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 don't want to just have my takeaway from any of these be "that was miserable" but this one really tested that. in the end, i have to admit, it wasn't miserable. it was, however, cursed. i literally got robbed out of a win due to a real life scare that literally turned out to be nothing. and that was after three or four ridiculously frustrating games where we lost to cheese/smurf picks that my team couldn't figure out how to fight against.

disruptor is a support who moves slow, and has no stuns and low burst damage. it feels like playing a big body grappler in a fighting game, and not in a good way. his kit is pretty heavily built around one spell, which is pretty unique (there's another hero who has sort of the "opposite" move, "x marks the spot"; they're actually really different in practice). "glimpse" moves a target enemy back to where they were four seconds ago. it reaches really far at maxed skill level, and his first skill gives you vision on an enemy (while dealing pulses of damage and short slows) so that even if they move really far away, out of regular sight, you can still click on them. then you can lay your traps at the spot where they get dragged back to. one is his ult, which is a large damage field which silences the enemy so they can't cast spells, and if you get scepter, they also can't use items. the other makes a wall appear; after a second enemies can't move through it.

glimpse is a piece of technical wizardry i can't imagine how they implemented in the warcraft 3 engine, and it acts as a super powerful counter to some really fast-escaping heroes who you can't easily stun and slow when they run away. it also catches enemy teleports at either end; they can't escape if you cast it on them right before their teleport finishes, and you can also bounce somebody back where they came from (with the scroll on cooldown) if you see them teleport inside your vision. it's also a spell that only really "works" when you're winning the game. because otherwise they'll just win the fight, or they'll jump and kill you before getting away. also, both glimpse and X can be escaped by eul's scepter, which tosses yourself or an enemy in the air for a few seconds before dropping them on the same spot; they take no damage or status during that time. but there's not a lot of heroes who truly want to build it and also, the tornado keeps them in place for a few seconds too so they don't necessarily get away.

i did learn a ton even in the games i got stomped, and i really figured out how to crush people who don't play very conservatively in lane. all the same, this hero feels more like a niche counter than a hero who consistently has the kind of impact i want to have in a game. also he walks too slow. there's a couple heroes in the future i suspect i'll have some difficulty learning, but i think this will hopefully end up being one of the most frustrating heroes of the challenge overall.

these are probably going to slow up a lot from this point, lol, my vacation ends today and once i'm back at work this isn't going to be something i want to put effort into necessarily every day