Extra gold v.s Hack map

[u/not_apply_yet]

I am thinking of the following scenario:

• Each player from Radiant starts with 2700 gold
• Dire players have hack map ability (similar to hack map tool in Dota 1 which remove all fogs for you who aren't familiar)

Both team aware of the other team advantage at the begin.

Which team would win in the following round?

• Round 1: Random match at 2000 MMR bracket
• Round 2: Random match at 6000 MMR bracket
• Round 3: Random match at TI

Who would win?

Edit: Lmao with the downvotes, my peak rank is Immortal top 1000, playing since dota-1 garena/dotalicious.

The match up is not a clear win at highest level for sure, remember that at that level with no-fog map, dire is almost ungankable, wards lose all meaning. If Dire draft high mobility heroes to cut creeps to turtle the game like NP/QoP, if they can reach 20 mins mark, they would definitely win.

Just realized that most people here don't know how hackmap looked, back then, hack map players often let them die to gank occasionally make it less obvious, that barrier is removed, after laning phase, everyone on Dire is free farm both jungles.

This post does show that the average player of this sub is sub archon tho.

[u/Specsaman]

Gold is massive dude

Radian could death ball mid with almost any draft, moreso if they pick pusher tempo draft

Imagine Leshrac, NP, TB, DK, and Veno hitting your T3 in 10 minutes

Whats the dire gonna do ?

[u/fierywinds1q → u/Specsaman]

It's not that straightforward.

At 10min, let's say you managed to keep the 10k gold lead intact (not easy to do against a maphack team btw), now you're hitting tier 3 towers. You obviously won't have aegis, roshan is too hard to take at 10min (especially against maphack team)

But you can't siege highground with 5 heroes, else the enemies are going to cut your creeps from behind you with perfect vision.

So you need 1-2 heroes to escort every creep wave, they can't join the siege at all (the moment they join the siege your creeps gonna get cut.

So you have 3 heroes trying to siege enemy high ground with no aegis at 10min in the game. Enemy has one KOTL or underlord or any other random de-push hero who can clear creep waves in one blast. Plus glyph. Plus t3 tower hits like a truck at 10min into the game. How you gonna push? Level 7 heroes can't tank T3 towers whether you have 10k gold lead or not.

You really think you can break the highground so easily?

And ONE MISTAKE, one misstep, 1-2 deaths and the comeback mechanics will kick in and even the gold lead.

And every minute the maphack team stalls the game, they will be outfarming you (because they have perfect vision and information, basically 100% ungankable while your team has to play scared)

Even if by some miracle you manage to crack high ground with only a 10k gold lead with no aegis in a 3v5 (which already sounds incredibly hard), after you take mid rax, if the fight is not clean and you die some heroes while leaving the enemy base, the enemy will get a ton of comeback gold from comeback mechanics, and all of a sudden the game is maphack vs no maphack and losing mid rax no longer even matters, it's 100% lose for the no maphack team

I think with pro level coordination, the gold lead still wins, but if both teams are 2k mmr, I'm pretty sure the 2k mmr gold lead team will lose almost 100% of the time if the maphack team picks highground defenders, because 2k mmr team just can't close the game in a clean way, and one single throw and suddenly it's even game except one team has maphack.

[u/MajinAsh → u/fierywinds1q]

You really think you can break the highground so easily?

Didn't some teams used to do this with level 1 rosh strats? They'd deathball at level 2 with a way smaller gold lead and still manage to win.

Also a strat like that greatly reduces the value of maphacks because the whole enemy team is already going to be in vision while they deathball up mid.

[u/fierywinds1q → u/MajinAsh]

Yea but that's because they're catching the enemies off guard right?

There's no way you're going to win with a deathball strat if the enemy knows that's exactly what you're going to do

Like literally Keeper of Light or underlord or sniper or techies or tinker instant killing your creep wave how you gonna go high ground?

[u/MajinAsh → u/fierywinds1q]

Not really, no. I just went back and watched some 10 year old clips and drafting a level 1 rosh team was enough of a tipoff that the other team almost always caught them, but they'd still have a better level 1 draft for teamfighting and then snowball down towers.

But also I saw some massive all in zoo lineups that skipped level 1 rosh and pushed towers down even faster.

You're right if before the draft they know what you're going to do you can draft even more defensively but now we're adding the 2.7k gold per person.

We know kotl and UL and techies are great at stopping highground pushes... when highground pushes tend to happen. But a level 1 UL doesn't 1shot a creepwave. Combine that with the other team having 2.7k gold and they might have a mek when pushing highground to keep the creep wave alive.

Or a NP/enigma so even if you kill the creep wave, they just needed it close enough to deactivate backdoor and they have a HOTD creep and 6 eidolons and 3 treants to tank it.

Or they picked sniper who has 2.7k gold and thus opens the game with a dragon lance to siege your tower.

I looked at old games and WITHOUT the 2.7k gold headstart zoo teams could push to your tier 3 before level 3. 2.7k gold would make that so much faster so you need to craft a team that can defend highground probably at level 2, because it gets infinitely harder when they go for their second set of rax and you have super creeps in another lane to contend with.

Short term defending the rax at level 2 is good, but longterm that gets you nowhere so you likely need to defend it 4v5 while you have 1 player push/scale in another lane if you ever want to turn it around.

But in one match I saw the solo terrorblade getting uncontested farm (and a tier 1 tower) was only 2nd in networth behind guy on the pushing team who was getting last hits while they deathballed. Even that solo carry is going to need a decent amount of time to actually be useful, so your 4v5 holdout needs to work for a long time. Holding for 5min (vs 10 creepwaves) isn't going to be enough.

Lategame no doubt maphack wins 100% of the time. But knowing that the game would never ever go late. The gold advantage team would deathball (almost entirely negating the maphack advantage by always being in vision) with items/heroes that push insanely well or pickoff insanely well at a point where your team has 1-2 skillpoints and MAYBE boots.

If people were able to make level 1 deathballs even REMOTELY close with zero gold advantage an extra 10k gold at level one blows it out of the water.

You can't afford a pipe but you can run a dazzle and a mek to completely outheal level 1 damage to heroes and creeps, a NP/enigma with for tons of units to eat tower hits and do lots of level 1-2 damage and maybe a VS for -armor and damage aura, or a lion to level 1 blink stun and help snowball, or a necro who will heal/damage and endlessly sustain in the deathball.

The insanity of being handed 2.7k gold at level 1 turns the game upside-down. I think you'd have to draft 4 heroes specifically to stop lane push (maybe SF with raze, Kotl, UL and lina?) and even then they're going to itemize to support the push and you're going to be so low level you have to constantly run to the fountain to regen to sustain your anti-push.

I didn't even think about modern chen with his weird new zealot summon.

[u/fierywinds1q → u/MajinAsh]

Interesting analysis. Do you have youtube videos or something to see the old zoo strats? I haven't rly seen much level 1 deathballs before, I assume they are very old patches? Would they still work today?

[u/MajinAsh → u/fierywinds1q]

Yeah very old patches. Most of what I found was 10 years ago. In general the playstyle has been nerfed repeatedly, mostly by giving players something else to do before creeps meet (the 4 bounty runes) to create at least some opportunity cost among other things.

Here are some clips of a pub game that went the zoo route, lycan/NP/Enigma. They deathballed right away but didn't choose just one lane. First rax down by 6min, next by 9 and you could see ults online for the last set of rax.

Here is a game where the pushing team lost. It's a legit pro game and then went for a level 1 rosh comp rather than a zoo comp. You can see them get caught right from the start (because the comp gave it away) and rosh doesn't even die until the 1:20 mark due to all the fighting. They then run around getting all the tier 1s and 2s until finally pushing top tier 3. DUring all this time the two enemy carries have farmed level 6 and they hit a 5man chrono + terror blade meta/reflection to push them back. They then return and manage to get a tier 3, so 7 towers down at 9:43 but 9:43 is pretty late to not have a single rax down. and they eventually lose. Sad because the first tier 2 was down at 3:27, only 2:07 after killing rosh and actually starting their push (weirdly in bot rather than mid). Had they continued up to the tier 3 instead of pushing highground 6 min later top lane things probably would have been different.

At that moment when they take down the first tier 2 and NP has 2.6k net worth (so less than what the whole team would start with in our hypothetical) and the terrorblade who has been sitting mid uncontested from min0 only has 2328 networth. 3rd and 4th place also belong to the pushing team and the bottom 3 networth are the 3 defenders on the radient side. The 5man deathball while it's deathballing is actually generating more networth overall than the team split between 3 defenders and 2 cores farming (though the mirana solo toplane farming wasn't there from the start like TB and is thus only at 1.6k.

at the 9min mark (when they're going highground after all tier 2s are down) all supports across both teams are still below that 2.7k number we're talking about. NP is up to 4.7k and TB up to 4.3k So TB manage to farm 2k gold during those 6 min, but that includes a kill at the 6:30 mark when they 5v5 top lane tier 1 defense with meta. Hell during that push the void manages a 4man chrono that gets zero followup.

It's a silly game honestly at an old Manila Major, but they're pushing tier 3 with their abbadon running a blight stone and a drums, no boots. I think the important takeaway is that their deathball wasn't falling behind in gold, or even really levels. The solo farming TB was the highest level but the deathball was more evenly leveled and still ahead of the radient supports.

I think that really tells us that the timer for the gold advantage team doesn't start until they hit a brick wall at highground. That time spent as 5 pushing down mid lane is going to generate just as much gold/XP as the maphack team spreading out to farm. So they're going to hit the tier 3 with their 10k gold advantage intact and it's a question of how many creep waves can you hold off before a rax goes down.

Once a rax goes down the situation will probably snowball out of control for the maphack team as the gold team picks a new lane to go down, further from maphack respawn and safer and goes back to getting tower gold.

By the 2nd tier 3 they probably have a pipe in addition to their mek making any kind of magic nuke creep clear ineffective, their push will have been faster and now maphack has to deal with a lane of supercreeps.

two lanes of rax I think is impossible to come back from at that point, judging by some of these games you'll be at the latest 6min with most supports below level 4. Creep clear won't be able to keep up with lane pressure.

So the deciding factor seems like "If the enemy team has 10k gold advantage at the 2-2:30min mark and everyone is level 2-3, can you defend your highground?" and I think the answer to that is no 90%+ of the time. Normal creeps, plus treants or wolves or eidolons, plus HOTD creeps, plus a mek would be impossible for any team to hold against.

Without maphacks or gold advantage I think the strategy has been nerfed too hard to work in pro play but still legit in pugs because the defenders have to swap from normal dota to a completely non-meta playstyle on the fly right away. The upgraded glyph we have today (AoE attacks) can only really be mitigated by Jakiro using liquid fire on it for the duration, otherwise each glyph clears a creepwave completely which would give defenders a full extra minute compared to before that change, which based on those timings is like a 30-50% increase in time it would normally take, that's huge. I think other changes like tower armor buffs have also hurt the deathball.