Dota 2 has quite a few options and settings that you need to know about before diving in. This section deals with the most important ones and provides a quick overview of what they do. If you want to use a Dota 2 boosting service or just increase your Dota 2 MMR by your self, understanding them is essential.

HOTKEYS

1. ABILITIES
2. CAST: allows you to set keys for all the abilities you want to cast for a particular hero that you can select.
3. QUICKCAST: allows you to set keys for all the abilities you want to quickcast for a particular hero that you can select. A quickcast ability will trigger as soon as the hotkey is pressed, at the location of the mouse cursor. So basically, it no longer requires you to press left-click. If you want to be able to selectively use some abilities on cast and others on quickcast, you must enable the 3.C setting listed in ADVANCED HOTKEYS (read below).
4. ITEMS
5. CAST: same as for abilities.
6. QUICKCAST: same as for abilities.
7. UNIT ACTIONS
8. Select Hero: selects your hero. Double tap to reposition the camera on your hero.
9. Select All Controlled Units: selects all the units you control, including your hero.
10. SHOP ACTIONS
11. Select Courier: selects your team’s courier.
12. Courier Deliver Items: tells the selected courier to deliver your items.
13. Purchase Quickbuy: instantly buys the next item you can afford from your quickbuy list. This is very useful if you’re on the verge of dying, because it allows you to instantly spend your unreliable gold, thus making you lose less of it when you die. To add an item to your quickbuy list, open the shop, hold the Shift key, and left click on its icon. This will add all of the item’s components to the list. To add multiple items to the list, open the shop, hold Ctrl+Shift, and left click on their icons. This will add all of the items you desire to the quickbuy list, instead of overwriting it each time you add a new item.
14. CHAT
15. Chat to Team: allows you to write messages to your teammates.
16. Chat to Everyone: allows you to write messages that can be seen by your teammates and enemies alike.
17. Voice Chat (TEAM): allows you to communicate with your team using a microphone. You must hold down the assigned key while talking.
18. Chat Wheel: allows you to access a set of 8 predefined phrases (which you can choose from a much larger set by customizing your Chat Wheel), in order to communicate a key message more easily, without having to write it in chat.
19. INTERFACE
20. Scoreboard: shows you the scoreboard, which contains information about every hero in the game.
21. Pause: pauses the game.

ADVANCED HOTKEYS

1. UNIT ACTIONS
2. Learn Ability: allows you to quickly put a skill point in a desired ability. Press the assigned key and then the key associated with that ability to put a skill point in it.
3. Upgrade Talents: allows you to quickly put a skill point in a desired talent. Press the assigned key and then 1 (for the left column talent) or 2 (for the right column talent).
4. Move: allows you to command your hero or some other unit that you possess to follow a certain target around.
5. Cancel Current Action: stops all actions. It’s usually used to stop an attack (during its animation), the activation of an ability (during its animation), or a Town Portal Scroll (during its channeling).
6. Select All Other Units: selects all the units you own with the exception of your hero.
7. Activate Glyph: Activates the Glyph of Fortification.
8. Activate Scan: Activates the Scan ability. This is a team ability with a 3.5-minute cooldown. It detects whether or not enemy heroes are present in the selected area, and is able to do this even if they are invisible or smoked (more on this later on).
9. SHOP ACTIONS
10. Courier Shield: makes your courier invincible for a short duration.
11. Take Stash Items: moves items from your fountain’s stash into your inventory.
12. Open Shop: opens the shop. Pressing the key while near a Side or Secret Shop will open that shop instead. By default, it opens your Fountain Shop.
13. HOTKEYS OPTIONS
14. Double Tap Ability to Self Cast: if enabled, cast an ability or item on yourself (if it’s possible), when double tapping its associated key.
15. Smart Double Tap: if enabled, allows you to press Alt + associated ability/item key to trigger self-casting.
16. Enable Advanced Quickcast/Autocast Hotkeys: allows you to choose which item and ability keys should be used on cast, and which ones should be used on quickcast.

OPTIONS

1. GAME
2. Auto Attack: you should always set this to “Standard” (you’ll learn later why).
3. Auto Select Summoned Units: enabling it allows you to instantly give the same command to all of your units. This is particularly useful for illusion-based heroes.
4. Unified Orders with CTRL: allows you to send the same order to all of your units by holding CTRL.
5. Teleport Requires Hold/Stop: always enable it. Otherwise you may accidentally cancel your Teleports.
6. Right-Click to Force Attack: always enable it. This allows you to more easily attack and deny your own lane creeps (more on this later).
7. CAMERA
8. Edge Pan: always enable it. Without it you can’t move your camera freely outside your current screen.
9. Center Camera on Hero on Respawn: always disable it. Otherwise you may misuse your Teleports.
10. MINIMAP
11. Use Extra Large Minimap: this is useful if you want to be able to read it more easily.
12. Use Alt to Show Hero Icons: always enable this.
13. Invert Alt Toggle: always enable this. Together with the previous option, it allows you to understand the information you see on the minimap much more easily.
14. CHAT
15. Mute all incoming chat: this is not recommended because Dota 2 is by nature a team game that requires you to cooperate with your allies in order to succeed, but from time to time you’ll want to use this. As you will soon learn (or maybe already know), Dota 2 can make some people really angry, which causes them to become really rude or annoying.
16. Mute chat from enemies: I personally use this, simply because I found that enemies say nothing useful and mostly distract you from your game, either by whining, being rude or making remarks designed to get you angry.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

1. Miscellaneous
2. Display Network Information: allows you to see your FPS, ping and packet loss during a game.
3. Strict Solo Ranked Matchmaking: enable this if you don’t want to run into parties when playing solo.
4. Expose Public Match Data: allows websites such as dotabuff.com to collect data about your games and give you valuable statistics. Be wary though, because this also gives your opponents the chance to look up your profile and see what heroes you’ve been playing lately.

Dota 2 is a game that requires players to pay attention to a lot of different things and make their actions as efficient as possible. Because of this, everything that can be done from the keyboard should be done from the keyboard. You don’t want to start making unnecessary and time-consuming actions in the middle of a fight, or in a situation where you should be focusing on something else. So try to pick the keys that suit you for the most important actions in the game, remember them, and then make these actions using the keyboard instead of moving the mouse cursor around. Following this principle will help you quite a bit if you want to become a better player and increase your Dota 2 MMR.