Whether you’re looking to play seriously, or you want to try something fun, there are plenty of awesome Dota strats that you can try out with your friends. These team-oriented strategies are hard to pull off with strangers in ranked matchmaking, since they’ll likely pick the wrong hero, despite your best efforts to communicate, or simply fail to execute the strat correctly. If you grab a few mates, you’ll be able to coordinate properly and you’ll be surprised to find how effective these can be. Even Dota pros aren’t above pulling out an effective cheese strat when the draft or game calls for it.
Drow Strat
The “Drow strat” is a classic that goes back years, and it’s fairly simple. Get some ranged heroes who can make use of the Precision Aura, build lots of agility items on Drow Ranger, kill Roshan, claim the Aegis, and push hard while you’re all right-clicking hard. The addition of the Dragon Lance has only made the Drow strat more viable, and the addition of an Aghanim’s Scepter upgrade has made Drow Ranger more capable of scaling into the late game. It’s important to draft the right heroes. For the Drow strat to be effective, your team will definitely need an initiator to give physical damage carries a chance in teamfights, and you’ll also need a defensive support hero like Dazzle to increase your team’s sustain during prolonged engagements. Medusa, Templar Assassin, Invoker are all mid picks that you should consider in a Drow strat.
Huskar + Dazzle/Oracle
Huskar is a decent hero right now and alongside a Dazzle or Oracle, Huskar’s unique ability to dispense more damage the lower his health dips becomes fiercely intimidating. With Shallow Graves and False Promises keeping Huskar alive, he’ll be transformed into a super-carry who can manfight entire teams and live through it. Key item purchases in a Huskar strat include Armlet, Black King Bar, and other defensive items to increase his survivabilty. Watch out for hard counters like Axe and pure damage heroes.
Global
There’s no better feeling than killing off enemy heroes without even needing to be near them. Zeus, Ancient Apparition, Nature’s Prophet, Invoker, Spectre and others all have the capacity to dish out damage from range and if you put a few of them into the same team and string your abilities together correctly it can be devastating. Drafting a lineup of cores with global abilities is a high-risk, high-reward strat, especially since many of these heroes fare poorly during the laning phase.
Shadow Demon and Illusion Strats
Illusion strats have been incredibly popular lately, largely thanks to Shadow Demon‘s strength as a support. If you want to take things to the next level then grab and illusion hero like Terrorblade, build Manta and some other stat items and keep on using Disruption on him to create an illusion army. Illusion strats struggle against lineups that include heroes with area-of-effect damage, including Underlord and Ember Spirit, but if the enemy doesn’t have a direct counter, you’ll be sieging highground in no time.
Who’s ready for the Kiev Major?