Dota 2 Discussion (~Boston Majors & Road to TI7~)

[Malakal]

If you have to play Phantom Lancer--say, he's one of your compendium heroes--how do you build him?

EDIT: To clarify, I'm mostly up to speed on illusion mechanics, but I'm not sure what exactly I should be doing differently to get myself up to the Heart, Manta, etc.

Cancer lancer is a very hard hero to play since he requires a high skill and a lot of micro. The optimal play is about stacking jungle camps with illusions, clearing jungle camps and lanes with illusions and split pushing until you have a huge farm advantage over enemies.

Core items are yasha, boots of travel (one of the rare heroes where bot is core, if you cant afford bot leave boots brown), diffusal (greatly increases his overall damage, worth upgrading before running out of charges), manta, heart and butterfly. You use a lot of mana spamming spears and dopplewalk so some people build soul ring or ring of aquila.

You get into a lane then spear a creep use dopplewalk then send half the illusions into the lane and half into the jungle, rinse and repeat until you are super fat. Avoid team fights early and late game you are your own team.

 

[abija]

Minor additions, in most pub games you only need to play PL at 10-20% of his potential and drums is not a bad early item either especially if you don't buy treads to jew it up for travels.

 

[Malakal]

Yeah that works too but I dont recommend building medium range items for pubs because people farm like shit there and getting drums may mean not getting manta. But drums are very good on any illusion hero, especially with bot and yasha. Fast illusions = a lot of farm.

 

[curry]

By the way, speaking of rat doto and Boots of Travel, I fucking love Meepo.

But meepo hardly needs boots of travel, its an expense he cant afford and he has poof anyway. You good with micro? What do you build on him, dagger into aghanim?

Meepo is the strongest split pusher in the game, because each clone has individual CD on the boots, meaning you can just tp+poof from lane to lane. I usually go tranquils->scepter->vlads->BoT->skadi.

The key to succesfully fight is to use quick cast and memorize the key strokes.

 

[Ninjerk]

I got my PL win. Fucked my item order up pretty good, but was carried by my QE Invoker and the surprisingly conservative play of my usually throwy DotA friends. I bought my Diffusal 2 all at once, then went Heart->BoT->Manta. Once I got the Heart and BoT the other team would try to gank me and I'd start panicking, but then I'd turn around and kill them lol.

http://dotabuff.com/matches/696987344

 

[Damned Registrations]

BoT are awful on PL. They do nothing for the illusions and you're better off hitting creeps as you move across the map to maintain your insane farm. Treads are much better, toggle them when using a soul ring to fire spears to bully people out of lanes or just speed up jungle farming. Also, don't level dopplewalk past 1. If you're using it often enough for the mana or CD to become worthwhile, the enemies are just going to get detection anyways. It's mostly good for screwing over some ganks early on and for closing on people (more for the phase and speed than the invis/decoy, though an extra illusion to build up the gangbang doesn't hurt.)

Drums are nice on PL but yasha and treads have a really nice buildup anyways so they're not really necessary to improve your farm, and if you need survivability you could always grab the vit booster early.

 

[Malakal]

BoTs do nothing for illusions? How about huge speed bonus? With yasha and drum theyre race cars. And if you dont want to go BoT then tranquil give way better sustain for cheap.

 

[Castanova]

My new favorite thing in this game is to go offlane with Huskar + a support whenever the enemy picks a melee carry. I thought Huskar was dead but he's alive and well! I go Treads -> Mek -> whatever. So stronk.

 

[Ninjerk]

I just played Ursa for the first time last night to finish off my compendium heroes. I think the other team picked Bloodseeker afterwards and my DP and Pugna pushed all their outer towers down in like 20 minutes so I didn't end up doing much ganking.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Illusions don't benefit from flat movespeed anymore. They changed that a while back. Now they just have a high base movespeed by default (they do benefit from auras though.)

 

[Ninjerk]

Illusions don't benefit from flat movespeed anymore. They changed that a while back. Now they just have a high base movespeed by default (they do benefit from auras though.)

Vlads, too?

 

[Great Deceiver]

Illusions don't benefit at all from Vlads. They don't get the armour aura, lifesteal or damage bonus. The only auras that affect illusions at all are attack speed and movespeed auras. If you click on an illusion the tooltip will show the relevant aura buffs (or the illusions will possess the relevant graphical effects in wc3 dota), even if they are not actually applied.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Illusions don't benefit from flat movespeed anymore. They changed that a while back. Now they just have a high base movespeed by default (they do benefit from auras though.)

I'm almost positive that illusions benefit from both flat and % movespeed. When was this change that you mentioned?

 

[Ninjerk]

Illusions don't benefit at all from Vlads. They don't get the armour aura, lifesteal or damage bonus. The only auras that affect illusions at all are attack speed and movespeed auras. If you click on an illusion the tooltip will show the relevant aura buffs (or the illusions will possess the relevant graphical effects in wc3 dota), even if they are not actually applied.

I thought I read that the illusions will show the Vlad's graphic but won't actually get lifesteal, but people claim all kinds of stuff about mechanics all the time.

 

[G a R M]

BoTs do nothing for illusions? How about huge speed bonus? With yasha and drum theyre race cars. And if you dont want to go BoT then tranquil give way better sustain for cheap.

I'm not a fan of Tranquils on PL since they break on attack. I find it much easier to just get a Ring of Health..or you could go Soul Ring.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Illusions don't benefit from flat movespeed anymore. They changed that a while back. Now they just have a high base movespeed by default (they do benefit from auras though.)

I'm almost positive that illusions benefit from both flat and % movespeed. When was this change that you mentioned?

Some time around when they fixed spectre's ult to give the illusions phasing? Might have been when they changed tranquils to always be broken on illusions too. I forget if it was even in the patch notes or if it was some weird stealth change. Should be simple enough to check: start a game as pl, create an illusion before you get boots, see if your illusions outrun you (don't forget to cancel dopplewalk speed). Pretty sure they will. And likewise, if you get BoTs, you'll outrun them.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Some time around when they fixed spectre's ult to give the illusions phasing? Might have been when they changed tranquils to always be broken on illusions too. I forget if it was even in the patch notes or if it was some weird stealth change. Should be simple enough to check: start a game as pl, create an illusion before you get boots, see if your illusions outrun you (don't forget to cancel dopplewalk speed). Pretty sure they will. And likewise, if you get BoTs, you'll outrun them.

I just tested this with Terrorblade - illusions get both flat and percentage based movespeed bonuses. Make a custom game, enable cheats, buy BoTs and a SnY and make illusions with / without those items, and compare their movespeed to your main hero's. They fully benefit from every movespeed item.

You might have gotten confused. Also, tranquil boots unbroken movespeed not applying to illusions was a bug, not an undocumented feature.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Did you actually move them around or just look at the stats? Because the stats on illusions are horseshit.

 

[Malakal]

Frankly I dont believe they would remove flat bonus move speed from illusions because that means they all would move at base move speed so even at low level would be left behind by anyone with brown boots. Even the fastest hero in game only has 325 base move speed, the slowest is what 280? With brown boots the slowest hero can outrun the fastest without. Simple observation of pro games with illusion heroes shows that not only BoTs are very popular there (Arteezy often goes radiance -> bot on naga first items) but that move speed stacking on illusions is very important.

Heres the wiki article on illusions http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Illusion and it says illusions dont ever benefit from lifesteal no matter what the animation shows. It also says that movement speed bonus works on illusions.

 

[Ninjerk]

Yeah, you'd be able to tell the real Phantom Lancer/TB/Naga from the others just by which one moved faster in a group order.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Did you actually move them around or just look at the stats? Because the stats on illusions are horseshit.

Of course I moved them around. Try it for yourself.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah you're right. Could have sworn they worked like Spectre's for a while (which just have 400 base movespeed regardless of boots) but either I was mistaken or they've changed it back since then.

Still don't like BoTs on PL (it's not cost effective the way the old tranquils were), but I can see the reasoning at least.

 

[Ninjerk]

Bracer yourselves. PA pickers incoming

 

[Great Deceiver]

I'd rather people understand that PA works better as an active midgame hero than a shitty safelane farmer; I've seen more than my share of safelane PAs who don't manage even a single item by 20 minutes and get steamrolled when the enemy team pushes.

But yeah, I fucking hate hero picking fads based on pro games.

 

[Malakal]

PA active midgame? With what if you could enlighten me, dagger dealing maybe 300dmg on a crit? Blink? Without items PA has nothing, no hp, no survival, no damage. If you want a carry active midgame you pick something other than PA, I recomend slark hes a snowball hero not very good at farming. Even luna is better because she has a good single target nuke good ulti and helps push a lot.