So I recently started playing role queue ranked, and I have no idea how I can get better, or whats the difference between lower and upper MMR players.
I used to play Starcraft, and I always knew in each league what was my problems, what went wrong in the game, and what I could do better in the next one.
In guardian level games I can see players stopping spirit breaker using charge of darkness with rod of atos in the blink of an eye, using tinker perfectly, starting and finishing every teamfight perfectly, and other plays that I don’t know how can get better. And still its only guardian, and can’t imagine what they do better in immortal.
But dota has so much more factors, like games can get decided during picking heroes, there are 4 other players in the team that I don’t always watch / know what they are doing. Is it even possible to judge a players skill correctly in dota?
In my current league (around guardian 2) 90% of the games are about one team absolutely destroying the other. I feel like whatever I do is pointless, because either the team is doing fine without me, or can’t do anything that will turn the game around, because of bad picks or that 1 or 2 players with 0-9-1 at 8 minutes.
I prefer to play soft / hard support. Not sure how much this sound like “everybody is bad except me”, but I’m totally open to the idea, that I’m just bad. But as I said, I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.
So I was wondering what could I do to get involved in better games. I don’t even dream of getting a high MMR (though it would be pleasing), I only want to play fun and close games where the team works as a team. My only guess / hope is that at higher levels games will get better.
I am not the right person to give advice on this matter, but I just want to wish you good luck.
Dota is a complex game. Best thing I can recommend is watching pros or their coaching sessions and understanding why they do what they do. But my two cents at that mmr, id imagine theres room for improvment in these areas:
having map awareness, knowing what all the items do, knowing what all the heros cam do, mechanical skill, knowing when to rotate, when to pull creeps to maintain a prefferable lane position, how to find farm outside of your lane as a support, stacking camps, denying creeps, checking enemies items
Is it even possible to judge a players skill correctly in dota?
It’s incredibly hard, because there are just so many different important skills in Dota. Like you say, players might be casting their spells/items with perfect timing in fights. But that’s only one thing! That player may be good at that, but maybe they’re a terrible teamplayer and don’t combo their spells correctly with their teammates. Or they’re off farming jungle a lot when they should be pushing a lane. Or they tilt easily and stop caring if things don’t go their way.
These are all different skills in Dota that everyone is a varying degree of “good at”. To judge someone’s skill level, you need to know all the skills there are and how good a player is at each of them. Since you’re new yourself and don’t even know which skills are important, and many of these skills also don’t have an immediate externally visible sign that tells you how good someone is, it’s very hard to accurately judge someone’s skill. It gets better the higher your skill gets, but never perfect.
However, it’s pretty easy to judge someone’s skill level in your own games: they’re all just as good as you, since their rank is close to yours (of course, sometimes there’s party queue or late nights where the match finder puts a larger spread of people together, but one you can disable and the other is not too common). So while you don’t know their exact distribution of how good they are at each skill, you know that their total average of all their skills is equal to your average.
There are some skills you’d want to find out about your teammates when playing. There are some that are more important to you, for example how aware they are of their surroundings and how inclined they are to help you.
Those are pretty easy to figure out, for example, if you do something a little off screen from them and need their help, if they come, you know they’re probably not terrible at it. If they leave you hanging you know they’re probably bad at it. You can then adjust your gameplay with that information, if you know they’re bad at helping you, you should play more careful since you know you can’t rely on their help, and maybe be more explicit in requesting their help.
An incredible resource for support players starting out is BSJ’s series of coaching sessions with Eri Neeman. It has the same problem as a lot of other BSJ coaching sessions in that they’re not very information-dense, so the videos are longer than they “need” to be. But he (eventually) goes through all the important stuff you need to do as a support and how to do it, and he’s actually correct in his assessments more often than not, compared to a lot of other educational content creators.
Thanks! Will get into it, looks like its good content
Edit: one question: I have seen that dota gets smaller/bigger patches frequently. Doesn’t this make old content obsolete?
Only minorly. Yeah, it’s not incorporating the new features, but most of the game fundamentals are still the same. There have also been patches in StarCraft, for example, but the fundamentals of for example that you want your buildings working, keep your resources low don’t change, of course specific stuff like build orders do. It’s the same in Dota.
The Eri series is very fundamental if I remember correctly, sure, there were no tormentors or xp runes or warp gates and rosh was somewhere else, but the fundamentals of creep pulling, farming, who to support etc don’t change.
You are certainly very bad. Don’t feel bad about it, though, being bad at something is completely normal, especially when you start out. The ranking algorithm is very accurate. So since you’re ranked in guardian 2, that means that roughly 90% of players are better than you.
Dota is probably one of the most complex games around right now, which is why it is so attractive to many. I’ve also played Starcraft 2, which indeed is also pretty complex, but compared to Dota infinitely less so. Just simply the amount of options you have to do different things is incredibly more vast in dota. Simply just to learn all the features of the game is basically a neverending journey, while you know pretty fast which units/buildings do what in Starcraft and are aware of all options of the game. Compared to learning all heroes, their spells, all items, all map features, all creeps around the map, all special interactions between items/abilities, it’s basically negligible. Everyone, even pros, are learning the game all the time, so you could basically say one of the main gameplay elements of Dota is learning.
And even if you were done learning all features, you’d still have to actually learn to use all these features, i.e. playing itself, to worry about.
What I’m saying is, essentially every player in Dota is “bad”. The game feels more punishing because you just sometimes feel absolutely stupid, even though of course you aren’t. You regularly have moments that feel like forgetting that you need to build a Cybernetics Core before you can build Stalkers, which sounds bad in a Starcraft context, but in Dota that’s just normal.
Also since you played Starcraft, you know very well that small advantages quickly spiral into larger advantages, i.e. snowballing. Theoretically, in a perfect Starcraft game, if one player falls behind early and both play well from that point onward, the one that fell behind will keep falling more behind and eventually lose. But of course, there’s also defender’s advantage, which allows to extend the game and allow the other player to make a mistake themselves, thus evening out the game again, which means that not every game where one player gets an advantage is always won by that player. It’s exactly the same in Dota, but it works completely differently, since defender’s advantage is not about rush distances, and in general, the gameplay is just completely different.
So what I’m saying with all of this is, what you’re experiencing is completely normal. Dota is very different from most other games and has very special knowledge required. It’s completely normal to feel completely lost and not even have an idea of where to start.
So, with that out of the way, let’s get a bit more practical: how you actually get better in Dota.
So first of all, what you’re doing here is the best thing you can do. Ask other people what to do better. You lack a lot of knowledge and experience, and in a game so complex that is incredibly valuable. Luckily, we humans have learned how to transfer experience, by talking about things.
The second most important thing is to just learn what all the things do in Dota. Whenever you come across something that you forgot, look into it again and make sure that you understand what’s happening.
The next thing is to actually play the game, of course. If you don’t play enough, you won’t be getting comfortable with how the game controls. This is the thing most people do the most of and which comes naturally.
As you probably know from Starcraft, watching your own replays is also incredibly important. In tandem with this, watching pro player replays and seeing what they do (and figuring out why) and thus learning new things to incorporate into your own game is also very useful.
And now finally, as the very last part, let’s get into actual advice for you on what you’re doing wrong and what you can do better.
I have no idea, and there’s just too much in dota to just give you general advice. The single best thing you can do is to post a match ID of yours and let me (+ others) look at it. I’m very knowledgeable about all stages of the game, but I’m pretty bad at playing currently since I’ve just not been playing the game lately, but I’ve been involved in the game since Dota 1. When I played more, I’ve been ranked ~top 10%. If you want, we can chat a bit about the game.
Thanks for the detailed answer(s) :)
You are certainly very bad.
The ranking algorithm is very accurate.
In fact, at your level, if you were playing at pro level, you would literally win 99% of your current games. [from other comment]
Its good to hear these, because if the ranking is accurate and I’m bad, and its possible to make this big of a difference in one game then I can improve! I feared that skill levels in dota doesn’t really vary, so thanks for pointing these out. But I love to play competitively, push myself to a limit, and figure things out (just like in starcraft).
One thing I can tell you with 100% certainty is that, while it may feel like you have no impact on the game, you definitely have. In fact, at your level, if you were playing at pro level, you would literally win 99% of your current games.
The only reason why it feels like you have no impact is because you’re used to 1v1 games, where you’re 100% responsible for the outcome of the game. Of course, in a 5v5 game, you’re only, in a completely even game, 20% responsible for the outcome of the game. So your feeling is absolutely correct, you are essentially only 1/5th as responsible as you’re used to, which is a very large drop and may feel like “nothing” comparatively, but it’s not nothing. That also means that it’s effectively impossible to win every game, and that some games can be won with you under-performing.
But of course, if you’d be playing 4v5, i.e. you would do absolutely nothing in the game, “having no impact”, so your team was missing 20% of its power, the win chance wouldn’t be 50%*0.8=40%, it’d actually be pretty close to 0%. Also, just “playing better than your opponent” is enough in a 1v1 game, but not in a 5v5 game. You also need to balance out your teammates’ average or bad performances. So instead of you “winning a game yourself”, what you’re doing is basically raising and lowering your chance of a win with your gameplay.
I only want to play fun and close games where the team works as a team
You are directly responsible for this! How often have you been talking with your teammates? How often have you been telling them what you want to do, and that you want their help? How often have you told someone: “I’m with you, when you go in, I’ll be there”?
My guess is roughly never. That’s also normal though since you have no idea what you’re doing and are completely focused on your own gameplay, which is understandable.
But if you want a game like that, you can have it by communicating your plan. Of course, that requires some sort of plan. And it requires that your teammates play along. So it won’t work every time. But you communicating and trying to bring the team together raises the chance a lot. Most people want to have someone in thejr team coordinating the action, and that role is very valuable.
However, as you noticed already, it’s incredibly hard to just focus on your own gameplay already, so until you get to the higher levels, where people got their own gameplay down a bit more, that kind of communication is indeed rare. So communication and teamplay does indeed increase a bit in higher levels.
But you still need someone doing what I just described. If you’re not doing it, then you’re relying on someone else to do it. And in that case, there’s only a relatively small chance that one of your teammates will be that kind of person. So if you care about teamplay and playing together a lot, it’s best to learn to make plans and coordinate with your team yourself.
You are directly responsible for this! How often have you been talking with your teammates?
I try to use the ping / chat wheel as much as I can. I love that feature, has nearly everything I need. I noticed that there is a setting to ignore messages from everybody except friends, and its the default so usually I don’t really chat, only reply if somebody is saying something. I’m sure typing messages is superior to using chat wheel only, but not sure how much
I’m not talking about typing or chat wheel at all, I’m talking about voice chat. Typing is much too slow and distracting and chat wheel does not allow you to be specific, for example how are you supposed to say “Void used his Chrono, go fight RIGHT NOW” with either chat or chatwheel? With chatwheel you can’t express this, with chat you have to stop playing to type which might be a death sentence and also too slow if you really need to go NOW.
Ah yes totally understandable, didn’t thing of voice chat. I just don’t feel comfortable speaking with random people online, especially after seeing what they can type in chat
Understandable. I do not care at all anymore, I just mute and move on.
What’s your favorite role or heroes? How many hours you played?
As for role, he already said that he mostly plays hard/soft support :) Hours played and heroes would definitely also be interesting though.
https://stratz.com/players/1547984348 Steam says I played ~250 hours (but that counts the game running not matches I guess), dota says 251 games, my favorite heros are hoodwink, techies and undying. But I don’t usually pick them, I try to play other heroes depending on what I think would counter / help opponents / allies better. Also playing a few set of heroes can be boring to me, so that’s why I try to be diverse.
My guesses about which hero is to pick is usually based on stuff I make up (i guess incorrectly) like lion vs heroes with important channeling abilities and if team doesn’t have many stuns, keeper of light with heroes that need a lot of manna, natures prophet if team lacks pushing abilities, crystal maiden if my supported teammates hero likes people stuck in one place, undying if team lacks “tank”. I also try to watch pro games. By “try” I mean that I don’t always feel that I 100% understand whats going on, but at least I learn something
For 250 hours you’re already pretty good. There are people with 10k+ hours ranked lower than you :)
Pro matches are actually playing a kind of different game, in my other message I was more talking about pro players in public matches, like what is found in https://dota2protracker.com.
Actual tournament matches are hard to impossible to learn from, since they’re so extremely different from pub matches. Having 5 people all on the same page against another set of 5 people that all communicate with each other, all understanding the game to a level as to play theoretically perfectly.
That opens up a whole new level of play in that they are predicting all the time what the others will do and thus countering that in a very specific way. But this is only really possible because they all know what the “perfect” play is, and the countering they’re doing is only possible because they all know what to do. A lot of this doesn’t work in pub matches, because if the opponent (or your teammates) do not know the optimal play, then you can’t predict what they do, and the counters you might try to do in an actual pro match might actually not make very much sense in such a scenario.
The way you win in pub matches (as long as not too much other pros are also involved) is by simply doing the optimal thing, not worrying too much about countering, since you likely won’t be countered, and counter-play itself is mostly not the optimal play, only in combination with stopping what the others are doing, which you don’t if they’re not trying to play optimally.
Idk this was probably a bit confusing :D anyway what I wanted to basically say is that actual pro matches are amazing because it actually shows the potential of how beautiful Dota can be, but they’re so far removed from pub play that they’re not very useful to learn from.
Do you want me to have a look at one of your matches and give you some feedback?
Sure if you have time and don’t mind, in my last 3 losses I have no idea what could I have done better (https://stratz.com/players/1547984348)
I’ll take a look later :) I love giving advice to people like you with a good mindset that want to learn, love spending my time like this :)
Not sure when you get the time to look at them, might play some more till then, so I meant these 3 games: 7262980053, 7263202132 and 7263284766.
Take your time, up to you which one and when you look at. Thanks again!
Just attempted to watch one of the Undying games, 7263284766:
-2:00 - Why did you start with Wind Lace? It’s honestly one of the worst starting items for Undying because Undying is all about fighting early and establishing lane dominance. Wind Lace is 250 gold, almost half your starting gold, and gives you exactly 0 fighting power. An enemy that is usually weaker than you, can, with those 250 gold in actual fighting items, be stronger than you. Instead get some Blood Grenade action going on there.
Also, Sentries are really important in the offlane because you really want to pull your large if possible or block the enemy pulling small, so it’s always useful.
0:48 - The enemy just made the fatal mistake of letting your wave go into their tower. You’re Undying with +8 Strength already, you’re incredibly strong, you can literally bully them out of the lane now. Just wrap around those trees to your left and get them from behind if they want to farm the wave. Instead, you retreat some more. stand around a bit, let yourself get hit by techies, and don’t even try to run at him.
1:07 - The fuck dude! You have +24 Strength, you’re a literal raid boss, you have 1176 hp, the enemy has 318 and 406, you alone have literally 1.6 times as much HP as both of the enemies combined, with your Legion you have 2.7 times as much HP on your side as the enemy. RUN AT THEM! They should be doing literally nothing right now except running from you. But you run back and let yourself get hit some more. You’re even at 100% HP the whole time!
I’m sorry, I have to stop watching here. You’re completely unaware of your early strength as Undying, which is basically the whole concept of why the hero is any good. The next time when you play Undying, you should run at them and don’t stop until they are dead or cowering in fear under their tower. If you had one or two Blood Grenades as well. you could have easily gotten a double kill at 1:00 in and then with the lane so far back kept denying them everything. Really, just try running at them always, if you die, it’s fine, then you can learn why in this particular situation Undying was not a raid boss. But it should be your default at least 90% of the time.
Of course, this doesn’t always work as Undying, but like 80% of the time. If the enemy here would have kept the creeps at their tower and stood under the tower, then you wouldn’t have been able to do much. That’s why Undying is almost exclusively played in safe lane, since there the creeps are at your tower and the enemy is by default far from their tower, giving you lots of room to run them down. You also have very little mana and as soon as you used your Decays and don’t have mana for them anymore, you’re like a fish on land. Of course there are also some enemy heroes where the early game is not completely free, but Techies & SF are incredibly bad against you.
I expect the other Undying game to be similar since you really seem to be unaware of his strength, so I don’t think it makes sense to look at that.
Remember my other comment where I said that it’s harder to learn since heroes play so differently? That’s basically what I meant. You play like a Crystal Maiden but you are an Undying. Playing like a scared Crystal Maiden as an almighty Undying is one of the worst things you can do to that poor killing machine.
This is for the CM game 7262980053:
1:15 - should have pulled small camp
1:50 - should have stacked small camp
2:00 - there’s rarely a reason to skill mana aura 2nd point, as you can just buy more mana regen. Having nova + frostbite lvl 2 is an incredible power-spike, more damage/control than almost any other hero in the game at that point in time, and you just wasted this timing. Skilling it at lvl 3 or 4 is almost always better.
3:25 - should have pulled large camp
3:30 - should have checked lotus (small pull would not have been necessary since you pulled large)
3:50 - pulling small would have 1. not been necessary because you pulled large at 3:25, and 2. is not necessary anyway since creeps are pushing into enemy tower, which means afterwards, since you’re in safe lane, the creeps will meet at your tower again (you actually see this at 4:00, where the enemy creeps are walking into your tower because you pulled). Instead, you shoud have used the creeps to put some pressure on the tower. Also, as you noticed, you can’t really leave Riki alone in this lane.
3:59 - you’re very bold warding the exact same spot that just got dewarded again, especially while you’re under vision where everyone can see you warding.
4:00 - should have moved your lane creeps either to the still living range creeps or into your small camp to your other creeps, not into tower. Now you’ve got a double wave pushing out again.
4:15 - use your spells to lasthit if you are full mana (or learn to lasthit better). Any gold you can get is incredibly important on supports.
4:38 - should have pulled large camp
4:50 - you have very weird camera movement. do you press some kind of “center on hero” button all the time? Idk if that is the cause or whatever, but you could have attacked like 2 or 3 times more if you actually attacked on your attack cooldown, which would have definitely killed SF.
5:10 - PLEASE lasthit the creeps. You can’t waste easy gold on the map. Collecting gold is the most important thing in dota.
5:45 - always try to hit as many enemies as possible with frost nova, would have been no problem here.
6:10 - you just killed both enemy heroes. There’s nothing dangerous here for you anymore. You can do what you want. Pull large camp immediately & farm it. Get the 6 min lotus. Use your healing salve immediately on yourself. Rotate mid or bot through twin gates with your full hp + full mana. Even steal the enemy XP rune at 7:00. Instead, you do essentially nothing until 7:05. Riki could have pulled himself and was under no threat since he had a ward, you would have likely been able to TP back by this time after your rotation or whatever you decided to do.
7:06 - Your ward that was just dewarded earlier at this spot is dewarded again. Surprise ;)
7:10 - lasthit. don’t. waste. gold. your riki wasn’t going to get it.
7:42 - no reason to push the wave in even further with your nova. keeping the wave at your tower is the most important thing against kill lanes.
8:11 - and you actually ward the same spot AGAIN :D
9:10 - could have easily frostbitten SF
9:15 - SF just TP’d out, he’s not coming back for at least 30 secs. Why do you back off against a single pudge? Pressure him, the tower, lasthit + deny everything. Instead you just let him farm and walk in circles a bit.
9:55 - should have pulled large
10:00 - if this move came 20 seconds earlier in time for the rune it would have been really fucking good. Like this you should not have bothered, and at least immediately went back to top. Your riki can do effectively nothing when you’re gone, but with you, you actually have a fighting chance. I mean Pudge+SF are terrible so Riki gets a solo kill anyway, but you see as you rotated back, that kill would have worked against better players as well, not just against terrible ones.
11:50 - Riki is terrible for leaving top, but again, you can’t waste gold on the map. Either you try & tell him “riki farm top” or you should go yourself to farm it. You skilled 1/3/1 which is suboptimal for this, so it’s not terrible that you went bot with your stupid team. But if you had gone like 2/2/1 into more points in nova later, you could farm & push all these waves much easier. Honestly, frostbite’s value decreases the lower in MMR you go, because people are just so absolutely terrible at farming & pushing creep waves so you will always have to be the one to do it. It’s almost always better to skill more nova than frostbite. At higher MMR it’s more of a choice which one you want to go, since your cores don’t leave gold laying around the map as much.
12:30 - absolute number #1 priority, nothing is more important than this, ever, it’s almost worth dieing for this: DEWARD THE ENEMY WARDS IN A FIGHT. Vision is the most important thing to win fights. Who has vision almost always wins against whoever does not have vision. The enemy is also bad at this, but you could have dewarded at the very beginning of the fight easily. Also yeah, you can’t stand this far forward as you noticed. You always have to have your team between yourself and the enemy team at all times as CM. Split second decisions matter a lot in fights.
13:20 - Should have went top or bot, waves are pushing in and can be farmed. Likely bot best because of 14 min XP rune. Could have stacked ancients as well at 14:00.
16:09 - you would’ve been just as fast walking ;)
16:25 - sentry first (almost) always
16:45 - that’s what tranquil’s are for, go stack ancients and let them regen youI zoomed through the rest a bit more roughly:
~18:00 - You don’t have anyone that can farm massive stacks well. Should have pushed top instead or farmed something else yourself or whatever.
~19:30 - Stacking is more of a downtime activity. You need to play with your team if possible, Riki got a solo kill, but if you had followed him and dewarded it’d have been better.
20:50 - Should have pushed the wave if no one else is doing it.
21:00 - You basically stand around for ~60 secs. Already stacked a bajillion times and no one wants to farm it. Time to go push top instead or farm some with your ult or sth.
25:00 - Always have a ward with you when you smoke. Smoke=Ward, almost always. you could have warded deep at 25:20 in their jungle with that.
26:40 - Push out the wave with a nova. You put too little emphasis on pushing waves out. Pushing waves is incredibly important since it gives vision
31:40 - No reason to keep pushing 4v4 with your carry dead and theirs alive. Split up and farm. Mid and top both need pushing. Predictably, you lose the fight without your carry. Set up for Rosh as soon as your carry is back.
36:00 - Still no one has pushed top, as a result SF gets T2 for free. And 50% dmg on T3.
38:40 - Perfect time for Rosh. Most important objective on the map. No one cares. No one pushing out bottom.
42:30 - Radiant takes Rosh and they win the game. Another surprised Pikachu face ;)You should have won with Pudge abandon. You lose because Viper+Riki are useless and build shit items and PA is not. Viper should have gone Bloodthorne and Riki should have gone MKB. You have to counter PA with items otherwise she’s unstoppable.
Key takeaways:
- Gold is the most important thing. You are position 5, that means you’re the fifth priority to get gold. It does not mean that you want gold any less than pos 1-4, it just means they get it first. That means if your pos 1-4 are not farming something, then it’s yours, and it needs to be yours! Every pull you do should be farmed (that’s mostly why you pull in the first place, gold + xp for you), every wave missed by someone else should be yours, etc etc. A CM specialty is just Frostbiting a random large creep while rotating around. You need to look for every way to get more gold onto your team, that includes yourself.
- Push your advantage, always! One hero off pulling/dead/whatever? Pressure the other in lane! You’re simply stronger (e.g. lvl 2 power spike)? Push them away from their farming locations: lane/jungle/whatever! As you see, that directly plays into getting more gold than the enemy, this time it’s about removing their ways to get it.
- Prioritize Rosh if possible. After ~25 minutes it becomes the most important objective in the game.
Thank you :)
Honestly, at lower levels, counters and synergies between heroes aren’t very important. While they definitely have an impact, just playing better can easily overcome this small dis/advantage. It becomes more important on higher skill levels, but also the way picks are done is usually that the supports pick first, or at most second, so the most you see is ether nothing or 2 enemy/ally heroes, which is not much info to go on. Also, like you already say, you’re guessing more than knowing what to pick, and your guesses are based on your skill level, which heroes are good varies vastly between skill levels, so learning that now will not help you too much later.
Also, many of the heroes you mentioned play very differently. If you like doing that, I don’t want to discourage you, but theoretically, sticking with 1-3 heroes is better for learning, since playing your hero well is one of the skills in dota, and when you’re practicing that skill all the time since you switch between heroes, you only slowly get to practice the general skills, since you’re distracted by all the differences between heroes.
It’s like playing random as your StarCraft race when starting out, it’s much harder to practice and learn 9 different (one for each race combination) build orders than just focusing on 3 (one against each race). Of course it’s possible but it’s harder and slower.
So I don’t want to discourage you, I just want you to be aware of it. An undying plays very differently from a crystal maiden plays very differently from a lion, and you need to be aware of that and not try to mix&match what you learned in one to apply to the other, except of course if it’s general stuff.
Also, many of the heroes you mentioned play very differently.
I kinda like that, not sure I’m the best at it though :) But it can be fun at least
Definitely :) I also like playing lots of different things.
