First ranked

Whoooo boy. It took 2 days of encouraging myself and beating pubs to convince myself I was ready for ranked. (link HERE)

I just wanted opinions on my item and skill build. Oh, the empty slot was when I snatched an aegis from ursa.

That is all.

I watched you doing that match ^^ :)

Overall I can't help much because I never play Dark Seer, you seemed to be doing pretty well though!

With that line-up, a Blink Dagger would have been really good to set up for meteor / wall / EMP / Slardar stun. Other than that, you did well.

Agreed, not enough Dark Seers build Blink Dagger. 8{(

Be careful, you appear to be in an MMR where there are Shadow Blade Gyrocopters, Bloodstone Queen of Pains and Ursas who don't build Blink Dagger. Are you sure you don't want to leave calibration games until you're in a higher bracket?

I can tell you now, starting below 3.5k in Solo Ranked SUCKS! 8{(

Word.

To judge how well you did, look at the timings of your core items. Mekansm before 10 minutes?

Also watch the replay and judge how effective your participation was. Were you invaluable, or could you have been replaced?

It looks good, though. I would, however, recommend waiting many levels and matches before calibrating. Anything below 3k is a form of masochism.

Thing is, is level 36 with 412+ hours still not enough? I've literally (after all that) only just started on calibrating. How many won games or the like would it take to be ABOVE the death zone of 3.5k MMR?

Hmm...I rushed soul ring after the obvious starting items, but I still got mek at....Oh, I think around the 13 minute mark.

Replace me? That depends who you're replacing me with. I wasn't INVALUABLE, but I had to use Surge to dash closer to Slardar and use mek right before a killing tower hit would have occurred more than three times.

Funny thing about that, Slardar got his armlet LAST, at 31 minutes, and the Phantom rushed skull basher and MoM.

Stuck up as it might be, I think I was the best player on the team at that point. Skillwise, because phantom just kinda...Cleaned up weakened heroes I was helping slardar chase.

Levels means nothing, same with hours played. If you can maintain something like 52% Winrate for a month or so, that should be more than enough for a good MMR. Also, until you've had at least 1k Games, I wouldn't recommend Ranked, there's just that much to see and experience before you can become "good" at this game.

.....Ok. Soo...After 600+ games, prepare to see my "third ranked" post :l

Level and hours played has zero correlation with MMR.

The only way to tell anything about your overall skill pre-calibration (and it's an estimate at best) is looking at your dotabuff and seeing whether your matches are "normal skill," "high skill," or "very high skill." Many matches won't have a bracket labeled at all, but some of them should.

I don't know where the normal-high divider is, I calibrated at 3300 and that was considered high. The high-very high divider seems to be around 3800-4000.

Either way it doesn't matter at all when you calibrate - you're working through the same ranks, the only difference is whether or not you are aware of it at the time.