Week 5: Who should I pick?
Strength, agility, intelligence and universal — not flavour categories but exchange rates for everything you earn
22 March 2027
This week’s decision#
Picking a hero is the first decision you make before a game even starts, and this course delays it until now on purpose. For the first month you have been learning what a hero does with gold. The attribute system is the answer to what a hero turns gold into, and the same purchase buys different things depending on who is making it.
The mistake this week fixes is picking on how a hero looks, and discovering in the game that every ability costs mana and you are a strength hero.
Mechanics#
The four primary attributes. Strength, agility, intelligence and universal. Your primary attribute decides what each level actually gives you.
How attributes become combat. Strength buys maximum health and health regeneration. Agility buys armour and attack speed. Intelligence buys maximum mana, mana regeneration and magic resistance — not spell damage, which is the thing most people assume it does and the thing it has never done.
What universal is. A universal hero turns every point of any attribute into +0.45 attack damage, which is why they scale from items that would do nothing for a hero with a single primary.
The line this week turns on. For a hero whose primary attribute it is, each point of that attribute also adds +1 attack damage. That is the whole argument: the same item, bought by two heroes, is not the same purchase.
7.41f removed Facets, so picking a hero is a smaller question than it used to be. This week needs attributes and abilities, not branches.
The resource lens#
Attributes are gold’s exchange rate. The same item pays different amounts to different heroes, because the primary attribute sets what your gold turns into. This is the groundwork for week 7, where you start spending it.
Before the lecture#
Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 1 — try a hero.
This week’s hero#
Three of them: Sven for strength, Phantom Assassin for agility and Zeus for intelligence.
No abilities are taught this week, and that is deliberate. The subject is attributes, not kits, and each of these three is a clean sample of one attribute rather than an interesting hero in its own right. Read the full kits on the official pages linked from the hero pool — the point of this week is what the three have in common with every other hero of their attribute, not what makes them individually good.
This week’s item#
The small attribute items, which is what a beginner actually buys before anything else exists: Iron Branch and Circlet give a little of every attribute, while Gauntlets of Strength, Slippers of Agility and Mantle of Intelligence give more of one.
Buy the same one on two different heroes and it is worth different amounts to each. That is not a quirk of the item — it is the mechanic above, showing its face in the shop for the first time. Week 7 is where you start spending on purpose; this week you only need to see the exchange rate exist.
After this week you can…#
- say what a point of each attribute actually buys, without looking it up
- explain why a hero’s primary attribute is worth more to them than the other two
- read a shop item’s stat line and say who on your team it is for
Teaching team
- Wen "Courier" Adeyemi — convenor