I am not really good in games where you need to make a comeback while at a disadvantage. While it is possible to do, I feel I lack the proper knowledge to create a good comeback.
Thus I sometimes get games where once we start losing, we are always losing. Which I wish to avoid and try to do better.
That said, what are the does and don’ts in losing games? As well as tips to create a good comeback?
The first tip for comebacks is to not get too far behind.
If you see any fight that’s unwinnable dont take it. Its okay to give up most objectives/camps/bosses if you’re not on the same talent tier or are a man behind. Fighting 5v5 3 levels down is always a bad idea. If you can CAREFULLY soak its much better to do. Though if you get more than 2 levels behind soak isnt the answer. As a general rule 1-2 level behind means you need to be soaking to catch up, 3+ means you weren’t soaking and instead took a bad fight.
Youd need either a really advantageous fight or a pick. You get the first by invading boss or doing a 5 man defense around core/keep. To get a pick just isolate 1 target, get kill, then disengage. Once your cooldowns are back up you can take the 4v5. If you ever do get a wipe go straight for buildings. Even if there are 2 left if they get cocky and defend towers on their own they will die to a 5v2. Never go grab camps in these cases unless you only have 1 left or just a one man advantage (3v4). Then you can steal their camps and depush lanes.
One final thing. If you are ever ahead and get a 5 man wipe after 16: go for core/rush structures. Its fine to disengage after taking a keep if you dont think you have time to core (15+ seconds is plenty of time). This little tip got me out of plat. Enemies dont know how to end and will give you 2-3 chances to turn it on them. A tank soaking tower shots, greymane, and any healer will do more structure damage than any merc camp/boss/objective (k maybe not braxis obj).
Soak until you get same level and fight as soon as/as long as you are on the same level. People always soaked way too long missing the window of opportunity. There is 0 difference between xp bar filled 1% and 50%. They also start fighting too early and do not wait for the 5th who waveclears on the way to the objective/TF (to get on the same level). Nothing worse than potatoes fighting behind with 99% xp bar…
That said, enemy team having level advantage =/= enemy team having talent/ult advantage. Level 11 vs level 12 is not unwinnable.
ROOTAAATEEEEEEE (together) and try to gank/outnumber enemy team.
Acknowledge that sometimes you simply deserved to lose 
Yea thats a big point. If enemy turtles and is tactically pushing with a 3 level lead you’re basically going for a hail mary. 2 level difference is not much and means game is still on.
My opinion is the same as it always been - in 99% of cases comebacks are the result of enemy making a mistake. True or not, it should be like that imo.
1. Don’t push lanes. If the lanes are pushed too far, you’ll have to walk farther away to soak, which means you’ll get ambushed by the enemy, and they’ll snowball. (Of course you do need to de-push if you lost a keep.)
2. Ambush. Players often get overconfident when they’re winning, and they might split up for no reason. If you see a hero alone somewhere. Call the gank to your team.
3. Trade. When the enemy is up in level, and is too powerful for you to face, go destroy a structure while they’re taking the objective. Watching them win it doesn’t do you any good.
4. Defend bosses. Winning teams will often random a boss for no reason, and you can catch them at low hp/ mana with their stuff on cooldown. Often, even if they do manage to get the boss, you can get 3+ kills. Then you leave a few heroes to defend the boss and the others go get objective, push a structure or get camps.
5. Fight your enemy while they’re lvl 19. You don’t want to fight them wen they’re 20.
#1 Tip for a good comeback:
Don’t sit there and argue in chat about who did what wrong. It doesn’t solve anything, and it just makes people AFK while they are having flame wars with each other.
I really like this tip, I wish more people follow it.
Don’t give up yet. Lotta players see a gap and go “oh well it’s pointless to try now” the “point” of a game is to play it. If they’re obsessed with only ‘winning’ then giving up means they won’t win and it undermines the point of their complaint.
Stuff isn’t up to “chance”. People are the ones that take actions and make decisions. Passive bystanders use ‘chance’ as an excuse to think there’s some of ‘luck’ to their actions; it’s not a matter of dice-rolls, is a matter of matching action with direction.
Put in a little more time/effort into actually aiming. The typical player tends to just use abilities because they’re off cooldown. However, the magical secret of a game built around skillshots is to actually have them hit an enemy by aiming at them (or aiming at where they’re going to be, ala the secret to Space Invaders) rather than just hoping they’ll be ‘lucky’ and the enemy will want into something
Don’t facecheck bushes. Once a team is already down, they may end up staggering deaths because of silly stuff they didn’t do at the start of the game, but are doing now.
Force a trade. That doesn’t mean just up and jump into the enemy and hope for a kill, but a skirmish is going to happen, and a lot of time is spent on players running back and forth or trying to escape a team that has better chase/cc/finishers. In the time they spend trying to escape, they could potentially get a takedown instead. Lots of players try to avoid the ‘trade’ mentality, but once a team is down 3 levels or so, your side gets a lot more out of it than the other side does.
Try to move in a buddy-system. Part of why one side gets low tends to come from a lack of damage distribution. One person gets caught out, focused, and everyone else is running away; enemy team has 2-3 heroes that are all low, but fewer deaths. Players tend to expect the tank to take all the damage or make all the peels, and they just can’t. That is part of why bruisers are fairly standard on teams (the extra durability) but being able to spread 3000 damage across 2-3 heroes is better than 3000 damage dealt on just one hero; tanks make be durable, but they need a bit of time to have their self-sustain work, and if their backline is already running away, of course that hero is going to get chased down and killed; putting in a little extra gumption to stand ground and poke at the enemy side can help get them to back down and not chase together.
The worst part of a team being down is they feel that much more vulnerable and are that much more prone to bailing on an ally before they hold their ground and force the enemy team back. Once a death or two kicks in, then they stand back and wait to get pushed in. While wiping on a lost objective loses that much harder, functionally, getting a kill can really help swing moral for the team and making the enemy side feel less overwhelming powerful.
The biggest issue for getting a game to turn around is making sure all players are on the same page; if they’re going to get an opportune kill (such as against an alarak) they need to be willing to fight for it; if they’re stalling a point, but are going to defend, then they need to back out together.
In my experience there is one golden rule that applies to all comebacks
You alter your approach in some fashion
Weather it was lackluster soaking, people getting ganked dosen’t matter fact of the matter is something was going wrong and something has to change in your approach,
If you got 3 levels down you already took a bad fight while you were on the same tier
That’s the best tip I can give that applies to all circumstances Something has to change and everyone on the team has to be on board.
Rush in one by one when you’re 4v5 and three levels down.
That’ll show them!
After a five level loss you can blame matchmaking, millennials, television and rock & roll.
be as toxic as you can. Toxic players win more then nice guys
I don’t have any tips for you as I am a terri-bad player. I just want to share my kudos to you for your mindset.
To some extent, it’s normal. There is a stat pair called First- and Second-to-Ten winrate. Mine used to be about 75-25%, but shifted to 67-37 last season. Matches where you are 10 almost together, have an equalizing effect on it.
I checked yours but your profile shows 70-62.5% across 18 matches.
It’s fairly normal, heck, to be expected that an advantage is that: an advantage. It’s the Snowballing / Comeback discussion: if being ahead isn’t an advantage (50% FTT/STT), then playing well (soaking, pressuring, roaming, killing) isn’t an advantage, so the whole game becomes pointless.
Things you can do:
Repeat this Fan quote: “We’re scaling”.
Your comp might have a disadvantage early on - stack talents, important tiers - but it can come back. If that’s the case, just sit it out. Defend your structures as much as you can and wait for the progress bar to fill.
Try and understand synergy in your team.
Got brawlers? Complement them. Start soaking and if they die, try deathballing instead.
Got headless chicken? With luck, they might react on pings.
Got slowbies? Think ahead and ping ahead. Don’t run ahead, wait for them to catch up.
Observe the enemies and react on their playstyle.
Enemies split pushing? Defend each lane.
Don’t stress too much. It might not come out as toxic but it’s the same inside: overspinning, tryharding, getting tilted because someone died. Just play. Carefully.
Don’t overextend. The enemies will pick you. Especially as you have a reduced chance to even win a 1v1, being down in stats. Stop pushing out lanes - roam together.
Hopeless? Reduce effort. Save your energies for the next match. Can’t win every time.
Bonus thought. Early objectives are weaker. If you can’t win early objectives, say you’re 0:2 on Garden of Terror, it’s better to ignore it, soak and defend 0:3 at level 8 than tryhard and get a 2:3 at level 12. (Even worse when you tryhard, die, it’s 0:3 and no one is alive to defend.) Structures don’t scale, hence you lose more no matter what. The later objective is more impactful. That’s the one you have to win.
Bonus 2. If you are at 0:2, taking camps helps with the defense and prevents the enemies to add it to the objective, or soon after when you’re still sweaty.
= “How could it be worse?” - Prevent that.
In teams that are winning, there often is someone who gets a bit too confident in their leads and they test their luck one too many times. Usually ranged assassin types.
In losing games, I’ve found out that punishing those opponents seem to work well.
When their Nazeebo is pushing a lane very hard by himself, or when you see enemy Valla vaulting forward during a skirmish, be bold and jump them. They may be a level or two higher, but they are still very vulnerable to focused fire.
You need 1 fort down in any lane before 20, and you need to understand that the game will give you opportunities to get on even talent tiers. If your enemy is on a higher talent tier you get more xp for killing their hero than they get for you, you are on a shorted death timer than they are. etc…
The other thing you need to understand is what are talent tiers talent tiers are 4,7,10,13,16,20 are when heroes get upgrades to their abilities. If your team is on level 5 and the other team is on 6 you can fight you are on the same talent tier, if your team is on 5 and their team is on 7 you should avoid fights because they have better spells than you do because they have upgraded at level 7.
If an objective comes up when you are down a talent tier, counter push (dont fight on objectives down a talent tier) go get camps if any are available, go push a lane and do damage to help offset the damage you will receive. Don’t fight till you get on the same talent level.
The most important thing to understand about comebacks is late game deaths are 1 minute (after 20) so TAKE ADVANTAGE. if you kill 3 people on the enemy team head to the shortest lant (the one with the fewest buildings) and push that lane harder. In order to win you only need 1 KEEP down to push the core.
Watch their death timers if they start to get around 10 seconds its time to make a decision, all in on keep or get out and get health and mana and wait for the next team fight.
The thing is though, if they are turtling, they are taking it slow, which is still a vulnerability. If they arent keeping open any vulnerability, its realy not turtling. Some hero comps are just slower at pushing, but are very stable, that is not turtling at all.
A real turtle is giving you the opportunity to even out the levels. Its in the name: he allows you to bash his shell (his only safety).
You forgot to blame OP heroes.
Should I also report my team?