Good Pub 5 Stack Drafts

Afternoon all :)

As some of you know/have been involved in, occasionally we manage to get a DOTAFIRE 5 stack rounded up from whatever waifs and strays can be found hanging round the backstreets of pubsville.

Although we have some great players, awesome all round knowledge and are fantastically good looking...so far the W/L ratio has been pretty poor overall. I'll throw in some ideas why:

1) We're technically a 5 stack, playing other 5 stacks. Chances are they've played together before.

2) They probably have a rough plan/draft worked out, one they've possibly used before.

3) We often don't have a plan, make panic last minute picks and have no real idea how we're going to play.

4) Quite often we don't settle on who's playing what role, ending up with inappropriate lanes, heroes, no stuns, no teamfight etc.

These seem like pretty basic errors! However, it can be difficult with a new group to sort out who's doing what - it's easy to be over-confident and just think "nah we're too good for em, it'll be fine". Maybe somebody wants to play a specific hero and it just turns out to be completely inappropriate, or we end up with our lowest MMR player mid against a much higher ranked opponent.

Basically, we're not giving ourselves much of a chance before the game's even started.

So, what do we do about it?

My feeling is to get some heads together here and talk over some drafts and combos that can work well together in these kinds of situations. Stuff that's easy to land and co-ordinate, difficult to play against and not too easy to counter.

So post up some idea of a "5 stack" lineup. It can either be a niche strat with massive push, ganking or teamfight, or a really well balanced line up that has something of everything. It can be as sneaky and cancerous as you like - these line ups are about easy synergy.

Bear in mind that we can never guarantee which players we'll have available, so it can be a good idea to suggest some alternatives for various heroes that we can swap in/out either as we don't have someone to play them, or they're easily countered by the opposition.

Ok gentlemen...start your engines! We'll refer back to this thread next time we're about to start a game!!

Magnus mid, Sven Safelane, Crystal Maiden semi jungle/ safelane/ roaming, Centaur Warrunner Offlane, Lion safelane/ roaming.

Lots of teamfight, high aoe damage, almost all heroes benefit from Arcane Aura, Sven with ult, cleave and magnus cleave + rp is destruction, plus Freezing Field for some extra magic damage. Not great late game scaling, but can take many early fights and can get lots of early kills and push relatively well.

How about one without Crystal Maiden Bunkan?

Why remove Crystal Maiden... when you can instead keep Crystal Maiden!

Besides, if I'm in a game, I'm gonna instapick crystal maiden anyway :3

EDIT: Okay fine, rplace Crystal Maiden with Disruptor instead for an alternate draft.

I guess it depends on the folks who are in the five stack.

Here in one 5-stack, I tried solo offlaning:
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1283756646
...and failed.

Yet, when I was in the 5 position, the one I'm familiar with:
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1264967459
...I managed to contribute the team.

So, I guess you got to know what everyone's good at, or comfortable with. Since I'm usually the lowest mmr member of our five stacks, I'm not going to be as comfortable being the solo-mid as I would be in the 4 or 5 position (Totally not because I don't know how to play any solo mid heroes).

I tried one with my team, because we were having the exact same problem:

Axe on the offlane -- Warlock and Crystal Maiden as the #4 and #5 -- plus a mid (preferably with right click, such as Shadow Fiend, or Sniper) -- and a hard carry [for instance Wraith King).

-- Bunkansee, here is Crystal Maiden too, you're absolutely right, why take her out when we can have her :D --

What we were looking for here was a combination of lock downs in the teamfight, with mixed physical and magical damage: Axe blinks in and calls, Warlock ulties, Crystal Maiden gets in to ulti at the same time, giving space for the carrys to kill everyone.

This has worked very well with some changes, such as picking hard teamfighters such as Undying and Venomancer instead of Axe and Crystal, or getting another tank, getting a double lane such as Bristleback + Vengeful Spirit.

Depending on your preferences, I would say the safest course would always be to go for the teamfight potential, with strong AoEs or lock downs in three heroes (the famous Faceless Void + Witch Doctor + Lich, for instance), reserving the other two heroes to counterpick and complement (if you have a teamfight composition only they will probably try to rat on you, so just go Nature's Prophet or Naga Siren too, and finally pick someone tanky.

If you like to risk, why not trying the ganking/mobility kind of team, with people like a Pudge, a Storm Spirit, a Spirit Breaker, a Tinker and a Lifestealer just to be sure? You could farm the Aghanim's Scepter on Lifestealer so he could take Pudge inside him while he would ride inside Spirit Breaker. The other two would easily show up after. Imagine the terror ;)

In order to get really really good at offlaning, which I'm currently working, you need to know every other roles, predict what they're doing. Obviously in low bracket it's different, but in mid bracket to comp bracket you need to know so you could outplay them. What are the supports doing (pulling, stacking, smoking, etc.). Obviously it's all about positioning, example for not getting caught by supports, or stuff like that. Or when you wanna trade hits with the support, try to get in position so you can aggro the creeps on him for extra damage, blablabla

It also goes with the hero pool.
If you feel like you want to try Tidehunter, and you usually play #1, well you will have to change a bit.

But as nubtrain once told me, offlane rust up mechanical skills, which is true. I don't have any, so when I play juggernaut #1, I ****ing suck at it.

While if you always core, you'll be generally more selfish. Which is true. A core that plays offlane will not learn hus limits and probably die to greedyness. So I think in the early stages of dota it's just better trying to learn all roles in general.

Thanks for all the comments guys, I'm thinking along the same lines in many cases. Just need a reasonable balance to the draft, ideally with a strong laning phase and then some combos which are difficult to deal with (e.g. the old Chrono/Death Ward etc) as you go along.

I don't wanna say "the lower ranked players should always be support" - that's not necessarily right at all, or good, it's more that we want to avoid 1v1 matchups for them, and to ensure we're not dependent on them landing a really difficult power to setup for us or something (or frankly any one being that vital).

We did sneak in a ET/KOTL duo last game (wulfy and me) which worked well against an Undying based aggro lane, it was just a bit weird as we'd planned it originally as an offlane duo and they ended up a tri with Meepo as we had 3 cores. We actually out-cancered them, which was funny :). However despite a near comeback, we just had too much farming needs to really get our cores powered up properly, and badly lacked stuns.

I put together a team earlier to best utilize my Sven build. It focuses having a strong teamfight and putting pressure on the map.

Sven
Bane
Invoker
Skywrath Mage
Tidehunter

I play Sven like more of a farming hard carry, and I think that he is really strong as of 6.84. Not only that, but I don't think that Mask of Madness is the right item on him for farming anymore, because of the nerf to the MS provided. It now gives about 60% the farming speed that it used to, because of that nerf. Helm of the Dominator is probably the better item now, because it makes you farm insanely fast. Even before the update, It probably provided more farming speed. Plus you want to focus on STR for God's Strength anyway (It builds into Satanic). If you farm well, you can reliably have 4.5K HP and 30 Armor at 50 min, along with crazy DPS and a BKB + Blink. (LV20 Blink, Heart, AC, Armlet, HotD) He can play very much like an insanely tanky Luna. Other carries can be picked off. Not sven. I have been smoke ganked in the late game 3v1 before, and killed all of them. They blew all their nukes, and I turned around on them, killing first the sniper, then the Lina, then the Abaddon. You just become an imbomidable rage monster who cannot be stopped by conventional carries.

The rest of the team can easily 4v5, can easily create space for Sven to farm, put an insane ammount of pressure on the map, and has exellent synergy. Feind's Grip ---> Mystic Flare is a favorite. Beyond that, their mid will have a vey bad time, due to smoke ganks from the Skywrath Mage and Bane.

Chaos Tornado ---> EMP ---> Ravage ---> LV 25 Deafening Blast is also ludicrous in teamfights, especially when you can DPS them to pieces on top of all the other disables.


Basically, I just think that the team is really strong.

This is one my friends and I use, mostly because of player preference and a little bit of synergy:

Juggernaut
Rubick
Tiny
Skywrath Mage
Tidehunter/ Centaur Warrunner

Good AOE disables in Tiny and Tide and Centaur, good single-target in Sky and Rubick.