Decision Making in Dota 2: When (not) to Build Hand of Midas

Hand of Midas is an item that I frequently see used incorrectly.  In my opinion the reason that it gets used incorrectly so often is that players do not understand the costs associated with building a Midas, instead focusing on the benefit of the item, namely increased gold and experience acquisition rate.  Here I hope to shed some light on the real costs of building Midas, and offer some scenarios in which building Midas is justified.

What is Hand of Midas?

Hand of Midas is an item which has two main benefits.  Firstly, if grants +30 attack speed.  Secondly, and most notably, it has an active ability that allows the bearer to instantly kill a non-player unit and receive 190 reliable gold, and a bonus 2.5x normal experience as a reward, on a 100 second cooldown.  It is created by combining Gloves of Haste with a 1400 gold recipe.

Why is Hand of Midas Valuable?

When completed, Hand of Midas will allow a hero to accelerate their rate of both gold and experience farming, enabling them to farm expensive items and gain levels more quickly, and eventually will grant them a power advantage over other heroes who have not benefited from this acceleration.  It also allows the user to instantly kill any player controlled creeps, making it more valuable when facing heroes like Chen or Enchantress.

What costs are associated with building a Hand of Midas?

Starting with the obvious, Hand of Midas costs 1900 gold to build, which is extremely expensive for an item that grants such a small amount of stats.  It is important to realize that you are forgoing any other combination of items that you could have built with that 1900 gold in order to build Midas.  Here is a list of items that that 1900 gold could have been used on instead:

Phase Boots - 1350 gold
Power Treads - 1400 gold
Perseverance - 1750 gold
Helm of the Dominator - 1850 gold
Mask of Madness - 1900 gold
Yasha - 2050 gold

Every single one of these items offers stronger stats, and will allow you to have a better chance of scoring hero kills, AND will allow you to kill creeps faster which means your farm rate is increased by purchasing them.  Not only are you forgoing the gold and stats, you are also forgoing mid game power and presence, which will allow the other team better opportunities to take your towers and win teamfights.  This is the true cost of Midas, you are giving up mid game power in order to have a stronger late game.

When is Hand of Midas the correct item choice?

When choosing whether or not to build Midas you want to ask yourself a few questions.  Most importantly would be: Can my team handle an underpowered mid game without losing too much advantage (towers, gold, experience) in order to allow me enough time to gain benefit from Midas?  You need to look at the heroes on your team and the opponents' team, and understand what parts of the game your team will have strength, and which parts your team will struggle with.  In my eyes there are 2 main scenarios in which Midas is a good idea:

1. The enemy team is obviously aiming to have the game go late, and have heroes are able to provide enough space for their late game hero(es) to farm up, while also defending against any attempts we might make to end early.

2. My team is 4 skilled players who have incredibly strong mid game heroes that will be able to play the game 4v5 until late game when I start to gain benefits from my Midas.

Outside of these two scenarios, I do not believe that Midas worth what you are sacrificing.  As I mentioned earlier though, when facing heroes that rely strongly on creep domination (Chen, Enchantress), the value of a Midas goes up.  At the same time, when you are playing a hero that strongly relies on attack speed as a stat (e.g. Faceless Void), the cost of building a Midas is lessened slightly.

Conclusion

Midas is not a license to print money.  It is an item that disadvantages your team greatly throughout the mid game in order to grant advantage during the late game.  It is a niche item that should only be built in very specific scenarios.  Please use Midas responsibly.

Decision Making In Dota 2: Ability Builds

Poor decision making is the single greatest contributor to lost games that I have seen (at the amateur level). However ‘decision making’ is a very broad term that encompasses many different aspects of Dota gameplay. In this series of posts, I will attempt to identify some of the most common incorrect decisions and offer alternatives to help improve one's Dota gameplay.

Ability Builds

Dota is a game that offers it's players a great deal of choice when it comes to how to play.  One of the more difficult aspects of learning to play Dota is the fact that there are so many different heroes, abilities, and items to learn.  One of the most basic decisions a player has to make is which abilities to level, and in what order.  Hero specific guides usually provide a recommended skill build, however due to the great variety in Dota games, players can often perform better with a skill build that is customised to the current match.  It is important to have an understanding of your own hero, your team composition, and your opponents heroes in order to choose an optimal skill build.

Relative Efficacy

The concept of relative efficacy is an important thing to understand when attempting to make better ability decisions.  Relative efficacy is the idea that a skill will have greater, or lesser value based on outside factors.  These factors vary from match to match, however there are some generalities that affect almost every game.

The first of which is that nuke spells (spells whose primary effect is to deal damage such as Lina's Dragon Slave) are comparatively stronger when the HP pools of the enemy heroes are lower, and the amount of mitigation they possess is low.  This is most often the case in the early game.  Simply put, at low levels, the percentage of an enemy hero's total HP that will be removed by a nuke spell is much larger than it will be at later stages of the game.  The result of this is that nuke spells are often (but not always) prioritized for skill-ups in the early game.

Secondly, the return on investment of points spent on crowd control spells (spells that serve to inhibit a hero's ability to perform such as Lion's Hex), beyond the first, is variable based on how dangerous enemy heroes are to you and your allies, and how valuable the positional advantage you can create is to your team.  There is immense value in putting a point in your crowd control skills early, since having crowd control options will greatly improve your team's chances of scoring hero kills and winning team fights.  However, most crowd control spells will primarily provide increased duration when skilled beyond the first point.  At early stages of the match, heroes will be less dangerous when compared to the later stages.  Therefore, the value of additional CC duration is much lower at early stages of the game, when the extra damage output or mitigation you will receive as a result is much lower than the value you get out of having a more powerful nuke or damage-increasing spell.  Conversely, the value of a crowd control skill will be much higher in situations where positioning is more important, regardless of the stage of the game.

Thirdly, the value of buff and debuff spells (spells that improve the power of allied heroes such as Ogre Magi's Bloodlust, or reduce the power of enemy heroes such as Bane's Enfeeble) also varies with external factors.  Like crowd control spells, the value of a buff or debuff scales with the power of heroes and often becomes increasingly valuable at later stages of the game.

It would be too lengthy to list every factor that affects the value of particular abilities, but I am mainly trying to get you in the mindset of evaluating the relative value of each point you spend in your skills based on the state of the current match you are in.

Know Yourself

In order to be able to optimize your ability builds, you must first understand the full effect of each ability your hero has, and the benefit they receive when levelled.  Unfortunately, the large amount of skills in the game makes it difficult to memorize each one.  I recommend trying to familiarize yourself with a hero you do not feel you fully understand before each game you play.  If you end up with a hero that you are not familiar with, ask for a quick pause and read through the abilities of the hero.

The main things that you want to identify when you read a hero's skill are as follows.

1. Is the skill passive or active?
2. How much mana does the skill cost to use?
3. What is the cooldown of the skill?
4. What kind of targeting does this skill use?  (e.g. target unit, target point, nearby enemies/allies)
5. What is the range of the skill?
6. How much damage does the skill do or provide, and what kind of damage is it (magical, physical, composite, pure)
7. What other effects does the skill have?
8. What is the duration of the skill?
9. What is the value of any buff or debuff the skill provides?
10. Which aspects of this spell scale when additional points are put into it?

Once you have an idea of the effects of each of your skills, you can use this information to help make better decisions about skill priority.

Know Your Allies

Again, this is an area that cannot be fully mastered until you have a knowledge of the capabilities of each hero in the game.  In order to make the optimal decision of ability build, you must understand what your allied heroes being to the match.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself about each of your allied heroes.

1. What are their strengths?
2. What are their weaknesses?
3. Do they deal primarily physical or magical damage?
4. At what range are they able to be effective?
5. How reliant are they on positioning?
6. What stats will they most benefit from?
7. What items are they building?
8. What skills are they levelling?
9. How has their performance been so far this match?
10. Which of my skills have the most synergy with them?

Being able to answer these questions will aid you in choosing which skills to take.

Know Your Enemy

Along the same lines as knowing your allies, it is important to understand what your opponents bring to the table.  Ask yourself all of the same questions that you asked of your allies, with the following change:

10. Which of my skills are most valuable when used against them?

Constant Evaluation

Finally, one of the most important habits to do when playing a Dota match, even beyond the context of choosing abilities, is to constantly evaluate the match.  Any time that a tower goes down, a gank or team fight occurs, or whenever you have a free moment, take stock of how things are going.  Ask yourself these and other questions constantly:

1. What is the strategy of the enemy team?
2. What is our current strategy and what skills can I take to help execute it?
3. Am I being targeted by the enemy or am I able to execute my abilities?
4. Is my team able to play offensively, or do we need to focus more on defensive play?

The key here is to use the information you gain from constant evaluation of the current state of the match to aid yourself in making better skill build decisions.

Conclusion

All of these questions are aimed at giving you a better idea of what the relative efficacy of each of you skills is.  The big question that you use all of this information to answer is as follows:

How does the value I gain from a skill point placed in one ability compare the the value I am forgoing which could be gained from placing it in a different one?

Decision Making in Dota 2: Refuse to Lose

Poor decision making is the single greatest contributor to lost games that I have seen (at the amateur level). However ‘decision making’ is a very broad term that encompasses many different aspects of Dota gameplay. In this and future posts, I will attempt to identify some of the most common incorrect decisions and offer alternatives to help improve ones Dota gameplay.

Refuse to Lose

The single easiest to avoid, yet still bafflingly commonplace, incorrect decision in amateur Dota is when a player or players make a direct and conscious decision to lose the game. More specifically I am referring to when players do any of the following: AFK in the fountain, feed intentionally, stop making attempts to defend their base from attacks, grief their teammates, etc. By choosing to do any of these things, players are taking what may have only been a slim chance of victory, and ensuring that the chance plummets to nil.

There are many possible motivations for choosing to lose the game, the most common excuse being that a player does not want to prolong a game that is already lost, however this is an incorrect viewpoint caused by inexperience. For those players that have never come back from being 3 barracks down or from a 40+ kill deficit, these situations seem nigh insurmountable. However that is far from the truth, as with careful and precise play, even the worst situation can be overcome. The game is never truly over until one team’s ancient is brought to zero hit points.

Aside from the fact that tilt situations are not impossible to overcome, playing in a tilt situation is an extremely good way to improve one's skill level. In normal game scenarios, players will incorporate some shortcuts or inefficiencies into their play. For example, if a player finds that their opponents are slow at picking up on gank opportunities, they may play with less care when it comes to grabbing runes, pushing, or jungling on the opponents’ side. While this adapted way of playing may work at their current skill bracket, they will find that players at higher levels than them will not make the same mistakes when it comes to capitalizing on such opportunities. In a tilt scenario, while a player is most likely still playing against people of similar skill to them, there is a sort of handicap (eg: level advantage, map control, barracks advantage) possessed by the other team which forces the player into refining their gameplay to iron out these inefficiencies. Since the player has had the opportunity to practice in such a difficult scenario, when they find themselves facing opponents who exceed their skill level, where similar advantages will be used against them (without first having to have lost several teamfights or barracks), the player will have a much easier time adapting to and overcoming these advantages.

Another way of saying that the player is able to play with others of higher skill and not afford them unnecessary advantages, is that the player’s skill level has increased.

Ten Basic Ways to Be a Better Dota Player

1. Never die when your death was avoidable.
2. Carry a teleport scroll 100% of the time.
3. Buy and place wards (if none of your allies who are less item dependant than you have done so).
4. Ensure that the courier is bought and upgraded as soon as possible (if none of your allies who are less item dependant than you have done so).
5. Frequently check the minimap to see where everyone is.
6. Always try your best to win the game, regardless of how lost the game might seem.
7. Always focus on self-improvement instead of worrying about what your teammates may have done wrong.
8. Do not get emotional when things are going wrong.
9. Communicate with your team, preferably with voice chat.
10. Try to have fun and enjoy the game!