How in the heck do I play DOTA 2?

My bud got me DOTA 2 for my birthday. So I fired it up. The game’s tutorial is… well, they haven’t actually programmed it in yet.

So I played. Hey, look, it’s my dude, I’m on a team. Oh, I’m dead. Oh, I’m dead again. What do these objects do? I’m dead again. I’m dead again. I’m dead again. Here, good. I levelled up. I have a new ability… I’m dead again.

Can someone provide some opening pointers so I can actually go a few minutes without dying? WTF am I supposed to do? Everyone I attack kills me. Effortlessly.

Have you looked at League of Legends? It’s a free-to-play game in the style of DotA. Even has two tutorials, basic and really really basic.

Yeah, DOTA 2 is fairly inaccessible right off the bat. They really should have streamlined, at the very least, the way the store works, if they’re smart they will before releasing the game officially.

Basically, go to to youtube and look for DOTA 2 tutorials. You’ll need to spend a few hours doing that. Then watch a few matches both on youtube and inside DOTA2 itself. There you can pause the action and focus on a single player to see what he/she does.

Or… try League of Legends as suggested above. It’s still a complex game, but it’s definitely more approachable IMHO.

The average Dota game goes through three distinct stages and how you play varies depending on the stage of the game. The three stages are the laning stage, the ganking stage, and the teamfighting stage.

Your playstyle is further broken down depending on which of the three character archetypes you’re playing. The three archetypes are ganking heroes, carry heroes, and support heroes. Dota 2 is kind enough to mark these roles with icons on a hero cards and through filters. Note that some heroes are able to fulfil multiple roles, but you need to decide on which role you’re going to play. An effective team consists of one carry role, one ganker role, and three support roles.

The first stage of the game is the laning stage. The purpose of this stage is to prepare your team for the ganking stage by manipulating the lane in such a way to give your team an advantage over the opposing heroes in your lane. A typical lane setup consists of your ganking hero going to the mid lane alone (which provides the most experience advantage), your carry role and one support hero going to the safe lane (so called because the creeps naturally meet in pocket that the enemy can’t sneak up on) and then the remaining two supports go to the off lane , which is the opposing team’s safe lane.

The role of a carry player is to kill as many creeps as possible in order to maximize her gold intake. This is accomplished by getting the killing blow on an enemy creep. The role of a ganker player is to farm as effectively as possible and to try and control the runes that spawn at every even-number minute mark (2, 4, 6, etc). If the ganker gets a strong rune, such as double damage or haste, she should forego killing creeps and try to kill an opposing player. The role of a support hero is to not die and assist the ganker if she comes into your lane. All roles also want to try and control the creep wave equilibrium, which is the point that the creep wave meets. The closer it is to your tower, the safer you are from gankers and the easier it is for your ganker to kill the opposing players. This is done through pulls (advanced topic) and denying creeps such that your wave of creeps dies before the enemy wave and then tanking the creeps so they don’t move forward. It is the responsibility of all players to control the creep equilibrium.

The second stage of the game is the ganking stage. This gank usually begins about 8 - 10 minutes into a game when support heroes have their ultimate abilities. The role of a carry player in this stage is to continue murdering opposing creeps in order to maximize gold. The role of the ganker is to attempt to gank the opposing team’s carry (ideally) or any hero in a weak position. Support heroes have the greatest responsibilities in this stage. They need to accomplish three things: don’t die, assist the ganker, respond to threats against your carry. An ideal play in this stage of the game is for the three support heroes to assist the ganker in killing all the heroes in a lane and then destroying the tower in that lane.

The final stage of the game is the team fighting stage. This stage begins after the carry players have gotten strong enough that it is possible for the ganker and supports to gank them without the assistance of the allied carry player. The defining element of this stage is that you should almost always be within a screen of the rest of your team. Respawn times are so long that if anyone dies, they’re off the map long enough for the other team to destroy some of your barracks. The ultimate goal of this stage is to destroy the opposing team’s throne. This can either happen by your team destroying the three sets of barracks and causing the “megacreeps” to overwhelm the enemy base or your team simply being so far ahead in power that they can overwhelm any resistance. I can’t explain you should be doing in this stage because what a hero needs to do in a team fight is too dependent on the specific hero compositions of the teams. However, a good guideline is to use disables on the opposing carry, kill supports with disables first, and opposing initiator-type supports last (since once they initiate, they don’t do much.)

In a bit, I’ll explain how to itemize these for these roles and stages of the game.

Itemization in Dota is probably the hardest aspect of the game to learn, since the mechanics of how items interact with each other are based on quirks and distortions of the WC3 engine. There problem isn’t a single person who knows every mechanic. Not even Icefrog. I’ll go through some of the major item mechanics though and how to itemize the various player positions through out the game.

I think the three critical mechanics are illusion-mechanics, magic immunity mechanics, and item-stacking mechanics. Illusions come from three sources: the item Manta Style, illusion runes, and a handful of hero spells. The important thing to know about illusions is that they benefit from only: the base stats of strength, ability, and intelligence; raw HP, critical strike multipliers and movement speed. Nothing else benefits illusions (until advanced gameplay, at least.)

Magic immunity is an important to know for both your defensive and offensive gameplay. Magic Immunity is offered by a few sources, but Black King Bar (BKB) is the most prevalent. Magic immunity blocks all magic-based damage and the effects of non-ultimate abilities, such as stuns. This means that the effects of ultimate abilities will penetrate magic immunity, but a twist is that magic immunity will clear effects already on your hero. So, if you currently magic immune, you may be stunned by a Beastmaster’s Primal Roar. You will not take the 200 - 300 damage that you’d normally take from the ability. Slardar’s Amplify Damage will reduce your armour through magic immunity, but if you activate it after being affected by Amplify Damage, you’ll remove the Amplify Damage from yourself. Some non-ultimate abilities will penetrate magic immunity, but that isn’t important at this level.

How items stack is pretty simple once you know the rules. The rules were simplified in the transition from Dota 1 to Dota 2, so it’s now much easier. The first rule is how Unique Attack Modifiers interact with each other. It’s only possible to use a single Unique Attack Modifier at a time and items or abilities that are Unique Attack Modifiers are clearly labeled as such. Your heroes active Unique Attack Modifier will be the highest of this priority: Proc-based Hero Skills, Proc-based Items, always-on Hero Skills, always-on Items.

Percentage-chance items and abilities such as critical strike chances and block chances work as follows: for each applicable instance (such as delivering an attack and critical strike) there is a roll on each of your sources. Whatever roll succeeds is that effect that is used. In the case of more than one roll succeeding, the strongest version of that effect is used. A 400% critical strike is override a 200% critical strike. A 20-damage block will override a 10-damage block. An exception to this is evasion items. For these items, only the highest source of evasion is rolled against. Not all sources. Items that increase statistics (strength, armour, whatever) will add together straight up. Though an exception is that you may only benefit from the movement speed of a single pair of boots.

Itemizing for the various rolls requires understanding the costs of items. Items have two costs: their gold cost and the opportunity cost of being unable to put a different item in that inventory slot (without taking a gold hit for selling the item.) In general, Support roles want to focus on items with efficient gold costs but high opportunity costs. Carry roles want to focus on gold inefficient items but with low opportunity costs. Gankers want to strike a balance. All roles get regeneration and stat items at the very beginning of the game and then a pair of boots as their first item.

Itemizing support heroes is the easiest of them all. The number of gold efficient items is fairly limited and players in this role don’t have enough gold to buy higher level items. Support players should buy wards, which allow them to locate heroes on the map, utility items such as dust of appearance to detect invisible heroes or a courier to transport items at the beginning of the game. All heroes need a way to regenerate mana and HP so they’re able to stay out in the field being useful. An effective item for this on a support hero is an Urn of Shadows or Magic Wand. A support player will generally begin the game by purchasing a courier, buy wards throughout the game, and buy a ghost sceptre as their final item. The support player with the greatest gold income (generally a jungle hero or offlane hero) will purchase a Mekansm to assist defensive counterganks and during team fights.

Itemizing a carry hero is also very easy. After getting a pair of boots, you build a farming item. What determines a farming item depends on the nature of your hero, but the most common are Battlefury, Linkens Sphere and Maelstorm. All of these items increase the rate you earn gold, which compounds through the game. Melee heroes use Battlefury. Heroes that use a lot of spells to farm get Linkens. Maelstorm provides heroes a means of killing large numbers of creeps quickly without relying on AoE spells or the melee-only Battlefury. A carry player follows up the farming item with a Black King Bar. The next item is a damage item such as Monkey King Bar or Daedalus. The final item is a survivability item such as Heart of Tarrasque, Assault Cuirass, or Butterfly. If the game goes long enough, a second damage or survivability item is picked up, depending on your need.

Itemizing a ganker is fairly open. You’re trying to fulfill two goals: being able to stay out on the map ganking and being stronger than any other hero on the map. Most ganker players will use a bottle for regeneration, since it synergies well with their rune control. An Urn of Shadows, Vladimir’s Offering or Vanguard isn’t uncommon though. With rune control, a Bottle and Magic Wand is sufficient for most heroes. The second goal is usually accomplished by getting an item balanced between being gold efficient and inventory efficient. It’s difficult to explain what to get since it depends on how your hero ganks. Strength heroes that rely on hero attacks will want an Armlet of Mordiggian or Medallion of Courage. Intelligence spell-based gankers may want an Orchid Malevolence or Dagon. A blink dagger is very common, since the mobility it provides prevents enemies from escaping. Drum on Endurance is another common item, since it provides a lot of stats to increase you hero’s power relative to everyone else and increases your mobility.

Regardless of your role, all heroes want to have a Town Portal Scroll. This item allows heroes to teleport to towers. You can use this to teleport to a lane to assist your gank or defense your carry. You can even use them to escape some ganks or move to another part of the map that has more creeps to farm. Extremely useful. As soon as you can do something useful in another lane, it’s important to get one and always have one.

Palooka, I’ll come back to this stuff later for sure, but, like, how do I heal my guy? That would be good to know.

I haven’t played DotA 2 but in every other version of the game I’ve played, there is a “fountain” in your base that heals you. It’s usually where your character spawns at the beginning.

At the start of the game, purchase one set of three Tangos from the store and one Healing Salve. Once you’ve taken about 100 damage or before you commit to an attack on the enemy heroes in your lane, use one of the tangos on a tree. If you’ve taken a significant amount of damage (say 50% or more), use your healing salve to regenerate quickly. Retreat slightly before you use your salve though, since its effect will be cancelled if you take any damage. If you need more healing items before you’re able to afford an item to provide consistent regeneration, just use the courier to bring them to you in your lane. If the courier is busy or doesn’t exist, just go back to your fountain to regenerate and then use a town portal scroll to return to the lane.

Tranquil Boots or Mekansm (depending on your income level) is a common healing item for support heroes. Bottle or Urn of Shadows is a common healing item for a ganker hero. Carry heroes generally either use Tranquil Boots or an item based on a Perseverance.

You need to watch tutorial videos and then play a bunch of bot matches. Once you’ve got the basic basics down, start watching some actual game replays inside the game client, since that lets you click around and watch how the players are managing their gold, items, and leveling.

The worst thing about DOTA 2 is that the community is really, really terrible. You’re going to take a lot of abuse while you’re learning the game (and even when you’re good you’ll still take abuse every single time you do anything that’s not perfectly optimized).

www.dotafire.com has guides for each hero. Don’t treat the guides like the holy bible or anything, but they’re a pretty good starting point.

I’m still fairly new (I’ve played less than 200 matches), but I’m starting to get a good feel for the rhythm of the game and can play at least passably with a broad selection of heroes. I try to stay away from:

  1. Most heros who requires lots and lots of gold to be successful (generally referred to as ‘hard carries’). There are a few who I’m getting better with, but I don’t generally want to be the team’s hard carry.

  2. Any hero who requires good micromanagement, either because they have illusions/images who have to be managed (Chaos Knight, Dark Seer) well or because they rely on minions of one kind of another (Lone Druid, Lycanthrope, Visage).

  3. Heroes who rely on clever movement tactics like blinking (Queen of Pain, AntiMage) or other novel movement (Storm Spirit or Nature’s Prophet). I just don’t have quite enough situational awareness to be effective that way.

Anyway, the DOTA 2 curve is really steep, but I think it’s hands down the best of its genre. I’d stick with it rather than go to LoL, where you have to pay money or grind if you want access to all the characters.

YMMV.