DotA - Defence of the Ancients .. For Newbies

Defence of the Ancients or DotA is a custom map for Warcraft 3, created by "IceFrog". It is a wonderful mixture of strategy, team work and fast paced action. The objective of the game defend your ancients (duh) . Two teams must clash in order to guard their ancients and destroy the opposite teams ancients or towers. Each human player controls exactly one "hero". Each hero has a skill set (of 4 spells) that makes it unique. Heroes are classified into 3 types: intelligence, strength and agility.

The image on the right is a top view of the DotA map, the so-called mini map. The 3 lanes are where the creeps come and fight and your hero goes. When you start you are at level 1 and have one skill point which you can use to learn a skill. You get two things by staying in lane: gold (if you kill enemy hero/creep) & experience (if you see something die) .


More gold allows you to buy better items that can make your hero stronger. More experience
allows you to increase your level (you start at level 1) which in-turn allows you to learn more skills or make the existing ones more powerful.

Sounds easy right ? It's not. Since you are pitted against another hero in the same lane, each competes for the head of the other (hero death gives a lot more gold/exp than creep death). So to stay in lane and avoid death and try to kill the other hero, you should have a fair idea of the opposite hero.

And so we come to why DotA is not a game for Noobs. First of all noob is a person who plays a game over and over again, and never learns anything. There is always something you can learn from a game, more so if you lose. DotA is game where to play well, you must have some knowledge of all heroes in the game. If not exact details then at least some idea of the skills of the person in your lane and also of heroes in your team are necessary. This page helps a lot to club the various skills of DotA and give a fair idea of almost all skills in DotA.

DotA is a team game. If you are with a partner in a lane, you should know each others spells. Further, given the hero/s against you two, you both should have some understanding of what should be done to avoid death and get kills to increase gold and experience. Co-ordination and teamwork are most important in DotA.

To start playing DotA, you'll need Warcraft 3 installed on your computer and the latest version of DotaAllstars which you can get here. Download the AI map if you want to practice against a computer. If you are playing for the first time, play with a hero like Sniper or Skeleton King. They have simple skills and are quite easy to understand. Do tell how the experience was by leaving a comment. Keep checking out this blog for more on DotA.