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"
luna is one of the game's ultimate carries. of course she's been tried in other roles, sometimes successfully, but really...she's so good at what she does that it's kind of silly to fight against it. she has a bouncing attack, which in allstars was a pretty huge limitation on what items she could use due to engine limitations, but that's been one of the biggest changes in dota 2. she has a damage aura that gives extra night vision too, and then the lucent beam, which just shoots down from the sky on some guy and does damage and a very short stun. her ultimate is eclipse; day turns into night for a few seconds and a bunch of beams come down in a row near her. this gives some scope for alternate builds, but the bouncing attack is truly character-defining. it makes her one of the fastest farming carries in the game and gives her absurd damage in any fight against more than one enemy unless they're unbelievably spread out. and then when you kill them enough times you push. your attacks bounce around the whole base, and they can't approach safely anymore while all their buildings collapse.
so she's pretty simple, but this is the first time since i picked up the challenge again that i've been playing a "true" farming hero, so i really had to take a new mentality. "i want to move far away from everyone and hit creeps for 20-30 minutes." honestly, i was close to succeeding in the first game, but the enemy team had someone who truly free-farmed the whole game who i didn't quite get ahead of even after we started winning fights. the second game ended up pretty rad, though. some guy started talking, and a couple other people responded, so i figured at least one of them was his buddy that had joined together. we ended up all communicating a bunch about where to go and what to do...in the end they were very chill about me hitting creeps for so long while they experienced the ups and downs of fighting in dota, lol. i died a couple times unnecessarily still by over-committing to pushes, but overall it was a pretty solid game. really, i feel like something like that is the most there can possibly be to write about with characters like this. "i played properly and then ran forward and did another 20k damage to the enemies so they all died"
not really my favorite style, especially because she's one of the super strange and rare heroes who still has two passives (and usually buys mask of madness for farming, which puts you in a berserk state so you can't press any spells, lol) so not my favorite hero, but she's really good at it and if i wanted to really get good at doing this thing for whatever reason (gaining mmr, perhaps; it'd probably be really easy to outfarm players in my bracket by enough to nearly-solo the game if i committed to practicing it for a couple hours) she's basically the best choice around.
next game, i get to play as the villain of one of my previous challenges. may take a bit to even get a game where i want to play him though, on his own he gets countered by a ton of popular heroes hahaha
