Given that Dota 2's entire character roster is available to everybody, all of the time, learning new heroes presents a daunting challenge to new players. Talking to people who are just starting out on the long road to being halfway-competent-maybe at Dota, a question I've heard a lot is 'how do I choose who to play next?'

In this series, then, I'm going to shine a light on heroes that new players may miss. In particular, I'm looking for heroes that have a higher-than-average win-rate (calcuated using DotaBuff) but who wouldn't otherwise be considered a major part of the current metagame. Champions of pub Dota, in other words, heroes you might not see very often in the hands of top players but who you might get a kick out of as you take your first steps into ranked.

We re going to alternate this series with our Dota 2 Q&A, Game Is Hard , on a bi-weekly basis. This gives us more time to set up interviews and gives time for new hero trends to emerge.

Let s get to business.

What does Omniknight do?

Omniknight is a strength melee hero most commonly played as a support. His abilities emphasise protection: even his most powerful damage spell is deployed defensively.

Purification is a powerful single-target heal that, in addition to restoring health, does a large amount of damage in an area immediately around the target. This is pure damage, which broadly speaking means that it ignores armour, magic resistance, and spell immunity. Omniknight can cast it on himself, allied heroes, or creeps. In ideal scenario, you ll always be getting maximum use out of both of its components: using it to prop up a beleaguered ally while also doing significant damage to their assailants. You ll put your skill points into this first.

Repel grants spell immunity and 100% magic damage resistance to a single target. This is exactly the same as the defensive item Black King Bar, which most carries won t have built until the midgame. Repel is great for ensuring that your carry doesn t get stunned into oblivion during a teamfight, or for shielding yourself while you use a teleport scroll to escape. It can also be cast on enemies to prevent them from receiving beneficial effects, but bear in mind that spell immunity is more often a help than a hindrance: if in doubt, Repel an ally. You ll put skill points into Repel second.

Degen Aura slows the movement and attack speed of enemies within a radius of Omniknight. This gives him a little bit of scaling potential in the late game, as attack speed becomes more important, but you wouldn t want to put skill points into it too early. Generally speaking, it s more important for Omniknight to survive long enough to use his other abilities and items than it is to be close enough to the enemy for Degen Aura to be useful. In certain one-on-one situations, however, the movement speed debuff can be used to get Omniknight slightly ahead of the enemy in order to line up a self-cast Purification.

Guardian Angel is Omniknight s ultimate. For a fixed duration, allied units in an area around Omniknight gain immunity to physical damage—i.e, auto-attacks and certain spells. If upgraded using an Aghanim s Scepter, Guardian Angel gains global cast range and also affects buildings—effectively acting as a second Glyph of Fortification. Guardian Angel has a massive impact on teamfights, effectively nullifying the impact of auto-attack happy enemy carries. In pub games, particularly at the beginner level, players tend to be pretty bad at playing around ults like this one. If you re tired of being rolled over by Sniper, Guardian Angel renders him entirely useless for its duration.

Why Omniknight?

Dota 2 tends to shy from traditional fantasy stereotypes—or at least they re rarely presented without a twist of some kind. Omniknight looks like a paladin, sounds like a paladin and—for the most part—plays like a paladin. The twist here is a relatively subtle one: despite the crusader knight imagery, angelic guardians and god-rays, Omniknight actually worships a cave-dwelling Elder Thing that may or may not have created the world by chance while trying to hide from space monsters. As you do.

He s been sat in the middle of the popularity charts for a long time, now, despite a consistently high win-rate—greater than 60%. Let s break down some of the reasons why this might be.

He s almost always played as a hard support

This contributes to both his winrate and his unpopularity. As a wise man once said: nobody wants to play support, but everybody wants to win. As a defense-oriented character, Omniknight doesn t offer the multi-kill potential that most players chase. On the other hand, picking him communicates a rare desire to cooperate with your team—and it s this, most of the time, that wins games.

He upsets aggressive players

Omniknight is powerful in pub matches because he punishes players that don t think twice before committing to an attack. This accounts for a lot of players. When somebody is diving in pursuit of an easy kill, a well-timed heal, burst of magic immunity, or team-wide protection from regular attacks can all turn fights on their head. In a game that is often about snowballing momentum, Omniknight acts as a human stop sign: and he doesn't need much by way of items or levels to do it. A well-timed Guardian Angel can keep a losing team in the game for a long time.

He acts as a safety net for allies

The inverse is also true: when your own allies are too aggressive, Omniknight is good at making sure that they don t pay too much for it. Repel acts as a free Black King Bar, granting on-the-fly magic immunity to carries who are dead-set against building defensive items for themselves. This doesn t mean they shouldn t build defensively, of course, but it s hardly unusual for pub players to go for more damage over more survivability: Omniknight patches up that gap, whether they like it or not. The key here is that Omniknight himself has to play carefully, even if his allies aren't: make sure you're where you need to be to deliver that clutch Purification, but don't die for it.

He is everybody s dad

To put all of this another way: Omniknight is great in pubs because he acts as a moderating influence on what tends to be an immoderate form of Dota. Your job is to stand on the sidelines, dampening enemy aggression and preventing your teammates from hurting themselves too badly. If you can keep a cool head, he s relatively easy to play: an effective Omniknight is one who reliably gets the most out of a single Purification, a single Repel, a single Guardian Angel. That means walking the tightrope between waiting for the right moment and becoming too hesitant, which is something you ll only improve with experience. But you d be surprised at how many games can be won by a single player acting responsibly, defensively, and putting their team first: Omniknight s 60% winrate isn t an accident. He isn't flashy, but if you enjoy winning games from a position of control on the sidelines, you'll get a kick out of him.

Items to consider

As a support, you re going to spend a lot of time buying Observer and Sentry Wards as well as the Courier and its flying upgrade. Mana and mobility are both important to Omniknight, so Arcane Boots are a priority. His abilities mesh well with a Soul Ring, and Force Staff lets him reposition within a fight and escape more reliably (something he otherwise lacks.) He s a natural Mekansm carrier, which transitions naturally into Guardian Greaves, and his Aghanim s Scepter upgrade can be game-winning. You might also consider picking up helpful aura items on him, like Vladimir s Offering and Drums of Endurance. If things are going extremely well, consider a Refresher Orb, Shiva s Guard, or Scythe of Vyse. Essentially: this is a team-focused hero. Build with your team in mind.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Last week saw the arrival of Dota 2 s much anticipated 6.85 patch. You can read the full set of accompanying notes here, but unlike other patches released after The International, 6.85 doesn t rework Dota 2 at a fundamental level. Instead, it has numerous tweaks that focus on the micro aspects of Dota. This is likely due to the proximity of The Frankfurt Major, with open qualifiers starting on October 6th. 

Despite the lack of sweeping changes, like the bounty rework made in 6.82, these smaller patches can still have substantial effects on the metagame. Take, for example, patch 6.83, which made Sniper s haunting laugh a common occurrence when he was picked in every single game. With that in mind, here are six of the biggest changes in 6.85.

1. The top tiers aren t as top anymore

Just about every hero used heavily at the top of professional play has received some sort of nerf. The immediate effect has been the plummeting of win rates, as DotaBuff gloriously shows. What s important is that none of these changes have ruined the design of any character. Leshrac can still do ridiculous damage, but Lightning Storm doesn t give him a free win in middle lane. Storm Spirit continues to excel at both zipping and zapping, but he lost some laning prowess and requires even more careful mana management. These heroes are not in some sort of unplayable fail state, but they no longer overwhelm other heroes in very obvious ways. These slight nerfs may have huge implications in upcoming tournaments, and have already had very visible effects in non-pro play.

2. Techies were nerfed

In what may be the best news of the decade, the reign of Squee, Spleen, and Spoon has been curbed. Techies are unable to enter lane as a short-range burst caster, a major issue in professional play. Gone are the days of laying down a single mine to wave clear, and farewell to the 1200 damage burst combo that was supported by heroes like Tusk. Additionally, melee heroes can clear all mine varieties with a quelling blade, giving every hero in the game a way to destroy troublesome mines. However, Techies weren t nerfed in a way that stops their forest traps, and hapless players will still find themselves blown to smithereens. Remote Mines weren t adjusted, and the Land Mine nerfs are irrelevant in successful multi-mine traps. As a matter of fact, Techies are even better at placing Land Mines because...

3. Techies art possibilities have been dramatically buffed

One of the major changes to Techies was the removal of a Land Mine cap, which was previously 20. In terms of gameplay it means that Techies players can draw out games to an even greater extent with higher usage of Land Mines during slow parts of a game. So a theoretical Techies game can be even more arduous than before. In terms of art, it means that that there s a new placeable object to help round the color palette normally used in-game. Dota 2 pseudo-pixel art has reached the next level.

4. Terrorblade might actually be scary again 

Terrorblade received tweaks across his skillset, and his in-game presence has changed dramatically. Reflection, a spell that produces replicas of enemies, gained a large area of effect at the cost of a weaker slow and slightly longer cooldown. Prior to this patch, Reflection was kept at rank one and was only used as a short-range slow in skirmishes.Now, for the first time in years, Terrorblade has a spell with noticeable teamfight utility and it scales into late game. Additionally, Terrorblade received numerous quality of life buffs to make him more comfortable to play. He s a bit less clunky and his illusions don t get left behind when he transforms. The major disappointment this patch is that his lore hasn t been updated, and he s still a weird demon that went to Double Hell.

5. Undying had a scaling flip-flop

Similar to Terrorblade, Undying received a rebalancing instead of the nerf that many popular picks felt. His Tombstone summon has had a total reversal in survivability, now taking hits to destroy instead of having decent HP and the powerful structure armor type. At level one a tombstone will have difficulty surviving as it can only withstand three hits, but in endgame fights, when carries have massive damage numbers, a max rank tombstone still takes seven hits. He also received an Aghanim s Scepter upgrade to his Decay spell, losing the rarely considered damage amplification it provided to his ultimate. The upgrade steals more strength, and Undying gains 190 HP when he hits a single hero with Decay. If the enemy team clumps up he can receive as much 950 HP with a single cast on a 4 second cooldown. Undying has a very direct and effective late game presence, something he hasn t had since the release of Dota 2.

6. There are still changes that have unknown implications

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, are the numerous subtle changes that came with the patch. Item adjustments, smaller hero buffs, these many small changes will take time and deep investigation to truly understand. For example, siege creeps can now be targeted like a normal lane creep in regards to spells, though they have high magic resistance. On its own this may not seem like a major change, but Helm of the Dominator was buffed to always give dominated creeps a minimum HP of 1400. Combine the two changes and ridiculously beefy siege creeps might have a role in 6.85 s meta. This is just one small possibility in the wide array of potential Dota changes, and it will take time for the hidden gems to surface. The latest overpowered build is just waiting to be discovered.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

The fall esports season begins in earnest this weekend, as many games return from their post-summer hiatus and shuffled team rosters settle into place. Qualifiers for a number of massive upcoming tournaments, including CS:GO s final major of the year, are mingled in with the first medium-stakes chance to see some of the new teams in action on a brand new Dota patch. There will also be some last ditch efforts to make it to next month s BlizzCon, and the action all kicks off today.

Whether you re in the mood for Brazilian god-on-god action, or some European wizard fumbling, there s something to suit all your pro gaming needs this weekend. Here s what we ll be watching...

StarCraft: 2015 DreamHack Stockholm Open

Unusually for an esports event, DreamHack Stockholm ran much of its course during the week, meaning most of the event is already over. However the StarCraft finals are being played on Friday night, and for one player they mean everything. Being the last event awarding WCS points before BlizzCon, there is a chance for Ko HyuN Seok Hyun to sneak his way up from 18th place into the invited Top 16 of WCS rankings. A win today and he ll relegate Jung FanTaSy Myung Hoon, whom he defeated yesterday to make it to the quarter-finals. You can see if HyuN makes it on the official DreamHack StarCraft channel from 10:15 PDT/18:15 BST with the Grand Final at 13:30 PDT/21:30 BST.

Counter-Strike: DreamHack Cluj-Napoca Qualifiers at DreamHack Stockholm

The CS:GO tournament at DH Stockholm is carrying on for another day, at least, so you can expect to catch a bit more of the action if you do something ridiculous like work during the week. The last remaining spots for DreamHack s next tour stop, Romania s Cluj-Napoca, are up for grabs and there are still a few familiar names waiting to snap them up. FlipSid3, Copenhagen Wolves and Dignitas, to name a few, will be playing Saturday from 03:05 PDT/11:05 BST until the final match at 12:05 PDT/20:05 BST. You can watch all that on DreamHack s official stream.

Counter-Strike: Gfinity Champion of Champions

More CS:GO for the top tier teams already invited to Cluj-Napoca as Gfinity holds a four-team invitational. Fnatic, Ninjas in Pyjamas, Virtus.pro and EnVyUs play a short three-game bracket with the semi-finals on Saturday morning beginning 02:30 PDT/10:30 BST, and the Grand Final at the same time on Sunday. If you re up in time to catch that, you can see it on Gfinity s Twitch stream but VODs will surely be available for late birds.

Nanyang Dota 2 Championships: European Qualifiers

After last week s Chinese Qualifiers, it s the Europeans turn, as almost every hot new roster shakes their tail feathers on the road to Nanyang. This weekend should be especially exciting as Dota s latest patch today means we ll see the clumsy evolution of a new meta before Frankfurt s Major next month. Saturday plays host to Kuroky s 5Jungz squad in a semi-final matchup against the Swedish Ninjas in Pyjamas at 11:00 PDT/19:00 BST, and a loser s bracket elimination between Team Empire and Vega Squadron before that at 09:00 PDT/17:00 BST. Sunday will feature the result of today s matches (Na`Vi versus (monkey) Business, and Alliance versus Monkey Freedom Fighters) at those same times. All can be watched on the BTS Twitch channel.

SMITE Brazil Gaming League Season 2

A chance to see the finale of Latin America s toughest competition this Saturday, as the teams with one remaining game in hand compete in the last week of SPL s Brazilian league. There s only one game to look out for here, and that s the clash between current first and second place in the table, INTZ esports and Keyd Stars. INTZ, formed of SWC 2015 fifth-placers We Love Bacon have a slight advantage over Keyd who were penalised by one point at the beginning of the season for a late roster change. You can see that match play out on x5TV Saturday at 14:00 PDT/22:00 BST

Hearthstone: Abios Grand Tournament

Lastly, a small $5,000 pot Hearthstone tournament with a surprising collection of stars should wile away the time until next weekend s European Road to BlizzCon. Names to watch for include current world champ Firebat, and European hopefuls ThijsNL, Ostkaka and Hoej. It s a single elimination event, which should provide some tension, though stakes are fairly low. More importantly it ll be a good chance to see what decks the European hopefuls are playing with before their BlizzCon qualifier showdown next week. Round of 16 matches start at 08:00 PDT/16:00 BST on Saturday, with the last at 14:30 PDT/22:30 BST, and the finals continue Sunday from 08:05 PDT/16:05 BST until the Grand Final at 15:40 PDT/23:40 BST. You can see them all on AbioTV s Twitch channel.

PC Gamer Pro is a new channel dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Valve has released patch 6.85 for Dota 2, ahead of the upcoming Fall Major tournament. After announcing the changes would be minor balance tweaks until a bigger patch planned for after November s Frankfurt showdown, it s uncertain whether Dota's master of balance Icefrog is familiar with the word minor .

To name just a few of the changes, Siege Creeps are no longer buildings and are now targetable by spells (albeit with an 80% spell resistance). Gone are the days of supports being able to flash clear an entire wave and then spend the next four days auto-attacking a catapult.

Also blending the spell-immune buildings rule is Ogre Magi s Bloodlust, which can now target towers to increase their fire rate and somehow cause a hunk of magical rock to grow in size. There are many other hero-specific changes too, the most interesting of which—as always—is the new Aghanim s Scepter upgrade.

Batrider has been blessed with an upgraded Lasso ultimate when he purchases the 4200 gold item, which now chain lassos another enemy hero within 400 radius, while doing 100 damage per second. Old Bats hasn t been seen much in the latest patches, compared to his almost 100% pick rate at TI3, so maybe we ll see a resurgence of the grab n run strats of yesteryear.

Other global effects of 6.85 s arrival include summoned units being immune to being purged, meaning Warlock s Golems can t be countered by a Diffusal Blade and neither can Necronomicon units. The in-game shop also appears to be having a sale, as a number of recipes and items have been reduced in price by up to 25%—in the case of Town Portal scrolls, which are down from 100 to just 75 gold. YES! 75 gold!

As an attempt to address the current HOT HEROES in the meta, Icefrog hasn t done too much nerfing. Queen of Pain s ultimate, Sonic Wave, has had a slight damage bump, and Tusk has 1 second less to hide away from spells in his snowball before he is forced to roll on a chosen target. But the real damage has been done to Leshrac—the jump distance and damage of Lightning Storm is reduced—and Techies.

The suicidal bombers mines no longer explode when they are destroyed by wary enemy heroes with truesight, who can now also chop them down with a Quelling Blade or Battle Fury for 10 gold a pop, just like wards. The proximity-activated Land Mines also cannot be stacked directly on top of one another for maximum damage, and their damage is down by a massive 50%. Good night, sweet goblins.

For all the minutiae of Dota 2 s changes, you can visit the blog page. We ll have a more in-depth breakdown on the meta later in the week.

Last week, we  asked you to come up with your best variation on recurring Dota phrase "too easy for Arteezy" for a short at two premium tickets to ESL One New York and a bunch of additional goodies. Total value, $400.

It's been a tough judging process. We received over a hundred entries, many including loads of attempts, and only a handful of them actually rhymed. Our winner is somebody whose entry will probably break this page, and who managed to convince me for a couple of moments that something had gone terribly wrong with our email server. It hadn't—they just know their numbers, and are probably a huge show-off.

The winner!

"Too 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639 for ALWAYSWANNAFLY."

Jordan Ensing

...who also wins the Everybody Clap For The Giant Smartass Award, for what it's worth. Congrats, Jordan. We'll be in touch about your prize.

There's no space here to list off every entry, but I do have a number of no-prizes to give out. They are as follows.

The Thanks For That Mental Image Award goes to...

"One bikini for Merlini"

Jason Small

The On-Point Sociopolitical Commentary Award goes to...

"Two tin foil hats for Twitch chat"

Cam Pratt

The Thanks Man, My Day Job Is Literally Knowing Words Award goes to...

"Too tricksy for Trixi (tricksy is a word)"

The North

The Thanks For The Helpful Picture Award goes to...

John Hunt

The Thanks For Making Me Spit Coffee At Work Award goes to...

"Two cups for Mynuts"

Christian Slot

Thanks to everybody that entered—I'm sorry that we've only got one prize to give out. We'll be running many more giveaways like this one in the future, and check back soon for more ESL One New York coverage.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

When we launched PC Gamer Pro last week, I started a couple of new regular Dota 2 features. Game Is Hard, which runs every Tuesday, is an advice column where I round up emails from readers and put the questions they ask to a personality from the scene, like PyrionFlax.

It takes effort to write an email and I'm grateful for every one that I receive, but in this week's column I want to discuss a theme I've seen repeated across dozens of emails in the last week: blame, and the dispensing thereof. This is a problem that exists in every type of competitive game.

It's impossible to play Dota for any amount of time and not experience finger-pointing: whether that means being blamed for something or feeling the urge to yell at somebody else. Dota places you in a stressful, complex and codependent relationship your teammates, who will often be strangers—it's inevitable that people will sometimes lash out to make themselves feel better. It's irrational, and it makes you a worse player overall, but as a knee-jerk emotional response it makes sense in the heat of the moment. I know I've done it.

The urge to blame others becomes a more serious problem, I think, when it becomes a part of your thinking outside of the game itself. In order to account for a run of losses or an overall dissatisfaction with their matchmaking rating, players spin worldviews for themselves that place all of the blame somewhere else: in Russia, commonly, or South America, or South East Asia. This is, in all cases, wrongheaded, self-deceptive, and unhelpful, and it reveals the need to recalibrate how you approach the game.

Over the last week I've had stranger conspiracies arrive in my inbox. There are people who believe that account-boosting is so rife that there's one in every game, others who claim that Valve seed real matches with bots posing as players: all to explain away a loss, all to suggest that a 50%-ish winrate isn't 'really' a sign that they're at the right MMR. The question they ask is 'how do I improve when everybody else is an idiot', but the question they should be asking is 'how do I break out of this dumb mindset'.

It's hard to say that to somebody who is so willing to shield themselves from criticism. Besides: I completely understand where this attitude comes from. The hardest thing to change in any given game of Dota is your own level of play: other people, flawed and foreign and possibly robots as they may be, make softer targets. Under stress, people follow the path of least resistance—it's human.

There's a more practical way to go about changing your competitive mindset. Rather than try to prove or disprove that it's really the Other Guy who is spoiling all of your games, consider how useless that information would actually be.

If every loss is somebody else's fault and you are playing flawlessly, you are the unluckiest human being in the world. You have broken mathematics. There is nothing you can do, and you should certainly never play any game that involves rolling a dice. If this is true, for you—like really, I-can-prove-it true—then you're screwed, aren't you? You are so unlucky that there is no point in trying to get better.

If some of the blame rests with you, if your play is not perfect, then there is something you can change. You actually have power, in this scenario, because while it is very easy to complain about other players it is very hard to make them play differently. However, it is easier than you think to make you play differently. When you die because you wandered into the enemy jungle with no vision, who is at fault? The support who spent their last 75 gold warding somewhere else, or you for going in anway? Hint: it's your fault as much theirs, they're not a robot, their nationality has no bearing on their ability, and the only useful thing you can do in that scenario is learn from your mistake.

It is incredibly empowering to learn that you're not very good at something, because that means that you are not yet as good as you can be. In-game flaming is a huge waste of energy, the construction of elaborate excuses for failure even more so. Dota 2 doesn't offer much in terms of feedback for the vast majority of players, and what it does provide can be a long time coming. You have a choice: work for that slow improvement on the assumption that you always have something to learn, or be satisfied that the result of your time with the game will be the same old story about how everything was always everybody else's fault. You can improve, or you can be blameless, but you can never be both.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

The Dota 2 Major Championships, "a series of seasonal marquee tournaments" that will be held in various parts of the world, were first announced in April and then dated, vaguely, for November a few months later. Now, finally, Valve has revealed that the first-ever Dota 2 Major will take place in Frankfurt, Germany, with 16 teams competing over six days for a total prize pool of $3 million.

The teams that will be invited to take part in the Frankfurt Major or the Regional Qualifiers will be announced on October 5. Regional Qualifiers will take place on October 10-13, while the Open Qualifiers, which as the name suggests will be open to any Dota 2 player who wants to take part, are set to run October 6-9. Registration for the Open Qualifiers will begin on October 1.

The tournament will take place at the Festhalle Messe in Frankfurt, and will be open to the public. Tickets will only be required on the final day, and will be available from Eventbrite  on September 27 in two waves, at 11 am CEST and 7 pm CEST, for 50 ($56) each.

Every week, PC Gamer Pro takes your deepest, most personal Dota questions and delivers them to the personalities that can help. You can find last week's set right here. This week, PyrionFlax talks Reborn, support woes, solo ranked attitudes, and the problem with panic.

If you'd like to send us a question for next week, email pcgamerpro@pcgamer.com with 'GAME IS HARD' in your subject line.

PC Gamer: About fifteen of the questions we received were people asking why Reborn doesn't work. I figured we could talk about your experience with it, and secondly—do you reckon it was ready?

PyrionFlax: I've played Dota for four years or something, for me Dota has gone from being very buggy and not having very many features, but still fun. It was accepted that it was in beta and that was fine. I feel like they've shot themselves in the foot in a big way because, post-TI, they had all these people that wanted to play Dota and they come into this client that, all due respect to it, can't be called anything less than a beta again. There are that many problems. People complaining about hitbox sizes, people complaining about missing clicks. Weird graphical glitches, weird bugs like the ancient stacking bug. I had a bug where the entire enemy team was invisible.

PCG: Shit, really?

PFlax: Yeah! It wasn't like they'd gained invisibility—they were gone. They could see me and they could attack, but these attacks would appear out of nowhere. I was like "what is going on? How was this released?"

I feel like Reborn needed more time, but they obviously thought "look, not enough people are playing it, we need to force people to play the beta." I think what they could have done is incentivise them by saying, like, you get item drops in Reborn and there'll be all sorts of cool stuff. That way people will play Reborn for the item drops. That's the way you incentivise it—not forcing them to do it and making them resent the client.

PCG: It feels like they should have said 'hey, you want to play Pit Lord? He's in Reborn right now, go play him.'

PFlax: Yeah, that kind of stuff—exactly. Wait for something to incentivise, rather than say "well, it's ready, so that's the only client there is"—when it obviously isn't.

PCG: The emails I got were split between, on one side, people for whom the game doesn't work any more. They're a bit heartbroken—"hey, I've only got my laptop and Reborn hates it."" Those people are basically screwed as far as I can tell.

PFlax: Yeah, that sucks! That really does suck.

PCG: The other people were like "hey, I've been screwed by the ancient stacking bug, I've been spooked by other bugs in-game, I don't want to play ranked any more". Is there an answer to that, other than "well I guess you just don't play ranked any more"?

PFlax: If you're playing a ranked game and you feel like you might lose because of the client, I understand that. In the last nine days I've played three games of Dota and they were all last night—because I've just been turned off it. I'm a little bit sick of the current meta, the whole thing just didn't seem as good as the last client. Which is a shame because it was almost perfect, there were hardly any bugs, and now we're going back to the days where really weird stuff happens.

We'll get there, the client will be great someday, but making us play with it makes people resent it and I think they've lost a lot of potential players, post-TI. I think the timing was really bad, but there you go.

PCG: On to specific questions. Gunars writes:

I would like to know how soon one should start specialising for a certain role? I mainly play position 5 and like it a lot, but I feel bound to this role because most other people don't play it, yet every team needs a support to win.

I suppose he's worried that, by only playing one position as he learns the game, he's gimping himself for the future?

PFlax: I honestly think that if you're playing the support role properly, it's a lot harder and a lot more work than playing the carry. Your job might seem like you're 'just' the 5, but don't think of rank in terms of importance. It's purely a rank in terms of farm priority. That's what it's for. You're the 5, you don't need money as much—but the job that you do is game-winning in just the same way that carry is. He's identified that! He's said, "I feel like we need a support to win". What does that tell you? That tells you that you have to have a support to win. You're winning the game just as much as the carry. He might get all of the kills and all of the money, but that's just the way the heroes work. Supports can win games just as much as carries can—and a bad support will lose you a game. It's the supports that make the difference.

PCG: The next one is related, albeit from a different angle. Rishabh writes:

I am currently trying to figure out how we can trust any player in solo ranked with a core position. Many players buy high MMR IDs these days and I have to suffer a loss. Help!

PFlax: First of all, get over yourself! You're not a pro player who can spot a bought account a mile away. I play with pro players a lot, and they can spot a guy whose MMR they think is inflated. But a lot of times, someone will have a high MMR because they've found a hero that's broken in the current meta and spamming it. That's how you do it. You don't grind MMR by randoming or picking something you think would be fun, you do it by picking the same boring hero that wins games over and over again. MMR is not, up to a point, a defining characteristic of how good that person is across the board.

This might not be this guy in particular, he might have a genuine point, but I find that in my experience the people who make the most noise tend to be full of the most shit—and they never shut up about how much they know about the game.

PCG: In practical terms, he's talking about how to trust people in solo ranked. But often my approach is that you have to lead with trust. If you try to make everybody you're matched with earn your respect, you won't get anywhere.

PFlax: In terms of trusting people, you've got to go in there without this toxic, "oh god it's solo queue these people are idiots I'm so smart, oh god Russians" attitude. You see that in game. Some guy joins and says "GG, I have Russians." Well you're going to lose the game—not because of the Russians, but because of this shitty attitude.

PCG: To finish up. Kadir writes:

I've been playing Dota 2 since it was in the beta and have spent ~900-1000 hours trying to learn the game; half of that time I spent learning the flow of the game and getting comfortable with a variety of heroes. I can confidently say that I still have no f**king clue. My main problem is, I panic. Like, a lot. Sometimes my panicking results in awesome plays and I feel like a god and I'm like "how did I do that?", but mostly I make stupid mistakes. How do I stop panicking when I'm poor Crystal Maiden and trying to ward, like the good support player I am, and Huskar jumps on me like a maniac with his stupid ult and with his stupid magic resistance and his stupid fire spears from stupid hell? (Huskar is stupid.)

PFlax: I agree with that! Like I said, Huskar is a crazy-unpicked hero.

If you're Crystal Maiden and you want to ward, don't listen to your teammates when they start screaming "the wards have expired! Go put some new ones down!" You'll probably die doing so. If your wards are down, you don't have any vision to go and explore, right?

The best thing you can do is keep an eye on the minimap, time your movements, and don't assume that it has to be right on the eight-minute mark. Smart players will know you warded at the start of the game and will wait by the obvious ward spots knowing that a squishy support will wander over. If Storm Spirit is missing from the map, don't go ward. If Nyx is missing from the map, don't go ward—and so on.

More often than not, supports feel such an urge to get the wards down that they throw their lives into this tombola of chance. They hope that after giving it a spin they'll pull out a ticket that says "phew! You made it." But more often than not they're going to pull out a loser—so don't take chances. One of the main things you'll see support players do in high level games is not die. Staying alive is huge. Patience, caution, and watching the minimap at all times.

PCG: There's panicking because you put yourself in danger when you could have avoided it, but there's also panicking because, say, you need to take action. It's a five-on-five, say.

PFlax: If you're panicking about a videogame, stop panicking about a videogame. Just chill. Even do something like turn your flippin' mouse sensitivity down so, if you panic, you can't do so much damage. Something that slows it down for you, you know? Just chill out, it's just a game, don't take it so seriously, don't worry about people screaming at you. Just take a moment. You don't need to rush. You don't need to keep up with the speed of thought of the pros. Just keep your own speed of thought, and try to do the best you can.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

I m a tiny, slow, vulnerable Invoker, and I m being chased by a gigantic Phantom Assassin. She s killed a bunch of my fellow Invokers already, and she s closing in on me. She s the predator, and I m the prey.

In this custom game, Phantom Assassin is simply known as Assassin , and one of her abilities allows her to turn invisible and rush down hapless wizards. As a survivor, I have a selection of utility spells—a heal, Blink, the ability to spawn trees a la Nature s Prophet s Sprout, and a fireball that knocks opponents back—but very little damage. To win, I need to either survive until the timer runs down or knock Assassin into a flaming pit on the left-hand side of the large, square playing field.

Now I m the only survivor left. Assassin uses an AoE damage ability, but I avoid it. I run directly for the mouth of the pit, anticipating that she ll use invisibility to close the distance—I have almost no health left. Instead she rushes me down, and I m forced to use Blink to teleport around her. She turns invisible. I guess at her position, line up a fireball between myself and the pit, and fire. It connects, revealing her, sending her flying into the pit to be destroyed. Survivors win, with three seconds on the clock.

That was the moment that I became a fan of The Predator, an asymmetrical competitive mode with a bunch of new characters. Although a given round is divided into two teams—up to seven survivors, all Invokers, versus a single predator playing one of several heroes—it s actually a free for all. The goal is to earn the most points as an individual over the course of many rounds, which means surviving as Invoker and scoring kills as the predator when it s your turn.

This inspires a dog-eat-dog mentality that is a really good fit for multiplayer of this type. Traditionally, asymmetrical games like Evolve or competitive Left 4 Dead place a heavy emphasis on cooperation between members of the weaker faction and don t leave much room for strategy when that cooperation breaks down. Here, that s a feature. The survivors really do need each other in order to defeat the predator, which is a net gain overall, but sometimes sacrificing a stranded member of the group is a good strategy for winning the match.

Having to knock the predator into the pit to kill them is a stroke of genius, too, because it prevents matches from descending into an anti-climactic damage-over-time race. It s not about whittling a gigantic health bar (hi again Evolve) it s about strategy, finesse, and a little bit of luck. It also reinforces the notion that the survivors are completely outmatched—batting the predator into the pit feels like the kind of desperate solution that the heroes come up with at the end of a monster movie.

Ability use by both survivors and the predator is mitigated by mana, which you refresh by returning to a pool at the top of the map. This becomes a zone of contention and potentially a killing field, creating scenarios where survivors screw each other over for a shot at some precious, precious mana. Mana scarcity does create situations where you re absolutely screwed, sometimes—fleeing from the predator with Blink an unachievable 15 mana away—but that s by design.

The predators are a varied bunch, too. Sage, based on Oracle, relies on spell combos and a projectile version of Mana Break to punish spell-happy survivors. Demon, previously Doom, is deadly up close but is damaged by the pool rather than the pit. I played a variation on Nightstalker who could lay traps that put enemies to sleep, and got absolutely destroyed by a Tinker driving a catapult who could command tiny Clockwerks to create towers. I m not sure if they re particularly balanced, at the moment, but it s definitely fun to discover what each of them can do (usually by dying.)

Let s talk about problems, briefly. A lot of care has been lavished on the new characters and their abilities, but the map itself is rather plain and functional at the moment. At the beginning of a match, a single player has to run around within a side-area pressing buttons to configure the game, which is confusing if you ve never done it before and a disaster if that person happens to be AFK. Finally, we hit some weird bugs—players being given control of another person s survivor, people returning from crashes to find out that they couldn t control their hero until they died and respawned, that kind of thing. That s par for the course with Custom Games, however, and it definitely shouldn t stop you from trying this one. I m really looking forward to seeing how it develops.

PC Gamer Pro is a new channel dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Image: Helena Kristiansson/ESL.

ESL One New York 2015 is only a couple of weeks away. It s your best chance to catch top-quality international Dota 2 on the east coast, and the first major LAN event since the massive post-International team reshuffle (expect more from us on that front in the coming weeks.)

Want to attend? We ve got two premium tickets to the event to give away, plus bonus goodies. You ll need to be able to get to Madison Garden yourself, but if you re a New York-based Dota fan (or simply willing to make the trip) then this is an opportunity to catch the action in the best possible way.

Premium tickets give you access to the best seating area, a goodie bag, exclusive signing sessions, a behind-the-scenes tour, an in-game item and access to the afterparty. For this giveaway, we re also bundling in an ESL hoodie and t-shirt—total value, $400.

To win, I want you to come up with your best variation on the oft-repeated line too easy for Arteezy . For example: too bendy for Dendi or too hokey for KuroKy . The best, silliest, most convoluted rhyme wins. Send your entries to pcgamerpro@pcgamer.com by 12.00 PDT/20.00 BST on Wednesday the 23rd of September.

If you d like to find out more about ESL One New York 2015, visit the official site.

GL HF!

PC Gamer Pro is a new channel dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more.