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.

  • AzzuMEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    It definitely does deplete your mana pool fast. It’s fine to skill Arcane Aura at lvl 2 if you don’t expect there to be any fights to the death, if the lane is about out-regening the opponent.

    However, this was with Riki (a good kill hero) against SF + Pudge (Pudge is the definition of a kill hero). SF (and Pudge) are easily killable by you and Pudge + SF want to kill you if possible, because they’re not going to out-harass you.

    You can easily see this by how the lane went: you almost never slowly whittled each other down, pretty much each engagement was going until one side was dead.

    The fights lasted what, 5-10 seconds? Any such fight is essentially a race between both teams on who can get the HP number of the enemy to 0 faster. If you only have Frostbite, you can maaaybe cast it twice if the fight is long. Or you could cast Frostbite and Crystal Nova and then later cast Frost Bite again by using a Mango. Which one does more damage in these 10 seconds? Obviously the 110-220(if you hit both) extra damage you get from the extra Crystal Nova you wouldn’t otherwise have. Almost no other hero can match that early damage. But many heroes have at least one spell as good as Frostbite or Crystal Nova, so then you’re just equal. So if you get lvl 2 Frostbite + Crystal Nova, you will very likely win the race to get the enemy to 0 hp.

    Sure, after that fight, it’ll take longer for you to get that mana back, but that’s what Clarities and Mangos are for. Like in Starcraft, you’re supposed to keep your resources low: use your gold to get an instant advantage. Mana/health regen is a very cheap way to gain a quick advantage in lane. You’re basically saying “I don’t want to spend my gold on regen, instead I want to sacrifice some of my potential DPS”. That’s only good if you can’t pressure the enemy and have to play very passively, but again, that’s not what the lane was. If you’d play against an IO+Necro, sure, skill Arcane Aura level 2.

    And yeah, you want to save for Boots or whatever, but remember, the game is about your team getting more gold than the enemy team. Kills give ~300 gold early, and then you also get to freefarm and the enemy doesn’t get to farm at all while they’re dead, so more like 400-500. You can buy a lot of regen with that. The enemy gets free regen once when they die, but that’s it. It’s incredibly good to kill the enemy in lane, and with Crystal Maiden and a decent 2nd you can very often do that.