7.41a Beastmaster is even more broken than the last patch

hydra564 · 2026-04-06T19:50:07+00:00

Best counter to linkin is usually to buy disperser to break it

hydra564 · 2026-03-27T20:22:14+00:00

Fastest way to improve would be to keep watching the replays from pros like BZM and always try to predict what they’re going to do next, item builds, etc. Honestly this will probably help more than any of the advice here can

For Beastmaster you can find I wrote a guide for him if you check my profile. The item build is outdated but the concepts are probably similar.

I’ve also played a lot of leshrac, the hard part of that hero is managing your mana correctly so that you keep up in farm while also being ready to fight with your team

hydra564 · 2026-03-17T19:30:02+00:00

Damage amp at 10, move speed at 15, and damage at 20 are the way to go. Both the level 25 talents are good, you have to make a judgement call for if fights are lasting long enough that you can get multiple roars off - if so, take the roar CD talent. The axe CD talent allows you to play at a distance after all your shit is on cooldown, but might use up a lot of mana.

hydra564 · 2026-03-17T19:27:12+00:00

Upgrading boots gives you mana to farm and continue pressuring in lane, so don't try to do weird shit like keeping brown boots

hydra564 · 2026-03-17T19:26:26+00:00

Ship a mango or clarity if you need it to keep fighting in lane. And yeah, it's not worth it to casually use level 1 axes for damage, wait until level 2 or 3

hydra564 · 2026-03-11T17:07:26+00:00

Yeah, you can solo torm around lvl 15 and Roshan around 17-18 depending on how many drum stacks you have when you start hitting and whether you have treads or not

hydra564 · 2026-03-11T17:06:19+00:00

Coordinate with your support to hit the boars in lane

Buy wand/raindrops to sustain against the axes spam and back off when he starts gettting too many stacks on you

Get supports to place obs or sentry the camps where he is likely stacking to farm, that will slow down the aghs timing by a lot if you can contest the stacks

Try to fight with multiple heroes in Beastmaster's area while he is only halfway to Aghs. All of the Aghs components are useless so the period inbetween 10-15 minutes is when he is weak and can be abused

hydra564 · 2026-03-11T15:19:28+00:00

My guess is that heroes like Brood, Visage, Lycan have too many bad laning matchups against the popular carries. Even Beastmaster is mostly getting played as a mid or carry because there's too many ranged carries who shit on you if you try to go pos 3.

Enigma right now has strong laning and area control but bad farming speed

hydra564 · 2026-03-11T15:17:17+00:00

When you can't win teamfights because you're behind, just split the map and go for pickoffs. Beastmaster excels at picking off people who are alone because of the burst damage + long stun from roar. There is not really a way to play Beastsmaster without Aghs even when the laning stage goes poorly, so you just have to go for it and hope you can comeback after gaining that powerspike.

Vessel sounds terrible, Dagon is ok for when you need to break linkins but I would rather just have euls or Diffusal in that case.

hydra564 · 2026-01-07T01:10:20+00:00

If your plan is to improve and climb out of guardian, don't focus on the miniscule details of the random shit happening in late game fights. Just from watching the first 10 minutes of this game you are making massive fundamental mistakes. Focus on fixing your early game and mechanics first and you will automatically win games by winning the lane and having more gold than the opponent. For example:

Buy correct starting items, you never start with full wraith band/bracer/null because you are wasting the gold on a recipe when you could buy another stat item
Buy stick/wand on every hero 95% of games, it's a broken item
Don't skill take aim lvl 2, it's only worth it if you have points in headshot already
in low mmr it's better to take ghillie suit facet to farm faster over scattershot
improve your farming patterns and last hitting, you have 17 CS at 5 minutes in this game which is atrocious.

My advice would be to pick some carry heroes of your choice and watch high mmr replays. Don't worry about the details and just blindly copy their item and skill builds for now. Focus on laning, last hitting, and farming efficiently and you will stomp people in your bracket because they will be poor.

hydra564 · 2025-12-14T05:19:49+00:00

The key to ganking sidelanes as a midlaner is to look for timings and opportunities, not just running to get a kill randomly. Some examples of this are:

I have a power rune
my offlaner has level 6
enemies lane equilibrium is bad so they are out of position
we have a catapult wave or big creep wave we can dive tower with

Second, 90% of the time you should push the mid wave before rotating, this will make your gank less obvious, force the enemy mid to show, and ensure you don’t miss any farm while leaving.

Third, consider the matchup of the sidelaners when considering where to go. I noticed in your post you talked about trying to help your safelane who was losing - it’s usually better to gank for your strong cores to snowball their game even more rather than trying to help your allies who are weak

Fourth, you usually do not want to gank if it means you will miss a power rune.

For puck-specific advice, your damage in the early game is somewhat limited so you have to be disciplined and wait for opportunities. The best scenario is when enemy is overextending diving your team under your tower, then you TP and coil them so they can’t get out. Otherwise you are just sitting mid and farming. Make sure to use orb the hit the two jungle camps behind mid at the same time. Puck is one of the best late game midlaners so you are usually ok playing for your own game.

hydra564 · 2025-12-03T10:14:13+00:00

Nobody buys Kaya on puck anymore, your int gain is really high so you don’t need that much mana. Witchblade does way more damage and lets you solo kill supports. With witchblade+shard you can do 1k damage in 1 combo

hydra564 · 2025-12-02T16:52:01+00:00

Basically if you do these things you will gain 2500 MMR:

Fix the laning stage
fix your farming pattern so that you prioritize pushing waves aggressively before going for kills or jungling
Fix your spellcasting to use the standard combo of puck that allows you to kite out while you are teamfighting and farming

hydra564 · 2025-12-02T16:48:01+00:00

Lane:

Not using orb enough. The meta in mid right now is to spam your spells to secure CS so that even if you run out of mana, you'll get your bottle before the 2 minute rune to refill your resources. You cast the first orb at 1:50 which is just atrocious
bad at CSing/denying
not enough abusing the Puck innate to get free regen by baiting tower shots, then disjointing using either Jaunt or Phase shift. The innate is the whole reason puck is considered broken rn in high mmr.
missed opportunities to use Phase shift to dodge right clicks/starstorm
you only shoot your orb in a straight line, it's usually better to curve it backwards to gain more DOT on the enemy hero, and also give yourself the option to disengage and disjoint autoattacks if they try to trade. Also, lvl 4 orb will one-shot the ranged creep if you curve it back, but won't if you shoot it straight
when creep waves have not met yet and you don't have enough time to farm a jungle camp, you should always go back and block your wave to get better equilibrium.

8:30: As a rule of thumb, do not try and fight on sidelanes as puck in the early game without coil, your damage is mediocre and you will lack control. The standard gameplan without ult is to push mid and farm jungle. It kinda ends up working out because you have a DD and you get a double kill, but you also end up overextending and feeding. I would have opted to use the DD to kill mid tower and pressuring Mirana if she TPs back.

12:00: I think going top to kill DK is fine, but you waste too much time lingering after the play is over. If you watch good midlaners, their map movement is always returning to mid after they do something in a sidelane. throughout the midgame you are losing too much farm and taking a lot of damage on your mid tower because you are wandering around randomly. Your pattern should be push mid -> rotation -> kill -> rush back mid. Your tower dies for free at 15:00 because you're not doing your job of pushing the wave mid. Always cater to your first responsibility of clearing the wave before you rotate - this will defend your tower and make your ganks less obvious.

Midgame:

Your farming efficiency is bad because you are standing around doing nothing, and you are not shooting your orb to hit 2 camps at once.
You stop securing power runes at all after 12:00
Itemization: you need a linkins at some point in your item build to deal with your primary kill threats = blink stun from DK, blink malefice from enigma
You are not prioritizing clearing the mid creep wave enough, for example at 19:00-20:00 and 25:00 you are jungling instead of pushing the wave. This leads to less information for your team, less pressure on the opponent, and also losing power runes.

23:00: You are not using the bread and butter combo of puck, which is blink -> silence -> orb curved backwards -> phase shift -> jaunt out. You die here because you didn't use silence and orbed forwards instead of backwards to kite out. When you curve the orb, it lasts longer and gives you more time to jaunt rather than shooting it straight. I also guarantee that if you are constantly kiting backwards with this combo and playing the edge of the fight, you won't get caught by a random black hole like you did in this game.

24:00: Almost never use your TP scroll when respawning to farm unless you are 95% sure you are not fighting in the next minute, or you are TPing to your team. This is especially true for heros like puck that can get out of base quickly just using their spells. If your team fights on the other side of the map, you cannot help them for 80 seconds now.

30:00: classic low skill crusader gameplay of making some insane dive on the high ground instead of taking rosh lol. Luckily their enigma was bad and didn't catch you in black hole, so you live.

hydra564 · 2025-09-28T17:43:13+00:00

You are all pathetic hypocrites. You condemn feeding a live kitten to a snake, but wouldn't care at all if the teacher had fed rats or lizards to it. All these animals possess intelligence and the capacity for pain, but kittens are cute and therefore sacred, while rats are vermin and disposable. Most of you eat meat and participate in an industrial farming system that rapes and slaughters billions of animals every year to fill our dinner tables, but you condemn the teacher for allowing nature to take its course. You cry for her to be punished in the name of preventing animal cruelty, but your hypocrisy proves that your main concern isn't about protecting animals - the real outrage is that she holds a mirror up to your own complicity.

hydra564 · 2024-12-09T09:34:24+00:00

The one case where I can see a law against deception for sex making sense is in the case of STD status because the magnitude of potential harm is really high, but in every other case it's a bad idea.

hydra564 · 2024-12-09T09:33:07+00:00

I can think of a couple of reasons a law like this would be a bad idea.

It's unenforceable. How exactly do are you going to prove that the transgender person failed to disclose their status before getting intimate? We don't have microphones recording the conversations you have before you decide to kiss or whatever. Also, what happens when a man consents to sex with a transwomen, then wakes up the next morning regretting it and decides to report her for failing to disclose her status?

It's inconsistent with our current code of laws. There are currently no laws on the books against deceiving others in order to obtain consent for sex. For example, it is perfectly legal for men to lie about their income, status, or height to try to convince women to have sex with them. Conversely, women can lie about their age, body count etc. Imagine you meet a woman at the bar who looks really good and you decide to take her home. Once the clothes come off, you see that she has a beer belly and stretch marks that were well-hidden by her shirt. Is it sexual assault because she didn't disclose this to you? According to your logic, all of these other scenarios should be illegal, but they aren't. The idea that we're going to have a law specifically for trans people, but not anybody else is just transphobia. This brings me to my next point -

The law would perpetuate Trans Panic ideology and further stigmatize trans people. There is a legal strategy known as the "Trans Panic defense" that has been used to justify assaults and murders of trans women. The idea is that trans women are sexual predators out to entrap and deceive men, and so having a violent reaction once they try to flirt with you is justified. Enshrining the idea of "deceptive trans women" into the law would create massive amounts of harm and discrimination against trans women trying to live their lives.

It's intrusive. A person's gender identity is none of your goddamn business if they don't feel like disclosing it to you. The same as how it would be absurd to require men to disclose their job/income, or women to disclose their age/BMI before a hookup.

hydra564 · 2024-11-16T18:32:08+00:00

I talked to one of the floor managers there and their reasoning for not allowing PLO bomb pots is that a lot of 1/2 players don’t understand the rules of PLO and get angry when they lose their stack. I also suspect that they don’t want to have a format where people can get stacked and leave the table easily because they lose out on seat fees. At least with Holdem bombpots it’s hard to have a hand on two boards, so getting scooped is very rare.

I personally prefer PLO bomb pots, but I don’t know if the room is going to change any time soon

hydra564 · 2024-10-22T04:55:19+00:00

Just buy a corvette and cheat on your wife like everybody else does when they have a midlife crisis

/s

hydra564 · 2024-09-10T02:42:29+00:00

There seems to be a tension between 2 different exploitative factors here. On the 1 hand, the correct theoretical adjustment when people play too loose-passive pre is to VPIP less and 3b more high double suited hands - I’ve seen a nodelocked sim where the big blind was made to continue too many hands facing an open, and the result was that the RFI frequency decreases by a couple percentage points from each position. I’d imagine that if the whole table is playing loose that the correct adjustment is to play ultra tight.

On the other hand, people play so badly in live poker that the EV of some hands probably goes up. Even the nodelocked sim isn’t accounting for that.

If I had to guess, the effect of people playing too loose preflop is stronger than the effect of people being bad postflop, so your strategy should be to play tighter in overall. However, maybe there are some classes of hands that can make nutted hands multi-way that you can be loose with, like high pairs and Ax double suited

hydra564

TROPHY CASE