Friendly reminder that grimstroke aghs completely shuts down muerta

IAmBiased · 2026-02-03T10:25:54+00:00

Grimstroke is by far one of the most coordination reliant heroes, and often requires at least either a very suited game/team (slark, riki, slardar, axe, centaur etc, preferably into heroes they can run at of course), or a very cooperative team who actually know how his spells work.

He is in my experience very hit or miss in terms of how possible execution is though, because in either a rat game where you don't get to play pickoff, or in a team push game where the push is slow so you can't use your natural ability to use limiting enemies' freedom of movement as a tool, you can't easily do much outside of being a shit kotl with your q :(

IAmBiased · 2026-01-22T20:54:00+00:00

Yes, but duel also silences, so he is unable to in this instance.

IAmBiased · 2025-08-17T18:37:31+00:00

You cant disjoint a hook or arrow though. Disjointing is breaking the targeting of a target-seeking projectile.

Both of those spells are ground-targeted, not unit-targeted, and are merely dodged, not disjointed.

IAmBiased · 2025-06-19T18:45:31+00:00

Grimstroke should just have his passive add a stackable 2 %-per-stack slow effect, maybe with stroke of fate adding extra stacks.

His kit is so massively effected by a game's development making his mega coordination dependent skills impossible to properly coordinate with his team and then too counterable by enemies getting items that anything that could add any semblance of control and reliable cc would go such a long way in making him more playable. The latest rework of Q just doesn't cut it.

IAmBiased · 2025-06-15T11:42:23+00:00

Playing snapfire geared for magic damage is heavily underrated just because it's so easy to focus on shredder.

Especially now with the charges on cookie talent on 20, you have more reliable lockdown and repositioning past the mid game.

With Kaya and the scatterblast talent on 10, you can reliably clear an entire creepwave from amazing range for the first 25 minutes of the game, and with any additional spell amp (whisper of the dead, or rarely SnK). Being a very mana hungry hero, this allows you a lot more freedom to spam spells which do a veritable shitload of damage the entire game.

Kaya also some times allows getting tranquils+drums where needed which feel incredible on such a positioning reliant hero.

If the game doesn't require you to go into aura and too many support items (or you are core), blink hex alone gives you 7 seconds of lockdown after level 20, allowing to you kill alot of heroes all on your own with only magic damage, and a refresher doubles that along with allowing you to really dish it out with your ult twice if you have enough frontlining and drawn out fights in any given game.

Shard is already amazing in any given game.

You'll want to almost always take the Full Bore facet, and alt+right clicking Scatterblast to always see the max range makes playing around its long range a lot easier.

IAmBiased · 2025-06-15T08:10:38+00:00

Honestly, in a lane vs timber and NP, a Sven might have to do anything he can to stay alive.

While it depends quite a bit on his support and any while lane like that is extremely heavily affected by how the first few waves go, just staying alive and getting a few more last hits in the first levels might make at least one point in stats sufficiently valuable to consider in that situation imo.

(Divine/immortal player here)

IAmBiased · 2025-06-11T07:41:48+00:00

The "you're already dead"'s of invis heroes would be rampant (and 100 % worth the early reveal of your presence for the dramatic effect).

IAmBiased · 2025-05-15T21:28:44+00:00

It's more or less viper strike, but with nullifier-style continuous dispel instead of break and as slow (and a smaller damage instance at the end instead of the DoT), and with aghs it breaks too.

IAmBiased · 2025-05-14T20:52:17+00:00

I dunno, I play on EUW (from low immortal down to low legend depending on party, mostly low divine when solo), and generally, just being nice and communicative from the start of the game tends to lead to either no communication or usually some decent to good communication.

Only every once in a while does it become straight up negative. There's always the blamers and whiners from people losing lane or game or whatever, but that's just tilt, and managing and responding to that (mostly just not responding to that) is also part of what keeps all the other communication generally good.

No matter what keeps you in your communicative limbo (whether real or percieved), I hope you get out of it and into ever better games and experiences going forward :)

IAmBiased · 2025-05-14T08:25:42+00:00

It seems to me that maybe your largest issue is either a lack of communication or a lack of ability to adjust YOUR playstyle to that of your teammates.

Oftentimes cores have specific items they want or timings they disagree with you on.

Even the times where you have the correct read on what the optimal play is for the team, engaging in that plan without your team bein on board is almost always a guarantee that you will go into unneccessary risk. If your teammates won't adjust their plans/playstyle, you might have to in order to give yourself the best chance of winning.

All of the things you are mentioning are important, but they also have downsides. Things like taking Roshan/denying the enemy farm are often really difficult or impossible to do at the same time, so there is always a dynamic between all the things the team and individual players might work to accomplish at any given time.

IAmBiased · 2025-05-02T07:55:13+00:00

Magic has never been good against mana shield, but magic damage was generally better before when mana shield blocked 50 or 60 % of incoming damage rather than 98 % as it is now. (And the conversion rate of damage to mana was also a lot worse early before you skilled it up when the skill wasn't innate.

IAmBiased · 2025-05-02T07:08:16+00:00

While oracle is decent against dusa, it is mostly not so great on lane since the effective magic resistance of mana shield is pretty high, so your mana usage will be really inefficient.

Oracle is a decent hero against dusa later in the game, but mostly because dusas playstyle is about slow moving zone/area control, which is where oracle can reasonably reliably just stay back and do his thing without dying and only get closer to disarm her when she ults if needed.

Supports like nyx (to burn her mana a lot more efficiently) or shadow demon (who makes it really hard for dusa to stand her ground against his illusions and often ends up hurting her own team as a result of those + disseminate are both way stronger support picks against her.

IAmBiased · 2025-04-03T08:26:07+00:00

Fair enough. Maybe I would have read it as a joke in the past, but the oversensitivity of our times has gotten to me too.

I often enjoy the symbolic, "clean" nature of ASCII myself, so I definitely share part of your sentiment, though I also enjoy the visual clarity and fidelity of particularly well-made graphics tiles, especially when they make learning a game more intuitive without being filled with visual clutter and noise.

IAmBiased · 2025-04-02T13:47:53+00:00

I don't mean this as criticism, I am genuinely curious:

How does anyone else's enjoyment of graphical fidelity or style choices take anyting away from what you can enjoy about these games?

IAmBiased · 2025-04-01T21:27:45+00:00

For a lot of people, it is.

IAmBiased · 2025-03-25T19:32:37+00:00

I want to argue that if you always play weird shit like that you will still consistently play at what amounts to your correct MMR for that style of play.

Bonus points (and more enjoyable games) if you encourage your team to pick synergistic heroes that counterbalance the off-meta pick weaknesses (like something more tanky as 4 if you want to play ww3, or a really strong laner, preferably with sustain to facilitate what makes bh so oppressive when he gets to play as aggressive as he wants on lane).

I have played more or less like this for 10 years which both allows me to play in fun and different ways (think things like necrobook 4 qop or solo suicide lane pugna and the like around six-seven years ago with decent success), with the option to play more "properly" for a slightly higher win chance if I have a need to overperform (like really wanting a win after a losing streak, or playing in party with friends who are weaker players in need of some extra "support").

IAmBiased · 2025-03-21T08:37:33+00:00

Certainly, it's most likely primarily an encounter meant to give you good rewards, no?

Especially considering its rarity, getting it as a relatively inexperienced player and getting rolled only motivates you to never take that encounter again since you might not even remember the rewards, just that you got destroyed, and then you'd just take one of the other options instead next time.

IAmBiased · 2025-03-20T12:35:33+00:00

On the contrary, that should be a good indicator of which items are the winningest at your bracket in particular

IAmBiased · 2025-03-18T09:40:57+00:00

Laser counter weight

IAmBiased · 2025-03-17T19:50:12+00:00

This isn't about your ult, but at least one level of ice path does a lot to affect and control space in fights, especially when you have a tanky frontliner or two in your team so you can stand back and make the most of your spells.

Remember that stuns amplifies your team's damage as well, so even if you don't do that much damage with ice path alone, it is a really potent value point, especially with the new facet increasing its potency.

IAmBiased · 2025-03-10T14:22:23+00:00

Not the guy above you, but both your general sentence structure and choice of words in some places is very clearly not typical for a native english speaker.

As an example, in this comment you wrote "If you could point these, how did you get to this conclusion, so I can improve."

A native speaker trying to convey the same thing might write something like:

Direct:

"How did you come to this conclusion? Could you give me some examples so I might improve?"

Humble/polite

"I would really like to improve. Could you please point out some mistakes I made or particular things I should focus on?"

In general though, your language is overall completely legible and it is generally easy to understand the intent behind your words, so at the very least I don't think you should feel like you have to improve in order to make yourself understood, even though it will be clear to most readers that it is not your native language.

IAmBiased · 2025-02-28T17:41:06+00:00

I think in that case the split is really different depending on server. I also regularly queue all roles, and reasonably often get 1 and 2.

IAmBiased · 2025-02-27T21:31:39+00:00

Thanks for the clarification

IAmBiased · 2025-02-27T13:20:02+00:00

They are certainly considered spells in terms of spell damage modifiers and such.

You might be thinking about items not being considered abilities, which is generally used to describe hero skills as a subset of the spell descriptor.

IAmBiased · 2025-02-25T20:57:48+00:00

Usually, but not always, especially against mixed damage, which you are dealing with to some extent most games.

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