Surviving 3k: Spectre is the the hero you should be playing

There are many heroes to chose from in Dota 2 but the hero you should be choosing is Spectre. This hero is one of the best hard carries in pubs currently with an astounding 55-59% win-rate in the safe lane (according to Dotabuff.com.) This win-rate should come as no surprise when looking at the hero: high ceiling team fight potential; the ability to globally pickoff heroes; high single target damage for separated heroes;  AOE damage; pure damage; damage mitigation; and the ability to chase a hero into the abyss. The biggest weaknesses of the hero are that your laning stage is very weak, you are dependant on your team to take good fights in the mid game, your flash farm potential is low, and you don't want to build a black king bar (BKB) for any reason. With this profile in mind, let's dive a little further into why you should be playing this hero.

As with many carries, Spectre scales well with items and levels. Unlike many carries, however, you can deal a lot of damage even if you're behind. This damage correlates directly to getting levels and some very cheap fighting items. Urn of Shadows or Ring of Aquilla (RoA) and Phase Boots are my preferred initial items because of the cost efficiency and mana regeneration. This hero needs a mana item in the early game to reliably ensure haunt + spectral dagger for team fights. Both Urn and RoA provide damage and have small trade offs; choosing which items is simply figuring out if another player on your team is going to get Urn (like Pudge) and adjusting your build accordingly. My standard rule is to always get Urn unless someone is getting it.

Your next item decision comes from how well your are farming and how many fights your team is winning. If your farm is high and you're winning team fights, saving for Radiance seals the win for your team. If you enter the mid-game at parity with your opponents or you need to to be able to solo kill heroes on the map, getting Vanguard and Diffusal Blade will help you survive, farm the jungle, and kill supports relatively easily; these advantages are on top of having easy build-ups. If the game is very close or you find yourself being focused, Blademail becomes an especially potent item on this hero, scaling with your opponent's damage output and taking advantage of her ability to mitigate damage. The final item you want to consider is manta style. While this is an expensive item, the build up puts it in mid-game item department. The stats are good and it spawns more illusions, which Spectre takes advantage of, increasing your damage and farming rate. The downside to this item is that sometimes, it just doesn't do a whole lot. 

Late game item decisions are extremely important. I cannot stress how important it is to choose the correct items for late game because you usually only get one or two top tier items (5000+ gold) before the game ends - choose wisely. Butterfly, Heart, Eye of Skadi, and Assault Cuirass (AC) are the main four items you want to go for, with a items like Monkey King Bar getting an honorable mention. Each offer different advantages: Butterfly and Skadi are the fighting items; Heart is a sieging and tanking item; AC helps you push and should be gotten if you don't have another natural AC builder; MKB is necessary against heroes that have or will get evasion (most agility carries.) Usually, I build Butterfly against opposing carries that want to man-fight you like Lifestealer, Sven, and Phantom Assassin. The evasion also makes your illusions hard to deal with - not to mention the agility and attack speed increases your damage by a lot. 

After itemizing correctly during each stage in the game, the last things left to consider are overall play style and decision making. The latter is personal to the player so I'll cover this in other posts. The former, on the other hand, depends on your itemization, team composition and game pace. In order to be the most effective hero you can be, you need to figure out, with your team, how to synthesize these elements together into a winning game plan. This is not easy. The most important decision you have to make is when to use your ultimate. If the game is about team fighting, then save it for that. Otherwise, use it whenever you have the opportunity for a pickoff. Be wary of playing too aggressive or not aggressive enough.

To wrap it up, get the right items for the right situation, analyze how the game is going, project how the game is going to play out, and then use haunt appropriately. Spectre is one of the best heroes in the pub meta and should be treated as such. Please use this guide to improve your MMR and expanded your hero pool. Thanks for reading and please leave comments below.

Surviving 3K: Doom and That All Mighty Money

I have been playing a lot of Doom this patch. This hero is naturally greedy and is picked on-and-off in the pro scene because he excels against single and dual core line ups and will always get gold out of the map. This latter reason importantly results in items to help the team, like Puppey's very notable Buckler. In a 3k MMR game, Doom plays a different role: he removes the best player from the game. His ultimate deleting a hero from a fight, allows your team to take a 5v4 against the weakest 4 players on the opposing team (goodbye and good riddance, OD.) But this isn't always the easiest thing to accomplish and begins to break down against 3 and the dreaded 3k MMR 4 core lineup. Let's give Doom one last hurrah! before the next patch.

There are 2 main roles Doom is currently played in: jungle and offlane. He spends the laning stage trying to get ahead and then the mid game staying ahead. He needs his levels and items to be effective but has the tool in the form of Devour. The question then becomes what to get with all this loot? And the answer is easy: Randiance.

Rather than getting an Aghanims, Radiance affords you the magical damage you need to become a true team fight nightmare and increases your solo pickoff potential. The nerf to Scorched Earth hindered Doom's ability to chase people down and kill them quickly but Radiance solves this. Radiance also allows you to farm quickly, provides you with some additional tankiness in the form of evasion, and increases the value you get from the attack speed bonus of power treads. Radiance also takes advantage of Doom ability to naturally acquire currency so a radiance by 20 minutes is normal. Let's dive a little deeper into the build.

I start with two rings of protection, a set of tangos, a ward and salve before heading to the offlane. Depending on the lineup you're facing, you can ward the pull camp or put it in a place to grant you vision. From here, you need to play the game by ear. Generally, it's correct to finish the Basilius so that you can continually devour creeps and pick up boots so you aren't as susceptible to ganks before weighing what item to get next. You can get Vlads to help your team, Vanguard  to front line or Midas to further increase your farm depending on the tempo of the game. Also don't be afraid to get Power Treads for the attack speed; with Scorched Earth, Treads, Radiance and AC your right-clicks become relevant. After itemizing for the midgame, you need to farm your radiance.

Upon acquiring Radiance, I usually get auras for my team and by stacking armor with Vlads, AC, and Shiva's. If you went the Vanguard route, this would be the time to get a crimson guard. If you're against a Zeus, then pipe is the item. These items help  your team fight. The patch favors early aggression to get ahead in the laning and early mid game stages and team fighting. If your team suffered because you went for a greedier build, these items will help make up for that.

The skill build is fairly straight-forward because you don't want to fight early. Maxing Devour lowers the cool-down, allowing you to farm faster. After that I max Scorched Earth then Infernal blade, getting Doom whenever possible. Scorched Earth increases your survivability and AOE damage which is preferable to the single target focused Infernal Blade. If you find yourself fighting a lot in the early game, then only get 1 point in Devour and focus on the other two skills + Doom. As always, go into each game with a plan and then tailor that plan as the game unfolds.

This build is greedy, to say the least however it's merit lies in Doom's ability to get a fast radiance. For some games, getting a fast radiance is good enough. Make sure that the team isn't going to be relying on you to get a tool of initiation and make sure you have the space to farm. The last thing you want to do is burden your team with an under-farmed and item-less Doom. Other than that, have fun burning down your opponents.

Thanks for reading!

Surviving 3K MMR: Objective Pressure

Objective pressure is that feeling when the opponent just double raxed you. Your team lost a team fight and your opponents decide the time has come to take out your precious barracks. Having had this experience more times than I care to count, I haven't let that feeling of pressure from being down overcome and consume me. Instead, I always ask myself how can I get back in the game? While this scenario takes place late in the game, a healthy pressure should always exist in the back of your head, keeping you alert and focused on the game. With all this in mind, let's dive a little further into objective pressure.

The main objectives are:

1.   Runes – the most important objective during the laning stage but fall off as the game progresses (unless you’re S4).

2.   Roshan – the mascot of DOTA 2 and his aegis represent one of the most important advantages any team can secure.

3.   Tier 1 and 2 towers – objectives teams try to secure after the laning stage

4.   Tier 3 towers and Barracks – the end game objectives, taking these greatly increases your team’s chance for success

5.   Tier 4 towers and the Throne – the penultimate objectives; taking these means you have won the game.

These 5 categories are the most important to understand for learning objective pressure because Dota is a game of objectives. Consider for a moment the following scenarios and decide for yourself if your team or your opponent improved their position, gained an advantage or it's relatively neutral.

• You trade safelane tier 1 towers with your opponent
• You trade damage on a tier 4 tower for stopping the opponent from killing Roshan
• You trade a tier 4 tower for stopping the opponent from killing Roshan
• You trade your safelane tier 2 tower for Roshan
• You trade a tier 1 in the offlane for a tier 1 in mid
• You stop your opponent from taking your tier 3 tower
• You trade your ranged rax for a buy back on one of your team's core and an opponent team wipe
• You trade your ranged rax for a buy back on two of your team's core and an opponent team wipe
• Trading damage on your tier 1 for a bounty rune as a mid player
• Trading damage on your tier 1 for a haste rune as a mid player

And the list goes on. Weighing these tradeoffs usually takes place in a split second. It's generally when we feel the most pressure that we make these decisions the fastest. This in turn is where we are most prone to err if we haven't thought through what we are going to do in those situations before hand. The best way to illustrate this is when high level players commentate about what when wrong for the losing team. Most of the time they use phrase's like: "if Beast Master doesn't buy back there, it's over" or "because the Sven got rooted at this point in the fight, they missed their window to win the fight." To a pro, these thoughts are second nature. This is because they have internalized conscious decisions made before this on what to do in certain situations. For the 3k player, we need to take these conscious decisions and make them unconscious through thinking how different scenarios in the game will play out and practicing.

Let's get back to our situations listed above. I'm sure a lot of you prefaced your answers with "it really depend" or something like that. This important phrase gives us insight into what we need to do when we feel under pressure. There is no pressure more palpable than trying to securing Roshan in the late game. Both teams jockey for superior ward position, trying to find pick-offs, and map control before confront the beast. This imposes a feeling of pressure that encourages you to act. Thus, you must properly identify which factors your actions will depend on. These factors range from your perceived lead to what point in the game it is to how many smokes you have left. This is where the importance of iteration and education (like this blog and others) come in. Playing games provide reference experience and education allows you to compare your reference experience to that of the educator. 

In the end, that feeling of pressure when related to objectives boils down to a feeling about making the best decisions by correctly identifying what factors your decision should be based on. We could go into the weeds of asymmetric information and the fog of war, but that doesn't help you in your next queue. Remembering that the feeling of pressure should be motivating you to make the best decision you know how to will.

Surviving 3k MMR: sometimes you just need to win the game

I am a big fan of games; Star Craft, Monopoly, Diablo, Scrabble, Candy Crush, Dominion, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Magic: the Gathering, and many others have been my jam at one point or another over the years. One way that I always try to think when I play is: how do I win the game from this point? This is a very simple but important question to ask yourself because often times there is a path to victory, you just need to find it. This gets harder in some ways and easier in others as you get better and better at a game and DOTA 2 is no exception.

I played a game recently as Huskar and even though we were over 20,000 gold behind, we still pulled out a victory. How is this possible? We just went down mid and won the game. Was it really that easy? Yes. Our opponents made some critical mistakes at the very end. This allowed us win. (You can find out more info about the match here.)

In this game, I initially thought our path to victory would be through the Sand King, Shadow Demon and me creating space for the Tiny and Lycan to farm up. With these two heroes, we had the possibility to take objectives whenever we eliminated a hero from the battlefield. This is one of the fundamentals of winning at dota: translate kills into objective (towers, Roshan, warding and barracks.) 

Sadly, our game plan didn't pan out. We were only able to convert kills into objectives once. Our opponents, however, did this to us many times and by the end, we only had a ranged barracks. What would you do in this situation? We chose to head down mid and pull out a victory. We didn't go for barracks or kills because the Antimage was destroying our base while we barreled down mid. In my mind, the only way we were going to win, given the way the game had gone so far, was to throne them and hope they made mistakes. As I'm sure many of you can attest to, in the 3k MMR bracket, mistakes are common place. So even though our opponents played stellar DOTA until that point, they made mistakes when it counted most, giving us a victory. 

Sometimes you just need to figure out how to go win the game. Share your story about find a path to victory in the comments below. Thanks for reading.