DOTA 2

The wife and I planned on going after geeking out on TI4 last fall. Then she got pregnant, and so the plan got scrapped. She really fucked up my summer / fall, had EDC / Burning Man / TI5 planned, instead it has been baby shit. My son is never going to live down crashing my last epic summer before he was even born . . . Lol

Steam Community :: [PRX] Angkar

I try to get in a few games on the weekend, the weeks are usually crammed, but sometimes a week day game happens.

Controlling your lane as Lich should be no issue at all since you can deny a full hp creep every wave. Just eat the ranged if you want to push the least possible and melee if you need more mana/want only to push less but not as much as ranged(ranged creep does more damage and generally dies last). You don't want to always make stuff go into your tower cause it's more annoying to last hit(though you should probably learn how to last hit under the tower as lich as it's good training and is useful) but also because it means the next wave will be "reset" since all the enemy wave will die to the tower, plus you/the tower take unnecessary damage. You want to control it so it's right outside. If all your creeps are dead, it's sometimes worth it standing in aggro range of the creeps but out of tower range to hold them there until your next wave.

But really lane control is a fairly complex system, it takes a long long time to see how to control it effectively, there's many ways to influence it that are too subtle or too reliant on personnal judgement to explain. It's something you'll get better at as you go.

Lich is a good learning hero, has a low reliance on items and strong base spells, he helps with controlling the lane and his ultimate against bad team(aka every single team at low tiers when you start) can easily win a teamfight on its own since it does completely stupid damage if people don't spread out properly. Definitely one of the most recommended starting hero. You can learn melee heroes later, though a few can do fine even if you're not that good just yet, like say Spirit Breaker since he has crazy base health and damage, Bristleback because he's super tanky and some others. I'd look into str heroes over agi heroes when learning for melees.

That said in general most melees have a reliance on items, which require farming well to see their true potential, so you're mostly not gonna do much until you get to late enough that you get gold from teamfights or whatever if you don't farm well, which is kinda meh. Learning with spell based heroes is a lot more fun, plus since they generally all have shit attack damage and animations, it's good training to learn to last hit on them. Once you know how to last hit with say Lina, Crystal Maiden or Lion, you can pick most of the other heroes and last hit easily cause most of them have better stats.