to the game. Ganking in the different hours of day is very different because the enemy will be able to see you later in the gank, but he will also have an easier of escaping by juking and utilizing the trees to obstruct your vision of him. However this is a thing everybody needs to get used to and understand.

Another cool feature regarding the day- and nighttime is Balanar, the Night Stalker. His 3rd spell which is a passive booster gets activated during night and he will receive a ton of positive attributes to him, such as movement speed and attack speed. An amazing and sweet feature of the game.

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Pulling
Pulling is an efficient way for a support to gain a little bit of farm and you gain extra experience from it. Besides those two things, it has a few other benefits. If your lane is pushed too far ahead and you want it back, closer to your tower so it's easier gankable for you or if it's too risky to be that far ahead because you leave yourself open to get ganked. And you deny your opponent experience from the creepwave that you pull. Smart, huh?

I've recorded two videoes that shows how you can pull as both Radiant and Dire. The first example in each video shows you how to stack a camp and note the time it's done at (between :51-53). You can do this for any camp and it's generally a good thing to do because you will get a few more camps to play around with which will increase your camp. However when you are pulling, you always want to stack the camps first. If you don't do it, it won't deny the whole creepwave that you're pulling in and that actually ends up pushing the lane instead of pulling it back. Important!!

In certain situations you can't always get to stack (maybe they've warded your pullspot to block your camp). If so you can do the trick of doublepulling which is shown as the last example in both videoes.

+ Show Spoiler [Radiant] +
+ Show Spoiler [Dire] +

When you're watching the Dire video, in the second example you will notice that I don't get the ranged creep in. It's because I chose a "bad time" to pull according to where our lane was, so the ranged creep got aggro from the other opponents creeps. If you just do it as I've done it, but your lane is pushed a little further towards your opponents tower, it will work perfectly.

While we're at the pulling thing, we can talk about blocking a pullcamp too. If you're too close to the spawn or have vision of the actual spawn, you will block the spawn which means no creeps will spawn. The funny - and great thing - is that because of that you can actually block spawns from spawning with a ward. This can be very useful to prevent people from having total lanecontrol who'll try to just keep stacking and pulling.

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The Jungle
The jungle is one of the most interesting places on the DotA map. Certain heroes are designed to farm the jungle from level 1, other heroes benefit a lot from it in the mid- and lategame and some heroes just don't use it at all. What's so interesting about it is that you can center a lineup around it and make the whole farming/level aspect a lot more efficient in a lot of ways. All that stuff is a little bit deeper than what I want to go into. There's a few basic and key mechanics in the game, you have to know about the jungle.

You've already seen what it is like to stack a camp and what benefits it has. To those of you who aren't aware of it, you can stack a camp up three times. Now you're thinking three times total or at the same time? At the same time is the correct answer. You can do the stacking maneuvre two times which will lead to the camp having 3 sets of neutral spawns. When they're killed off, you can start stacking again.

Now.. The camps have different difficulty and spawn different creeps with different "advantages". Some creeps have a lot of HP, other camps have a lot of DPS and some are just not very strong. I've done a little addition to the minimap, so you can see where the creeps spawn and their difficulty.

It's pretty easy to guess what is what. The green ones are the easy ones, yellow is medium, red is hard. But what is the blue one? It's the ancients. Ancients the strongest neutral creeps in the game and require serious business to be able to kill them - not something for a level 1-3 hero. They are also magic immune.

Roshan
Roshan the Immortal is the most powerful neutral creep on the whole DotA map. He is feared by everybody and only a few heroes with great farm can take him down in a one on one combat.

His abilities are:

Spell Block. Roshan will block one targeted spell every 15 seconds.
Spell Resistance. Roshan has a 75% spell resistance.
Bash. Roshan has a 15% chance to deal 50 bonus damage and stun for 1.65 seconds on an attack.
Slam. Roshan can slam the ground, slowing the attack speed and movement speed of units and heroes in a 250 AoE for 2 seconds on heroes, and 4 seconds on units. Slam also deals 70 damage and costs Roshan 90 mana to cast. Roshan will not cast Slam unless there are 3 or more units near him.
Illusion prevention. Any illusion that attacks Roshan will be instantly destroyed.
Devotion Aura. Roshan has a Devotion aura that increases his armor. The aura starts at +0.5 armor, and increases by +0.5 every 5 minutes from the first creep spawn. Roshan's aura has a maximum increase of +5 armor.

When Roshan dies, he will drop one of the most valuable items in the game: The Aegis. The Aegis will let you respawn at the point of death with full HP and full MP with a 5 second delay. It's basically an extra life. The Aegis is only alive for 10 minutes. If it's not used within those 10 minutes, it will magically disappear as Roshan respawns again (he respawn 10 minutes after his death). If you manage to kill of Roshan three times in a single game, he will start dropping more than just the Aegis. He will drop a little bit of cheese too. Haha. The cheese restores all your HP and MP instantly, but it needs to be activated. It's kind of like a mini Aegis.

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Rax & Towers
If you want to break down the main purpose of the game, it's all about eliminating your enemies throne. You do that by destroying towers and their main base. But it's very dependant on your lineup when and how you want to be pushing your lanes out. Different lineups require different timings and playstyles.

In every lane there's three tiers of towers. The higher tier tower, the closer to their throne it is and the more gold it will give you for destroying. It will give your whole team a set amount of money if it's lasthitted by a creep, but if the last hit is done by a hero, that one hero will receive a higher amount of gold and his team will receive less.

What happens when you destroy the rax? First of all, let's be clear. In every lane there's two rax, one melee and one ranged. When you destroy the rax in a lane, you gain a constant push as that lanes creeps will grown stronger for you. But also very importantly, it decreases the bounty on your creeps. Not only are the creeps harder to kill, but you also decrease the income of the enemy team. A very strong advantage at any point in the game. When the rax' are destroyed in all lanes, you will get mega creeps which are stronger than any other lanecreep. They do about 100 damage each and have a lot of HP. I have never seen a team comeback if they're up against megacreeps.

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Interested in getting access to the DotA2 beta?

This morning I pulled out the big hat with all numbers between 2 and 770 to draw the winner of the contest. Liquid`Nazgul took out the luckynumber #3, so the key will be going to post 3 (which in reality is post 2 because the OP count as post 1). Congratulations to Tanstaafl

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Last edit: 2011-11-09 05:43:12