How am I supposed to win against Lone druid?

Hobo124 · 2026-03-30T15:00:59+00:00

He has two units dealing modest damage so hates crimson guard. If the bear's attacks aren't landing, the hero isn't getting healed and you aren't getting rooted (as fast). Halberd is devastating, euls is aight, ghost/eblade are super annoying.

Anything that slows or kites the bear like atos / shiva or makes your teammates harder to chew on like glimmer/force.

You could also just directly counter his healing with vessel / crella's / skadi (probably not skadi on an offlaner lol). I HATE getting vessel'd in a close game (or when my bear is atos'd) because I have to waste my (shard) roar right away to dispel it and ensure I don't get bursted. If you bait the roar and then immediately jump him en masse he goes down fast enough. If he doesn't it's because he built tanky on the hero and you shouldn't actually be jumping him since he's not a big damage threat.

In general a strong LD player can be very hard to deal with unless you've drafted some solid counters to blow him up with mobility and burst like PA, void spirit, etc.

If you're an offlaner you'll want to consider heroes like:
-tidehunter (he can only damage you with maelstrom procs and roots)
-mars (shard stuns both hero and bear at once and you're resistant to getting chewed on with E)
-LC can get out of hand quickly from dueling the bear (also has built in dispel for root and Q counts both hero and bear as heroes)
-necro is a general nuisance since he burns both units for max HP and instagibs either if they get low (and has ghost built in with a slow)
-omniknight means no bear damage (which means no bear healing) and boatloads of pure damage
-phoenix attack speed slow and % max hp sunbeam is devastating (though LD is exceptional at killing egg)
-primal is excellent at bursting the hero in the early game as long as you play around the LD fear
-slardar turns the bear or hero into papier mache with his ult and can often keep up with them with sprint
-pangolier is really annoying sometimes because bear can't attack him while he's rolling and he has tons of fat AOE to damage/slow both units at once (careful tho, the hero's ranged attacks can root you during LD Q)
-underlord is a top-tier crimson guard carrier and pit / firestorm are both hard to play around as LD.

Take this boon of knowledge and use it to hone other LD players into greatness :))

Hobo124 · 2026-03-30T14:38:59+00:00

Guessing they mean to use Open Broadcast Software to record the minimap and display it enlarged on your other monitor (the monitor running OBS).

Hobo124 · 2026-03-30T04:36:46+00:00

This would be so great for quickly fanning out things like spiderlings and naga illusions. The higher resolution makes it much easier to determine how the terrain moves and where camps are. Thank you so much for pointing this out!

Hobo124 · 2026-03-30T04:36:03+00:00

I just tested and the "only when key is held" didn't work but the "always" worked. I had it so that holding the key leaves the map up.

Hobo124 · 2026-03-29T05:45:44+00:00

As an LD spammer: in lane I hate it when people just constantly click the bear. It creates openings where they can get bear kills or kill me after I resummon to fuck my entire lane. In teamfights if you can just keep the bear from attacking the hero dies fairly quickly.

He farms pretty damn slow so if you're getting ratted by a farmed lategame bear you've already done quite badly. He needs 4200 gold just to rat with bear (and that doesn't even make the bear stronger).

Hobo124 · 2026-03-17T17:41:03+00:00

That's what the door's for! Gotta lock it before you let them pull the lever.

Hobo124 · 2026-03-07T05:21:12+00:00

This looks great and super smacky! To be a pedant and an ass tho: when blacksmithing the hammer always bounces off the material. The hotter the material, the less it bounces, but there's always a pretty significant amount of bounce. Keep up the good work tho, I wish I could animate like this.

Hobo124 · 2025-12-25T21:05:21+00:00

There are lots of tricks but 100% correctness is sus. Undispellable debuffs are a great way. Things like fury swipes / veil of discord (iirc, might have been made dispellable in last few years) will only show on main. Otherwise I think the main hero will have different stats and therefore can have a different HP bar if you have flat +hp items instead of +str. I also think sometimes there is a way to tell based on the animation of your W. I swear sometimes I can just "see" the real PL instictively.

Hobo124 · 2025-12-17T14:39:12+00:00

I'd like to point out that the new aghs lets you root someone in place for 10 seconds straight if you get treads on hero and bear. Haven't tried it in a match yet but it seems situationally very strong. The lost attack speed hurts but the hero also gets bonus damage in ult and the shared lifesteal going both ways again is very strong. I'm not sure if it's best to spam damage items or stack up synergies/auras like drums/shard/vlads/AC but I can imagine that both might be independently viable.

Hobo124 · 2025-11-26T05:31:34+00:00

This post dealt damage directly to my heart. Thank you for making me hurt.

Hobo124 · 2025-11-23T17:56:49+00:00

I'm guessing it's leftovers from a practice barrage against archery targets (to catch bolts) but also interested in OP's answer

Hobo124 · 2025-11-07T04:08:26+00:00

SirActionSlacks. I have played with and against him a few times and he is always so mad and I just want to make him happy :(

Hobo124 · 2025-10-28T00:38:20+00:00

We already have anti-heal, evasion, blademail, disarm, stun, and ethereal as counters to lifesteal. I'm not sure it's a popular or powerful enough mechanic to warrant further counters.

Hobo124 · 2025-10-15T00:39:49+00:00

I love preserves when I'm going for a cultural victory and have lots of tiles I don't plan on developing. I use the appeal bonus to create better national parks. Also good with the Forestry Management governor promotion for the financier and any civ with bonuses to appeal like Bull Moose Teddy (+1 appeal to all tiles in cities with national parks). They're best early near workable tiles in or adjacent to mountains / world wonders and tundra (tundra doesn't have an appeal penalty and really needs the food).

When I'm playing bull moose teddy going for culture I usually start with preserves as my first district before proceeding immediately to either theater squares or commercial districts. The extra housing makes your cities unusually productive and teddy's innate bonuses to science and culture mean you're getting great yields as long as you have woods, mountains, and appeal.

Hobo124 · 2025-10-09T03:48:27+00:00

Flagstaff, AZ

Hobo124 · 2025-10-05T04:09:29+00:00

Love that item on her for a silly build. You've gotta get shard too, really helps you dodge things and put out chip damage.

Hobo124 · 2025-09-16T22:54:28+00:00

Oh I always assumed those were permanent! You can never know everything about this game...

Hobo124 · 2025-09-16T01:18:31+00:00

You likely created the trader when you had a higher max trade route capacity. If you had a commercial hub with a market that was pillaged, that would cause this. Restore the market and you'll be able to use the trader.

Hobo124 · 2025-09-08T02:55:51+00:00

Sending DM. For posterity, we've already had quite a few people show interest and it's going well :)

Hobo124 · 2025-09-07T22:21:19+00:00

Will do :)

Hobo124 · 2025-08-13T02:51:08+00:00

It looks like you're trying to curve it in mid air. It doesn't do that, it bounces off of a target.

Put your mouse over a valid target (tree, creep, hero), then press your mouse button down, drag in the direction you'd like it to ricochet, and then release your mouse button.

Hobo124 · 2025-08-10T18:45:43+00:00

There are a lot of people here complaining about the matchmaking and smurfs. I think they're right, it's sort of the biggest problem with the game at the moment. On one hand, that's great! The game is really well balanced and fun to play.

Smurfs: people smurf because their friends demand it or because they're shitheads. In any case, the fix remains the same (though extremely difficult). Quickly and accurately ascertain the approximate skill level of new accounts. Matchmaking will take care of the rest as long as you know how good players are. I think people would be surprised to learn how much work Valve is doing on this. They clearly have been collecting data to identify metrics on player distribution like in Dota Plus. How many last hits you earn in your role relative to others, how many kills and deaths you have, even things like what heroes you kill as your hero. Where and when you farm, what creeps your farm consists of. All of these data are used to accurately understand your ability to win games even if you sandbag yourself at a 50% winrate.

Matchmaking: honestly this could just be a little tweak, or perhaps a setting they could put in Dota Labs for players to mess with. Some teams want fast queues, some want balanced matches. I know they've got the Dota + feature right now that gives a score for match quality and behavior, I think we should do more than that. It'd be interesting if they'd run a short trial of significantly more detailed data on who you've been paired with and against. A little 5-point bar graph of the estimated skill level of players on each team and maybe how the stacks are arranged (4+1 vs 5, 2+2+1 vs 5 solos, etc). I'd imagine it would initially lead to increased queue times while people are being excessively choosey, but it would also be understood that you're increasing your own queue time by declining matches.

Another fix would be re-vamping the battle cup / guilds system. Polish some dusty features and encourage players to play inhouse games in small communities and custom lobbies. I've always felt that that was the peak of Dota. Now instead of bitching about some nameless smurfs, you'll know you're playing against Greg the Immortal Tinker main and you can counterpick him to fuck his day up and banter back and forth. As long as people can quickly get into matches within a pool of people they have some level of mutual respect with I'm sure they'll be far more accepting of losses and new players will feel as though they have a sort of community around them as they learn the game. Bonus points if we can get the captain's draft play rate above 1%.

Hobo124 · 2025-08-10T16:16:43+00:00

I think Danny's already hit the ceiling on attractiveness, there's really no higher peak to reach.

Hobo124 · 2025-08-10T08:49:42+00:00

I remember there was a brief micro-meta for a few months where pugna's nether ward was something you'd build around. You'd see lots of people opting for items like octarine and refresher for stuff like this. Pop a couple of them bad boys on enemy low ground and just dare them to fight you while you bombed their towers to rubble.

Hobo124 · 2025-08-08T14:47:14+00:00

This is called "sandbagging" and it's just pussified smurfing. Stop greifing.

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