Assignment 3: A guide to your hero

The full breakdown of one hero — kit, build, skill order and laning plan — that the weekly pages deliberately refuse to give you

Due: 21 May 2027 · Weight: 30%

The brief#

Pick a hero. Write the guide you wish you had found in week 1.

Every weekly page in this course teaches at most two abilities, and says why those two and not the rest. That restraint is a teaching decision — a beginner handed a full kit reads it as a list and remembers none of it — but it leaves something owed, and this is where the course pays it back. Here you do the whole hero, and you do it yourself.

The guide has to argue. Dota already has a great many hero guides that are build orders with the reasoning removed, and reproducing one is not this assignment: anyone can tell you what to buy, and the in-game guides will do it while you play. What you are being marked on is the because. Why this item before that one, given what the hero cannot do until it arrives. Why this ability first, given what the lane looks like in the first few minutes. Why a different opening makes sense against a particular kind of opponent, and what you give up by choosing it.

Choose a hero you have actually played. A guide written from the outside is recognisable within a paragraph — it is fluent about the kit and silent about what the hero feels like to pilot when it is not working, and the second thing is what a reader in week 1 needs.

Week 7’s stance applies here too, turned around. There we said: follow the recommended build first, then understand why. This assignment is the then. You are allowed to arrive at the same build the guide recommends. You are not allowed to arrive at it without being able to say what it is for.

What you submit#

• A written guide covering: the hero’s full kit, a skill order, an item build, and a laning plan.
• Sources for every figure you quote. The course pins its numbers to one patch; yours should be pinned to something too, and the guide should say what.

Format is yours. A guide is a document with a reader, so structure it for someone reading it before their first game on the hero, not for a marker.

How it is marked#

The full kit is the floor, not the mark — describing all the abilities correctly is what makes the guide complete, not what makes it good. The mark is in the justifications: whether each build and skill-order choice is tied to something the hero can or cannot do, whether the laning plan says what beats it as well as what it wants, and whether the guide would survive contact with a reader who then went and played the hero.