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"
well, this is the first one of these where i won a game after someone on the enemy team left it. we were winning pretty hard, but i've talked about heroes like night stalker where you used to be able to stomp the early game but fall off really hard as the game goes on. i think this is the first hero that's come up where that feels like what it's like playing as or against him even to this day.
spirit breaker's one of the most perennially popular heroes in the game; i'd say there's a handful of heroes which almost never leave the top 20 or so most played even if they become pretty bad. he's the most "run at you" hero ever invented. charge of darkness targets an enemy hero and runs at them till you catch up or cancel it, following them even into areas you can't see (or the base). if you hit the target it gets stunned. if the target gets killed while you're on the way the charge marker goes to the nearest enemy. anything else you run into gets bumped out of the way with a short stun and takes damage. along with that, he's got an active skill (bulldoze) that makes him run faster and gain a huge amount of status resistance. this was a common mechanic for a while but it became so dominating they took it away from most things, and only a few heroes can get it easily now. if you press it right before you get stunned or slowed it will only last for a tiny amount of time and you can start running away. his most well-known skill is the passive though, which is called "greater bash". regular bash (i.e. the skull basher item) comes out on hits and stuns an enemy for a short time. greater bash stuns an enemy and pushes them backwards. his ultimate, "nether strike", makes him teleport behind the enemy and hit with a guaranteed greater bash. early on, this means he has a combo of running forward and then ulting. the enemy gets stunned for a long time even if rng's not on your side and will take a ton of damage. later on he can be great at charging across the map to escape from bad scenarios or kill lots of creeps in other lanes, but his ability to stun someone out of the game to get kills with one other person falls off and you have to fight with your team.
charge really is an amazing disable spell, and with the scepter it beats bkbs and other spell immunity + has a cooldown similar to other stuns, so if you can find the positions to rush through people repeatedly in a fight you can still have game-winning impact. otherwise you have to hope you pissed people off enough earlier on that they want to kill you even though you do less than the other team members. lol. that's oversimplifying, but he's really not the most reliable hero around...and he preys a lot on worse players who don't see him coming. that said, it's possible to do real work on the hero at any level. at a tournament a few years ago lgd's coach xiao8/xiaoba was substituting for their midlaner. and practically the only hero he played was spirit breaker. honestly, it's a real treat to see this hero played well. he can feel cheap but he's also one of the easiest heroes to feed on in the whole game. it gets annoying when he's really strong like he was at TI last year, but even then, it's a hero that tends to keep the game moving quickly and create a lot of action running around, so it's hard to hate it too much.