Helllooooooo guys, it's me again, Exit, and today I, for once, am going to try my hand at passing my knowledge on down ;) even though most of you are better than me. So lately I've been seeing a lot of games thrown/lost because of one thing: unfair engagements. One person will run in and die, and then the whole rest of their team will de ice to go balls deep and feed, resulting in at least one tower, if not more lost. And it's pretty disturbing, because it's not as if they are getting tanked into the fight. They are consciously making a decision in heir head go go in and try to fight all five members of the enemy team and trade.

So, when to attempt a trade? Do you ONLY fight as five, and just give away objectives while waiting on your teammates re spawn timer? Or do you run and and try to get at least one of their heroes for yours? I have come up with a sort of guide to attempting an uneven trade(it's by no means definitive though, so please, lay on the criticizing).
1) is your teamma…
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Alright guys, it's armc3j, or exit, here. As you know, I'm not, in general, a big fan of people who complain that "the only reason I'm in 2k is because of my teammates," etc. I think that dota 2 is a team game, and should be played WITH, not WITHOUT, teammates. However, I have reconsidered that a bit.

First off, I still stand by the fact that dota 2 is very team based. You are thrown together with 4 other people, and you are expected to probably share a lane with at least one of them. If you can't cooperate, the other team gets an advantage, assuming they cooperate themselves. For instance, it's fine for me, as Magnus, to land a 5 man Reverse Polarity, but if my carry isn't cooperating with me, I'll feed and put RP on cool down. It's that simple.

However, your tea doesn't totally reflect your MMR. I played a Phantom Assassin game where I was the highest MMR, and this is what happened. This guy 1st picks Venomancer, and asks that someone pick a jungled so he can solo-offlane. Alre…
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Hello guys, it's me again, .Elusive. Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about one of my favorite dota 2 mechanics: quick cast. You should go check it out. But today, I realized I have skipped over one of THE MOST important mechanics of dota 2... Hotkeys.

Alright, so a little bit of background about myself. My first real online game was Starcraft II (I played Terran, Duh), a real-time-strategy game. In Starcraft, the commander's win rate is determined by if they can perform more actions in a limited amount of time while at the same time considering their opponents every move. For instance, in 5 seconds you should be queuing up SCVs, queuing up some marines, being aware of the map, controlling your army, and be thinking about what the opponent is probably doing AT THE SAME TIME. This is why it's vital to use hotkeys, and that is a lesson I learned well.

So then, I delved into dota 2, my first MOBA. Since I'd already learned what hotkeys were, I automatically transferred them over, a…
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So, hello again, .Elusive here. Today I'm going to be taking about an unranked pub I played today with a good mate of mine, and what went wrong. This is by no means a high tier game, but I will try analyzing it and showing my/others mistakes.

First off, they immediately banned Doom, which (we thought) signified lots of big ults. Our captain banned Pudge as a personal ban, then banned Sniper after they banned Phantom Assassin. He then picked Lich on my mates request, then they grabbed Witch Doctor. I realized they were probably going for big team fight spells to set up for a tunnel vision carry such as Sven or Troll Warlord. They picked troll second before we could ban, and so our captain banned some solid supports. We then grabbed Meepo? I think the captain thought he could counter troll.... Then they picked Lina and Enigma and he decided to pick Windranger for mid. On behalf of the Shadow Shaman player, the captain banned Storm Spirit because he was "broken". We picked …
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Hello there ladies and gents, it is me, .Elusive, yet again... And today I will be talking about a mechanic of dota 2 that is very dear to my heart. It's time to learn about QUICKCAST!

Quickcast is a mechanic of dota 2 that is sometimes(often, actually) misunderstood. Many people view it as difficult, weird, or have never heard of it. and as everyone knows, you can't learn something new if you don't know what it is. Simply put, Quickcast allows you to "flurry" or cast many spells within a small time window. This is very useful for all heroes, but especially ones that rely on flurrying to get their jobs done, such as Tinker, Skywrath Mage and others.

The way quickcast works is that, when a key bind for a skill or item is toggled, said skill will automatically be released at the cursor's current location. This means that, instead of hitting the key bind->moving the cursor to the target->clicking on the target/target area, you will toggle the key bind->and voila, the skill will be cas…
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