A lot of arcane thinking goes into the laning phase. If somebody is bellowing "BLACK HOOOLE!", accept that it is exciting and concentrate on the important fact: a whole bunch of characters are now squashed together where they don't want to be.Īt the beginning of the game, watch how teams arrange themselves on the map-and how they change it up after a few minutes. Don't worry about skillshots or stun-stacking or whatever: think about flanking movements, feints, counter-attacks and the rest will follow. If you're familiar with other team sports or strategy games then thinking of Dota in terms of movement makes it much easier to parse. Strip away the map and the characters and the casters for a bit and see the heroes as pieces on a board. Who's alone or unprotected? Who is moving aggressively forward? Who is being forced to move, either by threat of danger or a particular spell? Much of Dota 2 is forcing the other guy to make a sub-optimal play, and you can detect inefficiency by figuring out which team is leading and which team is reacting.
Pay attention to the relative positions of opposing heroes. At first, though, look at where people are standing. Eventually, you're going to need to understand all of it-the abilities being used, the items, the heroes, the phase of the game, all of it. Economics and skills smash into one another and create a new variable that is woven back into the match itself.
They're an expression of the game's churning background algorithms. Teamfights are the single most difficult thing for a new spectator to parse. When heroes fight, look at positioning-not abilties. In a game that overwhelms with detail, the easiest way to access the good stuff is to refine and simplify. They just need to be told where to look, and what to look for. But it's not impossible for newcomers to get something out of watching ESL One or The International.
#Min hero sapent professional#
The difficulty of watching professional Dota, I mean, not the thing about Gary Kasparov and a panther. I don't think that this necessarily needs to be the case. You can make comparisons to basketball and chess all you like, but nobody has ever included a sapient ball of beep-booping light on a basketball team and Gary Kasparov never won a match from the back of a prowling jungle panther, much to everybody's great loss. Dota 2 is about ghosts and fish people and bears who really hate each other's rock gardens. The same is true for StarCraft, to an extent, but StarCraft benefits from the fact that is a contest between armies, a unit of competition that most people will understand. It's for this reason that professional Dota 2 is incredibly hard to watch if you don't play the game. Spectators learn to look for the innumerable infintessimally small ways in which professional players express their talent over the course of a match: the things they don't do, the space that a small action creates, the late-game impact of an early-game twist of the knife. Dota 2 spectators are also players because it's easy to be a player, even if it's difficult to play well the distinction between a professional and the rest of us isn't quite as pronounced as it is in other forms of sport.
That might seem like an obvious point to make but it is the single most glaring distinction between electronic sport and physical sport, traditional sport, meat sport, whatever you want to call it.