Study

An intimidating role for beginners, but a useful one to master. The art of soloing is simple: don’t die. You’re not in it for the dosh or kills, unless you can guarantee your safety. Because you’re alone, you will benefit from getting solo experience, instead of sharing it with a laning partner. Denying can be a useful tactic to slow the experience game of your enemies, and further increase your level advantage. Heroes who can get out of sticky situations, or farm and harass from a distance, are perfect here. A pair of wards to watch for ganks and lane opponents making aggressive movements are a very good spend of your first gold.

Windranger is a mischievous archer who can manipulate the air. She’s a popular pick for solo play thanks to her Windrun ability that lets her get out of “oh shit” moments. Not only does it give you a 50% increase in movement speed, but it slows nearby enemies and also gives you 100% physical damage evasion.

Powershot will let you harass enemy heroes and kill creeps from a distance. If you can do both in one shot, you’re awesome. It does pretty good damage, particularly fully charged, but takes a few seconds to get there so requires some expert prediction and timing. Shackle Shot is equally difficult to master, but one of the best disables in the game. The trick is to make sure there is either an enemy unit or tree behind your target, so that the shackle will latch. If you’re good, you can shackle two enemy heroes together for up to 3.75 seconds of stun. If that doesn’t get them dead, well, you’ve got bigger issues.

Her ultimate, Focus Fire, is effectively a channeled nuke for a single target. It increases Windranger’s attack speed by 500 against any creep, hero or tower. Good for taking out a key structure solo or blowing up a shackled bad guy, it combos rather naturally with anything that adds special effects to attacks. If you can find the cash to pick them up, they’ll do you well.

Dark Seer is a small purple being, versatile in empowering his allies and messing up enemy positioning. His Surge ability is akin to the previously mentioned Windrun, in that it gives him maximum movement speed for a brief amount of time. This makes him a slippery hero to catch when your enemies try to gank you. 

Ion Shell enables him to harass his enemies and also farm safely, placing a bristling shell on a enemy or allied unit that damages other enemy units around it. It lasts for a respectable twenty seconds, and you can have two up at the same time thanks to its nine second cooldown. The damage isn’t something that can be ignored either, destroying heroes who get into melee range.

Get a Soul Ring, and you can sit well out of range of your enemies while still obtaining farm to advance your hero. Vacuum and his ultimate, Wall of Replica, are a monstrous combo in a team fight. Vacuum pulls enemies together from a large radius, whereas Wall of Replica makes an illusionary wall that creates copies of any enemy hero that passes through it. These illusions do incredible damage and can turn team fights by themselves.

That’s your lot. If you really are new, it’s probably best for you to figure out which hero you want to try your hand at and then play a few bot games. The Dota 2 bots are actually better than a lot of pub players, but because it’s a bot game your team is less likely to get annoyed at you for not doing so hot. That means you get the best of both worlds; a challenge without the risk of annoying your team mates. Then, once you feel comfortable with whoever you’ve gone for, head into a game, bearing in mind that even if you go for ‘All Pick’, it might not be the best idea to just make a bee-line for whoever your favoured hero is. Your pick needs to match your team, otherwise you’re going to ruin whatever synergy is being built.