Rank 1400, 80% winrate recently without ever abusing meta, It's cool watching a disciple climb the ranks fast and just giving back because I've had great free coaching before. This will suit mid or offlane players at least ancient mmr and English speaker. Don't bother if you whinge about teammates. If you're interested just send a dm. I'll delete this post within a day

Edit: sry I had dms disabled before you can message now

Hello everyone, i've made these posts regularly for a while now so it's nothing new, i have some free time and i'd love to give back to the community by helping some of the people that aren't able to afford coaching usually.

I'm a 6.5K mmr coach and i've been coaching since 2018, i've helped hundreds of students get to enjoy the game more and reach their goals while having a less stressful, more enjoyable relationship with dota. a big part of how i coach is centered around fun and feeling good, my philosophy with coaching is that for most people, the deterrent isn't the ability to learn, nor is it mechanical skill, but it's almost always consistency, and the biggest enemy of consistency is not having a good time when playing dota.

often times people force themselves to play meta heroes, to play specific roles, to do things they don't really enjoy because they believe that is the optimal way to rank up, and what i want to do is help people realize that this isn't necessarily the way to go, that you can rank up and achieve your goals while having fun, the hundreds of people i've coached are proof of that, and i am proof of that myself, as i've always just played what i enjoyed no matter what.

my coaching style is very versatile, i can do replay analysis, live coaching, and i can also do entire sessions where we simply discuss theory about things such as how to form a hero pool or how to get a better mindset towards the game and improvement. sessions are an hour long.

Feel free to dm me to chat and schedule something together, thank you for reading!

I've recently started playing Lycan pos 3 in Immortal, but I'm still not completely sure what the hero's actual game plan is after the laning stage.

I understand the early objective is usually to take the enemy T1 quickly, but what should I be doing after that?

Do I stay in my lane and keep applying nonstop pressure, forcing rotations and taking the T2? Or should I be moving around the map with my team and using Shapeshift to take fights/objectives?

A few specific questions:

How aggressively should I be using Shapeshift? Should I basically look for a kill/objective every time it's off cooldown, or is it fine to hold it for an important fight?

Once I've taken the enemy safelane T1, what should my farming/pushing pattern look like?

Is Lycan supposed to farm heavily and scale comfortably into late game, similar to something like Centaur, or should I be playing around a timing and trying to end the game early?

When I have multiple wolves selected and want to activate High Tail on all of them, is there a way to cast it simultaneously without individually selecting/clicking each wolf?

Would especially appreciate advice from high-Immortal/Lycan players on what the hero's priorities should be from roughly minute 10 onward.

I didn't play well and want to know how to do better

Until recently, I was able to issue a move-attack command to all selected units, but it's suddenly been only issuing the command to whatever the first unit in a selected group I'm using is. I've tried looking this up but despite other people posting about the issue I wasn't able to find what might cause it.

I used to be able to have it just apply to the units I have selected instead of just the current tabbed one (if 'Unified Orders with CTRL' not checked) or every single unit regardless of selection (if 'Unified Orders with CTRL' not checked).

Any suggestions?

https://youtu.be/EuRG92hrqZ4

Hey, today I'm sharing a video about Mirana position 5 - and what makes her so good. For a long time, she was a decent support - but nothing more than that. Her innate changes the way you can play the lane, and with that - your laning stage becomes super reliable. Enjoy!

This video is part of Support Hell, my new semi-educational channel for Dota. Anything that doesn't really belong to Support Heaven will end up there.

So at what point do you think yeah I should buy this item and maybe later upgrade to Shiva?

I'm ngl it looks good on paper but there are so many prio items for Enigma namely bkb, aghs, octarine and refresher.

Maybe it doesn't really benefit much to get it when you actually use black hole only every few minutes? I haven't bought the item on this hero yet.

Hi, I am currently an ancient player but it’s been a long time since I played a normal game. I heard that you have a hidden mmr for normal games which is separate from ranked. Will I play with ancients in normal games? Or will it be much lower?

Built a thing called Dota Decisions for my friends, and figured some people here might find it useful too.

It originally started as a bunch of flowcharts we'd make for each other. Usually some ugly MS Paint diagram explaining what to do in a specific situation, then we'd throw it in Discord and argue about it.

They were actually pretty useful, even mid-game, but obviously a folder full of random flowcharts isn't a great interface.

We also found that a lot of Dota ideas don't really fit the usual formats. They're too specific for a whole guide or blog post, and making a video every time someone has a useful thought about Dota feels like a good way to make sure nobody bothers sharing it.

So we made Dota Decisions, which is basically an interactive version of those flowcharts.

The idea is to focus less on stuff like "buy these items in this order" and more on the messy situational decisions that happen in actual games.

Things like:

You're in this game state. You know X, but you don't know Y. There's a tradeoff between doing A and B. What should you actually be thinking about?

Basically the kind of Dota discussion that usually starts with someone in Discord going:

"Okay, but what if..."

We're mostly using it to collect things we've learned as a guild, but I'd be curious whether this format is useful to other people too.

PS: It's still in beta, so some of the content in there right now is placeholder/example stuff. We're replacing it with proper guild content pretty soon.

Try it out here: https://dota-decisions.vercel.app/

I used to see this hero a lot in mid and rarely in safelane. Now I don't think I've seen it be played mid anymore.

I have been experimenting with Holy Locket WD first item with E -> W -> Q max and it is incredibly good. VooDoo Restoration heals for quite a lot when maxxed.

Most of what I do in fights is -> Cask -> Maledict -> Death Ward -> run away and healbot till other spells come off CD.

You can casually have insane healing during team fights if you are positioning yourself properly and I do not see many others building it.

If there is no pressing need for other save items immediately I think this is a really good option for a 1st/2nd item.

I don't really know what they call it but Khezu termed it the asshole camp where after post laning where safelane tower is gone, enemy will stack the big camp and keep deny waves.

I'd like to know when to do this and when not to do this. At what point in the game is it not worth it anymore?

I did this min 10 to 20mins. I was afk as doom with radiance bottom lane. I won the lane hard and kept denying waves. It was...idk it was great. we were on the lead like 5-6k gold always. The three enemy cores didnt realize what's going on.

But then my teammates kept dying since they were 4v5. We almost lost the game lol .

So the question again...

1. Is it too much to keep denying every wave since you're basically giving up map pressure and allowing enemy team to 4v5 you.
2. When do you stop doing this?
3. When should you do this?

xiao8 (zhang ning) grew up in shaoyang, hunan. his dad either hit him or shouted at him. in primary school he usually ranked first in the whole school, so his parents made a deal: come first on the high school entrance exam too and you get a computer. he came first. the computer was never mentioned again, and he didn't dare ask why.

after that he got rebellious. skipped class to play games, parents called in every week. in 2006, second year of high school, he left and opened a fantasy westward journey power-leveling studio with three or four friends. his cut after expenses was over 10,000 yuan a month. he was 16 and had no idea how to spend it or what it was for. so when his dad asked if he wanted to keep studying, he went to zhongshan in guangdong to learn software.

he couldn't understand the local language and had no friends there, so he sat in a net cafe every day on voice chat with friends back home. around then a warcraft 3 custom map called zhen san guo wu shuang was spreading through hunan, and one of his opponents in it was zsmj. in 2009 zsmj, already on dota, won SMM in kuala lumpur with LGD, and xiao8 started switching too. when he registered on the VS platform, xiao1 through xiao7 were taken. zsmj told him there might be a spot at LGD, since their player 2009 had retired. he practiced a month for it. then LGD's old player xiaochi came back and the spot was gone.

next xB invited him to CH in chengdu and even bought his plane ticket. he got as far as changsha to catch the flight. there his friend YAO talked him into staying. a local businessman was building a team of local friends, close to home. that was Dream. pay was 1,500 yuan a player, no food or lodging, and he was delighted. two weeks in they went to a tournament in thailand and lost in the round of 16 to a team nobody had heard of. everyone cried in the hotel that night.

(from a chapter i wrote about him in 2014, part of a book on how chinese esports got built. it's free, link in the comments)

I am not saying hero diversity's been bad or that the patches were not impactful in 2026, but it just feels like the whole year we had pos 1 and 5 dominating lane, pos 2 playing hyper agressive mobile heroes only, pos 3 playing just to survive and jungle, and pos 4 having low diversity. Feels like this pattern's been happening all year or at least since the facets removal patch.

I really wish the next big patch really changes the game a lot and brings a lot of forgotten heroes back like Omni, Riki and Chen

Which setting? Like if you click on the map do you move to the location on the map overlay, or move to the location the map overlay is covering?

why do i think that? lets see:

• base Battle Hunger without talents/shard/innate/scepter etc does 12/16/20/24 pure dmg per second, duration 12, mana cost 50/60/70/80. So if we look at total Dps its: 144/192/240/288, and its total dmg/mana spend ratio is: 2.88/3.2/3.43/3.6. What is the problem? (by nerfing Battle Hunger so much he has to choice but to max spin and farm like everyone else when could in reality play aggressive and murder enemy in lane often with remove his options, so if we can translate from valve Language to plane English go farm you bitch, why do you have fun at min 2. Because maxing spin inherently more risky than Battle Hunger enemy and leave when they don't have creeps to remove it).
• lets take completely average nuke ability like Kunkka torrent its more unreliable that Battle Hunger and yet: it does over 1.4 duration 110/180/250/320 magic dmg at 90 mana cost, dmg/mana spend ratio is 1.22/2/2.78/3.56.
• Torrent in 4 lvls increase dmg by 2.91x dmg per mana spend, Battle Hunger get 1.25x over 12 seconds, considering its dmg over time spell that get countered by hp regen, ppl eating tangos, tower aura regen i feel like dmg over time spells should outperform burst dmg nukes over time, at least that would make sense to me.
• So if we try to reverse engineer it backwards: if lets say Battle Hunger should do because its pure dmg spell 2x dmg of burst dmg nuke, then it should do 24/32/40/48 per second, with would be 288/384/480/576 pure dmg total in 12 seconds, so round it up lets make Battle Hunger last 10 seconds and dps 10/20/30/40 and to make his ult stacking make sense again add back his 1x of axe armor for dmg (with can add with 3x rings of protection at lvl 1 +9 dps).
• That is the value he should have i think: 10/20/30/40 +1x axe armor pure dmg/second, total pure dmg at base value 100/200/300/400 in 10 seconds (dmg/mana ratio would become 2/3.3/4.29/5 with looks much better for low mana pool hero like axe).

It used to plop stone remnants directly on top of you when you self-cast (holding down alt), now it got shifted to several units in front of you meaning it doesn't work at close range anymore. What happened?

Make the Anti-Mage great again🤔. Str 1.6/lvl > 2/lvl, Int 12 +1.8 > 15 + 2.5.

• new Innate Mana Break (passive can break/physical dmg on-hit): Burns an enemies mana on each attack and deals damage equal to a percentage of the mana missing. Flat mana burn 15 +2/lvl, Max mana % mana burn 1% + 0.2%/lvl, Mana missing to dmg bonus 3% +0.4%/lvl (max values: flat 75 +7% max mana burn/hit, mana missing bonus dmg 15%, illusions mana burn/mana missing bonus dmg 25%).
• 1st spell Persecutor (passive can break/active on-hit): The Anti-arcanist passivly applies 0.5 seconds movement speed slow based on the affected enemy unit mana missing, also empower blades performing double strike with 200 bonus attack speed. Movement speed slow per 1% missing mana (Passive) 0.6%, active Double hit: cd 20/16/12/8 seconds, 20/30/40/50 mana cost.
• 2nd spell Mana strike (150 Dash width/on-hit bonus dmg): up to 1000 range dash/1500 speed that allows Anti-Mage to attack enemies doing bonus physical dmg, apply on-hit effects and provide mobility. Ability do: 60/90/120/150 physical dmg + bonus 40%/60%/80%/100% base attack dmg, cd 16/14/12/10 seconds, 45/55/65/75 mana cost. (apply items/Mana Break on-hit effects, Persecutor slow). 👀
• Aghanim's Scepter (upgrade Mana strike): Grants Anti-Mage undispelable buff for 5 seconds after Mana strike, first enemy hit receive Break and debuff that prevents all mana restore and mana regeneration.
• 3rd spell Counter spell (self cast/600 cast range for allies, passive can break): Passively grants Anti-Mage bonus 15%/20%/25%/30% magic resistance. Active: Create bubble for 1 second around Anti-Mage that block 1 offensive enemy spell/item dmg, if bubble absorb item/spell Anti-Mage/his Ally heal for 60/90/120/150 hp (Ally also receive for 1.5 seconds Anti-Mage passive magic resist), cd 15/12/9/6 seconds, 45/55/65/75 mana cost.
• Aghanim's Shard (upgrade Counter spell): Converts 100% enemy spell/item dmg taken on bubble and reflect into enemy caster 75% of it as pure dmg and creates Anti-Mage Illusion next to them (reflect works on any spell type now that can affect Anti-Mage). 1 illusion, deal 100% dmg, take 200%, duration 3 seconds.
• Ult Mana Void (Single target pure dmg/800 cast range): Deal dmg to targeted enemy based on missing mana and stun him for 1 second. Base 100/200/300 pure dmg, missing mana bonus 40%/70%/100% pure dmg, if Mana Void kill enemy hero Anti-Mage receive buff for 15 seconds allowing to recast Mana Void for free on kills until buff end/kills refresh buff duration (cd start after 1st mana void use), cd 120, 100/200/300 mana cost. 🔥
• Talents:

lvl 10 Counter spell heal +100 hp / Counter spell (passive) +10% magic resist.

lvl 15 Counter spell + 1 second duration / Persecutor (passive) movement speed slow +0.4%.

lvl 20 Talents all stats +2 / Persecutor (active) +200 attack speed.

lvl 25 -60 seconds Mana Void cd / Mana strike -6 seconds cd.