MOBA Madness: 5 Dota 2 tips for helping your friends suck less

MOBAs like Dota 2 have crazy high learning curves and can be some of the harshest communities towards new players, so it’s common for newbies to ask their friends for help in picking up the game. If you ever find yourself on the teaching end of a master-disciple relationship, here are some tips to help you impart your Dota 2 knowledge in the most efficient and least stressful way.

1.Get acquainted with your coaching tools

The most obvious coaching tool is the in-game coaching function. You can use it to spectate from your disciple’s perspective, ping on the minimap, indicate mouse clicks to the student, draw on the ground, and communicate privately with your student via text and voice.

Playing together with your disciple is also important if you want to teach them teamwork and spell combos. If you wish to privately chat with your disciple without letting your teammates listen in on your embarrassing conversations that reek of noobness, then go ahead and use Skype because there is currently no private chatting system in Dota 2.

You can’t chat with just one player in a match; one for all, all for one!

The official Dota 2 website is a great place to read up on items and heroes, and there are nice videos showing off the spell animations which will help keep the “wtf was that?!” exclamations from your disciple to a minimum.

(See: MOBA Madness: Dota 2 6.81 Spring Cleaning patch highlights and analysis)

Lastly, when it comes to picking a hero to learn the game with, this list of hero difficulties is a nice guide that shows the easiest heroes to use.

2. Be a guide, not a puppetmaster

Remember that even if you are a much better player than your friend is now, your way isn’t always the best way. There are many opinions on the best item builds and playstyles, but part of what makes Dota 2 fun is that it allows us a lot of freedom to play the game in our own styles.

I would definitely not recommend new players try playing Shadow Fiend, though.

Some people enjoy hyper-offensive heroes, some like playing a support role. It’s not your job to decide for them how they should play. While it’s a bad idea in general for newbies to learn hard carry heroes like Faceless Void or high-difficulty heroes like Meepo or Invoker, you should at least give your disciple some room to try out various heroes for the fun of it against A.I.s, and give him some freedom to learn on his own.

The moment you start dictating with an iron fist is the moment the game stops becoming fun for the both of you, so don’t be too insistent on anything.