Team Guides?

I recently started playing DOTA with a bunch of friends. We all did some time in ye olde wc3 days on the very first versions, so the absolute basics are fairly familiar.

The problem I face is with picking a hero. I have made the tutorials, where you get to play some different heroes, but none of them really felt like to be fit for me (if you can even say that). So, in our first few Bot-matches I also tried picking just any hero I haven't played as of yet to get to know more of them.

Now, that obviously leads to the situation that our team as a whole is never really balanced, as everyone just picks a hero that he likes and knows how to play (to an extent at our skill level of course).

This strikes me as very ineffective. So, I tried to look for "team setup" guides, that could maybe give us a clue about what good starting team setups we could try to make our heroes more fitted for one another.

This search has not been very successful. There are a lot of Beginner Tutorials out there, but they are not for us because we know all the basic mechanis, terms and roles. Then, there are hero-centered tutorials which explain how to play a single hero.

But what I would really need/want is a tutorial that explains how we (as a team) should go about choosing and playing those chosen heroes. Also, a little bite more in-depth guides aboud playing a team as opposed to playing a hero.

Maybe someone here can put us in a good direction? Any help is much appreciated.

Say thanks to Sando.

Sando has made a real detailed guide, though you may disagree with a few points but it's very informative.
On a side note, I "knew" someone named sando, could someone link me his profile? The sando i knew wasn't to great at DotA

Thanks guys, I hope it helps. As noted, not everyone will agree with every point made - I've tried to be as objective and analytical as possible, but my personal bias and perspective is still in there somewhere. If nothing else there should be some food for thought in there.

Not sure if I've ever played with you Ping, I mainly play on EU west but have switched more to US east recently. In the old MS Zone days I was a top 200 Age of Kings player so think my general grasp of strategy is pretty sound - obviously nowhere near that in DOTA! :).

Ultimately my guides are what they are, I write them as best I can, and hope they'll be useful to people. I try and keep an open mind and keep learning (even after 1500+ games and 1600+ hours in DOTA 2), so always appreciate critiques and feedback on my thoughts. Cheers.

I read the guide now, and although it's alot to take in, I think I got the gist of it. Now, it doesn't really answer my initial question though. As I understand the guide, it's mainly focused on more... experienced teams, as it has a large portion that goes about the drafting process.

That is just not where we are yet. We are currently just playing vs. Bots (to try out new heroes) or in all-pick games, so that whole process it not really applicable in that situation.

I understand the strategies behind it, but what I was searching for (if it even exists) is one step before that, so to say. For example, just to see some "well rounded" setups that we could play around with, because if everyone just picks what he likes, it's just not possible to work as a team. If we hade some "beginner combinations", we could try them out to see what happens and then adopt what we learned in creating our own teams.

As I said, the guide is great but I think, for us, it focuses too much on the whole drafting and is generally a little too high in terms of skill level.

Yeah fair enough, you're not really the target audience for that. I'd suggest something straight-forward with some easy to play heroes:

2 top lane - Centaur Warrunner and Warlock
1 middle lane - Maybe Razor or Outworld Devourer, maybe even Night Stalker? (trying to think of some fairly easy to play mid heroes)
2 bottom lane - Sven and Lion

Don't think you'll want to be running trilanes and such yet as you won't be up on pulls/stacking etc. Basically Warlock and Lion are your supports and should be letting their partners take the last hits, doing the warding, buying the courier etc. Sven and your mid are the carries, with Centaur there to tank up for you. Pretty reasonable team fight with lots of area of effect stuns.

You could maybe start another thread asking for combinations, these are just off the top of my head, and obviously depends who wants to play what in your group.

First i should get familiar with the 1-5 roles. Ofcourse it is different with dual lanes but ofcourse you dont want more then 3 core farmers, and if you run 3 cores and a greedy jungler like prophet, make sure one of your cores is not that item dependant.

And ofcourse dont get 3 pure right click cores. If you already have an anti mage dont also get a shadow fiend and a gyro.
Sure you can run a gyro and an alc, but you thirdcore better be something like a puck or something less item dependant.

And finally try to get a lineup that complements eachother, so if you get an enigma or puck, get some aoe to follow it up.

I thought so, you and the person i am referring to have complete different personalities as he was quite a little child who belittles individuals and as the old saying goes, if you're worse than me you are a noob and if you are better than i am you have no life. He was one of this kids, he believed he was in a higher skill bracket which he was clearly not and blamed his mistakes on his team constantly lol. Was rather frustrating playing with him but it was amusing at the same time since he had open mic and you can hear all the stuff that's going on in his house which was hilarious!

You see, this is exactly what I would like guidance and examples for. I understand what you're saying but I'm having trouble to find examples to fill your advice with "life".

If you're looking for an easy way to pick a Team of 5 Heroes that synregises well, try following these rules:-

You need 1 Hard Carry (#1), 1 Solo Mid (#2), 1 Dual Lane Semi-Carry(#3) and 2 Supports(#4 and #5), it's a good idea if you and your friends try sticking to the same role for most games (feel free to try something new every now and then thoguh ;)

#1 should be able to Farm quite well, but not need too many items to be effective as you can't always afford to have them Farm for 20 minutes and should probably avoid Hand of Midas (unless you've got 4 kills by 6:00 and maybe a Tower).
#2 should be good as mobile as possible (High Movement Speed or a Blink etc. and should be able to Gank the Sidelanes at 4:00/when they reach lvl6
#3 can be your Tank
#3, #4 and #5 should always have Stuns or some other Disable.
#4 should know how and when to Pull the Lane, so #1 can get as much Farm as possible.

Following these rules, you can make a combination by picking any of these Heroes for their roles, and it should work relatively well.

#1 Juggernaut, Lifestealer, Gyrocopter, Tiny, etc.
#2 Puck, Queen of Pain, Nightstalker, Storm Spirit, etc.
#3 Dragon Knight, Sven, Kunkka, Axe
#4 Crystal Maiden, Witch Doctor, Jakiro, Vengeful Spirit
#5 Lion, Windrunner, Bane, Shadow Demon

Some comboes of 2 Heroes work better or worse than others, e.g. Kunkka only 'works' with Shadow Demon since he needs Disruption to set up Torrent and Lifestealer can Infest all of the #2s, but doesn't benefit as much from infesting Nightstalker.

There are more Heroes you can use, and you can even tweak the rules as you get more confident, but hopefully this will be enough to start you off. 8)