The Anticarry Series: Legion Commander

Welcome back to the Anticarry Series. Today is another look at heroes which try to put a damper on traditional farming carries. The last installment talked about Slardar, a hard hitting strength hero who loves to ruin carries which are highly mobile through a near-instant stun, ability to chase, and keep vision on your target at all times. Legion Commander fills a similar role, but with 2 notable twists: her lockdown goes through BKB and she can pressure in lane extremely effectively. Legion Commander is one of those heroes that just excels in the 1v1 match up which is why you sometimes see her mid. Let's look at how some of the top legion commander players itemize.

These are snippets from the top 10 legion commander players' most common items, according to dotabuff.com. If we assume that the order is descending from left to right, it becomes very obvious that blink dagger, power treads, black king bar, and blade mail are the most agreed upon items. Assault cuirass, magic wand and desolator all follow at 4, 3 and 3. What can we glean from these top rated players? 

1. blink dagger is the initiation tool of choice. Shadow blade has it's place, however, this hero benefits from the attack speed gained from press the attack and items more than any other
2. power treads give you strength and attack speed, which means you're more tanky and better leveraging the bonus damage you get from duel
3. blademail is a way to do more damage during duel and dissuades other heroes from attacking you during duel. It's also good against heroes that deal a lot of damage but don't want to get bkb, like Lion or Lina
4. minus armor further allows you to deal more damage during duel (noticing a trend?) and helps you translate duel damage more easily into objectives
5. you need at least 1 way to help you survive during duel, especially in the mid game when you don't have enough duel damage and/or attack speed to kill a hero quickly. This is mainly done through bkb but AC helps a lot against physical damage dealers.

With these items in mind, the premise of the hero becomes clear: use an instant initiation tool (dagger) so that you can press the attack, blademail and bkb before going in; increase your attack speed (treads and AC) to leverage your duel damage; get items that both make you more tanky and increase your damage (AC and blademail); and ensure you can do as much damage as possible during duel (BKB).

While items are by definition situational, with the LC, you need to stick with the basics and then decide what to get to round out your remaining item slots. After blink, treads, and blademail, the item you chose to slot with can fluxuate. Getting a desolator really helps translate your damage into pushing power, if that's what your team needs. BKB will be picked up more often than not. AC is that hybrid item that also provides some utility. If you find yourself up against heroes that have itemized for the mid game, Armlet might be just the thing; its downside is mitigated by your skill set and it provides armor, strength, and a lot of damage for relatively little cost.

When you find yourself needing a hero that has infinite snowball potential, great single-target lockdown, or you're against the Brood, look no further than Legion Commander. Make sure to itemize correctly and don't jungle from minute zero to ensure you have a great game.

Next time's anti-carry series will feature: Ursa

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.

Surviving 3k MMR: Don't play a worse something else

In DOTA 2, the easiest way to gain MMR is to pick the best hero for the situation. Things like opponent team composition, your team composition, and your hero pool eliminate a lot of potential heroes trying to lure you into the trap of playing a "worse something else." In the game, there are roles and picking the best hero for the role you want to play or the role you get stuck with (sorry, position 5) will dramatically increase your teams chances of winning. I have a few pocket pick offlaners and mids so that I can play that position competently. Even though I don't know all the intricacies of each matchup, I have confidence in my ability to play my hero correctly.

Picking a "worse something else" is especially obvious in captain's mode. Commentators almost always point out what they will think is the best pick for the current situation and they are right much of the time because they can properly identify each teams composition, strengths and weaknesses of the current line up and, based on the current meta, sum up what hero would be the best. This idea of picking the best carry or mid hero is what drives a meta.

So the next time you find yourself in the enviable position of picking last for your team, just remember don't pick a "worse something else." Let me know in the comments if this tip was ever helpful for you or if it gave you that "aha!" moment.

Surviving 3k MMR: Actively Thinking About the Game

I recently wrote a post about three things to do to survive (you can find it here). I would like to expand on the second point from that post, which is: not actively thinking about what's going on in the game. Too often players tunnel vision into what's going on right in front of them, lose focus and zone out. This results in three things:

1. Zombie mode farm fest
2. missing opportunities to gain an advantage
3. missing opportunities to push an advantage

There are simple exercises you can perform during the game to snap you out of this mindset and help you become a better player. The first thing to try is checking what items the enemy players have. This will give you valuable information and help you make sure you itemize correctly. Second, check the items on your teammates, especially your supports. You can tell how well a game is going by the number of items on the supports. Third, think about where your going to be in 30 seconds, 1 minute and five minutes from now. Make some assumptions about how the game is going to go and then try to predict how the game's going to unfold after that. Finally, check the minimap and count the number of enemy heroes on the map. If there's only one enemy hero showing, try to think about where the other heroes could be; they could be wrapping around on you for a gank, doing Roshan or farming your jungle.

Hope this quick tip helps as you continue to survive 3k MMR.

DOTA 2 fixes for upcoming patch 6.85

In my final TI post, I talked about how there are some specific fixes that could be done to heroes and the game to make it more balanced and fun. My ideas come from both professional observations and pub experiences. No one will argue that Leshrac needs a small nerf, I will argue that Lina does, and, beyond that, it gets gray... Well somethings are more gray than others so let me explain to you the things which are gray. The gray scale are things that aren't inherently "broken" or op, but still warp the game in some fashion or another. The closer to broken it is, the higher on the gray scale it is.

Roshan still favors the Dire, but only slightly. Yes, the map rearrange did good things for the rosh pit, but the dire still have the easier Rosh access and this is why CDEC and other teams favored picking dire. Sure, the radiant offlane is still a little better because of the large pull camp but that pales in comparison to Rosh. Roshan decides games, yet an offlaner may or may not. Roshan does warp the game, but the advantage it gives dire is a warp that could still use a little tweak. I think increasing the width of the Radiant ramp leading down into the river by the Pit and widening those path ways a little would go a long way into fixing this issue.
Gray Scale = 6

Lina needs a nerf. This hero is out of control. She's not leshrac level, but criminy, 950 pure damage with aghs at massive range and through BKB. Give me a break. This hero breaks carries and pushes heroes with low base strength, like Phantom Assassin, out of the meta. If a hero can't survive her damage, just don't even bother with picking it. To fix it, nerf the range more and nerf the damage slightly.
Gray Scale = 7

Supports have been seeing more love recently with the advent of better support oriented items. Glimmer Cape, Solar Crest and the like have allowed position 4 and some position 5 heroes to
increase their relevance in the game. This is at the professional level. At the pub level, it has created a position 3.5 and 6.5 where 1 hero always gets sacked. This has to stop. The position 5 has to be incentivised somehow. I don't know if it's through cooler, more flashy items or more gold for assists and less for kills or allowing them to buy tp scrolls at a discount. All I know is: no one wants to support and that fact destroys pubs.
Gray Scale = 9

People want to jungle in pubs, either let them or change it so it's not viable. Professional players don't jungle because it makes your lanes weak by putting only 1 support on the active field. Pub players don't care about this. They jungle every heroes that can hack it. I've seen Necro, Troll, Dusa, Jug, Ursa, BS, KotL, AM and more. To some degree, everyone should be free to pick what they want and be punished if they lose. However, for people to rationally and reasonably use a strategy, like jungling, it needs to reach a certain success rate because someone needs to rationalize how employing strategy A will lead to victory. Jungling is on the cusp of being just good enough for an all too large percentage of DOTA 2 population to think it's viable. This means that jungling needs to be adjusted such that it's either a little better or a little worse. Making it better would allow for a greater variety in strategies and give opponents opportunities to punish or get punished by it. My vote is for making it worse. Doing this in tandem with making supporting more fun would be a boon to pub games, thus increasing the user base and proving more revenue.
Gray Scale = 2

Leshrac is the single biggest hero offender when it comes to warping games. His ability to dominate any and every lane he sits in is like putting Sniper and Troll intro 1 hero. This is because his third skill, lightning storm. It is able to jump an extreme distance with a very fast projectile speed. Leshrac also leverages Bloodstone better than any hero (except possibly storm.) He was banned or picked in almost every game of TI.
Gray Scale = 10

Bloodstone is the most unbalanced item right now. It allows heroes like Leshrac and Storm to dominate a game because they can flash farm, respawn quickly, and participate in many of a team's kills. The previous change to bloodstone made the item cheaper and made the item build up more tolerable so that heroes like Zeus and Timbersaw could purchase it with lower risk. This allowed other heroes, however, to come online faster. Heroes like Lesh.  This item renders Antimage useless against a Leshrac in a straight up fight and he's the freaking ANTI-MAGE.
Gray Scale = 8

If bloodstone is the item creating the most broken heroes, then glimmer cape nerfs the most heroes. This item renders heroes like Lion, AA, and support lina useless. It's ability to reduce magical damage and render a target invisible at the low cost of 1950 gold. The item got a nerf (increased mana cost) after it was first released because of how abusive it was. It is still strong and needs to be brought down a peg. Maybe another bump up in mana cost, adding a recipe, and adding another item (blades of attack, ring of protection, quater staff) would add some balance. I especially like the latter 2 options because it makes it into more of a blademail for supports in terms of item cost.
Gray Scale = 5

Bounty Hunter has brought back dual laning mid. Lich used to fill this roll and Io will do it situationally. Bounty hunter, however, had a 90+% win rate at TI. This should raise many flags about the ability of this hero to warp the game. While EG dealt with well until upper bracket finals against CDEC, every other team feared the BH. He has built in comeback and get ahead mechanics which professional players easily leveraged into wins. I think that slight nerfs to the duration and cooldown of track would bring this hero back in balance with the rest of the filed. Keep in mind that it was the improvement to shuriken that brought this hero back into the pro scene, so slight nerfs might bump him down into the "better than situational" tier. This hero pushes dedicated junglers and heroes that rely on invis out of the meta.
Gray Scale = 7

Outside of these observations, here's a quick list and a gray scale number for heroes that could use a nerf:

• Bloodseeker - 4
• Spiritbreaker- 1
• Brood Mother - 3

What are you hoping gets buffed or nerfed next patch? Let me know in the comment section, I would love to hear from you.

Medallion or Battlefurry Phantom Assassin?

A while ago, the Foreseer's Contract and the Nemesis Event showcased the Phantom Assassin Arcana and added the Oracle to the hero pool. Oracle doesn't see much pub play, but PA still gets picked a lot. While the event was going on, I played a lot of PA. Being the engineer that I am, I analyzed everything to death, read every guide I could get my hands on, and watch replays of highly skilled players showcasing the power of this hero.

During that phase, I ran into this gem on how to play PA. The gist of the guide is that Medallion is the first item you want to buy after Treads/Phase so that you can farm and fight earlier. Beyond that, he offers advice and item builds for different lane positions and farming priorities. Since this guide was posted, desolator has gotten even cheaper and Vlads got a buff so this guide is even more relevant. If you aren't a position 1 hero, Deso is the orb you want and Vlads will give you the lifesteal you desire. The guide was also published before the changes were made in 6.84 about kills granting more gold. More gold from kills rewards players for finding kills early instead of passively farming a lane.

The above guide is a more unconventional take on how to play PA and I can attest to its merits if you can coordinate with your team. If you're looking for something that's a little more conventional or you'd rather watch a video, Relax You're Doing Fine has a great video for that. This is the more conventional Battlefurry + HoD to stack ancients and farm to get ahead with these items. Unless you can get the Battlefurry consistently by 18 minutes, I would recommend trying the Medallion build.

When you try the Medallion build, send me a match ID and let me know how it worked out for you. I am interested to hear about other people's experience building the hero this way. If you want to check out one of my matches, just plug in the match ID 1732300064. Thanks for reading.

The Anti-Carries Series: Slardar

Recently, Purge did a video about Slardar. He played him in the offlane as a 3 position hero, building power treads and blink to help secure his teams victory. Slardar is one of the few heroes who are what I will term an "anti-carry." He requires the 2 items listed above in order to impact the game. That's it. With these two items, his skill set allows him to lock heroes down and chase super effectively. Lets look at his dotabuff.

Items

As I already touched on, power treads and blink dagger are his bread and butter. After that, BKB, armlet and deso round out the top 5. These items are midgame oriented, allowing Slarad to jump on enemies and destroy them quickly. He puts pressure on the map through sprint but also takes increased damage so the next 4 major items (ignoring, TP and shout shield) increase his survivability. Vanguard is another mid game item, but AC and HoT are late game options that keep Slardar relevant. Magic Wand provides some stats and burst heal+mana so that you can just barely escape or get that last crush in.

Best Against

These heroes suffer at the hands of Slardar; it should be no surprise that they are weak to Slardar. They are either: high mobility (AM, Lycan, Brood, NS), rely on invis (Brood, Riki, BH), or are weak to lots of physical damage (Huskar, Ursa). Slardar's strengths stem from his ability to keep pressure on heroes all over the map and chase them to the ends of the Earth. I also like Slardar against Storm Spirit, Ember Spirit, Juggernaut, Troll, and Bristleback.

Worst Against:

While Slardar is good against many carries, there are a few heroes who do well against him. Tidehunter is tough to play against in lane and can counter initiate your mini-ravage with a full-fledged one. I'm not really sure why Gyro is on here; it could be related to his potential to team fight early and his high magical damage. PL is an illusion based hero and slardar has very little AOE. Enigma, Zeus, Tinker, Venomancer, and OD all dish out huge amounts of magical and pure damage which makes toast of a sprinting Slardar. Zeus and Veno can also cancel blinks easily. You shouldn't pick Slardar against illusion based heroes in general, heroes that can kite you easily (Viper), or defensive supports (ES, Oracle, Dazzle and Shadow Demon.)

Some tips for playing the hero:

• dart in and out of fights - Slithereen Crush has a 5.5 second and sprint has a 7 second down time, both of which are insane and you'll be able to get multiple crushes off per fight if you play it right
• use your mana well, tread swap, and keep the Amplify Damage on the enemy
• don't deviate much from the items listed above because you usually won't have enough time to farm blink + bkb + damage item + tank item
• maxing crush and sprint first with a point in your ultimate by level 9 is generally the way to go, however getting a point in bash can be worth it if your team has lots of lockdown or you're just feeling lucky (warning: explicit)
• Vanguard is a good item on this hero. The damage mitigation and extra health really minimize the downside of sprint
• If the enemy team mainly relies on right click to do damage, consider getting a butterfly as your 1st or 2nd tank item because...
• this hero benefits from attack speed like few others because of the 25% psuedo-random Bash
• always sprint around the map but be careful using it against burst heavy lineups

The next time you find yourself with an AM or Ursa problem, just pick Slardar. Pressure them all over the map, take an early Roshan potential and get aggressive. Pick him in the right situation and reap the benefits of playing an anti-carry.

The next anti-carry: Legion Commander