How to Use Dotabuff to Gain MMR and Improve as a Player

Dota 2 is a MOBA game played by more than 8 million people around the world. Furthermore, this is not a new title in the esports industry, but rather one of the oldest.

Dota tournaments began more than a decade ago and many of those who are competing today have thousands of hours of experience. In any competitive game, your competence is relative to other players’ competence. If you’re good at the game but more than 50% of the community is vastly better than you, you’re actually not that good.

To gain MMR and climb the ladder, you must use everything you have at your disposal. Playing Dota 2 without a clear strategy won’t get you anywhere unless you are exceptionally skilled at playing a specific role. It’s much wiser to stay informed at all times and constantly learn about the evolving meta.

Having a tool like Dotabuff at your disposal can help a lot in this scenario. Dotabuff is every professional Dota player’s go-to website for learning about the most important statistics related to the game and its community. In this guide, you’ll learn how to take advantage of it to increase your Dota 2 MMR.

The Dota 2 Ranked Mode

After playing Dota 2 for a few hundred hours, the system allows you to start competing in ranked games. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because finally, you get to see how good you are and receive your first rank. But it’s also a curse because you’ll generally find out that you’re not that good.

Apart from this problem, Dota is played in a 5v5 format and your teammates are given to you at random. If you’re lucky, you will get decent teammates for your current MMR and you’ll have a lot of fun. But in you’re unlucky, you may get teamed up with ruiners and people who simply don’t understand how the game works.

The ranking system features eight ranks. The first 7 of these Dota 2 ranks have subranks or subdivisions, numbered 1-5.

• Herald
• Guardian
• Crusader
• Archon
• Legend
• Ancient
• Divine
• Immortal

Naturally, you’ll start your journey as a Herald or possibly a Guardian. This means that your MMR will be somewhere between 500 and 1500.

Compared to the highest-ranking Dota 2 players, whose MMR is 12.000 or even 13.000, you’re just a newbie. But you can gradually improve to the point where you are an Ancient or even a Divine level player without having to compete for more than several thousand hours.

In some cases, people reach the Divine rank much faster. It all depends on how good you are at learning a MOBA game and what your previous gaming experience is. If you’ve been playing RTS and RPG games for a long time, you have a big advantage. Because MOBA games combine these two genres.

The Right Approach

This is true for other competitive games as well, so if you played something else on your Steam account or outside of it before switching to Dota, you’ll know what the right approach is almost instinctively.

At first, the goal is to not care about your actual MMR but to focus on improving your skills. You get to play ten calibration games and there’s a high chance that you’ll lose 6-7 of them. Don’t let these calibration games tell you how good you are because that’s irrelevant at this point.

Anyone who trains in a smart way will improve over time. However, some people improve much faster than others because they have the right attitude and also the right method. If you do the same thing in every ranked game without paying attention to your mistakes, you’ll improve very little.

In Dota 2, there are people who have more than 5000 hours of experience but are still really weak even for their MMR because they don’t do enough to notice and correct their mistakes. As soon as you do that, your matchmaking rating and your success rate in ranked matches will become much better than those of the average player.

Getting an Edge in Competitive Games

To improve your matchmaking rank in Dota 2, you must win, on average, more than 50% of the time. Ideally, your win rate should be somewhere between 53% and 55% if you want to make good progress and not stay in the same MMR bracket for 3-6 months.

However, don’t allow yourself to get demoralized by the failure to obtain much better rank medals quickly. In traditional sports like BJJ, it can take you 10 years to become a black belt. So if you move more slowly at first, consider it to be normal.

Like other rank tier systems, the one used by Dota 2 promotes those who win a lot. If your team won, Valve’s matchmaking system regards you as being a strong player for your current MMR, even if you got carried by the rest of your team.

But here’s what most players don’t see: over hundreds or even thousands of games, everyone gets around the same amount of luck and bad luck. The difference between those who eventually rank up and those who get stuck in the same MMR bracket for years is individual skill.

What you do really matters. It might not matter in one particular game in which someone decides to feed from the beginning til the end. But it will matter in most games.

Improving your matchmaking rank requires you to be slightly better than your opponents. You can achieve this advantage in several ways:

Train Harder

If you play one Dota 2 match per day, you will improve at a slow pace. But if you play several matches per day, you’ll see results much faster. Unlike martial arts, which limit you to a small number of hours per week because you need to physically rest, Dota 2 does not impose any real limitations.

Those who play for 20 hours per week will accumulate around 1000 hours in a year. Even if your training is not well-optimized, you’ll still be better at the end of those 1000 hours than the person who only played 200.

Specialize

After you’ve managed to unlock ranked matchmaking in Dota 2, you should try to find a role that suits your personality and then stick with it. Ranked matchmaking is designed to encourage specialization and promote those who can play their role really well.

Whether you enjoy being the carry or the position 5 support, master your chosen role and you’ll thrive in the ranked system.

Learn 5-10 Dota 2 Heroes

For any given role in Dota 2, there are dozens of heroes that are suited for it. However, in the beginning you won’t have enough time to master all of them. It’s much better to pick 5-10 after you’ve played each hero several times, and then play those heroes over and over, until you’ve learned everything about them.

Dota 2 heroes cannot be mastered with ease. You’ll need to invest at least 500 hours to really understand a hero’s strengths, weaknesses, and limits in every situation.

The world’s best Invoker players have thousands of games with this one hero. The Dota 2 community regards Invoker as one of the most challenging heroes to master. Below 1000 games, you’re probably still a newbie. That’s how difficult it is to learn all of his abilities.

Review Your Own Games

After every single match, you should analyze the replay and see what went right and wrong. Without making this effort, your understanding of the game and what you need to improve in your own play style will develop at a much slower pace. But if you do get to see things clearly, you’ll figure out relatively quickly what you need to change.

Study The Best Dota 2 Players

It’s often difficult to come up on your own with the best way of doing things. But if you watch someone who has perfected the art of playing Morphling, Spectre, or some other Dota 2 hero, you will quickly learn what works best.

Whenever you want to learn a new hero, apart from playing that hero yourself and watching your own replays, you should carefully analyze the games of the best players in the world. A POV perspective gives you great insights into the ideal play style.

Of course, you cannot fully copy someone else’s way of playing a hero. Eventually, you will need to develop your own style. But it helps a lot to take notes and steal lessons from everywhere you can.

How Dotabuff Can Help You to Improve Your Dota 2 MMR

Dotabuff is a source of valuable statistics about the game and what its community is doing on a weekly basis. These are the most useful ways in which you can use this site to gain MMR in Dota 2.

Discovering the Highest Win Rate Heroes

As the meta evolves, you can see which heroes are currently being picked a lot by the Dota 2 community, as well as their win rates. The table provided by Dotabuff gives you the possibility to select the interval and then sort the results table according to your preferences.

Ideally, you should check “This Week” or “This Month” to get a good idea of what other players like to pick and how successful they are.

For instance, you might discover that Legion Commander has a 55% win rate with a 24% pick rate. If you like the hero, you know that she’s strong at the moment. But if you don’t want to pick her for yourself, you should ban her, unless of course one of your teammates intends to pick her.

If you specialize in playing 5-10 heroes, you can always ignore the statistics and figure out a way to win even with the lowest win-rate characters. After all, a hero’s strength isn’t dictated just by its current stats but also by how good the player is.

Someone who has 1000 Templar Assassin games will likely have a good win rate with this hero even if her win rate at the community level is only 46%. But the statistic is still relevant, and knowing about it will give you a better understanding of the current meta.

Learning About Item Builds and Skill Builds

Another thing that you will find on Dotabuff is item builds and skill builds for every hero. You’ll also find popular items that are bought by those who play a given hero and their associated win rates. The same is true for talents and abilities.

Once you’ve played the game for a long time, you can determine for yourself what the best item build is in every situation. But in the beginning, it’s better to just inform yourself and copy what works.

In Dota 2, every game is different and will require you to think for yourself. If you want to make optimal decisions, you often cannot determine in advance what you’re going to buy. But it’s still good to know what the best options are, so that you can choose one of them more quickly.

During games, you don’t have ample time to think about what you need to do next. Because of that, you ideally want to prepare as many of the components as possible in advance. Knowing your timings, items, map movements, and so on will allow you to focus more on the specifics of the game. In turn, this leads to better decisions.

Discover the Best Dota 2 Players

If you want to master a given hero, on Dotabuff you can find out who the best players are for that hero and then study their play style. You can also just investigate a particular player and find their results.

If you have a name in mind, you can usually find the ID of the matches played by that player and then watch the replay. Someone who does a great job at playing Anti-Mage can serve as a great role model for you if you’re playing Anti-Mage yourself. One example of such a player is Artour “Arteezy” Babaev.