- So, we are here for another episode.
We are going to be analyzing 
one of my own replays.
We'll be taking one
from the international.
This game was a
particularly nice game.
It was our first game
against LGD in the grand finals,
and they tried to throw
us off on the landing phase,
what they where trying to do, 
we didn't expect it.
They put some Enchantress mid, 
they put the Storm safe lane,
and the Bloodseeker 
back down to our lane,
but to go back to it, 
since this is a
replay where I'm trying
to learn and I'm also
trying to learn mostly
about myself, not so much
about LGD are doing.
I can start off by
thinking to myself what
was my thought process, 
what did I do and did it work?
So this game, I opted
for a bit of mana here
I'm pulling my guy's tangos,
this case, the mid laner,
and I'm scaling the splinter blast
together with... 
I got my clarity going,
so what I'm trying to
create down here is a nice
game for my Spectre.
We talked about pulling earlier, 
and pulling is
still a very powerful
thing today, and it was
back in this patch as well.
I managed to get
my pull off which helps
my Spectre a lot, it also
helps the lane get back a bit.
He doesn't want to
be up here where
Crystal Maiden can flank him
from one end and
it's just harder to get blasted.
Also, if they are further down,
we might be threatening the kills,
so an optimal place to be
is down here.
So, I managed to pull the
small camp but I wasn't
able to pull it through,
as we got the big camp ourselves,
so what happens with 
a creep wave, well, 
that does depend on the
small camp, but here,
the creep camp didn't kill anything, 
it comes back, and now, 
we have two waves on the Dire team,
and we kind of want to use our creep wave
advantage to do whatever we can with it,
and then what you can do when you have
this many creeps is you
play offensive for a bit.
So, we are now in their face, really abusing
the fact that this is
a meat shield. 
If they right click on us, 
what happens is that the neutral
creeps or... sorry, 
the lane creeps will hit them back.
That's something that you 
often can't tank
this early in the game.
(electronic music)
My thought process is
a lot about the Spectre.
I'm really trying to
give Ana a good game,
I'm trying to give him a good time.
So, I'm also worrying a bit about
"Am I taking XP I shouldn't be taking?"
"Am I taking last-hits 
I shouldn't be taking?"
Not often the case.
Sometimes, you take
last-hits as a support,
most often, you don't, 
but something that can be very
harmful is taking EXP at the wrong time.
Watching a replay can maybe help you
get more mindful about
how much XP you actually took
because, in the game, 
it might be hard to
keep to keep track of.
So, that's again, from my
perspective as a support player,
I'm trying to really help my core.
If my core is happy, 
I feel like I did my job,
but I'm also fully trusting
and believing in Ana's
capability of doing
stuff that I give to him,
doing something with it, you know?
If I give him the perfect start, 
and then he has
the wrong item choice,
well, you could say that he
let me down or he let
down the lead that he got
from the rescorces that
I invested in him
or we invested as a team,
but that doesn't matter,
and it is the wrong mindset to think,
"Oh, it went wrong, 
so I can no longer trust him."
It's just sometimes, 
things don't work
out right, but in this game, 
I remember vividly,
very successful game, 
we managed to really come
together as a team and
also have some moments that
I'm pretty proud of myself, 
but I keep managing my mana,
I keep managing my teleport,
I look at the mini map, 
try to figure out if there's
something that I want to
react to, something that
I want to address, 
and I'm teleporting mid,
and as I do that, 
I also end up dying bottom,
this can be viewed as a
big problem or it can be
viewed as a mistake from Ana, 
I don't really know,
it doesn't really matter in the end.
You still have to be objective about
everything that happens,
me teleporting mid,
it might have saved the tower, 
this tower, we are
going to keep it up for
a very long time and
it's going to be a very
big problem for LGD later on.
Ana ends up TP-ing top,
this also affects my game.
Where is my best position to be?
Again, I don't want to 
overthink anything, I don't want
stress anything, 
something that I could be
stressing would be the
fact that my Spectre now
TP'd top, maybe I have to
be close to him to help him.
Maybe the best way
of helping Spectre is by
pushing the bottom lane.
This is often a very
hard decision and a
very hard call to make,
I often have to make
these choices based off
an instinct during the games.
In the replay I have 
a chance to analyze
and to see if it worked out 
or if it didn't.
My instinct was telling me 
to keep pushing this bottom lane.
I also didn't have effective mana
to TP around, so I would
have felt really bad,
it would have ruined 
my game to go top.
(electronic music)
I often think that
support players, they ruin
their games too often because they are too
considerate about another person's game,
and they don't necessarily
believe in their own capabilities,
what they can do 
given a certain amount
of space where their hero... 
when you get
really confident in a
support hero, we see it
most often with position fours, 
but this patch,
position fives are really strong.
hat I often see is,
a player doesn't believe
in his own ability.
If you don't believe in
your own ability, you can
be burdening your team
a lot more than,
even though you're trying to
enable them, you're trying
to help them as much as
you can, by the fact that
you're not being selfish,
you're not enabling yourself,
you're hindering your team.
You don't dare push that
bottom lane in because you
want to give that
Spectre the perfect game?
Well, you're not really
playing the best Dota you
could be playing, 
and you're probably not helping
the Spectre the best way
you could be helping her.
So, this is a lot of my
thought process when I'm playing.
"How can I help the best?"
"Is it right for me to be 
selfish or selfless?"
Try to think of the
perspective of another player,
watch the replay
from his perspective as well.
This is something that
can give you a much better
idea of the job that you're doing
to help him and it can 
also give you some
insight in, "How greedy should I be?" 
or, "Should I ask for something?" even;
sometimes, you can ask
the carry player to give
you a couple creep waves,
or to go to the jungle or
whatever to help you
get your mana boots.
And this can completely
change the game just because
you know how much
you can do with that mana boots,
or you know how much
you can do given that little
bit of mana space.
(electronic music)
So, moving on in this game, 
we had a funny and
interesting stalemate, 
they have this Enchantress
who is desperately trying
to push our mid tower,
and we have this Treant 
who has living armor
that keeps healing up,
so we kind of read
LGD very well in what
they are trying to do.
They only had a
couple obvious plays
that weren't just their only plays, 
but they were
so obvious that we
managed to counter them.
Here, with this guy constantly 
pushing in the mid lane,
we set up a kill for him, 
if you push this too far,
this is the only thing 
we have to counter
because we were happy with this
state of the game,
whereas LGD felt like they
had a timing that they needed to push, 
or if they don't push it,
we are about to hit our own timing.
So, from our perspective
and my perspective,
we're just countering their
only play on the map, 
we're reading the game; 
what are they doing, what's possible?
Well, I'm top, 
they can't kill me top.
Okay, that means there
are only two other places
that they might be able to go, 
and we just have to
read that and prepare for that.
In this game particularly,
we have a lot of cool combinations,
we have some really strong team fight,
between the Wyvern, the Earthshaker, 
and the Monkey King,
the Treant becomes
a great amount of team fight
given certain conditions,
he needs other people to deal damage,
he needs his ulti
to be good as possible
in this game, it's a very
good Treant game,
not just for tree armor, 
but the overgrowth is just
very, very strong.
But my focus, my contribution 
to this game is
going to be my winter's curse; 
I have these
amazing heroes that 
abuse the setup that
winter's curse is, 
if I catch two or three heroes,
they are about eat an
arsenal of AoE stuns and
enough damage to kill
them always, so that's my
main focus, to use my
winter's curse well,
and there also a lot of 
value in cold embrace,
their two spells is
more about deep pushing.
It's of course, if you land
a good one in a team fight,
it's a great team fight,
but these are the two
things that I mainly focus
on looking at my teammate,
when should I embrace him, 
looking at the enemy,
when should I curse him, 
and in this game,
I think we managed to
land a couple cool combos.
But there is also another
use of winter's curse
that is way less flashy
and is way less interesting
but I was still proud of 
that winter's curse,
even though it was very simple.
(electronic music)
So, moving forward in this game, 
we managed to
get stronger and stronger,
we hit out strong timings
our Monkey King now has
two items that just makes his
wukong incredibly strong,
we have all our spells,
our Spectre also managed
to get a manta.
Another really, really big timing, 
Shaker, blink dagger,
and we see this fight going really well,
I'm a big problem for them; 
I'm again, something that is
stopping the Storm from
killing the guy he wants to kill,
I'm also potentially
setting them up for
disasterous team fight, 
so they start focusing me
because I can also die very easy; 
Storm opted for an orchid,
but this also gives us freedom,
this is also part of the draft,
but part of the Wyvern hero,
it gives us freedom in
the sense all the heroes
begin to counter-jump the Storm, 
who has to go on me,
so they are no longer worried 
about the Storm jumping them,
they can even go in because they
know that the Storm have to jump me.
But here, we are going
to see even more usage.
Let me go back a bit,
we are going to see how
you can also look at these spells, 
even though they
are fantastic team fight abilities 
and they are great tools.
I buy back after dying in the fight,
I use my cold embrace on Ana,
and I winter's curse the Ench,
simple, just to stop her from hitting,
buying my Spectre some time
to heal up more.
This is... again, you just
have to make the best use of
the situation, it's not
the best winter's curse,
it's not the most flashy winter's
curse that just turns into
a triple kill or anything
like that, but the winter's curse
set up Ana for enough HP 
to now run into the Storm,
survive the Enchantress,
and yeah, that was huge for us.
Them getting a kill 
on their strongest
core like this, 
us getting the mid tower.
Oftentimes, people are
very shy with how they use
their spells or they
kind of think there is
only one good way of using a ability.
Once you truly start
feeling a hero, you're going
to start... you notice yourself
that you're going to start
using spells much more often 
given any situation,
and you don't limit
yourself so much too.
Getting the great mumbo combo or hoping
that you play so well that
someone makes a YouTube
video of it.
Often times, the great spells are the
ones that are used very modestly, 
and that goes to show
that you're really into
the game and your head's
into the game.
I will show you one more
example of a winter's curse
that I was thinking a
lot about, I was thinking
about my best purpose in the fight,
and yet a lot of people
might not have thought
anything of it or might
not even have noticed it; 
we decided to go for
the Roshan here, they have
some of the better Roshan
contesting heroes, 
blood rite spam from Bloodseeker,
the big one is ET stomp 
and the ET spirit.
We are going to have this team fight, 
Wukong is being expended, 
we kill the Crystal Maiden
BKB is being used by a Bloodseeker,
looking great, we are going
to go back to finishing Rosh,
and I'm already thinking 
about one of our big problems.
A continuous, annoying problem is
this echo stomp, and as you can see, 
I simply just
trade my ultimate that
has an 80-second cooldown
for a 12-second second cooldown
or an 11-second cooldown stomp
just because I don't
want it to interrupt the
team fight that we're having down here.
Our communication, 
going back to our other
episode about team fight, 
we talked about everything that
LGD were looking to do,
or what they were trying to do,
and I thought to myself, 
if I stopped the stomp,
my Shaker and Treant,
they will deal with the
Bloodseeker and the Storm,
I don't have to worry,
no problem there, so very
modest use of winter's curse,
but at the same time, 
I feel like it was one of
the better uses; this again, 
your small, individual battle in Dota,
your idea versus his idea,
he wanted to mess with the rush,
fight to his stomp,
I didn't want to give it to him, 
so yeah, I thought about it,
I invested into it, 
and made it work.
