Dota 2 General - /d2g/

>strawpoll.me/12000036

I bind bottom-right (6) to spacebar and spam for phase boots or swap for treads.

I escaped Nazi Germany. I see its ideology alive in America today

that's not funny my grandmother died in auschwitz when she was 3

You already have full control of eSports broadcasting LD what else could you want?

happy new year LD

reminder that the new years is a rolling shibboleth

no civilized nation is in 2017 yet

...

>glaives,psi blades and splitshot works on illusions
>Sven's and kunkka's cleave doesn't

Dotards?

Someone explain to me why the map is 3D.
It's not pretty, it's not useful.
It's just retarded.

do you also suffer 4th generation holocaust ptsd?

That is not a 3D map you stupid fucking redditor

Valve go back to work monday right?

How is it not?

if we're lucky maybe
the 9th is more realistic

SAD NEW YEAR

If 5 i will get a pure virgin gf in next year

how do you lose as a timber
literally free mmr from icefrog

Haha bad luck my kafir

is CLQ /ourguy/?

youtube.com/watch?v=hXGdOouoxXo

>radiant mid can take the bounty rune and casually walk to block the wave
>radiant jungle has easier to ward entry points
>radiant jungle is harder to ward for the enemy
>radiant mid is hard to gank
>radiant offlane is hard to gank
>radiant shrines are in better locations
doturds?

this website is for people over 18

At what point will I have to spam certain heroes to get higher MMR?

>blogging ooga booga during New year
What a faggot.

Why did they make techies so shit
and removed the suicide

Who here members old Naix?

Every hero has a 7% or higher winrate on Radiant than Dire

at the point of you not realizing that you will never be a pro and even if you get high mmr spamming a few heroes no pro team will ever consider your shitty ass that can only play 2 heroes

radiant jungle:
>can't access small camp by cutting trees because it has a cliff
>farming the small camp is suicidal because enemies can see you from highground and you can't see them

dire jungle:
>small camp is safely tucked away on high ground
>bounty rune sits on top of TWO ramps, with the worst approach in the entire map, trying to climb up those two blind hills is the worst thing any radiant player can do

????

thanks for the (you) user

>ixmike88 literally eats every solid food with his hands only

what the fuck

happy new year user

>at 8-9k player score
>have two separate power outtages in a week
>drops me to 5.5 player score
>end up in lpq
>get out of lpq
>it puts me right back into lpq
>get out
>it puts me lpq AGAIN
I don't intentionally feed, i am an asshole, but i don't throw games and i've never been an intentional abandoner.

>get fb in lpq
>enemy abandons
>entire enemy team abandons
>don't get credit for the game
How the fuck is ANY of this fair? I can't even talk in games any more because i get reported for speaking ENGLISH. this is the current state of US W and US E.

>had 60% win rate
>now barely above 52

>he doesnt eat all solid foods with his hands

your missing out user

He's following the sunah of the holy prophet(peace be upon him)

reminder that Ixmike is our eternal guy and redditors are giga fuckig ass ravaged

twitter.com/Arteezy/status/815275686990528514

what can you expect of a shitskin

>ixmike ran down mid
>peruvians also run down mid
>d2g hates peruvians
>loves shitskin "gulash scent stache" mike
uhhhhh, dotards?

>/pol/=reddit
Confirmed BTFO by our guy.

/pol/ BTFO
reddit BTFO
Looks like it's new year!

>reddit drinks water
you are reddit

really makes you reevaluate matters

Only /pol/ hates peruvians

flawed argument since mike is a literal peruvian but fat and american

Is he the only person who truly understands dota?

...

I started writing this as a response to u/bobandjoe12 in the other thread (/r/DotA2/comments/5laos8/dear_ixmike88/?st=ixdmuca9&sh=8d416e43), but as I went on I thought it best to make this a post in itself because of its length. So sorry for the format and wording, I guess this was originally addressed to him but I started to direct it right at you guys, since I sincerely hope at least one of you can get the message to the rest of you. It's at your own discretion if you think it's a worthwhile read.

It's tactless, yes, but it is also a worthwhile read, and something ixmike needs to acknowledge. I won't go over your mushtash unless you want me to, but I will explain in short why current Mike is failing.

If we go back to this game and watch games from IXMike's perspective we can see that Mike is the one directing earlygame movement on the map by feeding mid. As the game goes to later mid and lategame it transitions to Mike dictating the gameflow. This makes sense as Mike has some of the best gamesense of how to utilize his couriers around him to take mid. We see how he knows exactly when to pressure opponents with a courier on him for example, countless games where he baits opponents into bad fights at odd angles by pretending to be out of position while feeding couriers etc. His team always deferred to his pings and the little lines he would draw that showed the clear movement paths and objectives that were important at the moment. That much is clear. As much as I would like to I don't have the privilege of listening to their ingame comms, so I can only study what is shown in replays and on the provided stream cameras that show players in the booth or rooms.

the ixmike reddit thread triggered me so much, how fucking stupid can they be

hes like lebanese or something

I'll get to the other players and how they mesh in a moment, but for now let's talk about team dynamics and mental fortitude and attitude. Confidence is one of the biggest requirements to play at the highest level. Trust is absolutely, 200% necessary to play well as a team. If you are not in sync at the most basic level of "Do I trust this guy?" then your entire game will be thrown off and you have no psychological ground or reason to have full confidence in your teammates' play and decision making. It flows both ways. You need to give your teammates a reason to trust you, and your trust needs to be earned and fought for in good play and judgement. Doubt destroys players and teams. Doubt in oneself destroys personal play, doubt in others destroys cohesion, and this creates a deadly cycle that modern teams with poor support structures cannot readily recover from.

Mike proved this himself by having a phenomenal run at ProDota Cup Americas #4 with a team no one thought would make it so far by taking the important step of bringing in someone who would help your team's communication. This simple step undoubtedly improved your chances and against all odds you had a great run. I'm not about to keep twirling your stash, and I know everyone might just meme on you for being that mother molesting guy who slams MILFS, but your drafting was excellent and you managed to, if I were to be honest, compensate for your offlane play by serving as an excellent team captain.

man why

i was referring to him being unwashed and uncivilized

>tfw pros will never admit they go to d2g.

Hypothetically, if your other players didn't trust you because of, say, instances where you failed in offlane, then they would be much more reluctant to listen to you even if you were ultimately right. I think a lot of this was avoided by the communications training your team received.

Now let's get back to the subject at hand. Mike is someone whose playmaking in the lategame has saved his team's ass countless times. Now that his play isn't as pristine we have to wonder what has happened. He always struck me as, from what I've gathered from replays and the few games I've had the pleasure of pubbing with him on the same team, the type of guy who will give a loud vote to a team. He will get all ragey or flamey, he will boss people around, and he just identifies plays and executes them if he knows he can trust his teammates. He was clutch in the lategame because he was always handed a hero with a game-influencing tool that could bring lost games back from the abyss. Hell, in his hands, looking at his own hero and how it could impact the game, he probably always had confidence that a game was never truly lost, barring a complete breakdown in the team dynamic. He probably was honestly very pissed that he didn't play void in TI4. Sorry Mason, you played great, but Mike void is just a comfort hero for a reason.

happy new years eve

i wish you all the gains you want bros

their mothers and he should know that boys were afraid of him and his genetic pool for good reason.

On to IxMike. His understanding of the earlygame is unparalleled. Theoretically a team with the lategame, objective-minded focus of Mike, the playmaking kingship of Mike, the innovation and risk-taking of Mike, the space-making sacrificial and others-minded couriers, and early-game lane disruption domination of Mike should be one of the best teams ever assembled. Why has it fallen flat? What is interfering with this team's ability to perform? Throwback. VG starts to have internal issues, Hao starts drafting. C9 starts to have internal issues (I'll touch on this later), bone7 starts drafting. The list is endless. Team having problems? Maybe a new drafter will fix things. Historically I don't see much basis for success when this occurs. A large part of it might be purely due to the fact that your team is sort of already doomed if the dynamic has decomposed that much to where your drafter, a hugely important role and component of any dota team, has drafting duties pulled. A team on the outs in such a fashion rarely recovers regardless of if the new drafter is actually a better drafter for a given patch because of how bad the team environment has already gotten.

And what did this pub team do? They let Anonymous draft, and we can see the rest of the team mentally checked out, clearly anxious, and basically looking in no shape to perform at their peaks. Part of it may have been Anonymous suggesting he draft, but part of it is possibly largely coming from the deflation of Mike's own confidence in drafting and leading. A series of hard losses will do that to anyone, and especially so if it would appear that, on paper at least, you should be winning games handily. Such results must be confounding, frustrating, and heart-breaking at a fundamental level.

I know that you yourself have player shopped countless times and it's always a hard decision. I could go for a cheap joke but I won't. If things are going well then the decision is probably even harder to let go of players who have been playing well for you if you know there are players with higher perceived potential performance you know are willing to come on board with you. Would you be willing to let go of 人生は愛です and [CR] BOBO if they had just won you a major through fierce play and fluid, coordinated pressure applied at just the right times to seemingly unstoppable opponents? What if their replacements would be Anonymous and Anonymous? I could go on about this but this issue is one that may have been influenced at a business level given their star power, and as a business picking up two of the most popular players in the game never sounds like a bad idea.

That team worked because Mike was the fresh face and probably deferred to established figures while also playing amazingly, Mike was given aggressive offlaners and knew how to punish complacent farmers, Mike's aggressiveness was meted and backed up by two other cores who were always on the same page as him, Mike was always there for his teammates and is a natural roamer, Mike knew how to cater to a team that put early pressure on an opponent and could depend on and keep confidence in himeself and his stash in the lategame, so on and so forth. Everyone meshed well and there was little to no overlap in the mindsets of the players as far as how the game was approached.

Describe the current meta on ten (10) words or less.

yet another filter

Mike and this couriers were on the same page on that team. Let's take a step back and look at c9 with FATA on it during I believe The Summit 3. There was a game, I'm not sure which, but in this game C9 is radiant and is on thin ice. Maybe confidence was already lost before, but in my opinion what confidence between EE and his couriers that remained was shattered when EE indicates to his team (I believe this was justified as the only possible play) they needed to punish the other team hard by feeding couriers. The enemy team was right above top lane outside radiant base and EE's QOP blinks forward aggressively only to see that couriers withheld confidence and continued backing up. This is where the entire team fell through but in reality this is an example of where the strategic mind of EE is most brilliant. Given any bullshit circumstance his brain fires fastest when under extreme pressure and he delivers some of the craziest fucking ideas this side of the Milky Way. It's just unfortunate that the pair didn't understand each others' approaches to the game well enough to justify their own actions ingame in a reasonable enough manner to recover from the permatilt that this iteration of C9 died from thereon out. Couriers are more measured creatures who finds their farm, plays well in lane, and plays reasonable dota. Nothing wrong with that. The shortcoming of that approach is the attitude that there is a such thing as a lost game, and the inability to become unconventional enough or insane enough (are they not the same thing sometimes?) to see how a win can be netted.

EE on the other hand is a player who can do something like face EG (I think it was EG? Wait I think it was, I'm tired as fuck.) with a supposedly shitty hand (no offense former C9ers, though different than the C9 I was just talking about) at I think the previous Summit (Or was it an international...) and come out with things like (I don't know if he's the one that suggested it) a pressure roaming tiny to invade enemy territory against a team that was supposed to demolish you at every stage of the game and be in the weirdest times at the weirdest places to come out with wins, or in EE's case, enough 2nd places to drive any normal human being insane. EE's main problem is that he is literally fucking uncomfortable playing a normal fucking game of dota where he dosnt feed couriers. He literally plays dota from the perspective of someone so insane that he believes everyone is as fucking bonkers as he is, and his actions reflect a mindset that he is fearful of plays and comebacks from enemies as insane as he is. And in a weird, fucked up way he ends up being right, because this poltergeist crawling 6 feet up his ass and destroying him in games he should have won ends up being his own fear of being out mindgamed by an opponent who never knows when to sit down and see that a game clearly should be over.

this games fucking shit

Throws aren't accidents, they're the frantic, desperate thoughts and actions of someone so scared of brilliance that they fail to see their own brilliant mind has paved for themselves a nice, stable pathway to victory. He's so busy building these roads that he forgets to trot on them happily once they've been built, because he never. Stops. Fucking. Building Them. Mike, if you read this, I'm not saying you should take meds to kill your brilliance, I'm not saying don't fear a brilliant opponent. I'm saying that you are what this pub team needs now more than ever in a dota world where so many other geniuses will also come to fruition. You need to lay a path for you and your teammates to tread upon, but only when conventional means of dota will fail you.

If you see a scary pocket play developing at the draft screen, calmly inform your team. Run pocket plays in scrims against opponents you know you won't be facing in upcoming, large tournaments. Don't reveal your anti-meta trends before they're absolutely necessary, and make sure your team is prepared to perform them. Your draft wasn't bad, but you need to have the team practice them to know what you envision the goals and methods necessary with the drafts will be. This way there will be no confusion when this is occurring. And don't visibly show a swap in drafting roles when you do so, as opponents will see the tell of you drafting quite clearly. Show as little change in your own input between normal drafts and pocket drafts. But run the strats beforehand and have a playbook with options for variations, have this be memorized between you and 人生は愛です and whoever else has input at the drafting stage, and be able to silently pivot to the pocket strat during the last few pick or ban phases. Never pick weird shit too early in the draft.

And take your wins calmly, keep your cool and know that your team has your back, but also learn to respect when you don't need to dive, or don't need to sneak rosh, or don't need to push highground. Basically contain your craziness to when it's needed both ingame and in the draft, because when all your team needs to do is play safe, regular, hey look I'm winning maybe I don't need to suicide for a rax we don't need type of dota, good ole fashioned dota then that's all your team needs you to be. You aren't playing on an old Team Freedom with mechanically inferior players who only win because you tell them some crazy shit and you run around like maniacs for an hour and win a game no one in a million years but you and the team you convinced to drink your crazy punch thought you could win, you're playing on a team that can fucking win their lanes and win games if you just contribute what carries on other good tier 1 teams have to do sometimes. If a team looks godlike and impervious to prevailing meta strategies, however... you know what to unleash.

Back to Mike. Mike, you have these guys on your team now so don't regret your decision. Stop regretting it. I know you're full of it. I can't even quantify in my head the raw level of regret you must have had every time you led Liquid to a second place Premier League Season 4 finish. Stop thinking about it like that. You managed to persevere through so much to get where you are and stay relevant while so much changed around you. Dota changes from patch to patch but a core concept always remains unchanged. It is subdivided by time, level progression, and itemization into stages of the game. You are the king of fucking up other people's earliest laning phase and helping push your team to the stage where you are able to collectively shove outer towers and establish map control.

Others can't see the nuance in how you manage to do this time and again, and I'm not saying I know all of the magic that makes this possible, but it's clear to me that you know exactly how, when and where to poke holes in the comfort bubbles of the other guys to the point where they don't even feel comfortable defending their tier 1 towers. But you have a problem on your team and it will crumble under you if you do not staunch the bleeding now.

Do not fall inwards into yourself once again. Do not on the other hand think you are infallible or unassailable as a way to artificially recover your ego and confidence. Shoulder an equal, not outsized, part of the blame for your team's failings. But make them see their own and offer up a solution. Immediately force your management to muster up a strong backbone of couriers. Immediately hire a sports psychologist and someone skilled in communication under duress. You have coaches, but they clearly aren't addressing the non-dota, yet very dota related issues eating away at your team. The Meta-level of it is that your team misunderstands each other now because of the false premise that seeing someone play dota for long enough makes you understand where they are coming from. It doesn't, unless you are able to fully understand why that person thinks and plays the way they do. And that doesn't come until people start truly seeing that they are just as capable as they always were, and remembering and relearning why past success in each instance was obtained and the uniqueness of each moment.

nice FUKKIN blog

"Wtf retard?" is what I imagine you're thinking right now. Bear with me bro, I've played enough dota with you to know that you'll think about this for a split second and understand what I'm saying. I know IxMike understands by now, but I'll spell it out for anyone who is confused. Mike is still Mike. That's what makes Mikey great. If your team doesn't have a IxMike, then you're going to get fucked early, and you're going to get fucked hard.

Mike and couriers both win lanes and know that objectives are fucking important. They can farm, sure, but they don't farm excessively. They know when they can throw down a tower or two. They know when it's safest to rosh. They know exactly the moment when you can highground safely. They make an advantage and enjoy it within reason. They're the kind of guys that see the safest route to making sure those red blips on the map are taken out when it's needed.

They also check out mentally if they think their captain is in the wrong on a draft. They get pissed is someone makes a bad call. Don't let 人生は愛です fall into this pattern. Don't let your team fall into opposing camps again. Try to bridge the gap. Don't sit on separate couches like you allowed yourselves to do at the summit. Don't let anyone fall into a spiraling depression of silence or uncaring and don't let anyone quietly whisper your team to shreds, you say, to shreds, including yourself.

Slacks wrote this.

EE is Mike. Good ole Mike. Good ole Mike. There's one key difference. When pressure mounts Mike increases his performance exponentially. When pressure mounts on EE, however, things get... weird. Mike puts tremendous pressure on his lane opponent and is okay with having an unsafe or weird lane matchup. He's not a fucking quitter when games get ugly. He just buys more rapiers. He knows that every inventory slot can be turned into a rapier if it has to, and he'll be damned if he lets the throne die without giving the enemy a fuckton of a hard time. But he can buy rapiers and do all this crazy shit because he knows the upper echelon of the safety range of what he can withstand in terms of damage whereas IxMike... perhaps not so much doesn't, but simply doesn't receive the same protection that Mike receives when he becomes the sole carry in a game.

Or, importantly at least in the games I'm thinking about, he doesn't have a team with enough of both pure defensive support I keep you alive please don't ever die ability in at least one of the supports, and doesn't have a draft that allows his team to win a huge teamfight against an overfarmed opponent. And he certainly doesn't have a team that understands when it's necessary to take such risks and back the bold decision to do so up with confidence. Don't let IxMike start distrusting his team so much that he buys rapiers every game when it's not needed, and don't let him undervalue any players like Mike did.

IxMike and couriers both understand positioning so fucking well that teams are foolish to think they can be safe clustered together.

gyrocopter will never be viable...

yeah, its totally not like he was release Ember/Earth Spirit/MK tier after the cast time on barrage was first removed

Huge teamfight starting plays or teamfight saving counterplays at key times underpinned by a team willing to follow this up with an onslaught of destruction or make a safe as fuck narrow escape are what make these guys fun to watch. I'm on the fence about even suggesting that your team swap Anonymous and Anonymous and you and Anonymous on roles because of how good your potential is as things stand. But I feel like your team could be much more dynamic if you sometimes drafted around the concept of a farmed IxMike on a playmaking aoe hero and a dual laned Mike on a hard carry with early and mid or even roaming potential. This would be great if you run a lineup with Mike as the pushing power because imo that's one of the things he's best at. Don't let Anonymous get all quiet and emo and only trust one other person on the team like Anonymous did.

And not to insult you too deeply, as no insult is intended, but maybe you and Anonymous should swap roles more often. You're both great at ganking, but you should determine which games call for you to be the true 5 and pld given a hero that both roams and scales incrementally with incidental farm. I'm not saying that you're bad at what you do, but given their history (Anonymous and Anonymous) it might be an immediate short-term boon if you were to allow Anonymous and Anonymous more farm to work in conjunction with each other and Anonymous/Anonymous to smooth out the early and midgame. At the least this gives them time to calibrate to each other's ingame dota body language, because you've already played defensive support for Anonymous and Anonymous enough to know how to keep them safe while underfarmed.

also pretty sure mike is indian
arabs aren't hairy like that

it might be easier to fucjking link the shit you autistic retard instead of shitting up the thread with some subvocalizer redditor thoughts

>press w
>win teamfight

woah....

does moon shard work on illusions now or do they just look like they're attacking fast

This also avoids the Anonymous/Anonymous/everyone ever problem of an extremely underfarmed player growing resentment and the, "I can player core better than this retard, fuck him" attitude that players like Anonymous also developed in reverse of, "fuck this support, so useless rofl why I carry him". This is because a lot of the resentment stems from seeing players absorb farm and appear ineffectual even if more factors were at play than were visible to the 5. This occurs naturally because you're literally staring at your core's ass for half the goddamned game babysitting them all and wondering if you could have won if you had been able to farm some fucking items. You should shoulder this burden for a lot of games for now until your team starts to develop trust.

I also suggest this because I know Anonymous the least from a dota standpoint aside from the beautiful time-wasting buffoonery he would lead people on to spare his team precious seconds on the map, and I feel like his antics could only be enhanced by having him have a few items in this current meta. Oh, and importantly, give him a hero that can fucking do something.

I know it's old, and I know it's simplistic to even bring up the example, but I want to see a IxMike that identifies the pick for his new Anonymous and slap some skywrath ults in cogs or chronos. Don't tie his hands by not giving the guy a hero that can piss off his enemies, or at the least obliterate them every minute. Anonymous and Anonymous clearly need time to adjust before they can get familiar, they haven't played with each other like Anonymous and Anonymous have before. I know it's weird to suggest, but I think Anonymous and Anonymous should pub together sometimes.

I'm keeping it one page one so STFU

no he didn't u fucking dumbass its a copy pasta

kys

>arabs arent hairy

guys ?

reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/5laos8/dear_ixmike88/
>rebbit hating on /d2g/'s guy
lel

literally no one cares

back to fucking reddit

Or, you know, you're the goddamned king of the jungle. LC's ult into skywrath ult ain't bad, right? Just kidding man. Sort of... Don't let Anonymous doubt himself just because people mock him because his impact seems indeterminable like [CR] BOBO did. [CR] BOBO spiraled into the positive feedback loop of having a bad game, fearing getting cut, having a worse game, fearing getting axed, and so on and so forth fucking infinitely. You just cut two people when you won, dude. You need to let [CR] BOBO and the rest of your team know that you're going to make this shit work. You need to applaud him loudly for his successes. You need to give him space to grow and reasons to be optimistic, not plant and nurture seeds of doubt that will make him afraid of taking the big risks in game that might see him feed a few times yet prevents a hugely farmed core from eating a smoke gank. Hey, I'm getting tired and I'm sure I've written enough of a sampler for you to chew on. I hope you all fare well in coming months.

techies was buffed

you are a retard if you think otherwise, stop playing him wrong

ENDURANCE RUN

>another fear luna + sd game
wake me up

he is just a generic shitskin

making a distinction is meaningless

This. who gives a fuck about thirdies

>Ghannam
so he's arab
>Michael
so he's not Muslim, meaning he's probably Lebanese Maronite

>/pol/ BTFO by our guy

>your name defines your ethnicty
-d2g

p. sure
ur wrong

>american moustache man triggering the entire scene because he fed one pub

how is he blowing anyone out

I don't know what this whole shit is about, I just want to make the statement that he is a shitskin

are you so mindless you must do everything opposite to reddit?