A Brief Background
In Dota 2, two teams of five players are matched against each other on a map with two different bases that need to be occupied or defended. Before every match each player gets to choose a powerful character from a big roster of 115 different “Heroes”, all with different abilities, strengths and weaknesses.
During the game, players collect experience points to level up their characters by performing different feats, such as killing another hero or progressing closer towards the enemy base by killing defense towers. According to their performance, players can collect and earn gold. This is a very vital part of the game as earning gold will allow you to buy items for your character that can vastly improve your characters’ effectiveness. The first team to destroy the opposing team’s base will be crowned winners.
How to Play
The main goal of Dota 2 is to destroy the enemy’s ancient building, which is the biggest building inside of your team’s base, and by doing this you’ll win the game. The two different teams need to pick one individual hero to play during the entire match. It’s important for players to pick a character you are willing to stick to, because once you’ve picked your hero there’s no turning back until the next game.
The map has 3 different lanes (left, mid and right) that leads from one team’s base to the other. Players then decide with their teammates which of their lanes will be your focus at the start of the game. In these lanes, players will run into defense towers and non-player characters (creeps) which need to be killed to gather experience points and gold.
By killing these creeps and destroying defense towers, you’ll help your team to progress closer to the enemy base. As a player focusing on a lane, as is the enemy team, this is where the player versus player action begins.
All heroes are very weak at the beginning of each game, hence the importance of gathering experience and gold. The experience points are used to level up your character and when leveling up you can acquire new abilities or upgrade the ones you already have. With gold, you can buy items that can give you a higher damage power, quicker run speed or similar and the more expensive items can even grant you extra abilities that can help you turn the battlefield into your favour.
However, to gather gold from the creeps, you need to be the player that does the killing blow. If you don’t get the killing blow, no gold will be awarded. You can also deny your enemies their killing blows on your own creeps by making sure that you kill them yourself, just before the enemy hero is lining up a killing blow. This is an amazing way of denying your enemy gold, but also experience as only 70% of the creeps regular experience will be rewarded to your enemies, and the remaining 30% will be rewarded to your team.
So, early in game, focusing on getting last hits on creeps and denying your enemies to farm gold and experience is a great way of gaining a huge advantage in the game. This is due to heroes being weak in the early game, and if one of the team manages to get one or two levels above their opponents it’s very easy to continue to slay them as your willpower increases at a higher rate than your enemies.
This is often referred to as “snowballing”, since you are taking advantage of being the more powerful hero and utilizing this momentum to keep growing stronger. One good way for the enemy team to hinder a snowballing hero is to put a lot of effort in making sure that the hero gets killed. By killing a hero with a strong gold grind or a hero that’s on a kill streak, the rewards are higher than normal which gives the team a small opportunity to catch up and even out the odds.
If you, as a player are unfortunate enough to end up in a lane where the enemy hero is starting to snowball, you could be the one that enables him to do this. This is called “feeding” and is one of the worst things you can do in the game.
If you notice that you have begun to “feed” the enemy hero by allowing him to continuously kill you, you need to make some changes to your play style and either ask for help from your teammates to rush your lane and help you end the enemies’ killing spree, or you simply need to make sure to not engage in fights you don’t believe you can win. Sometimes running away can be a much better strategy than to pick fights you’re not comfortable in.
After this early stage of the game it’s time for “Mid game”. This is when the team try to make efforts to push their lanes and get rid of as many defense towers as possible. It’s also pretty common that players start to try “ganking” enemy heroes by leaving their lanes and try their best to flank the enemy heroes by coming up behind them and attack them together at the same time to get quick kills.
This is a great way to get some more map control and push further into your lanes. But be careful, if you leave your lane to gank another, you are leaving your own lane without proper defence, and the enemy could also use this as a counter to push your lane closer to your base.
When lanes are pushed further and players’ heroes are at a higher level, we are entering the “Late game”. This is where good communication and coordination within your team becomes very important. A good strategy here is to make efforts in trying to reach into your enemies’ base to destroy their “barracks”. These are buildings that are in front of the ancient building.
By destroying these, your creeps will become stronger, and give less experience and gold when killed by the enemy. So by doing this, you aren’t only putting pressure on the lanes, but also slowing down your enemies’ gold and experience grind. It’s also very important to make coordinated attacks against the enemies heroes at this stage, as killing the whole team gives you a good amount of time to try to destroy their base.
How to Watch
As mentioned earlier, Dota 2 has a very big presence within the esport scene, and there are multiple ways of watching tournaments and games online. What’s more, it offers one of the biggest prize-pools in the selection of esports games.
Valve has an official twitch channel which you can follow to watch The International every year. This is one of the biggest tournaments in the esport scene, and it covers not only Dota 2, but also other popular games. This specific tournament has often been praised for its high production value and insane prize money. The Electronic Sports League also have a twitch channel which broadcasts a lot of european tournaments. You can find the channels here: