I first want to thank Sam “The Plaid Pirate” for giving me the opportunity to share with you, the reader, the secrets of tread switching. I’ve uncovered these secrets through hours of playing Dota, hearing casters refer to tread switching, and then Googling “tread switching” to find out what they meant. If you follow Dota on Reddit, you may know that tread switching is one of the very basic tricks that all the 9k Redditors know, like countering entire heroes with one item (BKB), and only losing because of the Peruvians on your team. Understanding tread switching will add somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 MMR to your solo account – you’re welcome! (therefore my actual MMR in the absence of my tread switching ability is somewhere between 300 and negative 700)

More seriously [No, probably not more seriously – Ed.], tread switching is one of the many game mechanics in Dota that is completely unexplained and likely emerged from players’ actual play, rather than being an express design decision of IceFrog. It gives you some more efficiency in resource use (hp and mana), and critically makes you feel like a professional dota player. The esteemed gamer Sean “Day[9]” Plott explained in one of his “Day[9] Dailies” that esports and gaming are great because you can watch what professionals do and then do that very thing in a game against your own peers, and feel good about yourself, even if you’re never going to win GSL or an International. So really, tread switching is about positivity and feeling good about yourself! Tread switch, WLDers - you’re worth it!

Mechanics

Here’s how it actually works: when Dota adds or subtracts attributes (STR, AGI, INT) from a hero, it maintains the same percentages of hp and mana that the hero had before the attribute change (throughout this essay I will use the term “attribute” to refer to STR, AGI, and INT, and “resources” to refer to hp and mana). This is why, for example, when Undying throws a couple Decay stacks on you, you have “full” health, even though you’ve only got 200 hp. What’s interesting about this is when you combine 1) Power Treads’ ability to quickly move around attributes with 2) the expenditure of resources, mainly (though not exclusively) mana.

An example: Say you are Dragon Knight (a STR hero) and have 300 mana without Treads, and you’d like to cast Level 1 Dragon Tail – a spell that costs 100 mana. You do so, and you now have 200 mana, or 67% of your previous total. This, I think, is fairly straightforward.

Since you’re playing DK, you buy Treads. In STR form, they add the normal +25 attack speed and +45 movement speed, but also 180 health, some health regeneration, and +9 damage. But you want to stun your opponent, so you switch to INT on your treads, which among other things not relevant to our example adds 108 mana, so your total mana pool is now 408. You cast Dragon Tail, which costs 100 mana, and you now have 308 / 408, or around 75% of your pool. Here’s where the magic happens: when you switch back to STR, Dota maintains your percentage of expended mana, and you have 225/300 instead of 200/300. Free 25 mana!

This works in all sorts of examples, too, some of which I’ll mention in the next section. It doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re dealing with spells that have low cooldowns and low mana costs, it can add up and really improve your efficiency.

What follows is a brief explanation of how you can learn to do this. It is how I went about learning tread switching, and so it is almost certainly the objectively correct one. Behold: The Liberace Method.