Portal hopping will be defined in this text as the act of entering portal A, throwing a Q, optionally an auto-attack, then entering portal B. Repeat.
Just for clarity’s sake, whenever you enter a medivh portal, the game will forcefully move your camera so that it is centered around your character after you go through. This is a problem and on this text i shall discuss some of the techniques designed to counter it.
The most well known technique, the one explained by itsnotparadox in his youtube video, is the easiest to perform because it requires the least amount of apm:
1.- Place portals
2.- Press “L” or hold “space” to center the camera around medivh.
3.- Click portal A and then attac with Q
4.- Click portal B.
5.- Repeat.
When using this technique your mouse is basically always in the center of the screen and you only have to move it slightly to aim the Q but there is a trade off.
Since your camera moves back with you when you return to portal A, while you are at portal A, you don’t know what is exactly happening at portal B, because you don’t see there, this can easily make you miss a Q or make you waste time figuring out what’s happening and therefore increasing the risk you take.
The problem with this technique is the lack of information, basically not being able to keep your camera at portal B.
Another lesser known technique is the manual camera moving option. Based off the idea of moving the camera manually to always be able to see what you want to see, to facilitate the landing of Q.
1.- Place portals, center camera @B
2.- click A, immediatelly Q and click B, now your camera is centered @A
3.- move your camera manually back to B and repeat step 2.
As you can see this technique is more mechanically complex because you need to do many more things. The huge advantage though is that you always keep your camera centered around portal B and therefore it is much easier to land your Q, specially if you have your camera movement speed maxed.
Another technique that achieves similar results while staying at a similar mechanical level is the fixed camera viewpoints technique.
1.- place portals, center your camera around portal B and save this viewpoint as viewpoint 1
2.- click portal A, Q, then click portal B, now your camera is centered around portal A.
3.- click portal A and immediately press the button to go to the saved viewpoint 1, then Q, click portal B and repeat step 3.
This technique gives you vision on point B during the time it takes medivh to enter the portal after you click it, which is around .5 seconds, enough to make sure you land the Q.
I have played a lot of Medivh games recently and do not agree on this portal being so unnecessarily complex.
Sometimes i don’t want to play Medivh just because i think there are heroes whose mechanics are better designed.
This is how i see it: Medivh is labeled as an “extreme” difficulty hero purely because of 2 things.
Other heroes that are not “extreme” have very similar mechanics to medivh but the portal is unique to him.
If we removed this forced camera movement from the game, Medivh would be labeled as a hard hero.
If we allowed Medivh and all other heroes, of course, to enter the closest portal by clicking either, he would be labeled medium.
By doing this, Medivh’s winrate would naturally increase without him being buffed in anyway. If we make this change, mostly only low mmr players will feel a difference, because high apm is not a problem with pro players, so the winrate for high mmr would not change at all, but he would no longer have 40-43% winrate constantly @diamond elo and below.
All of this without buffing him.
I’m still salty about Whitemane btw.