How to win Chicken Dinner in Underhollow?

So it’s finally here. Valve, and Dota 2’s take on the Battle Royale genre: The Underhollow. The custom game accompanying this year’s Battlepass is actually quite fun to play if you are a fan of Battle Royales and Dota 2 in general. The fact that it doesn’t require too much of a time commitment with most games lasting just 15 to 20 minutes is an added bonus which panders towards the casual player base.

But just like any other multiplayer game, there is a very minor learning curve. To help you leap over that here’s a short guide to beating out 21 other players and win in the Underhollow game mode.

 

What is Underhollow?

In this mode, 24 people duke it out to either be the last one standing or the last one with the Roshefort, Roshan’s finest cheese. Players choose any hero on the Dota roster and join a team of three in order to move through the depths of the Underhollow.

Along the way, you move through different rooms and meet different threats — not just other players, but also different waves of NPC enemies and even environmental threats. Much like the classic Dota 2 game, defeated enemies level up your hero, making you more powerful as you move towards the center of the map and closer to more terrifying obstacles.

While the entertainment is its own reward, there are prizes for doing well in Underhollow. Depending on your Battle Pass level you can earn up to 4000 Battle Points per week. So it really is pretty easy to level up your Battlepass with the Underhollow.

Underhollow 101

The Basics

The map is a rectangular grid of rooms. Each room but the start will have some sort of a challenge, and fully clearing them will give you a Treasure chest in the center with gold, items, and healing. The rooms get harder the closer you get to the middle of the map. You want to keep moving towards the inside as quickly as you can while not dying in the rooms, and also not dying to other teams you run into along the way.
 

Just like any other Battle Royale, the playable area closes in after 6 minutes, the outermost rooms will be covered in falling rocks, dealing 80 DPS to anyone still in them. 6 minutes after this the area closes in further, and so on.

You should be the last team standing to win the game.

The Strategy

You initially start off in one of the outer edges of the map; Buy your items here. I’d recommend not getting much here. Just something like a Stout shield (if you are a tank) or clarities if you are a spell based damage dealer.

You can clear out the first two rooms pretty easily with the items you start off with (1 Mango, 2 Healing Salves, and 1 Escape Potion). Just remember that creeps can’t cancel your healing salves, so you can salve while tanking.

It’s crucial to move quickly, the faster you clear rooms, the faster you assimilate Gold/XP than other teams. But make sure that you can handle the damage the inner rooms can dish out, before moving there.

As a rule of the thumb,

• Move to the 2nd ring of rooms as soon as you see a door leading you there.
• Move to the 3rd ring, when you get to level 7 or 8
• Move to the 4th and innermost ring when you get to Level 13.

A full list of all the rooms in Underhollow, and what they contain can be found HERE

Use dynamite to break down walls, if you are stuck in an outer ring for way too long.

That’s basically it. Only fight an enemy when they’re low, or you have a level advantage over them. If it’s the other way around, immediately use your Escape Potion and get away from the vicinity of the other team. Most teams won’t carry detection, which gives you a free pass at escaping unscathed.
 

The Heroes

Image Credits: MilliganVick

Heroes who can heal, sustain teams, and have some wave clear in the early levels while also having the capability to dish out a lot of damage in the later stages are very valuable. So heroes like Winter Wyvern, Juggernaut and Necrophos are very valuable.

Heroes who can just Tank through the hordes of the smaller creeps and have decent teamfighting abilities for the skirmishes are pretty darn good. So Centaur Warrunner, Abyssal Underlord, and Axe are the type of heroes you should be looking to pickup.

Aura based physical damage heroes like Vengeful Spirit, Luna and Drow Ranger are also pretty good. While they aren’t that good early on, in 5 minutes they are extremely good at clearing out mini-bosses and skirmishes against other squads, a few minutes in.

But IMO the best hero in the game for this mode is Zeus. He does a ton of damage in the mid-game, can easily clear out waves with arc lightning in the early levels and grants vision of all enemy heroes in the map with his ultimate.

Image Credits: Kamixaqui

To start off, Heroes who need a lot of farm/levels to come online aren’t good in this game mode. You will most likely have to fight in under 5 minutes when you have 3000 Networth/ Level 6. So heroes like Anti Mage, Terrorblade, and Slark are quite useless and hence are bad picks.

Invisibility based heroes are pretty bad at this game. Riki, Nyx Assassin, and Bounty Hunter don’t offer much in clearing rooms quickly. While Clinkz is a bit better, he can’t use Dark Pact on any creep in game making his Ultimate worthless.

Aggressive ganking heroes aren't very good. You don't know when and where you'll find the other team. So that rules out heroes like Spirit Breaker, Nightstalker, and Tiny (Whose abilities are modified)

Image Credits: Kostya-PingWIN

Be sure to factor in these elements when picking up your heroes. Just in case that was too complicated, here’s a cheat sheet