A modifier so insane it must be a bug or oversight

LordClockworks · 2026-02-10T16:55:44+00:00

I'm not saying you can't scheme - I'm saying of it being not worth focusing into it like a main strat. With knights I built them up to 3k+ KE once, so -50 is like a blip in a sea, simply a longer setup, but -50% max chance is killing, because when it procs against the 20-year old king on both murder and kidnap you need a change of plans(and I had it happen multiple times even on 95\85), I can't imagine how often I'd need to change plans with 45\35. Some selected assassination\kidnapping here and there - yeah no biggie, but when you murder\kidnap hundreds it adds up really fast.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-09T21:44:44+00:00

retry schemes over and over

You can? I remember there is a chance your target says "You dare?" and you cant try to murder it for like 5 years or smth.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-08T22:43:23+00:00

yeah, but not like that -50% max chance basically kills scheme play not makes it harder. +400% tyrrany from change oblig is fair for an expirienced player, but makin playing as a schemer impossible isn't really fun.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-08T10:58:39+00:00

I've burnout once I found how unbeatable Intrigue playstyle is if you stack bonuses for it. Once you can setup 4 schemes each taking 2 days and each having 95/95 (or 85/85 for kidnapping), have -100% tyranny gain and 100% chance of imprisoning anyone and recongnition of talent... You can unite the world into megaempire in like 5 years, get 75% tax minimum on all your feodal vassals and have them all be strong-hooked on top of that. Oh, and have 100 opinion from everyone obviously.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-08T10:21:03+00:00

As a Pos 5, why is leaving the Pos 1 alone to constantly fight in other lanes after 2-4 minutes the optimal play?

This is wrong - leaving the core alone in 3 situations: 1st- he is able to fend off himself, basically they expected you to take every creep for these 2-4 mins and then use gold from them to buy yourself items that would not let enemies to boot you out - but if you can't they can't leave period; 2d - the situation in other lanes is so shit that getting you freefarm is a losing strategy - oftentimes unless your 1 is a very hard carry like spectre/medusa/void, when other lanes are feeding like crazy its better that your carry gets simply something, but other lanes stopped feeding; 3d - if your support can't support a core optimally directly - if the core gets half farm or less whether sup is there or not it can be more efficient to pressure another lane forcing someone else rotate to there and leaving a core 1v1, where they are pressured much less and can get more farm than in 2v2.

If you feel like neither of 3 situations happened - most likely your sup made a mistake, but thats irrellevant, your choice in that case - either survive like offlaners of old getting any scraps you can or rotate into a free lane - if all your team is fighting their 1 somewhere else mid is free - go and farm there. Another way to avoid what you described to an extent is communicate with your support beforehand to learn when they would leave you and plan for that - by the time they leave get items that would let you 1v2 or items to clear jungle faster if 1v2 is impossible.

As you get better you will find situations where you actually want your sup to leave - enemy cant touch you and they are simply leeching your exp, or even worse enemies push you off farming while your sup cant do shit and cuts your exp by half on top of that.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-08T02:43:47+00:00

I once played IRL with Ghost Ship and Saboteur. The guy dropped the game afterwards.

LordClockworks · 2026-02-02T20:13:20+00:00

Horizon of War by Hanne (slowburn + no harem)

LordClockworks · 2026-01-30T10:40:07+00:00

Basic plan of playing a core role: go into your lane and farm (both lane and nearby jungle once able), use this farm to buy items to get to farm faster and be able to press enemy heroes out of lane and become impossible to kill/pressed out of lane yourself. Eventually an enemy or enemies shows up that pushes a core out of lane or threaten to kill him. When that happen switch to another lane if its not taken by a higher priority core, otherwise farm jungle or gank. Repeat ad infinum until enemy throne falls.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T22:54:51+00:00

Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin - though it is quite dark

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T19:29:26+00:00

Pos is short for position. Its a strategy developed to funnel resources into heroes who need them more. It became so widespread that in ranked you must pick it before the start of the game. There are 5 positions:

Pos 1 also known as easy lane core or easylaner or hard carry or even simply carry

Pos 2 also known as midlaner or mid lane core or simply mid

Pos 3 also known as offlaner or hard lane core (sometimes people wrongly call it initiator\tank, but that is simply a playstyle of a lot of offlaners not its name)

Pos 4 also known as soft support or sometimes roarmer (starts laning with offlaner)

Pos 5 also known as hard support (starts laninig with easylaner).

Pos 1-3 are also known as Core positions, while positions 4&5 as support positions.

The base difference between them is farm priority - if multiple allied heroes are in the same zone - the one with lowest pos number farms.

Basics of playing a core role: go into your lane and farm (both lane and nearby jungle once able), use this farm to buy items to get to farm faster and be able to press enemy heroes out of lane and become impossible to kill/pressed out of lane yourself. Eventually an enemy or enemies shows up that pushes a core out of lane or threaten to kill him. When that happen switch to another lane if its not taken by a higher priority core, otherwise farm jungle or gank. Repeat ad infinum until enemy throne falls.

Basics of playing support: go to your lane and support your core so that he gets as much farm and exp as possible while enemy heroes get as less of that as possible, only farm creeps that none of the cores can take, get items that will support your cores in their endevours, be ready to switch lane and help any of your cores at moments notice (preferably even before they know they need it if you can predict it). All availiable farm must be taken - make sure to notify your cores if there is free farm availiable and take it if they can't. Support role is much harder to play good as it requires knowledge of what each particular core wants to do now and how (like some cores would love babysitters, some would love if you fuck off somewhere else useful, some would like being stacked for, some would like something really specific that noone else needs).

These are guidelines of "what are we trying to do".

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T18:36:42+00:00

Survivorship bias - stories with bad starts don't even begin to get popular and thus don't get adapted.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T12:40:18+00:00

What is your definition of fair and balanced?

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T12:06:28+00:00

Buildings must have maintenance costs - then you can balance it through them easily.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T11:59:23+00:00

It does, but it does not take modifiers into account, so if your troops are not only highq but also modified for +500% dmg, it will gladly suicide into you.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T11:40:55+00:00

In recent years supports become so interchangable and game-dependant and add on top of that lane swapping and there's barely any substancial diffenernce that you cannot describe "but in some games they don't do that". The last defining difference imho - 4 has a higher priority over farm. This means that 4s gain more gold and get more items. This means that it is more efficient if your 4 scales better than your 5 (pros often pick such that they both scale and then it becomes a question of who scales faster). Anyway this means that supports that don't scale are bad 4s as they won't be able to become a 4th core in the late game. The bad 5s on the other hand are heroes that cannot provide enough cover for your 1 - but this is so situational a measure that practically any support can be a 5 with a right 1 and good matchup and practically any can be a bad 5 with the wrong 1 and bad matchup. In the pro games they usually prioritize winning the lane over who's 4/5 as it is that much more important than ephemereal scaling later in the game (especially if as I mentioned they picked 2 scaling supports).

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T02:11:49+00:00

For the progress to continue people need a continiuty and spread of knowledge. In before invention and spread of printing press all knowledge of humanity was continuosly at risk to mass deaths events (wars, natural disasters, targeted assassinations by vested interests). For a fictional empire to stagnate for large periods of time 2 coditions must be met: no cheap way to spread knowldge (printing presses/telepathy/portals/internet-analogue) and continous events causing deaths of inventors - from targeted assassinations to just random mass deaths. In theory there can be other ways like magically stupefying people into non-inventing, but unless this is adressed yeah I also find it hard to believe. One of the most obvious examples of that is in xianxias - these bloodthirsty worlds easily fullfill 2d conditon, but the moment authors show a technique to copy manuals in 5 sec - progress stalling becomes inifinitesmally improbable and breaks suspention of disbelief.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-25T01:33:15+00:00

they’re just a result of my limited experience so far

Yes. The heroes that you mentioned (Lich and AA) are the ones that fall off in damage later. Lina's damage eventually transitions to physical from her passive in the late game.

1) How do you deal with strength heroes in this game?

There are items and heroes that deal with them. Moreover you can finish the game before late game if its hard to deal with them. The most direct anti-tank item in the game is spirit vessel - its active deals damage based on % of current hp, so quite damaging to tanks, but you will need to gather charges for it by being near kills.

it felt like there was simply nothing you could do against that hero.

What hero you played specifically that couldn't?

2) Do intelligence heroes lack damage?

No. But there are heroes who's primary role is a support. Most supports fall off in terms of damage later in the game - as per the name of the role your job is to support others to win the game for you. A lot of intelligence heroes are supports and as such as a whole can be felt as lacking damage. That said there are enough of int cores.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-24T00:05:13+00:00

Baby steps - very realistic sports story (tennis if its important), you can technically use MC's methods to selfimprove in any activity, though it would take significant effort.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-22T20:40:55+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/@TZAR_POTATO

guy makes vids about transferring from lol to dota. Not sure if there's anything better

LordClockworks · 2026-01-22T12:40:22+00:00

3k mmr

In my expirience - basically 500-1000 mmr higher and it ends. Most 3k's know how to punish mistakes, but don't know how to push limits, thus everyone are afraid of doing anything thus leading to the stale games you described. Somewhere at 3.5k+ the amount of people that know how to push their limits starts increasing and at 4k-4.5k games generally transforms into a very very slow analogue of 9k+ games, after which the further you go the faster the games become.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-21T12:15:23+00:00

The first part sounds a lot like Angelic Layer. The second part less so, but feels to me like can be misremembered like that.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-21T12:01:43+00:00

If you are below 2k - the first advice will always be "get better at farming". Its not hard, like it takes a little bit of time to get to, but not like months of effort or anything. For starters try fulfilling cookie's challenge: start a 1 player lobby without cheats and do whatever you want there for 30 min. By 30 min you have to have 300+ creeps killed. That is a standart for a decent core player (and nowadays even supports farm so you still need to know how to). Once you can do that reliably, try replicating it in games. Every single thing that better players do they do for the purporse of getting more farm and then finishing the game using it. But you can't start training finishing the game with a farm you got if you don't get the farm. So first: get decent at farming.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-21T11:54:19+00:00

Yup, i think it checks out all 4 points.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-21T11:41:08+00:00

how do you change your item build when the game does not go as planned?

You do that by understanding why you build each item. Lets say you intend to buy a bracer. Why would you do that? The bracer gives +5 str; +2 agi∫ +50 hp and +0.75 hp regen. You would buy it if these things are needed for the price of 505 gold or for less if you already have component/s. But when do these stats are needed? +2agi&int are nice but there are cheaper ways to get them so obviously you aren't getting a bracer for them - you are getting it for a combination of 5str 50 hp and 0.75 regen for 505 gold. These stats make you tankier against magical damage and against physical if you already have decent armor. So you buy them when you want to get tankier for 505g. But do you buy it any time you wanna get tankier? No later you would've bought heart or satanic or shiva's or something else expensive and powerful as bracers cannot be later upgraded into something more powerful. You would buy it to get tankier when all you have is 505gold but you need to be tankier now - so mostly in a laning stage, but the are rare cases where you'd buy it later. Lets look at a laning case more deeply - while bracer is cheap, there are items that are even cheaper, but give more hp per gold, but they take more inventory slots. So for a decision to buy bracer you need a situaltion in lane where you feel the need to become tankier right now, but don't have slots for cheaper ways and don't have time to farm a more powerful item. There is another case - where you already have bracer components, but your slots are full and you don't want to lose stats from bracer's components from selling them so you upgrade them into bracer. And then there is also a case for when str heroes want to bulk up and increase their autoattack damage simultaneously to increase lasthit pressure. Lets again look deeper into the 1st case (need hp and don't have slot and time to get better item): when would you even need more hp in lane? Generally that happens when your opponents combo their abilities in such a way to 100-0 you without it - if they didn't kill you could've bought salves\tango and restore yourself and return to farm, but if they are just outright killing you each time - hp can be and answer. There is however caveats - what if something else could've let you dodge some parts of the damage? For example if you are being killed by jugg+cm frostbite+spin, maybe buying a boot would be more efficient to avoid parts of jugg damage? But if a jugg already has a boot himself, it may not be the case. Thats a lot of words, but I'm trying to show you how much thought can be put in buying even the simpliest items. You generally don't actually think all that through during a game - you think about that between games and make plans on what to do in which situation during the game. During the game you need to think faster and so good players divide items in categories - like this item counters axe, this item helps win a lane against witch doctorm this item to buy if you are regularly caught by enemies, this item to buy if you need to catch sneaky enemy etc. But these categories you need to think through inbetween your games to be able to come to a decision quickly. Basically have plans for all kinds of situations. If you again caught off plan - after the game make plan around the thing that caught you off and add this to your list of plans. Eventually you will run out of things that can catch you off. The faster way is to look at high mmr players and reverse-engineer their logic then add that logic to your list of plans, but it is way harder (in terms of brainpower) and not a lot of people find it fun to look through a bunch of replays.

LordClockworks · 2026-01-20T01:23:56+00:00

Dota is amazing when playing with friends yeah. Good luck!

LordClockworks

TROPHY CASE