At the starting page you will find every week's news, so if you want to be filled into current updates and changes, this the place where you can look for them.
Customize is all about the cosmetical updates and tools you can buy, collect, use and create inside and outside of the game. Since you are new, this will not interest you much, yet.
Play is self-explainatory and we will inspect this in a second.
Watch will enable you to watch live games with delay (2 minutes from when the action happens originally I believe), watch old games or watch tournaments. Check out some of the top live games if you want a glimpse of the game. When you are watching chose "player perspective" as your view to see every single mouse movement and action of one player. You can select the player by left clicking on the hero portrait at the top. Very informative.
Learn leads you to http://www.dota2.com/heroes/ and http://www.dota2.com/items/ and gives you basic information about each hero and item. There is much too remember for now. You just have to accept that you can't know all those things, yet. Use it as reference if you want to read up hero details.
Socialize is not implemented yet, so you won't find anything to do there yet. It is expected that you can manage teams/clans at that place once it is implemented.
Then you got your steam avatar, level and battle points (each level you rise will earn yourself some cosmetical item or other things that can be found at the customization tab). Clicking on your steam avatar will bring up more information about your profile, you can view your games and if you want to watch them again, you can download their replay. For now there shouldn't be anything interesting there for you.
Below that is the public chat, you can add channels by pressing on "+". And then last but not least you see your steam friends list. Leftclicking friend will enable you to view their profiles, invite them to your party (= play with them) or watch their games.
PLAY
So let's inspect the play tab. You have different options (other options like clan matches are not implemented yet):
- Find a match: you will search a match to play with a team of human players versus other human players. If you have added friends in your party, those people will play together with you in the same team
- Find a co-op bot match: you will search a match to play in a team of human players versus bots (computer controlled enemies)
- Find a lobby: you can find lobbies of other players. In lobbies you can set some game rules (like enabling cheats) and will be able to control which player plays in which team. They can also be private/password protected or public.
- Create lobby: you can create a lobby. This comes in handy if you want to check out the game the first time as only player or test something with cheats or play with a group of 9 other people
So click on "create lobby" and then again. Press the edit settings button and you will be able to set up your game:
Chose a server location near to your location (automatic is fine most of the times, but f.e. Australian players will probably want to us US west instead of the default SEA server, since the routing is better and you ping will be smaller).
Everything else can be left as is. You will always want to use the latest version if you are not playing a tournament though, so change that if it is not set already. It is your decision if you want to play with bots in the first game. If you tick "fill empty slots with bots" you will fight with 4 allied bots against 5 other bots. Make your choice, it will make things harder, but you also get some impressions about fighting against heroes. Save setting, click on join slot and start the game by pressing start game!
BTW did you know that you can use the steam webbrowser in the overlay (SHIFT+TAB) to display this text in the steam overlay? So if you do not want to tab out and read on while being ingame, check it out.
After loading a bit you will see the pick screen. Press CTRL to switch to grid view if you want to take a look at all heroes at once.
I won't force you to pick a specific hero for your first game, so just take something that appeals to you, but avoid Invoker, since he deviates a bit from the norm. Once you clicked "pick Heroname" your selection will lock and noone else will be able to play your hero. Press "play Heroname" to get yourself into the game. If you have enabled bots, they will be joining the game with you.
So now you might ask:
what is a hero and what am I supposed to do. There is no short answer to that, but let me try to explain.
The hero, which you just have chosen, is your character you will be playing for the entire duration of the match. Each hero has its own characterics, which are also shown in the HUD (enlarge the picture for HUD details):
Your hero is similar to a character you play in RPGs. It will gain experience and gold from killing enemies and ultimately level up once it has reached a certain amount of experience points and it will die once it reaches 0 HP.
With each level you'll get a skill point that can be invested in one of 4 skills (while the 4th skill is the ultimate, which you can level up to 1 at lvl 6, 2 at lvl 11 and 3 at lvl 16). If you do need more life and mana, you can also chose to learn stats. This will add 2 points to all three attributes: strength, agility and intelligence. Hover the stats overview in the HUD to know what benefits you will get with each stat point. Click on Level up and on skill button to learn a skill. You can also learn skills by holding CTRL + the skills' hotkey. Try out the skill if you want by pressing its hotkey and then selecting a target, if there is one available.
Besides the 4 skills the hero can learn and use, he also has an inventory where you can equip him with items, 6 at most. Items are bought in the shop for gold and have many different effects. Items will help your hero in different ways and I will cover that in another blog post later on.
For now, you will want to go with the suggestions on the left side of the opened shop. While not perfect, they will be at least decent and helpful, so you won't make too big mistakes there. Buy the items listed under starting items by opening the shop (left click on shop button OR hotkey), and then right clicking each item listed under the starting items section. You will now probably have some items in your inventory that have an active effect (most likely Tangos or a Healing Potion). Use the correspondent item hotkey (which is displayed in the inventory slot of the active item) to use its ability. You can use a Tango on a tree to eat it and it will restore health over time. You can use a healing potion on friendly units to heal them faster, of course that only makes sense when you have lost some HP already. So keep that for later.
Besides the active items, there are also items that just give you static bonuses, for example to strength, agility, intelligence, armor or movement speed. You will not need to use them to get their effect, then only requirement is to carry them in your inventory. While most of the times your item choices will differ from hero to hero, every hero will want to get Boots (or their upgrades) at some point of the game, because movement speed is important for everyone.
You can move your hero to the places you like by clicking with the right mouse button on the target place. If you right click enemies you will attack them. A(ttack move) + left click will enable you to attack your own creeps below 50% HP and towers below 10% HP. If you lose track of your hero, press select hero (F1 is the default, I think) twice to move your view to him.
Objective of the game:
Now that you can move around your hero, learn skills and filled your inventory with some starting items, you will wonder what to do. In each match two teams will compete against each other. They are called Radiant and Dire. The main goal of the game is to destroy the enemies main building (throne/tree).
But there are towers (white for Radiant - and black for Dire towers) protecting it, so you will need to fight your way to the main building one by one, especially since you can only attack the foremost tower on every lane.
The towers are situated on three lanes that run across the map: top, mid and bottom lane. The river divides Radiant's and Dire's territory. Between the lanes you will find the forest, also called wood. Those grey things are called rax (short for barracks), destroying them will gain your team a good advantage since the enemy will be pressured harder. That's why your main goal will be "pushing" lanes and destroying towers and rax on the way on one or more lanes until you can finally destroy the main building.
How to achieve that?
Every 30 seconds, starting at 0:00 game time, on every lane computercontrolled creeps will spawn at the grey spots for both teams and run along the lanes until they find some enemies to sink their axes, staves and what not into. You and your hero will want to be near that spectacle, since your hero will gain gold for each enemy it kills and you will also gain experience while being near dying enemies. Both of those things help you get stronger. Do not attack all the time. Wait for creeps to get on low HP and then just execute the last hit, because only that will give you the much needed gold. If you attack at all times as soon as you are in range of enemy creeps, chances are high that you push too far out into the enemies part of the map, making it more difficult to survive. And that's what you really want: survive. Better safe then sorry, especially when you are a beginner at this game.
Once you are strong enough and with the help of your team mates you can destroy towers. But you do not simply run to towers and start hitting them, you will want to go with your creep wave most of the time, that take the damage, while you are hitting the tower. Ofc enemies will try to defend or destroy towers as well, so keep offense and defense in balance. Killing enemy heroes actually is very helpful, since it grants yourself a gold- and experienceboost, while they will lose some of their gold. But don't get cocky, especially if you are a new player - you do not want to act too aggressive, because you cannot judge wether trying to kill a hero is dangerous (sorry if I keep repeating myself a bit, but can't stress this enough). Try to avoid hits in general, from enemy heroes, creeps and towers. Try to maintain your hp and throw in some regenerative items if you need some healing (Tangos or Healing Potions) or go back too the fountain if your HP is too low. More to behaviour on lane and in general in another blog post.
If you have gathered 500 gold, buy Boots of speed, then follow the other item progressions as suggested on the left hand side of the shop tab. Try to support your team by helping them defend or push towers. If you do not play with bots, just focus on last hitting (= getting the killing blow on an enemy unit) and also try to get comfortable with denying your own creeps (A+left click on allied creeps below 50% ho to get the killing blow on them). Try out your heroes skills.
Try out the quickbuy: drag an item from the shop / item suggestions to the quickbuy region. Next time you will have enough gold for one of the components in the quickbuy, you will hear a sound and you can easily purchase the item by either hotkey or rightclicking on the corresponding item in the quickbuy without opening the shop. Talking about shops, there are two side lane shops, located at the outside forest near the border of the map of the top and bottom lane, check them out. And there are two secret shops, one between top and mid lane on radiant side and one between mid and bottom lane on dire side, look closely at the map and you will spot them for sure. The secret shops have some high quality items in stock that cannot be found in the normal shop, so sometimes you will need to get your items there.
basic items you will definitely want to check out in your first game (about what they do), you just need to know them since they are some of the most basic items:
- Scroll of Town Portal (you can teleport to allied structures like towers)
- Tangos (3 charges, each charge can be used to eat a tree and grants you some HP regeneration after you have done so)
- Healing Potion (heals 400 hp over 10 seconds)
- Clarity Potion (grants some mana over time)
- Ironwood Branch (good filler item for the start if you have empty slots)
- Magic Stick (gains charges every time a visible enemy casts a spell near you, activate it and it will use up all its charges and restore some HP and mana for your hero)
- Boots (makes you faster)
- Stout Shield (gives you some sustainability against physical attacks)
- Quelling Blade (can cut down trees, opens up new paths if you want)
- Observer Wards (can only buy a limited amount of those per time, but gives you vision on the map to help anticipate enemy movement)
- Sentry Wards (gives vision of invisible or smoked heroes in a decent AOE)
- Dust (will reveal affected invisible heroes for a short amount of time)
- Smoke of Deceit (covers you and heroes around you from enemy eyes, you will only be seen once you attack in sight range of enemies, walk through regions where true sight is available (sentry wards) or come close to enemy heroes)
- Courier (if you play with bots, chances are high, that one of the bots will already have bought a courier; this little guy will help you delivering your items you bought at the base to your hero, since every item you buy is placed to your stash instead of your inventory, as long as there is no shop near your hero that offers the item you just bought; oh and don't let it die: even though it will respawn after 3 minutes, it will give grant your enemies a big amount of gold)
Push towers by clearing creep waves in a fast manner. Sooner or later tower, rax and the main building are going to fall. Your first game is finished. Well done, now it can only get better.
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