Basic DoTA Guide

These are some of the basic skills you will need for you to be a better DoTA / DoTA 2 player.





Familiarity with Heroes and their skills

This is one basic fault of new players. they tend to use heroes that they are already familiar with even when practicing. I do suggest to try out other heroes so you can familiarize your self with how to use the other heroes and their skills. It would be great if you can do this on a not-so serious game or when playing with bots or AIs.  This can help you during game time. When you are familiar with the heroes and their skills, you can predict what items, builds and attack patterns they would probably do and what you can buy or do to counter their attack / skills. You can avoid Earth shaker's Echo Slam, Mirana's Arrow, Pudge's Meat Hook, Sand King's Epicenter, etc. if you have already seen those skills being cast and you can find a counter or a way to stop or avoid those skills. Familiarity can help you take your game to another level.




Map Awareness

 The mini-map in dota and dota 2 is not a mere design. It was placed there on your screen for you to use. Advanced players can easily tell when someone is about to gank them (even without wards-that will be another topic) just by looking or glancing at the mini map. This is especially true in the early stages of the game or at the time when the mid hero reaches level six (especially for heroes like Queen of Pain, Pudge, Lion, Lina, Luna, etc) as they already have the Level 6 skill which can easily kill you with 1 hit or a combo of their skills. I'm not telling you to watch the mini map closely and with all your attention. If you do that you wont be able to farm and level your hero properly. A simple glance every so often (like when waiting for creeps to come) can be a big help. That time to time glance can be developed as a skill or habit for players wanting to play a higher level of dota. Advanced Players do this as a habit as to avoid being ganked.

 

DoTA mini map

 DoTA 2 mini map

Mini map Hero Icons

Last Hit


One of the main points of players games that needs improvement. This is your bread and butter, your money maker, your pot of gold. This is where battles are won and lost. This aspect of the game dictates if you can get higher level than the one you are against in a lane, if you get more money than the one your against and more importantly the psychological edge that you are superior to him/her. Nothing shakes enemies knees better than a player who gets all the last hits in his face.

Players have different techniques in doing last hit. Some players use the stop-stop-hit method while others use the walk-walk-hit method. It really depends on the hero you are using and the technique which fits the hero better. It also comes down to TIMING and how familiar you are with the amount of damage your hero has.

There are also heroes that spam skills to last hit creeps like shadow fiend, mirana, necrolyte,  death prophet, dragon knight, earthshaker, jakiro, etc. Their skills are used more oftenly on creeps to obtain money and exp.

Item Familiarity

Another basic skill that a dota player must have is item familiarity. it is basically the same as hero familiarity but this time you will need to be  aware and knowledgable with the items that you can create and build for different characters. Knowing which heroes needs the aghanim's scepter and how it affects a heroes' ultimate skill is a good example. We had someone in our team one time that created an Aghanim's Scepter for Enigma thinking that it will boost the Black Hole's effects instead of getting a refresher orb(little did he know the Aghanim's Scepter doesn't affect Enigma's Black Hole. Item Familiarity will be detrimental of how successful your dota/dota 2games will be. Another good example is when to build a Linken's Sphere and which skills it blocks. Some players get frustrated getting pawned by an enemy hero skill which he expects to be blocked by the sphere and usually calls it a bug. little does he know that another hero's skill was cast on him before he was pawned and it triggerred the cooldown for the sphere. He also didn't know that the enemies did that on purpose so they could pawn him and it is part of their ganking strategy.


More DoTA Gaming Improvement Pointers to come.

Here are our other articles:
Arcane Legends
Dragon City