Invoking the Spirits

I hit a wall in my Dota 2 All-Hero challenge a while ago. Invoker. If you haven't played Dota 2, Invoker has the most spells (14) out of all the heroes in the game - if you don't count Rubick, who can steal an active spell from any hero, or aghs Chen, with the neutral creeps. He is a hero with a high skill floor and a moderately high skill ceiling, meaning that to even play him somewhat decently takes a lot of skill, and when played by an incredibly skilled player, he is fairly effective. Long story short, he's really tough to play.

I managed to win a game with him. He took me 7 attempts, which is more than any other hero so far.

Playing him was an experience in perseverance. I got called useless a lot, because at the time, I had only mastered one of his spells - Cold Snap. It didn't require any skill shots, I just had to click my target for it to land.

I started out maxing Cyclone and EMP, because Anton said that's the best way to contribute, but I wasn't landing any of my EMPs, and though I was able to disable people with my cyclone, I didn't really have anything to finish them off. So I changed to maxing Sunstrike instead, thinking that I could hide and farm fairly safely, and still contribute somewhat with the global spell Sunstrike. People yelled at me a lot, because I didn't do much otherwise, and I wasn't farming all that efficiently. Also, it was hard to defend the base when all I really had was Sunstrike and Chaos Meteor.

So my next journey was to go Forge Spirits + Necronomicon, to try and push towers. I also got yelled at a lot, but less so, because at least I was doing something. At this point though, I was starting to get the hang of invoking spells. I found something I was comfortable with, Forge Spirits + Cold Snap, and because I was maxing Exort, my Sunstrikes were fairly powerful - and I was getting better at landing those.

If you're interested, the final scoreboard is here (you can see that I was carried by my team, but I managed to finish with a positive KDR, and I also contributed to the fights):

I was actually really proud of myself in that last game, where I had been ganked by Shadow Fiend, and I managed to quickly invoke Ghostwalk and get away. Six games ago, I would not have had the reflexes to pull that off, but by that game, it was like second nature.

I still haven't managed to use Ice Wall, and while I've invoked Alacrity a couple of times by mistake, I haven't really used that either - though I imagine it would have been handy.

After all this, I'm not going to play him again for a long time.

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On a movie-related note, I filmed my first piece of footage today! I tried to film some stuff over the weekend, but everything looked too depressing with the rain.