Dota 2: Venomancer guide, emerging hero in meta 7.23

When you think of offlane heroes, you usually think of strength champions. However, this article does not refer to hero strength, but hero agility!

That hero is Venomancer. This is one of the strongest offlane heroes you can pick in pubs since the Outlanders update came out.

At the time of this writing, Venomancer has a 52.38% win rate with a pick rate of 8.26% at Divine/Immortal ranks.

In this article, we’ll find out why Venomancer is so strong and guide the popular ways to play.

VEVNOMANCER MAKES HEROS IN META

One of the reasons Venomancer is so strong is because he is strong against heroes that are popular in the meta and is only weak against heroes that are not used by many people.

The list of heroes countered by Venomancer includes Tiny, Clockwerk, Templar Assassin, Doom, Ember Spirit, Ursa, Keeper of the Light and Riki. How many times have you seen these heroes appear in games? I must say quite often.

As for the opponents that Venomancer fear the most, they include Broodmother, Arc Warden, Dark Seer, Terrorblade, Sniper and Medusa. These are heroes that are not commonly picked in a normal pub game.

HOW TO GROW RED

Venomancer is one of the most mobile heroes out there. There are a few common items for this hero, but that doesn’t mean you have to build them in every game.

In the last month, the top 5 most purchased items for Venomancer (excluding Magic Wind and non-Guardian Greeves boots) are:

1. Veil of Discord
2. Aghanim’s Scepter
3. Force Staff
4. Spirit Vessel
5. Guardian Greeves

These items still don’t show all the ways to build because there are 19 different items that have been built by Venomancer in over 100,000 games. Venomancer is very diverse in terms of build, different from Enigma – a hero with only 5 items purchased in more than 100,000 games.

An effective build that I like quite a bit is the Aghanim’s Scepter rush. If you have Aghanim’s Scepter before 20 minutes, it makes it difficult for the opponent to team fight you because the Venomancer damage is too high. With this build, you just need to step into the middle of the teamfight, use your ultimate, then sit back and watch your teammates chase your opponents.

HOW TO BUILD

The way to raise the skill with the highest win rate and the most popular way to raise the skill is focused on Poison Sting to the maximum when reaching level 7. In patch 7.23, Poison Sting has a new effect: reduce healing.

This has a pretty big impact. Poison Sting is one of the strongest harassers in lane right now, while Venomancer is already an extremely effective lane poke hero. Heal plays an important role in the early laning phase. Even the Poison Sting only requires hand fighting so you don’t have to lose any mana.

After lifting the Poison Sting, focus on raising the maximum Plague Wards. The most common way to upgrade is to get Poison Nova at level 6 while raising it at level 8 has the highest win rate. Venomous Gale is completely ignored, only raising 1 point at level 2. This is completely understandable since Poison Sting is now a more influential move.

TALENT

In terms of talent, most people have the same choice.

At level 10, 74% picks +90 GPM and 26% gets -8 second Venomous Gale cooldown. Quite unexpectedly, the cooldown reduction talent has a 1.1% higher win rate than the GPM talent.

At Level 15, 77.4% picks a Hero with Gale Summon 2 Wards and 22.6% picks -12% Poison Sting Slow (extra 12% slow for Poison Sting). Picking summon wards only has a 0.7% higher win rate than slow.

At level 20, 74% choose +7 seconds Poison Nova duration and 26% choose 15% Spell Lifesteal. 15% Spell Lifesteal has a 3.2% higher win rate.

At level 25, 63.5% take 3x Plague Ward HP/Damage and 36.5% pick +800 Poison Nova AoE. The first pick has a higher 1.4% win rate.

EPILOGUE

Venomancer is an easy and fun hero to play. One of Venomancer’s special ways of playing is to attract the most attention in team fights, and deal as much damage as possible and then die for his teammates. This is something Venomancer does very well, especially if you can cast your ultimate effectively.

Do you enjoy playing or facing Venomancer? Let’s try this offlane hero!

According to Dotabuff