Team Moral and Mid-game mistakes

DOTA is an RTS, you need to turn kills into objectives and increasing map control, or you the comeback mechanic will turn your "over-leveled / over-farmed" heroes into a liability.

First, your safe / mid lane don't make sense. I get the Legion pick as a blink-initiator to deal with some of their team, but Abaddon? You gave Batrider an easy lane, should have drafted something else if you knew you wanted the aggressive offlane tri.

Second, on your first tower push, you should have taken T1 and T2 - the enemy was on their back foot and you had a real ability to keep pushing.

Third, your smoke gank at 16 minutes? Why did you wrap so far, you went woods, you saw they weren't there, you saw they weren't at T1, they had to be grouped either offlane or grouped mid - you should have seen wood were clear and IMMEDIATELY rotated the smoke into Rosh.

Then around 18 ~ 19 minutes, you decide to awkwardly Rosh, with 3 of your heroes out of position spread by mid. You know they have a Batrider, and he does his thing - easy swoop in, pulls out Troll, gets the kill, makes Rosh stop happening.

Around the 20 minute mark is where I feel your failed ganks and generally odd decisions start to really accumulate against you. We could get specific on item choices, movement, where people are farming - etc... but I think your gank / fight at 20:40 is the most revealing.

So, at 20:40 you commit basically most of your lockdown abilities (Rubick, Legion) to ganking a Dazzle. Then you're all grouped in the enemy jungle, allowing an easy Silence / AA-ult onto your group. Drow immediately focuses down Rubick (since he's you're only real remaining disable) and then turns to take down your Tombstone (your real last disable). At that point, you're boned.

Batrider is going sexy mess on you, your whole team is standing in fire, Drow is working heroes down 1-by-1 using the fog to avoid being targeted, and the rest of the enemy team just disrupts anything that could potentially threaten Drow.

Just... bad decision making. There's a point in the game for ganks, and there's a point in the game where you say "okay, laning phase over, now we play smart".

If you watch a ton of pro games, you'll see where they don't go for a gank that you as a spectator think they could get - because of the risk factor. You have to evaluate that - you guys could have been pushing as 5 from the 12 minute mark and winning, but you instead gave the enemy a ton of chances to use their heroes against you.

The enemy takes Rosh, you guys have another bad fight into the Aegis, and at this point you're facing a farmed Drow and Necro against your Abaddon (bleh... I mean seriously, bleh, worthless) and Troll.

At that point you really needed disables - like, the Hood on Undying? Uh, what? A single Force Staff could have killed Drow for you multiple times or disrupted Batrider.

The TL;DR... you guys were winning at 12 minutes, you stopped pushing and started doing weird ganks for some reason, the enemy team had a Batrider / Necro / Drow, and you guys got wrecked because you failed to recognize the game state.

And yeah, sorry if that's kinda blunt / harsh - but I hope it's helpful. I've played a couple of accounts to 5k, and I just generally see these kind of throws come from decision making.

/r/DotA2 Thread