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"
#2 was medusa but i don't remember that particularly at all and the hero's pretty different atm. oh well!
night stalker is based on the day/night mechanic. he's actually a hero i used to play a ton, back when the game was less about spellcasting and people were a lot worse. in the daytime he sucks. at night his passive buffs him up and his spells become stronger. also his ult makes it night. his passive used to be totally fucked up and at around 5 minutes you could run around the map really fast and kill everyone on the enemy team, then later you'd buy aghs and show off giant amounts of vision wherever you walked. at which point if you lost it felt well within your rights to get mad if your teammates wasted the huge advantage you got them
now the map is so big and you have to spend more mana. you can't do that and actually have to play the whole game. it's hard to get used to. i think a bunch of the item changes actually make him a little weak at the moment since it's hard to get enough mana to fight and running fast to gank people in the current meta usually just leads to overextending. (i've watched high mmr games lately. people do the same shit, just endless brawls in one lane. it's a little less frequent but still) but the unique nature of his silence ability (it's an aoe near him so meaties a bunch of stuff that you normally would never be able to click on) does make him a strong counter to some things. i had a hard time playing him because i spammed him when i knew how to make him totally broken. that's going to be a recurring theme