Team Communication

As this is a team game, communication is necessary to make things go as smooth as possible. Unless you’re playing with mind readers, inform your allies with actions they need to participate in such as ganks. By doing so, you increase the success rate of your action and everyone involved can get hero kill gold and assist gold.

Thanks to the toggle key, letting your team mates know that an enemy in the lane is missing. This can telegraph enemy movements as players determine the capabilities of the missing enemy hero. Even after a successful kill on an enemy hero, be mindful of their absence after respawning as they may very well have teleported into another lane.

It also pays to pay attention to enemy skill builds and items as they may introduce weaknesses that the team can exploit. A clear example of this is when an enemy hero doesn’t have a TP scroll and is far from any shops. This means that that hero cannot quickly defend enemy structures. And given that most heroes can choose several item builds for their hero, telling the team what an enemy is building into can help mitigate its effect. If an enemy Storm Spirit is building into Orchid of Malevolence, high priority heroes such as the carry should consider buying Manta Style or Linken’s Sphere while other roles can buy items that can remove silence. By doing this, ally heroes can avoid building items that will be ineffective against enemy heroes. It also gives your team a sense of urgency. Like if the enemy carry is getting massively fat, the team should address the problem accordingly.

Knowing enemy cooldowns is also important. As they say, the threat of a skill is sometimes much more effective than the skill itself. Certain heroes have devastating ultimates but have long cooldowns (Tide Hunter’s Ravage, Enigma’s Black Hole to name a few). Letting the team know if a skill with a long cooldown has been expended would mean the enemy won’t be as strong. At the same time, items with cooldowns should also be kept in check. Like if am enemy hero uses a TP scroll, that would mean that they won’t be able to use it again for over a minute.