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 "weakest hero in the game" bit from last time was a joke, obviously. sorta. lone druid kind of only has one spell, and in terms of 1v1 fights, should you find yourself in one, he's probably one of the least capable heroes in the game. needless to say, this is a bit of a cheese hero, albeit less than in the past (when it was famous for being one of ti3-winner Admiral Bulldog's top two heroes, both of which executed similar gameplans), and if you can duck most of the huge pool of heroes that will make you absolutely miserable (it's probably close to 1/4 of the roster), you can usually have a nice, easy game that ends in half an hour or less. i started playing him a bunch when i came back to dota, and it's a bit frustrating because usually if the game isn't like that you can't really get strong enough to win the game.
the "lone" appellation refers to him being like, some kind of long-lived woodland person or something, and is obviously sort of ironic since his gimmick is to summon a bear. the bear is a literal second hero who shares your main castable ability (an aoe roar that briefly makes people run away from you with fear status, which is mostly defensive but sometimes useful in stun combos) and passive (it raises their armor based on the other hero's armor and gives life steal to both) and can use items. and then his ult turns him into a melee hero (he's ranged otherwise) very similar to the bear. it's sort of a second panic button in team fights since you gain a bunch of hp and armor, but it won't save you from people going on you for very long. meanwhile, the bear can trap people in place randomly on attacks and does lots of damage to buildings. you get those passives during the ult as well. if you move the bear too far from the hero the bear can't attack, though (unless you get the scepter and put it on the bear)
the bear is incredibly strong at the start of the game, with dangerous offense, good movement speed, and twice as much health as some heroes, though its armor is very low till you reach the maximum skill level. and then you still have the lone druid as well, giving massive attack damage in lane and huge threat if people get rooted early on. and lone druid is only as powerful as the bear part of the time (though it can become quite frequent late in the game), so the general understanding of this hero has always been that you build items for the bear and go for the most cost efficient stuff possible on the druid. they both have universal type, but the bear doesn't gain stats the same way and the hero eventually becomes potentially stronger than it...but going for that would take quite a weird game. and if you farm tons and the game lasts forever you might reach a point where you have two full heroes. it's fun to imagine what builds you might go for like that, but...with so many item buildups and super expensive late game items you can give the bear these days (it's customary to buy cheap items that power up its attack speed and ability to slow enemies, but those now turn into even better items if you can afford them later...), it'd take quite a game to reach that point, and if you can't win before that you're probably losing too hard to farm that much. this hero is the best building attacker in the game, even over others i've mentioned like luna, and if you can gather with your team, win fights, and take towers in the first 15-20 minutes you're on track to win the game handily. if not, you get to spend the next 30-50 minutes thinking "maybe the next item will save me?" and then finding out that it definitely does not.
the old-school druid actually just ran the bear around the map far from the hero and hit buildings before running away to not die. this has commonly been called "ratting" or "rat dota" and it sucks to play against but is one of dota's most interesting meta concepts...some people still do this, but every time i've tried it i've committed to it too late (after realizing i can't win fights, haha) and not been successful. a lot of heroes can prey on the fact that the hero and bear usually stand close together, though, so it's easy to feel very counterpicked. anyway, the need to split quickly and move both at once at times means this is a hero that feels very easy except when it doesn't, and i still feel very weak after quite a few games on it. even when i started thinking about learning the hero, i said "i want to learn a hero that only assholes play." every game that's not an easy win is an absolute struggle where i can't manage anything in the end...either way, a lot of people in the game are totally miserable. that's dota!!