I haven't talked about DotA recently, let alone done one of these, so I figured I'd do three at once, about everyone's favorite type of hero, the carry.
Kardel Sharpeye, the Sniper
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| I hated this guy in Warcraft 3 and I hate him now |
Heading to your lane, and upon looking getting a good look
at Sniper, you're not really that impressed. He just seems to be a slightly
slow, low health midget, albeit one that's packing some serious heat with that
gun of his. So you run forward to try and deny one of your creeps...you wind up
to hit it, and it just explodes in a bloody mist. Slightly baffled, you try to
last hit an enemy creep, and the same thing happens again. You figure your
partner in lane, the one with a ranged attack might have a better chance at
taking a last hit or a deny, so he aims at a creep with low health, the
projectile is in the air, about to hit the enemy...and once again Sniper seems
to get it first.
Meet the first perk of Sniper, the fact his projectile has
THREE THOUSAND speed, in comparison, most other projectile speeds are a number
between 900 and 1500. What this means, is that for all intents and purposes,
Sniper is effectively wielding a hitscan weapon, only one other ranged her
holds this honour, and that's Gyrocopter, but he has less base range than
Sniper, notice how I said 'base range'? That's because one of Sniper's skills
is called Take Aim, and it's just a simple little passive that...boosts his
attack range by +65 per level, up to a maximum of +260. What this means is that
once he finishes levelling up this spell, he'll have 810 range.
While certain things do outrange this, there are several
major things that don't, like the physical attack of every single hero in the
game, and much more disturbingly, towers. What this means is that Sniper can
just stand there, far beyond the range of a tower and just constantly plink at
it. Of course, it could be worse, he could be hitting you instead, especially
due to his second passive, named Headshot. Quite simply this gives a 40% chance
to deal 50 extra damage on a physical attack, and stun for 0.2 seconds, what
this means is that Sniper manages to get the drop on you, you're going to find
it very, very difficult to run away from him, especially as he ministuns you
constantly and you have to get over 800 units away from him, and keep in mind
he is using a gun, and they hurt, so he's not going to take several hundred
hits to kill you.
Let's say you do run away from him though, and you're lucky
and do so with 400 health, a stray creep or tower shot won't kill you, though
Sniper doesn't seem to want to chase. And then you notice the crosshairs above
your head, and the rather ominous looking debuff in your bar. Then you proceed
to hear a gunshot and just fall over dead. Sniper's ultimate, named Assassinate
does up to 655 damage at max rank, maxes out at 2500 range, tying it with Heat
Seeking Missiles for the longest ranged non-global targeted nuke in the game,
and best of all, it has a 10 second cooldown, however, the mana cost is rather
large. But if Sniper happens to be best friends with Harbinger or Keeper of the
Light, enjoy eating huge amounts of distant damage every 10 seconds.
Shrapnel is an aoe that does 432 damage total over 8 seconds
in an area, it works on towers but only does 33% of the damage, also it slows
heroes. If you can think of any way to make this skill sound interesting you
deserve some letters after your name and a lucrative series of book deals.
Balanar, the Night Stalker
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| Best server in WoW |
To be honest, Sniper isn't that exciting, and as the first
day begins, and you move to begin laning against Nightstalker, you think this
guy will be much of the same, stale, tired, boring melee hero. He runs forward,
tries to take a last hit and takes some damage for his trouble. You begin
thinking this'll be quite easy despite his respectable health. His movement
speed seems slower than average, you swear he can't see as far as you and
strangest of all, he seems to have a buff called Hunter in the Night, that
doesn't do anything at all, besides mentioning he's apparently better in the
night, well, he'll need all the help he can get, especially with how he's
progressing so far.
You still bully him, and he doesn't even seem to be fighting
back, and you feel quite bad, though due to his cautious play, you're not quite
able to kill him, and he is getting quite a few last hits, partially due to his
relatively decent autoattack, and also since he seems to be using a nuke every
so often on a creep, it seems to be doing respectable damage, but he seems to
want to remain close to full mana, so it's not really being used that much.
Three things then happen at six minutes: Nightstalker
hitting level 7, the end of daytime, and all hell breaking loose.
Unless you're one of a few heroes in the game, your vision
range becomes less than half of what it normally is, conversely, Nightstalker
then proceeds to see as far as you could during the day and he instantly makes
a beeline to you and casts a max level Void on you. Void does around 300 damage
at maximum level, which is already pretty bad (for you), but then, since it's
night, it proceeds to make you half as fast for four seconds. You decide to
turn around and fight him with your physical attack and the help of the tower,
but your attack speed is lowered by around a third.
To make matters worse for you, his 'useless' passive now
seems to actually be operational, causing him to, at level 2, be hitting you
45% more often. In your crippled state, he mops the floor with you and then
proceeds to run off to another lane, revealing the second half of that passive,
a 30% movement speed buff. Moving towards top, you see him begin to make a move
on a stunner and a carry. He can't have a chance against them, you think, at
least until he reveals his second active spell, Crippling Fear. This thing
silences for 5 seconds AT LEVEL ONE, upon dropping this on the stunner and
casting a Void on them, he proceeds to shred them to pieces in a few seconds
before 'retreating' into the forest for a few moments.
He emerges once again and drops Crippling Fear on the carry
and starts to hit them as well. Apparently undaunted, the carry begins to hit
him back. However, you seem to be noticing that while your teammate's health is
dropping like a stone, Nightstalker's health odesn't seem to be moving as
often, you then realize that Crippling Fear isn't just a silence, but also
seems to cause a major reduction in hit chance, which, coupled with Void causes
your carry teammate to be hitting successfully around one third as often as normal.
Rather unsurprisingly, they also die.
Running back to your lane, Nightstalker drops a Void on you,
doing that 300 damage, and then shows you the new toy he bought, Urn of
Shadows, this gives him some mana regeneration, health, health regeneration and
damage. However, it also places a 150 HP damage over time spell on you. He
proceeds to chase you and hit you until his Void comes off of its relatively
short cooldown, only 8 seconds, and then proceeds to hit you again with it,
leading you to take 750 damage in spells alone, as well as the numerous
physical attacks from him hitting you. Once again, you rather obviously die.
Realizing that Nightstalker's power might be a bit more
limited if you travel as a group, you decide to do just that, heading around in
groups of 3 or more, the second day rolls around and he seems to be a bit more
subdued, his Void and Crippling Fear don't seem to debilitate as long, he moves
and attacks slower, meaning he's also staying with his team, especially since
he doesn't seem to be using his ultimate at all, teamfights are relatively
equal.
However, the second night finally, inevitably comes and once
again your entire team returns to being rather easy pickings for Nightstalker.
He silences and kills your stunner, and then methodically works through
everyone else, able to employ his movement speed to get in and out of combat
quickly. He also buys another item, Aghanim's Scepter. While this has nothing
to do with his ultimate, which I haven't even got to yet, it means that at night
time, his sight radius is no longer blocked by such things as trees or cliffs.
Nightstalker demonstrates this by firing a Void UP a cliff and killing one of
your teammates, if he buys a gem he can then see anything within his sight
radius at night, so well...
You then look at the clock and you realize that it's just...not
moving, in fact it seems to be stuck. Welcome to Nightstalker's ultimate, quite
helpfully called Darkness. What it does is stops time and causes, at max rank,
80 seconds of night time. With a 120 second cooldown at max rank. To put this
into simple terms, it is able to convert a 6 minute night, into an 18 minute
night.
The rest of the game could best be described as 'Blair Witch
Project' meets 'Predator 1'.
Lucifer, the Doombringer
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| Don't worry he's cooler than he looks |
Doombringer is big, red and angry and he quite clearly gives
no fucks about anything at all, he gives so few that he just instantly walks up
to your creep wave and eats one of your creeps. The reason why he gives no fucks is
due to his Strength, which is pretty much if Dazzle spent all the time he spent
reading up on his nerd priest lessons going to the gym and getting buff as
hell. It's high, really, really high, highest in the game high, he has a lot of
health, but no armor, as in, literally zero points of armor. In comparison,
Obsidian Destroyer, WHO IS LITERALLY MADE OUT OF GLASS, has five points of
armor, but this tangent about Doom being a big bag of unarmoured meat that can
be solved by him buying a cheap ring that gives him 2 armor has gone on long
enough.
The reason Doombringer ate a creep was due to his first
skill, quite simply called Devour. Right now the only bit of it we're focusing
on is the gold gain he gets from eating a creep. Maybe the gold fairy is so
impressed by him unhinging his jaw she just throws gold at him, I don't know,
he just gets it. At max rank though, this skill could just be called
"Increases Doom's Gold per minute by 133", right now, at rank 1, it
increases it by the much less exciting 40 gold per minute. It does have another
use though, which we'll get to shortly.
Early on, at least until level 5, Doom seems quite content
to just eat creeps, maybe hit you if you get too close, and by 'too close' I
mean 'literally right on top of him' and just last hit and deny with his
enormous bulk and pretty respectable base damage. Once you both hit level 5
though, he instantly nukes you for around 400 damage. That's not a typo, his
main nuke, interesting called Lvl? Death because someone just happens to be a
fan of Final Fantasy, does 100/150/200/250 damage depending on its rank, and
then bonus damage if you level is a multiple of a certain number based on the
rank of the spell. At level 2 of Lvl? Death, this number happens to be 5, which
is what you are, it also has an 8 second cooldown, and since you're not big
into that entire dying thing, you limp home while Doom drinks his Bottle and
takes a rune because he's an asshole.
Returning to the lane, Doom has secured quite a major level
advantage, being at least level 6, while you're still level 5. He instantly
nukes you again for 400 damage, but right after it lands, you hit level 6.
Thinking you're safe, you become just a bit more aggressive, and then Doom hits
level 7, nukes you for 500 damage and you explode into a fine mist. The final
rank of Lvl? Death can be taken at level 7, the number is 3, 6 is a multiple of
3. Do the math........heh.
Playing cautiously, you hit level 7 which thankfully is a
prime number so you know he can't pull any maths based shenanigans on you this
time, except that time when you were level 5 but let's not talk about that
again. However Doom is now outlevelling you and his rather fun active that is
partially a gold increase passive is now beginning to kick in. This means that
not only can Doom buy a suit of armour, he can make it a solid gold suit of
armour.
Deciding he might as well active the second part of Devour
now, Doom heads into the jungle and looks for a sufficiently powerful neutral
enemy, at least one that is strong enough to have an ability outside of
mindlessly hitting their target, his choices are between a series of active and
passive abilities, he can pick one from the following list:
Active
- A 2 second area of effect stun.
- A buff that grants a large armour of armor and causes
anyone hitting the target to be slowed
- A minor, spammable heal.
- A 100 damage straight line AoE
- A controllable tornado that slows and deals damage.
- A buff remover that also grants massive movement speed
reduction
- A 1.5 second immobilize
Passive Auras
- 20% chance to do 2x damage
- 30% extra damage
- 3 Armor
- 3 health per second regeneration
- 15% increased attack speed
Passives
- Slowing attack
- Mana regeneration
What this means for you is that Doom Bringer can buff his
team in a variety of fun ways, or cause one or several of you to be slowed,
damaged, stunned or immobilized. All while nuking for 500 damage whose level is
divisible by 3. He can already turn the tide of a teamfight and we've only
talked about two of his skills. Doombringer's third spell is called Scorched
Earth and is a 600 radius AoE that follows Doombringer around, healing him for
24 health per second and damaging enemies for the same amount, leading to him
being even more of a bother in team fights. It also makes him move faster
because, you know, why not.
Finally, there is Doombringer's trump card, his ultimate,
called, quite simply, Doom. It's a fitting name, at max rank and boosted by
Aghanim's Scepter it deals 110 damage per second for 14 seconds, causing it to
do somewhere in the region of 1450 damage. However, this isn't the worst bit of
the spell, it's also a silence, but instead of locking out just spells, it
prevents the usage of items and passives as well. If Doom decides to cast this
on a spellcaster on your team, enjoy having a mobile paperweight for the next
14 seconds, though, on the bright side, at least you can deny them and not let
him get the gold, making those teamfights you lose just a bit less painful...
