Learning Raijin Thunderkeg, the Storm Sprit

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storm spirit

Ever since Icefrog remade Storm, I haven’t really made an attempt to master him, but I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen some people do with him lately. So I did some searching around and found one of the most impressive strategy guides I have ever seen for any hero: Raijin Thunderkeg, the Storm Spirit Guide by cam_miles2003.

About half-way through the guide, (after all the basics are covered) there are some very interesting facts presented. Now I have not yet tested this for myself, but it is stated in the guide that Storm’s ultimate “Ball Lightning” can allow him to escape Crystal Maiden’s Frostbite, Rooftrellan’s Overgrowth ultimate, and even travel unharmed while under the effects of the Bloodseeker’s Rupture ultimate! There are quite a few more useful trivia about his ultimate ability throughout the guide.

Like you would expect from any good hero guide, there is recommended item and ability builds. The builds mentioned make sense to me, and fortunately cam_miles2003 even makes a case against certain “fail items” that a player less experienced with Storm might purchase without the proper considerations. Most notable among the “fail items” is Maelstrom, which was a cornerstone item for Storm before his recent remake. Good to know!

Have a look at the following justifications for a recommended ability build:

Static Remant is maxed early on for pushing/ killing/ defense purposes. Its a no brainer. 1 level of overload is fine early on since maxing it only results in an added 45 aoe damage.

Max Remnant and electric vortex early for the early 2.5 sec disable and add 1 level of Ball lightning at lvl 6 for escaping, ganking, spell evasion purposes.

After Maxing out Remnant and electric vortex, finish leveling remnant in order to effectivly clear creep camps and waves.

And he later goes into quite a bit of detail about how exactly to optimize farming creep camps and waves.

Other things mentioned that you don’t normally see mentioned in a strategy guide are specific threats to Storm. For example, Keeper of the Light’s “Mana Leak” may often prevent you from having adequate mana to escape using Ball Lightning, and Rhasta’s “Shackles” being a rare disable that cannot be escaped from via Ball Lightning.

Roshan rush: How to win a game in 5 minutes

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You’ve probably seen the Roshan rush DotA trick before, and even if you have, this video is quite entertaining. If you haven’t seen it, this is a must-see. A team of friends set out to win a pub stomp as fast as they could, and did it in about 5 minutes, tearing up the center lane after killing Roshan. Their teamplay is pretty good, and there’s quite a bit of entertaining chat messages to read when you watch it in HD. Even some of the players on the losing team found the rush amusing.

The heroes were chosen for their ability to take down Roshan in the opening minutes of the game, although it can be done with other heroes. The key seems to be Ursa and Syllabear.

lich veno ursa syllabear dazzle

Enjoy the movie!

I’d like to see this done by a Scourge team. If anybody has any similar videos, please link them in the comments.

DotA 6.60 probably not released in April

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Icefrog just updated his blog with a new post about recipe shops in DotA 6.60. To me, the most interesting thing in it is this little bit:

With the addition of some items in 6.60 and the overdue need to organize the shops, I’ve been working on sorting them. I’m looking for input on organization approaches, as well as thoughts on the matter in general, so feel free to drop me a line.

Without saying it explicitly, Icefrog let slip a clue on the timeline for the DotA 6.60 release: he is still taking input on difficult design problems. I don’t mean to imply this is a bad thing, and I don’t want to discourage Icefrog from asking the community for input where it counts. I want the best release possible even if it means waiting a while, but clearly we can conclude that DotA 6.60 won’t be released in April. We can still get our hopes up for May!

Google Trends says DotA is growing fast

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An article in this week’s Economist magazine called Googling the Future explores how data from Google Trends can provide a dramatic increase in the accuracy of economic forecasts. After reading this article, I thought it would be interesting to do a rudimentary analysis of esports using Google Trends. In particular, I’m interested in the popularity trends of the games chosen for WCG 2009 compared to DotA, which didn’t make the cut this year, as I recently discussed in this post. The choice of which games to select for the tournament is in fact a business decision, making this sort of analysis important to the tournament sponsors.

First, let’s have a look at trends for “dota”:

google trends for dota

Google Trends makes its analysis back to 2004, and DotA has been in existence throughout the entire period. Interestingly, we see a very steady uptrend. As you will soon see, this is actually quite the opposite of what happens with most games. So to build a frame of reference, let’s look at the google trends for a couple other popular games, “world of warcraft” and “halo”.

google trends for world of warcraft
google trends for halo

Both of these games show big spikes at release, and down trends thereafter. The spikes are from new releases, like Burning Crusades and Halo 3, after which they return to down trends. Having established that DotA is different due to the persistent uptrend, let’s have a look at the 5 headliner games at WCG 2009:

google trends wcg 2009 games

I omitted version numbers except for in the case of Warcraft 3 so that it doesn’t collide with World of Warcraft. The first thing that jumps out at me is the incredible popularity of guitar hero. The google trend confirms it as an excellent choice for WCG 2009. All the other games are in steady decline. Virtua Fighter has the most irrelevant trend, but it may in fact be the best fighting game candidate. Now let’s see how DotA stacks up. I did the same graph but replaced Virtua Fighter with “dota” so that we can see how it compares:

google trends for dota and wcg 2009 games

These results are fascinating. If we project the trends out another year, to my eye it would seem that DotA would overtake every game except for Guitar Hero, and perhaps even overtake Guitar Hero as well if it were to suffer a slight drop in popularity. Clearly there is reason to believe that DotA may be the single most viable game for WCG 2010. With DotA 6.60 on the horizon, there has never been a more exciting time to be a DotA player. Let’s encourage new players to come to the game we love, don’t go out of our way to make a dota game be a bad experience for another player, support our tournament and league sponsors, and we just might take esports to new heights in 2010 with the best game ever!

Lastly, I want to give a special shout out to our Southeast Asia readers, who are completely dominating the popularity by region for DotA at Google Trends. Philippines, Malaysia, Bolivia, and Singapore!

Laning as a Melee Hero: Pro Tactics

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One of the hardest things to do in DotA is laning as a melee hero against strong ranged heroes in the early part of the game. We’ve all been crushed in this scenario before at one time or another. For example, you roll Ursa and wind up solo against Lich and Drow Ranger. You are going to have to tower hug, but what else can you do?

Everybody has seen the standard creep block, where a guy runs his hero in front of the creep wave, pausing from time to time to slow up the creeps. This will help you get started if you are in the top sentinel lane or bottom scourge lane. But it can backfire if you’re on the bottom sentinel lane or top scourge lane. Here’s why. If you slow your first wave down too much, and the opponents don’t slow their wave down, the first fight will begin underneath your tower, and the tower will clear off their creeps in no time flat. Now they’ve drawn you out from the tower and can keep the fight far away from it by attacking their own creeps and keeping you at bay.

You want the fight to happen just out of range of the tower, so that you can stand under its cover, but it can’t quite hit the creeps. Instead of running around gnashing your teeth or pressing caps-lock when the enemy draws the fight out from the tower, run back and block the next wave as it comes in. I rarely see players think to do this, like the first wave is the only one that can be blocked! If you are in the bottom sentinel lane, you can also pull the nearby neutral creeps into the lane as the creep wave runs by, causing them to stop and fight in a relatively safe location.

As you gain experience and become competitive in the lane, another tactic will help you build an advantage. When the creep waves meet and begin fighting, usually it looks like this:

y h1 h2
xxxx
XXXX
Y Me

x = enemy melee creep, y = enemy ranged creep,
X = friendly melee creep, Y = friendly ranged creep,
h1 = enemy hero 1, h2 = enemy hero 2,
Me = me!

If you stand close to the fight and order your hero to attack an enemy hero, the nearby opposing melee creeps will charge at you. Quickly cancel your attack command, and the creeps will go back to fighting each other, but the layout of the fight has changed. It now looks more like this:

y h1 h2
XXxX
xxXx
Me Y

Usually you are within attack range of 3 enemy melee creeps, and most of your melee creeps are positioned to quickly defend you if an enemy hero targets you. Opposing heroes will suffer more damage from your creeps than they will inflict on you with an attack or two, and you can last-hit the enemies for gold much easier.

A scenario that comes up quite frequently is that an enemy creep and a friendly creep are about to die at the same time. You can last hit one of them, but not both and so could your enemy. Do you try to deny, or go for the gold? Surprisingly neither one has an advantage. The advantage lies with the player who beats his opponent to the punch. In other words, anticipate which your opponent will go for, and make your fatal blow land first. One notable exception is if you can use a spell, such as Impale (Lion, Crixalis, Nerubian Assassin), Hoof Stomp (Centaur Warchief), Fissure (Earthshaker), Split Earth (Leshrac), Avalanche (Tiny), to both last hit the enemy creep for gold and stun your opponent. The nearly dead creeps are great bait and make him vulnerable to a spell attack. You’ll have more flexibility with your timing by using the spell, and the stun will ensure your opponent doesn’t get to make his attack. Often the best time to harass an opponent with a spell is when they come in for a last hit.

If you are fortunate enough to be facing melee heroes, I’ve discovered a neat trick that makes denying quite simple. Whichever friendly creep is closest to death, repeatedly right click on that creep. Your hero will “hug” the friendly creep, keeping you within melee attack range and ready to swing. As soon as the creep is ready for the death-blow, force attack it by pressing “A” and left clicking the creep. For enemy creeps, you can repeatedly right click the ground right beside them to achieve the same “hug” while keeping your attack ready to unleash.

There are many guides on laning. BLAOW has written up a very helpful guide on lane control in the premium guides section of the DotA Allstars forums. I’ve read many such guides, and BLAOW’s is one of the most comprehensive, and is fairly up to date.

MYM DotA team: Gone but the culture will live on

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To honor the newly departed MYM DotA team, I wanted to call attention to a series of highlight videos put together by MYM|slahser, the Perceptive Play series. My first exposure to these highlight videos was Perceptive Play 4, shown below.

It is easy to see that this is DotA at the highest level of competition. Some of the fights are incredibly chaotic, yet each player has an uncanny grasp of their role and what is happening everywhere in the game. They’ve got composure, and fights are won at the margins.

The coolest trick was at 1:25, the anti-mage using an illusion image to “creep block” his fleeing opponent, the bloodseeker, while the real anti-mage hacked away. My favorite moment was probably at 4:37, a sick blink dagger escape by Zues. Not only did he jump out of the way of Magnus’ shockwave, his blink took him from the hostile river bank all the way over to the friendly river bank.

The production quality of the video is quite good, I always found it easy to follow the action. One thing to keep in mind is that nearly all of the clips are from slahser’s perspective, so if you check the hero portrait in the top left corner, you’ll know which hero to watch in the big battles. The music was upbeat and enjoyable, and there are several cut scenes used to set a cool mood.

If you like this video, be sure to check out the other movies in the Perceptive Play series. MYM might be gone, but there’s a lot of amazing DotA culture created by them that will live on.

The Art of the Pickup: Part 1

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Playing hundreds of pickup dotas, you learn things. Like how to swing back to victory when you’re team is up against the ropes, and what guy is going to quit the game first before the creeps start running down the lanes. The best players practice to learn, to hone this kind of intuition, rather than to gratify the ego with a win every time. I don’t care how pro you are, DotA is a team game, so you will lose a pickup game from time to time. Your teamates combined are a bigger factor on the outcome of the game than you are in every single game. That said, there are lots of small things you can do to give your team an edge and win more often than you lose.

Waiting until most of the other players have picked before you make your pick gives an advantage because you can try to fill a gap in your team or select a direct counter to a glaring theme of your opponents’ picks. For example, if the enemy team has Rikimaru and Rooftrellan, you might consider Slardar. If the opposing team has three intelligence heroes, you might opt for Magina or Silencer. If your teamates have picked three agility heroes, you might choose a tank like Knight Davion, Axe, Pandaren Brewmaster, or Centaur Warchief.

Sort of like poker, one of the first things you need to do after the heroes have been picked is feel out your opponents. Are they lanned together using Ventrilo, or are they a pickup team also? You are more likely to be facing organized ganks if you are on the scourge side because at least one of a group of friends can host. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Roshan is slightly on the scourge side of the map. Another clue is the hero picks of your enemies. Which lineup is more likely to indicate an organized team using Ventrilo?

Earthshaker Puck Rooftrellan Sand King Krobelus

or

Rikimaru Axe Nightstalker Tinker Techies

The first lineup of course. It more closely resembles league play picks, and there is a theme of AOE damage and stuns. The second lineup also has a glaring weakness. If a player were to get a gem and bring his teamates along, they could greatly reduce the threat they face. No such obvious weakness exists in the first lineup.

Starting out, check to see what items your allies are purchasing. If none of them get a bottle and you feel like you are probably not facing an organized team, you will likely have free run of the runes, making bottle an attractive purchase. If there are no couriers, purchasing a courier can make you a popular guy. If you do get a courier, periodically watch the health of all your allies in the early game. Timely ferrying a health potion to a cornered ally can make the difference between a win and a loss. For $100 gold, you can make your ally competitive again, meaning you have less reason to worry about a ganker coming from his lane.

After the outer towers have gone down, and the game progresses into the next phase of play, if your team is being edged out, use the buddy system. Figure out which ally is the biggest threat to the enemy, and actually follow that hero around. This will subconsciously discourage that player from creeping neutrals, and encourage him to gank a lane. One of the best places to make a gank happen is the lane where your weakest teamate may still be trying to push his lane because he doesn’t know what else to do. Make this guy your bait, and lead your “follow buddy” using occasional map pings.

If this doesn’t work and your teamates are still getting picked off, chat to the “bait” player to use the buddy system, and let him have the buddy you’ve picked out for yourself, the strongest player. This frees you up to pick a different “follow buddy”, or even join up with the weakest and strongest players. If you are in a hard-fought, close game, use a “power play” to kill Roshan rather than try to break open the enemy base. Lead your team there by pinging the map. Tactics like this when you are up against the ropes will eventually crack an undisciplined team of opponents.

DotA Not Included at WCG 2009

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The WCG 2009 games list doesn’t include DotA. There’s quite a bit of disappointment coming from the comments over at MyMYM’s WCG news post. But should we be surprised that our favorite game, DotA, played by millions of players didn’t make the cut for the biggest video game tournament of the year? We didn’t put our best foot forward, but we can change that starting now.

We can learn a lot about what qualities a winning game candidate possesses by considering the list of headliner games that made the final cut:

  • StarCraft
  • WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne
  • Counter Strike 1.6
  • Guitar Hero: World Tour
  • Virtua Fighter 5
  • FIFA 09
  • TrackMania
  • Carom3D
  • Red Stone
  • Wise Star2 (mobile)
  • Asphalt 4 (mobile)
  • Dungeon and Fighter (promotional)

I don’t even know what some of these games are, but I bet my 14 year old nephew does. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t get to play DotA. The reason is that his family doesn’t like the vulgar atmosphere created by foul-mouthed online players. And he’s not alone, most of his peers don’t play DotA either. If we are going to create a future for our beloved DotA, we need to make sure that there isn’t a generational gap because kids are growing up with more “teen friendly” games like Guitar Hero. To a parent, Guitar Hero probably seems like a fairly productive thing for your child to be doing, in the same boat with taking piano lessons perhaps. But watching a DotA game for about 20 minutes often will expose the player to cyber bullying, as the pickup match becomes monopolized by ravenous, immature PVP dogs barking intimidating all-caps slander.

By taking a pro-active approach, we can change the negative environment. When you host a game, boycott players who have racial slurs in their names. Kick them immediately without question. When you find yourself in a game that is digressing into a shouting match or blame game, leave. Don’t give any time to those players. Don’t shit-talk the other players or LOL them when you make a kill. Don’t blame a loss on your teamates. Create a friendly environment for beginners. We were all beginners at some point, and we only stayed because we enjoyed playing. So let’s do our part make it a fun environment now that we are the stewards. Make new friends instead of new enemies. It’s easy.

Blizzard removed the advertising banner from the Warcraft 3 battle.net lobby with the latest 1.23 patch. Unfortunately, this makes DotA a less commercially viable game. As a gamer, rather than business owner, you might be thinking, “I hate ads”. But ads are only bad when they are invasive. I’ll give an example of great advertising. When I went to see “Lord of the Rings”, there was a trailer in the movie theater for Warcraft 3. I think they even had a demo disc available in the theater. Many DotA players got their start because of this ad campaign. So as a community, let’s be open to ads, and not try to circumvent them. Let’s give a moment of time each day or each week to those people in the DotA community who spend their time looking for corporate tournament sponsors. If you want professional gamers, you need sponsors. You can’t have one without the other. If you are unhappy about some ads or sponsors, do what you can to facilitate an alternative sponsorship. Here’s an example: I’m sure Hollister might care if 50,000 DotA players ordered shirts from their website this year, or if a dozen gamers in a game room drink Bawls Gaurana every night. But we have to let companies we buy from know what games we like. I’m going to buy my Adidas jacket anyway, if I can get to the Adidas website from a DotA page, and by doing so, let Adidas know that I play DotA when I buy the jacket, I’m helping the DotA community. Getting companies more involved in our community can only mean good things for DotA’s future.

As DotA’s primary caretaker, Icefrog should make a careful study of how Counterstrike 1.6 is on the big board at this year’s WCG. Counterstrike wasn’t always at the big tournament. It was once a young mod that stood out from the rest. Sort of like DotA today. In fact, the makers of Counterstrike weren’t inhibited by working with Valve software, they were enabled. Their vision for Counterstrike got bigtime studio support when Valve put great effort into the Counterstrike: Source remake. Gamers got the benefits for free! Counterstrike: Source was included with Half-Life 2 at no extra charge. Everybody gained. Blizzard and Icefrog would do well to emulate Valve’s approach and not crush the opportunity by trying to apply an iron fist.

Playing DotA on Garena: A Review

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Many players can barely remember what playing on battle.net is like. They’ve moved on. When they want to DotA, they fire up the Garena client and do things like play games with no perceptible lag, hang out in a vibrant lobby of hardcore DotA players, and compare their DotA rank to everyone else. On Garena, it is plain for all to see who’s a noob, and who is so elite that they can get into exclusive high level rooms where the top dogs duke it out for reputation. What awaits the victors of these closed-door pickup matches is a chance to flex their talent in front of the entire Garena community in broadcast championship matches made viewable by GarenaTV. This is the making of legends: epic contests to delight the mass of spectators, glory by right, and most importantly, the possibility professional sponsorship.

Despite all this excitement, I still log in to battle.net for many of my games. It is most fun to play where your friends are playing, and many of my casual DotA friends still prefer the anonymity and simplicity of battle.net. And so, for the benefit of any players who might be curious about Garena, I wanted to share my experience.

The first thing you’ve got to do is to download the client program and create a user account with password. It seems to work on Windows XP and Vista just fine. But this is where the similarities with battle.net end. After logging in, you can’t simply join a game. You need to join a room first. This got a lot simpler after a friend told me that the DotA rooms are in the “War3 RPG” area, rather than the “War3 TFT”. After configuring my “War3 RPG” executable path in the settings and joining a room, I was able to get in to a game. Garena has a nice walkthrough of this process in the Support secion of the website.

How do you join a Garena DotA game you might be wondering? You must launch Warcraft 3 using the “Start Game” button in the Garena chat room. Then, in Warcraft 3, go to “Local Area Network” and you will see any games that are hosted by a player in your room. Any GarenaTV match (live or recorded) that you want to watch will also appear in the LAN games after you’ve selected it. I have no idea how these mechanics work, other than the Garena client is creating a simulated lan game for you. Because of all this advanced networking wizardry, they were able to include some cool latency reducing features, like “anti-spike” and “tunnel”. It sounds like something Boris Grishenko from GoldenEye might use. Believe it or not, the tech actually works. I live in St. Louis, and was able to play in a European room with a host who lives in the UK, and ping less than 200. It was as playable as your average US East battle.net game. A comparable game for me on the European battle.net server would be unplayable, with a ping of over 500.

All these benefits didn’t come without a few cons. The Garena client feels a little on the bulky side, and seems to consume quite a bit of resources on my laptop, an old dual core with 1 gig of ram. I have had the Garena client crash on me one time right after a game ended, fortunately without interrupting my play. There also seems to be a shadow element, rearing its ugly head from time to time. From what I can tell, a somewhat less strict policing of cheaters than battle.net seems to make Garena a choice environment for them. Fortunately, the problem seems relatively isolated and fairly harmless due to the ease of banding up against cheaters facilitated by Garena’s community aspect. It feels like everyone knows everyone else, and it’s a refreshing change to retire to the chat room after a game and discuss it with all the players involved after the game is over. Many of these games roll over into another game composed largely of the same players.

It feels like the good old days all over again, and I can say that Garena is a part of it. If you’re curious but haven’t given it a try, I would encourage you to grab a few of your friends and try it together.