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"
the "tormented soul", the ghostly transulcent keeper of the light in allstars. this is another hero who's been very similar forever, and as a result kind of reliant on item metas to become very strong. in last year's final big patch he became the best hero in the game for a week, but the nerfs to solar crest and bloodstone at the end of that week hurt the hero a lot, and the more recent discovery that mage slayer is one of the best two items in the game right now (and partially counters shiva's guard, the other one) has put him back to rest until the presumed 7.36 in a month or five.
but people in low unranked don't build mage slayer, they build DAEDALUS and BUTTERFLY and other items that make big numbers appear on your screen really fast instead of tiny numbers appear really really really fast. so it's fine. (it's maybe fine. this hero has a terrible winrate across all games and a horrendous 23.5% in the top tier of pubs over the last week (though, accordingly, this isn't a very big sample size)) this one turned into a wacky hour long game where i died a lot, which led to me building defensive items very slowly and continuing to die a lot. this hero basically puts out tons of spell damage constantly till you run out of mana or life and the latter is more likely to happen a lot of the time (even after the bloodstone nerf...it used to give a lot of mana when you use the active but now it's just "satanic" for spellcasters, giving lots of lifesteal briefly.) generally you play this hero out of mid and make a kind of exodia build to become almost impossible to kill since the spell damage naturally flows out of it anyway, and once i was close to buying eternal shroud (at 58 minutes into the game) i was like "ok, NOW i will not die again." and it was true, but i was also very conservative for a couple more minutes after that which helped. shiva's, eternal shroud, bloodstone give you the lifesteal and armor + magic resistance to endure almost anything, plus they have strong synergy between them for this hero. add in sange and kaya for extra health and spell damage+lifesteal and a pair of boots to help on the mana front a little more and it becomes hard to go on you even as you stomp most heroes 1v1 (unless they have mage slayer). and if that's not enough you can buy scepter, giving a skill that makes you unattackable while disarming nearby enemies and increasing the spell damage they take.
the enemies had a strong two-pronged assault with death prophet for spells, silences, and frontline power, and muerta with physical and magical attack damage behind. she's able to shoot two heroes at once so she kinda slaughtered the whole team for a lot of the game, but kept getting killed as well since she waited so long to buy her own defensive items. but of course my teammates wouldn't buy theirs either, so even an hour in she was nearly one-shotting some of them...eventually my build overtook death prophet though and the tide shifted a lot. after a couple big defenses at the final towers we pushed back and won mega creeps, then the whole game. exciting stuff. i didn't play well (though in the end i mostly did my job. i took way more damage than anyone else in the game and tied with a few other heroes for most deaths). this hero's spells are the same, but you have to play different...
in all that i've never talked about the abilities really, despite saying i love this hero. he has a very slow-activating stun called split earth (the cast animation is only a little long, but there's an extra second or so before it hits). it casts automatically several more times in the same spot if you get shard, which is extremely good. but since it's slow the way to set it up is with his lightning strikes, which slow enemies a lot for a second, bouncing between nearby ones for high damage. then his ult (pulse nova) is a toggleable ability; when it's on, giant magic damage rains once per second on nearby enemies, but it drains your mana the whole time. this makes him a premier farmer and fighter out of the midlane, though he's been seen relatively commonly in other core roles at times due to his overall power and game pace. my favorite skill, unsurprisingly, is "diabolic edict." it locks onto one nearby enemy and deals damage to that enemy several times per second. it's based on your current position, so you can chase people with it, but most importantly...it hits towers. you'll deal over 1000 damage to towers in a cast if you can hit it the whole time. but with the buffs to lightning strike it combos super well with split earth, so you can't really justify the tower hitting spell until more of the midgame anymore, when you used to be able to get pickoffs and then crush towers with edict very early.
i still kinda love this hero, but not as much as the old days when it literally was like "drive people out of the lane and push their towers so they can't play after 20 minutes". my winrate in those days was really good. i'll have to play him more if he becomes good again, but if not...at least there's death prophet.