Welcome to yet another edition of Dota Tips & Tricks. If you missed our previous Tips & Tricks episodes, you can check them out here, here, and also here for more Dota 2 tips. Let’s go ahead and get started!
1. The Courier can use Dust of Appearance
Have too many items in your inventory and can’t seem to get your team to carry dust against those pesky invisible heroes? Look no further! The Animal and Flying Courier are both fully equipped with dust propulsion packs. Just be careful to steer them away from harm’s way.
Couriers can also use Smoke of Deceit, Cheese, and Shared Tangoes.
2. Pocket Riki Neat Tricks
It was all a meme at first, but then Valve made it a reality! Aghanim’s Scepter can now turn The Assassin into Pocket Riki, allowing him to start his ultimate in the pockets of teammates for a whopping 10 hits and 9 seconds of invulnerability. A fully channeled Tricks of the Trade will leave the cool down to only 21 seconds, which is pretty insane value. It also 100% guarantees using Blink Dagger afterwards. Riki can become impossible to kill. Here’s a short tutorial on how Riki can blink out of anything, even Chronosphere.
An interesting feature for Pocket Riki is that you will follow your teammate even through death. If you use your ultimate inside a teammate and he dies and buys back, you will also be teleported back to the fountain. It works the same way with teleporting to different parts of the map.
Credit: “Chroneco” at DeviantArt
3. Blink Dagger Abuse with Backpack
There is a way you can blink out of danger, even if you continue to take damage from enemies. When your Blink Dagger is disabled from taking enemy damage, quickly put it in your backpack then immediately into your inventory again. Your Blink will become disabled for 6 seconds but will be fully operational after that time—even if you take damage from enemies. I recommend putting blink to quick cast and spamming the button. If you can survive for 6 seconds, you will be able to blink out of most things, including Pudge’s Rot damage.
4. Consider Keeping a Spare Heart in your Backpack in the Super Late Game
After winning a huge team fight 70 minutes into the game, you must absolutely push. But if you’re low in health, it can be dangerous since the enemy can buy back and potentially turn the game against your favor. If you’ve got the change, go ahead and keep a heart in your backpack. After the fight, just put that item in your inventory, heal up, and swap it for your normal items. No need to waste time to heal up.
5. How to Play the Mid Lane if you have a Bad Match up/Susceptible to Ganks/No Ward Vision
In a typical ideal middle lane scenario, you want to try your best to keep the creep wave on your side of the map, denying and last hitting as much as possible. Sometimes, though, that can be hard. For example, you’re playing a Sniper mid and the enemy has a Spirit Breaker that can easily gank and kill you. What you should do then is just push the lane. Auto attack it, spam shrapnel, etc. You will not win this lane by keeping the lane static and waiting around for the very last hit and trying to deny. You can be ganked, especially if your teammates did not place vision around you.
The goal by pushing is that you’re quickly just getting all the xp and last hits. Your creeps will run into the enemy mid’s tower, which in turn be very difficult for him to last hit. In that time, you can leave the lane, get the bounty runes, stack camps, etc. You are off the map and less likely to be ganked with Smokes of Deceit for example. This also ensures that the next creep wave will reset and meet in the middle again. Just rinse and repeat. The last thing you want to do is feed first blood to the enemy mid. Good players will recognize the middle lane match up, as well as assess their susceptibility to ganks from the rest of the enemy team.
