Week 7: What do I buy?
The shop, recipes and the logic of a build — and why following someone else's is the right way to start
19 April 2027
This week’s decision#
Gold is arriving and you have some sense of what your hero wants to become. The shop is where those two meet, and it is the first place where a decision you make in a menu changes what you are able to do on the map.
The mistake this week fixes runs in both directions: saving for one big item while owning nothing in the meantime, or the reverse — spending everything on components and never completing anything at all.
Mechanics#
How the shop is structured. Components, recipes, upgrades. Dota items are assembled rather than selected, which is why an item you are halfway through is already doing something for you.
Consumables and the teleport scroll are bought for what they let you keep doing, not for what they add. The regeneration keeps you in the lane you are already in; the scroll means a lane is never lost just because you are not standing in it.
The logic of a build. Solve staying alive, then solve damage, then solve whatever the enemy has aimed specifically at you.
Follow the recommended build first, and change it once you understand why. That is this course’s position and we will not apologise for it. An item you cannot justify is worse than one somebody else chose for you.
The resource lens#
Gold into stats. Week 2 said gold is time; week 5 said attributes are the exchange rate. This week joins them up: your gold passes through that rate and comes out as specific numbers, and numbers only matter inside particular windows of a game.
Before the lecture#
Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 1 — regeneration and teleporting; and section 4 — build guides and the item panel.
This week’s hero#
Lich — Frost Shield. Lich’s mana pressure is severe enough that a student feels, for the first time, that what they bought directly decides how many spells they get to cast. Items and abilities stop being two separate subjects here and start being one.
This week’s item#
Power Treads. The first item that asks you to operate it during the game, by switching which attribute it is giving you. It turns buying from a one-off decision into a running one, which is exactly the step this week wants you to take.
A note on in-game guides: open one from your first game. TorteDeLini’s build guides answer “what do I buy and when” for you, which frees your attention for everything else on this page. Some time after week eleven you will start disagreeing with the guide, and that disagreement is the whole point of this week — by then you will have reasons behind it.
After this week you can…#
- play a whole game following a guide, and say where you wanted to deviate
- explain what each item in your starting kit is for
- say what to buy when the enemy has aimed something at you
Teaching team
- Hana "Denied" Okabe — tutor