In any givenDota 2game, there are over 120 heroes to choose from, and each one is unique, with different stats, abilities, and play styles. Naturally, some heroes are vastly harder to play than others. Micro (Mircro-managing movement), fast decision-making, and map awareness are universally useful for a Dota 2 player, but for playing some heroes, it’s a hard requirement.
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While playing a Sniper may feel like a point-and-click adventure, playing Arc Warden feels like anything but. If the enemy is playing an easier hero than you, being slightly higher-skilled than your opponent only gets you to about even. That’s exactly why winning with a hard hero feels much more rewarding than cruising by with alower skill-cap hero. Here are some of the trickiest picks.
In the right hands, Rubick is one of the scariest heroes in the game. Not only does a good Rubick do everything your hero does, but he also does it better and with more impact. What makes this hero so impactful? Well, it’s all about the little things.
What makes Rubick hard to play is the decision-making aspect. Rubicks need to pay attention to all heroes' abilities at all times in the game. They need to have quick fingers to steal the right spell at the right time, and know what every other hero does to even begin to understand when to steal and from whom.
9Naga Siren
Naga Siren requires quite a bit of experience to play properly. This hero possesses the ability to create three strong illusions that are incredibly tanky, last for a very long time, and have a very short cooldown. These illusions should, theoretically, always be on the field.
Any Naga player worth their salt will be able to micro each and every illusion separately and maneuver them around like four different units. They should be able to move across the map, cut creep waves, and take up every single neutral camp in the jungle. This hero can easily solo-carry any game, given enough time. Just remember to invest in someearly game protection.
8Earth Spirit
Earth Spirit requires no micro. This hero remains a single unit throughout the game, and you are only responsible for one set of inputs in order to play this hero right. However, Earth Spirit is an entirely skill-based hero. Every single ability that he has needs to be vector targeted. Not only that, this hero’s ability changes depending on how many remnants he has placed in the pathway of his ability.
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Earth Spirit players are expected to know exactly how far their roll ability will take them, with a remnant and without one. They need to be able to predict where the enemy hero is going to go, because the roll ability has a really long travel time.
In the hands of an expert, Visage is terrifying. Usually played from the off-lane position, Visage requires a good amount of game knowledge along with the ability to micro three units at the same time. He is a fairly squishy hero that can be taken down quite easily with the right setup.
What’s great about him, though, is that he has access to two birds/familiars that give flying vision, deal a lot of damage, and have the ability to stun units quite effectively. However, each bird drops a bunch of gold if killed, and they are even more squishy than Visage. All this makes playing Visage a game of bait and switch.
Puck gets four active abilities, and three of them are what are termed “escape abilities.” Illusory Orb allows you to throw a slow-moving ball of light that you can teleport to at any time along its path. Phase Shift allows you to wink out of existence, impossible to target, for a few seconds. Waning Rift allows you to perform a short-range blink that also silences all units around your landing point.
Playing Puck is all about keeping the enemy team guessing where you are at any given moment in the game. Your job is to outwit and outmaneuver five enemy heroes and play on the edge constantly. Throw out an illusory orb into the trees, baiting the enemy into thinking you’re going one way and then escaping via another route. Rinse, repeat.
Like Puck, Tinker is also a hero with a high focus on escape. His ultimate ability, Rearm, is a reset button for all his other abilities and cooldowns. This is very, very useful because of the existence of one item: Blink. Blink allows you to teleport for a set distance with a cooldown of 12 seconds. With Rearm, there is no cooldown.
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What this means is that Tinker is one of the most mobile heroes in the game, with essentially limitless mobility. Tinker also has access to two high-damage abilities that it can spam with the help of Rearm, with the only bottleneck being its mana. Situational awareness is required to play this hero effectively.
4Arc Warden
At level 6, Arc Warden gets the ability to create a doppelganger. This is a replica of Arc Warden that has all of his abilities, his stats, and his items. It can teleport around the map using the teleport scroll and gets to use the Hand of Midas separately from the original.
If you’re planning on playing Arc, you need to control two units at the same time.
On top of that, both copies of Arc Warden have abilities that need to be pressed in order to have an impact. Not only do you need to switch perspectives constantly, but you also need to pay attention to the cooldowns of the abilities and when and how to use them. It’s a lot of decision-making, mixed in with some advanced micro, that makes this hero hard to play.
One of the most powerful heroes in Dota lore, Invoker has always been a staple in the game. That doesn’t make him any easier to play. True to his name, he has a lot of spells to cast. Ten of them, in fact. The way it works is that as Invoker levels up, he puts his level-up points into one of three aspects. We call them Quas, Wex, and Exort.
All possible combinations of two aspects grant Invoker access to a different spell. Quas-Quas-Wex is one spell, Quas-Wex-Wex is another, and so on, for a total of ten spells. It comes down to juggling through these abilities, activating the right one in the heat of battle, and not dying in the process.
The king of micro, Chen, is notoriously hard to play. Chen has access to his signature skill, Holy Persuasion, which allows him to essentially persuade any creep in the game to become his ally (provided high enough levels). The result is an army of creeps barreling down a lane, squashing enemy heroes like bugs on their way to take down towers.
Not only does this require incredible micro skills to even move the units around, but Chen players also need to know the exact stats, advantages, disadvantages, and uses of every single neutral creep in the game. This is game knowledge most players, even at a high level, only have vague notions of. By the time you become a Chen expert, you’ll have a doctorate in Dota lore.
If you thought micro with Chen or Naga Siren was hard, Meepo is on a different level entirely. Playing Meepo requires you to micro five different copies of the same hero at the same time. Although not incredibly squishy, they can easily be focused down by a physical damage carry because, on their own, a single copy of Meepo is not that strong.
So far, it may sound like any other micro hero, but one caveat to Meepo’s power makes this hero nigh unplayable for most people. When any single one of the copies dies, Meepo dies. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This means that any Meepo player needs to be hyper-aware of their clones and have the presence of mind (and the micro skills) to save them from an attack.
