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
ayyy, fuck it, yolo. first draft made it to the last phase with lion banned and no viper/apparition/necrophos/bane, so if i picked huskar and someone like that showed up i could chalk it up to bad luck. the notable enemies were furion and spiritbreaker, who have somewhat dangerous pace-setting for the game, and jakiro's got a long but awkward and slow stun, which is a bit worrying but not on the level of high-powered targeted lockdowns. so i went for it and the enemy's last pick was bloodseeker. that's...a bit rough. bloodseeker gets powered up and can see when an enemy is low on life (they don't have to be very close). i want to be low on life. so there's a stretch early on where it seems truly threatening to be doing stuff with this hero, and i committed to a couple engagements before i had all my items that i was not complete enough to fight in. i also got chased halfway around the map by 3-4 heroes a few times and got away in two of them, which was hilarious. overall my goal was like the last game though. farm hard, get all the items to get my survival combo together, and then laugh while beating down everyone almost helplessly.
this hero's got a unique concept with a passive that makes his health regen and attack speed kick up super high as he drops in life, which means in the late game when other strength heroes with items similar to ones he would build are rolling around with 5000 hp or so you are trying to start off fights with maybe 1800 or so ideally. he can throw burning spears that cost his life, and his ult can reduce a lot more life; you spend about 30-40% of what you have to jump at someone and cut their life by the same amount. lastly, he's got a slightly defensive spell that pushes people nearby back and stops them from attacking briefly. because of this setup, he wants unusual items that are rarely bought by other heroes these days, usually at most as niche picks: the "armlet (of mordiggian)" and "heaven's halberd." halberd's a simple one, you get a bunch of strength and a little evasion and gain a second disarm status. the armlet is a weird thing that you can turn on to gain a bunch of strength, damage, and attack speed, but it drains your life. this leads to the potentially very technical "armlet toggling" mechanic where you basically use the strength gain to heal repeatedly (you "lose the life" every time you turn it off, but if your hp is lower than what you'd lose, you go to 1; then you go back up to the 500 or so you gain by turning it back on). though it's not as powerful these days as a lot of damage over time is assessed faster and enemies attack faster earlier, which makes it harder or even impossible. but for huskar you don't always have to do that much, since the bonuses from the armlet align nicely with his passive, allowing you to gain the benefits of both the low life and the armlet simultaneously and (somewhat imprecisely) set your hp into a kind of stasis in a range between 25-60% most of the time depending on what you need by turning it off and then back on when you reach the amount you want. (that upper range goes up and eventually reaches full hp as the game goes on and you get stronger, but if you're above it you'll drop down, and if you're below it overtakes the drain.) eventually you get life steal to counteract higher damage enemies too, so that they can't just beat you in attacking wars. that happened to furion eventually in my game, and i bought a gem to stop him from running away. as much as i'm loath to say that he's a skillful hero, the player did play a really good game, crushing the early game and buying all the items he could to have the best chance in later fights. but the rest of his team couldn't deliver the rest of what he needed and we were only in actual danger for a short time after getting killed destroying most of the base. (that happens a lot.)
overall, this hero dunks on enemies who don't have good stuns and/or burst damage. as a result he's gotten a kind of reputation as a cheese pick, whose mechanics have powerful counters...but if you don't draft them and can't easily build enough items to counter him, he can take over the game easily. the kind of thing commentators groan about in pro matches because he loses really rarely-you'll never see him picked in game where he'll probably lose! and if i was in higher skill brackets where people buy shiva's and other healing reduction constantly this would've been a really hard game. but it was just a fun one. i didn't panic and hit all my shit in the endgame teamfights. feels good.
i promise i'm going to stream more ys tomorrow
