Sure, the faces may be different from time to time, as Icefrog's mighty hand buries some into the trash tier while invoking others to positions of prominence. Hell, even the terrain itself may be swept clear and remade as seasons come and go. But at the end of the day, it's always a bunch of scared kids charging out into a senseless bloodbath, defending a hunk of magical rock that never did a damn thing for 'em.
It's times like this it's good to have a friend by your side: someone to watch your back. Because the world isn't nice to small, fragile men that waddle from place to place. Who was stupid enough to follow me into battle, you might ask? None other than the master of all cuttlefish himself. Damn fine soldier.
Cuttleboss:
We had Sniper planned beforehand, Cyn hoped for a miracle. I was prepared to give him the next best thing, Abaddon, a hero that can pair very well with Sniper, since Sniper really just needs a tank who can lead charges with him behind, and Abaddon was my go-to hero for ranking matchmaking too. Then suddenly, enemy randomed a Tinker. Tinker likes to hop around, and without disables, Tinker would’ve been a big issue (not realistically, but it’s what I thought at the time). So my mind went to another tanky hero I win a lot with: Doom.
Then everyone picked, I managed to get my solo offlane. Ursa Dazzle… okay, this lane sucks. However, I’m Doom and I blocked the pull camp. Honestly, it was terribly boring in the top lane, Bounty was there for one wave because I went to eat a secret shop creep at the beginning, and then he went to the jungle to screw with Lycan and snipe the enemy courier. Every time the lane went past the hard camp, I stayed back, maybe headed to the secret shop camp to have a little snack. Boring stuff, got easy tranquil boots, Dazzle didn’t even try to zone me. Okay, thanks bro. It wasn’t until about 10 minutes in that I was ganked, a Dark Seer came and surged the Ursa on me, but I Doomed the guy and killed him as he dove my Tier 1 for me.
See, in this situation, I probably would have just screamed like a baby and ran back to base. Good on ya, Cuttles.
Back on my side of the map, I was having a less than boring time. Being a fragile old man against the purple spiky energy balls of death was bad enough, but my support kept running off to attempt to pull the wave: leaving me open for getting dived by the watcher of darkness. Picture this for the first ten minutes of the game, will you?
Heeeeeeeeelp.
But there's one thing about that picture that's important: it immediately precedes first blood, that our Shaman manages to grab. I'll say this about the lane: I never died. It was still difficult to farm, though, partially because of Sniper's low damage early on, and partially because... well...
No seriously, heeeeeeeelp.
Now, the observant among you will notice that someone got the Aegis of the immortal as I'm being chased around there. That'd be their
Ursa, with his mighty solo Roshan killing powers. The 
Dark Seer and the 
Lycan stick around my lane to try and get a kill, knowing Ursa's around to back them up, but my team responds: 
Shadow Shaman gets a trap on Dark Seer and I finish him of with 
Assassinate. 
Bounty Hunter slows the Lycan and leaves me to right click him down for a double kill... then, and only then, does Ursa reac h the fight and charge in. Shadow Shaman shackles him and he goes down once, but the 
Dazzle has arived, and both SS and BH are getting low... the battle looks like it's tipping against us. But then...Ursa had taken Rosh and we had a fight where I purged him of his overpower and we wasted his most important Aegis. Purge was so good against this team of Ursa (with MoM) and Dark Seer, and in combo with the Sniper that I decided to stick with it for the whole game over armor or alpha wolf.
A purge and a
Doom and Ursa dies a second time... three kills for me in the span of a minute, and we get the deny on our tower. All of a sudden, I'm doing shockingly well. The game continues to go pretty consistently in our favor: we take back to back to back favorable engagements and by the twenty eight minute mark the score is 20-10... heck, I'm 8-0-5 and have barely left the bottom lane. The issue is that, thanks to their teams tremendous counter-pushing power, even with that lead we're unable to take and tier two towers.This means that when they do begin to take fights and get crucial pick-offs, they're more able to turn them into objectives. At around the 45 minute mark I've been killed twice and forced to buy back, and we're officially stuck in our base. We Koopas now, and as far as heroes go, I might as well be called Bowser: Sniper is the king of turtles, after all.
Then the game got really boring really fast. Lycan and Tinker ratted like mad, and the enemies refused to fight us directly. Many times I could’ve Doomed Ursa I had to stop myself because the dude had an aegis. Also, a Dazzle on the enemy team made it difficult to finish off the guy I Doom.
Also, when it came to base defense, I was always bugged by devour being off cooldown but having nothing to eat because the Sniper just mowed down the creep wave too fast. Dammit Cyn. I mean, you’re stopping our towers from being chipped, but my greed demands it.
This was a game of a lot of “Not-Dooming” happening, since Tinker was still hard to catch, Lycan didn’t like to fight, and Ursa often had an aegis. Because of all the Not-Dooming I did, no one on the enemy team built a Linkens Sphere, which meant that I could actually use the Rod of Atos I built for popping the Linkens Spheres I expected. With my purge all game combined with this Atos, I have never seen a more miserable Dark Seer.
I didn’t foresee the how long the game was gonna last. I probably should’ve, Tinker on one team vs a Sniper and Zeus on another. Probably should’ve went for a Midas. In hindsight, with the Dazzle preventing me from getting kills, I really should’ve went for it. Actually, the Shadow Shaman was interesting, he was actually asking us what to buy, between blink and aghs for his first item, me and Cyn both said Force Staff and Ghost this game against the Lycan and Ursa. He listened, and then against near the end, between scythe and refresher. We said Refresher will win us the game, let’s get back to that.
This was one of those games that was really painful to play because of “a whole lot of nothing” happening. We faced our darkest hour at about 43 minutes, my last death in the game, where enemies got Ursa aegis, SS was jumped on, I tried to save him, but I froze up because I couldn’t Doom anyone and was killed, BH got picked off afterward, then Zeus. Finally, Cyn’s Sniper was killed by the Ursa. This forced out our double buyback, one mistake and the game is lost. Then the next time they tried to push, Ursa had to dive our T4s to kill Cyn, but as a result of this, 4 people on their team died (and his aegis ran out as he died), so then the game just… stopped. Everyone just stopped trying to fight us and ratted the rest of the game. What the hell?
The look of a lost soul.
The Aegis timing out right before Ursa's deathdive was one of those beautiful, lucky moments in Dota: sure, we probably would have won the fight anyways 1v4 against him, but it made things infinitely easier that he was dead and gone: after I had been dead for 100 seconds and respawned to find all our barracks still on the map, I entered a state of bliss. We were stuck in base and couldn't push, but they couldn't do anything to us either. They were simply lining up CS for me to grab.
And grab CS I did. In fact, this game I broke my record the most gold earned in a single match. I already had
Sange and Yasha, 
Monkey King Bar, and 
Mjollnir, but then came the 
Eye of Skadi, and the Boots of Travel, the Boots of Travel 2. The 
Daedalus. The 
Moon Shard that I bought, ate, and still had buyback after consuming. I was honestly considering buying a 
Necronomicon to deploy from the Courier or a 
Refresher Orb for the lulz. At minute 69 (lol), the enemy take their fifth Roshan of the game and Cuttleboss types 'come on, let's go', wanting desperately for them to take us head on so we can finish it.It doesn't happen, but we combine forces to take out
Lycan when he stays a little too long trying to take our bottom ranged rax. The 
Tinker actually makes an absolutely sick play of TPing on top of him with Travels 2 and denying him at the last second, but either way he's out of the way... long enough for me to step out of the base and, with Cuttle's help, four shot the poor Dazzle.Finally, pushing time. Enemies took our bottom rax to get us to go back, but we called them on the bluff and met them mid, and we kill them except the Dark Seer. Then Lycan buys back, as does Ursa. I look at lycan to see if he will rat our base. He doesn’t, he stands and fights with his Manta-Radiance. They all die. Tinker’s buyback comes off cooldown, and he’s got his aghs ready to blast us away with missile, but Shaman, who listened to us and got refresher, ran past their barracks and dropped his double wards right onto their T4s and Ancient.
Snakes win games. You heard it here first. 74 minutes in and my
Sniper game is finally in the can. GG.
The Dotabuff for this match can be found here, and you're all of course welcome to download/comment/watch etc, etc. I liked this game more than I really should have:
Sniper is a hero that, if I'm honest, I could end up doing surprisingly well maining: as a cautious player who tends to shy away from going balls deep on teamfights and who actually enjoys PvE, he sort of fits my playstyle.That being said... I probably won't play him again for a long time. If I want a game to go on for 70 minutes, I'll take [Naga Siren, thanks. :D
Why? Well I guess as a support it feels great to have more than 3 items ina normal match in which you idn't snowball.
You guys think that Snooper is still viable then? I like the hero, but I'm feeling it might need some changes.
His skillset however...that's where the real problem is. Techies is obviously first place on the "needs rework now" list, but Sniper is arguably close second.
The rest were irritating AF. Especially the gyrocopter (or whatever they were called in wc3)
Hey, a bear! It's coming right for us! Shoot it!
If you need a support to your carry or carry to your support hit me up.
Would love to come for that io game. Ck +io and we will wreck everything.