General Discussion

General DiscussionHow do you train for reaction time, efficient apm, map awareness and ...

How do you train for reaction time, efficient apm, map awareness and team fight effectiveness in doto? in General Discussion
Bad Intentions

    Just wondering how do u train or git gud at these things? Are these things trainable or is it something that cant be trained? or other factors makes it difficult like internet issues or pc limitations?

    Pls share your thoughts 😨

    Trodlabundin

      Guess you just play.

      Having a background of other games like Counter-Strike/League/Any reaction brain based game, may help you while playing Dota.

      You can lose efficeint APM if you play too much, but if you have a good health everything like mapawareness etc. will stay top notch if you already had good mapawareness. How to get all this shit? geet gut.

      Relentless

        In martial arts movies, people train and get a lot faster. But (1) that's the movies and (2) they are just practicing particular patterned unthinking motions.

        This thing is done in boxing with a speed bag. This will speed up your hands to the point where you can go as fast as you can go... but it won't make you the next Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee or Mohammed Ali. It also won't allow you to make faster decisions or have faster reflexes... instead what this sort of training does is speed up a particular action to your reflex speed.

        You can do that same thing in manufacturing processes. You want to get repetitive actions out of your head and into your motor neurons control - into "muscle memory". You don't have the fingers of Dendi, but your fingers are still much faster than your brain. So practice to get your fingers trained so your brain is not slowing them down. Do not make a decision to execute mechanics in dota. That takes way to long. But remember your fingers are still only so fast, and when you get to their limit you can't make a choice to get them going faster... you already are moving them faster than you can think before you get to that limit. Choices are not available anymore.

        In magic they say "the hand is quicker than the eye" and its true. The hand is also quicker than the brain. When you get to the limit of your speed, you can't change it. You can't think about it. In fact you can't even perceive it. The hand is quicker than the eye. This is why you cannot really improve your reaction time. It's just talent.

        But you can speed up a well practiced action to reaction speed. You can also go one step farther, like Chaun the IG support player does and guess. Watch Chaun play from his perspective, he is not as quick as most top level pros, but he anticipates their moves amazingly well. He uses "Jedi reflexes". He will start to tp to defend a gank before the enemy appears from fog. He will select to cast a counter stun and position his mouse over the spot where an enemy is about to blink in before they do it.

        The simplest example would be for split push, rat hero with blink - you already have your blink dagger selected and positioned, then blink the instant they blink on you. It's faster then a double click reaction because it cuts out the time required for the key to come up and go back down. The other nice thing about this situation is if you accidentally panic and blink into trees for no reason you can just go right back to pushing if you decide the coast is clear.

        This comment was edited
        yiran

          What are the optimal controls? Legacy vs Qwerty? Edge pan vs Middle mouse drag? Item hotkeys? Extra mouse buttons? Control groups? Which one matters the most?

          Relentless

            Control groups are huge if you are playing a micro hero. Even with Elder Titan I have far more success if I set a hot set to automatically move the spirit every time I cast it.

            Legacy Keys are definitely slower, but the transition is hard. Once you relearn them you are faster. But I don't think qwer is the best option. The best option is to put hotkeys on a gaming mouse. But I don't have one. I find WERD is faster than QWER. Q is especially slow because of the extra time to reach up with the little finger from the A (attack). I like to have D for the ult because it prevents accidental casting.

            My item use could be a lot faster if I had a gaming mouse. As it is I reach across to press number keys with my left hand which means its impossible to quickly cast an item and an ability, or an item and an attack. But I think that would only gain me a couple hundred MMR at best. It's not going to make me a pro player. I already Jedi cast important items anyway with my finger on the key before its needed. In chaotic teamfights though when the sequence is not predictable I could be faster with better equipment.

            Pros often set hotkeys for map position views as well to quickly check runes/items/etc. But I can't see those things that fast anyway. When I watch Beesa do an item check, which he does in about 0.2 seconds all I see is a flash. I really struggle to mentally process the inventory even at half speed on the replay. I have to slow it down to quarter speed before I actually know what items the guy had on Beesa's item checks. I can't click that fast on a hero and even if I could I can't see the items. I've seen a number of pros check items between lasthits in the lane like its easy for them.

            This comment was edited
            Ariaflutter.Ataraxia

              muscle memory ; if u came from wc3 u must already use legacy from the starts. just use the best and the usual. you confident with that go ahead.

              Sir

                As someone who trained allot of martial arts the reasoning and technique i apply to life and in dota is that when you have a problem the solution can have various outcomes so try to se the big picture and go towards it without emotion.

                An example would be thinking about a Teamfight as in What can happen if we do this?
                what would happen if they do this?

                Also i think what most 4k players lack and what most of us 5k+ players are alot better at is the Tunnelvision aspect of dota.
                Everyone in the world has tunnel vision but you can activly get more aware of this and force yourself to go around it.

                A good way to train this is to know all the basics of dota that way you wont have to think about Lasthitting, spells and itemshopping.

                Whenever i see people saying a Proplayer did something Next lvl, as in checking "items" or whatever while doing something else without breaking asweat its becuase the rest goes on by default.

                Even if most players think 80+ lasthits first 10 min is "optimal" its not untill you can do this without watching or paying attentions when you actually know how to do it right.

                Also one really sad part of dota that is exdtremlytt under developed is that PC, CFG and optimization aspect of dota which is nothing short of awkward and sad.

                I still see dendi and many others using their mouse to skill up next lvl of a certain spell and i know alot of 6-8k players not even using CFGs or even having thought about PC optimizations.

                While a proplayer might have a reactino time of about 0.1-0.2 sec using a CFG could cut that number in half or even in 4.

                Sir.

                Andy

                  We don't train for dota. We just search a game, feed, loose and blame our team.

                  Ariaflutter.Ataraxia

                    reaction time how to train it? and awareness it's easy

                    drive motorcycle at 200mph. you either train with it or die cause of it

                    casual gamer

                      pick 1 thing to improve and focus on it for x amount of games--you may want to pick the same hero every game so there is less to distract you from what you want to learn

                      jo~

                        expect what is going to happen and ull react faster

                        TripleSteal-

                          pretty much what DD and jo~ said

                          an extention of jo~'s suggestion: this is actually very important for all the games where reaction matters. you have to force your brain to believe that something (like magnus RP initiation) gonna happen in the very next moment, and keep this belief for a long while. it's not very intuitively obvious, but you gotta expect something happen immediatly but for a long while.
                          i used this approach when playing CS a lot, particularly when holding a position with awp. If you learn this concept and manage to stay focused for a while, your reaction becomes close to ideal. But it's really hard to keep this attitude for more than several seconds (and also, in CS you gonna get banned for WH over and over again).

                          This comment was edited
                          quity

                            I believe that every human being is Born as a perfect Dota Player. The only limiting factor are our shithead teammates.

                            Nox_Luna M.Sc.

                              quickcast everything. items and abilities. qwerty, not legacy keys

                              items are on alt+qwe, x,c, and spacebar.

                              one extra mouse button.

                              practice on bots, then practice a game one a server to get used to the ping delay. :)

                              nami

                                retweet triplesteal

                                the hardest part is maintaining your guard at all times but honestly if you can maintain it, then it isn't that hard to say blink out of chronos or reverse polarities. the window is surprisingly large but its simply because people get caught off guard they can't react in time.

                                Mekarazium
                                  This comment was removed by a moderator
                                  Metallicize

                                    you masturbate a lot, really helps

                                    Mokujin

                                      mfw I read a post by Relentless

                                      This comment was edited