Orb Effect Tip: Dual Orbs, Little Known Facts

Quite possibly one of the most misunderstood and in my opinion "should be explained better" parts of DOTA is orb effects and overrides. When a heroes inventory slots are controlled correctly and the right orbs are paired together, you CAN have two functioning orbs together on the same hero.

Key things to remember with orbs:

1. Lifesteal for some reason overrides all other orb effects no matter what the placement of slots are

2. Slot placement matters. Inventory slots on heroes take priority over each other...so depending on where you place your orb items, one may work over the other. The slots, ranking priority, go as follows:

• First priority, top left slot



• Second priority, top right slot



• Third priority, second row from top...left slot



• Fourth priority, second row from top...right slot



• Then so on and so forth all the way down to the end of the inventory slots

Let me explain using a carefully researched orb chart that can be found here by Malle from dota-allstars.com (highly recommend look at this first, which so far I have found no mistakes with) and some common examples from in games I have played...

Common Dual Orbs I see are with:

Sniper - Something I have been seeing a lot recently with sniper is the dual orb effect of skadi and lifesteal. You get the slow attack and the lifesteal. Skadi technically is not an orb on ranged heroes but if paired with say "a desolator" the corruption orb overrides skadi and you get no slow effect from skadi.

Lightning Revenant - Skadi and Maelstrom....You always get the slow effect from the skadi and the only time you won't is when the maelstrom triggers, so both orbs work together as maelstrom triggers on percentages and skadi hits every other time maelstrom does not trigger. It works the same way with maim and skadi. Skadi works on every hit except for when maim triggers.

Item Tip: Bashers 15%

Bashers are arguably a decent item on a few heroes.... This post is focused primarily on heroes with the ability to interchange between melee and ranged form. Heroes of this sort off the top of my head would be Syllabear, Troll Warlord and Terrorblade.

I dont know what you want to call it, a bug or just a little known permutation of the game, but few people seem to know in public games that you can change the basher from being normally 10% bash in ranged and 15% in melee to 15% in ranged and melee.

(All this assumes you bought the basher in ranged form on each of these heroes)

To do this with each of the heroes mentioned above:

Syllabear - If you bought the basher in ranged form, drop it from your inventory, go bear form, then pick the basher back up. Then drop it again. Now go ranged form and pick it back up again and look at the percent bash....it should be 15% instead of 10%. Also, now you can interchange from ranged to melee and it will stay 15% in each form.

With troll warlord and terror blade you do the same thing. Make sure you drop it, go melee form, pick it up (to change it to 15%) , drop it, then go back ranged and pick it up again.

The extra 5% bash gained in ranged form on these heroes is quite nice, especially with some attack speed as you do not have to tank as much to get the same bash effect as a melee form hero.

Extra little known fact with dual bashers....the bash decreases exponentially so dual bashers bash effect is not 30% but rather 15% + (85% x 15%) = 27.75%. So, never get more than one basher on any hero, attack speed always is a better return for your money because you do not get full bash effect after one.

WC3 Banlist: Adding third party approved banlists

Ensuring a good public game of Dota is tough, but I have found that employing third party hosts approved bans has significantly increased the quality of my games. Then the question comes of which ones to use......

I have found that on top of using the buddy banlist system via http://www.banlist.nl/ other xml types (file extension in which the bans are stored, very easy to import into your personal banlist program) that have fairly decent bans are the following:

• TDA Shitlist
• ASG XML (Azeroth Sharing Group)
• ABC XML (Azeroth Banning Corp)
• Approved Bans [your realm] (For me it is Azeroth)

The approved bans of your realm can be obtained by clicking your appropriate realm:

Azeroth,Lordaeron, Kalimdor or Northrend. (These were down for a while, may be working now)

The tda shitlist can be obtained by the following link:

tdashitlist.xml

The fixed approved bans azeroth and the ASG list can be obtained at the following link:

http://banlist.us/download.php

The ABC list can be obtained at the following link:

ABC Ban XML

To import the lists found at http://banlist.us/download.php follow this link to the site and click the lists you wish to download (ASG and Approved Bans Azeroth). Then it will ask you what action you want to perform...Open...Save...or Cancel. Click Save and save it somewhere that you can find once you open banlist (recommend the desktop). Then go into your banlist program and add them by clicking on the green chain looking icon under one of the tabs in the program. It will then ask you the location of the file and you go locate it (for me it was on the desktop) and add it.

To import each of the others into your banlist right click on the link and and select "save target as". When it asks you where you want to save the file at choose somewhere that is easily accessible (I prefer somewhere on my desktop). Then once you do that for each of the links, go into your banlist program and add them by clicking on the green chain looking icon under one of the tabs in the program. It will then ask you the location of the file and you go and retrieve it to wherever you chose to put it (for me it was on the desktop) then you repeat it for each of the other links. (I realize this is a somewhat weak description, if you are completely unfamiliar with this process leave a comment and I will post an additional detailed piece on the process of adding bans within banlist).

New blink dagger or lothars?

With the significant changes made to blink dagger in 6.51, a question arises...... is blink dagger still better to get than lothars on the traditional blink dagger heroes? First, let me define traditional blink dagger heroes. Off the top of my head some would be CM, ES, Sand King, Magnataur, WD....and many others.

With it no longer being the "dagger of escape," due to the 3 seconds added after any hero/spell attacks you in which you cannot blink, the creators have taken away a significant use of the dagger which justified its value. If you are a weak intel hero or agi hero, or even a vulnerable strength hero at times getting attack heavily the dagger often saved your life, even allowing you to dodge stuns if timed right.

Now, the only reason to have a dagger with traditional blink dagger heroes is to blink in and surprise attack w/ an AOE ult or AOE stun that requires necessary cast time or a surprise attack to be effective. With the dual use of the blink dagger gone, does the price of this item still justify its payoff?

On a lot of heroes I would argue no. I think the new lothars is better to get on certain, what used to be "traditional blink dagger" heroes. I have tried on a lot of the intel heroes and I think it is better to get a lothars with them especially. I argue this due to the traditionally weak hp of intel heroes and I often relied on the survival side of the dagger as much as the sneak attack effectiveness it brought. With the survival side gone, lothars is a better item in my opinion because one can still be attacked by someone and go invis with lothars to escape.

However, lothars has many counters....gem, wards, necro book, truesight abilities etc... It seems the days of mass blink dagger games are gone due to their cost/payoff inefficiency. Yet, I do not expect to see mass lothars games either.

To conclude, to universalize when to get a blink dagger or a lothars, I would say that if I am any intel hero, or highly weak agility hero I would go with a lothars because I need the escapability as deaths put ANY hero way behind in a competitive game. I would go with blink dagger still on those heroes that are more tankly like Magnataur, ES, or Sand King who do not need the escapability as much as they have other abilities to aid in escape as well. For them, the blink dagger is still relatively useful and in my opinion justifies the cost as it enhances their ultimates tremendously.

Dota Hosting: Listchecker and WC3 Banlist

By this stage of Dota, many ways of hosting are available (dota client, listchecker, WC3 Banlist, Banlist Beta, GG client). In this post I plan to break down how to use listchecker and run WC3 banlist at the same time. For those of you who are not familiar with listchecker, it is a 3rd party program that you can download by searching google that allows you to host Dota (or any custom game) with little to no lag, assuming the host connection is halfway decent, would recommend at least 5mb dsl/cable or equivalent connection. Anything less than this will lead to monstrous lag and extreme spiking as listchecker is very unforgiving. However, given the right connection capabilities, listchecker is a wonderful program to host with. It hosts with little to no lag because it basically sets up a lan game, as the program bypasses the bnet server system and hosts directly from you to the other players in the game. Downloading and setting it up is somewhat complex and is far too long to implement into this post, so the site I recommend getting it from which does a very good job of explaining how to set it up is here.

Once you have downloaded it and got it working the way it should to host, here are some useful commands (All assuming you have read the manual in the given link). Once you have made the game public by typing /bnethostpublic [game name] ... then some useful in game commands are:

/refreshbnet . . . . allows you to refresh at will in game which is good to use every once in a while if your game is taking a while to fill because the auto refresh on listchecker is quite slow in my opinion

/pingclients . . . . will allow you to see everyones pings in your game..... anything over 90 to 100 i do not keep as usually they will spike or lag and most likely drop

If you are running WC3 banlist along with listchecker, to use its commands while hosting w/ listchecker simply type /bnetcmd then whatever you want to do in WC3 banlist. For example, if i want to check everyones locations in my game while running listchecker I would type . . .
/bnetcmd /fromall
This tells listchecker that you wish to use a bnet function. You use /bnetcmd to also whisper people or do anything else you would normally do if you were logged directly onto the bnet servers.

FYI : For those of you who use custom kick programs do not run with listchecker because since it is a lan game basically when you custom kick someone the whole group of players in game will get booted as the program thinks all players are on a lan. Kicking one leads to the entire 10 players being kicked, including the host (I know this because in my listchecker noob days I did this).

If you are having problems setting up listchecker on your computer or getting it to function properly with other things like WC3 banlist after reading the site I recommended you can leave a comment and I will attempt to help you solve your problem.

Item Explanation: Shiva's Guard

Shiva's guard has a very impressive casting animation, which made me wonder how it was created. It is actually drow ranger's frost arrow cast from the center of the hero possessing shiva's guard and projected out at a certain range from every angle of the hero resutling in the very interesting AOE slow effect and animation.