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[yarr]

This is probably meaningless to all of you, but the guy I made the bet with a long while ago concerning my pro-Luna build bought a courier for me today! Yay!

To tally all the stuff I have:
1. Storm Spirit Announcers
2. Robot Courier
3. Stumpy Courier
4. Fat Treants

Will everyone in game hear the Storm Spirit announcer when you do a double kill for example, or only you?

[Briggsy16]

DOTA 2 invites are apparently like golddust to find.

[Rez]

I've heard that if someone in-game has an equipped announcer, then everyone in the game will have the option to activate it.

Well, they're not worth what they were when value released the item for them, but invites are still being sold for 3+ keys.

[Briggsy16]

Got one in the last 30 minutes off a kind soul on the playdota forums Looking forward to finishing work and getting started on it when I'm home

Anyone have any good hints and tips for me? Good beginner Hero to start off with? I was thinking Axe just because I seen TotalBiscuit play a game with him..

[ukulele]

Beginer tips (i hope):
1) Most important rule: Dont Die, if you really are a newbie you must play like a coward and dont risk it, if you estimate that you can kill another hero and maybe get out chances are you are estimating wrongly becouse of lack of experience, the outcome wont be that.
2) Map Awareness+Last Hit/Deny: Make sure you dont get ganked and more importantly tell your team when they might be close to a gank, as you are new you will need to give the team all the help you can becouse your skills wont be enough. Try to deny from te enemy and focus on suporting your partner, if your partner cant last hit, then you do it.
3)Dont be one of those people that only play with one hero, the only chance of improvement is to understand every heroe and item on game, you have to know your allies and enemies and what they are capable of. I recomend playing "Random" every game until you feel you know every hero. (Yeah you will get flamed and you will rage and sometimes you will lose, but this is the best way to learn)

Basically if you are new your skills wont save you so try to focus on exp and gold advantage (not your advantage but your team), thats why not dying is of such importance. if you dont die no matter how bad you play your team wont be so handicapped.
EDIT: Comunicate with your team, tell them you are new, ask them what they want you to do and ask for item builds if you get lost.

[Briggsy16]

Are the AI any good for practicing? Was hoping on running through a few games using bots to get used to heroes and items?

Thanks for the tips, very helpful! This is a game I'd love to really get in to.

[Vherid]

I've heard that if someone in-game has an equipped announcer, then everyone in the game will have the option to activate it.

Yes.

[ukulele]

Are the AI any good for practicing? Was hoping on running through a few games using bots to get used to heroes and items?

Thanks for the tips, very helpful! This is a game I'd love to really get in to.

There are bots, and they are quite good but not in a human way, if you never played a moba id still recomend playing a few bot game.
You never played a moba or you never played dota? whats your background i could give some better advice knowing that.

[Briggsy16]

I've played either LoL or HoN for possibly 1-3 hours. That's all my knowledge of moba games, always wanted to get into them but never got round to it.. Watched some videos of DOTA 2 this weekend and loved the look of it

[umiman]

This is probably meaningless to all of you, but the guy I made the bet with a long while ago concerning my pro-Luna build bought a courier for me today! Yay!

To tally all the stuff I have:
1. Storm Spirit Announcers
2. Robot Courier
3. Stumpy Courier
4. Fat Treants

Will everyone in game hear the Storm Spirit announcer when you do a double kill for example, or only you?

People have to manually enable it themselves (from the button on the top left) but yeah it's available to everyone on both teams. I generally tell people when the game gets paused at some point.

I hope Valve puts in a notification telling people when there are custom announcers available in game, but it's quite likely they're already working on it.

----------------

Briggsy16: Play Lich. He's the most newbie friendly hero. And you almost always want to be a support for the first few games when you start out so you can understand the gist of the game. He's nowhere near useless either, having one of the highest winrates in the game. Playing him is a guarantee you and your partner will win your lane. It's practically assured. Furthermore, unlike other games of this genre, being a support doesn't mean you do nothing other than sacrifice for your team (though you quite literally have a skill called Sacrifice, but more on that later). Being a support in DotA simply means you can do crazy ass shit without needing gold. Again, Lich for example can blow up an entire team almost by himself with just his ult WITHOUT any items.

Here's a simple guide:

1. Buy whatever is in your recommended items. Lich is damn bloody easy to play and his items barely ever change. Almost the same all the time. Hell, the only difference between MY Lich and the game's recommended Lich is that I get healing boots.

2. Start with your E, Sacrifice. Use it right from the start to eat the melee creeps that get spawned from the barracks. After that use it every single time it's up. Sacrifice is special in that unlike regular denying, you actually deny ALL the gold and ALL the exp from that creep to your enemies, not to mention it will almost completely prevent the lane from pushing at all thus keeping lane control in your favour permanently. As you can imagine, over time you are seriously screwing over your lane opponents and there's literally nothing they can do about it except lose. You don't actually want to max this though, it's actually fine to leave it at level 2 for a while.

3. Max your Q, Frost Blast, first. It hurts like the ungodly furnace of hell and you can spam it nonstop. Use it for everything. Use it for farming. Use it for bursting down squishy carries. Every time the enemy comes in range, smack them with this Q then autoattack them a few times while they're slowed. Between this and sacrifice the enemy will quite likely sit at their tower and cry.

4. Once Q and E are maxed you can get Frost Armour between levelling your ultimate whenever possible. It's not that Frost Armour is useless (it's actually fricking amazing), it's just that Lich has so damn many good skills. Leave it on autocast and you can manually cast it as well whenever you feel like it.

5. When a teamfight starts, press R and win. 'Nuff said.

-----------

The interesting thing about DotA is that many of the best heroes in the game are also the easiest to play. You could also look into Sven (Epic stun, Master Yi racing), Viper (Press Q to win game), and Ursa (Right click on enemy to win).

[Rez]

I'd suggest you play a couple bot games.  HoN is supposed to be pretty similar to dota, but the penalties for getting caught in a bad position are much, much more severe than in LoL.  The bots do not play like humans, but the things they do will train you to be wary of stunners and nukers in the right ways.  They'll also teach you not to let agi carries free farm the whole game, since your bots will never try to gank an opponent sniper.

As for heroes, lich is a decent one to start with.  It can't hurt you to try more complicated heroes and carries, as long as you understand how they're supposed to be played.  Support isn't really the best role for a new player, but it's one in which failure is an option.  If a ganker or carry fails, then you'll almost certainly lose the game or have to work a ton harder.  If a support fails, then you won't have wards and upped courier for a while.   If you're decent at last hitting, there's nothing stopping you from being the carry in low skill games.

Don't pick lich if the other team has a push line-up:  heroes like leshrac, chen, enchantress.  Those are the main ones, but there are all sorts of abilities that let people push onto your towers and kill them quickly.  Since one of lichs key points is making the friendly creep wave smaller, he will always pull the lane closer to the friendly tower when he uses sacrifice, which in turn makes it easier to push the tower.  Tower gold is something like 1200 gold per tower and the map control the tower exerts is priceless.  It bears reiteration, though if you've played an AoS before you know it already.


Other fun supportey heroes that have a low skill floor:  veno, vengeful spirit, tide, shadow demon, ogre magi
Not fun, but decent support heroes: crystal maiden, warlock

Edit: AND OPPONENT! My eyes burn.  Their going to fall out.

[Briggsy16]

Thanks a lot guys, your hints will help! Shall report back later after a few bot games

[aenri]

2. Start with your E, Sacrifice. Use it right from the start to eat the melee creeps that get spawned from the barracks. After that use it every single time it's up. Sacrifice is special in that unlike regular denying, you actually deny ALL the gold and ALL the exp from that creep to your enemies, not to mention it will almost completely prevent the lane from pushing at all thus keeping lane control in your favour permanently. As you can imagine, over time you are seriously screwing over your lane opponents and there's literally nothing they can do about it except lose. You don't actually want to max this though, it's actually fine to leave it at level 2 for a while.

Start with Sacrfice, but eat the ranged creep, not the melee. Melee creeps have no dmg, and no pushing power. Eat melee creep when you need to regain mana - i.e. the original use of Sacrifice. On the other hand ranged creep has tons of damage and pushes the line heavily towards opponents - you don't want this so eat him.

[umiman]

Melee creeps give significantly more exp (33% more exp compared to 12% less gold) and has way more hp (250 hp more!). They may not have as much dps as ranged creeps, but who gives a damn since the lane is completely not pushing anyway regardless of what you eat, (you just outright denied 25% of the entire lane straight off the bat, up to 50% within the next few seconds) so you might as well maximize the deny value.

Basically, the comparison is:

1. Deny two melee from the start: denied 124 exp
2. Deny ranged + melee: denied 103 exp

- A hero needs 200 exp to reach level 2.

- Each standard creepwave gives 227 exp, resulting in a 54% total exp deny if you ate two melee compared to 45% deny for ranged + melee.

- In duo lanes, this number is halved, so while the percentage is the same, each hero would end up with 51 exp if you ate two melee compared to 62 exp if you did the alternative.

- Extrapolate this number from successive creep waves, with one deny per wave after this, and you can see that eating two melee at the start in a duo lane can translate to one extra creep needed to be killed for the enemy heroes to level up. This gives you more time to capitalize on your advantages however you like. For example, a lane like Lich and Jugganaut easily translate an extra 10 seconds of level advantage into easy first blood.

It's up to you if you think this is worth less than a lane pushing at the start. Though it won't regardless of what you ate, as like I mentioned earlier, you'd have eaten 50% of the entire lane by yourself.

-------------

Lastly, you can block the creeps so the ranged creep dies first. Though again, it wouldn't matter anyway.

[Rex_Nex]

(you can safely ignore which creep to eat, just eat one)