What Is Dota 2 and How to Play It

Dota 2 is one of the most popular MOBA games in the world. With an active player base of around 9 million, this esport is famous for its history, tournaments, prize pools, and beauty. In this guide, I will present the fundamentals of Dota 2 and try to give you a better understanding of what you’re getting yourself into, in case you’re not already a die-hard fan.

What Is Dota 2

Dota 2 is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game. It basically has RPG elements, such as heroes, items, and gold, mixed with the fast-paced action and RTS elements (such as buildings) of a game like StarCraft 2. At its core, Dota 2 is PvP StarCraft, if that makes any sense. It is played in a team versus team format, with 5 people on each side. Each of them picks a hero from a pool of more than 100 options and the goal is to get as powerful as possible, as fast as possible, in order to overwhelm the opposition and win.

How Dota 2 Is Played

The game takes place on a unique map. If you’re used to CS:GO or Overwatch, you’ll learn that in Dota 2, you always compete in the same arena. This arena is a two-sided territory split by a river. And on each side, you get a team made up of 5 heroes, which in turn need to defend a set of buildings. The most important of these buildings is the Ancient.

To get to the Ancient (think of it as the king in chess), the opposing team needs to destroy lane towers and make slow progress toward this final goal. This is not easy though. On each of the 3 lanes that make up a team’s side of the map, there are monsters called creeps. These are units that spawn every 30 seconds and their behavior is simple: advance on a lane and attack everything that’s an enemy. If your units can get near an enemy structure, they will attack and damage it. And with enough damage, it will collapse.

In order to achieve this, a team needs to use its heroes wisely, both offensively as well as defensively. On the one hand, you don’t want to lose your structures. But on the other, you want to take down your enemy’s.

The Role of Heroes

Before the game actually begins, the 10 players need to pick their heroes. Each of them gets to choose just one character from a large number of options and will need to stick to that choice for the entire duration of the match.

Once the heroes have been picked, the game starts and you spawn in your team’s fountain, the place where you can quickly regenerate and buy items. With the little gold you have, you will buy some consumables and then go to your lane. Or, who knows, perhaps assist your team in some tactic designed to get a kill.

Roles

Different heroes are suitable for different roles. In Dota 2, there are 5 roles: carry, midlaner, offlaner, roamer, and support. The roamer is usually a semi-support, but unlike the position 5 support, he’s roaming around the map, trying to assist his team wherever he’s most needed. Sometimes he secures a kill, other times he saves a teammate. There’s a lot that this role can achieve, especially in the early part of the game. And that’s because Dota 2 is a game in which you’re trying to get ahead in gold and experience and then put that power to use in the most effective way possible.

Gold, Experience, and Items

Heroes receive gold whenever they kill an enemy unit (creep or hero), or when their team destroys an enemy structure. Of course, it’s more complicated than this, but the basic idea is that you get gold whenever you score some kind of small victory against the other side. In particular, enemy creeps only give you gold if you land the last hit. If you’re the one doing the killing, you get absolutely nothing except experience. That’s why one of the first things you need to learn as a Dota player is how to land last hits.

As you might imagine, the amount of gold you get for each creep kill is small. But it adds up. Heroe kills offer a lot more gold, and depending on their level, several kills can offer you a big advantage, not just in net worth but also in experience.

The gold you’ve gathered can be used to buy items. The more powerful the item, the more gold it will cost. And that’s the whole purpose of getting ahead in this department: if you get ahead in gold, you will buy better items and become stronger. And with that strength advantage, you will likely with direct hero battles more easily. When teams fight each other on the map, the stronger one usually wins. Of course, much depends on other factors as well (such as positioning, hero composition and so on). But a raw numbers advantage is often hard to overturn.

Levels, Talents and Abilities

The growth of a hero depends not just on the items you buy for it, but also on its level. The maximum level on a hero is 30. You get levels by gaining experience. And you get experience by killing creeps and enemy heroes. With each new level, you get a skill point and some attributes like Strength or Agility. At certain levels, such as 10, 15, 20, and 25, you get to pick a talent.

Almost every hero has 4 unique abilities. The first 3 are available on level 1 while the 4^th becomes available on level 6. And you get to put 4 skills in the first 3 abilities and 3 skills in the 4^th. But there are constraints to this, of course.

The key of the game is to think about your team and what you can do together: the right mixture of heroes, used optimally throughout a match, will allow you to overpower the opposition and win.

 

Photo credit: Valve