The International 2013 Immortals

Dota 2 Immortals from TI3 Compendium

Because the 6th goal of 2.6 million US dollars was reached for The International 2013 fundraising, Valve has released different immortals for players who bought the International compendium.
Each player gets an Immortal Reliquary.

Open the Immortal Reliquary and get a chance to get the following items.

2013 Compendium Immortals:

Leviathan Whale Blade - Kunkka Immortal

Upon the rough seas swam the wondrous and terrible leviathan whale, set upon consuming ship and crew, and when it had eaten its fill did it vanish into the roiling waves leaving stranded those in its wake. Forged by one that lived, the blade ever seeks the heart of the beast.


Cauldron of Xahryx - Lone Druid Immortal

Until at Sylla's paw the vile Xahryx fell asunder, the wildest power known was held within the cauldron's depths. In fear of what evil may seek such strength was the vessel taken, and put to heroic purpose.

Whale Hook - Pudge Immortal

Ideally, a hook made for reeling in enormous creatures of the deep would not gouge and hack into the bones and flesh of the prey. But Pudge doesn't much care if he makes a mess of his meat.

Scree'auk's Talon - Vengeful Spirit Immortal 

Scree'auk's Talon was fashioned by a certain winged Mage, forged from shades of unrequited passion, tempered in grief, and quenched in the secret tears of her admirer. More's the pity that she uses it now, approximately half the time, to hunt him.

Mace of the Chosen - Abaddon Immortal

Weapons forged in the primal mists of the Font of Avernus may only be wielded by those the Font has chosen to defend it.

Source : Here

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The International 2013 Unusual Couriers

TI3 Dota 2 Couriers

 
There are 3 types of Dota 2 unusuals to celebrate The International 2013.

Unusual Osky the Ottragon

"Osky! Osky! What a good boy!" He capers and sports, but underneath the playful exterior is an abiding sadness. He misses his siblings.

Unusual Fezzle-Feez the Magic Carpet Smeevil

Fezzle-Feez, like most smeevils, has no floor on which to spread his magic carpet, therefore he unrolls it in mid-air.

Unusual Trapjaw the Boxhound

Within the dungeons of the Severed Keep there sits a treasure hoard long abandoned. Many are the raiders who have set their sights on its wonders, yet only one has ever returned, telling grisly tales of a family of enchanted chests brimming with gold, devouring his friends. 


Source : Here

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Get Smeevil mounts for Dota 2

How to get Smeevil mounts for Dota 2

The International 2013 Smeevil Courier mounts

A genuine Smeevil is a courier given to all players who unpack a Dota 2 Compendium.

There are 3 smeevil mounts: crab, mammoth and bird.

How to get a Dota 2 Smeevil with the Crab mount:
Complete 8 sets of Dota 2 player cards (including 2 challenge teams) to get the Smeevil Crab mount.

* Get Edge Crab Lure (Mythical)
 
How to get a Dota 2 Smeevil with the Mammoth mount:
Complete the creation of an International Fantasy Challenge to get the Smeevil Mammoth mount.

* Get Mammoth Bait (Mythical)

How to get a Dota 2 Smeevil with the Bird mount:
Complete the Main Event Predictions to get the Smeevil Bird mount.

* Get Cleft Hawk's Call (Mythical)

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DotA 2 Guide to Stat Manipulation

 Introduction

Stat manipulating is something most DotA players have heard about, but not something usually used to its full extent. Many of us have heard the casters pointing out how a player dropped two of his gauntlets (+3str) to get the most out of their salves, or heard how changing Power Treads to agi lets you refill more mana and HP with a bottle charge. This guide will explain the inner workings of stat manipulation and cover all relevant tricks, from the most common to the most rare and rewarding.

Basics

All of this guide is focused around filling your bars in the fastest, most efficient way possible. Those bars are your HP bar, with a maximum value of (150+Strength*19+bonuses from items/skills) and your Mana bar, with a value of (13*Intelligence + bonuses from items/skills).

One way to fill those are the passive regenerations, which are:

-HP regeneration = Base Regeneration (all heroes have 0.25 at least) + Strength * .03 + Bonus HP Regen from Items/Skills

-Mana regeneration = Int*0.4*(100% + % based regeneration from items) + Flat regeneration (Basilius and similar auras, Crystal Maiden's Aura)

The other way are items with activable effects and skills with relevant effects to the current HP/Mana values. Since most of these effects are flat (not based on max HP/mana), the smaller your max hp/max mana is, the stronger those effects will be. And that's where stat manipulation comes into play: you can lower your max HP/Mana by either dropping items to the ground or switching power treads while keeping your current HP/Mana percentage the same, get the bars refilled, and increase the max values of the bars again.

There are some maxHP/maxMana changes that change the current values for the same number (and as such, can't be used for these tricks). Those actually hurt or heal you, changing your current % value. Some examples of these are white number stat changes (levelup, Morph), Death Pact(it heals you on activation, and only lowers the maxhp once it finishes) and Armlet of Mordiggian's active effect.

Example scenarios

That's right, straight for the usage examples. I thought about listing items relevant in a separated section, but would have ended repeating a lot of information.
I'll list a bunch of items you have in your inventory, your objective and how much time you have to achieve it. The answers will be spoilered so you get a chance to answer it yourself before checking.


Scenario 0:

You have 20 seconds to recover as much HP and mana as you can.

Drop the gauntlets, use the healing salve and the clarity potion. After 10s, you can pick the gauntlets, since the salve effect has ended, and the clarity effectiveness isn't affected by the strength of the gauntlets

Scenario 1:

You have 3 seconds to recover as much HP as you can, while sitting at max Mana.

Drop the bracers, use Mekansm, pick bracers. You do pay a bit more mana than you could since you lost int from dropping the bracers, but max HP was the targe

Scenario 2:

You're traveling towards your jungle from your ancients, and you want to recover as much HP and Mana as possible during the displacement.

Set the Power Treads to either int or agi and wait. Setting it to int or agi doesn't matter at all, since your max mana, current mana and mana regen scale directly proportional to your int

Scenario 3:
+
Same as before, you're moving through the map and want to recover both mana and HP.

Set the Power Treads to agi and wait. Since you have two sources of flat mana regen (Brillance aura and Vlads aura), setting your PT to int would make those flat regens less relevant

Scenario 4:

You are missing mana, and want to recover as much as possible in 11 seconds.

Set Power Treads to Strength, drop the bracer, use Soul Ring (-150 HP, +150 mana), pick your bracer, set the PT to int and wait 10s.

Since you will increase your int, the 150 mana of the SoulRing will get multiplied by: (Base int+3[Bracer]+8[Power Treads])/(Base int), but you will only lose 150 mana at the end. If you were, for instance, a Level 7 Sven (23 int), you would have gained ((23+11)/23)*150-150. That amounts to 72 mana.

Remember that you could also have spent 150 mana in those 10 seconds (after switching PT to int and picking the bracer), preventing the mana removal, and the SoulRing would have provided 150+72 effective mana. This also allows you to set your PTs back to STR/AGI and keep the same mana % at the end of the SoulRing buff, since no mana will be subtracted.

Setting your PTs to STR, using SoulRing, PT to int, cast a spell, and PT back to STR is a very good habit in combat/farming situation

Scenario 5:
+
You have to manage two heroes that want to recover as much mana as possible.

Hero1 drops both items, Hero2 drops the null talisman and uses the Arcane Boots. Then Hero2 drops the Arcane Boots, Hero1 picks his up, uses them, and then both pick the rest of the items up

Notice that if you had to wait a long period of time, you could keep the Arcane boots or Point booster dropped, since droping those keeps your mana regen the same, but decreases your max and current Mana. If there are flat regens involved, even droping the Null Talisman would help

Scenario 6:

You're at your fountain, sent back by Chen during a clash. You want to recover full Mana and HP as fast as possible to rejoin the fight.

Drop the Aghanim and use bottle. Most of the regen of the fountain is percentage based, but there's a small flat mana regen component, plus the big flat HP/s Mana/s provided by the bottle. Dropping the aghanim and picking it up before teleporting hastens the refill

Hero-specific tricks or item tricks not covered by this guide should be easy to infer from these examples. There are times that neither option is optimal. For instance, you want to use Mekansm. Do you drop the Point booster to get healed for more, or do you keep it to pay less mana? You'll have to decide what's the best option, and if it's worth the risk of getting the item destroyed. Tricks with Arcanes or Mek are safer, since if you're fast enough (specially with shift-queue) it's almost impossible for someone to hijack/destroy the item. On the other hand, bottle or specially salves carry a considerable risk if you're not under an allied tower.


DotA2 exclusive, making use of items during the 10s window

DotA2 has a 10s period of grace during which you can have an item and sell it back for full price, as long as you don't use its active (when possible). Apart from the obvious disadvantages (you could get killed and be forced to keep the items), there's also the fact that if you spend Reliable gold, you will only get Unreliable gold back. You can read about Reliable gold here.

I'll list some useful items from the Side Shop, since that's where this trick is most useful:


You can buy these items to increase your current mana, TP back, and sell them at base. Or you could use them to cast a spell, and sell it right back, to diminish the mana cost on your real mana pool. Energy booster works only if you have already your tier 2 boots (since if not, you'll build Arcane boots and won't be able to sell back for full price).



These can be bought to boost your regen for a few seconds. If you're doing it, it'll be safer to sell and rebuy them each 4-6 seconds, so a 2 second stun doesn't prevent you from selling them (death will always prevent you though, unless you plan to buyback)



Useful to reduce the damage received from delayed damaging effects (like Maledict or Shadow Poison), or preventing Zeus from claiming vengeance in the name of the ally you just killed. It reduces Thundergod's Wrath lvl 1 damage from 169 to 143.

Last words

If you have any scenario you'd like me to cover, maybe even hero-specific (I could make a dedicated section for specific hero tricks), don't doubt asking for them.

Any correction (specially, which are the actual mechanics behind the armlet trick) or suggestion about the other sections is also very welcome.

About the title: I know that DotA2 is supposed to be spelled without capital A. I still think that those of us who consider DotA2 the true and only sequel to DotA should spell it like that, regardless of Valve not being able to do it.

Finally, I want to thank flamewheel for letting me use his AM guide as template.

Source : Here

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Draft Analysis: East versus West

GosuGamers' signature Draft Analysis feature returns with an in-depth breakdown of how Western and Eastern DotA differ from each other in terms of hero selection.  
Much has been discussed among the DotA 2 community about the difference between Western teams' approaches to the game in comparison to their Eastern counterparts. More often than not, teams will pick the heroes that suit their respective gameplans. So while a difference in playstyle is not always noticeable enough to be quantitatively analyzed, we can have a general idea of a team's preferred strategy by looking at their drafts.
Since the 6.78 patch was released, there has been no shortage of high-quality DotA from both hemispheres. With the high volume of games played and thus a relatively large sample size, we again decide to use the patch release date (June 4th) as the starting point for our analysis and July 15th (end of EMS One Finals (West) and Redbull ECL Finals (East)) as the cut-off. Thanks to the great work of our friends at DatDota.com, we were able to gather data from all the tournaments being played over the past month, be it big (Super League) or small (Neolution Cup), thus further validating our samples.
(Note: since we are doing this analysis solely based on the location of the tournaments, Na`Vi's drafts during their participation in Alienware Cup will be counted toward the Eastern total. Also, LGD.int will be regarded as an Eastern team for the purpose of our analysis despite their members' nationalities.)    


1. Top Choices Overall

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Not much of a surprise to see Batrider drafted in 100% of games in the past month. In fact, since mid-December of 2012, Batrider has only been neglected three (3!) times out of 2752 competitive games recorded. While we have seen Wisp being picked more often in recent Eastern tournaments, he has yet to make it to the Top 10 and is still nowhere near the popularity the hero has in the Western scene. The exact opposite applies to Visage.
Despite the nerf to Open Wounds, Eastern teams are still leaning toward Lifestealer as their go-to carry option, while Western teams love their Gyrocopter. The numbers show that the Nature's Prophet, Keeper of the Light and even the Lone Druid are very popular selections among the Western teams, yet could barely even crack the top 20 over on the Eastern chart. A possible explanation could be Western teams' propensity to run pushing/split-pushing lineups, in which these three heroes thrive. Eastern DotA, on the other hand, seems more teamfight-oriented.    
In the next part of the analysis, we will dig deeper and compare the top options of Western and Eastern teams in terms of hero roles in the current metagame. We understand that once in awhile teams will run a support Gyrocopter or a 2-position Nyx Assassin, but the occurences aren't significant enough to alter the sample. Therefore we will stick with a hero's traditional role everytime it appears in a draft.    


2. Top Picked/Banned by Role

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Carry

Pretty boring, isn't it? When it comes to carry heroes, the top 10 choices for both sides of the hemispheres are nearly identical, with the exception of the Chaos Knight (East) and the Phantom Lancer (West). Taking a closer look at the table, however, there are quite a few notable differences. While the GPM machine Alchemist is oh-so-popular in the Eastern scene, he is not much more than a situational, second-tier option for Western teams. Conversely, while Western teams still love the Lone Druid and don't seem to mind playing 4v5 in the first 20 minutes of games just to farm up a Radiance on the Bear, this hero has gradually faded into forgotten land over in the Eastern scene.
Naga Siren is also much more popular in the West; but it seems as though teams are no longer content to run 1-position Naga Siren anymore. We have seen her in mid lane and sometimes even as a support just to make use of her ultimate in setting up favorable teamfights. Also, it's pretty evident that doctors across the globe are successfully finding more and more ways to remove cancer, as the dreaded Phantom Lancer couldn't even make the top 10 list in the East while just barely making it in the West with a meager 16.2% appearance rate.


Solo mid
Breaking: Chinese love dragons. In all seriousness, ever since the 6.78 patch release, Dragon Knight has turned into a go-to mid-lane option for Eastern teams. With a spammable nuke, a reliable stun that's already effective at level one and a built-in HP regeneration, Dragon Knight has the perfect makeup of a solo-mid hero in the current metagame. He's hard to shut down completely early on and also scales very well in the late game thanks to his ultimate. The Western scene is slowly jumping on the DK bandwagon, but they still seem to prefer the traditional ganking mid solos in Puck and the Queen of Pain.
The difference in mindsets of Western and Eastern DotA is reflected in their mid-lane choices here; Eastern teams pick DK because the hero is a relatively safer bet to remain effective throughout the game. On the other hand, QoP and Puck are a lot more level-dependant in comparison to the DK, especially early on. And when teams run these two heroes mid, it's a medium-risk/high-reward bet that, if they have a good start and snowball, they can singlehandedly guarantee an advantage for their team in mid-game. On the other hand if they fall victim to a smoke gank or two early on and struggle, their mid-game impact will take a significant hit.
This also somewhat explains Eastern teams' rationale for sticking with the heavily-nerfed Magnus. They know that even though Magnus most certainly will be at a disadvantage in mid lane, he can still be relied upon later on with just a Blink Dagger because of how powerful and game-changing Reverse Polarity can be in teamfights. This goes to show that generally speaking, Eastern teams are less likely to take risk with their mid-lane options than their Western counterparts, who seem to have a more aggressive approach.


Off-lane/jungler
Either by running an offensive tri-lane or just sacking the lane altogether, teams generally don't seem content to put a solo hero on the suicide lane anymore, unless they have themselves a Dark Seer, Clockwerk, or Bounty Hunter. Nature's Prophet will just go straight into the jungle unless he is up against an opposing solo safe lane. Same thing applies for when Batrider is not banned, teams will most likely pick him and put him in the jungle for a stress-free 8-minute Blink Dagger. Windrunner is picked up quite often in the Eastern scene, but usually as part of an offensive tri-lane (Orange Esports runs this a lot to take advantage of Ohaiyo's incredible Shackleshots). 


Support
Support is the area where West and East differ the most. Eastern teams love to run offensive tri-lanes and roam early with their supports, while Western teams often focus on getting experience in preparation for the mid-game. The Enchantress is a popular pick in the East but not the West because of this exact reason. Western teams like to run Chen as well, but not as a roaming tool early on as he tends to stay in the jungle, get fast levels and a Mekansm for mid-game pushing.
Similarly, Treant Protector is ignored in the Eastern scene because he is not a viable roaming option while Western teams can afford to pick him as a defensive support, let him get experience by creep-pulling while helping out other lanes with Living Armor.We also mentioned above that Eastern teams are generally more teamfight-oriented, which explains their love for the Visage and the Sand King. Sand King is a very high-risk/high-reward pick that can give teams a huge boost if he can get a timely Blink Dagger.

3. Conclusion

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Looking at the drafts, there are plenty of similarities in the way Eastern and Western teams approach the current metagame, at least in terms of hero choices. The hero pool is almost the same. However, differences are still evident as we have discussed above. It's worth pointing out that while the trends are clearly there, we do see certain Eastern teams operating like their Western counterparts and vice-versa. Competitive DotA has always been a copycat community, even moreso now that replays are readily available. But generally speaking, Eastern DotA is more active in the early game and has a stronger emphasis on teamfights and late game; whereas Western teams love to get agressive mid-game with a good start yet can always switch gear to split-pushing and avoiding 5-man engagements if need be.

Source : Here

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