Hi Guys

Ive been watching youtube videos on how to orbwalk but was wondering if this is something everyone does and I havent been doing or is this an advanced technique that most people dont use?



I solo laned the long lane with windrunner yesterday and it was a horrible experience vs Lion and Skele King.

Lion could harass me all the way back to my tower hitting me 4 ot 5 times although he had a lower movement speed. After the game it turns out he was a level 50 so I suspect he was used to orb walking which is why he kicked this level 2's ass.

It also raises the question of when its not possible to orb walk. AT level 25 with high attack rate I couldnt see this happening.

Orb walking is just a fancy name given to the act for manually triggering a heroes special attack modifier between steps as you move forward. I don't believe either of those two heroes have effects that can be triggered in that fashion so that's probably not what was giving you such a hard time.

http://www.dota2wiki.com/wiki/Unique_Attack_Modifier

If you check out that link the #2 Ability Modifiers are the ones I'm talking about. A good example of a early orb walking ability is Drow's Frost Arrows. At level 1 you can basically orb walk most heroes right out of lane just by hitting 'q' clicking the enemy hero, moving forward while the shot is in the air, stopping as it hits and repeating the process.

Make a bit more sense?

Have you watched this vid yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVw-D3-C9bc

I thought it explained the concept really well.

What you are describing here is animation cancelling, not orb walking. Every attack/spell has three important phases (my nomenclature may be off): the wind-up animation, the attack point, the wind-down animation. The attack point is where the attack or spell actually goes off. The wind-up is the amount of time it takes between issuing that command and the attack point. The wind-down animation is the time after the attack point before the hero will continue doing things. These times are highly variable between heroes and abilities.

With that background laid out, what was happening is that the Lion would right-click you, wait until just after his attack point and then issue a move command towards you. The move command will cancel whatever he was currently doing, which in this case was the wind-down animation. This effectively increases his movement speed relative to you since he is spending less time standing still, but he is still getting his attack off since the attack point was reached.

As people have said, orb walking is using things like Drow's Frost Arrows, or Huskar's Burning Spear to attack the enemy. Usually when you are next to (400 range) creeps and you attack, the enemy creeps will begin attacking you to defend their hero. With an orb walk, when you manually use the ability, it does not trigger the aggro from the creeps, allowing you some free harass.

Solo laning is tough. Basically you are only there to get some experience and a few last hits. Your goal is to survive, and that's about it. Get some harass in when you can, maybe some denies, and perhaps a few last hits. As soon as the support shows up and comes within range to attack you, you just back off. When he goes to do something else, you move in for denies and last hits. As soon as he comes back, you are out of there. If things go well for you, you will outlevel the opponents and can stand against them a bit longer at level 5-6, but otherwise you don't have much power to do anything. In pro matches the solo hard lane won't even get a single point of experience until 4-5 minutes into the game.

This is why dark seer and bounty hunter are the best offlaners, once bounty hunter hits 6 he can start ganking everywhere and make up for all the gold he missed out on in a matter of minutes with track kills/assists. Dark Seer's ion shell is just so strong that youll get more gold than you thought and youll put in alot of harass and play with the creeps alot so their carry who's on the safe isnt going to have fun



And specifically about windrunner, i find that she has somewhat of a harder time solo laning because she has a weird escape, the best thing to do with her is to get power shot and to max it so you can get creep kills and harass, theres a reason her core items are really cheap but still really effectove, mek force staff and maybe even drums some argue are the 3 of the best cheapest items in the game

I can show you some windrunner tips and tricks this week if your interested

thanks for the feedback chaps

So animation cancelling is what its looking like. The guy was level 50 compared to my level 2 so I guess he has put in the hours to be good.

In future I will just stay back towards my tower which was the advice given by the guys at the time.

i'd better get practicing some anim cancelling!

Especially heroes like windrunner who have a slow animation and then it takes a while for her arrow to be shot, shes a sitting duck for that second or 2 so its good to shave that fraction of a second!

I wouldn't worry about animation cancelling. It doesn't really help until you've mastered your mouse control with last hitting and denying. It just allows you to get in about 1 more attack for every 5 attacks, generally. More often than not you'll find yourself cancelling your attack animation instead of the backswing animation. If you want to watch an example of someone who does animation cancelling well, watch draskyll's stream on twitch, but its really more of a high level skill that is less important than the core skills of harass/last hitting/denying.

The best most simple animation cancel ive seen is the antimage blink, he blinks and its really fast
but then he stands around for a split second, people will work things so that hes not standing around doing nothing! and he can keep chase!

well something worked cause two games last night I won both. pwned my lane in a windrunner game then went 34-4 with void (or something like that)

Love my bracket lol