EvilPenguin
02-27-2010, 11:16 PM
Hi, this is a guide for 1600-1700 level players although the strategy passes into other skill levels as well. As someone who has played this game for a long time, is 26 and more mature, it's extremely annoying to hear most of the comments that people make, especially 1600 level players trying to tell me what I'm doing wrong. I know I can ignore/mute them and I usually do but really that just makes the problem worse rather than fixing it. To try to picture the stupidity of this go into a game of 1400 level players, only from what I've seen a lot of 1400 level players know they are not that good whereas a lot of the 1600 level players really think they are good. I thought I could try to help teach some 1600 level players how to get better and what some of the differences are they don't understand.
1. Carrying has as much to do with the skill of a player and the exponential nature of items as it does with the hero, if you double your attack speed, double your damage, and double your hp, your now 8 times more powerful and with 2 teammates should easily be able to defeat 3 enemies each of which has double their attack speed. So it is better to have most all of your gold stacked on one person than it is spread out but it doesn't necessarily have to be on your carry type hero and you almost never want 2 or more carries you don't even have to have 1. If possible you want to let your top players, carries, or people who are farmed get even more gold but *****ing about it probably is not going to solve anything it'll probably just make things worse.
2. Farming is all about security, there should never be more than 1 person in a lane that is perfectly secure, say close to your second tower when you have wards up and know they are not there. If some dirty bastard comes into to my perfectly secure lane, he probably doesn't know better and I'll just leave to neutral so as a team we get more experience and gold total.
3. Ganking also has to do with security and numbers, if there are 2 enemy players top, 1 mid, and 1 bottom, once the first 4 players are going top it's probably better if your the one lagging behind for you to just take a secure position mid depending on what you can contribute. Turning a 4v2 or possibly 4v3 into a 5v2 or 5v3 really doesn't add much whereas if you are in a lane the enemy players top may think they are safer and you may get more gold/experience. You will need to know if their mid and bottom players have tp's though. It's even worse to try to tp into a 4v1 situation to help the 1 guy getting slaughtered.
4. When choosing your last hero you want to already have figured out what your lanes are looking like and who this last hero would be with, you usually want about 2 melee to help spread your team out and avoid getting massively aoe'd.
5. Pulling neuts is good for 3 reasons it increase the amount of exp you get, it might increase the gold usually is about the same, and it denies you creeps so the enemy does not get exp/gold. If your in a lane that you can pull neuts the support or melee player should pull the neuts unless it's a hard lane and the carry cannot creep with the support player gone than the carry probably wants to pull neuts.
6. Group items are usually better than solo items, several items you want to glance at what other people are making, these include, bottle, abyssal skull, nomes, necro book, assualt cuirass. Auras are very powerful as proven by chen who if he gets the right auras can greatly boost the strength of a team.
7. Wards are so good that even if your carrying it's better for you to buy them than for no one to buy them. This is especially true if your not playing a true carry or not one of the highest rated players in the game. The best time to buy wards is when the enemy is ganking your side a lot, by spotting them in your defensive area you can avoid or gank them allowing you to out farm them.
8. If your having a bad game the best thing to do is get hp, plated greaves or str steamboots and a few bracers/power supply. The thing not to do is have empty slots while going straight for enhanced marchers and an item that has no effect on your survivability.
9. If you have 2 or more empty item slots your doing it wrong, the tiny items are usually much better than the large ones per gold. Iron shield, bracer, power supply, tp scroll, circlet all are better than going straight for a big item unless you just happened to have the gold for that big item and are doing well.
10. Psr is a good measure of someone's skill unless he's got a 2 k/d and 70% win ratio which means he made a new account to stomp people. Don't assume because someone's doing horrible or great that they are actually a lot better or worse than their psr indicates, people get lucky or unlucky and some people suicide themselves in every situation they think it's best the team fights whereas some people never initiate and sit in the back until everyone is low hp and has used their abilities.
11. Often times carry or better players will use you as fodder for an extra second, sorry, but sometimes the effectiveness of a player/character can outweigh the short term death of their team mates. Having your worst player be the sacrificial lamb works a lot better than having your best player whose carrying as the sacrificial lamb. In order to play your role the best you have to know your allies and your roles and don't be so quick to ***** at the guy whose 0-4 because maybe it wasn't just stupidity that got him there. Top players will often criticize one specific thing someone does that is really stupid, bad players will often criticize some in a very general manner like dude u suck your 1-4. In most situations there is something someone can do to avoid getting destroyed but due to their limited ability to understand the game it often feels like their was nothing, sometimes even really good players cannot avoid many deaths often times the first few they were prepared to take as an acceptable loss.
12. Probably the number one thing you can do to be better is to have an awareness of where the other team likely is, better players often have a much better idea of probable location of enemy players and adjust what they do to make up for that. This is why wards are so vital for higher skilled players because they change probabilities of locations so much when you can see choke point areas. Being able to recognize that a group fight is about to occur or that a player near you needs help seconds earlier can make huge differences.
13. If someone is 150 psr over you, you can expect them to know a lot better what is happening and what needs to be done. You may want to follow them a bit or let them pick when to go in but be there right behind them, for players lower than 150 below you, you may want to guide them a bit. In any case you are often stronger as a team than you are alone so when you know someone is making a slightly bad decision it's often better to follow/support them and hope for the best. For example you can often take 2 routes to a destination one route is aggressive where you might run into the enemy and the other route you are less likely, can also choose to split up to increase the odds of finding someone or stay together to increase your immediate fighting strength. The decision is not a small one and very often I see 1600 players choose the wrong route, follow the route I take when they should not, or not follow when they should that's why you always have to have great map awareness and keep in mind the other player may be doing something so smart your unable to understand it that's why u have to keep in mind what their rating was.
14. Do not fort a tower unless it's deniable, I see this all the time, 4 players beating on a tower it's about to get to deniable range than wait it gets fortification early and then everyone is there but no one can deny it. The same thing happens with creeps as well, a player comes to defend a low tower and redirects the attacks from the tower to himself leading to a tower that is afterward not deniable.
15. Don't be a dick, half of every argument you get in your probably wrong, especially when other person is just as good or better than you, and don't feel you have to backup that one ******* friend you have that picks a fight with everyone. I've seen a lot of people just give up because they don't want to put up with all the **** and I've given up sometimes too, it's just not fun listening to people who ***** at everything and cannot even understand why what they think is wrong and unfortunately games like this tend to draw in the young dicks because in real life there are problems with making stupid comments to everyone around you.
Ok I'm done because this is getting too long even though I could add a lot more than this. I hope some people enjoyed reading.
1. Carrying has as much to do with the skill of a player and the exponential nature of items as it does with the hero, if you double your attack speed, double your damage, and double your hp, your now 8 times more powerful and with 2 teammates should easily be able to defeat 3 enemies each of which has double their attack speed. So it is better to have most all of your gold stacked on one person than it is spread out but it doesn't necessarily have to be on your carry type hero and you almost never want 2 or more carries you don't even have to have 1. If possible you want to let your top players, carries, or people who are farmed get even more gold but *****ing about it probably is not going to solve anything it'll probably just make things worse.
2. Farming is all about security, there should never be more than 1 person in a lane that is perfectly secure, say close to your second tower when you have wards up and know they are not there. If some dirty bastard comes into to my perfectly secure lane, he probably doesn't know better and I'll just leave to neutral so as a team we get more experience and gold total.
3. Ganking also has to do with security and numbers, if there are 2 enemy players top, 1 mid, and 1 bottom, once the first 4 players are going top it's probably better if your the one lagging behind for you to just take a secure position mid depending on what you can contribute. Turning a 4v2 or possibly 4v3 into a 5v2 or 5v3 really doesn't add much whereas if you are in a lane the enemy players top may think they are safer and you may get more gold/experience. You will need to know if their mid and bottom players have tp's though. It's even worse to try to tp into a 4v1 situation to help the 1 guy getting slaughtered.
4. When choosing your last hero you want to already have figured out what your lanes are looking like and who this last hero would be with, you usually want about 2 melee to help spread your team out and avoid getting massively aoe'd.
5. Pulling neuts is good for 3 reasons it increase the amount of exp you get, it might increase the gold usually is about the same, and it denies you creeps so the enemy does not get exp/gold. If your in a lane that you can pull neuts the support or melee player should pull the neuts unless it's a hard lane and the carry cannot creep with the support player gone than the carry probably wants to pull neuts.
6. Group items are usually better than solo items, several items you want to glance at what other people are making, these include, bottle, abyssal skull, nomes, necro book, assualt cuirass. Auras are very powerful as proven by chen who if he gets the right auras can greatly boost the strength of a team.
7. Wards are so good that even if your carrying it's better for you to buy them than for no one to buy them. This is especially true if your not playing a true carry or not one of the highest rated players in the game. The best time to buy wards is when the enemy is ganking your side a lot, by spotting them in your defensive area you can avoid or gank them allowing you to out farm them.
8. If your having a bad game the best thing to do is get hp, plated greaves or str steamboots and a few bracers/power supply. The thing not to do is have empty slots while going straight for enhanced marchers and an item that has no effect on your survivability.
9. If you have 2 or more empty item slots your doing it wrong, the tiny items are usually much better than the large ones per gold. Iron shield, bracer, power supply, tp scroll, circlet all are better than going straight for a big item unless you just happened to have the gold for that big item and are doing well.
10. Psr is a good measure of someone's skill unless he's got a 2 k/d and 70% win ratio which means he made a new account to stomp people. Don't assume because someone's doing horrible or great that they are actually a lot better or worse than their psr indicates, people get lucky or unlucky and some people suicide themselves in every situation they think it's best the team fights whereas some people never initiate and sit in the back until everyone is low hp and has used their abilities.
11. Often times carry or better players will use you as fodder for an extra second, sorry, but sometimes the effectiveness of a player/character can outweigh the short term death of their team mates. Having your worst player be the sacrificial lamb works a lot better than having your best player whose carrying as the sacrificial lamb. In order to play your role the best you have to know your allies and your roles and don't be so quick to ***** at the guy whose 0-4 because maybe it wasn't just stupidity that got him there. Top players will often criticize one specific thing someone does that is really stupid, bad players will often criticize some in a very general manner like dude u suck your 1-4. In most situations there is something someone can do to avoid getting destroyed but due to their limited ability to understand the game it often feels like their was nothing, sometimes even really good players cannot avoid many deaths often times the first few they were prepared to take as an acceptable loss.
12. Probably the number one thing you can do to be better is to have an awareness of where the other team likely is, better players often have a much better idea of probable location of enemy players and adjust what they do to make up for that. This is why wards are so vital for higher skilled players because they change probabilities of locations so much when you can see choke point areas. Being able to recognize that a group fight is about to occur or that a player near you needs help seconds earlier can make huge differences.
13. If someone is 150 psr over you, you can expect them to know a lot better what is happening and what needs to be done. You may want to follow them a bit or let them pick when to go in but be there right behind them, for players lower than 150 below you, you may want to guide them a bit. In any case you are often stronger as a team than you are alone so when you know someone is making a slightly bad decision it's often better to follow/support them and hope for the best. For example you can often take 2 routes to a destination one route is aggressive where you might run into the enemy and the other route you are less likely, can also choose to split up to increase the odds of finding someone or stay together to increase your immediate fighting strength. The decision is not a small one and very often I see 1600 players choose the wrong route, follow the route I take when they should not, or not follow when they should that's why you always have to have great map awareness and keep in mind the other player may be doing something so smart your unable to understand it that's why u have to keep in mind what their rating was.
14. Do not fort a tower unless it's deniable, I see this all the time, 4 players beating on a tower it's about to get to deniable range than wait it gets fortification early and then everyone is there but no one can deny it. The same thing happens with creeps as well, a player comes to defend a low tower and redirects the attacks from the tower to himself leading to a tower that is afterward not deniable.
15. Don't be a dick, half of every argument you get in your probably wrong, especially when other person is just as good or better than you, and don't feel you have to backup that one ******* friend you have that picks a fight with everyone. I've seen a lot of people just give up because they don't want to put up with all the **** and I've given up sometimes too, it's just not fun listening to people who ***** at everything and cannot even understand why what they think is wrong and unfortunately games like this tend to draw in the young dicks because in real life there are problems with making stupid comments to everyone around you.
Ok I'm done because this is getting too long even though I could add a lot more than this. I hope some people enjoyed reading.