Week 11: Who goes first?
Initiation, buyback, high ground and a drafting primer — the week the course finally lets you have a teamfight
17 May 2027
This week’s decision#
Teamfights come last rather than first, and this is the clearest place this course disagrees with the way Dota is normally taught. A fight is the most legible thing in a match and the worst place to begin, because nearly everything that decides one was settled earlier — by the draft, by who had vision, by who could not be prevented from acting.
The mistake this week fixes is going in first because you have the most health. Initiation is decided by which abilities combine, not by who is hardest to kill.
Mechanics#
Initiation and counter-initiation. “Who opens” is really “whose combination of abilities pays most while the enemy has not reacted yet”.
Positioning. The seconds before a fight starts decide most of its outcome, and they are the part nobody is watching.
Buyback. A mistake you can purchase back, once, expensively.
High ground. Why the attacking side is at a structural disadvantage — vision and terrain, both against you.
Captains Mode, which Assignment 4 is played in. Conceptually: a ban handles what you cannot beat, pick order decides who is answering whom, and a flexible hero is itself a resource, because it delays the moment you reveal what you intend to do. The exact order of the ban and pick phases is settled when the facts file lands; this page does not state it until then, and the Lobby Lab is where you walk through a real one.
The resource lens#
Time — whose curve peaks later. Week 6 introduced power spikes on one hero; this week applies them between two teams. When to fight and how to draft turn out to be the same question asked twice: whose game is this?
Before the lecture#
Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 2 — teamfight initiation; and section 4 — All Pick matches.
This week’s hero#
Tidehunter — Ravage. The textbook shape of initiation: wide, forgiving of imprecision, and its consequences are visible immediately. You can learn the judgement from it without the execution getting in the way, which is not true of most initiation.
This week’s item#
Refresher Orb. It buys a second attempt. In 7.41f it no longer refreshes item cooldowns, only abilities — which makes it a cleaner teaching example than it used to be, because what it buys is now unambiguous.
After this week you can…#
- say who opens for your team and when you enter the fight
- complete a simple Captains Mode draft and give a reason for every ban
- name a fight lost on initiation timing rather than on execution
Teaching team
- Grace "Banphase" Nakamura — tutor