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"
viper is also a dragon. i guess? he's an ugly green flying thing who's toxic as hell. literally, his skills are all poison and venom and stuff. i think a lot of people don't like this hero since he's kind of just a slow turret with no stuns, but a few people do really like him because he often does absolutely unreasonable amounts of damage for the first 30 minutes of a game, and longer if you can coast on momentum from killing people like that and buy greedier items. if not you just do your best to turtle up and survive fights till you hit 25, and then you get to do too much damage again due to a talent that changes his attribute from agility to universal.
he can add poison to his normal attacks, spit poison on the ground, poison people who attack him, and poison one guy so hard their passives stop working (the "break" status). this is the ult and it's one of those things where, for a good chunk of the game, if you get hit by it at full hp and teleport immediately you might live, and otherwise it will kill you. the scepter gives him a skill that isn't poison, but it is a stun that involves crashing into the ground near someone. i didn't buy it in these games...his shard lets his poison attack affect buildings, which is cool and (imo) really strong in the high ground pushing situation that's pretty hard this patch, since it becomes way easier to wear down towers without committing your body close to them.
i lost a game on this hero where i was like 8 levels higher than the rest of my team because there was a phantom assassin 8 levels higher than the rest of her team and she's a lot harder to click on than viper is. (it's a genuine counterpick since she can cross the screen instantly and the high damage per hit counters the poison armor, but i still might've been able to win by playing better.) and then i didn't want to play him again, but a few games later i was at a loss for what to pick and decided i would suck it up and try him in a supportish role for a game (this does occasionally happen at higher levels too, even though he's usually a non-carry core; he does mostly ability damage early in the game anyway, and he's not the easiest hero to kill, so it kind of makes sense). i was in a lane with a sniper whose early game last hitting was a little scuffed but we easily zoned the enemies and got a large experience advantage, after that i started cruising with leshrac and we won a bunch of slightly ugly fights. by this point i'd come to the conclusion that i was fine to go into a damage build as long as i kept carrying dust to kill clinkz, which i did a few more times. the enemies honestly put up some very good fights but i felt like my early game really set us up for success.
also the techies who kinda blew up the game was on our team this time. that helped. for all i didn't want to play this hero very much i actually felt like i had a banger game with a lot of good plays and reads. maybe i should do it again