How to Raise Your Dota 2 MMR In Season 4

How to Increase Your Dota 2 MMR: Fighting

Throughout history, many were the times when an army with worse equipment and fewer soldiers emerged victorious out of an unfavourable battle. In Dota 2 games the same thing happens when one team plays and coordinates very intelligently during team fights, while the other wrongly assumes that it has already won the match just because it has an advantage in gold and experience. Here are the fundamental principles and strategies of Dota 2 fighting:

1. Occupy the high ground

When the fight takes place on a terrain that contains stairs, these stairs create portions of low ground and high ground. In such situations, occupying the high ground gives you two advantages:

• Better vision. In the absence of an Observer Ward, allied units or certain abilities placed on the high ground, your opponents won’t be able to see you due to the fog of war, while you will be able to see them.
• 25% evasion against ranged attacks. When a ranged hero attacks uphill, it has a 25% of missing its attack (unless it has a Monkey King Bar).

2. Don’t attack alone into a well-positioned enemy group

When you initiate the fight, search for a poorly positioned target that has separated itself from the pack and can no longer be instantly helped by its teammates. Or, if you initiate in the midst of the enemy team (with a hero like Magnus or Enigma), make sure that the rest of your team is close enough to be able to intervene right away and take advantage of your initiation. Otherwise you will most likely catch just a few heroes in the disable with which you make the initiation, and the others, being close to them, will counter-attack using their items and abilities. This usually results in your quick death and a wasted long-duration cooldown ultimate.

This principle also applies for heroes who do not initiate through an AoE (Area of Effect) disable, or in situations like defending a tower. I’m pretty sure you had at least one time the experience of losing your entire team in such a situation, in which your opponents had occupied an assault position near one of your towers, while your teammates were trying to stop them from taking this objective by attacking or teleporting in one by one. Always keep an eye on the minimap and check how far you are from the rest of your team. Otherwise you risk attacking just by yourself into an enemy concave and getting killed instantly before anyone can intervene to help you. All of us do this from time to time, and then spam pings and rhetorical questions: “Team? Team? Team?!...”.

3. Divide and conquer

A lineup works like a machine in which every piece has a vital role in the functioning of the whole. If the “heart” dies, the entire lineup dies. If the link between the support heroes and the rest of their team is severed during a fight, the entire team suffers.

The strength of a team during fights depends on the way in which its members synchronize and help each other. And the key to destroying this team in such moments is to identify and sever the critical links that its playstyle relies upon. Maybe they have a Dazzle who wants to keep his Shallow Grave ability in order to save a teammate. Or an Omniknight who’s trying to stay near his allies in order to cast a key spell at a critical moment. Forcing these support heroes to use their abilities on themselves, or keeping them away from the rest of their team during a fight, can be a sure way to victory.

The divide and conquer principle also applies when facing a team whose gold and experience advantage is too big and who can no longer be defeated in a 5 vs. 5 battle. In such situations, the strategy of split-pushing implicitly uses this principle by forcing the enemy team to split its forces into groups that can be beaten separately.

4. Make sure you have superior vision at the place of the fight

When you know that you’re about to fight at a static location such as a tower or near the Roshan pit, it’s very important to make sure you have excellent vision over that area and are prepared for any kind of initiation from the enemy team. Especially if it has invisible heroes, or items such as Shadow Blade and Blink Dagger. At the same time, you gain a big advantage if you manage to take away your opponents’ vision. Without it, they can no longer follow your movements and predict what you’re trying to do. Because of this, Observer and Sentry Wards cannot miss from your support heroes’ inventory in such moments. These wards should be placed before the fight begins in order to ensure a vision advantage for your team, and, ideally, a lack of vision for your opponents.

5. Identify where the enemy damage comes from and prevent it from being utilized

A lineup will almost always have heroes whose role is to deal damage, and heroes meant to help the first ones fulfill their role as damage dealers by creating the necessary conditions and enabling them to attack as much as possible during fights.

Identifying the key sources of damage of the opposing team allows you to create a strategy for avoiding that damage. Sometimes you will decide together with your teammates to buy Force Staffs in order to save someone from an enemy hero like Ursa or Life Stealer. Other times you will decide that a Heaven’s Halberd or an Orchid is the right item to buy in order to prevent a damage dealer from doing their job. Ghost Scepters, Eul’s Scepters, Glimmer Capes and Black King Bars are other alternatives.

Ghost Scepters, Eul’s Scepters, Glimmer Capes and Black King Bars are other alternatives. Regardless of how you decide to deal with this problem, the key thing is to identify and address it. Otherwise your team will be completely unprepared to fight against certain types of heroes, or it will fight them in a random and unthoughtful way, with completely unpredictable results.

6. Pick your battles intelligently

Ideally, you should be seeking direct confrontations with the enemy team’s heroes in moments that are favorable to you and unfavorable to them. There’s no point in starting fights that you cannot win due to a big difference in gold and experience favoring your opponents. It’s also a bad idea to force a fight when:

• Certain key abilities of your team are on cooldown.
• One or more teammates are low on mana and HP.
• You would have to fight in numeric inferiority, due to the fact that one or more members of your team will not be able to get to the scene of the battle in useful time.

Before engaging in a direct confrontation with the enemy team, ask yourself four questions:

• What are my chances of winning this fight given the balance of power between my team and the enemy team?
• Should I win this fight, what objectives do I stand to win (a tower, Roshan etc.)?
• Should I lose this fight, what objectives do I stand to lose?
• Is it absolutely mandatory that I engage in this fight?

And if the answers indicate that it would be better for you to avoid the fight, simply dodge it and use your time in a more intelligent way: by farming, pushing the lanes and so on.

7. Deceive and bait your opponents into traps

Every time you show yourself on the map, your enemies will decide whether to attack or leave you alone. And when making this decision, they will ask themselves the questions mentioned above in order to determine whether the fight makes sense for them or not. Who would foolishly launch an attack that’s destined to fail?

During such moments, you can hide a part of your forces and create the impression that you’re weaker than you actually are. And in doing so, you might bait your opponents into starting a fight under circumstances that actually favor you, not them.

Hiding forces can be done using smoke, Shadow Blades or the limits of your enemy’s vision. People often hide in the trees or simply in a fog of war area, and reveal themselves only after their opponents took the bait.

8. Use a focused damage approach

Whenever you can, focus the team’s damage on one or a maximum of two key targets. This will greatly increase your chances of bringing down an enemy hero before they or their team can react. Subsequently, such an advantage obtained at the start of the fight can have a snowball effect, leading to an entire team wipe or a scared enemy who will soon be in disarray, with every team member running for his life.

On the contrary, if everyone on your team goes for a different target and the damage is spread thin, the results are likely to be poor.

Good teams usually decide these matters ahead of time, or at the very latest during or just before the fight. They will identify who the most important targets are and they will go for them.

9. Don’t passively farm with a team-fight oriented lineup

If your team picks heroes that are slow farmers but good fighters, and if your opponents have a weak early game fighting potential but scale better (become stronger) into the late game, go fight them as soon as your team has hit a power peak. Force fights around objectives like towers or Roshan and press your early game advantage. If you fail to do this you will most likely lose, because neutral time (time during which neither team takes any meaningful objective) passes in your opponents’ favor, who will most likely outfarm and overpower you if left alone to do whatever they want for a significant number of minutes.

10. Don’t bite more than you can chew

After winning a fight, a team’s tendency is to keep pushing and fighting without going back. This is especially true in low MMR brackets, where players don’t really stop and think about what caused them to win the fight in the first place. Often times, this decision to keep going forward is a mistake and leads to defeats that reset the advantage that was previously gained.

If you watch professional tournaments, you will notice that teams, after winning a fight, usually take an objective such as a tower and then go back to regenerate and farm some more. Why do they do this? Because they recognize that the fight was won due to the abilities that they used, which may now be on cooldown, and also due to the fact that their heroes had high HP and mana at the beginning of the fight, but may now be low on both of them. At the same time, their enemies will soon respawn and be at full strength.