i think i decided on my goal for dota 2. i want to finish the all hero challenge one time. raising mmr is a lame goal and one that just makes you mad at everything. the all hero challenge is an incentive to sincerely try and learn a bit about everything while utilizing your fundamentals in the game. you get assigned heroes in order. when you finish one the game tells you your next one. i'm probably going to write a bit about each one (or most of them) since it'll be a fun way to talk about the game and the heroes. gonna make each post a reply to this one and also tag it with "d2ahc" and "[hero name] (dota)" in case anyone wants to find these later for some reason. technically i started this years ago and forgot about a couple of the early ones...
i'll probably also try and get in some games with my favs from time to time in the middle still. especially bc i've still gotta figure out how you can win with morphling. i think he's the #1 hardest hero in the game to play...
i've always liked playing everything, in fighting games too. being so close to competitive scenes kinda beats that out of you unless you really play only one game and are really smart, which does not describe how i feel about myself in fighting games. but maybe this'll teach me something about that. i'd like if it did. but the first one i got...is "wisp"
i really have no idea how to describe this hero, especially since i haven't talked much about illusions yet. his offensive spells feel a bit convoluted and really the goal is basically to land huge combos where the enemies get hit by all of them at once. on the defensive end he has surge, which sets an ally (or himself, but the cast delay reduces the value a lot, lol) to maximum speed. you can turn it into an aoe buff at level 25 though, which is really funny.
the main source of illusions is his ultimate, which is called, uhh...the wall. of replica, but everyone just calls it wall. it doesn't actually block enemies, but if they move into it they take damage, get slowed a ton, and an illusion is made of them. illusions are copies of heroes that usually can only attack (much weaker than actual heroes) and take extra damage. ideally this is when you use his other spells. one is castable on allies or enemies and deals damage to every one of your enemies near them (but not the target if it's an enemy), and the other is vacuum, dragging enemies in an area towards the center point. in some circumstances hitting a perfect combo lags the game for a second as the damage dealt by the wall and creation of progressively weaker illusions that get hit by enemies leads to a feedback loop with the entire enemy team getting imploded by it, but it's more common that the enemies just get stuck in a position where they can't fight out of but also can't run away from and all die after 5-10 seconds instead. also, because he can generate the illusions repeatedly, he's really good against most other heroes who like having illusions. you can turn them building up their illusions to your advantage. (he doesn't make the strongest illusions in the game though. we'll have to talk about that another day.) with scepter you can also make an illusion by punching someone, which raises his ganking and 1v1 potential by a bit and is very strong in the right matchups (it also stuns) but comes pretty late in the game usually.
it's really fun to do things like that but nothing he can do changes the fact that this is a hero like death prophet where you need your team to fight with you. you have no stuns and while surge sounds great for chasing in theory that's the kind of thing that gets you killed. and honestly it's even harder to play with your team because you don't have anything to open with. if you show first you get pounced on and killed and you really need somebody to set up the position for you to combo off of. that made both of the games it took to get a win feel really slow and sloggy even though the one i won was honestly a huge comeback where i hit a few great combos. this is another really flashy hero who's fun to watch, but when things aren't going well...oof.
may be a while before the next one because bloodseeker is a hero i already know i don't like playing much. could still be tomorrow though, who's to say