General DiscussionThe boring and largely meaningless calculation of why AM fails in pubs.

i thought it was because picking am means your team has to fight 4 vs 5 for 30 minutes
i suggest you do this again, but replace phantom assassin with obsidian destroyer

Man, your internet must get laggy very often...That said, will you do these AM comparisons with other carrys? Some of the stuff you write has been very useful when I try to convince my friends about their stupid decisions and theorycrafting and I'm too lazy to come up with an explanation myself most of the time.

Both are shit for pubs if played bad and not supported. Many don't really care who wins in 1v1 of them. BTW Pub players(and others as well) don't max blur first. most of them don't even get a single point of it until they max dagger and blink. And PA is in "worst versus" list of AM. no surprises.

This is a good analysis if you think of normal bracket pubs because the AM won't easily outfarm the PA due to low playerskill.

However, I have no doubts that in a 5 men stack AM is one of the best, if not the best, carry in the game. In a 5 men stack where you have rotation, decent supporting and a good offlaner your team can easily win, or perhaps just HANDLE, a 4v5.
But yeah, picking AM in solo queue is highly risky and will probably fail.

He is a bit like furion; he's bad in low level solo queue pubs

since when furion's bad in low level pubs

When people rush shadow blade and midas + the same damage every game, and going jungle so all the lanes get weaker and lose. He is also not that useful if you can't communicate properly with your team mates

As someone who lived in the trench months ago, and sometimes takes a quick peek back into its black depths depending on who I queue with, I can tell you that Furion wrecks low level pubs.

Yes NP does very well in low level pubs because he can farm plenty of items on accident. So if he just manages to get items that are not terrible he will win the game.

"He can farm plenty of items on accident", that means he can use his ultimate in order to steal farm from his team mates

^ He's talking about low level pubs, where people use all their skills to kill creeps out of frustration from not being able to kill them with autoattacks.

Lets try another right click war.

Antimage vs Dragon Knight, Level 16 both fail to use abilities. DK does not use Dragon form, AM does use mana void. DK does not use his stun. AM fails to blink away when he is losing.

Each have 22.5k networth of items. AM got Bfury, Manta, Bfly, Heart, and has AGI treads. DK has MkB, Heart, AC, Deso, and STR treads.

AM has 2160 hp, 17.24 armor, 246 dmg, 2.10 Attacks/sec . DK has 2407 hp, 35.56 armor, 289 dmg 1.49 Attacks/sec.

AM first 9 attacks can burn mana for an extra 328 dmg. AM will do 709 dmg from physical attacks for a total of 1037 dmg in the first 4.28 seconds. During this time DK can do 6 attacks. Since AM armor is reduced by deso and AC... DK will do 1317 dmg with these attacks assuming that he gets no mini-bashes (7% chance of getting RNG this bad). Now DK is oom, AM could blink away but being nub he won't...he also forgot to use Manta just like DK forgot to stun him. DK has 1370 hp left. AM has 843 hp left.

If DK got the best possible RNG AM would be down to 387 hp ... really it would be even worse since some of AM attacks would be interrupted by the mini-stuns. But only 1% chance of getting all 6 mini-bashes. Most likely he would get 2 so AM would have 691 hp left.

At this point with no mana to burn AM has only 165 effective dps against that massive armor. While DK has 246 most probable effective dps. DK will have 907 hp left when AM dies. If for some reason AM did cast Mana Void at the end it would hit DK for 450 dmg.

In short, with 4 major items each lowskill AM can only run away from an equally farmed lowskill DK lategame. If DK manages to stun him, DK can about half kill AM during the stun duration. AM cannot kill a DK without help, but AM will die to the DK easily if he does not run away. Both will quickly regain health with those hearts...but DK will not regain mana very fast. If AM attacks when DK has no mana he is dramatically less effective. Antimage is quite impotent against a late game DK whose mana is not there to burn. Hp and Armor are just to big a factor late in the game and AM has much less than most carries. His high base attack speed doesn't come close to making up for it.

This wasn't a fair 1v1 actually, if you're going for a 1v1 build you should put Abyssal and not Tarrasque on AM.

Nub Antimage won't get Abyssal. That is an activatable item. I'm surprised he got Manta Style, but the guide said to get it.

Besides if AM doesn't get heart, DK can kill him from full during one stun. Nub AM should not risk that. He will get stunned by something and die very easily. Of course that is exactly what happens to bad pub AM late game. They blink into a fight and die having done nothing. We have all seen it. They also tend to spend several seconds walking and end up doing maybe 3 or 4 attacks before dieing in a teamfight if they even get that much. Even those who get bkbs still do almost nothing because they spend the bkb time walking.

If you watch low level pub games you will see that the real reason Drow is a successful low skill carry is that failed orb walk attempts result in far more actual attacks in a team fight than the normal performance of a low skilled carry which is mostly walking around doing zero attacks.

Many low skill pub carrys walk through the fight instead of attacking because they are attempting to right click targets. But since they are so bad at clicking they actually end up giving walk orders. Right clicking on the correct target during the chaos of a teamfight is truly quite beyond the abilities of the average dota player. Most would be a lot better off if they just let go of the mouse and let their hero autoattack whatever was close.

Slowing and stunning a hero does much more than merely prevent them from escaping. It dramatically reduces the difficulty of clicking on them. Frost Arrows now do a 60% slow so the pub carry is able to click on the hero again and again. This is important because pub carries tend to do 4 or 5 times too many clicks and maybe half of them will miss accidentally giving a walk order. Many actually believe spam click meaninglessly makes them pro. They will say they have high "Actions per Minute". Many have developed a habit of spam clicking from RTS games where this could be measured and would give a meaningful indication of skill.. IF... if someone was actually doing something instead of spam clicking the ground spastically. Watch any low level pub POV and you are likely to see thousands of meaningless clicks in any given game. I've seen people who do as many as 10 wasted clicks per second. If you consider each one an attempt to do something, then they miss nearly all click attempts.

The sad thing about Anti Mage is that they are fully retarded. AM with around 500 matches got 10 last hits after 30 min and feeding enemy team. What the fuck?! And that OD? Losing lane vs Pudge...? 42 cs after 30 min?

I'll never play support in pubs again.

^ valves mm

@Relentless
The reason why AM fails is because his team cannot hold the game 4v5 while he is farming. Or even worse, he is not farming.

PL, void, medusa, morph have at least one nuke or a good team fight ulti, but AM has nothing. Without items he is zero.

good post. In the past 2 days I picked am 10 times and lost my first 7 games. One thing is due to noob teammates who consistently lose their lanes while I won mine in 7 consecutive games (nice matchmaking). But more importantly I realised that sometimes it is not easy to farm with AM even if you get battlefury. In the games I lost I couldn't farm because my team did not have map control, and my enemy teams always counterpick heroes to counter AM, like Riki, SB, bh, clinkz so much so that I never got to blink, clear neutral camp, blink, clear creepwave, blink, clear neutral camp ad infinitum. My GPM was still highest on my team by mere 400~, instead of 600~ possible when given maximum room to farm.

I think this is the reason why AM is hardly picked in pro games-he is very difficult to play and playable only against a certain set of heroes.

So I figured out this strategy- against heroes that counter AM you have to stick to farming the nc and not show up on your opponent's map at all. The most useful item for that is vlads, and you don't need to get the standard battlefury at all for this. I've played this way and I feel it works better than insisting on rushing the BF and failing hard.

^ I'm just sharing how I failed with AM

I think a large part to do with it is people not knowing how to utilise the crucial abilities of Blink and Mana Void, as well as Mirror Image.

First, Blink. Yes, 5 second cooldown. Unless you're silenced or stun-locked, how are you gonna get killed? When you blink in without a Heart, of course! The same problem happens with Queen of Pain. People want to blink in and get some kills… except they don't get kills and die within 5/6 seconds.

Then, Mana Void. I don't even know how to explain this one. People just don't use it on supports after they have exhausted their mana because… they don't know how to use this skill? I've seen one too many Anti-Mage use it on the other team's Lifestealer or Alchemist, and sometimes even with their Rage or BKB up.

Finally, Mirror Image. Manta Style is a crucial item for Anti-Mage due to Mana Break. From my experience, as AM, with at least equal footing with the other team, you should blink in and command all 3 units to attack one unit, which will utilise Mana Break to its fullest extent. But I see a lot of Manta Style users (not just Anti-Mage) just use the thing and… use the illusions to scout? Or leave the illusions attacking their tier 3 tower while they and their team retreat outside tower distance? The DPS and confusion is most effectively applied when your actual hero is with the illusions.

Also, there are way too many people not bothering to get 1 point in Spell Shield early game. Seriously, 0% to 26% Magic Resistance is worth more than 2 seconds cooldown on your Blink.

Most carries have pretty low winrates simply due to the nature of them, though. Well, I guess there's Spectre and PL, but… Maybe I'm just mad at my Shadow Blade Keeper of the Light last game. Pfft.

Actually noob AM will get Vlads and Vanguard, then won't farm anything more from there.

Well the think is even if you are good with AM i think is a suicide to play am on solo queue, you need a good team who knows how to play 4 vs 5 early, and if there is a fucking clinkz with fucking orchid searching to slay you its even harder.

Elder titan is more dangerous then clinkz. If you get manta clinkz can't do much.

Yeah ET can gank you while you are farming. WTF.

^ To be fair, it's not very often you see a decent clinkz either.

With ET spirit chasing you at high levels, you can't fight either. You have like zero armor and reduced magic resistance. Also OD kinda' wipe the floor with AM.

^That has nothing to do with Clinkz though. Also with that logic ET counters everyone.

didnt read but why am fails in pub is because, lowskilled players have a free BLINK and use it like morons, :> blink in and die
which they couldnt do with other carries.

That's the basic idea Nova, but its a special case. More generally speaking AM fails in pubs because his power is in mobility and positioning so simply acquiring items until you can accidentally win fight rarely works. It is difficult for antimage to win a fight on accident, unlike more successful pub carries like

Skeleton King --- accidentally survives to the end of a fight like a carry should

Lycan --- accidentally does high dps in a fight because pubs lose control of the extra units and let them autoattack

Ursa --- free agies almost as often as SK hides several feeds per game

Luna --- accidentally hits the right target because glaives hit everything, her farming is also much better because of accidental lasthits

Spectre --- pressing 1 button and your hero will attack all the enemy heroes for at least 7 seconds even if you fail everything else

Viper --- does dmg to everyone who hits him completely on accident. Also, with his orb set to autoattack he accidentally casts slows.

Drow --- Lots of accidental lasthit power here, also an accidental slow like viper.

These are the top pub carries. They all can be played with great skill but they can also be played with very low skill as well. Antimage can't accidentally blink to the right target at the right time and can't accidentally get lasthits until he has battle fury. Often by that time the game is lost and even if he gets it he still has the lowest Strength gain of all carries but weaver so its quite easy for him to blink in to a bad position and die. Like Nova said its much easier to feed and fail with a high mobility hero.

Look at the bottom of the list of pub winrates. Its all heroes that require high mobility or micro. Heroes that cannot win fights accidentally. Being very mobile is huge liability if you have no idea what you are doing. It just means you can screw up your position more often and by larger amounts.

lol @relentless never read so much bullshit in this 4rums before...srlsy dude ure basically saying all pubs are completely retarded..."accidentally does high dps in a fight because pubs lose control of the extra units and let them autoattack" LOL or ure a huge troll or completely braindead

also holy fuck, thats a lot of free time u have there

No, I am not saying they are retarded. I am saying they are unable to control their heroes and unable to see what is really happening and understand it in time to do anything about it.

Also judging by your response you really don't understand that well over 3 million dota players are much worse than you and always will be. The way you play is impossible for a truly average player to match. Just because there are plenty who are far better than you... you can't forget about all those far worse. Most people who play dota REALLY CANNOT control their hero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cMSpmWpDFw
Watch the game and remember what its really like. You complain about nub, but you never see them. Matching is bad, but its not anywhere near as bad as it could be.

rolf atum you expect too much from pubs.

Dont forget that not everyone has too much time to dedicate to this game, so a lot of people just play and dont really give a fuck about improving or searching guides or anything.

Anyway, its forum such a long word that you need to write 4rums ?

I'm afraid relentless is right. My last game I played Venge. Laned with AM against medusa and tree. I thought I did well and we won quite comfortably in the end but the first blood is exactly what relentless explains above.

I go stack neutrals and medusa dives my AM almost to our tier 2. It takes me a while to notice but when I do I go to save him. Quick scream and then I stun her was the plan. I scream and then I don't have enough mana for the stun. I stand there auto attacking the creeps as they duke it out, both really low, whilst I try a few times to cast the magic missile.

I didn't notice this until I watched the game back as well, didn't have a clue at the time. Thought I was attacking 'doosa but just standing there attacking creeps instead. AM won the battle but I would have been raging at me if I was him and lost.

TI4, here I come!

xd "Thought I was attacking 'doosa but just standing there attacking creeps instead"

Monkeh has learned to watch his replays. I highly encourage it. If you don't watch them you won't even know what happens in your own games. Every pro player watches their own replays to learn... and not just for dota 2, but for real sports as well. It really is not possible to see and understand everything happening as it occurs live.

If you think you know what, how, and why everything in your games occurred then you are just delusional. Probably most of you all don't care enough to take the extra time to find out, but if you want to know then watch the replays. The best players see more of the game and see it more accurately but everyone still misses some of it. Most of the map cannot be seen. Only details on one unit can be selected at a time, and you can't see PoV on other players until you watch the replay. Then you will know what really happened in the game.

I really should make a video of it actually, the 'action' and my face when I watched it back. Honestly, 2 heroes duking it out on like 100 health each and I'm stood 400 units away auto attacking the creep wave. Just 2 strong.

Again, relentless is right. Watching replays of yourself is a very worthwhile exercise. If you can stand it, it's often embarrassing when you're me.

Now that you mention it, it's funny because I saved a replay of an epic escape with Shadow Demon by me, and when I watched again I realized I couldn't use it in a movie because there was an AA who accidentaly hit creep instead of killing me. Ir ruined the whole scene.