Beginners Tips

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You will find here several tips to help you start your experience. Those are examples you can inspire/follow to help you build your character.

## Basic Tips and Tricks

### **Shortcuts**

Like in Warcraft III, you can create unit groups by selecting any unit and press left Ctrl + any number. As a result you have a shortcut to your unit assigned to the selected number.

Recommended shortcuts for beginners :

* 1- Hero
* 2- Horse
* 3- Horn of Cenarius Pedestal

### **Managing your Hero**

If you let you Hero on a position without clicking anywhere, he would naturally be in Stop state (shield icon). In this state he will naturally attack nearby units and even move to get closer to them in order to deal damage. This can be very annoying in particular if you let your unit alone on the side of a lane when looking at the shops to buy items.

The basic situation is that you are calmly looking at the items to buy and you hear tha narrator saying that you are engaging the enemy. Affraid you look in all directions and see that your hero is fighting a whole enemy wave alone. You can guess what happen then: you do not have the time to make your hero retreat than he is already dead.

Forunately this situation can be avoided by clicking on the "Hold Position" State when your hero is immobile (crossed swords, see the highlighted icon). In this state he will just stand in position without doing anything. This can save your hero life, in condition that you positionned him away from the range of enemy distance units.

## General guide for a DPS type Hero :

**Thanks to Dean** for the post he wrote wich I modified to create this guide. This guide was originally made for Darky's version but you could inspire of it if you are playing on Ofiicial).

The first item to focus on is the Holy Bow.

* If you're not playing on -ezmod:

You should first get Ring of Strength or Ring of Agility, depending on what you need. The next item you could get is Mask of Death (lifesteal) since it significantly improves survivability and creep farming abilities.

Now, you want to build towards Holy Bow. After Holy Bow, go for an AOE item (if you're meele I just get the simplest Large War Axe, and if you're ranged you want to go for Diabolic War Axe or Giant War Axe (Weapon Recipes shop).

After that, you get Wind Boots lvl 1 then lvl 2.

If you've farmed everything properly, you should now be saving gold for your Holy Bow upgrade.

After that, you have a lot of freedom with what you buy.

For instance you can first buy a War Golem to guard my lane, then upgrade your AoE/cleave item and get Hero Armor (can be dropped in Darky's version) and upgrade to Corrupted Sword, all to boost survivability. Then, after all that you can go for pretty much anything. It is also recommend going for attack type change ASAP since changing attack type removes some bonuses you might have gained through the game.

* If you're playing with -ezmod, go first buy the entire Holy Bow, then Mask of Death and everything after that is the same as above.

Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule. If you play as a hero that has very good AOE (Garithos, Sniper, Archimonde) you might not want to get an AoE item; if you're playing as a hero that has great survivability and/or lifesteal (Illidan, Archimonde, Dante) you might not want to go for a lifesteal item.

If you find that your hero is using too much mana (Sniper, Dark ranger) you might want to buy a mana item (Khadgar's Gem of the Energy or Mana Sphere) somewhere along the line.

### Also to see :

New Player Guide if you didn't check it earlier.

Beginners Heroes to have some examples of heroes easy to handle.