These 10 tips will improve your Dota 2 gameplay

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like Dota 2 tend to be self-explanatory to a certain point. While it may feel like you’ll never understand what’s going on in a complex team fight, every player develops a basic game knowledge.
Once the foundation is set, improving further requires a bit of studying, however. If you’ve started feeling stuck in a bracket and don’t know what you can do better, it means you’re ready to take the next few steps.
There are some relatively straightforward tricks that higher level players use to gain an advantage over the less knowledgeable, but also to optimize the flow of their gameplay in each game. From the simplest mechanical tasks to the most complex of moves, some things separate players who play for fun and those who play to win.
While small efficiency tricks will increase your game knowledge, they’ll mean less if you keep making the same fundamental mistakes. Before implementing advanced tricks to your gameplay, you should perfect your understanding of the game and fully grasp the essence of Dota 2.
Here are the best tricks you can apply to take both you and your team’s Dota 2 experience to the next level.
Fundamental tips
Understand the game and your role
While it’ll be easy to perform in a game where your team’s winning all the lanes, it may get confusing to identify what you should do when the game starts going south. Most newcomers to Dota 2 usually prefer following their team even if it means losing fight after fight.
To make the most of every game, you should first study the game and become able to identify bad situations from the good ones. Once you can start telling where the game is going, you should play to your role’s strengths.
If you’re a support, you should focus on providing safe vision and enable your team to farm safely while having a teleportation scroll (TP) ready to help your team whenever they need you. A carry should focus on getting farm and completing essential items until achieving a certain confidence level. If you’re on a playmaker offlaner or a mid laner hero, it’ll be hard to play from behind but you should try your best not to take any bad fights.
Knowing how much farm you should take is also another vital aspect to consider. While the position five player’s prime objective is to allow their other teammates to farm safely, position four supports need to play in a way that allows them to farm at least a bit, which will help them be online when it comes to hero interactions and teamfights. Position one and two players will need the most farm to potentially carry the game, while position three players will settle for a certain amount of farm that gets them going most of the time.
All of these are aspects that each player will grasp over time as they play more. Still, you can speed up this process gradually by tuning into educational streams of high-level players and watching professional games.
Study the metagame and find your place in it
Metagame, also referred to as ‘the meta’ by some, refers to the most popular heroes in a given patch and the most viable strategies. Though you should be able to figure out what works and what doesn’t from professional games and personal experience, studying your skill bracket is critical to reducing your sample size.
Statistical websites like Dotabuff and OpenDota gather data from all skill brackets to help players understand the metagame around different skill tiers. A hero can have a high win rate in lower brackets while it may struggle in Divine and above. It’ll always be hard to master all heroes, so if you aim to climb up in ranks, we recommend picking a role and a couple of heroes that have positive win rates to master.
Mastering a handful of meta heroes and a role will give you the best chances of winning in a specific meta and your skill bracket. Watch guides for your heroes and roles to understand our effect on the game. Try not to die without casting spells at least once in fights and master the art of positioning to get the most out of your hero.
Understand objectives and resources
Dota 2 is a game of objectives. You can be 30 kills behind, but it won’t matter the slightest if you manage to take down the ancient. There will be times defending a tower will mean everything, while sometimes you’ll need to sacrifice resources to gain more substantial advantages like the Aegis of the Immortal from Roshan.
From a support’s point of view, even taking down an enemy ward is an objective and you should consider helping out your supports while they’re trying to provide vision. Placing wards around the enemy will also enable your team to cash in on the enemy team’s resources, such as their jungle camps. This will increase the total amount of farm your team receives, which can transition into a stable lead over time.
Grasping these two concepts will help your position one and two carry players to farm safely since your more durable heroes can surely utilize the resources close to the enemy territory. You’ll be keeping the enemy busy as well which will cause them to fall behind in terms of farm. You should understand that going as five people may not always be the best strategy all the time and playing the game of resources can secure a solid win.
Play around timings
Just like objectives, timings, and the element of surprise are some of the most powerful tricks in Dota 2. If you’re against a magic damage heavy line-up, consider using a Smoke of Deceit right after your carry players purchase a Black King Bar. Taking the fight to the enemy, before they know your carries’ item situation, will catch them off guard and give you an upper hand to take down a more significant objective. Gimmicks like these can be essential to take down Roshan or take down a lane of barracks.
The same applies to the mentioned enemy team as well. If you understand the gold income rates and the timing within the game, you can prompt your team to take action before a certain hero completes an item. In the same case, the enemy team could be the ones using the Smoke of Deceit and gank the enemy carries before they finish their items, which would delay their timing even further.
You should also be aware of the timings throughout the map, like the Roshan, which spawns between eight and 11 minutes. Bounty Runes spawn every five minutes starting from the beginning of the game and reward your team with an increasing amount of gold with each spawn. Power-up runes spawn every two minutes, starting from the two-minute mark. Power-up runes include Double Damage, Haste, Illusion, Invisibility, Regeneration, and the Arcane Rune.
Each rune, including the bounties, can be a recipe to make a play. You should consider strategizing around these timings to catch the enemy team off guard.
Don’t hesitate to change your gameplan and item build
Though you may have expectations of how a game should go before it starts, Dota 2 can always surprise you.
Swapping lanes, teleporting to help, or ganking a lane in need can help you secure an early advantage. Don’t be afraid about moving from your lane if you see an opportunity to help out a teammate. Enabling a teammate can lead to them helping you once they solidify their lead.
The same goes for your item build, too. Your guide might be telling you to finish off that Sange and Yasha before everything, but sometimes you may need to consider an early Black King Bar to stand your ground in team fights.
While you’ll fully grasp these situations with time, mastering a handful of heroes while watching professionals will undoubtedly help your progress. This is because you’ll know your heroes’ strengths and witnesses through both experience and study.