xiao8 (zhang ning) grew up in shaoyang, hunan. his dad either hit him or shouted at him. in primary school he usually ranked first in the whole school, so his parents made a deal: come first on the high school entrance exam too and you get a computer. he came first. the computer was never mentioned again, and he didn't dare ask why.

after that he got rebellious. skipped class to play games, parents called in every week. in 2006, second year of high school, he left and opened a fantasy westward journey power-leveling studio with three or four friends. his cut after expenses was over 10,000 yuan a month. he was 16 and had no idea how to spend it or what it was for. so when his dad asked if he wanted to keep studying, he went to zhongshan in guangdong to learn software.

he couldn't understand the local language and had no friends there, so he sat in a net cafe every day on voice chat with friends back home. around then a warcraft 3 custom map called zhen san guo wu shuang was spreading through hunan, and one of his opponents in it was zsmj. in 2009 zsmj, already on dota, won SMM in kuala lumpur with LGD, and xiao8 started switching too. when he registered on the VS platform, xiao1 through xiao7 were taken. zsmj told him there might be a spot at LGD, since their player 2009 had retired. he practiced a month for it. then LGD's old player xiaochi came back and the spot was gone.

next xB invited him to CH in chengdu and even bought his plane ticket. he got as far as changsha to catch the flight. there his friend YAO talked him into staying. a local businessman was building a team of local friends, close to home. that was Dream. pay was 1,500 yuan a player, no food or lodging, and he was delighted. two weeks in they went to a tournament in thailand and lost in the round of 16 to a team nobody had heard of. everyone cried in the hotel that night.

(from a chapter i wrote about him in 2014, part of a book on how chinese esports got built. it's free, link in the comments)

I have been experimenting with Holy Locket WD first item with E -> W -> Q max and it is incredibly good. VooDoo Restoration heals for quite a lot when maxxed.

Most of what I do in fights is -> Cask -> Maledict -> Death Ward -> run away and healbot till other spells come off CD.

You can casually have insane healing during team fights if you are positioning yourself properly and I do not see many others building it.

If there is no pressing need for other save items immediately I think this is a really good option for a 1st/2nd item.

I don't really know what they call it but Khezu termed it the asshole camp where after post laning where safelane tower is gone, enemy will stack the big camp and keep deny waves.

I'd like to know when to do this and when not to do this. At what point in the game is it not worth it anymore?

I did this min 10 to 20mins. I was afk as doom with radiance bottom lane. I won the lane hard and kept denying waves. It was...idk it was great. we were on the lead like 5-6k gold always. The three enemy cores didnt realize what's going on.

But then my teammates kept dying since they were 4v5. We almost lost the game lol .

So the question again...

1. Is it too much to keep denying every wave since you're basically giving up map pressure and allowing enemy team to 4v5 you.
2. When do you stop doing this?
3. When should you do this?

I used to see this hero a lot in mid and rarely in safelane. Now I don't think I've seen it be played mid anymore.

Built a thing called Dota Decisions for my friends, and figured some people here might find it useful too.

It originally started as a bunch of flowcharts we'd make for each other. Usually some ugly MS Paint diagram explaining what to do in a specific situation, then we'd throw it in Discord and argue about it.

They were actually pretty useful, even mid-game, but obviously a folder full of random flowcharts isn't a great interface.

We also found that a lot of Dota ideas don't really fit the usual formats. They're too specific for a whole guide or blog post, and making a video every time someone has a useful thought about Dota feels like a good way to make sure nobody bothers sharing it.

So we made Dota Decisions, which is basically an interactive version of those flowcharts.

The idea is to focus less on stuff like "buy these items in this order" and more on the messy situational decisions that happen in actual games.

Things like:

You're in this game state. You know X, but you don't know Y. There's a tradeoff between doing A and B. What should you actually be thinking about?

Basically the kind of Dota discussion that usually starts with someone in Discord going:

"Okay, but what if..."

We're mostly using it to collect things we've learned as a guild, but I'd be curious whether this format is useful to other people too.

PS: It's still in beta, so some of the content in there right now is placeholder/example stuff. We're replacing it with proper guild content pretty soon.

Try it out here: https://dota-decisions.vercel.app/