For the last week or so, I've worked pretty hard. From Monday to Wednesday I've hardly had any sleep, and my working hours went something like ten hours per day. Still, it felt really nice to be working because despite all the stress, I felt I've contributed something. Besides tutoring English on the side, I'm doing my bit helping out the family business. We received so many orders last week, and the workload was absolutely crazy. My parents and I worked really hard to get those orders moving, and I think we did a good job. The running joke is that this is the start of the new Rockefeller enterprise, and that I might take over the family business one day. Well, we are not earning nearly as much as them. But we are catching up!

I'm probably going to spend the rest of this summer on those two jobs, and then spent the next few months volunteering overseas before returning to Auckland, possibly finishing off my Bachelor's degree. In the United States, the Bachelor's degree lasts for four years. In New Zealand, a Bachelor's degree only lasts three years, and they give you an option to do an extra year which they refer to as an Honours degree. Which is basically an extended year of undergraduate study, except that you get to write a dissertation on a topic of your interest. I've always enjoyed reading and doing research, so I'm sure I'll pull through with good grades. I'm not too sure whether I want to actually go back to school, though, since I do have some loans to pay off and I don't like debt. 

Dota has been fairly interesting lately. Both the PA arcana and Oracle came out a few days ago. The former caused an influx of PA pickers, as expected. There are also quite a few Oracle pickers, and I think Oracle is lining up to be a really good support if he's properly used. In general, my pub games lately have been pretty decent. I play on Australia, which isn't exactly the server with the most skilful players, but people have in general been nice. Maybe it's to do with the PA arcana and how the prospect of getting free sets is making people cooperate more than before. I really am not sure. But I definitely hope this lucky streak continues. For the first time in a really long time, I feel that I'm enjoying this game again. Hopefully I don't jinx it.

What really got me excited were the hero effigies. In fact, if it hadn't been the effigies, I wouldn't have gotten back into the game. Valve is just really good at manipulating my feelings, it seems. It took a long time for Pygmalion to finish his sculpture, in the same way that it took me an hour finishing character creation on Dark Souls. But alas, they are done. So pretty.

Queen of Pain is an underpowered hero right now. A few years back, Queen of Pain was the midlaner to go for, and she was featured prominently in TI2. As newer heroes like Ember Spirit and Slark came out, Queen of Pain's skillset became less and less powerful. Queen of Pain belongs in the same category of heroes as Windrunner -- good by standards back in the days, increasingly outclassed by newer heroes that fulfil largely the same function but are better at it. 

Queen of Pain's recent buffs hasn't done too much to improve her pub winrate or making her more relevant in the competitive scene. Decreasing the cooldown on Shadow Strike is useful, but Shadow Strike is primarily used as a harassing tool in the laning stage. The casting animation for Shadow Strike is so slow that you'd almost never want to do it in the middle of a teamfight. The thing is, Shadow Strike is just a very mediocre spell when you compare it to, let's say, Ember's bolas or Storm's Lightning Vortex. It loses a lot of its utility after the first 10 minutes.

Still, I think she has potential in certain lineups. Faceless Void is very popular right now, and there is no other midlaner that combos as well with Chronosphere as Queen of Pain. The key to succeeding with her right now, I think, is to pair her up with big CCs like Ravage and Chrono, and keep on picking teamfights where she can cleanup and snowball those kills into an item advantage. It's kind of counter-intuitive to revolve a strategy around an underpowered hero, but that's just how things are. Unfortunately, her room for error is very low, because Blink itself has a very low margin of error. When I watch my replays on Queen of Pain, for example, I always think that if I had blinked just a bit to the side, my Scream/Wave could've hit two more people. If I'd been a bit more careful with my positioning, I could've dodged a stun and threw out a few more nukes. If my mechanics had been a bit more polished, I could've landed a few more right clicks. Even though I've played so much of this hero, there's always room to improve. 

Sonic Wave just got buffed with a slightly bigger AoE.

The circle indicates the casting range of Sonic Wave. 

Notice how the line intersects with her effigy on the right.

Unfortunately, neither the spell's animation, nor the range indicator, shows the spell's actual AoE.

The actual range of Sonic Wave is about twice that of the casting range. 

It has a MASSIVE AoE, which I feel is underused by Queen of Pain players right now, myself included.

So the trick to landing a good ult is to click in the general direction of the enemy, between yourself and the casting range limits.

Since unit targeting has been removed, do not ever click on the enemy hero.