Do you ever look back on the game of DotA you just played and ask yourself in realistic, non-salty terms "why did we lose this game?" I do, quite a lot, and here's the answers I most often come up with:

• because I suck at DotA
• because I picked a hero that wasn't a good pick for the game
• because I itemised poorly
• because our team lacked disable/waveclear/damage; and
• sometimes you just lose and it's fine

Now, it's abundantly clear that after 3k games - mostly unranked - and maybe 50 to 100 ranked games, that I'm a 2k scrub and I'll never be the Chad offlaner that BSJ spoke so insanely fast about. So, we'll leave that one to the side for the time being.

What I've found in the game of DotA is that picks absolutely matter, and they matter more now than they ever have before in the five years I've been playing this game. The reason why they matter more now is because the game is more finely balanced than it ever has been: heroes don't get GPM and XPM talents anymore, they don't get all-encompassing cooldown reductions in talents anymore, they rarely get !Value to AllStats nowadays, and if you look closely at most of the hero talents, there's a consistent dichotomy in it: survivability and damage. Whether it be spell amplification increases, lower cooldowns on save spells, extra STR or HP, bonus AGI or % increases to things like Burning Barrage or Multishot, it's all pretty much the same. Survive more, or deal more damage. We'll come back to this concept in a little bit.

I've played precisely five games of Timbersaw since I started playing DotA, and I lost my first four games on this hero. Recently I picked up the Overwolf Dotaplus app, and checked the percentage increase winrate in my game versus the first two phases of picks, and Timbersaw was rated as being a good counter to the enemy's lineup, so I played it.

I was dogshit. I was so bad as Timbersaw, I missed most of my Timber Chains, rarely hit anything with Chakram, itemised incorrectly [went second item Heart of Tarrasque instead of Lotus or Eul's vs a Drow] and just was generally dogshit in this game. Despite this fact, we eventually won and the end result was I played a hero I wasn't familiar with or comfortable playing, to a standard far below what someone might expect for even 2k scrubs, and despite doing all this sub-par, the hero I picked proved to be pretty hard to kill for the enemy's lineup, often requiring 3 heroes to kill me, and usually 4 or 5 later in the game. This might be anecdotal, but there is statistical information available that shows at almost every level of play, that Meepo's winrate - even in Herald and Guardian - goes up substantially versus Anti-Mage. That's right, even a Herald Meepo will win more versus a Herald Anti-Mage than the Herald Meepo normally wins. Picks matter, and they're mattering more and more as the game is more finely tuned, whether you like this fact or not. So the expression I've heard here many times that "picks don't matter until #k bracket" simply isn't true unless you're already substantially better than the MMR you're currently placed at.

I often buy Radiance on heroes, and I've been told that Radiance just isn't a thing anymore. I don't really agree, especially if the hero I've picked is a good hero for the game I'm in. For example, I've won 10 of my last 11 Wraith King games, and every game I've gone Radiance, AC and Swift Blink in that order. It does pay to think about the kinds of heroes you're against, and where their damage primarily comes from, and that will influence your decision on how to itemise the hero. At my level of play, a lot of people will pick right-click heroes, and I think Radiance is still just fine in these circumstances, particularly on Wraith King, Naga Siren, Lifestealer etc. I do still lose a lot from itemising poorly, but it's usually on offlane or support heroes because they get less farm naturally, and need to make the right item decisions more often. Let's just say that 4-position Windranger getting Maelstrom 1st item isn't the best.

Do you know how many times I've looked my team's lineup after the first two phases and thought "I don't think we can win, regardless of what I pick" and had it largely come true? Or alternatively, how many times I've looked at the enemy's lineup and thought "I don't think they have the damage to kill me if I pick this hero"? This leads me to my most realised concept in DotA in the last couple years of play: you need damage to win. By and large, I've organised my hero grid into five separate "pages", based on where they would normally sit in the context of a teamfight: frontlining, Blink initiators and secondary initiation, carry-style heroes that kite in and out of fights [or just jump in once they've got BKB or an item that makes sure they don't die straight away], backline carries [like Sniper, Drow etc] and then your backline supports. Each of these pages has organised the heroes into three categories, roughly split by how much damage they do. Here's an example:

Sven, Chaos Knight, Bristleback and Lycan are all relatively high damage heroes, particularly when using their ultimates, at virtually all stages of the game. Then you have heroes like Kunkka, Lone Druid, Tiny, Beastmaster, Brewmaster, Dragon Knight, Night Stalker [and a number of others, I won't list them all] that deal moderate levels of damage at all stages of the game. The third category has heroes like Tide, Axe, Mars, Necro and Clockwerk etc., which are all relatively low damage-dealing heroes at all stages of the game.

I've gone back and looked at the vast majority of my games, and pieced together the heroes I've played, and my allies, and looked at where each hero sits in the damage stakes. Most of the games my team lost, were games where we had no heroes in any of the five pages of grids, that dealt high damage. Most of the games lost had 3 heroes in our draft that were low damage-dealing heroes, and only one or two moderate damage-dealing heroes at best. Without good teamfight synergy and execution, these games are really hard to win in conjunction with low-MMR players' propensity to not draft enough disable.

It's hard to win a game of DotA, but it's harder when your team lacks disable and/or damage. I've never had a draft where we lost the game from having too much damage, but I can confidently state that a lot of games were lost to having not enough.

Lastly, sometimes, you just lose and it's fine. I'll try to get mad less.

Enjoy :D