You’ll Never See Dota The Same
Your new Dota 2 vision analysis tools have arrived
You’ve spent years honing your map awareness skills. So much so that even when you’re out for a drive, you check your rearview mirror every couple seconds, just in case an enemy Riki [or PA persona] tries to ruin your day. No sir — nobody can gank you…not even IRL.
But nothing could prepare you for this. This indignation. This darkness.
The sightlessness yielded from a map without wards makes all your eye-twitching acuity vain. Did the enemy deward you into your blindness, or are your allies to blame? No matter…you’ll solve it yourself.
Vision, whether it be granted by wards, neutrals, stealth, or otherwise, is a key component of Dota. A single smoke can turn a close match into an easy win, and your ability to see your opponents’ moves ahead of time is often the difference between a successful initiation or a walk into trouble.
Today, we’re very happy to introduce the most powerful and comprehensive set of tools for you to evaluate your matches based on how well you and your team managed vision — with your new Match Vision page! Let’s take a look.
At the top of your page, just below your pageheader and navigation, you’ll find your new Match Vision filters. Some of these will make more sense once you see the rest of the page.
Your first two filters are toggles — one to show allied and enemy buildings that haven’t been destroyed on the map [since they provide vision] and the second to limit your analysis to wards that were destroyed by a hero. By removing all the wards that expired on their own, you can easily get a sense of how successful each team and player was at dewarding throughout your match.
Your other three filters include those for ward types (Obs/Sentry), Faction, and Heroes/Players. If you only want to evaluate vision generated by Observer Wards, you can easily remove all Sentries. And of course, you can combine any filters, to compare the dewarding performance of each team’s position 5, for example.
Underneath the filters row, you’ll find three summary items, which include the total number of wards planted and destroyed, along with the combined duration they survived. These datapoints respond to your filters, giving easy access to these core pieces of information.
As you know, the amount of wards on the map varies enormously over the course of your matches. Existing vision analysis tools aren’t able to properly emphasis just how dynamic the warding advantage between teams changes over time, which is why we’ve carefully built a highly detailed and functional Wards Over Time chart for you to leverage during your post-match analyses.
Your new WoT (Wards over Time) chart has a lot to offer. When you first load a new Match Vision page, the WoT chart can look pretty sophisticated. Before you interact with it, you’ll just see the graph by itself, which includes two sets of stacked area charts for Radiant (green) and Dire (orange). These stacked area charts show the amount of Observers (shown with brighter fill colors) and Sentries (dimmer fill colors) that each team has on the map at every second of your match.
If any wards were destroyed throughout the course of the match, you’ll see a slashed out ward icon above or below the chart to signify the event. Hovering over this icon provides details of its life and death, seen below.
Hovering your cursor over the graph shows the time you’re hovering over, as well as the wards that were on the map at that time. Then, if you want to evaluate a specific part of your match, you can click and drag your mouse over any portion of the chart. This creates a highlighted area of the chart with dashed borders, and works as a real-time filter for all data on the page.
You can clear this filter by either clicking anywhere on the chart, or by clicking the “Reset” button in the sticky Timeline Slider at the very bottom of the page.
Under your WoT chart, you’ll find a comprehensive Vision Summary table that goes beyond just warding to look at each player and teams’ Dust, Smoke, and Gem activity. This table defaults to showing only each team’s support players, but you can toggle this in the section header by clicking the “Show all heroes” switch, which will expand the table to show all players, as well as each teams’ total metrics.
Pro tip: If you want to temporarily hide the Vision Summary to make room to use the WoT chart as a filter for the minimap, just click the collapse (minus “-”) button on the far right side of the Vision Summary section header.
Finally, at the bottom of the page you’ll find three more features: The minimap, your sticky Timeline Slider, and a comprehensive table of warding events throughout the match. Each of these, of course, responds to all page filters, with your Timeline Slider working in concert with the WoT chart.
Your minimap can, unsurprisingly, be a lot to take in without any filters active, assuming that each team actively warded during your match. Once you set a filter or two, it becomes quite approachable and easy to digest. Regardless of the number of wards that are visible while you’re using the minimap, you can reliably hover over each ward to gain a bit of insight in its life, as seen below.
Another way to interact with the minimap is by hovering over any row in your Ward Timeline table (to its right), which highlights and isolates the corresponding ward on the map, the same as if you hovered over the ward directly.
Your Ward Timeline table is sorted by each ward types’ order of placement. This means that it will show the 1st of each type/faction of ward that was planted first, then the 2nd of each type/faction, etc. So even if the 1st Dire Sentry ward was planted after the 3rd Radiant Observer Ward, it will still be sorted above that Radiant Observer Ward, since it was the 1st of its type. The order of placement is the first value shown on the left side of the table, next to an icon of the ward that was placed (Radiant/Dire Obs/Sentry).
The above is probably confusing, so let me explain more. The image below highlights the ward type index values on your Ward Timeline table. By default, your table is sorted by those values in descending order. As you can see, there are four 1s, four 2s, and a 3 in the image, in that order.
Each of the four 1s show the first of each ward type that was placed in the match. These include the first Radiant Obs, Dire Obs, Radiant Sentry, and Dire Sentry. You’ll notice that the 1s are sorted by the order that they were placed (the time shown in the dark region of the graphic).
However, if you look closely, you’ll see that the 2nd Radiant Sentry was placed at -00:58, which is BEFORE the 1st Dire Sentry was placed. However, that Dire Sentry is above the Radiant Observer in the table. This is because your table is being sorted by the order of placement of each ward type, NOT by the order of placement of each ward. I hope this helps to explain how this sort function works.
The table then shows both the time the ward was planted, and the time it either expired or was destroyed. The meter between those two values shows how much of the wards max duration it survived for. To the right of the ward’s expiration/death time you’ll see its total duration.
The final two columns on your table show the hero who planted the ward, and if it was destroyed, the hero that did the deed.
Last but not least, your Timeline Slider that sticks to the bottom of your window while you scroll provides a lightweight way to zoom in on any specific time frame you’re interested in from your match. Just like your WoT chart, you can quickly reset the timeline to include the entire match duration by clicking the “Reset” button on its right side.
We hope that you love your new Match Vision page, and as always, can’t wait to unveil what’s coming up next!
Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get notifications of our latest Supdates! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!
Did you miss our last Supdate? Check out the new Hero Synergies pages and the TI11 Leaderboard!
See you soon!
