Dota – way to make a skill autocast-able

When you're last hitting in Dota2, a lot of the damage from creeps is being dealt by the ranged creep. Notice which enemy creep it's attacking and often simply just time your projectile to hit immediately before or immediately after the ranged creep's attack to ensure the last hit. You should be hitting each enemy creep exactly once- this way your enemies won't have a chance to deny it while you're waiting for your next attack. If your opponents are too close to the wave, especially if they're melee and you're ranged, you can harass your opponent to completely remove the ability for them to deny you. Doing this will draw creep aggression to you, however, so you should usually start to back away as soon as your attack is released to minimize the damage you'll take (none, if you've positioned properly). If you feel like you're in a good position, you can also animation cancel (begin walking towards your target) as soon as the attack is released, and usually get off more attacks and really harass your opponent. Just be careful when chasing past the creep wave, you usually don't want to expose yourself that much unless you're in a strong position and an creep wave can do a surprising amount of damage.

Your starting items will also help you to last hit in lane dramatically. My typical ranged carry build is a +3 primary stat, a +2 all stats, and three +1 all stats items, and a health potion or tangos. This gives you adequate health regeneration, +95 HP, and +8 damage, and builds nicely into a Magic Wand and a Wraith Band/Talisman. For melee carries, I usually buy a Stout Shield, a health potion, tangos, and three +1 all stats items. I see a lot of new players buy boots or other worthless items first that don't help them win the lane, they just lose it less dramatically. You'll be surprised how simple choices like this can help you crush a lane early against equally skilled opponents who are making bad choices. If you're a melee hero competing with a hard hitting melee hero or an opponent who keeps denying creeps, consider buying a Quelling Blade to improve your damage. If it lets you get 3 last hits you otherwise wouldn't and then you sell it, it's more than paid for itself.

One concept calling animation canceling is unintuitive at first but incredibly important both in lane and in general. To perfect your last hitting, you'll need to know how to do this and understand your hero's attack point. Here's a full list of Attack Points that's sortable (add the Atk Point column)- they typically are between .3 and .6 seconds, with a few outliers. A lower attack point is better because it lets you prepare an attack faster. It's kind of like riding the edge of a trigger: you want to be really close to firing as often as possible, but not actually fire until you're sure of it. When you know your hero's attack point (which will improve over the course of the game as you gain attack speed), you can start attacks and cancel the animation just before it completes by pressing S or H, immediately being able to start another attack. Doing this repeatedly is very effective for faking attacks and causing your enemy to misplay- they won't know when your true attack will be coming out. To last hit with ranged heroes you'll also have to account for projectile speed, which also varies but can be seen in the same link.

Play this until you get your time down to 10 seconds or so: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75495922/InvokerTrainer.htm

Then play a bot game or two until you're confident with your hero and your build, and you should be fine jumping into a real game at your skill level. The hero is definitely hard to play, but he's not nearly as hard as people pretend he is because he's so damned good at everything.

The skillbuild most commonly used right now:

QRQEEEREQQW

Q first for regen, R for Cold Snap, then another Q should give you plenty of regen in lane. Then you level E four times (getting Invoke when possible), followed by Q twice more. This puts you at 4-0-4-2, which allows you to summon double Forge Spirits as early as possible. This combined with Cold Snap is absolutely devastating at low levels- you will melt through armor and with three Exort orbs up you'll hit tremendously hard. From there you get a point in Wex to open up the rest of your spellbook (notably Ghost Walk). Typically you max E first, then W, to get the most casting power.

The typical item build:

• Starting items: Claw of Attack, Iron Branch, Healing Salve
• Early items: Phase Boots, then Drum, then Force Staff
• Midgame items: Aghanim's Scepter. You want to be finishing this right as you hit level 17.
• Luxury items: Sheepstick, Blink Dagger, Desolator, BKB, Eul's. All situational.

If you're interested in learning basics about the hero, I did a relatively popular walkthrough a few months back that goes over the old Quas-Wex build that was popular at the time. We didn't touch much on the Quas-Exort build that I've described above, though, and that QE style is much more popular recently due to a buff in the most recent balance patch. Video: