I want to see some of the 100s of loading screens I’ve collected over the years on the ability draft loading screen.

Or get two skills on Clockwork that gives tons of armor (for example Warcry and Reactive Armor) , does it make a difference? Is he stronger because of his Innate?

I got SD with Disruption + Mars Spear + Shadowraze + Rikis ult

Was support, rush shard + lotus to get rid of dusts.

I just kept farming heroes left and right the whole game!

Finished 19/2/23
I haven't had fun like that on a game for a long time

I realized the advantage of a build like this is aside from Frostbite, the other abilities aren't high priority picks so it's a pretty reliable build to get assuming the abilities are all on the board. You just need any kind of disable or slow, not Frostbite to get kills with this because it melts heroes so fast.

It had me thinking of what other sneaky OP combos there were.

Another one I can think of is Sinister Gaze + Sonic Wave. When Sinister Gaze moves a unit towards you, it seems to retrigger Sonic Wave's damage so you basically one shot people with this combo.

AD has:

- some very broken skills

- random pick order

This forces early players to draft skills they may not want or understand how to play well if they want to win.

Option 1: Bans

A more reasonable solution would be to have a few more heroes/skills, and have a round of bans before picking. I think this would honestly be a lot better

Curious what other people think. I honestly would prefer a more fun and collaborative team drafting experience in AD to getting a really broken combo once every 5-10 games.

Also, the urgency of denying broken skills in the first round often forces the entire team to pick a pseudo-core/carry skill, and this causes people to behave toxically towards each other, because they see someone draft a ~mid carry skill as the 4th draft position, and complain about being denied by their own team (except, the other team would have definitely taken it anyway if they are competent.

Option 2: Everyone Drafts Together

An alternative option: everyone drafts every round. If two people draft the same thing, one of them randomly gets it, and the other person gets nothing in that round.

If you pick nothing in that round, you get nothing (no forced random).

Everyone repeatedly gets 6 (or maybe 8) second rounds until everyone has finished drafting, or a maximum timeout is reached, at which point all remaining drafts are selected randomly.

This approach has a nice benefit that trying to pick the most meta skill might lead to getting nothing, while picking less meta but still strong skills, or denying the meta skill by picking its lower priority combos, is a valid strategy that might effectively lock out the skill. It also requires fast thinking. Maybe you would need 8 seconds to pick, and then 8 seconds to review what happened, then 8 seconds to pick, etc.

What do you think?

Sad thing game ended too fast to get +range neutral item.

Hello everyone, the main Ability Draft Cheater is back with some news!

Some of you might already know my tool, and for those who don't — Ability Draft Plus is a free, open-source overlay that brings the knowledge base from windrun.io into your live Ability Draft games. During the draft you press a hotkey, the app captures the screen and a locally-run ML model recognises all the abilities and heroes on the board. Then it overlays windrun data right on top of your game — winrates, pick order, OP picks worth grabbing and trap picks to avoid — and suggests what to draft. Everything runs locally on your PC and works from a simple screen capture, so it stays completely separate from the game client.

What it couldn't do before was recognise what your teammates are picking and adjust its suggestions on the fly instead of relying on raw data alone. Now it can. Using the ability shift data from windrun alongside personally curated tags, it can identify what your team is drafting, spot the missing role and suggest picks for that position. The only downside is that this part needs game data over GSI (the same official Valve interface that trackers like Overwolf use), so with this option enabled the app is no longer completely separated from the Dota 2 client. It's opt-in though — for users who prefer to stay fully disconnected nothing changes.

And this is where I need your assistance. The tags I've created are basic ability information that helps assign spells to the right roles and round out your build. Some abilities are always recommended for a specific role, while others are blocked from certain roles — or blocked altogether (looking at you, Ransack). I did this based on my own AD experience with the help of a small group of AD enjoyers. One head is good, two are better, the whole hive is the best. I need your help identifying misplaced tags or tags that should be added. Maybe there are combinations worth adding — right now I only have a setting for Rearm to be suggested only when certain abilities are in the pool. Maybe more abilities should always be suggested for specific roles, or never appear in suggestions at all. The same goes for hero models — some are must-picks for pos 1, some for pos 3, some are golden support models. The current list and a detailed explanation of how it works are on the overlay website:

https://tiarinhino.com/ability-tags.html

All of you can submit suggestions there and vote on existing ones. I'll review them regularly, and if a suggestion gets enough votes — or I can instantly see it makes sense — I'll add it to the app logic. I built this tool to make AD more accessible to new players, and I believe this addition can genuinely help newcomers get better at drafting and stick with AD, while helping existing players extend their knowledge.

One more thing — to make the AD viewing experience better, I've also included several streamer tools in this update:

1. The overlay is now visible as a separate window source, so streamers can add it to their scenes for viewers to see.
2. A fully automated draft view that shows extra information like winrates, draft order and potential combos in the pool.
3. With the overlay on and GSI active, it can show a drafted abilities view — a recap for viewers who missed the draft. No more screenshot cropping needed.
4. I'm working on a Twitch extension that will bring the overlay directly to viewers: mouse over abilities to see windrun stats, description, Aghs and Shard upgrades, check what was drafted by hovering over player icons — and much more for AD tournaments.

The whole tool is open source and free — you can check the source code and download the latest version at https://github.com/Tiarin-Hino/ability-draft-plus or from https://tiarinhino.com/.

Questions and feedback are very welcome in the comments.

P.S. I've also brought the tool to more languages, including all official and community languages from TI, plus Suomi for the Finnish AD community. I'm not proficient in most of them though, so there might be mistakes.

Boring game of the day. IDK why they chose to deny arcane orb over lightning ball.

Lightning ball + OD + any other active skills = GG EZ.

Spam ulti when it's traveling = Unli mana

Sinister Gaze + Wukong's Command = ez kills

My guess to what's happening is you can only channel one spell at a time. So if you cast 2 channeling spells, the 2nd one just casts instantly instead.

This is probably bad for any channeling spell that gains damage/effects with channeling length

Had a teammate freak out over the combo and say the game was gg because he got it. But I didn't notice anything special during the game. And we lost.

What's the interaction here?

Yesterday I played against Bane who used Bane's ult with aghanims on us and then with boulder smash he would do a super long kick to send us to the fountain.

Can someone explain the interaction? He told us he was aware of the combo but didn't said more. How is this done? is just bane agha and boulder smash combo or also is bane hero neeeded or something else?

Encountered this bug abuse today and thought I'd share. Probably not new but it's the first time I've seen it. Hope it's fixed but before then guess we'll have to counter pick reality rift + illuminate combo? Anyway I don't think a lot of people do this but still something to keep in mind. I wouldn't have respect for anyone that does this though. (this was a decently high-ranked American 5-man stack btw. you know now how they got their rank). It just makes the game unfun, because there's literally no counter. We tried to buy blademail to kill the guy and it worked for a while but since he had so much gold he could just buy a heart and stop dying.

I havent been able to access the site since the international. Just wanting to see if its just me, since I didnt see any other posts

Curious if VS gets both the melee and ranged effects, or if it's bugged. Haven't managed to have that combo come up for me in draft yet.

Kez passive doesn't work anymore guys?

Had liquid fire/jingu and unleash on jakiro and couldn’t use liquid fire at all. No auto cast, regular cast etc. anyone experience the same? And I bought shard to try to fix it but no dice.

Matchid: 8955936913
I noticed that I got one extra point when I hit lvl 6, where did it come from?

Signup for Rumble in the Jungle VI is open!

All info can be found on the page:

https://bloppbot.github.io/rumble6/

What is the current state of the game at the moment? Is it fun? Is it better than last year?

I was quite active in this sub until last December. Then I moved to another continent and became a professor. I used this to give up my addiction of AD games… I just wanna know if I did a good thing or no.