Dota 2 bottle crow guide

NoobSchool: Guide to Bottle Crowing

The courier as well as delivering your goods can also be used to create a lifeline of sorts, mainly for the Solo Mid player. To avoid having to cower back behind the tier 1 tower, consuming tangoes and salves galore, fearing the harassment of the enemy solo mid, you’ll need to start bottle crowing. Luckily unlike other oh-so-hard aspects of Dota 2 like Warding, Stacking or Pulling. Bottle crowing is an easy skill to master.

Introducing The Bottle

An item seen in the recommended builds of almost all mid heroes, the bottle is an essential for survival in the mid lane; it allows the mid hero to farm longer, deny creeps longer, harass longer and maybe, just maybe, even get a few kills.

A bottle, not only stores charges that heal your hit points and your mana, but it can also preserve a rune if you pick one up. Once you pick up a rune it will refill the bottle’s 3 charges and place the rune inside. Click to activate the rune or alternatively it will self-activate after 2 minutes.

An empty bottle is however, nothing but an inventory slot wasted. It isn’t always possible to guess the right rune spot and get there before someone else does; therefore heroes need an alternative, that’s where the courier comes in handy.

Enter The Courier

Na’vi’s charming courier
Sending the bottle back to base via the courier will allow you to refill the bottle’s charges. However, you should bear in mind that as of 6.78, while empty, Bottle causes couriers to move 30% slower, so for the fastest possible delivery, keep 1 remaining charge in the bottle while crowing.

With a steady back and forth, the courier can ensure that a hero stays healthy in that mid lane during the crucial early stages of the game where every moment needs to be utilised productively in lane. One may even go as far as to say, efficient bottle-crowing can mean the difference between throwing a game (with early deaths) and stomping it.

There are many reasons why bottle crowing has lost its popularity amongst the new generation of pub-players. They find it time consuming, risky and disadvantageous for the heroes in the other lanes. However there are ways to remove those reasons entirely, with a little smart thinking and lot of Shift-Queuing.

Holding down the Shift key as you tap on the hotkeys or issue commands, allows you to stack your commands in the order you want so that they are carried out instantly one after the other without further intervention from you. All you have to do is drag the bottle from your inventory onto the ground – preferably somewhere a bit away from the battlefield, then queue the following commands:

TLDR Step-by-Step Gu >

-Make sure its away from the battlefield

-Select courier
-To get the courier to fetch it
–To fly it to base
-Optional: Retrieves items from stash
-Transfer bottle back to hero
-Speed Boost (mind the 20sec cooldown)
-Select hero again

This simple process makes bottle crowing a cinch, it ensures that you use the least amount of time to bottle crow, and also makes the courier available for the rest of your team quicker.

Further Tips for effective bottle-crowing:

When playing a hero with Bottle who uses Power Treads, make sure to switch the attribute of treads to Agility before using Bottle. By doing so, you maximize the amount of Health and Mana regained from a bottle charge.