4Game

So, I've been struggling with getting additional MMR points. I'm currently rated between 200 and 300 MMR points. And I'd need some advice on what position is best suited for that?

Midlane Viper

I devised this strategy for getting MMR points, which was this unorthodox Viper build that I play on the midlane, especially the Dire midlane. Basically I buy the arcane boots and stack camps and try to farm really efficiently, instead of harassing the opponent with poison attack, so basically all the mana goes into nether toxin, and zero mana go into harassing into the opponent. That also means they're having a good game, but I'm having a better game coz Nether toxin is great for farming camps. On the direside, you can also do this 3-stack routine, of stacking the rightmost camp by casting nethertoxin on it at ##:48 and then stack the two lower left hand side camps by attacking them at ##:52 and ##:55 and then kind of running towards the tower.

The next item I buy is always Heart of Tarrasque. Viper is legit the only hero in the game that can pull this strategy off for various reasons, which is also why I'm doing this in part. As it's an unorthodox spell damage builds tanky, a lot of the standard counters on the DOTA2 wiki page somewhat fail, but not all of them. And also some additional heroes are really strong vs this build, probably the most devastating opponent is Morphling, which is not even a counter for the standard Viper build.

DOTA2 itemization has a lot of farming lean or bias on it

One of the differences of DOTA compared to other games is that the competitive pvp encounter involves farming. Which has the effect that people build their heroes putting a lot of weight into farming rate. So you have heroes building battlefury, which is slightly suboptimal for simple pvp, but increases farming rates a lot. So that's where this Viper build comes in. Viper is just about the only hero that is efficient at farming without building any real items for it. You can basically do it with just arcane boots and farm a lot of gold, especially when the lvl10 spell lifesteal talent comes around. Which means you can also itemize the hero for pvp directly and just ignore farming. That means you can afford to build more defensively, towards the more optimal 1v1 type of build. And Heart of Tarrasque does that immediately.

Long-term sustained fight strategy

The purpose of this build is not to win by bursting the opponent down very quickly, instead it's to win over time and win a sutsained fight, if you can prolong the duration of the fight, and you're building heart as first item, that means you get to regenerate a lot more health. Additionally Viper has a passive ability that gives them magical resistance and some other minor effects, and being an agility hero, they get a reasonable armor even before you build armor pieces, so the Heart of Tarrasque is a decent item to get as 2nd item (1st is arcane boots).

Poison attack takes some time to stack but if an opponent remains within vicinity, it'll do a lot of damage over time. Usually the problem is that people find it easy to run away. But that's fine, because this is built in this defensive and tanky way. Nethertoxin then is an important defensive tool, which also does the more damage the longer the fight, or rather, the longer the opponent remains in it's effect, and it strips several tough opponents of their passive abilities. Basically you want to time the nethertoxin very well, and also make sure that you're on it yourself, so if an opponent engages you, they'll have to take damage from the toxin. I.e. don't cast it on them, but keep the optional to defend yourself with it instead.

Along with this sustained fight strategy I often build items like Assault Cuirass, Lotus Orb, Sange & Yasha, or Heaven's Halberd, recently I've started liking Butterfly, Eye of Skadi, Shiva's Guard. Basically after the first 2 items you've to be very careful and analyze the opposing team's line up to figure out what item is going to be most crucial in this game. You've to take into account their damage types, their passive abilities, burst potential, and think about what's your game plan to survive these opponents. Luckily this unorthodox build doesn't have a lot of strong counters. The hardest counter is morphling, and after that I think probably Chaos Knight, because CK has an insane dmg output, and your plan is to tank and prolong the fight, well it's gonna happen with CK coz you can't tank the damage. Still if you've very much outfarmed them and have something like Shiva's Guard and say Heaven's Halberd, it's not easy to take you down quickly even on CK, but that still is a hard counter for this build. Other additional hard opponents include Clinkz, simply because this is a spell damage build, clinkz does a lot of damage, and they always build orchid. Depending on opposing team's lineup, though, clinkz does physical damage, and if the opposing team is very heavy on physical damage, it's easier to stack armor. Blademail and Halberd are nice items vs Clinkz with build. Another very difficult opponent is Terrorblade. It's very similar to CK in a lot of senses, but they also always build of Eye of Skadi. Which is really strong against Heart of Tarrasque, basically the Skadi applies a magic immunity piercing damage over time effect on you that does 40dmg per second, or something like that

(well I think the base regen from Tarrasque is only like 50hp or something, so if you lose 40% of that it's only 20dps, but with additional levels and other health increasing items that value could increase)

Notably though the way this game is made, Sange actually counters the effect of Skadi to some extent, since the Skadi doesn't interfere with Sange's health gain, you instead have the same effect from Sange, but now your health regen is proportionally increased more from the Sange due to having retroactively lost a chunk of the base regen. So it's a bit counter-intuitive, but having sange helps vs skadi, but just a bit, since it's still a strong item. Of course, Sunder, is the real reason why Terrorblade counters this build, and Eye of Skadi is like icing on the cake.

Some timings

The timing for this is if all goes well, 2:00 for arcane boots and 12:00 for Heart of Tarrasque. That means you've a networth of 6200 gold at 12:00. Which is a really competitive value. But since you're spending less time denying creeps and harassing opponent, they're also going to have a good networth, but it's more likely to be something like 4500-5500 when you're at 6200. But this is only possible on the Dire side, because of the 3-stack routine, that's not possible on Radiant. Which impacts the Heart timing a lot, a good time on the Radiant side is 13:45 while 12:00 is good on the Dire side. Which is why this build is better played on the Dire side.

But I got a bit bored of this

So I managed to gain quite a few MMR points playing this Viper midlane, but I got bored with it. And I like playing Captain's mode, but I tend to lose points playing other roles, and so I've fallen back a lot again after basically playing all the other stuff. So now I need some new ideas on how can I get more MMR points?

Trying to get points playing Hard Support

So I try to stack camps, pull creeps, harass, place wards efficiently so they're harder to deward, and I also like to itemize my supports keeping an eye on the opposing team's lineup and figure out which opposing hero I can help to counter. E.g. I sometimes buy Orchid of Malevolence if the opposing team has midlane Storm Spirit. Not because I would do more damage myself, but preventing the SS from retreating when they're doing a gank attempt and there's someone else who can take them down. And so on stuff like that. But I find it very difficult to gain any points, which I find strange because it's rare to see the opponents even pulling creeps at the Herald level, and usually no one else does a lot of stacking. In fact often the carries don't even understand the significance of pulling properly. But regardless of this I mostly just end up losing points if I try to play support.

Looking for people to party with

So I'm also looking for people to party with, I like thinking about these theoretical questions like you probably tell from the above explanation, and am sort of competitive and interested in finding people to have good teamwork. My steamid is:

1140726503

Go ahead and add me on your friends list and then invite me to party!

Twitch stream

I'm also experimenting with a Twitch stream, also I set it up so that it records the entire screen, not just the game, so basically you can check what I am doing and it should show me writing this reddit thread right now. Although there's a 30 second delay. And I'm not using a microphone nor a camera, so there's not much to watch for now, but here's the url incase you want to check it out:

https://www.twitch.tv/ww_86

You can also write in the chat and i'll try and reply, but unfortunately Twitch doesn't have any kind of a notification feature when someone writes into the chat and I just often miss it. Which is kind of weird. Does anyone know how to get some kind of a notification for it?