Wulff

Seriously though, the place is a cesspool. Stay out if you value your sanity.

I agree.

IF you let people get within the Marksmanship radius range of you. "Deathcannon" potential is still there. People are going to have to play Drow Ranger more like Sniper, staying at max range and orbwalking the enemies as much as possible. Smart people will try and get ontop of you of course and I do think that Drow will end up being played much less because of this change. If anything it will make Shadowblade even more core on her than it was before, so that you can quickly position yourself around in a teamfight. I think maybe going for fast Boots of Travel for crazy early game MS could also be an option. Considering you can get BoT's at ~6 minutes if you farm well and get them as your first item. We'll see in a while if it was too much.

Not my experience. A "drooling retard" can do well with Nyx just as easily as they could with Drow, because Spiked Carapace is a get out of jail free card. There is also no point in exaggerating, even without the Marksmanship bonus, Drow will hit hard - She just needs more farm before she turns into a potent right-clicker. Her stats still scale semi-decently and she is still going to be getting items. Like I said, I too think the Drow nerf is looking a bit harsh considering how easy she is to destroy with burst and stuns - but to claim her completely useless without the Marksmanship bonus is just not going to be true and that is also assuming she won't get the Marksmanship bonus. People will just have to be more careful with Drow and position themselves better and make sure they have their team in front of them during fights as much as possible.

Even if I think the Drow nerf looks excessive on paper, I'll wait to see how she fares in actual games before making final judgement on her changes. Other than that, I'm just glad Icefrog isn't making knee-jerk reactions and over-the-top changes.

Don't even joke about that. I am already sorely disappointed in Legion Commander's lack of giant moustache.

:)

Chances are it might be a female in Dota 2. TIME WILL TELL.

can't wait until all the current heroes are ported and we only see 1-2 heroes every year, if even that. Gonna have to step the bitching up.

u kno' it.

10/10 gameplay

If you by any chance mean "Where did that paring come from and I don't mean which artist", it's because Omniknight and PA are deadly together in lane and Omniknight really compliments PA in general. Blinkstrike into Purification is great lane harass and PA can participate in fights way earlier and even potentially mix up her item build because of Repel in general. Not to mention that Degen Aura + Stifling Dagger makes it easy for PA to stand there and beat up her super-slowed opponent whilst Omniknight fusses over her hair.

I'll agree to an extent, but there are most definitely other reasons for heroes being picked and banned. Pro teams do not pick heroes because they are "Flavour of the Month", they pick and ban them because they can be useful to/heavily disrupt their strategy and they end up becoming FOTM because they have been proven to work against the heroes they are usually picked against. Pro teams play it safe in 90% of the games, that is why picks and bans been the same over the past months. It works. In scrims it is way different. I was watching Dignitas scrim the other day against VP and VP absolutely crushed them with a Huskar. If you want to see the actual testing of heroes that pro teams do, I'd recommend you stop watching tourney games and start watching scrims. Batrider for example is banned/picked a lot these days because Nai'x is the most commonly used carry and with Lasso going through BKB it makes him perfect for dealing with that hero. Bans and picks are all about what you want to do with your team or what you think your enemy is going to do with their team. I do believe that some heroes fill that "You wouldn't pick any other hero if this one wasn't banned". Heroes like that (In my opinion) are Magnus and Keeper of the Light. You basically can't ask for better initiation with a Magnus, considering RP stuns through BKB, he has great health from his Strenght growth, good nukes and power-boost your carry. Even with all that, Enigma is sometimes picked up over him due to his fast Jungle or more rarely, but still at times, Tidehunter for his ability to offlane. Keeper of the Light, while an extremely versatile and powerful support, is currently seeing as much play as he is, because he shines in trilanes. He can keep the trilane supported with constant mana and has the potential to land huge nukes on all enemy heroes in the lane, but if the "meta" (I dislike that word, but I can't think of anything else) was to shift to say a roaming/ganking meta, I can almost guarantee you that Kotl wouldn't be picked nearly as often. There are way too many equasions in Dota 2 to reliably say "X hero is the pinnacle of its role, you should always pick it."

Watch replays of your games. If you're serious about getting better about your gameplay, taking an hour to watch over some replays and see the moments where you died, of if you remember a situation that left you puzzled, figure out what happened. Your positioning, enemy positioning, your hero, enemy heroes, your items, enemy items etc. It's something I carried along from when I was playing Starcraft very seriously in S1. Of course you can just continue to play the game and have fun, but if you want to improve, doing some replay-analysis can really do wonders for your understanding.

Support or mid are my favourites.

I have to agree with Magickus. Comp TF2 is very hard to understand and get into, compared to Dota 2... Coming from a guy who used to be really "in to" comp TF2, it also gets pretty boring, pretty fast.

Normally I'd say that Facade's answer is concise enough, but I have 30 minutes to kill before my train arrives. First of all, make sure you get yourself a solo lane. Broodmother is a hero that benefits highly from levels and is great at tying up multiple heroes in a lane because of how evasive she can be if you're smart about it. Make sure to get a pair of Sentry Wards and the Soul Ring Recipe in your starting items. If a support can throw you the Sentry Wards, cool, if not buckle up the money and get them yourselves. Smart opponents WILL bring Sentry Wards in a lane against a Broodmother because she is practically shut down completely by detection and seeing as she also practically needs to be in her webs to live in the early game, it's usually pretty easy to zone her out. Use your Sentry Wards to counter-ward their Sentry Wards. If you lucked out and you're laning against idiots and/or newbies, the Sentry Wards can be used to potentially to De-Ward later in the game, or maybe the enemy team have some invis heroes. Soul Ring should be obvious. Broodmother has one reliable nuke that she will be using throughout the entire game. Unfortunately she is also an Agility hero with a shitty Intelligence growth, so the extra reliable mana-on-demand is great for making sure you can always harass/burst in lane/fights. Also the health regeneration the ring gives passively makes you a regen beast in your webs. Spread your webs CLEVERLY. Expect the enemy laners to have brought Sentry Wards, expect them to expect you having Sentry Wards (AKA They will try and kill your sentry before you can kill theirs and if there is more than one enemy hero in lane, they WILL win that fight). So in the case that you cannot avoid their Sentry Wards, at least your webs will be spread enough that you have some corner(s) to hide in. It's better than nothing. Use your webs to knock down trees! Those things take down all trees in their area of effect (Granted they grow back again) but it will make it extremely easy to spot ganks coming from the jungle. Do not leave your lane. This is one thing that is a problem for Broodmother in pub games. One of two things happen: A: The enemy team focuses the large majority of their efforts on shutting you down. If you're good/lucky that will win you the game as your team takes advantage of this. If you're unlucky, your team have no idea of how to utilize the pressure being directed towards you and call you a feeder. B: The enemy team abandons your lane early, leaving you to your own devices, allowing you to push and farm with extreme efficieny. If you're good/lucky this can win you the game. You'll be farming well and getting good items for carrying in the mid/late-game and your team will be doing okay fighting 4v5 in teamfights for a long time. If you're unlucky your team will buckle under the pressure of being a hero down in basically any fight that goes down outside of your lane and you will be called useless. The thing about Broodmother is that there is a fine line between sticking to your lane and helping out. Ideally you don't want to leave the safety of your webs until you've pushed a couple of towers and gotten some big items so you can actually do something in a fight. It's easier when playing with a stack because you're communicating and you have a better understanding of how dire the situation might be without you there. It probably the hardest part about playing Broodmother if you ask me, juggling that balance of pushing/teamfighting.

Artstyle returns to Na'Vi and performs magically.

Ixmike's moustache wins another game. What will Europe do to stop this menace?

Necrobook is great on Clockwerk. - Strength is of course a delicious stat for him. More health, more regen and more auto-attack damage. - Intelligence helps the mana issues he suffers from, being a Strength hero who relies a lot on his spells. - Necro-units are extremely powerful with mana burn and high damage on their auto-attacks, that combined with the fact that Clockwerk has potential to lock people in with them for up to 7 seconds makes them extremely deadly. Necro units are of course also useful outside of Cogs, for general pushing power and detecting enemy heroes/wards at level 3. I wouldn't build Necrobook as a first item on Clockwerk, but maybe as a third or fourth item, after Blademail/Drums/Aghanims etc. If you badly need invis detection or if you're going for a fast pushing strat it would probably be wise to get it earlier. Depends on the game.

I love solo queue, it's way easier than stacking.

i love you ixmike xoxo '>

Okay this is going to cover the very, very, very, extreme fucking basics, because Dota is a game with an extremely steep learning curve. It's mainly trial and error. Cosmetics Forget about them for now. They have ZERO impact on the game other than changing your look. It's not like TF2 where some items do different things. Heroes and why are there so many of them? First of all, the reason there are so many different heroes is because there are a myriad of roles that can be filled in a game of Dota. No one hero is the same! Some heroes are similar and some share the same overarching role, but not ONE hero is the same. Heroes can be different in the following ways: - Looks and appearances (A given). - Spells and abilities. - Roles - Melee or Ranged (In a rare case, both). - Movement speed. - Animations (For auto-attacks or spellcasting or even turning around) - Stats and stat growths (Strenght, Agility and Intelligence and how many of these stats they gain per level and which they benefit the most from). If you want to learn Dota, you're in for a hell of a time. Truth is that you probably won't have a firm grasp of the game until you've put at least 100 hours into it. It might sound intimidating but it is a ton of fun when you get there. My advice would be to go here: http://www.dota2wiki.com/wiki/Heroes Take some time, read up on the heroes, read about their lore, how they play and their abilities. Find one that looks or sounds cool and try him/her/it out in some bot games. Put the bots on passive, take babysteps and make an effort to slowly understand what you're doing. No one expects you to master this game in five minutes. And for the love of god don't enter matchmaking yet.

nth on the ropes http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/18zr82/eternalenvy_kicked_off_of_nth/ weeaboo status: told: [X] not told: [ ]

Perhaps because they took first and second place in the most prestigious and most difficult Dota 2 tournament over two years?