Kentakky

Why people pick certain comps 1. Sometimes it's because certain lords are so strong in the current state of the game. 2. Sometimes it's because a player is specialized with a certain lord. Recently in The International SEA qualifiers every team banned (or first picked) Naga Siren when they played against Scythe because they didn't want a player called Meracle have the hero, if he goes through ban phase Scythe will probably play around a Naga Siren split push lineup so this includes having heroes that are strong 4v5 for the early game while creating space for Naga Siren. 3. Sometimes in a Bo3/Bo5 teams will try a "cheese" lineup that catches the opponenet off guard usually involving a fast push strat that ends the game in 20~ mins. Heroes like Pugna, Rhasta, Chen/Enchantress with fast mekansm, item that heals the whole team and Pipe, item that gives all heroes a shield that absorbs magic damage which is usually what the opponent will use to defend against a giant creepwave knocking on your front door sub 20 minutes. It's very normal to ban out Keeper of the Light if you try this as his nuke will demolish most pushes. 4. Most importantly it's trends though I would say, teams see other teams do well with certain lords so they will start incorporate those lords into their drafts. Before EG started picking Treant Protector frequently he was basically only used by one other team (Rox.Kis) but now it's common for everyone to pick that hero because EG is one of the best teams in the world at the moment, though when Rox picked him they didn't always do well so I guess teams weren't sold on the hero. 5. Some combos are just strong SD+Mirana, Kotl+PL, Tiny+Wisp etc Puppey captain of Na'Vi talked about certain comps only work if you bait the other team into picking certain lords so there's a lot of mindgames going on. I can probably go on about this for longer but will go on to your next question. Lane setups 1. There's a lot of mindgames going on when figuring out how to lane, normally at high level it is easy for one team to see how the opponent is gonna lane based on the lords picked but because the team knows this they might completely change their lanes so it will favour them but then the other team might change their lane thinking the other team will change their lane etc Because of this teams might change their lanes after 5 minutes because they got outsmarted by the other team and this will set them back in gold and experience and it doesn't mean they will recover. 2. Teams might smoke 4-5 people into the opponents jungle to find first blood but also gain information on how the opponent will lane and set their lanes up accordingly. 3. The norm is still 1 offlaner, 1 mid, 3 safelane I would say but you can put aggressive trilane if you have the lords for it like Ancient Apparition, Razor, Visage etc. Teams put aggressive trilane to completely shutdown the opponents carry who is usually in the safelane. It's not set in stone so you can lane however you like 1-2-2, 2-2-1, 1-1-(jungle)-2 etc it all depends on the lords, the other teams lords, what you want to get out of laning phase, Glyphing In the early game glyphs are usually used for either defending a push or getting a tower of your own. In the midgame you probably want to glyph for either defending, roshan or getting one sometimes two towers in your favour. In the lategame you hold on to those glyphs for the Tier 3 towers/Barracks it's okay to lose Tier 2 towers if you can't defend it but you might be able to defend Tier 3 (saving it for the most important time). Being down in Gold/XP You can be down in gold/xp early game by quite a bit if you have a team composition that comes online in the mid game, if laning phase doesn't go so well but you have lords that when they reach level 6 get a really important ultimate you can easily turn the gold/xp lead the other team might've gotten. Other times it's fine to be down in gold/xp when you have a really strong lategame hero that comes online after 30-40 minutes like Naga Siren/Spectre. You can however be completely screwed if you're down in gold/xp when you have a early game lineup. If however the game is 70+ minutes long and both teams are still in it the gold/xp graph don't matter at all because every hero probably have their key items by that time so it all comes down to one team fight or potentially no team fight if one team just split pushes their way to the win. I don't know if any of this helped. Interesting tidbits BKB used to always be 10 seconds of magic immunity now it scales down with each use down to 4 seconds as minimum, Force Staff when first implemented was basically never purchased by pro teams as they deemed the item bad in comparison to blink dagger. Invoker way back in the day used to have 27 spells, now he only has 10 so it was even more buttons! , Skeleton King used to never be picked in competetive Dota but has now seen a lot of play after a lot of tweaking with his spells from Icefrog.

latest episode hasn't been added so you can find it on twitch http://www.twitch.tv/d2l/b/527341057 Play by play when it's in a really big LAN event or something is just so damn hype! from tobiwan, ayesee, LD, Lumi etc. I can still remember phrases from commentators during big moments in the international. And finally a guest on Dota Today! You've talked about having people on previous cast but never actually had many guests in the last like 5-6 episodes so it's nice to hear a new voice. To talk about some things mentioned in the show I would like to go into the "what will happen after the parity is complete" topic. Some things I know are coming are custom games, this coming week I think you will be able to play Pudge wars which is a parity of a wc3 map with same name and I reckon more of the favourite wc3 custom maps will come to Dota2 (funny how that goes) although you will start of needing a third party program to play it I reckon Valve will put in a system for custom games later, it's a no brainer really seeing how popular it is. During my time playing wc3DotA if you had a couple terrible games you could go cool off in a fun custom game and then go back to DotA with a fresh mind which probably increased my playing time a lot when I think about it. When it comes to patches I think Ayesee has it spot on, Icefrog will continue as he did with wc3DotA releasing smaller patches(fixes etc) and bigger patches that sometimes have heroes and sometimes huge changelogs that changed the way you play, we got maybe 2 heroes per year or something and we were perfectly happy with that because inbetween there were these big changelogs that changed it all up and made the game feel fresh again. The other topic was one that ayesee mentioned with the oversaturation of tournaments lately that made MLG and other tournaments cancel their events. For me as a spectator at the moment I try to catch everything because I want to go into the TI4 qualifiers with good knowledge and it's fun watching teams I don't normally watch BUT the rest of the year I basically only watch the big LAN events so I hope that is where it's going to go in the future I feel most of the oversaturation problems is from the online leagues anyway, it's just that this one time Dreamhack, MLG, ESL and TI4 just happened to be scheduled so close together that MLG had to scrap their plans which is unfortunate cause I feel these big organizers should have an easier time communicating their big events so it doesn't step on anyones toes. So more LAN events less offline stuff or make the offline stuff cater more towards the scene below Tier1 teams so we might get couple of new teams every now and then come up to the big league. Anyway great episode, more guests!