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