General DiscussionI guess it's my turn to rage about a game I played.

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/860435520

luna built vanguard, was splitpushing without tp scrolls, so he pushed until he reached a tower, ppl tp there and kill him
and we won

i was tinker btw

the game was weird, i was having some ping issues, missed lots of lh early on which delayed my bots (i think i got it by min 8 or smth)
my team was getting raped hard by viper, there wasnt many places to farm

but as soon as i got dagon 5 eb (40 min or smth) the game was over, we team wiped, took 2 rax, they forced a fight we wiped again ggez

They did good?

SnY against a team where bloodseeker had only 1 pickoff target. Anyone else I imagine would just manfight him down if he tried silencing them. That farm on the DS is also unbecoming and force staff??? Dagon was okay but blink purely to counter Void was stupid. Battlefury on PA as a damage item instead of farm is actually decent thanks to the splash. Don't think the player was going for that though.

How you could have won? Dude you were an early game support in an early/mid game oriented lineup. You guys should have been balling from the start and it seems you were by Necro raping. Your DS failed to create space. He probably had the largest potential impact in your lineup but he was a scrub.

Nothing you could have done would have won the game. Nothing because your teammates lacked the competency to follow up. I guess the best possible thing you could have done was to be amazing with initiations and setup in your own lane and helped it win hard as well.

that ds was utterly stupid. I mean ok necro didn't build a mek, but ds? its core on that hero. He built a force staff for what? that doesn't give him survivability or utility for the team.

And 47 lh in 38 mins? was he even trying to farm? I mean cmon the hero is fairly simple why do pubs fail with him so hard? you just farm by creep skipping and jungling surge is amazing, and a combo with ult and vacuum takes care of most troubles.

dazzle is very defensive which means you probably won't do shit to make your team comeback and stuff like that

try some aggro supports such as earth shaker, skywrath.. even if your team suck with an ultimate you can change the odds of a fight
you cant do much as dazzle in that sense, in pubs it is hard to time your ulti because people dont coordinate well, so you will end up using it in the midle of a fight where your allies will die before the armor gets huge so its kind of useless if playing with scrubs

sure you can keep 1 guy alive but if your team is getting steamrolled its a matter of time for him to die, then again, nothing you could do about that.

@kitrak
Dazzle is a weird support where he thrives more in the mid game than early game, because he needs a shit ton of mana regen items to consistently heal his team. At level 1-6 he's very restricted in what he can do as his poison touch and grave have crap ranges and crap effects (the poison touch, not grave). This game I should have gotten an urn.

As for feeding, it's a problem of mine as I can't find a good raw hp item for Dazzle (got it narrowed down to Road to Atos (provides most hp,high range slow, 1000 gold components tho D:), Necrobook (least strength, high utilty, but that 1250 recipe cost D:), and Drums (Good everythin, relatively cheap, good aura). I kept getting silenced by Riki tho. D:

The reason I hated on Necro was because:
1. I'm buying sentries and dust, so at best I can get a 40 min mek.
2 He didn't use dagon to kill a lot of the heroes he should have.

I have a communication problem where I feel that my mic isn't good enough, and people in 2k don't like taking advice.

dazzles abilities are all actives so dont level them until you need to use them - always keep skillpoints spare until you need to use them. skills can be levelled quickly by holding ctrl and pressing the associated hotkey. so it's easy to quickly level up a skill and also use it immediately after levelling it.

e.g. ally getting dived at 1? ctrl+w, w+click ally. if you don't need grave, maybe poison touch lets you get a kill at 1. but if you had levelled one or the other as soon as the game started, not knowing which you'd need, you may end up in a situation where you have completely the wrong skill levelled, which also can impact your future skill build

e.g. if you get 1 into grave at level 1, it's impossible to go 2Q/1E at level 3 which could have resulted in a won lane because X happened which results in Y, then you snowball and Z happens, et cetera.

applies to lots of heroes but especially dazzle support because all of his abilities get much better with more levels into them that you can't afford to be wasting skill points especially when you're going to be underlevelled.

try to have a general idea of what your skill build could be at levels 6,7,8 and 11.
• why 6? because you may or may not want your ultimate at that point
• why 7? because thats the earliest you can max an ability. do you even need to max an ability by 7 or not?
• why 8? because thats the level supports easily get, but then they have trouble progressing to 9 and 12 because of the higher-than-normal XP requirements - you can miss timing windows because you skilled something at 9 rather than 8 as a support.

going to level 6, 7 and 8 from the previous level all only require 600 xp when you'd expect it to require 600, 700, 800 xp, while getting to lv 9 requires 1200 xp when you'd expect 1000, and going from lv 11 to lv 12 requires 2200 xp, when you'd expect it to require 1200 xp.

this is for balancing purposes so that when carries are trying to get lv 9 or 12, that gives supports time to catch up in levels and also upgrade their ult to lv 2.

i dont see how you can say dark seer played decently when his gpm is even lower than yours as a core hero, and he chose to get force staff instead of a mek, leaving the 5th position hero to get it, which you didn't even do - not a surprise when you're supposed to be spedning your gold on consumables for the good of the team and farming isn't one of your highest priorities.

try watching the replay and look for mistakes, events with a negative outcome, such as deaths you could not prevent, or kills you did not get. try to remember these mistakes and prevent them from happening the next time you play dazzle

maybe you lacked the slow or the extra damage from not levelling poison touch to get a kill
maybe you could not grave an ally in time because you werent in range, or it was on cooldown where it would not be with an alternate skill build.
or your push ends early because you went medallion where you would have a mek instead.

would the alternate skill build have made a bigger impact on the game? for example. lets say you max grave by 7 and it protects 3 extra deaths because it wasn't on cooldown, compared to your current build. in a vaccuum it seems better because n+3 > n. but what if this alternate skill build results in 5 extra allied deaths because you lacked points into shadow wave.

dont be overly critical of yourself. note down when your skill build (or item build) paid off.

e.g. maybe you levelled poison touch just enough that the extra damage resulted in kills - check the combat log - or a max touch cancelled an important tp.
maybe the cooldown reduction in wave saves your allies multiple times, or weave could have granted you vision of an area, that prevents void chronoing 5 people, et cetera.