Playing on public teams

[Sud]

Ah the joys of the random chaos that is a public team.

Playing on a public team is quite a bit varied, but one thing you can count on is a lack of decisive coordination. People playing pubs (at this point in time) are generally very new and usually only know Dota, which can be as much a detriment as it is AoS experience.

You should make a conscious decision to pick a hero that is well rounded, or a defensive expert. A well rounded hero can fight and farm well, while a defensive expert hero will quell any solo enemy's attempts at pushing down towers. Good choices for well rounded heroes may be Pyro, Psionicist or Sea Captain, good choices for defense are Engineer, Architect, and Geneticist. Some support characters, such as Cleric, can be good, if they have farming ability.

Your first goal in this situation is to see who on your team is reliable and who is a liability. You can usually do this by communicating with them. The reliable people you will want to talk with because you may need them to swap lanes with you or you will need to order them to defend/attack a point.

Always carry a town portal scroll. You are the only person on your team that you can trust. If a strong enemy push comes (ie. Anti/Conj/Necro ultimates), you HAVE to be there to defend or it will mean tower loss.

In any situation where I feel I am outnumbered (even if it's just a case of the enemies are better than your allies) I tend to want to play a tower game. This means getting up the Tower Buff towers (regen mason/fortified defenses/enhanced defenses/spiked defenses) when possible. EVEN IF YOU HAVE LOST TOWERS these are still worth getting because the surviving towers will be able to hold off the stronger creeps. If your team will benefit from it, getting up a mindtower/unholy synthesis tower is also recommended. After that, you can start working on unit towers, then eventually a blows of conviction or grave tempo tower.

Never leave a lane empty if you can help it. Enemies can get into empty lanes and push hard at a moment's notice. Try to get a teammate to cover his lane and stay there. If they're running to town to heal or buy items, remind them that there are healing stations and couriers, and that they should NEVER leave their lane to go on a shopping trip.

If the enemy puts up towers in response, try to get yourself in the lane where the new units are running down. User tower units are worth more gold and xp when you kill them. Normally, public enemy teams tend to focus on items, such, if you're going towers, you have a good opportunity to kill the enemy heroes who are itemming up. You'll have to make up for the item defecit by using skill, but the gold you get from a good itemed up hero kill is worth the effort. Just someone running around with a couple tier 2 items and 1-2 tier 1 items can be worth upwards of 800-1000 gold, and given the average skill of a pubbie, it's very worth pursuing.

Try to remind your teammates that dying is a bad thing, because of item bounties (hero XP is the best XP gain in the game as well, so some pretty lopsided levels can be the result if your team dies too much in the presence of enemies).

Direct and encourage teammates to do things they're good at (ie. Giant please push bottom, Pyro fireball tower, Captain Armada enemy base, etc.)

From here, you have a good base to start from. The enemy shouldn't be breaking down any of your towers, as your efforts should be enough to take their solo pushes down (keep those portal scrolls stocked up, and if you have to you might have to suppply the healing stations for multiple lanes ). Your teammates from there should be free to push as they can, as the enemy team likely won't have a stand up guy like you keeping the lanes protected and buffed with towers.

[seifer]

I found out all that information the hard way, JS. ;D

Its why I have so much practice with the architect and Sea Captain. I really do wish I had a chance to try out other heroes in multiplayer, though.
My team usually lacks the basic knowledge of how important those towers are! Or necessary that car, item couriers, or healing stations are to not losing.
Once I can start getting in organized games I should be getting a chance to play as more heroes. Like it is with DotA.
Although those games are nothing alike...

[Sud]

I find that CoD is most enjoyable when played with at least 1 person who knows what they are doing. 2 people working in tandem can often throw back even the most determined enemy teams. 2 people working together can assign tasks and carry them out. I recently played in a game that was basically a 2v4. We lost every tower and at one point were 0-10 for tower ratio. We came back by doing coordinated strikes on the troll (who had worldslayer) with psi and exec and using the income that we gained off their heroes to power feed the exec into a murder machine. He ended that game with juggernaut, a heft, blade boots, worldslayer, a guardianship, and something else nice. This is where itemlust gets a lot of people, they do well pushing towers, then decide they're going to item themselves up, giving the other team a chance to come back by hunting down their heroes. When your hero is worth 2k gold a kill, this adds up quickly.

That being said, solo is a different kettle of fish. Architect is very nice, but you can get into the situation where you have a great defense, but no offense, and the enemies start doing triple prong attacks on your bases, spreading your resources too thin (while your team has a picnic in the base by the fountain reading item descriptions). If your team is not completely inept, he can make up for a lot of their mistakes, however, and keep things nice and cool.

There are other heroes fairly well suited to being in a down situation:

- Geneticist: An adept defense (farming for you) coupled with very nice combat/tank abilities makes Geney a really nice hero for all round (unlike architect you can have an offense with this guy)

- Anti-Paladin: Fighter and pusher. Also nice. He's going to be getting a little bit of a damage nerf on his ultimate, but he's still going to be a good seiger. He can throw down with most heroes, has vamping skills, and works well with items which makes him excellent for being in a 5v1.

- Necromancer: Necro combines good nuking with good summons and bone wall serves as a great blockade. Necro needs to be careful later on when melee heroes start getting items that let them charge him due to his lower hp, but he has a secret weapon - his innate which is 40% less damage, 40% lower attack speed, and 10% less run speed for the target hero. Excellent to throw on a melee hero insisting on trying to kill you.

- Engineer: Engineer is great, he can defend with his gun, and putting a decent item like gloves of blurred attack or spinechill on his bot will make it outfight most enemy heroes (careful that you don't let them kill it directly for the item bounty applies to the bot). The bot doesn't lose its item when it dies, it can be recreated and will have the item in its inventory. The seige mode bot and sentry gun combo poses a signifcant mental block to newbie enemy teams who sit there trying to figure out why they can't right click the gun to death before it shreds them. In short, goblin + enemy stupidity = unretaliated pushing power for you.

- Sewer Dweller: Played right, the dweller can fight most enemies into the ground, and has tentaclax to help him on pushes. Because enemies are generally too stupid to pick heroes like architect, geneticist (they never use mutants on defense, they take them on the offense), or goblin, tentaclax often gets to go crazy unretaliated on the enemy towers. This coupled with dweller's great speed and damage dealing capabilities make him a solo force not to be trifled with.

Beyond that, you have to figure out what strategy is going to work. If your team is just somewhat inept, having to fall back and run away but not giving up too many kills, then you may want to go for the tower buff towers yourself. The 4 tower buff towers help an incredible amount, and they can make up for the shortcomings of some newbies.

If your team is hoorendous, then you may want to go for hero kills and items, and let the fate of the towers be as it will be. If your teammates being sloppy, stupid, iteming up and dying to enemies, you can expect the enemies to recipricate by getting tons of items on their heroes. If you can maintain a competitive item inventory with the enemies, you can use your superior skill to crush them and claim their item bounties, with each kill making you stronger to the point where you can comfortably take on multiple of them at the same time. This is where you can turn a game around when you have a 10 tower defecit and start making strikes of your own against the enemy.