Simple Questions, Simple Answers - Page 1252

I can't think of too many supports who can start offlane but essentially roam immediately, because a dual lane can stifle the hero's potential pretty heavily IMO. That's how i would go about it if you don't play it from mid and dominate lane that way.
Imagine you are versus a zeus, there is nowhere he can go after you hit level 6. He will never beat you to rune, etcetera etcetera.
In all cases, it's about how strong you got relative to them in that time spent laning. You can play slightly behind if their lane wasn't low commitment and you are favored against them in fights. Again, slow heroes, and strength heroes.

In lane once you get everything you need (soul ring, boots, stick, a few levels of passive), you will be killing heroes because of their will to stay in that lane. Your midgame is not the same as their midgame. Your midgame means you're playing at their T2 already. Their midgame is catching up from an awful early game which could often be the jungle.
You could already be enjoying a full Hood + Euls before their under-leveled supports can hit 6.
How do you leverage your advantage?
You're farming the lane next to their base and they're coming to you.
When you see a hero by themselves, chakram and cast a high level timberchain. If it's bad, you just timberchain out shortly after. If they show they are willing to commit everything and the kitchen sink (and it'll work) once you get close enough to their clutches, cool. Farm their nearby jungle and continue the same while they twiddle their thumbs as the rest of your team is also farming.



If you want to get complicated, match survivability (items) to their ability to kill you.
You must be efficient with mana and use the time well to get ahead while they are reeling and struggling to move heroes around to match.
Your only actual fears are pure damage and ultra efficient ways of dealing damage.
Eg. Laguna blade, Rupture, super urn, decrepify combo. you know, stuff that would normally kill other heroes.
In the face of those threats, when those aspects are online just adjust to play more with teammates.

Once you're at the point where they no longer want to engage you willy nilly, or you need to re-push waves out,
Soul ring is up every creep wave. That is, every 30 seconds. If you clear wave with chain and chakram, that is 250-300 mana per go. With just soul ring and natural mana regen, you're losing about 100 mana every creep wave.
All your spells are doing around 2 damage per mana used, chakram gets more efficient if you use the channel portion.
So the basic amount you're going to use on creep wave is always going to hover around 200 mana if you just use chakram only. As you get arcane boots or euls, you are basically gaining mana killing creep waves.
If you gather all this, then it should be apparent that this is just a methodical hero.

As for items, going off the idea of matching survivability vs. the ability of the other team to kill you,
it is always a mix of Pipe, Euls, Lotus orb, Shivas, Aghs, and Bloodstone. Euls and BKB can be interchangeable as with many heroes.
Bloodstone is frankly almost the same mana regen as Euls, so if you're doing it primarily for the mana regen, save yourself the money and itemize differently to win faster.
To gauge your actual performance to this effect, every kill is worth about 5 creeps to you.
10 kills is 50 creeps. Adding that to your CS, it should be 100 every 10m, or 10 every minute.
If you are not reaching that as a core that had a good lane, you had better be in the process of beating them down, or you now need to work on those aspects of play.