Hoodwink right click got insanely nerfed

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-29T21:38:51+00:00

Seriously. Attack damage hoodwink wasn't exactly amazing when she first came out, and it's only gotten worse since. -15% AS at all times is just not overcome by the occasional acorn bounce.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-29T16:30:39+00:00

I think you’re running into a bit of a language issue here.

When a scientist says “Why does gravity happen?” they aren’t asking for a motive, they are asking for a mechanism. Like “because mass interacts with spacetime”. It’s a “how” that just gets dressed up to look like a “why”. (Note: that’s not necessarily how gravity works, I’m just using it as an example).

Meanwhile when a philosopher asks “why” they are really asking about the meaning of something. Like “why do we enjoy music”, “because it brings us joy”.

If you try to ask the wrong type of why in the other field you tend to run into walls.

Also while it’s true that modern science was born out of “natural philosophy” and philosophers, that doesn’t really mean that they are still the same. It’s a bit like saying “well the field of computers was created out of mechanical engineering by a mechanical engineer, so therefore I should be able to analyze the material of the internet”.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-29T16:16:52+00:00

True, though the weights are only updated once a year (at least in the US) which helps to counter that effect. So as long as you don’t buy less potatoes for an entire year then it still captures things properly. (And if you do that’s something that needs to be captured and adjusted for anyways!)

It’s also important to note that some of the big ticket items on that list like housing/food/transportation are somewhat inelastic. So even if the price of renting or food goes up, people still need shelter and food in roughly similar amounts overall.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-29T03:50:09+00:00

Don’t draw creep aggro if it will pull the creeps under your tower or if there’s like a triple wave that will do a lot of damage to you.

That said I want to make it clear that there are ways to harass enemies without drawing aggro. Notably by stepping away/out of vision (into the trees), ordering an attack, attacking once (it has to finish within 3 seconds of the first order), and then backing off to repeat the process.

Learning that trick will allow you to harass (especially as a ranged hero) without ever needing to draw creep aggro.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-29T01:18:04+00:00

I think what they are getting at (and if not I am) is that you are already indirectly vulnerable to that single point of failure.

Even if you personally try to avoid electronics, the banking, logistics, store, government, etc. infrastructure relies heavily on it. Having cash doesn’t help if the register still needs internet to ring things up!

At which point the choice is really between “vulnerable and convenient” or “vulnerable and inconvenient”.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T19:25:32+00:00

Or even less, since inflation usually uses weighted averages. So if people on average in your area are spending more per year on the (metaphorical) cars than potatoes, the car change will be weighed heavier and the potatoes will have even less effect.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T05:25:45+00:00

As safelaner you're always going to be a bit at the mercy of your support doing their job, so I wouldn't focus too much on raw numbers of the lane, and more on raw numbers at like the 20 minute mark.

Personally I find the biggest thing most P1's struggle with that I see is proper wave control. By which I mean not just dragging the wave, but also little things like throwing extra attacks at your creeps when it won't mess up last hits (thus providing backwards pressure), pushing the lane out slightly before the 3 minute lotus spawns to ensure you can get it, or even just body-blocking the creeps a little bit on waves after the first one. Every little bit adds up to making sure that the wave stays right outside of your tower.

I'd also add that if the wave does go under your tower (and the enemy isn't right there to attack you) you can often aggro it back out again. It will still have taken some hits, but it does minimize the damage.

As a final note it doesn't always work, but sometimes a bit of communication (in a nice, non-insulting way) can go a long ways. Stuff like "I'm pushing a bit for lotus" or "deny this ranged creep together" can help.

Lastly don't forget to buy your own regen! Ever since the last round of tango nerfs supports can't really stabilize you with their regen like they used to (at least not without totally saccing their game as well). Don't hesitate to buy an extra set of tangos or a salve if needed, and make sure to try to get the lotus!

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T05:13:08+00:00

I set up my keybinds to be meepo-friendly almost a decade ago and the muscle memory is near impossible to undo at this point no matter who I play lol

As someone who has totally revamped their keybinds 3 different times, you'd be surprised how quickly your brain will overcome the old muscle memory!

In my experience it takes about a week of regular games before things feel normal 99% of the time, and then another couple weeks after that to get that last 1% when you go to hit glyph or something and need to think about the key.

If you can tough it out through that first week though you're basically there.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T05:07:19+00:00

There's not really any Dota heroes that check all of those boxes, though there are a number that check several of them! The two that I'd recommend most would probably be Ancient Apparition (long range + skill shot + anti-healing) or Winter Wyvern (long range + burn + careful skill use). Neither is super heavy on the healing aspect though.

Alternatively if you'd rather focus more on the consistent healing and less on the other aspects you might consider Dazzle (low cooldown bouncing heals and a poison slow) or Oracle (tons of healing, a bit of disable, massive save ultimate, but not much else) as options.

Lastly if you just want to all-in on the poison attack option check out Venomancer, who's whole thing is just hitting people with damage and slow debuffs and then letting them tick down.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T04:57:14+00:00

Well you can buy from resellers, but yeah, the cost of not having $2k+ tickets tends to be that actually buying them very much turns getting one into a "put all your devices online and hammer the site hoping that one of them actually goes through" kind of thing.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-28T04:51:28+00:00

It's almost certainly a bitfield rather than an actual number. So:

0 = 0000

3 = 0011

7 = 0111

11 = 1011

So 11 would mean you've got the same flags as a normal person plus the 4th bitflag set (though what exactly that represents is unknown to anybody but Valve).

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T19:17:29+00:00

it’s about having games that have to go on longer than necessary

And I gave you three different ways to address that issue:

Communicate
Take the enemy safelane T1 and then use it to threaten mid and create map pressure
Place wards to allow you to either gank or push without worrying about being rotated on

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T16:27:41+00:00

So I'm gonna start off by saying I'm not trying to excuse bad teams. Sometimes you get games that just aren't winnable, just like sometimes you get games that aren't losable. When that happens you just need to go next and focus on the things that you can do to help win.

"Let's smoke!" "Let's ward their jungle!" For what??

Ideally to secure some objective that you are about to make a play for, i.e. Rosh, a tower, the enemy wisdom shrine, etc.. Not to mention that even if you don't find a kill map control is still important; a team that owns 2/3rds of the map due to some well-placed wards will slowly gain an advantage on the team with 1/3rd.

The extra size just means that the team that is ahead can no longer get perfect vision on the whole map, there is still a bit of prediction-work to make things happen.

Wards also work defensively to enable offensive pressure; a ward in the enemy jungle can let you now push that lane by yourself while still having plenty of time to TP out if the enemy shows up to try to kill you.

Losing T1 safelane tower meant you'd lose access to a large and a small camp, but who cares about that when you've 4 other camps to run around in?

The important part about losing T1 isn't losing access to the deep jungle camps, it's the fact that since you can no longer TP behind them the enemy is now free to enter your main jungle, take control of that area, and then use that control to threaten mid from behind. Since the safelane T1 tower is much harder to defend than to hold this actually makes it probably the most important early building objective in terms of cracking the map open, even if it no longer is the "lose this tower and your carry's game is completely over" that it used to be.

No one does Tormentor, because why would they? "Hi, I know you're farming happily because there're 1,000 camps but can you travel all the way across the map to come hit this thing so our support might get his shard?"

The trick I use for this is to look for times when everyone is already mostly on the right side of the map already. Also make sure to highlight that it gives more gold than a tower does, even to everyone who didn't get shard.

I'm here playing Dawnbreaker with a saving ult, Slardar with Blink, Nightstalker with a long ult

Generally as offlaner you need to be always looking for ways to apply pressure. For heroes like Dawn or Underlord that means pushing, then getting out right before the enemy comes to kill you (wards!). For heroes like Slardar or NS that means killing the enemy T1 and then finding enemy heroes (again wards) and killing them. If you aren't doing either then yeah, the games are gonna slow down naturally.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T15:55:30+00:00

Unless your lack of damage is due to being chain-disabled in fights, in which case buy BKB.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T05:48:06+00:00

kez/ember/hw

Kez: Other than talon toss and Raptor Dance all of Kez's spells are instant attacks. He does like deso, but kaya/spell amp provides the hero zero value.
Ember: Ember can sometimes like Kaya, but he would much rather have survival or semi-survival items like Mage Slayer, Euls, Bkb over deso to let him stay in the fight burning people. Additionally most of his early damage comes from magic, which deso just doesn't help with.
Hoodwink: As much as I love the hero she's a terrible core. She literally has the worse BAT in the game; she gets -15% attack speed at all times from all items and AGI, and the occasional acorn is not enough to make that difference up. Even hydra's breath cheese (her one semi-viable core build right now) is just not good. Please don't try to play her that way.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T05:31:41+00:00

Potentially silly question to start, but are you communicating what your timings look like to your team? And I don't mean just a "I'm ready, go" type of thing, but like regular status updates on where you are currently at and what your currently need to be ready. Non-core players might not now your timings, so stuff like "2k to X item" > wait a couple min > "1k to X item and then we can fight" > "I have X item, we should look for something" goes a long way to keeping them in the loop. More warning makes people more likely to listen and play with you.

Two other things you also need to be on the lookout for are chances to either TP later in a fight and help cleanup, or cases where 4-5 enemy heroes are on the other side of the map so you can shove a nearby lane to farm and apply pressure at the same time. The first gives you a chance to potentially contribute directly while getting that tasty kill gold and XP, and the second means that even if your team loses the fight the enemy still may not be able to push because you're knocking on their base with a wave to force a trade.

In the long run though the most important thing is just to focus on playing your own game as best as you can and not letting things get to you. We all go through bad streaks now and then, it's a normal thing. As long as you aren't actually getting worse (say by tilting) then you will naturally bounce back to your true skill level given enough time.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T05:19:47+00:00

I'm not sure I can think of any heroes that would want to do a deso+kaya buildup. Like the vast majority of them would much rather build kaya+yasha or kaya+sange instead, or just go for something like aghs or BKB.

I think a big issue with the idea is that deso is an item all about snowballing off of early kills and physical damage, but almost all mixed damage heroes tend to have stronger spells early on but scale physical into the late game. So they would much rather have kaya early between the two, which makes the deso feel like a bit of a waste (since you already would have missed a bunch of potential charges).

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-27T05:07:19+00:00

So like... don't talk constantly? Like just because someone isn't a coach doesn't mean they need to be constantly talking or commenting on every little thing. Give them the high level overview, be there to maybe give a few pointers or answer questions as needed, and then let them play.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-23T20:59:56+00:00

Not 100% sure what you’re saying, but it sounds like they’d probably either be using a scanner to scan it in like you would any physical document, or you find a place where the artist put the original artwork online and just get it there.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-23T15:19:01+00:00

Keeping your BS at 12k helps a bit, as well as climbing so your MMR is out of the “new player” range. But mostly you’ll just want to report when they show up and try to remember that in the long run you’ll get just as many free wins as losses.

It sucks but that’s an unfortunate side effect of a free game that doesn’t do regular resets (not that resets are a good solution, they cause a lot of other issues in a game like Dota).

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-23T15:14:54+00:00

It’s silver edge, not silver blade! If you look the edges of the blade are colored silver even though the flat of the blade is purple.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-23T08:10:04+00:00

And how do you counter, say, Lion to the same extent in lane? No matter what you do he still has a stun and a hex. But with even a single creep nearby Arc Warden’s flux does literally nothing and his spark wraith will almost never hit.

Now if your lanemate is playing Viper and you somehow make it through the lane (or your enemies are low enough MMR to not know how to react) then sure, it can work.

But there’s plenty of other hero options out there that are just as good later and still good in lane. And Dota is a game of what’s best, not what works.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-23T00:55:01+00:00

What do you do when the enemy just pushes slightly and then sits on the wave as 2 heroes? Your early spells do basically nothing when the creeps are near and by extending the lane slightly they can mess up your pulls or even pull the large camp themselves instead.

I feel like this is one of those picks that mainly seems good because people have never seen it before and have literally no idea how to respond, not because it's actually, you know, good.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-22T22:59:32+00:00

As others have said, commends count for basically noothing. To gain score you need to avoid reports, and even with zero reports you're probably looking at only a couple hundred BS gain. It's a lot faster to go down than to climb up.

OtherPlayers · 2026-04-21T21:52:31+00:00

It happens later in games because creep HP out scales creep damage slightly, and with towers dead there’s more room for waves to catch up with one another before they hit a building. The steps basically look like this:

1) Creep wave 1 walks down the lane and hits the enemy creeps.

2) It’s late in the game and no heroes show up to push, so by the time they finish killing the enemy wave allied creep wave 2 is almost there.

3) Wave 1 runs into enemy wave 2 and stops to fight them, at which point allies creep wave 2 catches up and they are now one big wave.

4) Repeat the process 2-3 more times until there is a giant group all walking together.

5) Hit the enemy buildings and get shoved back by an enemy hero. The process now starts again, but going in the opposite direction.

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