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Comprehensive Guide to Team Play (Part II: Team Plays and Combos)

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Comprehensive Guide to Team Play (Part II: Team Plays and Combos)

1.	Introduction
2.	1. Recognising Team Compositions
3.	2. Have more than one trick up your sleeve
4.	4. Pressing the advantage with early combinations
5.	Part III: Team items and misc. things to note

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Introduction

Hey all!
This is the second installment to my guide on team plays.
If you haven't seen the first guide which is an elaboration on Team Positions, please have a quick look here!

This second installment will cover more on the different types of team compositions and hero choices to be made when choosing your heroes on a team. In a best case scenario, each hero should have synergy with all other corresponding heroes on the team. More often than not, selfish hero picks will do your team more deficit than good. While the hero choices, combos and synergies are almost infinite in dota, I will try and cover the basics and from there, hopefully you can/will see better hero choices.

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1. Recognising Team Compositions

This is the first step to picking an effective team. As basic as it sounds, I have played against players who simply fail to recognise threats until it is too late.

Sometimes, your opposing team will pick an entire team right off the bat without even waiting to see your team picks. When something like that happens, warning signs have to go off inside your head. This means that your opposing team already has a plan in mind.

On occasions like these, you might see a deceptively weak team pick that looks something like this.

Fresh or even some seasoned players would look at this team and say "Hah, theres only a Sven to worry about. I shall pick a high dpser like the anti-mage to run around the map to kill all these mana intensive heroes."

This in itself is a wrong pattern of thinking. If you are against a team who want are brave enough to only pick a hard carry with a handful of support heroes, you have to realise these picks are probably pre-planned and in your head, work out why these choices have been made.

In picks like these, you can be assured that the Hard Carry Sven, will be farmed up faster than any of your heroes regardless of what they choose to play. Why and how?

1. Regardless of whether they go for an aggressive tri-lane or opt for the more traditional pub style 2 1 2 (2 heroes on the top and bottom lane respectively and 1 hero on the middle lane), these heroes have to potential to put immense amounts of pressure on any of the lanes. This allows Sven a quick and continuous farm with the level of sustainability this team has to offer. (Heals, mana regeneration, mana restoration etc etc)

2. In team battles or ganks, you can rest assured that all focus will be on sven. Be it heals, mana, spell immunity, physical immunity or even damage enhancement, this team will provide Sven with everything he needs to rush around to knock out every last one of your team heroes.

In a nutshell, without elaborating too much on this team, the point of this chapter is to help players realise the importance of team compositions and the threats they might pose.

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2. Have more than one trick up your sleeve

One fatal error even experienced teams make is that they build a team around a singular type of strategy. A common play among pubs is the solo-lane Broodmother. This play puts an immense pressure on the opposition as not only does a Broodmother have a permanent invisibility at level 1, her spiderlings are able to give her high pushing capabilities. With her incapacitating bite, she could actually go for kills in the early game.

This build usually forces opposing teams to bring up heroes from other lanes to help stop the broodmother wave, thus giving the BM's team time to farm and push other lanes. When this build works, the BM's team tends to snowball out of control which later leads to a much easier victory. However, when this build fails, more often than not, the broodmother still will continually push that lane as her webs are already set up. This essentially turns the tide against her team, as her team mates will have to run a 4 v 5 more or less half the time, in which case, the opposing team WILL snowball out of control.

Pick teams that have the versatility to adapt to situations. Afterall, DOTA wasn't built on a single form of strategy. An easy way to do this is to pick a team that can centre around 2 different forms of strategies.

Here is an example of such a team : -

As you can see, this team is built around a sort of global range play. This is a team would mean easy pick off for junglers because of the bloodseeker's thirst. This would mean at any point in time, lone heroes are often in danger due to the availability of zeus's wrath, invoker's sunstrike and prophet's teleport. The counter to a team like that is to simply ball up and have a support farm a pipe of insight as soon as possible, along with other health restoration items. With this, global team's potential is substantially lowered. But with an enigma in the mix, they can take this fight to either one of two sorts of strategies.

1. Enigma as an initiator. Anyone who has seen an enigma and invoker combo will know how much burst damage these two can cause. With zeus in the mix, a balled up team would mean certain death.

2. Dual lane split push As though a prophet with a shadowblade isn't annoying enough. imagine 2 more pushers going on a seperate lane, both with escape mechanisms. With invoker's ghost walk and a blink dagger on enigma, it is very likely opponents will have to start spamming and devoting resources to buying town portal scrolls just to defend against the never ending waves of treants, forge spirits and eidolons.

This is essentially how you start forming combos that are both deadly and versatile.
But then again there are still a myriad of ways to counter this team. No team in so far has been perfect enough to counter every line up.

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4. Pressing the advantage with early combinations

In the early stages of the game, one of the most basic ways to get ahead is to give your hard carry all the farm. For about 90% of the matches i've played, i've been a position 5 for all of them, which means Primary Support. This means laning with the Hard Carry and assisting him in anyway possible. In situations where the Hard Carry hero is decided, the Primary Support should pick heroes to best compliment the Hard Carry. Either have a hero to significantly improve his farming/killing capabilities or enhancing his survival capabilities.

But sometimes there are combinations which are insane enough to start putting insane pressure on opponent teams.

Here are some examples: -

Offensive Combos

Offensive combos are combos that are designed to move in for kills in the early stages of the game, giving your hard carries an early gold and experience lead.
Eliminates early need for centaur's blink dagger owing to tusk's snowball
Constant slow with Bladefury takes out almost any hero without escape mechanisms
Dual disables combined with rocket barrage and homing missile makes easy work against almost any hero
Invisible ion shell combined with decently high burst from bounty hunter

Defensive Combos

These are combos to support your hard carries and enable them to continually stay in lane tso that they don't lose out on gold/experience
This combo makes abaddon an unstoppable farming force early game owing to already how hard to kill he already is (actually a dazzle that dedicates itself to babysitting a hard carry pretty much makes it insanely hard to kill already)
This actually works both ways owing to the fact that huskar tanks up spell damage like a dry sponge and also converts to a deadly combo at level 6 where the omni heals huskar upon life break.