Week 10: Towers or heroes?

Buildings, Roshan and the map — how a lead stops being a lead and starts being a win

10 May 2027

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This week’s decision

There is a point in most games where you are clearly winning and nothing is happening. This week explains it. Killing heroes feels like progress and mostly is not: buildings, Roshan and the map itself are what a lead converts into, and a team that cannot make that conversion will win every fight and still lose the game.

The mistake this week fixes is going home to shop after winning a teamfight. That is the most expensive minute in the game, and it was spent in a menu.

Mechanics

A tower is not only an obstacle. It gives vision, a safe area and gold, and destroying it permanently changes the shape of the map you are playing on.

Barracks. Destroying them permanently weakens the enemy’s creep waves — one of the very few irreversible gains available in this game.

Roshan and the Aegis. One extra life, held in reserve. In 7.41f Roshan’s pit preference moved to the top pit, so where this fight happens is not where an older guide will tell you it happens.

Outposts and runes. Small, scheduled resources whose value is precisely that they are scheduled, so you can plan time around them. 7.41f also moved Tormentor to the bottom chasm and changed the Wisdom Shrine experience.

Teleport defence. One player carrying a scroll is one more defender for the whole team, which makes a cheap item into a structural one.

The same schematic board as week 1 — Radiant bottom-left, Dire top-right, three lanes and the river across the other diagonal — with the lanes drawn back so the neutral buildings read. Two Roshan pits sit on the river at the north-west and south-east corners, each with a Twin Gate beside it and a Watcher on its ramp. A Tormentor sits on the west map border and another on the east, each with a Watcher in front. Four outposts: one inside each team's primary jungle and one beyond each team's safe lane toward the map edge, each of those with a Watcher by it. Two more Watchers sit at the west ramp of each primary jungle and two more in the outer jungle near each team's tier-two tower. A Lotus Pool sits on the west edge toward the north and another on the east edge toward the south.

Positions are relative, not to scale. Roshan prefers the top pit in 7.41f and moves between the two.

The resource lens

Converting a lead into map. The first nine weeks were about accumulating; this week is about spending. A team that does not convert an advantage into buildings watches it expire, because the enemy heroes are growing the whole time you are admiring yours.

Before the lecture

Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 2 — mid-game farming, Roshan and the Aegis.

This week’s hero

Enigma — Black Hole. It destroys nothing by itself. It creates a window whose only purpose is to let the team do something else, which is this week’s subject stated as an ability.

This week’s item

Blink Dagger. It buys position. Of the five resources, space has been the most abstract since week 1; the dagger is where it becomes a thing you can pay for directly.

After this week you can…

Teaching team