[Megathread] DotA 2

[Lysah]

What would be the best to go with then? serious question

Phase + Aquila > Drums and roam/team fight early. You can help your team an amazing amount with rank 4 dagger and blink strike and 1 in evasion - PA is actually very hard to kill this early (huge base armor + evasion + mobility). You should already be able to pick up kills at this point, easily, especially on weak supports, but even on lowly farmed carrys (AM is a free kill with a well timed dagger (it gives vision of him and after he blinks away you can blink up to him to chase)). Go for BKB next if you need it, otherwise I like basher and yasha unless my income is very high and I can finish manta (or SY - this is one of those heroes it's actually good on)/abyssal in a timely manner.

All in all, PA is not weak at all early game. Her dagger spam has an EXTREME amount of utility behind it.
http://dotabuff.com/matches/250263009
Too bad the replay is expired and, of course, I wasn't streaming for some reason it looks like so I don't have it recorded, but this game was a great showcase of PA's real power as a hero. There were a few team fights early (level ~9s) where I sat behind trees at 100 health and simply spammed dagger at people for kills, the slow is very high for such an extremely long range and the damage honestly isn't bad, either.

You can see that AM tried to rush battlefury but their team already lost the game by the time he got it.

tl;dr
Build PA like a hybrid carry and help in team fights early on, get your gold from heads not creeps. I really don't like PA for AFK farming, her base damage and attack speed are way too low to beat a hero like AM. If I had tried to go Bfury and beat AM in this game we probably would have lost.

[PizzaSHARK]

PMS + Tranquil + Booster is 3 slots, Vanguard is one. When building for cheap items slots matter quite a bit. Tranquils also mean that you're not having Power Treads, and you can't really fight with Tranquils very well post-nerf.

I'd question the Tranquils. We're assuming you're getting the regen for lane, right? If you're going for an early push timing, wouldn't you'd make sure your team has a Meka before you start pushing? I definitely wouldn't try to do any fighting with Tranquils on an AM... you need attack speed bad if you want Mana Break to do much, and he has terrible, terrible strength.

Honestly, I'd probably just do something like Vlad's, Treads, and then some other source of HP - drums, vitabooster, or maybe ogre stick. Having vlad's on AM will eventually cause a problem in the very late game when he's running out of item slots, but if you're going for a push-focused AM, wouldn't the game probably be over before that "I want vlad's but don't have any item slots free" thing comes into play?

[Lysah]

Vanguard helps you ignore towers as well.

Pretty much helps you ignore everything except enemy carry. Supports will get blocked pretty much for their full damage, towers and creeps too, neutrals, summons.

[Pantelija]

Vanguard helps you ignore towers as well.

Pretty much helps you ignore everything except enemy carry. Supports will get blocked pretty much for their full damage, towers and creeps too, neutrals, summons.

Vanguard is hands down the best surviability item in Early and Mid game

[Deleted]

Has anyone noticed an obscene increase in the amount of early abandons recently? Half the time i don't know why people do it, because people pick heroes they don't like, took their lane, hero?

3 games in a row where someone has abandoned within the 1st min of selecting a hero.

[Lysah]

Just won a game hard with vanguard AM build, will post footage if anyone wants to see when and why to buy it.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I find it difficult playing games with those that don't speak English ._. I feel little...fellowship.

[Rucati]

I find it difficult playing games with those that don't speak English ._. I feel little...fellowship.

Indeed, it's pretty miserable.

They need to make it reportable if you queue for a language you can't speak. Sick of playing with 2-3 people that only speak Spanish, pretty sure they have servers for Spanish, so why are they on mine?

Incredibly frustrating.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Indeed, it's pretty miserable.

They need to make it reportable if you queue for a language you can't speak. Sick of playing with 2-3 people that only speak Spanish, pretty sure they have servers for Spanish, so why are they on mine?

Incredibly frustrating.

It's also very obnoxious when they later say "Riki Noob" or some shit. I'm like "......." I also dislike A LOT the lack of reports I can make. It's annoying.

[Rucati]

It's also very obnoxious when they later say "Riki Noob" or some shit. I'm like "......." I also dislike A LOT the lack of reports I can make. It's annoying.

Yeah definitely. I had a game the other day, I was playing with 2 other friends and one of them picked a support then me and my other friend both picked carries. The two Spanish players then both picked carries, after the three of us had chosen, and then when we got in game they said "y so many carries" it just makes my head hurt. When I asked why they picked carries one of them said that Juggernaut wasn't a carry. Just... It's amazing how dumb people are. Truly amazing.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Yeah definitely. I had a game the other day, I was playing with 2 other friends and one of them picked a support then me and my other friend both picked carries. The two Spanish players then both picked carries, after the three of us had chosen, and then when we got in game they said "y so many carries" it just makes my head hurt. When I asked why they picked carries one of them said that Juggernaut wasn't a carry. Just... It's amazing how dumb people are. Truly amazing.

Yeah...I had one time where one kept speaking Spanish(He picked Clinkz) and then later said. "You a gay boy" "You like fuck in da ass"



It was full of lolz. Like the stuff that's so stupid it's hillarious(I have nothing against gays but this was just so...ugh).

[Bane123]

Just saw this amazing video and thought i'd share it here

[Deleted]

Has anyone noticed an obscene increase in the amount of early abandons recently? Half the time i don't know why people do it, because people pick heroes they don't like, took their lane, hero?

3 games in a row where someone has abandoned within the 1st min of selecting a hero.

There was a bug with abandons.
I think it's fixed now tho.

[Deleted]

Vanguard helps you ignore towers as well.

Pretty much helps you ignore everything except enemy carry. Supports will get blocked pretty much for their full damage, towers and creeps too, neutrals, summons.

Not really. Vanguard doesn't help you ignore towers that much more than Drums + PMS. Try it yourself in a solo game and you'll notice you pretty much block the same amount of damage. The reason being that damage block is a very poor version of armor. All damage blocks are calculated before armor reductions and as heroes get more right click damage, damage block gets worse and armor better. That is also why Mekansm is almost always the preferred choice over Vanguard on any hero that have mana to sustain it. So damage blocks don't scale with armor at all. I tried Drums+PMS vs Vanguard on AM at level 9 tanking a level 1 tower for 10 seconds. I took about 450 with Drums+PMS and 400 with Vanguard.

And on levels 4-9, most of the damage from supports come from spells and don't really right click much. Actually, about the time you get Vanguard is usually the part where enemy either hits hard with his right clicks or does most of his damage from spells. Against either of those two scenarios, Vanguard doesn't really do much more than other items.

I also saw your AM game. As in that game they literally had zero stuns. I did not see where Vanguard allowed you to tank anything extraordinary or help you survive creep damage or anything of sort. At 15 min where you tanked the enemy for the first time you died without killing anyone. At the early game your team was either losing the fight or winning convincingly, you didn't really jump into any fight but mostly standing on the side lines and sniping, as an AM should.

At 20 min most AMs have a BF Yasha Treads and you had First Blood so that would be easily achievable for you too even if you went bot to fight like you did with your Vanguard at 13 min or something. Your team was losing most fights until like min 24 I think. Never once did I see you tank damage that made Vanguard worth it. If you can give me a time stamp or anything from that game where you did and it paid off, feel free to tell.

I also believe AR games are incredibly random. If you play AP, enemy won't go with the weirdest lanes and force heroes into roles that they don't really excel at because of another hero taking their role. In AP people also try harder, as you've mentioned yourself and that itself makes the game harder to win, regardless if the players are worse or the same skill level as AR. And I know from the games we played that the games were extremely one sided and I don't think Valve has team MMR as shown here: http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=98284 where he discusses a game and their ELO and that they are a stack.

[Drunkenvalley]

Man, the happy feels of playing Mirana for the first time, and missing a whopping three arrows in 44 minutes. :3

[Deletedaccount1]

can someone send me a beta key

[NotValidAnymore]

can someone send me a beta key

Or just go and get it yourself now that it's free.

[Deleted]

can someone send me a beta key

sent :)

[Hermanni]

Not really. Vanguard doesn't help you ignore towers that much more than Drums + PMS. Try it yourself in a solo game and you'll notice you pretty much block the same amount of damage. The reason being that damage block is a very poor version of armor. All damage blocks are calculated before armor reductions and as heroes get more right click damage, damage block gets worse and armor better. That is also why Mekansm is almost always the preferred choice over Vanguard on any hero that have mana to sustain it. So damage blocks don't scale with armor at all.

I like how you're trying to explain all this like you're talking to a 5-year old.

I don't know about the game you're talking about though, I mean if somehow blink refresher Mags and scepter Brew are 'literally zero stuns' and then can I really expect you to have noticed things like brewlings and zombies adding more reasons to get Vanguard, or the amount of times AM was barely getting away alive?

[Deleted]

I like how you're trying to explain all this like you're talking to a 5-year old.

I don't know about the game you're talking about though, I mean if somehow blink refresher Mags and scepter Brew are 'literally zero stuns' and then can I really expect you to have noticed things like brewlings and zombies adding more reasons to get Vanguard, or the amount of times AM was barely getting away alive?

Not everyone knows everything about the game and this is a discussion board after all and not only you read it. Furthermore, I was confused about how Vanguard makes you able to ignore tower damage so that led me to explain how damage block works.

Do share a time stamp where AM barely gets away alive because you saying it doesn't really tell me anything. I don't think you can count refresher Magnus in that game for a discussion about Vanguard when the Magnus got the Refresher at like the last fight and you'd basically won and AM had already sold his Vanguard anyways, don't you? And regarding Blink Magnus. If you get caught in RP (which you shouldn't as AM unless their whole purpose is to only RP you) and die without Vanguard then you'd die with Vanguard too, or can you show me an RP AM got caught in that made him survive 'cause of Vanguard? I for sure didn't see one.

And now that you mention Brewlings makes me wonder if you understand damage block which I just explained. You know the part where armor>damage block if the opponent has high right click damage? I'm quite sure Brewlings hit for 100+ dmg each with Agha.

And Zombies. I'm quite sure BF cleaves those pretty well and PMS would block the majority of their damage anyway.

I watched all the fights quite carefully so I'm a bit confused and confounded about what you're saying about Vanguard helping in that game.