[Hero] Lycan - Page 21

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 23 2014 19:42 GMT

#401

I don't think vlads contributes much to pushing at all. Creep/wolf lifesteal is irrelevant as is the armour and regen component of the item. It adds about a bracer's worth of damage when farming and 2 bracers when using howl and pushing which is arguably worth less than a faster necrobook when you also take having more hp when jungling into consideration, so its mostly a farming and not a pushing item. You don't lifesteal off towers anyway. The window of time where you are weaker than a vlads lycan is irrelevant because you simply rush necro 1 from jungle and push right away which is definitely better than pushing without a necrobook after taking roshan. Speaking of Roshan, its slower but its possible (its actually a lot faster if you choose to use your necro units to kill him then going medallion + vlads) after expanding most of your mana pool without using soul ring. You also lose a lot more hp but in all of my 34 lycan games this patch I've only been ganked in Roshan TWICE. One of the times I managed to suicide to Roshan and the other time I died but came back to take aegis with my team and that's at 4.2k+ mmr and skipping the ultimate. The most sensible thing would be to ward jungle then when lycan is missing past the 8~ min mark you group smoke into roshan but I've never ever seen this happen.

Laurens

Belgium4541 Posts

April 23 2014 19:47 GMT

#402

How is lifesteal and +5 armor for all creeps/minions irrelevant?

How can a bracer, which gives a fixed amount of damage (9), ever be compared to an item that boosts damage by a percentage (15%)?

How is more hp important in jungling if you can have LIFESTEAL?

O_O

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 23 2014 19:54 GMT

#403

the 5 armour is possibly enough to save one melee creep when pushing through waves, but that's too much theorycrafting. It's good if you have a chen or enchantress or any of the creep summoning heroes but otherwise its irrelevant. its compared to a bracer since that's how much damage each of your wolves get (with howl). By the time the % of your own damage becomes better than a faster necrobook you should be building an AC or whatever item after necrobook. Lifesteal does absolutely nothing for creeps or wolves, and most of the time you do not need it when farming jungle between pushes. Your hp might be a bit lower but when its low enough you have to go to base anyway even when you have vlad's, but once again this is a trade-off for getting a faster necronomicon which is your real core item that pushes towers down and does a lot more than vlad's even with level 1 necrobook.

TheYango

United States47024 Posts

April 23 2014 19:56 GMT

#404

What do you mean it's "possibly enough to save one melee creep"?

Vlad's +5 armor means that any full HP creep takes 1 more tower hit to kill. When pushing a tower, this means you get ~20% longer to hit the tower before the creep wave thins out, in addition to you, your wolves, and all melee creeps doing 15% more damage.

Laurens

Belgium4541 Posts

April 23 2014 20:07 GMT

#405

Vlads % gives more damage to Lycan than necro 1 at all times. Necro 1 gives only 8 damage ..

If you were including the creeps:
The necro 1 melee does 25 damage, 2 more than lane creeps, albeit with 0.25 lower BAT.
The necro 1 range does 40 damage, 15 more than lane creeps, same BAT.

Rushing necro 1 seems utterly pointless. The stats your hero gets are minimal for a 2700 cost. Every 95 seconds you can get 2 glorified lane creeps, woop.

The only argument you could make is that it gets you quicker to Necro 3 (which is the good stuff), but as I mentioned earlier I wouldn't be surprised if vlads first gets necro 3 at the same time due to towers and rosh ..

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 23 2014 20:19 GMT

#406

Well you wouldn't consider the bonus damage to necro minions from vlads because you wouldn't have a necrobook by the time you pushed if you didn't build vlads. Necro units still do more than a hero at that point of the game even at level 1, especially when enemies try to contest your push and eat the mana burn and pure damage from the melee dude. TheYango I didn't count the tower hits because T1 towers will fall to level 1 necrobook regardless, and with those towers gone you can't really compare the amount of gold you get that adds to getting more necrobook levels to pushing down the T2 towers. It's just too much theorycrafting to find out at what small point in the game you will have a vlads and not another 1250 gold for another level of necronomicon, but the point is you get a faster necrobook level 1 which is more pushing power than a just a vlads by itself albeit on a cooldown.

Anyway my point is not that vlads is bad, but is that its not a core item on lycan, necronomicon is your core pushing item. The weakness of vladimir's offering is that its no longer required since wolves have regen and you are only delaying your core by getting it. It is still good because of its synergy with necronomicon units, jungling, and pushing as a team so in some situations it would be ok to get, but a faster necronomicon will allow you to take towers faster than if you just had a vlad's and use that tower gold to get an earlier advantage than if you would have delayed your core.

ZerG~LegenD

Sweden1179 Posts

April 23 2014 21:28 GMT

#407

Tried the Soul Ring build on a jungle lycan. In general, it felt pretty similar to playing playing with Vlads. Rosh was a lot harder though. I used my necros but just barely got him even though I howled twice (I normally don't howl at all). Ancients are also harder to take, I think you need double wolf summons to take the dragon camp. Can't remember if I used howl or not though so perhaps they are easier than I remember. It was a short game so I only killed one ancient camp.

The cost difference between vlads and soul ring is exactly one necro recipe. Dunno if its worth it, gonna experiment some more.

Thienan567

United States670 Posts

April 23 2014 21:34 GMT

#408

On April 24 2014 04:18 DucK- wrote:

Show nested quote +

Your reasoning sounds valid. Although as you said, this benefit is dependent on it being a necessity for you to push the T1 in the first place.

Another point to moot about is that given a free farm scenario (as with most competitive Lycan), is Vlad's first better than Necro 1? You don't need SR yet because you barely use Wolves, so it's just 700 gold more.

It's "just" 700 gold more, but the thing is Lycan wants to rosh and take t1s asap. Farming up that 700 gold in the early game even if it is in the jungle takes time away from a Lycan that wants to take objectives as soon as possible and put the gold advantage in his team's favor. For this reason I shy away from rushing necro 1.

I think the only situation where I would consider rushing necro 1 is if lycan is radiant and got the best camps of all time to jungle with, as in only satyrs, wolves, and trolls good. Even then, I'm not convinced it's better than vlad's.

DucK-

Singapore11447 Posts

April 23 2014 21:54 GMT

#409

Well glad no one is outright dismissing this idea yet.

On April 24 2014 05:07 Laurens wrote:
Vlads % gives more damage to Lycan than necro 1 at all times. Necro 1 gives only 8 damage ..

If you were including the creeps:
The necro 1 melee does 25 damage, 2 more than lane creeps, albeit with 0.25 lower BAT.
The necro 1 range does 40 damage, 15 more than lane creeps, same BAT.

Rushing necro 1 seems utterly pointless. The stats your hero gets are minimal for a 2700 cost. Every 95 seconds you can get 2 glorified lane creeps, woop.

The only argument you could make is that it gets you quicker to Necro 3 (which is the good stuff), but as I mentioned earlier I wouldn't be surprised if vlads first gets necro 3 at the same time due to towers and rosh ..

Well mathematically speaking, if Necro 1 is 'pointless', then you are worse off with Vlad's when you want to push/fight. If you refer to this link, the numbers show Necro 1 to be superior. I'm not certain of the accuracy of these numbers, but he is quite known for doing such calculations.

DucK-

Singapore11447 Posts

April 23 2014 22:01 GMT

#410

On April 24 2014 06:34 Thienan567 wrote:

Show nested quote +

Well the thing about Rosh which I do not quite like as an argument is getting it asap. I mean if there was a laning Lycan, and at ~8-10 minutes mark he is missing from the map, anybody would smell a rosh attempt.

As for safelane T1 towers, it's not like Vlad's is a major criteria to push it down.

ZerG~LegenD

Sweden1179 Posts

April 23 2014 22:01 GMT

#411

Laurens didn't take howl into account which makes his post utterly pointless.

TheYango

United States47024 Posts

April 23 2014 22:15 GMT

#412

On April 24 2014 07:01 DucK- wrote:
As for safelane T1 towers, it's not like Vlad's is a major criteria to push it down.

It depends on teamcomps, though in pubgames it's pretty easy to shove down the T1 regardless because the off-laner randomly got killed or went to dick around in their jungle with a huge creep wave pushing.

Though again, with Vlad's you have the potential to snowball that big T1 push into a T2 tower--which can get your team a huge advantage if the enemy responds poorly, either by not coordinating to stop it, OR over-committing, resulting in them losing a T1 elsewhere or someone else getting caught.

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 23 2014 23:46 GMT

#413

I just had a game where I went soul ring lycan, Rosh was doable at 8 minutes still just like with vlads, then I pushed bot with my necro1 and several teammates and when they tried to stop us we just won because at that point in the game necrobook minions do so much that you can take down any hero with howl and ultimate, and the enemy never expects you to have a necrobook complete at this time. Right after that fight was over, we went to heal and bam necrobook was back up and we took 2 more towers with it. If we had more people in that first fight we would have snowballed to push T2 regardless of whether we had a vlads or not, although it would have been easier since we had Furion and his treants that would have benefited from the armour bonus against towers.

I went for a clowny manta build

soul ring > necro 1 > necro 2 > necro 3 > brown boots + travels at the same time from the tower gold > manta when the throne was exposed

govie

9334 Posts

April 24 2014 00:30 GMT

#414

Isnt it possible to draft in CM a team where someone else farms an early vlads. In that way you could time everything around the early necro3+SR+bootless timing. Because the timing of the necro3 seems really nice and could certainly have a big impact.

E: like abbadon support, he stays alive longer then a lycan would so it would make him a good vladscarrier or am i wrong? Or beastmaster offlane (howl awesome), something like that.

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 24 2014 01:25 GMT

#415

a meknsm is usually a much better item to rush for pushing. abbadon/chen/beastmaster would be better off going mekansm than vlads. Arcane boots would be ideal as well. The timing of mekansm is much later than if you lane lycan and he rushes necrobook so the plan would be to rush arcanes on a support and mekansm on your utility hero, so ideally you would take a tower with necro 1 and then use the gold from that + roshan to get mek and arcanes from which you 5 man middle and attempt to take all of their towers.

Discarder

Philippines411 Posts

April 24 2014 04:17 GMT

#416

Is this still a valid guide? http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guide/howl-at-the-moon-updated-3-14-2014-4425

NeoRussia

Canada381 Posts

April 24 2014 05:45 GMT

#417

No, that guide is not updated. if you're not playing with necronomicon as a core item then you're not playing lycan. Also howl is very good and the only reason you don't get levels in it early is because you will have mana problems in jungle if you intend on using it and jungling.