yep watching it

Grand Final is now on, Empire has been crushing, they are still undefeated. Last game they picked my boy Tusk and he did work. Let's see who gets Axe this time around.

wow this game is insane

and getting even more insane

wow best game of the tournament to end it all

nice. That disperse damage from the spectre almost killed the whole empire team at the end lol

I haven't been able to finish a proper game all week. This server nonsense has got to stop.

neither, the difficulty in becoming pro is magnitudes greater than the difficulty in becoming good

someone who is 35 or even quite a bit older could easily be good at this game

i think plenty of adults probably play mobas and i am curious about the numbers - i imagine its a growing demographic






dota was orginally a Mod on Warcraft 3 which was released in 2002 - assuming those players stuck that is a large adult audience

Easily can be good enough right into your 30's. There are some CS pro's well over 30. Traditionally gamers are young because older people can't dedicate the time to it. Your reactions, everything slows down slightly but it wont make much difference at all. I am 28 and I don't think I am at any disadvantage whatsoever to when I was 15 its simply I get way less time to play.

This x1000

First game of Dota in ~4 months.

I random Huskar. After I random, the enemy team picks AA, Timbersaw, Panda, Spectre, and finally a Jakiro support. Get off to 12-2 start, which is necessary because their team is totally Anti-Huskar. I'm on a clock. Enemy team realizes they're getting torn apart and begin holding hands at all times.

My third item after soloing Rosh was a BKB (went Treads -> Sblade ->Armlet to start), but I still absolutely melted during engagements. The early shadowblade was obviously a questionable pickup, but it served it's purpose. I was able to keep their Spectre down, but Timbersaw showed up at 22 minutes with aghs, bloodstone, and a dozen kills against our safelane. The rest of my team finishes a collective 5-40 as the throne goes down at 30 mins or so.

I accidentally queued for a Normal match so the enemy team was a 4 stack + Jakiro, but still, I don't remember the game being this hard.

I'm in my 30s as well, Bryce. I'm noticeably slower than I used to be, but if you throw 100 dota players in a room I'd still crush 95 of them on any performance metric. Casual dota is less about mechanics and more about gamesense and decision making.

I also always random in all my games, usually first ofcourse so my team can pick around that but the counterpicks are so real. I haven't had TA match-up besides Viper or Venomancer in years. You just have to get used to it. It's the price we pay for dat sweet sweet 200 bonus gold.

Also maybe you should skip armlet vs AA but idk it's so good on huskar.Versus that lineup you pretty much lost no matter what you buy.

Yeah, the AA was Johnny Onthe****ingspot with his ults. Half of my Spectre pickoffs resulted in me dying in the fountain after TPing out. Not because he'd snipe me at the fountain, but rather he'd hit me with ult during the spectre kill or as I was TPing out. His awareness was pretty good.

The other reason I like Armlet on Huskar is because you can solo Rosh without lifesteal early on.

I, too, can't get enough of that bonus gold. Unfortunately, my go-to strategy of repicking into Invoker if I randomed a hard support was nerfed in ranked whenever they put in the new picking rules. That made me sad. I stopped playing shortly after that.

Bulldog is such a good addition to TT, qojqva creates so much more space than SingSing (and I say this as a fanboy) which he can abuse and bulba was a bit lackluster on support. Interested to see how far they can go. Iindividually they are all really good. And it's the best I've seen TT play in a looong while.

I would like to start watching more pro games but I'm not sure where to start. Are you guys just watching streams on liquiddota or something?

yep

Cool thanks.

I have a question about Ember Spirit. He is my favorite to play and I do very well with him individually, but I have a less than 50% win ratio with him. He seems like a character you have to build a team around as opposed to just grinding MMR with. Does this sound accurate?

Liquiddota and liquipedia to keep track of the different tournament.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/dota2/Main_Page

Dota 2 Asia Championships is the next big tournament coming up.

as said above, twitch is great for live but i like being able to skip around on youtube. i generally watch "Beyond the summit" and "join dota" channels for entertainment. and like AUI2000 or other pros giving free tips for getting better

http://dailydota2.com/

is really good imo


it links all the live pro streams, and you can look up interesting games you missed on twitch tv

NiP just destroyed empire.

So weird. Like a few weeks ago they were Lajons and a tier 4-5 team and now theyre in the finals of a decent tournament.

Ember is more reliant on what your opponents pick to be effective than what your team picks (as long as they don't pick 4 other carries). If they have few disables you should win.

Have plummeted my solo MMR off a cliff (-200+) on the back of 5 straight games of playing carry and having highest net worth and losing because team refuses to group and push to take objectives and just keeps getting picked off.

On bright side group MMR has been +150 because playing with friends is the best.

Tree+ags is unreal for pubs. we had like 85% map vision from 40mins until the end of a 70min game. i really dont think its legit to get gem+quell to de-tree, it just takes too much time and you can get jumped. if you dont have Timber or someone like him, how do you stop this?

agree that its the enemy lineup is extremely important with ember - you want to fight squishy heroes, not durable ones - if they start with a core DK or medusa or viper, for exampe, ember is probably not the best pick

but its also really important that you have complimentary supports to help secure kills