Speeed: “An important point in Dota: kills early in the game aren’t that valuable.”

We’re up against Clockwerk, so I’m playing Venomancer in this game. I’m trying out a new strategy that my teammate Bignum told me about: using Plague Wards at level one to destroy the cog machines. Pretty cool, isn’t it? They’re worth a decent amount—18 gold—and if you destroy them, he won’t be able to use them. So it’s a decent way to deal with them, though not entirely foolproof.

An important point in Dota: kills early in the game aren’t that valuable. If you spend too many resources on a kill, especially when the enemy was already low on health, it’s absolutely not worth it. For example, at the start of this push under the tower, they were both at full health. If they retreat now, they’ll have a gold lead. If they hold it—another reason why pushing under the tower is bad: you’ll likely lose two creeps. In the end, they lose both gold and the lead.

They could have combined their waves and continued to build their advantage on the lane. Instead, they’re like, “Oh, let’s attack him. 200 gold!” Even if they kill him, it’s not worth it. He’ll just return to the lane with full health and full mana, and if they’re out of resources, he’ll be able to kill them, giving him a creep advantage—which is arguably more important than kills.

Clockwerk is like, “I’ll try to outplay you”—and ends up dying. Even if he didn’t die, it’s still terrible because you simply couldn’t stay on the lane for a full 45 seconds or a minute.

You need to act simultaneously. If you’ve decided to defend the bottom lane, everyone should teleport at the same time. How do you use this advice in ranked matches? Countdown. If you’re in the mood and ready to take charge, do a countdown: 3, 2, 1—teleport.

I sincerely believe they could have won this game. Of course, even if they outplay us in the early game and build a 3–4 thousand net worth lead, they’ll still have to fight hard because we have a good setup for Phantom Lancer and Lycan. But they need to win the early game against Lycan and PL; otherwise, it’ll be really tough if they fall behind with their heroes.