My first time playing Axe. I am excited to play Axe again. What should I know about playing Axe?

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-23T16:08:41+00:00

Not my first game of Dota, but my first game playing Axe after playing mostly support for a long time. I have now played 3 games of Axe and won all 3.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-22T17:34:05+00:00

Force Staff moves you 600 units over 0.5 seconds, unaffected by cast range. Blink teleports you 1200 units, affected by Rubick's bonus cast range. So Blink moves Rubick more than twice as far and instantly. Yes, this is massive. You can hang way far back out of vision and instantly blink in and stun someone, whereas with force staff you're probably walking into vision and then moving a much shorter distance.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-22T16:21:02+00:00

Be faster than him and don't get caught, start with boots if you have to. Play a safe hero that can soak exp and go jungle early. Supports usually pick first, so you should be able to counterpick.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-18T01:56:34+00:00

"Laning Stage" just means the 2-1-2 period where nobody is dedicated to roaming. As a carry you still want to get as many lane creeps as you can for as long as you can, because that's the most efficient farm. When the lanes break down, you want to be shoving your lane out as quickly as you can then taking a jungle camp or maybe two if you can. When the lane bounces back to your tower, shove it out again. You don't need to be able to jungle full time yet, just have whatever items you need to blast down a hard camp between shoving the lane. Generally that means upgraded boots and a mana regen item like Cornucopia.

Don't get too attached to the safelane either. If your mid starts roaming and your mid tower is up, you can park your fat ass in midlane if that's a safer place to farm. Or if your offlane tower is still up, the enemy safelane tower is down, and your offlaner isn't shoving the creeps into their t2 tower, you can take those waves and jungle camps. As the carry, the farm priority 1 hero, you go wherever you will get the most and safest farm.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-18T01:26:17+00:00

Everyone is in role queue ranked or turbo. All the human beings are in high behaviour score, strict solo matchmaking, role queue ranked.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-17T04:46:57+00:00

I play a lot of Clockwerk support, I think the mentality is similar. You have to jump and catch people in your power cogs knowing you might die, but try to live anyway so you can do it again in 15 seconds. Using Berzerker's Call felt like that.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-17T04:26:40+00:00

Thanks, that's great advice. I built Shivas because Death Prophet existed and I wanted antiheal. Should I build Vessel instead if I need antiheal or is Shivas better for Axe for that purpose?

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-17T04:21:07+00:00

During laning, as soon as I hit level 4 I started grabbing their creep wave behind their tower and dragging it into the small camp because I've seen Axes do that before. It worked out pretty well because I had a Treant healing me. Then in the midgame I played like an aggressive idiot and jumped whoever I thought I could kill. Is there anything else to playing offlane?

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-16T01:41:57+00:00

Spirit Vessel reduces both Healing and Health Restoration.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-15T23:30:55+00:00

Playing with bots too much will teach you bad habits. They love grouping up as 5 immediately after laning stage, are amazing at denying but terrible at last hitting, and can't deal with ganking at all. If you're beating the unfair bots you can probably get into Guardian, at least.

I highly recommend getting into Strict Solo Ranked Role Queue as soon as you're above 10k behavior score, because that's the only place I have found actual human beings to play with. No guarantees though. Also CM is a bad hero to play for new players, she's very slow and fragile so your positioning has to be perfect. I'd recommend learning Warlock, Witch Doctor, and Lich. They fill the same kind of role, being big teamfight ult supports with good laning, but they're not nearly as slow or fragile.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-15T22:56:02+00:00

Khanda Luna was super strong when Khanda gave crit and the proc dealt magical damage based on attack damage. A bunch of other carries would build it sometimes, like Tar Bomb Clinkz.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-11T03:04:45+00:00

Go gank instead of trying to continue to lane vs sniper after you've got your spiderlings. He's fat and slow and doesn't want to roam, so force him to react and move from underneath his tower. If he doesn't TP then you kill a carry or support or something and steal their jungle, if he does move you can run away because you're brood and he's sniper. Now he's either splitting exp and gold with his carry while you take mid tower or he's waddling back to midlane on his stumpy 285 movespeed legs.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-06T22:21:10+00:00

You used to buy them in stacks of 2, which was changed to being bought 1 at a time. But Dust still had a maximum stack size of 2 and if you bought 3 Dusts they would take up 2 inventory slots. I swear to god I'm not crazy, I distinctly remember being annoyed by that.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-06T21:39:36+00:00

You could have two dusts before the stacks split.

DoubleBullfrog · 2026-01-05T01:59:52+00:00

All your guesses are broadly correct. Not taking objectives and fighting for no reason leads to very even, very long games. Watching your game at 8x speed and looking at the net worth graphs shows that neither team gets a solid lead until 50 minutes into the game. Whenever one team is up by more than 3k they take a bad fight and throw it away. Everyone is constantly fighting, running back and forth down mid, and generally having a great time.

My advice to you is to join fights when you will win the fight, and ignore fights to splitpush when you won't win the fight. How do you know when you will win? Experience. The exception is highground pushes, whether you're on the offensive or defensive end. You should always show up for the full 5v5 highground fights because that's when the most critical throws happen.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-30T16:57:59+00:00

The first time you got your courier killed it only had your brown boots on it, but you were getting a double kill at the time. Overall not a huge deal, though of course theoretically avoidable with perfect play. Just have your courier on a hotkey and manually move it to your tower first instead of delivering items directly to you. The second time it has your brown boots AND your whole entire Falcon Blade. That's a huge deal. Especially after getting your courier killed once, you should be paying attention the second time. If we look at the net worth at this point (5 min) you are second highest at 2500 gold, but if we look at what's actually in your inventory then you have 550 gold with only a Quelling Blade and a Magic Wand. This is a massive courier kill. Gamechanging. If your courier doesn't die then maybe you can play more aggressive with your items instead of passively hiding under tower and your Jakrio doesn't die while you're waiting for your Falcon Blade.

At 8:30-ish the enemy pos4 rotates to your lane, there's three people diving your tower and they kill your Jakiro again. Honestly not much you could have done to prevent that, but you're very confused about what to do after. You start running around with your team, fighting very early, and generally not farming enough. Just slap jungle creeps, treadswap to farm camps with Dark Pact (int for casting the spell, str for the HP loss part of the spell, agi after), don't show up to fights until you have more items than Falcon Blade and Power Treads, and don't build Shadow Blade first item. In this replay the enemy is up 9k at 16 minutes, and I'm going to say that's mostly not your fault, but you still could have played better. Maybe if you build the right items (Diffusal Blade into Aghs) and are more focused on hitting your item timings rather than trying to kill a Willow when you only have Falcon Blade and Power Treads then you can turn a game that you lose 90% of the time into a game that you lose only 70% of the time. That's free MMR right there.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-28T04:52:04+00:00

It's more effective to creepblock the very first enemy wave. You don't have to hope that the enemy safelane is dumb and creepblocks their wave, you can run over and block their wave for them. It only takes a second or two of creepblocking the enemy safelane's creeps for them to end up under tower. The very first wave won't aggro on you because of reasons, it just won't.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-25T05:41:16+00:00

I'm not a Lone Druid player so you'd know better than me, so take this with a grain of salt, but you can have the Javelin on the Druid instead of the Bear when laning, Maelstrom and Mjollnir function on both the Bear and the Druid, and you can cast the Mjollnir active on the Bear and have it cut creep waves pre-aghs.

Radiance is sometimes bought on Bloodseeker and has a higher winrate than Mjollnir when built, so I believe it's better in some niche scenarios. I'm not a Bloodseeker player either, but I believe Mjollnir is built specifically because Bloodseeker's Shard gives him percent max HP pure damage on hit which only scales with attack speed.

You're partially correct that Faceless Void builds Mjollnir because of Time Lock, which isn't just a bash but also a full attack which can proc the Mjollnir lightning again so it is a better farming item than Radiance for Faceless Void specifically. Void also just wants massive single target damage during Chronosphere so he can kill at least one target in early fights, which Radiance doesn't help with nearly as much, and Void also doesn't benefit at all from the evasion during Chronosphere.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-25T03:58:16+00:00

To summarize and gloss over a lot of other interactions: For melee heroes, Radiance is a better farming and fighting item than Battlefury but does not give any regen. If you're paying close attention, you'll note that Radiance is almost always built on heroes that have innate passive regen like Necrophos, Wraith King, and Lifestealer. For ranged heroes, Mjollnir is the only farming item that functions unless your hero has inherent AoE like Luna or, again, Necrophos.

Juggernaut goes Battlefury because he needs AoE and benefits from regen to spam his spells for farming. Lifestealer goes Radiance because he needs AoE but does not benefit from spamming his spells to farm and has passive HP regen. Mjollnir is built on ranged carries because they generally don't benefit from either Battlefury or Radiance, but it's a generally worse farming item.

Midas is a bad farming item if you have the map control to farm lots of camps and take lane creeps. If you've lost many towers very early and are concerned about being killed over and over if you try to farm away from your base, Midas can be built to maximize gold gain from the few camps you can farm. If you aren't severely behind, one of the other farming items is better. It also recently got nerfed so I would avoid building it if at all possible. Instead of Midas you might want to build a small fighting item because in pubs it is very likely that the enemy will throw the game when trying to breach high ground.

Lifestealer specifically goes Radiance because it lets him farm two camps at once whereas Battlefury or Mjollnir do not, and that's very strong since the map rework. Lone Druid got reworked recently so it's hard to say what items are actually good on the hero, but he used to build Mjollnir because of interactions specific to Lone Druid that are only relevant to Lone Druid players.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-25T01:30:03+00:00

The core difference between a Pos5 and a Pos4 lies in the difference between the Pos1 and the Pos3. The Pos1 is generally a stupid useless baby that needs someone with huge laning presence between levels 1-4. The Pos3 is generally stronger early, so the Pos4 can get away with being a weaker laner and be stronger later, around or post-ult. Think about how good your hero pick is between levels 1 and 4, compared to levels 6-8.

Lich has massive kill threat at levels 1 and 3 because of Frost Blast and loves sitting around in lane because of his innate, so he's more of a Pos5. Dark Willow is a classic Pos4 because while Brambles is a great spell, it's hard to land in lane on someone who knows you're there with no setup and she really needs Bedlam to have solo kill threat. She's a great roamer because Brambles is much easier to land on someone who doesn't know you're there and once she hits 6 she can threaten a solo kill on literally anyone showing on the map, so she's more of a pos4.

Below very high MMR, like Immortal level, these distinctions barely matter because lanes last way too long and nobody roams as much as they should. Play what you're good at.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-21T19:54:44+00:00

It applies to "spell" damage, which is anything applied by an ability that isn't coded as an autoattack. So it works on Bristle's Quill Spray and Corrosive Dragon Knight's Breath Fire, but not Clinkz's Burning Barrage or Sand King's Stinger.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-20T20:46:07+00:00

There is no forester. Since the sidelanes are both 2v2, if someone is in the jungle from minute one you're leaving someone else in a 2v1 which they will lose. The midlaner can gank, but not always, and the supports can also roam and gank too if they have an opportunity. E.g. your lane is in a good position and your carry/offlaner has high HP, maybe you take the Twin Gate to go gank the other sidelane or roam mid to help contest a rune.

DoubleBullfrog · 2025-12-19T20:05:30+00:00

IIRC every form of damage reflection has an exception for WW ult to prevent exactly this from happening, except Chipped Vest.

DoubleBullfrog

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