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"
he's a knight who turns into a dragon. the knight is a moderately slow guy with a weirdly slow feeling sword attack, and the dragon is his ult, which upgrades his spells and abilities in general while also turning him ranged. he was a main character in the anime on netflix, which i did not watch. but it was named after his "dragon's blood" passive, which gives a ton of armor and hp regen for free. it gives you a few minutes to chill in the early game knowing some carry and their support can't kill you, before the enemy mid suddenly runs in out of nowhere and does the job for them. there's a skin based on his design from the show, which is somehow way less interesting than his default (which covers a blocky face with a big helmet that leaves a long red ponytail sticking out the back)
broadly the proper thing to do on this hero is to build a ton of survivability since the upgraded spells are very strong (a melee stun that gains decent range in dragon form and a fire breath that weakens enemy attacks and does a bunch of damage over time afterward) so just being a dragon for as long as possible gives most of the offensive value you can get. he's not the only transforming hero like that but he might be the one whose default form feels worst in general. that's kind of fine actually since it's not like i enjoy farming a ton so a hero who's trying to get involved in scraps and pushing a lot is fun. but at the same time his "go mode" is a bit unremarkable compared to some of the truly fucked up micro ults, so i don't like to play him much these days even though i used to. i love dragons. but now there's winter wyvern and she's a girl too
got a one and done for this one, which is nice even though i didn't play too well. less generously, i had a garbage game, but i ate the hits i needed to for my team to win fights, which is the hero's main job in the end (though he's one of the best tower attackers per item you get). i could have survived better by itemizing for it but it's not really that fun and i think it would've mattered less than usual because primal beast was pretty much tunneling on me. also i crutch too hard on buying sage's mask for early mana regen. it kind of works since there's almost no hero who can't build either arcane boots, urn, or orchid malevolence as the game goes on, but that's partly because orchid and its upgrade are kind of overloaded items at the moment that give too many buffs on top of the debuff you can cast with it (it both silences and increases the damage taken by the target, so a ton of heroes you usually can't kill quickly just turn into piranha food). in the end i canceled plenty of ults with my disables and we were never in much danger of losing the game. the primal beast decided to shit talk about winning the mid lane in the end, but he was up against snapfire. i'm really not that impressed, bro, she had way more impact than you in the end
i feel like dk is often considered one of the "boring" ranged cores (though not to the same extent as my next hero, viper) since he doesn't have a big button that obviously wins fights and doesn't build damage items to get crazy attacks either. playing for these steady gameplans doesn't appeal to a lot of players and i admit it's not much my thing either, but it does win games. and i like attacking buildings, so it's fun when you finally bust the game open and rain down icy poison fire on the enemy base. he's not a bad hero, he just feels like he has a super old-school design at this point. (because he does, haha)