Kel'thuzad, The Lich
When you face Kel'thuzad, one of the first things you'll notice is an odd one indeed, one of the creeps in his wave is missing, just not there, gone, erased from existence. You find it strange, but you'll deal with it, it was probably just a bug, a bug that inconveniences you, since you won't get the gold and experience from it, but probably just a bug nonetheless. Then, around 10 seconds later, the Lich just kills another one of his creeps, nothing else seems to happen yet, he just kills another one of his creeps, robbing you of more gold and experience.
So he hits level 2, while you're around 3/4s of the way there, and he doesn't seem to be doing much else other than killing his melee creeps when they're at full health, forcing the lane to get pushed up further, forcing you to overextend and make yourself much more vulnerable to an attack from behind, and allowing Lich to have a position of absolute, complete safty, sitting next to his tower, getting last hits and denying you at will.
Once hits level 3, the real fun begins, at least for him. He runs forward, hits you with a physical attack, then casts Frost Nova. If you've played Warcraft 3, you're familiar with Frost Nova, it was the second half of the feared Coil-Nova combo employed by the Undead race and designed to cripple, if not kill a unit with each and every cast of it. None of its potency has been lost in the transfer to DotA, and once he begins casting its Rank 2 version at level 3, he'll be dealing 200 damage per cast to you, on a 9.25 second cooldown, for the cost of 150 mana.
Now, you'll notice Lich's mana starting to slowly dwindle as he begins to barrage you with Nova after Nova, they're not cheap, and the cooldown is low, but then Kel'thuzad, at this point level 4, turns to kill another full health friendly melee creep and, to your utter shock, you notice his mana go up by 165. The second half of his creep denial spell, Dark Ritual, is now revealed. Whenever it is used, he not only kills one of his own creeps, but receives a percentage of their current health, eventually capping out at 60% at its max rank, which means he'll be receiving 330 mana at that point, compared to the max rank 190 mana cost of his Frost Nova.
So what does this mean in simple terms? He's never, at least normally, going to run out of mana, he'll keep on killing his friendly creeps, denying you gold and experience before you even get the chance to consider taking it, before darting forward and either hitting you with a combination of physical attacks and low cooldown, damaging Frost Novas, or forcing you away from your creep line, you'll either be crippled through constant harassment or crippled through being grossly outfarmed by Lich.
So eventually, obviously, you tire of this unending, perpetual bullshit, any sane person would, You ask for help from another lane, a lanemate gladly obliges and surprises Lich, now at level 11, you both begin to chase him. Lich throws on Frost Armor, a 40 second buff giving him 3 Armour and giving you a quite noticeable movement and attack speed debuff every time you hit him. However, rather strangely, he doesn't appear to be running towards his tower, but instead towards the river, almost like he's luring you into a trap, but he can't be, there's no runes, all his teammates are accounted for in different lanes, what type of shit could he possibly be pulling?
Then, as both of you wail on him, with nothing around but the Lich, he fires off Chain Frost, his ultimate, a giant ball of frozen death that the Lich gets to target once, after it hits its first target, it checks to see if there are any other available targets, if not, it fizzles. If there are, it bounces to them, then it bounces to another available target (which can include the initial target of the spell), and then another target, and so on, until its done so 7 times. The targets of the spell are essentially random, but if there's only one target that it can hit, it's going to hit that target.
Since there's only two things in front of him, one of them is going to take 370 x 4 damage, and the other one is going to take 370 x 3 damage, and due to the sheer closeness of the targets, they'll probably have half a second to react between the firing of Chain Frost and their deaths. Having secured a double kill with a single press of a button, Lich saunters back to his lane and continues his unparalleled dominance.
However, Lich does have one drawback, outside of getting an Aghanim's Scepter, he can't really make his spells deal increased damage, which means that, eventually, he's going to stagnate. Despite this, drawbacks can be turned into opportunities. Why should Lich exercise all his power in getting experience and gold for himself, as well as denying his enemies the chance to get either, when instead, he could get a carry, one with a traditionally weak early game, and instead protect them, let them farm with complete and utter impunity as he destroys anyone who tries to do anything with them, as well as using his slows and powerful nukes to help the carry secure his own kills, before respectfully accepting a support role and helping his team out with auras, wards and buffs.
Time to talk about by far, one of the most skill intensive heroes in the game, the hero that separates the wheat from the chaff.
Leoric, the Skeleton King
As you head to your lane, you'll find yourself facing a large, rather imposing looking Skeleton, a larger version of one of the most generic models in the game, but now he has a rather fetching crown, just so you can identify him as King of the Skeletons, rather than a simple grunt skeleton. He last hits efficiently, using his bulk to take your auto-attack harass. He eats trees when his health bar begins to move in any way that could bring even the slightest bit of fear to the King of Skeletons. Finally, at level 7, after the most boring 10 minutes of your life, it is his time to strike.
An enemy hero ambushes you and begins to hit you and burst you down, you think you can take him, so you turn to attack him, at that precise point, Leoric throws a Hellfire Blast at you, a 2 second stun that prevents you from moving and deals a rather hefty 200 points of damage to you. It then proceeds to slow you and further hurt you for another two seconds, spelling your death as a result of this decisive gank.
Suitably cowed, you let Skeleton King farm for another 15 minutes, you struggle to stay awake.
Now level 16, Skeleton King returns to base, and nothing seems to happen, enjoy the last minute of any hope of victory you have...
Down the middle lane, you see Leoric, the Lord of all Undead beginning to walk, his health is slowly draining due to his Armlet of Mordiggan being activated, but the fell talisman gives him Strength, Damage, and a Attack Speed buff. He begins to hit the enemy creeps, his team around him, quite content to watch as every hit revitalizes the fallen warrior, his life returning to him. The Armlet, with the combination of his Vampiric Aura, causes a third of the damage of his attacks to be returned to him as health. For his allies though, the bonus is the same 30%, a noticable boon.
He walks through the tower like it isn't there and your team decide to engage him. Every hit the Skeleton King deals out seems to restore his health back to full, your attacks seemingly useless against his Vampiric Aura, to make matters worse, every so often, he deals almost three times the normal damage on an attack, dealing a solid blow to you, or your allies, and restoring more of his health, the fight is a slaughter for you, and you lose another tower, and then another. Leoric still on his constant, unending march of victory
Finally, you mount another offensive and this time, through probably the sheer desperation of your team, you manage to make Skeleton King lose more health than he gains per hit, it's a slow, painful process, but you finally manage to fell Skeleton King. To your confusion though, there is no fanfare, just a faintly glowing corpse. Three seconds later, Leoric, the Immortal God King of all Skeletons rises back to his feet, his ultimate, Reincarnation functioning exactly as the name suggests. To make matters worse, the sheer shock of watching him rise from the 'further dead' to a state of 'undeath' causes your legs to turn to lead, unable to flee from him as you're slowed by one third of your movement speed.
Your team is destroyed again, and the wordless, emotionless Leoric, the Louis XIV of skeletons proceeds to rip your base to shreds, winning the game decisively.
It turns out the player had to go to the store and just attack moved into your base and didn't see any of this, he finally comes back and just laughs, then plays another game as a real hero.
References: http://www.playdota.com/guides/epic-return
Pugna, the Oblivion
Fun Fact: Pugna is the Latin word for "Fight"
Now, normally I've been writing this from the perspective of a hero getting owned by the target of the spotlight, but Pugna is so crazy and fun to play that I'm going to swap the perspective.
Alright, so you're Pugna, you're a flaming skeletal midget wizard, also your head is on fire and you're surprisingly cheerful, probably because you have a cool fucking cape. Also for some reason he reminds me of that "aaaay" noise the Fonz makes.
Now, a hero in DotA has to have the best Intelligence growth in the game, and surprise, it's you! You'll end the game with a staggering 142 Intellect, the next highest is some guy called Dazzle, who has 128, which no one cares about. To make it even better, you don't even have the worst Str or Agi growth, those dubious honors go to Enchantress (some dryad) and Dirge (some boring zombie guy) respectively. What this means for you, is that your mana pool slowly but surely becomes more and more insane, which is a good thing, because you're going to be casting a ton of spells.
So you head to your lane and start last hitting and denying. Your damage isn't the best at first, but due to your stat growth, it increases quickly, you also have higher range than most heroes, however, you have an ace up your sleeve, which I'm going to cover now.
You have a spell called Nether Blast, due to 'efficiency issues', you don't begin casting it straight away, unless you have to, so let's take the level 3 version. After a 1 second windup, you deal 250 damage to all enemies within a 400 unit area of effect, this means you can, with careful preparation, destroy an entire creepwave with a single spellcast, and also make it so the opponent cannot deny you in any way shape or form, unless it's Lich, but if it's Lich, he's going to have his own problems later on.
So, you're going to start demolishing creep waves, pushing your lane further and further up to the tower. "But Chucat!" I hear you cry "Pugna isn't a pushing hero, he can't summon minions and his base damage, while respectable due to his stat gain, is plagued with a bad attack speed!" and while that is correct, Nether Blast has a second component. It does damage to buildings, this eventually maxes out at 100 damage. Level 1 towers have 1300 health. Nether Blast has a 5.5 second cooldown. Assuming you had infinite mana regeneration, you'd be able to take down a tower in 71.5 seconds, it'll never be that fast, but it's just nice to know.
Now, your opponent might start trying to do the same to your creeps, hitting them a lot more to prevent you from pushing, now, if they're ranged, they might be able to get away with doing this, but if they're melee, you can quite simply Nether Blast them as they run in, or you can do that if you're not a jerk, but you're Pugna, so you're going to be a jerk, so you're going to Decrepify them beforehand.
Decrepify is a debuff that lasts for 3.5 seconds at max rank, it reduces the enemy's movement speed by 50%, prevents them from attacking or taking physical damage and causes them to take 40% extra damage from spells. An easier way to describe it is that it makes the enemy unit really, really shitty. So that poor melee hero who runs in to try and secure a deny or last hit now takes 40% more damage from a Nether Blast.
So now you've managed to push in the enemy's first tower, you have a ton of money, what do you do now? You have two choices:
Slightly more boring Pugna (in the same way that wrestling sharks is slightly more boring than wrestling crocodiles)
So the enemy team has a lot of health, which makes your burst damage weaker, but will allow you to use your sustained damage to your advantage. Most of Pugna's sustained damage comes in the form of his Ultimate ability, called Life Drain. It drains an absolutely insane 185 health per second at max rank and lasts for 9 seconds, with a hilariously low cooldown of 22 seconds, which is already pretty terrifying, but there's a way to make it more fun. You pick up an Aghanim's Scepter, which casues Pugna's ultimate to suddenly drain 250 health per second, which, quite frankly, is fucking ludicrous.
So your plan now involves running up to someone, Decrepifying them, Draining 350 health per second for 3 seconds, and then draining 250 health for the next 6. After that, you stand around and wait for the cooldown to expire. Except with Aghanim's Scepter, the cooldown is 0 seconds, as in, you can cast it again, and again, and again, until they die, obviously.
Asshole Pugna aka the greatest build known to man
Decrepify (the spell that makes a hero shitty), causes ALL forms of magical damage to be increased. This includes an item known as Dagon, which has an active ability which is just a 400 damage nuke, which can then be upgraded to a 500 damage nuke, then a 600 damage nuke, and then an 700 damage nuke, and finally an 800 damage nuke. What does this mean for you? A fully upgraded Decrepify + Dagon + Netherblast does somewhere in the region of 1500 damage. You'll start off doing slightly less, but then heroes have much less health at the start, so it's a completely unfair balance (but it's unfair to you so it's actually the best shit ever).
In case you hadn't gathered, your gameplan involves running up to someone with less than or equal to the damage of your nuke and doing an intricate keyboard command (E, N, Numpad 7) to wipe them from the face of the earth. To make it even better for you, let's say an enemy hero who does physical damage is wailing on an enemy and has them down to around 100 health. Decrepify your ally and then nuke down that enemy hero, or, if a bunch of your allies are killing an enemy, Decrepify the enemy and blow him up, you need the gold to upgrade your Dagon, if anyone insults you, tell them you're Pugna and to shut the fuck up, because Pugna fucking owns.
Once you have enough gold buy a Refresher so you can Dagon twice in a row, you inhuman monster.
"Hey doesn't Pugna have a fourth skill?"
Pugna's final skill, but not his ultimate, is called Nether Ward. Pugna summons a low health ward with a large area of effect that does the following things, in order of excitement:
- Causes enemies to regenerate Mana slower
- Causes enemies to get ZAPPED BY A GREEN BOLT OF LIGHTNING whenever they cast a spell, which does up to 1.5 times the mana cost of the spell in health to them.
So what does this mean for you?
Lich casts Level 3 Chain Frost, he just took 750 damage. Rhasta casts level 3 Serpent Ward, he just took 900 damage. Any orb effect a hero has causes them to take minor, but constant damage every time they attack. I can't emphasize how fun this spell is, like just watch any sort of teamfight in slow motion and see how many spells are cast, now imagine everytime a spell is cast they get zapped by a bolt of lightning, and that Pugna is just sitting there laughing his ass off about it, and if he kills someone he'll probably fall off his chair and die or something.
So what do you do in the relative downtime during a teamfight when you're not stealing kills or just draining the life out of someone?
You laugh at everyone who isn't Pugna.
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