Any experienced Dota 2 players willing to give advice?

I only recently grabbed Dota and, I've gotta say, it's pretty good. I've played several bot matches (on medium difficulty) and won every time as Razor. However, I haven't really experimented with any other heroes and I'm kinda afraid to go marching into an online match. I'm still not completely familiar with most of the strategies and items yet, so could a fairly experienced player give me some advice for a noob? I already know how to last-hit and deny, so I've got that down already. But something seems missing.

You shouldn't be afraid to jump into an online match the match making does a pretty good job of matching similarly skilled players. The low skilled unranked games are usually where people are the friendliest anyway (I.E. people don't start being rude untill they start thinking they're actually good)

For basic mechanics and introductions to new heros alot of newer players check out the videos by Purge (youtube). Some of his stuff is dated by this point but he's where I got my start.

The truely good advice however is this. There is a mute button on the score board. If using it ever crosses your mind, even for a second, do it.

Alrighty, thanks! I went ahead and jumped into an online match as Razor and the first time we were destroyed (The Dire won.) Though, the second time I tried it as Razor again, we (The Radiant) won and I somehow managed to get a dominating triple kill.

I don't think I've heard of Purge, but I have found another Youtuber who gave tips on what a noob shouldn't do (such as wasting mana on creeps). Of those two matches, nobody really chatted much. I'd suppose they didn't know about the voice chat feature, but...

Anyway, thanks for the advice!

Purge is a fairly well known streamer/YouTube personality. He wrote what can only be called a famous guide for DotA called "Welcome to Dota, You Suck." which is a pretty decent primer to a lot of the basics and semi-basics. Learning the mechanics comes from playing though. You're going to encounter people who say terrible stuff to you, this is kind of an inevitability. Learn how to use the mute button, and do not use it sparingly. If you let the poop heads get to you it will make it a lot less fun.

Some people may say different but I genuinely feel like its very good to watch hero be played before you play him. Go watch a video or two of Purges, find a hero that looks like fun, learn the basics of what the hero does, then just go play him. ALSO YOU SHOULD CONSIDER WACHING DOTA AS AN ESPORT! Watching pro players play is another way to get better (though that really is for later when you're looking for advanced maneuvers and builds). It's super fun regardless though. In fact: the DotA 2 Asia Championship is this weekend. It'll be here! They're playing something else at the moment but the big event has a $1.2 million grand prize. The best players in the world are there. A lot of people aren't into esports but I love to plug it when I can

StormTroper said:

I'm kinda afraid to go marching into an online match.

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As someone who's quit all the mobas within a week (and even lost some friends over them) due to hostile players: play limited hero matches. There's no penalty for leaving, so people don't get near as upset if the game starts going badly. You might also do well to play against a friend in a 1v1 to practice actually preforming the strategies you read about. It's one thing to know what order to fire off spells in, and a completely different thing actually making them land in the right order while there's a real player fighting back.

Also, in my experience playing competitive type games, the new player stuff almost always comes down to getting good enough at learning what buttons to press until it becomes second nature. I could learn all there is to know about last hitting creeps, but if I can't actually manipulate my mouse and keyboard so as to consistently last hit while under pressure from a human player, then that knowledge is useless. It's only after I could do the basic gameplay functions as muscle memory that any kind of high level strategy became worth paying attention to.