The resource nobody reviews
Teams review fights, drafts and laning. Almost nobody reviews vision, even though wards are bought every single minute of every single game, cost real gold, cost a support’s time and positioning to place, and determine whether most fights start on your terms or theirs.
The reason is practical, not philosophical: vision is genuinely hard to review. It is not an event you can point at. It is a state that exists across the whole map, changes continuously, and is invisible in the replay unless you happen to have the camera in the right place at the right moment. A list of ward positions does not capture it, because what matters is not where a ward was — it is what you could see, when, and what you were blind to at the moment it mattered.
Coverage as a thing you scrub through
The heatmap renders observer and sentry coverage over the map across time, so vision becomes something you watch rather than something you infer. Scrub to any moment and you see the actual shape of what each side could see.
Watched this way, a lost fight often has an obvious prologue. Your coverage of the enemy jungle lapses at 26:10. Nobody replaces it, because the support who normally would is dead and the other one is holding a lane. At 27:40 five heroes arrive from exactly the direction you stopped watching. Nothing in that sequence looks like a mistake in the moment, and all of it is visible in ten seconds on a coverage map.
- Coverage over time
- What each side could and could not see at any given moment, scrubbable across the whole game.
- Deward ledger
- Every ward placed, spotted and killed, with its lifespan and who paid for it — so a deward reads as an event with a cost attached.
- Blind-spot windows
- Periods where a key area was dark for the enemy. Those are push and Roshan windows, and they are frequently sitting there unused.
Vision is an attacking tool
Most teams below the top level treat wards defensively: place them so we do not get caught. That is half the job, and it is the less valuable half.
The other half is knowing when *they* cannot see. A window where the enemy has no vision on the Roshan approach, or on the tier two you want, is a window where you can take an objective for free. Those windows exist in every game — usually several — and go unused because nobody knows they are happening. Vision expires on a timer, supports die, and the enemy map goes dark in patches without anyone announcing it.
The question that changes games is not "where should we ward?" — it is "what can they not see right now, and what does that let us take?"
Reviewed after the fact, blind-spot windows train a skill you can use live. After a few sessions of seeing that you had a ninety-second free window at minute 22 in four consecutive games, a team starts checking for it during the game.
Dewarding as an economy
Every ward has a cost and a lifespan, and the ledger makes the trade explicit. A sentry that kills two observers early is a large profit. A support spending forty seconds and a sentry hunting one ward that was about to expire anyway is a loss, even though it produces a satisfying kill message.
Aggregated across a scrim block, the deward ledger answers questions that are otherwise pure vibes: are we spending more on vision than they are, and getting less map out of it? Are our observers dying within a minute of being placed, and if so, are we placing them in the same three spots every game? Does the enemy always find the ward in that one location, which would suggest they know exactly where we put it?
What to do with it in review
- Check coverage before every lost fight
- Scrub to thirty seconds before the fight started and look at the map, not the heroes. Fights that felt like a mechanical loss are often an information loss.
- Find one unused blind window per game
- Pick the clearest window where they had nothing on an objective, and ask what the team was doing instead. This single habit changes objective tempo faster than most drills.
- Watch your ward placements repeat
- Across a block, patterns are obvious. If the enemy dewards your first observer within thirty seconds in game after game, the placement is the problem, not the support.
- Tie it to the lane plan
- Early vision is part of the laning plan, not a separate activity. Coverage in the first three minutes usually explains a lot of what happened in the next seven.
Vision review pairs naturally with the 2D mini replay: the heatmap tells you which windows to care about, and the replay lets you watch what everybody was doing during them.