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The Goo welcomes you. This is my new guide, this time I am going to go into the concepts under the Hood. Stuff like settings, the advanced techniques, the true advanced techniques, taking everything to the max and how to do it, and everything along those lines, except micromanagement, that is something I will create a guide exclusively on at some point in the future, but not for now.
Anyway, if you read this guide and find it interesting/informative you can also go to my profile by clicking my name up there on the index and check out any of my other guides that may help you for other concepts that arent covered here.
As always, I tend to go a little far with my guides, length wise, so if you arent here for the full ride you can jump directly to a section by using the index, again, up there.
Like in all my other guides here is a link to /r/learndota2. If you are in reddit be sure to check it out, they answer questions and doubts to any player of any level. Great subreddit.
DotA can be a pretty technical game when it comes to settings and better settings advantages. This goes not only for things like sensibility, but other options I will talk about in a bit.
Sensibility if you didnt know is the game sense for dpi; this means how much you need to move your mouse in order to move the cursor a determined distance. The higher the sensibility, the less you have to move the mouse (physically of course) to move the cursor an X distance. Lower sensibility means you have to move your mouse more to get that X distance. But I bet you already knew that.
You have to find a sensibility in which you are comfortable, as this is the first key component for proper eye cursoring (See the eye cursoring section below). Sensibility too high makes eye cursoring really hard if not imposible, but lower sensibility will make it harder to click around for last hitting for instance, or turning around, as your cursor will feel sluggish in many situations. Also makes edge panning much harder, which takes us to the next point.
Edge pan is a way of controlling the camera movement in dota in which touching a side of the screen with the cursor pans the camera that way. This is the most common way camera control, even if some people use middle mouse scrolling and WASD or arrow keys. The reason edge pan is a superior way of camera control is because after a while it will become a no brainer. You know how much you have to cursor the edge to pan a certain distance. This makes it great for space extrapolation (See space extrapolation section) and long range casting, like blink dagger, sacred arrow, etc.
Using middle mouse scrolling (this is like dragging around the camera when pressing down your cursor with middle mouse click) conflicts a lot with regular cursoring and eye cursoring as well. Regular cursoring as when you try to move around for example, but your mouse has to keep getting stucked behind your hero and that means you have to move your cursor forth repeatedly so you dont accidentally click back or click the minimap.
Also having to physically put more fingers on mouse clicks takes away from stability from claw gripping (holding the mouse with two fingers, great for eye cursoring, will explain later).
The best display aspect ratio is 4:3 (remember we are talking about playing optimal conditions, not aesthetics), as the objects are closer to each other clicking and eye cursoring is easier (and faster). However, there is not much difference with 16:9 once you get the hang of it. 16:10 is a bit too wide for my liking, makes the game feel too stretched out, unless you set your sensibility higher than normal, that I dont recommend, sticking with the same settings makes it easier to get comfortable with them in a short time.
Anyway, the rest is up to you. Of course always keep auto attack off, if you take into account the pros and cons of it you will wonder why would you ever have it turned on.
Unless you have quickcast, auto attacking after casting a spell is a something you might want too keep turned on, as it makes aggroing in chase situations and similar cases much easier, with far less clicking involved.
Framerate is key to your success. Also known as FPS or frames per second, higher fps mean the game runs more fluidly, lower fps means the game stutters and can become unplayable if fps drop too much.
Setting lower resolutions and aspect ratios, disabling cosmetic features of the game and details of animating like better shadows, textures and models will improve your fps. Try to find your balance between how pretty the game looks and the fps it can run.
Try to stay away from anything under 20 fps, playing at that rate will make it impossible to perform a variety of actions and will also difficult your improvement by a considerable amount. 30 to 40 can work, but be careful with settings, as sometimes some game effects will make the fps drop and that can tank your game a lot. 50 to 60 and up is just fine, you shouldnt have problem if you can run the game at this rates. If you can get 60 fps consistently you should be able to perform the more advanced stuff like narrow disjointing and have a proper information update of things like positions, hp and mana, cooldowns, spells in the air and the more un-noticeable stuff will become much more relevant, like hitbox yawing for creepblocks and turn rates.
Also the more simple stuff like last hitting and denying can be difficult with a low fps rate.
Just as important are the key settings. Having a keyboard you are comfortable with and set with good options will result in a noticeable positive difference.
First of all you must know that there are some keyboards (usually the lower end, cheap ones) have a low key stroke cap, this means that they have a maximum of key stroke registering at the same time, sometimes this cap can be as low as three keys, pressing anything past that will not be registered. Gaming keyboards can have caps of 10 (which is usually more than enough) and in some cases, all the keys; you could press all the keys at once and they will all register and in the order they were pressed as well.
Anyway, the key situation in DotA is something really personal in my opinion. Sometimes people are used to place their hands more vertically, and have no issue in using the keys to the left side, for instance shift queueing using their annular finger, etc. I made some pictures here, hopefully you will identify yourself with one of the following. Unless you use legacy, which you shouldnt by now.
Using these colors:
Bottlecrowing. 6 is purchase quickbuy, this makes it easy to buy before you get killed most of the times. 3 is select all units, which I tend to use mainly to regain control over 
Helm of the Dominator and 
Necronomicon units; for more complex micro there no other option other than use keyboard keys. And the most important one is 2 and 1, 2 is select skillpoint (for when leveling up) and 1 is level stats. This two binds help a lot especially in the earlier game, as if I level up I can easily select the spell I want to skill by pressing 2 in my mouse and then the key with my other hand, while my cursor is still over the creeps for last hitting, etc. And in the late game if I level up I can just roll my thumb down 2 and 1 and that selects the skillpoint and upgrades my stats. Sometimes I am so used to doing this that when leveling up I sometimes upgrade stats even if I need to skill a spell at that moment.QUICK CAST IS A MUST USE IT LITERALLY IMPROVES YOUR GAME THE SECOND YOU TURN IT ON! You might have heard some people say. This is not totally true though¦
If you didnt know quickcast is a targeting setting that removes targeting as a whole (erm, what?).
You know for example if you want to cast a spell like fissure you would press Q, then your cursor would change to the proper targeting, then you would left click and fissure would be finally casted. With quickcast you press Q and wherever your cursor is, fissure is casted.
The pros of quickcast are the following:
-Responsive (for spells like meat hook for instance, you have to cursor around and click less)
-Easy Flurrying (for heroes like 
Tinker and 
Skywrath Mage that have to use a lot of items and spells in quick succession, just sliding your finger down the keys and all are casted in that order. 
Concussive Shot, 
Scythe of Vyse, 
Ancient Seal, 
Ethereal Blade, 
Rod of Atos and three 
Mystic Flares in just a second or two.
-Clicks wont stack, this means you can cast spells where your cursor is, without changing actions, so you can keep right clicking and casting at the same time, without moving the cursor (see 
Bristleback players?).
-Baiting with casting is much easier with quickcast, for stuff like cancelling your 
Meat Hook for example before its thrown as its a small time window.
-And more if you find it comfortable. 
Meepo 
Poof, etc.
The cons are usually related to the misuse of quickcast. However:
-Double self casting (Double tapping force staff to cast on yourself doesnt work anymore, you have to move your cursor to yourself and cast force staff then).
-Misclicking spells becomes much more common.
-Sometimes can conflict with edge panning, and of course, conflicts even more with middle mouse dragging.
It is completely up to you if you want to give quickcast a shot, but if you dont is not like you are never reaching the skill cap of dota 2. It is, as always, a thing of personal comfort.
I just cannot stress it enough. I talk about this in all my guides. Memory is key for successful play.
Memory means more than just knowing the numbers, with memory we are talking about muscle memory, skill sequences, laning behavior, flawless ganks, efficient jungling, maxing your item and spell effectiveness, among other stuff.
The most important of these are broken down into the next few sections. You will understand it better when you get to those.
With knowledge I am talking about knowing the game inside out, and the guts and how it works. With time you will memorize every hero stat starting value and growth, armor, movement speed, etc.
You do not have to know the exact values, just have it in your head as a > & < proportion. What I am trying to say is that you do not need to know how much starting armor 
Pudge or 
Phantom Assassin have, you just have to know that Phantom Assassin has a considerable amount and that its not easy to right click her down, and know that even if Pudge is tanky he doesnt have much armor. With time you get the feel of these just by laning against them, you get to feel how 
Axe is able to take the hits and 
Phoenix not so much. Its just a matter of having the values in an imaginary scale. With experience and time players realize how broken 
Upheaval is, and how long are Phoenix´s cooldowns.
Having the values in your head is a huge upper hand if you make the best out of it, the best example for this is cooldowns for instance, if you know your spells and items up times you can use them relatively more lightly as the rest, making the best out of stuff like Rod of Atos or 
Veil of Discord, and you will see how powerful items like that can be if used to the max. Just so you have an idea here is a list of stuff you should be trying to be memorizing (I tried to arrange it from the most important to the less important, hopefully it is sort of properly done):
-Item costs; you have to know and create a mental map of what items are more handy gold wise, you have to know that some items could have been left for a more expensive one, or the other way around, like rushing a Scythe of Vyse isnt always the best idea, with that same amount of money you can get both a 
Force Staff and a Rod of Atos, and maybe with those, with a better up time and the fact that they come along online faster could make a bigger game impact than farming one 
Hex disable for 15 minutes. Also, be aware of items like 
Orb of Venom and 
Magic Wand, that can be just as cheap as a set of regen but have a much bigger impact. Manage your gold.
-Movement speeds; memorize the heroes´ movement speeds, this is most important if you are a ganking hero or a roaming support, just by looking at the heroes and the spells you must know if you can go on them and complete a kill, or if you are just going to get kited around and get turned around when its already late. Stuff like this is what makes Skywrath Mage 
Boots of Travel first viable, having 425 movement speed and being a really powerful nuker is game winning if you put the right foot first.
-Armor values; same goes for armor, for early encounters you have to know previously if you are going to be able to get the kills, high armor targets can be tricky to follow up to, especially if they have any kind of escapes. Same goes for magic resistance, you dont want to 
Finger of Death someone and having them leave with 40 hp just because you forgot about magic resistance, most new players forget about this when using 
Assassinate.
-Creeps; be mindful of creeps, Helm of the Dominator or heroes like 
Chen can do much more than push towers down and bodyblock with them. Some creeps have powerful auras and actives. Sometimes people dont realize that harpies have a 140 nuke on level 1 with almost no cooldown and that they are flying units that give full vision. If you have a permanent control like 
Holy Persuasion or Helm of the Dominator they work like permanent mobile uber observer wards. Also stuff like the satyr banisher with purge effects, mana burns, slows, stuns and ensnares are all useful even if they come from a 300 hp creep. Also Necronomicon units, forged spirits, etc, have very powerful effects that most new players tend to forget.
-Casting ranges and casting times; this is most important for gankers and spellcaster heroes, but everyone should be pretty well familiarized with the casting animation delays of their spells and their ranges. One of the heroes that I think works as a great example for this is magnus, all of his spells have quite noticeable casting times and knowing the range of 
Shockwave, the grab range of 
Skewer or the radius of 
Reverse Polarity and having those values and lines in your head when you play are a definite advantage.
-Cooldowns and mana costs; pretty self explanatory. You dont want to dive a tower and realize you dont have mana for your planned combo. Best example is 
Juggernaut, manage your mana properly, and keep in mind up times all along.
-Stacking. I am not talking about jungle stacking, but knowing what items stack fully and diminishingly, crits, evasion, blocking, etc. All that stuff. This way you are sure what your possible item pickups can be. This is most important with attack modifiers! You have to memorize which are the ones that stack and the ones that dont stack. 
Eye of Skadi and lifesteal stack for instance. And remember that 
Anti-Mage 
Mana Break is a permanent modifier, etc. Also learn which ones are modifiers and which ones are over lappers. For example critical hits, chain lightning from 
Mjollnir procs, etc. 
Ember Spirit, 
Kunkka are examples of heroes that play with modifiers and over lappers a lot. If you play illusion heroes you should know what auras get carried to illusions and what modifiers as well; and what auras work best with your illusions.
*clickclickclick* Muscle memory is the best thing ever; if you manage to develop it your game will improve just drastically.
Muscle memory comes after being comfortable with the game, experience, knowledge and practice. It is the final result, and it becomes a huge part of your game, especially if you play a position with a lot of movement, like mid or offlane, or position 1 in the later game.
DotA becomes a Rubiks Cube, most people cant do it, some people can at their own pace, and some just feel it out and solve it with ease in a matter of seconds. Everyone can achieve that, but it takes time and being comfortable with what you have. Most people relate muscle memory with stuff like arena shooters, fast paced game, moving targets and the precision you develop; but these are just as important in this game, and just feeling the game out gives you an advantage over enemies. This is why DotA is learned by more than just reading or watching it, its not like chess in that sense, you need to feel the combat by yourself, and with that comes the advanced stuff I will get into later on the guide.
Tinker match.
Card counting is the name I came up with for that act of knowing the game values and foreseeing the play. It comes after the knowledge and the muscle memory, as a combined result of them both.
Being able to do that is in a whole different level. Card counting is something that is usually seen more in midders, and sometimes supports and semi supports. When a player is able to count cards he/she already knows how to engage, how to follow up, how to finish off, how to escape a situation, how much mana they are going to need and what the possible variables are. It is as close as you get to a serial killer mentality. These players play flawlessly, unless they fail at recognizing a variable or get turned around for something they didnt have in mind.
Usually card counting is related to armor and magic resistance, casting range and casting times, movement speed, cooldowns, mana management and positioning.
Playing mid for instance against a similar player can be extremely hard, as they already have everything measured, they just need you to cross a point so they can initiate on you and in three hits take you down. There are some ways to counter them though:
-Harass brainlessly, most players like this dont expect retaliation before a first kill or two. Keep them on the line, and make them be counting their hp and their danger zones instead of yours, they are cut short for any window of opportunity you might give them, and if they take a chance, fight back, sometimes they fail at counting tower shots or measuring creep aggro draw range (personally my biggest fails are because of that last one).
-Ask for multiple ganks. If they dont get a gold and exp advantage they cant make use of their knowledge, experience, etc. Sounds simple but sometimes these players have their distances well thought out, and ganking them becomes harder than you think, they never overextend.
-Card count yourself. Usually match ups with more than one of these players are either dull and centralized, as they never initiate on one another; or they are extremely aggressive and they keep attempting the zone off on each other. When it goes down that way it is usually just a matter of who has a better fit hero.
-Do not play sloppy or they will feast on you.
Something usually related with arena shooters is extremely useful in DotA. If you do not know, eye cursoring is the ability to have almost perfect or perfect hand eye coordination with your cursor, so you dont even aim spells or click on units, you just flick around and target them.
Again this is a muscle memory and practice thing.
Pretty simple concept, but one of the most important to improving your game that isnt related to learning numbers. And takes a good while to develop fully.
Keyboard Coordination, again something rather intuitive but as well worth mentioning. This is the equivalent of eye cursoring but with the keyboard, basically consists of being used to a keyboard and being comfortable with it, with the physical keys as with the key bindings. Memorizing the key bindings and relate them with simple finger moves makes the time of playing easier for keyboard uses.
Keyboard Coordination is the base of some other stuff I will get into later on, like flurrying for example.
Reflexes are something every player has, some more than others, and it can be developed further with practice and time, but generally it is bound to the player.
Blink Dagger, he could also have a 
Mask of Madness, etc. If you want to make the best out of the trade and test how far is he willing to go just to create space or leech any exp left you can stay. You have a Blink Dagger and a tp scroll. You now go through their heroes, do they have invis carriers, hard supports, instant disables like euls. They have a 
Nature's Prophet. He decides to secure in the gank and tps down the lane, to the midpoint between the tier 2 top dire and where the tier 1 was. You are in between Nature's Prophet and 
Sven, but you dont know it, so keep waiting for Sven to finish tping. Just as the tp ends he instantly casts 
Storm Hammer, you have to react in time not just because you need to disjoint the spell, but in what direction you are going, as you might just blink into another enemy hero that could disable you as well.
Boulder Smash twice in that encounter? Willing to risk it?Disjointing is one of those things that really makes you feel you are playing the game. In case you for some reason dont know, disjointing is using a certain ability or item to dodge a spell or its damage, generally of projectiles. In this section I will talk about how to perform more effective disjoints and also go into details of some disjoint styles or uses you can take into the game for yourself.
Escape Disjointing is the most simple one, it is used when you are in an escape situation, meaning that you dont want to engage, rather get away from your pursuers. Note that most disable spells have long casting animations, are projectiles, are ground targeted and so easy to dodge or have short casting range (stuff like shackles or nightmare). So if you are trying to escape a vengeful spirit as naga siren, you can just easily disjoint her stun when she casts it with mirror image. The vast majority of times if you are using blink to disjoint you want to cast it in the direction your base is or wherever you are trying to escape to.
Narrow Disjoints are for those situations where you dont have a safe route where to escape to (assuming again you are using blinking abilities), unlike escape disjointing, or if you want to stick around for something like a teamfight, but just want to dodge a single spell. Narrow disjoints are regular disjoints, but done in a very reduced space, almost without moving, like blinking to the same place where you were or a few centimeters across. This disjoint has to be done in the last possible instant of the projectile in the air just before it connects with your hero, as it has to hit the space between the start of your blink and the landing point, so its a very small gap. For this is especially useful knowing the projectiles speed and the hitbox of your hero. Sometimes people are confused when a very small narrow disjoint is used, as it seems your spell vanishes and the hero you targeted is unaffected.
Back Disjoints or backward disjoints, sometimes called back tosses are blink disjoints done along a kite move, to create distance between them and you. What I said in the last section, when sven pops a storm hammer at you and you wait until the last possible instant to disjoint it, and running away from the projectile at the same time so its on the air more time and sven is coming towards you waiting for the stun to outrun you, you turn around and blink behind him, but far away. This way, at the same time you are disjointing the storm hammer, you are also exploiting the fact that he ran all the way to you expecting the projectile to reach you, and now he has to run all the way back to you to your blink landing point, and with all that distance you can tp out, keep running away, or go into fog of war. Careful with the turning around part, as sometimes the turning rate is slower than the projectile and you can get hit before you can blink. Honorable mention to Ember Spirit the king of back tossing.
See this magnanimous graphic:
In order to counter 
Blink disjoint heroes you must use your casting animation as a tool, as Blink Dagger has no animation (excluding the turn rate to the target position) and other blink abilities have short animations that can be tricky to cancel use that to your advantage, imagine if someone tries to back toss you and you cancel your 
Magic Missile animation, they Blink back and you stun them there, now they are severely screwed, and by the time Blink Dagger comes off cooldown so is Magic Missile, and you probably got some allies come to help in those 10 seconds. So be advised, against high skilled players back tossing can backfire.
Maxing the relevance of an ability, spell or item active is something that is usually not mandatory, but if you and the enemy are in equal conditions, this will grant you the upper hand.
Maxing relevance can be stuff as simple as not using 
Black Hole on a gank when you know there is a teamfight coming soon, or not using your bkb to escape your overextensions. Maxing relevance can be more complex too, usually this is related to hero positioning, players that play a lot of initiators or ganking heroes should use this to the max, basically means waiting to use your disable on the most ankward moment for the enemy, or saving up your 
Wave of Terror for when one of your allies stuns is off cooldown, so you can cast wave of terror, then stun, hit, then have them stun and hit again to secure a kill instead of chasing down. Another positive concept to have in mind is that you can use spells for stuff they were not intended to directly, like 
Telekinesis as a setup spell, 
X Marks the Spot as an aggressive extension tool, 
Frozen Sigil as scout, 
Shadow Dance to find wards, etc.
The next section is about the less intuitive stuff.
In fighting situations, movement speeds and turn rates are more important than what you think. Of course movement speed impact is much more noticeable, if you are slower they catch up to you, that simple, but turn rates are different. If you have a slow turn rate (heroes have different turn rates if you didnt know) and you do a 360° turn you are taking a huge time out of running, they can easily catch up to you. But Goo, why would I ever do a 360°!? To throw a spell back, and that stun for instance is indirectly reduced, as a part of the duration is being wasted on you turning around and back.
Even worse, you can exploit a turn rate like so by disabling the target hero with them looking to your side, or even worse¦ Force Staff.
When they turn around to slow you/stun you, disable them, etc, so they wasted time turning around, they get the disable time, and then again need time to turn the other way around, in all that time you can get an ally to go around the enemy and set themselves across, to block both ways of possible escape.
Also turn rates can be really important for some heroes, like 
Magnus for instance. You need to control your own turning around before all else. An easy way to control your turning is selecting the point you want to move towards to and wait something like 0.5-0.6 secs, that should be enough to turn you around 100%. Or take advantage of enemies not paying attention to their turning.
The concept of teamfight fragging is generally not looked at so hard because most of the teamfights consist of people just trying to stay alive and kill anyone with low hp. But maybe this will be helpful for that kind of people too, hopefully.
Against some lineups you will notice that is going to become more and more important to focus a single or a pair of heroes in their team, and killing them off early on can win you the teamfight, usually carries on a babysit strat or big initiators, etc. Chaos nukers are heroes (usually nukers or heroes with big hits) that disrupt teamfights with their presence, they can turn around a teamfight just because they nuked down a carry to ashes in 2 seconds out of nowhere. Usually you want a chaos nuker to also have a jump in ability, like blinking, to make the best out of their kit.
Top notch chaos nukers go along the lines of core Skywrath Mage, Tinker, 
Legion Commander, 
Pugna (dagon & 
Nether Ward), etc.
For instance a teamfight can break out, Tinker teleports in and shotguns their 
Omniknight, then blinks out, then comes back and Hexes their tiny, again and again and again, he has no Omniknight to 
Repel him now, but it was so quick before that he didnt notice omni got killed, or he didnt have the time to retreat at least, chaos nuking is supposed to break the scheme of thinking where/when you are safe, by reminding you that anyone on your team could be gone in an instant you cannot do a 5 man counting on everyone, as anyone could be picked off.
Chaos nuking can be broken down to two main concepts. Target priority & gank like attitude in a teamfight. Chaos nuking can be a setup line or a finisher, check out the next sections.
Finishers are heroes or spells that are used towards the end of a teamfight, they can turna round lost fights, they can secure a teamwipe, etc.
If you have a beefy finisher, like a refresher tidehunter, you can bait over extension from their part, setting up the teamfight with a first ravage, making them come in a fight, baiting them closer to you, thinking you dont have ravage, or that your refresher orb is on cooldown, try to wait for a key moment, like your carry and theirs in a manfight, and ravage again. If they used bkbs between the ravages, even better.
Other 
Refresher Orb aoe disables come across as finishers too, that can be Reverse Polarity, even 
Chaotic Offering.
Honorable mention to 
Chronosphere, if they pop that on you when you are retreating thats four kills to 
Faceless Void.
Setup spells are those that come before the big initiation. One of the most famous teamfight setup is 
Moonlight Shadow, giving you sneak initiation and perfect positioning to land your 
Echo Slam or whatever without retaliation. Also similar global setup spells, like 
Battle Trance, 
Stampede, even 
Global Silence if you want to pop it early.
Setups can be disrupters as well, 
Duel, berserkers call, 
Power Cogs, Meat Hook, 
Nether Swap, 
Charge of Darkness, doppleganger, blink poof, 
Tombstone. Spells that cause instant chaos on enemy lines, giving you a second to set up the big initiation.
Honorable mention to 
Techies, being able to set up and end a teamfight with one button.
Other setups usually not looked at too much are spells like 
Blinding Light, 
Rupture, 
March of the Machines, curse of the silent, 
Life Break, 
Infest. Set up spells can be anything similar to baiting in that sense, as you make it look as a misplay, and when they try to exploit that fake mistake, you initiate on them head first.
Shadow Blade 
Huskar takes down their carry to 40% hp, everyone focuses huskar, 
Ravage comes in from the trees, easy win. Note 
Oracles 
False Promise as an alternative for sneaky, powerful and safe initiation spell.
Cast Times & Casting animations have the same issue than turn rates, they are a small window of opportunity for the opponents to put a dead stop to your action and use your mis-timing and lack of position to kill you or initiate on your team.
This is why instantly casted spells are so great, they are counters to any initiation with animation or long cast times. 
Flaming Lasso for example has an almost instant delay, with quick reflexes you can Ancient Seal him before he can initiate. A great instant counter attack for teamfights is Echo Slam, with a relatively big aoe and a short animation, its a guaranteed stun most of the time, its really hard to predict Echo Slams unless you saw them from afar, popping bkb in the casting animation is not something you want to trust your players to do.
Casting animations can also hinder your escapes and your chasing capability, being limited for instance to cast something like venomous gale because you know that the dead stop it needs to be casted could cause you to miss the spell or making it easy to dodge, add turn rate to that and your slow is 100% back firing on you. Seeing the person you are chasing turn around to cast is extremely predictable and timing shouldnt be a problem if you are looking to dodge the spell or something similar.
Be familiarized with your spell casting delay, stuff like Tinkers 
Laser have a noticeable cast delay in which the target can respond or run to fog, but also the shortest delays can have a big impact, missing a pounce and dying because of bad positioning for example.
On the other hand, spells with animation can be more easily cancelled if you dont want to use them or if you are trying to bait defense or disjoint. Spells with no casting animations can also be cancelled, but you cant cancel the animation (as there is none), you cancel the turning rate for them; can be tricky at first, but if you can get them off consistently you are going to be saving a lot of spells from being wasted.
The trick is you turn a small 20°-30° from the target you are casting on, and then cast, for example suicide squad attack. If you were looking at the target directly, you cant cancel it, as its instant, but if you are 30° off of them, when you cast, you have the time Techies takes to turn that 30° back to face the target, and in that period you can cancel the spell.
Hope that helps, its one of my oldest DotA tricks. Used to cancel Dagon shots primarily.
Shifting, short for shifting commands, done with default hotkey shift, if it wasnt obvious enough. Basically what it does is, as long as you hold down shift (and the action is finished, will explain in a second) every action you command, like attacking, moving, casting spells and items, etc, isnt done in your regular order, normally DotA responds to the last command; with shifting it responds to all of them, in the order they were sent.
Why is this useful? Well there is plenty of stuff you can do with it. Here is some of the most important of them:
Instant Response Queue: This for stuff that is key they are done instantly. Best example is for TP blinking, basically what you do is tp to somewhere and if you expect being ganked or that there is people waiting for your arrival you blink into the trees as soon as you arrive ( Tinker pushing for example, being the initiator on a tower defense situation, etc), without shifting you would wait for the TP channeling to finish and then blink instantly, with your razor sharp reflexes, but if you dont want to risk it use shift. During the TP channeling hold shift and blink into the trees, then let go shift, of course it wont cancel your tp by trying to blink into the trees at that very moment, as you are performing a commanded action. The blink into the trees command is queued after the TP finishes, so in the literal instant you arrive, you blink into the trees.
Micromanagement: In general microing stuff like illusions is a pretty intensive activity, with shifting it can be a little bit painless in some non-combat situations. For instance if you are a unit-based jungler, like 
Enigma, Chen, natures prophet, etc, and you have to go get a rune, help someone, go to base, you can leave your units jungling for you in the meantime for the gold, with shifting you can make them take on multiple camps and even use them to pull or stack with good timing in your queue. A cool example of shift queue micro is when I am playing Pudge and get an illusion rune, sometimes I dont really need its effects for anything more than refilling my bottle so I activate it and control one illusion and send them with a really long queue of commands that include moving to other lanes, walk through jungle camps, stand and block pull camps, etc. Then repeat again with the second illusion. This is even better as you would imagine with a hero like Pudge, because people usually expect illusions to move predictably or be standing still, when you have your hero and the two illusions moving like so it becomes much harder to determine which one is real, and sometimes people arent willing to take risks and stay away from the illusion Pudges too. Almost sounds like a prank. There was also this trick for stacking ancients with a controlled creep and shifting where you would send a 5 minute command queue to your helm of the dominator unit as something like luna or pa (or maybe you are a support like chen and you want to help your carry) and they would go base and stack ancients and base again then go and stack ancients, and so on, until there was a huge stack or the creep was killed. Check it out.
Third thing shifting is capable of doing is making flurrying easier, or faster if I may. But you can check that out on the section on flurrying later.
STOP. AUTOATTACKING. Maybe you have heard it before, let me break down for you. Its all about laning. I have always believed that the laning stage is the most important part of a game, if you win here you win everywhere.
There are a lot of different lanes: Offlanes, Mid Lanes, duo lanes, trilanes, offensive trilanes, etc. But they all share the very simple rule set of the three Gs.
-Get Kills
-Gold & Exp
-Dont Die
Depending in your type of lane the priority of these can vary, also your position in the team, position 1 to 5.
All three of those rules are related to one big concept, Lane Equilibrium. Lane equilibrium is about space and creep waves. If we want to sum it up, the space behind your creeps is relatively safer than the space behind their creeps, for various reasons, aggro, bodyblocking, vision, etc. And of course the same goes for the tower, behind your tower its safer than anywhere else in the lane (most of the time anyway). Lane Equilibrium is about pulling your lane back and pushing it forward, simple.
You want the lane pulled back when you want to get more gold and exp, safelanes with position 1 carries should have their lane pulled back 24/7 (most of the time anyway). With the lane pulled like so the danger zone is drastically reduced, and so are their ganking routes; this way you can get easy last hits. Also applies to mid lane, with the lane pulled back you are safer from support smoke ganks, etc.
You want your lane pushed when you want to limit enemy movement and maybe force rotations from other lanes, etc, disrupts lineups; this is commonly called pulling or hero pulling (dont be confused with pulling the lane creeps with neutrals, or if you dont want to confuse everyone call it force rotations). Pushing the lane also makes it great for smoke ganks from behind, as vision becomes tunneled, even more in mid and hard lanes, with scare juke paths along the lane.
Those are just some general guidelines. The next sections are about concepts related to Lane Equilibrium as a whole.
Danger Zones are a big, big part of playing DotA, especially for early game but extend for the whole match duration, they just change with the progress of the match, depends a lot on what heroes you have, what heroes they have, warding, who is leading, etc.
Basically your danger zone is any place where you could be ganked, lack vision, etc. Opposed to your safe zones, also commonly called space. Creating space is giving your teammates safe zone for farming, pushing, Roshan, etc.
If your lane is pulled back you have access to farm inside your safe zone, which is good, but at the same time your danger zones grow bigger, and trying to go for a rune for example when your lane is pulled back could be potentially dangerous. Also if your lane is really pulled back you could have problems with your tower, it can mess with your last hitting or take damage and be eventually destroyed. If you pull your own lane you are also forcing the opponents to come closer to your safe zone (their danger zone) to get farm and exp, this way you can create space for ganks coming from behind them from your midder, etc.
If you push your lane you are doing the same but to yourself, can be useful to take down their tower, etc, but you have to keep in mind that you are going far from your tower, and so from your safe zone, this can hinder your escape ability, best way to stop it is with proper warding and positioning, never over extend unless you are sure you can take the trades.
I will create a Full/Dynamic guide on everything about danger zones along the map in the future, this is just some general knowledge everyone should keep in mind, nothing in depth.
A very simple way of pulling your lane back without using the neutrals like in the safe lane (if you dont have access to them for example in mid) is by early denying. Lane creeps can be attacked by ally heroes from the point they are lower than 50% HP, this means that you dont have to only attack them to get a guaranteed deny, you can start attacking them from before to have them die faster and pull the lane back step by step, attack them one, two, four times, this will pull the lane back.
Some downsides and ways this can back fire are the following:
Dont over-pull your lane, otherwise you are giving the opponents way too much space (unless you want that to set up a gank), dont get rid of your own space and restrict yourself to tower range.
Focusing on early denying can make you forget/miss last hits, big mistake, farm is the main priority; if you are with a support and they are doing the early denying and you can focus solely on last hitting, thats great.
Sometimes by early denying you are setting easy last hits for your opponent, be mindful of that, they can be just waiting and time their attack to take a last hit since you just did the hard work for them.
Other than this it is a fairly good habit to have, its a pretty independent way of pulling your lane, along this next method.
This is a section from my guide to the mid lane, about bodyblocking the creeps to have your lane pulled back, if you already know what I am talking about you can just skip it, no problem.
Using spells in lane is something that is either situational or mandatory, depending on your hero. If you are using something like Zeus there is no way around it, you are going to be unintentionally pushing your lane constantly via 
Arc Lightning, or something like 
Razor or 
Death Prophet, that need to keep spamming their spells to keep the opposing mid away and farm more consistently.
Usually the midders are the heroes that use the most spells in their lane during early game, most of the time this is related to two main factors, the first is that they carry Bottle and have guaranteed mana and hp regen to sustain their spam and trade with the opposing mid, the other is that they are laning against a single hero (most of the time), and they really need to make it hard for them to farm, draw space from them to farm or gank, etc, and sometimes heroes just need to keep using spells to work in lane, like 
Astral Imprisonment on outworld devourer.
My go to example of a hero that spams spells in lane and has a pretty easy time with the lane equilibrium is Pugna, core mid lane Pugna to be exact. Until level 5 they use 
Nether Blast twice per creepwave, this just destroys the enemy lineup for mid, they dont have space to gank and their farm in case they are farming mids is severely sabotaged, if they are melee heroes even better, this is why Pugna core is such a massive anti farming/anti carry mid hero, they just win their lane effortlessly by messing with the lane equilibrium so much.
In the case of mid lane pushing the lane two creepwaves in advance is more than enough to grab a top rune without losing any exp from creeps, unless the enemy starts denying early. Keep that in mind, you both have the same tools for lane equilibrium, it is just a matter of who knows them better and uses them more effectively. Stuff like March of the Machines & Nether Blast are some examples or big lane control tools in mid.
Exploiting not in the VAC ban sense, but to make the best out of it. I am talking about stuff like jukes, blind spots, tree spots, uphills, wards, blocking camps, etc.
You may have come across videos like 
Medusa farming ancients from level 1, triple stacking 
Earth Spirit and other stuff of that nature, that is using the map to the max, even if doing the medusa thing is a massive game throw.
The best way of learning the map cues and hidden spots, etc, is by playing different roles in different lanes, jungling to learn which are the spawn boxes and just eyeball them for other matches, knowing where to plant a ward and knowing what vision it gives, all that good stuff.
Some heroes are better at using the map to their advantage, mainly hard supports and offlaners, for example clockwork offlaning Power Cogs blocking/redirecting the creepwave to the trees to pull the lane back, using the enemies camp to pull from the hard lane by cutting some trees, and more.
Next sections covers some of these.
Choke points if you didnt know consist of cutting certain trees near jungle camps or juke paths to only one unit can fit through at a time. This is key part of lifestealer jungling strategies for example, but it can be used for supports too, as it limits the creeps to hit you only once at a time, that way improving your durability in your jungling. You can watch the video below if you are interested or what to see it in action.
This is one of the things in dota that really make you wonder, like disjointing. Using blind spots or blind spotting is a technique in which you use the fog of war in a way to reduce the angle of visibility, in order to set ganks, escape with a TP, among other stuff.
Blind spotting messes around with hero hitboxes and vision of fog of war, and the only way to counter it is unobstructed vision or flying for that matter, and in case you are blind spotting with trees, stuff like 
Midnight Pulse, 
Supernova, and other spells that kill a lot of trees can get you busted too.
Using blind spots and combining them with choke points and juking will make your escapes much more consistent, instead of trying to outrun them across the lanes. Give them a shot.
Handling Stats & Regen is one of the advanced techniques that arent that advanced, dropping your null talismans to get more out of your bottle isnt really an advanced technique as much as blind spotting is for example.
Especially during the laning stage and the early game in general you will find yourself lacking regen and having to go back to base more than once due to a close encounter or harass, the basics are just making more out of your regen items by dropping stat items, changing your 
Power Treads, etc.
Here is some detail in the next sections.
Again, I dont know if something as simple as treadswitch is worth putting in what is supposed to be a guide on truly advanced concepts, but I might as well to have more information and it can still be helpful for new players, even if this is mentioned everywhere.
You know Power Treads? Well if you understand how stats work you know that having them on Strength gives you a larger hp pool and hp regen, on Intelligence same deal but with mana instead of Hp, in Agility gives you attack speed and armor, this is how you use them to get more out of your Hp and Mana pools.
What I mean is that if you are about to take a hit you should switch to STR, so you have a bigger Hp pool, every time you want to cast a spell switch to INT to have a bigger mana pool, so % wise you are saving up some Hp and some Mana when doing the switches. The regen can make some difference, if you just had a gank and you are low on mana but full on Hp, and you are back to farming you can treadswitch to INT so the small extra Mana regen will make a difference along 1 or 2 minutes of farming, so you can have at least some spells ready for when you need them, without using actual clarities or bottle charges. Same deal with Hp and long periods of time.
When it comes to using consumables such as bottle charges you should always put your treads on AGI, this way your Hp and Mana pools arent receiving any extra stats from the treads, giving you more for the same consumable, then when you are done with said consumable turn them back to whatever attribute you need.
Which takes us to the next section.
Dropping is similar to treadswitching, in the sense that is a method to use consumables to the max. Dropping is done in two situations: when using consumables and when in the fountain/well.
For example imagine you are playing a rather mana hungry hero in mid like 
Storm Spirit or 
Queen of Pain, and you have your 
Null Talisman and your 
Oblivion Staff, you get a bounty rune and it recharges your Bottle, so you put your Power Treads on agility, drop your Null Talisman and your Oblivion Staff and then use the bottle charges you need, after that wait until the effect wears off and pick everything up. If doing this in lane please be careful where you drop your stuff, as anyone could come take it or deny it, try to shift queue the pick up command so its done instantly or you can cancel the regen any time and your hero will automatically pick up anything that they dropped, you can use uphill, tree fog, whatever to keep your stuff safe; careful with invis heroes.
The fountain regenerates your Hp and Mana by a semi percentile value (fixed + precentile), this means that if you drop stat items and switch treads to agility you will regen faster, just as with consumables. Always remember to put big stat items like 
Heart of Tarrasque on the ground or in your stash when in the fountain, there is a noticeable difference on how many seconds you take to regen to 100% Hp and Mana. Also if you have a Bottle spam it like crazy in the fountain, it gives you the full bottle regen on top of the fountain regen, and it wont waste charges as you are in the fountain after all.
Advanced Technique: You can use your bottle for a second or so after teleporting out of base without it wasting charges, fountain regen lingers for an instant, use this to give charges to allies and help them stay in lane without wasting bottle charges, or use it to cast a free spell as harass or to stop a push with the fountain regen on your side.
True Advanced Technique: Drop your bottle near the finishing Tp of an ally that is coming from the fountain and have them pick up your bottle when they still have the fountain regen with them, this will refill your bottle to three charges again, then they can give the bottle back to you. Extra useful since the nerfs to bottle crow and the buffs to roaming support playstyle. Easy lane sustain.
Flurrying is personally one of my favorite parts in DotA. The concept of flurrying is attributed to intelligence heroes usually, or spell casters in general.
If you didnt know flurrying is the ability of a player of casting multiple spells and items in rapid succession, its a personal skill that requires practice, muscle memory, quick fingers and a lot of fast decision making. This skill is inherent to Tinker, Skywrath Mage, Storm Spirit, Earth Spirit, Pugna, 
Invoker or course, 
Necrophos, natures prophet, 
Puck, Queen of Pain and 
Rubick players mostly. Heroes that use a lot of buttons with different effects in quick succession.
A player capable of flurrying, for instance a Tinker player can Blink Dagger, 
Soul Ring, Hex, Ethereal Blade, dagon, 
Rearm, Soul Ring, Ethereal Blade, dagon, Hex, Rearm and blink to the trees again, ideally, in the lapse of 2.4 seconds, maybe 2.7s with the changes done to Ethereal Blade depending on the distance, and consider that 2 seconds of said time lapses are coming from the Rearms that take 1 second each at max level. Of course if the player uses spells like Laser or 
Heat Seeking Missile he is making his flurrying way slower as they have a considerably long casting animation.
Shifting and quickcast are useful tools for flurrying, but it is possible to perform it without them, just not as fast.
Guys, report me, but flurrying is fun. Dotabluff.
By now you probably know what juking is, but if you dont its basically using trees, fog of war, moving in weird ways to dodge your pursuers, making you hard to keep track of and hard to target with spells too.
Juking is a pretty complete piece of term, but I can still divide it into two smaller, easier to digest parts: Chase/Escape Juking & Space Extrapolation Juking, these are complementary one to the other, but mastering one first makes the other one easier to understand.
Chase or Escape Juking is basically what you do with trees and paths to confuse anyone trying to chase you down, you go through tight tree paths and turn in unpredictable sharp corners to make them waste time figuring what way did you go. To be good at juking/not getting juked is mostly knowing the map and those tree paths (often called juke paths or juke spots) like the back of your hand. Again this is a pretty big general concept and matter for a full guide I will go into in the future, this is my advice for now.
Space Extrapolation Juking is one that disrupts space extrapolation for enemies, basically this is what you do when you try to dodge sunstrikes, etc. Its something you concrete once you are done with escape juking, and already in fog, moving swiftly and unpredictably inside fog of war, so your route cannot be predicted, this is useful for dodging anything pretty much, from meat hooks to rocket flares to ice blasts. The best tool for this type of juking is dead stops, if you drop a full on stop during it, space extrapolation becomes extremely hard or impossible, as people dont usually expect it or dont know how long are you going to do it, although this can be countered if they are really good players (see the space extrapolation section).
Vacuum, etc), slowing them, or juking, you make them change target several times, this makes it so jukes are done in a one on one situation, even in close encounters. A big part of kiting is turn rates, try using your mobilities in the most horizontal ways possible in relation to the person you want to kite, similar to back tossing disjointing, so they have to waste even more distance in turning around 90° or even 180°.On the subject of juking and kiting we have this big factor that wasnt mentioned before, and that is mobilities. Mobilities such as Force Staff, blinking abilities, spells like ball lightning and rolling boulder, etc. How are you supposed to use them to the maximum potential in initiation and escape situations.
Main trick to use your Force Staff or Blink Dagger, especially Blink Dagger to initiate with spells like Ravage, Reverse Polarity, or spells of similar magnitude you are going to want to max the jump factor of your Blink Dagger, you are supposed to cast instantly after you finish blinking, this has to be faster than anyones reactions so they cannot pop bkb on you, Blink out, etc; you are supposed to be using shifting for this, and queue the spell with the Blink Dagger; and to be completely safe use the angle trick I told you about earlier with the Blink Dagger, stand 30° sideways to the place you want to initiate and send the commands, if someone moves or it is not the proper time to initiate you still have that 30° of the heros turn rate to stop the command chain, it wont blink instantly. Apart from that I tend to use this technique with Techies suicide squad attack and Force Staff to take supports with me in my denial.
That is regarding initiation; regarding escape it is a tad simpler, basically you have to use your mobilities but with the map, in order to make everyone path around obstacles.
What I mean is that if you have a Force Staff for example you can go through terrain, and they cannot, so if you use your Force Staff just to separate yourself from them you are wasting your big main escape, the distance that Blink makes you travel or Force Staff for that matter is not the big part of them, the big part is that they play around with terrain, tree lines, up hilling, etc. Check this out.
Force Staff (purple) in the direction he is running, pushing him away from his persuer, and creating a small gap.
Force Staff (in purple again) to go uphill, as the red hero has no mobility spell or item, he has to go all the way around from the left or right side, giving the blue hero a huge gap, and a lot of time to escape. Apart from that, when using Force Staff even if you go out of vision the fog behind you lingers, letting you see what way your persuer is going to take (if they decide to keep chasing you), and as they cant see you in the uphill, you can take the optimal route for escape.Eyeballing & Pinpointing are two skills that complement each other almost fully, the vast majority of situations you need both to succeed, having only one of these developed can actually even be counter productive. These two skills are also inherent of card counting players and experienced players in general.
Eyeballing is the ability to measure the games distances almost perfectly, this means that just by eyeballing you know how far your sacred arrows go, etc, things of that style. But also eyeballing is useful to measure chases and ganks, with movement speed you can predict whether that gank you are about to perform is going to be fast and efficient or its going to get juked around and get re initiated on; this is a subject a lot of new players especially fail to understand. You can measure results prior to performing the actions, this is why sometimes you see pudges that dont bother to throw a hook, because they know in that angle is not going to reach or that is most likely to miss.
Chronosphere goes, pinpointing is seeing a teamfight and knowing where you click to catch everyone with the Chronosphere, Black Hole, Reverse Polarity, and smaller stuff like Power Cogs, 
Starstorm, 
Sleight of Fist, among others.Baiting huh, well you know, they follow you and your mates fight them, ez right? Yes sure, but baiting goes much further than just making people follow you into trouble, that can be just way to obvious, your way of acting and usage of spells and items can actually create ambiguity if you are baiting or attempting blind spots, etc.
The key to baiting overextension is to test how far are your pursuers willing to go to secure the kill or an objective like a tower or Roshan, and exploit that. If you are being chased by someone and you toss an stun on them and they go away you are not going to be able to bait them, they dont feel like they can kill you with the time you just created, but if you toss the stun and they still follow you because they saw that as a window opportunity (as your stun is on cooldown) you can use it to your advantage.
Main most basic strategy is creating a big gap between them and possible safe zones or reinforcements, this means you have to bait them into places they have no vision, limited escape routes and less angles, while making your team have an easy way in for the kill (or to save you if you are not in position to fight back).
By having sets of wards will provide you a window of safe zone inside their side, and they have a danger spot in their jungle for instance, they can be ganked there, etc. This way if you overextend or are looking to force movement from them or rotations you can use your aggressive ward as a safe oasis of sorts, where your team can intervene more efficiently. The reason this is done with agg wards instead of regular warding spots is because people tend to expect defensive wards, Roshan wards, rune wards, etc, and not overextend over those zones, as they know you could have them turned around with a single Tp rotation.
In order to perform a long bait (where they really have to commit) and not let them go away is usually by using any gap closer as a time creator; honorable mention goes to tusks snowball, as he can stay tucked in there for a period of time, then start rolling and add a stun to the mix, this really turns around chases (can backfire if you get pulled, you start 
Snowball and they move away with a Blink or something similar and you dont know in what direction you are going to roll).
In baiting terms there is something called chase openings (commonly also known as juke openings or juke closings depending on the context) are multiple juke path connections that can be used as a pseudo time-gap creator for allies, works even better when the hero in question has no allies nearby (something that isnt that common though). Where you would have a teammate enter a juke path inside fog of war, bait past that point (creating a small blind spot with some angles) and then turn around and cast a spell, after that have your teammate follow up by coming out of the juke opening and closing them off or force them to keep extending (most of the time a secured kill); this technique should only be used with heroes that have a guaranteed escape or done in pairs, just to discard the possibility of a counter gank, which can happen if they are actually trying to turn around/re-initiate with the bait.
What I am trying to explain is that sometimes, especially on high skill games where people will exploit your bait attempt to force themselves into overextension, and use that to pull your teammates into rotating to help you out, not only wasting their time but exposing them to a juke closing with their teammates (which can get in position with fog of war if you dont have wards or with 
Smoke of Deceit of you did have wards.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but these terms will help you overall to use baiting more effectively, the rest is just positioning options for different variables of heroes and different ways to tackle scenarios with playing with items and mind games as the kids call it.
This method of re-initiation can be used in both sides of the situation, as being the bait side just as well as being the baited side.
The main point of this technique is initiating a teamfight from rotations called in from a bait situation or a gank situation alike. With a similar line of play as of a juke openings and closings its a call for a bigger trade, usually to break lane lineups or start skirmishing to disrupt the enemy carrys farming ability taking up their space, etc; instead of being a 1 for 1 or a 1 for 0 it can become a full teamfight with 4 and 3 deaths per team, which shakes a lot of lineups to the core.
If you are in the baiting side (meaning the bait hero or hero being chased is one of your allies) you must call in as many teleports as possible to a nearby location, creeps, tower, etc (see how to TP faster to a same tower in a second). With the gap created by the baiting hero you can wait and see how many other enemies are coming around to help out the chaser get out of his overextension and there you can pop in with your initiator and take three, four kills in exchange.
If you are on the follower side, try to get the initiation on all those heroes coming in from the teleports, or even better, smoke up and hide in a juke path, wait for your teams chaser to fall back and be followed by the rotations committing to that kill, and then initiate.
Its actually a pretty simple concept but it can be tricky in practice, as there are big rotations and many teleports to take into account, and when playing around with fog of war and smokes can lead to someone getting out of position just slightly and giving away the move you were about to perform.
Space Extrapolation is a concept that I tend to repeat a lot in different guides, if you have read any of those in the past you should already know what I am talking about here. If you dont, space extrapolation is basically the ability to know where everything and everyone is by calculating movement speeds and last known positions. This means that you can pinpoint where someone is just because you saw they go into fog of war and you have a gut feeling based off their movement speed.
Its the most basic concept in order to land Meat Hooks to people in fog or global 
Sun Strikes for example.
But sure, space extrapolation has way more impact in a match other that just landing spells, it can go for a lot towards warding and dewarding, ganking, taking objectives, etc.
The big thing with space extrapolation is getting one piece of information to give you an idea, then there are methods that people use to get the feel of the positions; most people develop their own technique but here are some that I have found useful in the past (as a big Pudge player myself):
-Map cues and seconds: Some players like to get an idea of how many seconds it takes a certain hero to travel a certain distance, then when in the match they can use that information and count the seconds themselves and get the position of the hero in the fog or at least somewhere really close; this method I have found to be effective to pinpoint the positions, but when it comes to using the movement sometimes you can lose track of the counting when focusing of different things in the match. If you can multitask escaping the gank and still be counting down the position of that low hp support then props to you. Also if people backtrack, do a dead stop or change directions it becomes harder or impossible to keep counting by seconds, breaks the scaling you had in your head.
-Steps: More experienced players use the walking steps animation of the heroes to get the feeling of positions, this is far more exact and doesnt suffer as much when the heroes change position; also if said hero casts an spell it can still be counted down from the restart of the walking animation. Is a bit harder to get the hang of it, but its more precise in the end. Can be prevented simply by stutter walking for a bit by cancelling animation as you were creepblocking, do this if you expect follow up on you after you get into fog of war.
-Both, animation timing: Even more experienced players use a combination of counting steps and seconds to count up positioning, for example, I know that 
Vengeful Spirit takes 1 second to travel 6 steps and queen of pain takes 1 second to travel 5 steps but if they are both at 310 MS they travel the same distance, its just that Queen of Pains walking animation is a big longer and slower. Then you can not only use walking and time to reference, but different animations, I know that each Pudge step takes about 2 hook animations, and even further, I know that skywrath can cast all of his spells inside one of his flapping animations before it restarts. This method is the hardest to learn and it takes way more time, as you have to soak up all the animation timings of heroes just by playing with and against them. You can adopt any visual queues you want or none at all; I have seen other experienced players use other visual queues, like selecting and deselecting the spell the want to cast (Dendi uses this to cancel Pudge hooks he knows are off the mark, for example), etc, etc.You can develop your own technique as I said before.
Using space extrapolation is also helpful for ganks, for example if you ward sees someone running off into your jungle you can sort of predict what was his route and you can use an ally to close him off, get the kill, or even more aggressively if you plant a ward on the enemy lines, like in their jungle. This ward gives you the first piece of information you need to keep track of those heroes.
Apart from all these techniques, space extrapolation also serves as a discard of danger and safety zones, if you see people walk past a ward you can predict where they can and cannot possible be, so you can use that information to consider a zone safe to farm or dangerous by enemy occupation, if they are somewhere around there-ish, they cant be here, this way you can get into farming places even without vision as if it were dangerous but you know that there is no one around to gank you/punish you for it. However, always keep in mind that there are plenty of heroes that can teleport to unpredictable places, etc, and can do some things that arent traceable just by space extrapolation.
Space extrapolation can also be used to predict jukers inside juke paths and block them off with an unit or ally. Bodyblocking inside restricted areas is most usually a guaranteed kill.
This section is here just in case I need to add anything in the future. Basically this is my edit section, just in case I have to fix stuff. If I do any changes you will know what I did by looking at this section.
It is empty for now though.
Anyway everyone thats it for this guide, its not as in-depth as I originally laid it out but here it is nonetheless, more guides going into detail of some of these concepts will be coming around, especially regarding juking and blind spotting, hopefully soon enough.
If you considered any of the treated content to be misleading or overall not helpful please point it out in the comments so I can get around on fixing it as soon as possible, other than that feedback in general is always welcome.
If you want me to answer a more personal question or if you want to play with me or are looking for coaching send me a personal message on reddit. I am /u/TheDrGoo over there, and I read my inbox everyday or every two days worst case scenario.
Liked the guide? Want more? Here are some of my latest guides in the general strategy field, guide to mid and guide to drafting n strats, eh?
If you already read those and want even more then be patient. My next guide will probably be on the subject of juking, kiting, blind spots, choke points and space extrapolation (treated on this guide, but more in-depth), either that guide or a hero guide, which I havent made in ages.
I am not crazy, I just like writing.
And as always, dont let me get buried by techies guides.
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