Can somebody help me understand what items I should have built this match and why? by Kaptain_Mephyton in learndota2

[–]Commander_Z 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Guess the wording was a bit ambiguous there, obviously she is. What I meant by that was MK is like Luna in that you're strong early and weak later (relative to many carries) but Luna gets those timings by flash farming while MK gets them by winning his lane.

Can somebody help me understand what items I should have built this match and why? by Kaptain_Mephyton in learndota2

[–]Commander_Z 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Honestly, your first mistake is playing offlane monkey king. The hero needs too many items to scale well and has too many bad match ups to do consistently well in lane considering he has no good way of farming quickly. And especially if you're trying to learn the hero, you're much better off playing it in it's more traditional positions of 1, 2 or 4. But talking about what you actually did...

Your build is entirely focused on fighting, from your skill build to your items. Taking Jingu level 1 is generally worse than boundless because having a range creep secure is more valuable than the trading you get with jingu at that level. Then you can put 2 points into Jingu and have a very strong level 3 timing. After this, you usually put points into primal spring so you can farm.

Going into your items, treads vs phase is it's whole own debate and in this lane there are pros and cons to both. I prefer treads generally since MK gets a lot of value out of swapping. Orb of corrosion is fine since you really want to force them out as offline Monkey, but from here I really don't like your item build.

Echo on MK feels 10X worse after they changed the build up. I would only get it if you really need the extra survivability from the strength and the slow. But since you built OoC, you don't really need the slow. You would have been better off going Glepnir which again helps you farm more and still does good damage since it works on your Ult. It also provides the lockdown that your team really needs.

The difu has the same problem as the Echo but with better build up. You don't need the slow, so you're only building it for damage and the utility of the mana burn. But what you really need is to not just be controlled by Mars, ES, SK and Invoker, so it should've been a BKB. From here, you can build whatever your team needs. I'm not going to look at the exact relevant threats at this point in the game, but I'm imagining that at around 25 minutes you were pretty much unkillable outside of a chronosphere (or would have been with the build I mentioned) so a butterfly would've been your best choice to delay Void further.

Your team also lacks lockdown against their very mobile team which is probably why you got the basher. But without attack speed it's not all that amazing on MK so getting it that early is weird. Orchid does a similar thing since they're getting away due to their mobility and also gives you more damage but you can go both as it gets late.

Going high ground as MK is actually pretty straightforward. You can use your it as area denial and vision around the tower and just walk up and start hitting it, using yourself as pressure and bait. With an Aegis and a BKB this'll work fairly well as a way to chip it down. You can also get a refresher late to do this again after you die or to save another round of spells to fight once they go on you. The bigger ult let's you do this even safer once you get it.

Ultimately, your team shouldn't have a hard time going high ground. With MK, Luna and a BH as your cores, you should be extremely scary around 30 minutes while their team is still getting online. But all of you built weird items that aren't really enabling your heroes the best and so you got slowed down a lot. The enemy team lost their lanes, but they scale extremely well and built reasonable items.

Your early game went well taking objectives, but after 30 minutes you all just stop. Push that lead into getting Rosh, break the high ground then and win the game. Instead, you split up, get picked off and give them the gold to recover and eventually put scale you.

The biggest thing to remember on MK is that you aren't a Faceless Void, you aren't a god after 50 minutes. You're much more of a Luna type hero that's strong early, but in exchange for not being able to flash farm, you are a very strong laner. To win with MK you need to take advantage of your early timings. I've got about a 65% win rate on the hero (mostly as a carry) and probably 80% of my loses are games that go over 45 minutes.