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[Kagus]

Yeah, Slark actually regens FASTER than a heart, and the movespeed is absolutely crazy.  His leap is great both as an escape (disjoints projectiles) and as a nuke/semidisable (and although it's a skillshot, it can't hit creeps).  Dark Pact is bloody AWESOME as if you're just a bit lucky/smart you can cancel any and all disables coming your way when you first charge in (also works on dust, which means even if someone dusts you when you're shadowdancing you can just shrug it off and go back to being combat invisible).  And his essence shift passive is of course just ridiculous later on in the game when you've got some major attack speed.

Furthermore, he can be used to sniff out enemy wards, as his ultimate will deactivate the passive when he passes under any kind of enemy surveillance.

[NobodyPro]

His leap is great both as an escape (disjoints projectiles)

Glorious.

Phantom Lancer is an absolute beast in the late game.

• Get boots of tranquility and stay alive
• Farm creeps and swarm junglers for megacash. NOTE: Clones can clone themselves thanks to your passive ultimate, so feel free to run away.
• Buy Manta Style (bonus damage for clones) and Heart of Tarrasque (56hp/s!)
• 
• DOTA Episode 2: The clone wars

[Simmura McCrea]

Yeah, Slark actually regens FASTER than a heart, and the movespeed is absolutely crazy.  His leap is great both as an escape (disjoints projectiles) and as a nuke/semidisable (and although it's a skillshot, it can't hit creeps).  Dark Pact is bloody AWESOME as if you're just a bit lucky/smart you can cancel any and all disables coming your way when you first charge in (also works on dust, which means even if someone dusts you when you're shadowdancing you can just shrug it off and go back to being combat invisible).  And his essence shift passive is of course just ridiculous later on in the game when you've got some major attack speed.

Furthermore, he can be used to sniff out enemy wards, as his ultimate will deactivate the passive when he passes under any kind of enemy surveillance.

And I see so many Slarks not taking Dark Pact until last.

His leap is great both as an escape (disjoints projectiles)

Glorious.

Phantom Lancer is an absolute beast in the late game.

• Get boots of tranquility and stay alive
• Farm creeps and swarm junglers for megacash. NOTE: Clones can clone themselves thanks to your passive ultimate, so feel free to run away.
• Buy Manta Style (bonus damage for clones) and Heart of Tarrasque (56hp/s!)
• 
• DOTA Episode 2: The clone wars

There's a good reason he's almost invariably picked or banned by the pros at the moment. Also, get a diffusual blade and watch as people's mana pool disappears. An enemy Shadow Demon becomes their hard carry, though.

[umiman]

Nobody calls him Phantom Lancer right now.

His name is Cancer Lancer.

[Frelus]

For the one who asked about Spectre:
Try getting Armlet, phaseboots into raidance (if you can farm) or diffusal (if you can not).
You need to be able to armlet toggle a little bit for this, but it is way more powerful thn the "oldschool" Vanguard/Radi build (seriously, Vanguard is weak) and gives you some power earlier in the game.
Also, with that combo, always activate armlet before ult (or any illusion making stuff), then deactivate it until you  need it, as illusions only keep boni that were present when the were made.

[Kagus]

Fun with testing:

The bonus damage taken while under the effects of banishment/Mask of Madness is reflected with Blade Mail, as it returns damage calculated after modifiers.

Mask of Madness works as expected with Spectre's Dispersal, meaning that the extra damage is properly calculated into reflected damage.

The combination of Blade Mail and Dispersal means that anyone hitting Spectre during that time period will actually do MORE damage to themselves than to her.

Desolate is, as expected, not counted into lifesteal.  Neither with modifier-lifesteals nor aura-lifesteals.

Spectre cannot realize into Manta illusions, but they do of course carry Desolate as standard haunts do.

Razor's illusions carry his full passive, with purging, slowing, damage and all.  Axe's illusions can counter helix, and damage is not reduced for these.

Refresher orb can "stack" a few interesting things, such as Razor's Eye of the Storm and Spectre's Haunt (does not work with Manta though).  You can't stack Necronomicon summons from the same book, but you CAN do it from two different books.  Use one, refresh, then use the other.  Using the same book will overwrite the spawns.


As you can probably tell, I've found the debugging commands.

[ukulele]

I realy never understood how spectre was a n1 pick as carry some time in the past, Its basically a super late carry with skills crafted for midgame ganking, id take almost any late game carry over spectre anyday, i just dont get it.

[Kagus]

More testing:  Doom can unleash a nuke chain that can kill anything up to and including a six-heart level 25 Bradwarden (9056 health).

Doom - Veil of Discord - Ethereal Blade - lvl?death - Refresher Orb - Ethereal Blade - lvl?death.

That in itself kills anything up to 5000 hp, but above that they'll have a little health left.  However, Doom will still be active by the time this chain is finished, and will stay active until lvl?death has recharged, which will kill the target.


Due to the complexity and length of this chain, not to mention the fact that you need a good mana stockpile (this chain will take off about 60% of level 25 Doom's max mana pool with only the items required), it's really just a theoretical design.  Also, the items required are perhaps not first picks for Doom otherwise...  The final nail in the coffin is that this only works if the target is of a level that the bonus damage of lvl?death procs.

So, if you find yourself stuck in a super-late-endgame match with Doom and about 10000 cash, you can think about how hilarious it would be to do this.  Bonus synergies include having a Veil handy for everyone else to make use of, the ability to Doom two people in a teamfight, and the armor/attackspeed bonus from EBlade.

[Thexor]

You can do similar things with Huskar's ult. Deals 65% of the target's current life in damage, if you've got Aghs. Combo that with Soul Catcher for an instakill. I suspect Ethereal Blade + Veil might be enough of a boost too.

That said, I'd never recommend Ethereal on Huskar, for hopefully obvious reasons. But it's still a nice theory! 

[Kagus]

It's aaalmost enough for an instakill, but not quite.  I tested it out myself.  Soul Catcher is still what you need for the guaranteed (sorta) kill.

Doom's combo, though, has the benefit of super-silencing the target so they can't blink or use items while you're doing all this.

[umiman]

Spectre is an odd one.

She's actually very potent given time and I'd say she's more of a "if you let her farm, you will lose for sure" hero than Medusa is. Medusa literally needs 6 items to come into force but Spectre can do it with about 3 or 4. The thing about Spectre is that not only can she do substantial damage, but she will hurt you just by virtue of existing. Attempting to kill her will merely kill you. For example, if you do 3000hp worth of damage to her (she has a heart), then you'd have caused 660hp worth of pure damage to everyone in a huge vicinity and she'd still have 660hp left.

Furthermore, her ultimate is extremely devastating to squishy supports and heroes who rely on blink dagger. There is absolutely nothing that they can do to stop her from killing them. In the past, she was bugged in Dota 2 in that her illusions moved much slower than normal but that's been fixed now. The fact that the illusions now also last the full duration is also a very large buff to her. They last 7 seconds each and assuming they each attack once a second, she can easily do 600+ damage to anyone standing just a little too far from allies.

Now, the interesting part about this is that neither of these aspects of her are particularly pronounced. You don't get the big "oh shit my damage is incredible" moment like Antimage or PL. She expends massive damage very subtly and teams will only notice her contribution when everything is dead. Spectre is basically what Radiance would be if Radiance were a hero.

Finally, she poses a ridiculous dilemma to the enemy team. If she can get farmed, which is the most difficult prospect, how exactly can you stop her? Do you focus her down at the start of the fight? In that case you are basically forced to take a large chunk of damage to the whole team (possibly 70% of a support's hp) just to accomplish that. Or do you leave her for last? In that case how can you finish her off if everyone is at low or little hp? You and all your teammates will quite literally die before she does. Either way you will lose.

So essentially teams just have to find a way to secure her early game because it's almost impossible to lose with her if she gets 3 - 4 items. She still gets picked every once in awhile these days.

[Thexor]

Exactly. Late-game, Spectre's a tough beast to counter. Do you 5-man push? Dispersion's a permanent, AoE Blade Mail + damage reduction, and you're dying to the Radiance burn. Do you split up and try to farm? Whoops, she ults, locates you anywhere on the map, and Desolate destroys you.

She can also get a bit of an advantage mid-game. Medusa's got nothing but Mystic Snake spam and a bit of extra health until she's farmed up, while Spectre can hunt down weakened foes with her Dagger, or use it as a pseudo-escape mechanism (especially now that the free movement lasts for 2 seconds after leaving the path). Her main weakness is her reduced farming speed, but an early Radiance helps offset that and synergizes well with her ult to boot.

[sambojin]

Medusa is nice if she has an alpha wolf (or a Doom beside her). Still a late game carry, but it starts putting her farm with mutli-shot into doable levels. It's not quite as nice as a bouncy-cheap hard hitter, but it makes her useful enough.

Support Doom with that aura (and a quelling blade, in case Medusa sucks or you just deny away her lane enemy's cash) or support Chen with good micro (or just wait/gank/push a bit later with him, ward-bitch until then) and Medusa is golden. No HotD needed, it'd be too late to make a difference on her levels and cash anyway and she needs damage and levels.

Then again, this is the weakest form of these heroes (yay support!), but it's good to know. At least she scales a little faster and farms a bit better. Whacky build, but multi-shot can "just" work for her early on, it just needs a wolf aura. A quelling blade can help, but the 12% isn't really enough to help the farm (although, it might just make spammed multi-shot and always-max mana mana-shield better. If that made sense). She'll still need truckloads of farm, so make farming easy for her.

[Alg]

There's one pretty important aspect to Spectre that a lot of people understimate, it's her ability to farm anywhere she wants (very safely with her high survivability and spectral dagger) and still be there for teamfights thanks to her ult. In her glory days, when the game was all about farming more than the other team, it was a game-changing ability.

[Alkhemia]

- Added Skywrath Mage! 

COMMUNITY
- Added stricter system implementing communication (voice and text) bans for abusive players.
- Combined voice and text reports into a single 'communication' report.
- Reduced reports per week to 4.
- Removed ability for spectators to report players in-game.
- Reports now allow single selection of behavior type only.

GAMEPLAY
- Beastmaster: Fixed Wild Axes losing vision after the second cast.
- Doom: Scorched Earth now shows its duration on the buff icon.
- Lich: Fixed Frost Armor auto-casting while Lich is channeling.
- Magnus: Fixed a rare crash involving Skewer.
- Slardar: Fixed Slithereen Crush not slowing attack speed.
- Spectre: Fixed Haunt illusions moving while out of the game.
- Timbersaw: Fixed Timberchain travelling too fast.
- Timbersaw: Fixed Timberchain not latching quite far enough.
- Tusk: Fixed Tusk not issuing an attack order on the snowballed unit after the snowball crashes.
- Enabled Drow and Tusk to Captain's Mode (Tournament Version next week)

UI
- Added tab to the Watch section showing downloaded replay files.

VISUALS
- Riki: Added Smoke Screen and Blink Strike animations.
- Sniper: Added victory animations and more aggressive posing of idle, run and attack when enemy is in range.

BOTS
- Bots now know to avoid standing in Macropyre and Ice Path.

WORKSHOP
- Added a button to the preview that allows you to test your imported model in-game, in a local server.