WednesDota: The All-Hero Challenge 08/30/17

First? Keep it up!

Wow, that was fast. Thanks!

This series finally pushed me over the edge to start learning DotA!

Which is probably a bad thing.

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD

@dr_monocle: Please remain calm and stay on the line. The rescue teams are on their way.

Are people able to find when this series livestreams? I thought I had a YouTube push notification for the Giant Bomb page but didn't get anything and nothing was on at the time listed in the "Upcoming Content" schedule

@comradesolar: they had some problems today with the stream, power shortage or something like that

I waited for this this morning and when it went live and there was no chat my heart sunk after a few minutes it was no longer listed as live on the webpage. Brad cleared it up on twitter but I never thought I would wanna watch someone play DoTA. I really enjoy this series and it got me into the game! I have a history of DOTA in the sense it dominated all of our LAN parties at my friends house when all we wanted to play was Quake 3 and other games others wanted to play WC 3 DOTA so I didn't really like it but playing it again now it is fun (not against other players yet, the community is one of the worst sadly).

I had people from the Giant bomb community show me the ropes, Im almost up to 1500 matches now, dota is a really good game.

It's cool to learn about DOTA here and there. Still overwhelming as hell, but Ben does a good job at explaining things. If I could get a group of friends to take the plunge with me I would but its a rather large commitment.

As someone who has never played Dota before, why is this my favorite series? Great job Ben and Brad!

Am I the only one who can only watch this in 360p?

Ben and I have about same mmr and play style triangle.

Wooh good job Brad.

That last fight was very well played by Brad. popping BKB beforehand and going after the Sniper & Bounty Hunter while Axe & pudge dealt with the Sven was a game winning play. Their team saw a BKB'd dragon fly at them and could only run back to their fountain while their carry got chopped down. Normally i like a Shadowblade ,Blink or hurricane pike on DK so you can jump into a fight and go ham, but since there were 3 types of initiation on your team already (swap / axe blink / pudge hook) this build was fine.

Ben pointed out that Pudge did a 'bad hook' because he was super low on hp as he brought the enemy close to him. Fortunately, the hero he hooked didn't kill Pudge. . the '!' that appeared over the Pudge indicated that he suicided , meaning that the enemy didn't get any gold or xp for his death. You see, his skill 'Rot' makes Pudge take a bit of damage himself too. So luckily, as he used this skill, the last damage that finished him off, was not the enemies damage, but his own damage.

Felt like Venge was getting pretty sweaty in this game. Good to see she at least acknowledged some mistakes she made. That's always a good foundation to build upon. Hopefully a few wins on Venge will make her more confident. Ben noted that he tends to see more supports lately. I feel like that's because Valve has been making supporting a more fun role now. No longer do you need to sacrifice 2 slots for wards (sentries & obs wards fit in 1 slot), smokes can be popped on the courier, every 2 minutes you get to run towards bounty runes to get your gold / levels, tomes can be purchased if you feel underleveled, and a lot of 4 position supports are particularly good at getting kills early on, so it's a very dynamic role with plenty of action.

Two tips i have to give to Brad after watching this.

1.Think about Kill potential of 1v1 situations. Sven has no kill potential on Dragon Knight before Sven's ult is available at level 6. DK's health regen / armor is so high, that you should never be afraid in a 1v1 against Sven early on. Brad seemed to acknowledge that his hero was in a favorable match up, but uses this knowledge more as an assurance that he will be having an easy time to last hit creeps instead of using this knowledge to make Sven's lane a nightmare. Whenever Sven gets nearby, you hit him. Whenever you use your dragon breath, you hit him. You should be able to bully him out of lane by doing this and take the tower down with your first level 6 dragon. Honestly, lane equilibrium is not as important mid anymore now that there's an extra creep in the mid creepwaves. If you push 1 or 2 waves of creeps into Sven's tower, he's going to miss a lot of gold and take a lot of damage on himself and the tower. Especially as Dragon Knight, in a favorable lane, you're pretty much always safe to last hit. And if you sense danger, you can always dragon breath Sven and the bulk of the damage is gone.

Also, when you use DK's dragon, the time to be patiently last hitting creeps is over. You use it to take towers down and push. So keep hitting creeps / Sven / tower at any moment instead of patiently focusing on CSing creeps once they're low. That's what you do as a human, not as a dragon. Dragons burn towers down. Eventually the tower died at the second dragon ult, but that was just wasted time if you look at it in retrospect. Getting that tower earlier lets you join in on the fights earlier. Or push lanes out since the enemies pushed quite a bit of towers down as well.

Which brings me to

2. Do not feel like it's a 'waste' to TP to a lane to push it.

Brad seems to mostly use TP's to escape from fights gone bad. This leads to him wasting a lot of time walking from one side of the map to another, because he doesn't want to walk around with his TP scroll on cooldown for whenever things go bad . This is wasteful time and can be solved by teleporting to a lane instead. Sure, if you get in danger you can't TP out for 80 seconds, but if you go into each fight thinking that you need to escape the fight at a sliver of health, maybe the fight you want to take isn't a good idea at all.

Brad acknowledged at the start that DK is just a hero that is there to be tanky and deal damage to towers / heroes. So as long as you keep a good pace regards to your levels / items, you're going to among the hardest heroes to kill in the game. Being around creeps to get XP / gold from is therefore way more valuable than saving a teleport scroll in the hope that you might escape. If you just use that scroll to keep your pace up by pushing lanes / killing creeps, you will be much stronger in fights and not even get to the point where you have to TP out on a sliver of health!

Teleporting to lanes to farm, keeps your towers up, lets you keep map control and gives you way more farm than having to walk huge distances on the map while farming junglecreeps (note, jungle creeps don't give nearly as much as lane creeps). Basically, jungle creeps are the things you take if you walk past them, you almost never want to make them your priority. Especially as Dragon Knight, you should be hitting lane creeps / towers whenever you can.

Thanks for the Dota! Great that you guys managed to record an episode even if the power outage prevented a livestream. A lot of people seem to be enjoying this feature a lot. Next week, i hope Brad's Viper will attack the enemy mid hero whenever he is in range. Just by doing that, he will be able to win his lane probably. Viper has a favorable match up against pretty much all mid heroes.

@dr_monocle: Same, trying to learn Dragon Knight right now. It's going poorly

Because it's two people playing something they're actually interested in. It's why I like Murder Island so much, they all genuinely enjoy playing together.

I thought this was cancelled when I saw Brad's Twitter

Love these I dont even play Dota and all the item building talk makes no sence to me but this is just fun to watch

Well Played Brad and well coached Ben. Thanks to you not being worried about streaming issues we got to see most of the action.

I like Dota II but I agree with Ben, when you are on a losing streak you might as well uninstall the game and take time off it.

Brad and Ben, you guys got me to re-download Dota 2 after over 2 years of not playing it. I came back to it and was reminded why I stopped in the first place. I prefer watching you talk and play it than me actually playing it. Keep it up!

Patience from Zhou

@dr_monocle: once you win your first close good game, you start to chase that high every time after that. It's like legalized crack.

Thanks guys. Keep the hero challenge going. I have Dota2 installed but haven't actually played, just looked around. I've been interested in playing since watching Daily Dota.

Decided to open Dota 2 and check out the skins. Had a free Total Warhammer Treasure for pre-ordering waiting for me. 17 chests later and I got the Doom Khornate daemon prince skin I wanted. How dare dota mash up my fav franchise with dota heroes......how dare they. Guess I'll be playing the game now.

GBeast is putting out some quality #content these days, but I...I think this is my favourite series on GB right now. Brad and Ben are so *chill*.

Really fun series

I know nothing about Dota and this is one of my favourite current features.

I only play 10v10 dota because nothing there is of consequence.

"This Axe is a Smurf." - Ben Pack, dadaist

Backpack tangos are the best tangos.

its good to see the cycle continue because however many years ago like 3-4 watching is what got me into start playing. learning the basic entirely from watching the daily dota. seeing the comments of people wanting to try it and here we are...

DOTA can be the absolute worst [the game mechanics are always good, it's the people.] but it can also be the greatest of all time.

"thanks" brad

Really wish ben left the camera on Brad for more than a few seconds at a time he is always moving from fight to fight and never get a chance to see how Brad is doing... my biggest complaint here

Much better spectating without chat interfering. Keep up the great work!

Enjoy watching these more than playing lol

@nitestocker: Have you joined the Giantbomb DOTA discord channel? Bunch of people there new/old who just enjoy playing and would be more than happy to show you the ropes

I enjoy watching these, and every time it's like "i should learn dota". Then I play and it's just kind of painful. So many strategic and skill based concepts for a new player. I just want to get to the part where I understand it well enough to enjoy playing it... or at least watching esports stuff without completely relying on the commentary team to tell me who's doing well and what people should do next. Also the slow starts kind of kill me.

I am in a similar boat and found that the "Day9 Learns DOTA" series on youtube is a great way to gain a ton of understanding while still continuing to suck at playing the game. It did make watching the last International a lot more enjoyable and easy to understand tho.

@rabidlamb: Literally tabbed out of episode 1 of Day9 and Purge's series to check GB. For some reason, I saw some of it before TI and came away with the impression that it was all just Sean playing and Purge giving tips, and I was like meh. I was totally wrong though, this laning info dump in episode 1 has been really helpful and it's more of a proper lesson. Also really highlights what a terrible job Dota2 does of explaining anything past the very very basics to new players.

It sucks that this was delayed and i wasnt able to watch it live. I prefer watching it live cause the past few times, there were helpful people in chat explaining stuff.

WednesDota? Today is Dota

I still have no interest in playing this. But I do enjoy watching it, at least in this context with Ben and Brad.

Basically just fun to learn how this game works.

Brad and Ben work off each other so well. Would love to see this duo together in content more often.

Having a dedicated observer makes these games much more fun to watch. I love dota but just watching one heroes perspective on a game can get boring. Good show guys!

I don't play DOTA or any moba but this is the best thing on GB right now.

Is this series still running? Would love to see more. I've just started playing and love watching these for some tips.

DoTA ignoramus here, will probably never pick up the game, but I really, really like this series. Hope it continues, it's a very engrossing watch.

I don't have anything insightful or clever to say, but I really enjoy WednesdDOTA, thanks to @benpack and @brad for making it happen.

Oh man, totally fell off this series huh guys? Really like where it was going.