[Megathread] DotA 2

[Charge me Doctor]

Except if its about half the hero you would want to gank that can just escape lol? Blink gush literally just warns them, if i saw a tide hunter do that to a tinker before me as most heroes with silences or stuns, id be mad as hell, its called a ruined gank.

And if you saw Tide doing it to a Shadow demon before you? Blink gush is needed to slow enemy down for allies to get this ~1,5k distance gap, which is often enough (40% 4 second slow with bodyblocks).

[minteK917]

And if you saw Tide doing it to a Shadow demon before you? Blink gush is needed to slow enemy down for allies to get this ~1,5k distance gap, which is often enough (40% 4 second slow with bodyblocks).

So like we said, LC is good at picking off important heroes and tidehunter can pick on shadow demon? Even shadow demon blink gush is not a very good opener. You just warn him and his team with a slow, if its near a tower you probably ruined it. You are giving him the time to disruption and allowing him to live if he has team nearby. If this is what you are going for, you let a better hero to initiate pick off, like LC, to start and then gush if they can get away. Are you gona blink gush in front of doom? If the answer is no, you arent that great hero at pick off. Unless theres nobody with a silence or a stun that can reach in to gank, then you can blink gush.

[Charge me Doctor]

So like we said, LC is good at picking off important heroes and tidehunter can pick on shadow demon? Even shadow demon blink gush is not a very good opener. You just warn him and his team with a slow, if its near a tower you probably ruined it. You are giving him the time to disruption and allowing him to live if he has team nearby. If this is what you are going for, you let a better hero to initiate pick off, like LC, to start and then gush if they can get away. Are you gona blink gush in front of doom? If the answer is no, you arent that great hero at pick off. Unless theres nobody with a silence or a stun that can reach in to gank, then you can blink gush.

Well, it's you started talking about specific heroes being caught by Tide. Off course it's better to just walk out of fog on enemy with hope that someone will reach him with CC before he notices than using blink gush on enemy and slowing/baiting out his CC on Tide and buying time for team to catch him.
You don't pick Tide to pick off heroes in enemy woods while creeping, but his 40% slow is enough to catch up running enemy or to initiate gank on someone without decent escape.
Just to be 100% clear about what i mean, because it seems that i suck at explaining it, there is an enemy running to his tower to safety while you push, you see that important enemy heroes aren't here, you blink gush, sees TPs, fall back. If you blink+duel him, you are fucked, because first TP will end sooner than your team will catch up and you kinda suck at tanking towers as LC, that's why you won't blink+duel someone knowing that you are chasing him, because there is huge risk involved that you will be killed by enemies sitting if fog and you feed them not only exp+gold, but also bonus damage.
If our specific hero has a team nearby, you are doomed to die as LC (if we are still talking about treads+blink LC). There is much better options to pick someone off than blink ult of LC, its called smoke, allows you to lessen the gap between you and unsuspecting enemy, than just blink+CCing someone and hoping that there is no one from enemy team to interrupt/kill you

[Deleted]

Well, it's you started talking about specific heroes being caught by Tide. Off course it's better to just walk out of fog on enemy with hope that someone will reach him with CC before he notices than using blink gush on enemy and slowing/baiting out his CC on Tide and buying time for team to catch him.
You don't pick Tide to pick off heroes in enemy woods while creeping, but his 40% slow is enough to catch up running enemy or to initiate gank on someone without decent escape.
Just to be 100% clear about what i mean, because it seems that i suck at explaining it, there is an enemy running to his tower to safety while you push, you see that important enemy heroes aren't here, you blink gush, sees TPs, fall back. If you blink+duel him, you are fucked, because first TP will end sooner than your team will catch up and you kinda suck at tanking towers as LC, that's why you won't blink+duel someone knowing that you are chasing him, because there is huge risk involved that you will be killed by enemies sitting if fog and you feed them not only exp+gold, but also bonus damage.
If our specific hero has a team nearby, you are doomed to die as LC (if we are still talking about treads+blink LC). There is much better options to pick someone off than blink ult of LC, its called smoke, allows you to lessen the gap between you and unsuspecting enemy, than just blink+CCing someone and hoping that there is no one from enemy team to interrupt/kill you

You're overthinking it. We're talking about a hypothetical situation with, say, a Faceless Asshole farming his woods, which you have conveniently warded. If Tide is your initiator in this situation, he either has to jump in and Ravage one person, which is a waste, or he blinks in, uses Gush, and Faceless Asshole just lolnopes out of there with Time Walk.

If your initiator, in the given situation, is LC rather than Tide, Void is 100% dead, assuming you have backup in both situations. That's why LC is a fantastic pickoff initiator.

Edit: Essentially, part of what makes LC so great is that, especially as a carry, if there's an LC with a blink in the game, you have to play super fucking paranoid. Any time you can't see her on the map, you basically have to AFK in fountain, or half your team has to follow you around babysitting you, and you don't even get a 2-3 minute respite between "fuckfuckfuck where is LC fuckfuckfuck" like you do with a blink Doom.

[Charge me Doctor]

To pick off someone as important as Void, Ravage doesn't sound as a waste. I'm not arguing about Tide being equal to LC in this regard, but that blink gush is enough to slow heroes down for your team to catch them up after a fight or to slow someone without major escape mechanism for your team to kill.
When i was talking about someone off position i meant someone being slow to retreat from your team pushing lane, or after aggressive warding or after stacking an ancient camp. If you see enemy team walking from your woods to push your bottom lane and you are poor Warlock, Tide with blink gush reaches you and whole enemy team starts running towards you baiting out TPs or/and your ult.

And remember that daytime vision range of most heroes is 1800, while range of blink duel is 1200+150 (960+150 more often), so when Tide is able to get enemy with his blink gush, LC won't be able to duel them. Blink gush is not a tool that you use to surprise gank 100% of heroes in this game, it's a tool to punish enemies for being greedy/too slow

- - - Updated - - -

Edit: Essentially, part of what makes LC so great is that, especially as a carry, if there's an LC with a blink in the game, you have to play super fucking paranoid. Any time you can't see her on the map, you basically have to AFK in fountain, or half your team has to follow you around babysitting you, and you don't even get a 2-3 minute respite between "fuckfuckfuck where is LC fuckfuckfuck" like you do with a blink Doom.

Why i have to play paranoid? It's not like wards are not common (or even expensive thing to spend money on as a carry if your team supports refuse to buy them). And to defend you against blink LC is enough of Lina/Lion/Jakiro/Phoenix/Skywrath. Remember that Duel is two-sided CC, and anything that works with LC, will work against her

[Deleted]

Well, to pick off someone as important as Void, Ravage doesn't sound as a waste. I'm not arguing about Tide being equal to LC in this regard, but that blink gush is enough to slow heroes down for your team to catch them up after a fight or to slow someone without major escape mechanism for your team to kill.
When i was talking about someone off position i meant someone being slow to retreat from your team pushing lane, or after aggressive warding or after stacking an ancient camp. If you see enemy team walking from your woods to push your bottom lane and you are poor Warlock, Tide with blink gush reaches you and whole enemy team starts running towards you baiting out TPs or/and your ult.

And remember that daytime vision range of most heroes is 1800, while range of blink duel is 1200+150 (960+150 more often), so when Tide is able to get enemy with his blink gush, LC won't be able to duel them. Blink gush is not a tool that you use to surprise gank 100% of heroes in this game, it's a tool to punish enemies for being greedy/too slow

Well, sure, I don't disagree with you that Blink-Gush is great for catching people with no major escape mechanism that get caught out of position, but that doesn't make Tidehunter a great pickoff initiator, by any means. LC is such a great hero at pickoffs because with a good ward, she can blink anyone out of fog and they're fucking dead. It doesn't matter if you're Antimage with 3 Blink Daggers, 3 Force Staffs, and an extra Force Staff on a nearby courier, if LC gets the drop on you, you are fucking dead.

Basically the only other hero that fulfills this function is Doom, and Doom can't be played from mid effectively (which means either his farm or his xp are compromised to some degree, depending on whether he's offlaned, safelaned, or God forbid, jungled), whereas LC can easily have Treads, Bottle, Blink, and lvl 6+ at 12 minutes. Not only is Doom the only other hero that really fulfills this function, Doom doesn't actually lock the target in place, which means that they can still make a beeline for the nearest tower and hope they dodge shit and get saved by reaction TPs, whereas you can just drop a Skywrath ult on top of a Dueled target with 100% successrate for EZ katka. Duel literally leaves you a sitting duck, which makes farming safely against an LC almost impossible - you either play paranoid and farm less than you need to, or you play greedy and LC laughs all the way to the bank.

[Charge me Doctor]

I don't remember even speaking about Tide being a great pickoff initiator.

LC is not that great hero, if you roam solo and look for a kill you are always in danger of being killed by enemy in your own duel because of interference of enemy team. Even single frostbite (after a start of a duel, not before, its important) will be devastating and will turn tides if you try to pick off a carry. And i really doubt that you will find support farming woods. And one thing about dueling a carry, it doesn't turns off most passives like berserkers blood or backtrack and it can really hurt you instead of enemy.

If you roam with someone, you increase chances of enemy thinking "where the fuck did LC from mid and Skywrath from safe lane go? Oh-oh, we don't have a ward, i should surrender my creeps to be safe, bye bye" and ruining your attempts at ganking. The only trick i remember when 3 man ganking fed carries with LC is duel + astral prison on LC when is is low, duel still works, enemy stands still, and LC still gets a kill bonus (while, iirc, when you imprison someone who was dueled and LC dies, this person doesn't get a bonus).

And level one duel is very often not enough to make plays, 3 seconds is not enough and LC by itself won't do much damage while dueling at this level

[Deleted]

I don't remember even speaking about Tide being a great pickoff initiator.

LC is not that great hero, if you roam solo and look for a kill you are always in danger of being killed by enemy in your own duel because of interference of enemy team. Even single frostbite (after a start of a duel, not before, its important) will be devastating and will turn tides if you try to pick off a carry. And i really doubt that you will find support farming woods. And one thing about dueling a carry, it doesn't turns off most passives like berserkers blood or backtrack and it can really hurt you instead of enemy.

If you roam with someone, you increase chances of enemy thinking "where the fuck did LC from mid and Skywrath from safe lane go? Oh-oh, we don't have a ward, i should surrender my creeps to be safe, bye bye" and ruining your attempts at ganking. The only trick i remember when 3 man ganking fed carries with LC is duel + astral prison on LC when is is low, duel still works, enemy stands still, and LC still gets a kill bonus (while, iirc, when you imprison someone who was dueled and LC dies, this person doesn't get a bonus).

And level one duel is very often not enough to make plays, 3 seconds is not enough and LC by itself won't do much damage while dueling at this level

Of course you don't roam solo with LC until you're already fed. That's literally the second-most stupid thing you can do with LC - the stupidest thing being jungling her which is just fucking retarded.

Like I said, and as you've just echoed, the "thing" with LC is that once you have Blink, you force the other team to play scared. If you're missing from the map, nobody can be off on their own - which leaves you room to outfarm and outcarry traditional, harder carries even without bonus damage - and this is completely ignoring the fact that her Q is amazing in teamfights until quite late, and her W is an AS steroid equivalent to lvl 2 Troll Ult, which also purges debuffs and heals. Have you ever used Press the Attack on a Tiny with Agh's, or on a Void that's Chrono'ing people? The results are ridiculous.

She's just a flat-out great hero atm, assuming you don't jungle her like every retard pub and their mother does.

[Charge me Doctor]

Yeah, but you seem to not realize that LC just missing from lane doesn't means that you have to be scared. When i play a support i don't care about LC ganking me because i always run around warded places and spam-ping-annoy everyone when i need to ward a new place because of sad experience being killed while warding. To be honest, Pudge rune ganks on your safe lane is much scarier (and earlier) than LC blink duel ones (if she actually gets a rune, lol)

I understand Slark (always at 100% HP, leash, burst damage, CC removal) or Riki (miss, *silenced* miss, miss, *silenced* *silenced* miss, miss) or BH (lolburst) or Nyx(lolburst v2.0) missing from lane being scary, because your wards won't help you, and hiding under tower won't do much, but LC can do only limited amount of damage unless doing it Axe style and not particularly scary when you know/expect that she is ganking you

[Deleted]

Yeah, but you seem to not realize that LC just missing from lane doesn't means that you have to be scared. When i play a support i don't care about LC ganking me because i always run around warded places and spam-ping-annoy everyone when i need to ward a new place because of sad experience being killed while warding. To be honest, Pudge rune ganks on your safe lane is much scarier (and earlier) than LC blink duel ones (if she actually gets a rune, lol)

It sounds like you think LC has to be scary early, which couldn't be less correct. The point with "LC is effective as soon as she gets Treads and Blink" is that LC can start looking for ganks here, but the real point of LC is that she isn't weak at any point during the game. Sure, you don't have to be super scared if LC isn't on the map at 12 minutes, but if you've lost your mid and bot tier 1 at 25-30 minutes, game is close, and you don't have vision of LC and one other hero, you have to play scared.

In the early game, you look for easy Duel damage from people that are out of position, or from counterganks. After 30 minutes, when the towers start falling and map control gets worse for both teams, you force the other team to play scared and handicap their xpm and gpm because if they can't see 4+ people on the map, they can't run off alone. She's not necessarily an early ganker, and she doesn't have to be - she's a tool of psychological warfare for the entirety of the game, and that, coupled with the rest of her skillset, is what makes her great.

[Charge me Doctor]

Well, that's why wards exist and that's why supports defend their carries if they are in danger of getting ganked (aka going to take this stack of ancients). You always can run alone, because if LC disappears from the map it doesn't mean that she is going for a gank, i very often find LC players farming woods, and there is limited amount of opportunities for gank (carry doesn't really sit for long in woods while creeping, and you have to know exactly when he is going there, you have to have a ward here, you have to know that you will not be seen, etc), it just seems for me that it's huge investment from LC team side and takes lots of time to create for opportunities like these.

I don't say that things like you describe don't happen, but from my experience they happen very often in stompy games like 10/1 if favor of LC team at 7 minute. And rarely happen on close games, the only reason when it happen it something like "oh fuck why did i walked there it was obvious that they were coming for me", or "OMG I HAD LIKE 0,00000001 SECOND LEFT ON CAST ANIMATION TO GET OUT WHAT THE FUCK"

[PizzaSHARK]

Dusa wont see play with her movement speed.

She has 600 range and 319 ms with yasha/manta style which is core on her. Skadi is also typically considered core on her and it's an effectively permanent slow on her primary target. Phase Boots or Boots of Travel are also core on her. Dusa doesn't have major mobility issues.

[Charge me Doctor]

She has 600 range and 319 ms with yasha/manta style which is core on her. Skadi is also typically considered core on her and it's an effectively permanent slow on her primary target. Phase Boots or Boots of Travel are also core on her. Dusa doesn't have major mobility issues.

I guess he was talking about one particular game where a team decided to troll and play Dusa with 3 rapiers without boots showing her around with force staffs. Yeah, sometimes people want to play these crazy strats, but nothing is crazier than 6 (old) blademails (battlefury) on (old) Centaur (magnus) har har har!

[PizzaSHARK]

LC has shit lane presence, needs to snowball fast to even be useful, its a waste to let her farm beyond the initial dagger/treads and her ulti is just an inferior beastmaster ulti that can backfire pretty hard

u wot

LC has phenomenal lane presence.

[Grable]

Exactly. Yesterday got beaten in lane as Windranger vs LC. Soul Ring and Q spam = gg

[Deleted]

Exactly. Yesterday got beaten in lane as Windranger vs LC. Soul Ring and Q spam = gg

I honestly think Soul Ring on LC is gimmicky and overrated - much like Soul Ring on Bane. It delays your Blink by, what, almost 1k gold for little benefit. Unless it directly nets you those 1k back in short order, I dislike it almost as much as Midas on TA, which verges on the outright mentally challenged.

[Charge me Doctor]

I honestly think Soul Ring on LC is gimmicky and overrated - much like Soul Ring on Bane. It delays your Blink by, what, almost 1k gold for little benefit. Unless it directly nets you those 1k back in short order, I dislike it almost as much as Midas on TA, which verges on the outright mentally challenged.

Soul ring on Bane is pretty much needed with his manacosts (165 on T, 200 on B and 200 on F with manapool of ~600) to be able to lane properly, or you will be in permanent state of level 2 CM.

I think you have weird obsession with getting blink asap, soul ring on Bane allows you to trade and harass enemy on lane without leaving yourself without mana or health, you basically become a nightmare for enemies much earlier than blink. Also, there is much more better items to get (aghs (too strong to skip this statstick with huge bonus to ult), bkb (mandatory if enemy has more than two heroes to interrupt your ult)) early than blink

[Deleted]

Soul ring on Bane is pretty much needed with his manacosts (165 on T, 200 on B and 200 on F with manapool of ~600) to be able to lane properly, or you will be in permanent state of level 2 CM.

I think you have weird obsession with getting blink asap, soul ring on Bane allows you to trade and harass enemy on lane without leaving yourself without mana or health, you basically become a nightmare for enemies much earlier than blink. Also, there is much more better items to get (aghs, bkb) early than blink

Hohoho I hope that was intended

[Deleted]

Soul ring on Bane is pretty much needed with his manacosts (165 on T, 200 on B and 200 on F with manapool of ~600) to be able to lane properly, or you will be in permanent state of level 2 CM.

I think you have weird obsession with getting blink asap, soul ring on Bane allows you to trade and harass enemy on lane without leaving yourself without mana or health, you basically become a nightmare for enemies much earlier than blink. Also, there is much more better items to get (aghs (too strong to skip this statstick with huge bonus to ult), bkb (mandatory if enemy has more than two heroes to interrupt your ult)) early than blink

I was speaking about Soul Ring on LC specifically. I think Soul Ring is an OK situational buy on Bane, since he's much, much less reliant on good Blink timing than LC is. Soul Ring works on LC, but I'd only really consider it worth it if your opponents in lane are downright obsessed with getting hit by your Q - otherwise good Blink timing is much more important.

[PizzaSHARK]

I honestly think Soul Ring on LC is gimmicky and overrated - much like Soul Ring on Bane. It delays your Blink by, what, almost 1k gold for little benefit. Unless it directly nets you those 1k back in short order, I dislike it almost as much as Midas on TA, which verges on the outright mentally challenged.

Blink is garbage on LC unless you're drafting her specifically to counter rat heroes like tinker, profit, etc. Otherwise phase boots + S&Y will give you like 500+ ms with Overwhelming Odds, more than enough to rapidly close on someone for a Duel.