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"

easy one and done. playing a temporarily busted (i think she's top 3 in ban rate in high skill brackets) hero with a smart grimstroke on your team is a quick recipe for success. i bought an item instead of buying back after i died in the fountain trading enemy buybacks, so the game ended when i was still dead for 1 more second. there's a lot to say about the hero though

spectre is one of those heroes who comes and goes with the tides, a really old allstars mainstay who has had nominally the same kit for the whole ~20 years (this also means she still has two passives, which is really strange now) and was also implemented very early in dota 2. i remember this well because she was banned nearly every game i saw at the first TI, and for good reason, because when she got picked, she won. in allstars she's one of many heroes who used a warcraft 3 model with crude effects to make them look spookier/sinister (or in a few cases just different). i wanted to say "shitty effects" but let's be real, i love that kind of thing. also, she didn't speak words in her sound clips in allstars, which was a common recipe for heroes i played a lot. according to dota 2 she's also one of my most played heroes since 2011 (when i got into the beta), and i won a bunch of those games. i don't remember that