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When you hit midgame, and teamfights start to break out, a whole new level of dota emerges that goes far beyond farming, harassing and ganking. Teamfighting requires not only good items, but also effective positioning, effecient focusing, and skill synergy. But, like any sport or even war, there are more to fights than just numbers. Players themselves get affected by being focused, disabled and being low on life.

So, today I will focus on teamfights, and on what could metaphorically be called the Morale Bar, which is actually the HP bar.
Consider a teamfight. Skills fly, right-clickers click, and pretty soon you see your HP bar falling below the half-way mark and still fall very fast. Your mindset at the start of the fight was, 'let's own them all'. Now, however, you start to feel a bit more 'scared'. Not real fear of course, its only a game, but you fear for the life of your character. This will make you more inclined to flee, and less inclined to stay in the fight. The lower life …
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Although you might not play them a lot, Captain's Mode games are actually pretty fun to play when you get the hang of it. Usually better with friends, this mode allows for Hero drafting, which is basically two teams taking turns to ban and pick heroes for the game. But I'm sure many of you guys don't know exactly how it works, so I thought I'd enlighten you.

How it works

If you are a five stack, the party leader will always be the 'Captain'. This means he will be the one making the choices. But it's always good to talk it out with your fellow team mates to maximize your chances by getting good input. Drafting are started Radiant, who gets the first Ban. A ban is simply choosing hero that neither you or the enemy team can pick. Usually those heroes that are considered very powerful gets banned out first to prevent the other team from acquiring them.
In the current Meta some common first bans are Io, Magnus, Dark Seer, Batrider, etc.

After Radiant's first ban, comes Dire's first, t…
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Being in the 50th percentile of the great Dota 2 player base, accented as "Normal", doesn't mean that you need to play like an average player. In fact, one of the reasons you continue playing Dota 2 (enjoyment hopefully being the most important reason), is to improve yourself. What better way than to watch the pros do it.

There is various ways to do this. Going on Twitch.tv will give you various streams that you can watch which features all the major tournament games between pro Dota teams. All games of the large Dota 2 tournament hosted by Valve, The International, is free to watch inside the client itself. Not only is this a lot of fun, its a great way to learn tactics that you otherwise wouldn't normally encounter in public games.

But just because you only play soloques doesn't mean that you have to play like a solo quer. That extra TP support, that random call for a smoke gank. It can all help you and your team improve and win, even if it might not always synchronize well with o…
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When playing in pub games, you won't find advanced laning such as Tri-Lanes or Solo Hardlanes. You will find the default dual top, and dual bottom lane, with a solo mid. But one day you might want to try it with a group of friends in a 5 stack party, or even in a pub where someone requests it. So here is a general rundown of these advanced laning techniques :

The Tri-Lane

It became popular a while ago, and is still considered a fairly common strategy in the pro scene. This lane setup's main purpose is to give your carry the safest farm possible. To do this, you send two supports with a carry into the safelane (the long lane, bottom for Radiant, Top for Dire). The jobs of the two supports are to harass the enemy (be it one, two or three heroes), pull creeps from neutral camps to keep the lane from pushing to the enemy tower and the most important task, protecting the carry. This lane is usually sustained for the first 10 minutes or so of the game. After that the supports will usually s…
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Now we know that Captain's Mode games involve a lot of strategy even at the picking phase. When playing CM, you concentrate on choosing a balanced team that will out perform the enemy's team, and also assign lanes to the correct heroes for the job. But some people forget that this is also half-true in normal public AP, SD or any other mode really.

I am sure that a lot of games you lose are because of team match-up and lane choices. Because unless the enemy is extremely bad, if you have the wrong hero for the wrong job you are faced with being annihilated before you've even started.
To illustrate, let me give you an example. Let's say you see the enemy picking up a Drow Ranger, Warlock, Silencer, Witch Doctor and a Dragon Knight.
Quickly analysing the line-up can significantly increase your chances of winning.

The first thing we see is a Drow. We all hate and love this hero for her amazing damage and slow. Although fairly nerfed, she is still a significant hero and needs to be co…
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