Honestly, given the health swing on Necro's heal, I'm not actually sure if Pudge hooking necrolyte in lane is problematic for Necrolyte. At six, yeah, you may die, but before then, you'll almost always come out pretty even on mana and HP in terms of overall swing, and you regen a lot better than Pudge in lane.
Yeah, pre-6 you're fine. And if you've been doing it right, he should be at low enough health to seriously think twice about hooking you at 6. Bottle kind of fucks things up though, as necro ain't much for controlling runes mid.
If you want to harass just shoot your target like a normal human being.
Grey Paladin on
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
You really only want a single point in Heartstopper until Sadist and Death Pulse are maxed out, because the damage doesn't start really scaling until the game goes on longer and health pools get bigger; before that it's just good harassment (and free kills on Templar Assassins who try to meld out and hide).
On Necrolyte I've had good success going
Death Pulse
Heartstopper Aura
Death Pulse
Sadist
Death Pulse
Reaper's Scythe
Death Pulse
Sadist
Sadist
Sadist
Reaper's Scythe
Heartstopper Aura
Heartstopper Aura
Heartstopper Aura
stats
Reaper's Scythe
Stats forever
He is a pain in the balls to last hit with, is the one caveat I'll say. But he's amazing at punishing people who get too ballsy. For me he's one of those heroes that I'm like "buh whatever okay" and then get like a 15 minute Bloodstone with a Heart 13 minutes later and go on a Rampage and end the game at 30 minutes. I've found a good item build is Arcane Boots-->Disassemble into Bloodstone, Phase Boots, Heart of Tarrasque, Shiva's Guard.
That is the skill progression I was using. I was going for a different item set though. I'd go for Mekansm first to try to continue on in that support role. I'll have to look at the ones you've described and give it a try.
edit: also it passively harasses your opponent out of lane which gives you more farm
No. Not at all.
Can you elaborate? You feel that Heartstopper isn't very useful? I found if I was up against a ranged hero who knew what was up, it was easy for him to push me out of Heartstopper range.
Dendi is streaming as Pudge...so OP. He got an assisted TP and hooked someone at the same time. Dragged the dude across the whole map straight to their fountain for an instakill.
No matter how terrible your animation is, at 550 range you can harass just fine unless your opponent is much better at harassing than you (Venomancer, orbs, etc).
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
if you are going to argue from statistics then you should be arguing for 4 pt in heartstopper because it performs the best in public games so it must be optimal!!
Shameful pursuits and utterly stupid opinions
0
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
that's not what the stats looked at you're a goose
The reason Heartstopper sucks because the situations where it is 'good' are situations that Necrolyte is terrible at. Necrolyte can do 3 three things reasonably well. Be babysat as the carry in a trilane, stack/pull the easy lane*, solo mid**. In the first two situations the offlaner is not going to be sitting around in Heartstopper AoE, in the solo mid situation the mana from Sadist is infinitely more important than the free auto-attack every 30 seconds or so. Sadist mana is also extremely important if you are stack/pulling as Necro because it lets you get decent GPM (which Necro needs) even though you are 'supporting'.
Heartstopper is 'good' at 2v2 lanes, which is a situation that Necrolyte sucks at***.
* Necro isn't actually good as a trilane support in the situation where you'd be contested at all. He works if you are going to be 3v1 or 2v1 supporting the easy lane where he can just sit in the jungle and stack/pull.
** Necro isn't actually good at solo mid either because his base damage / animation are garbage.
*** Death Pulse range and damage is too low for Necro to be a threat in a kill lane. You could make the argument that Necro + another healer is a 'good' lane but it would lose to most good duo lane comps hard (also none of the other healers are good heroes either and likely to be drafted)
I will accept counter arguments in the form of 1v1s only.
I've found there's a certain threshold below which harassment is useless. If your opponent is running with the standard 3-Tangos/1-Salve build you have to actually hit them with enough damage to eat those consumables up in laning for it to be any good. Heartstopper doesn't really do this alone so you do need a lane where you can supplement it with auto-attacks/spells. That's not always viable given Necro's terrible Death Pulse range and awful armor.
That article is pretty interesting. Necrolyte is a fairly terrible character without farm so you generally want to play him a bit greedier with Sadist. Not to mention with the new health regeneration it could be as effective or more in a fight than Heartstopper: as long as you can score kills on creeps/heroes during the fight with your Q/R.
I like to build my characters to fufill the role that the hero should bring to the table. Sadist lets Necrolyte spam his spells more to help his team and gives him more farming potential to become durable enough to be useful in teamfights. Still, that article does speak well for Heartstopper early. Catering your build to the situation in game may be more necessary than I thought for Necro.
Eh, P10 makes good points. There's a reason Necro was a fairly common pick in the ATOD games. In my experience to really play him well, you're much more reliant on effective last hitting for Sadist procs than you are on Heartstopper. That said, it's still a non-trivial amount of free harass (added in with the auto attack harass you should be doing anyway) in the lane, and it does add up over time.
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
Out of curiosity, I decided to figure out a relative measure of how much damage heartstopper will actually do to somebody in lane.
If you were spirit breaker against a rank 1 heartstopper aura, not counting items, at level 1 it would be almost exactly the same damage as being hit by every other attack from a ranged creep.
I don't know if that actually helps visualize things better, but I found it interesting.
EDIT: Also, even on the squishiest people heartstopper is probably going to get close to 3 damage per second; I don't think that many people (who aren't generally easy kills) go to lane with a health pool of <500 and no stat items.
If dota was a staring contest in which both teams stood behind their creep line and deployed their best impressions of the thousand-yard stare for 25 minutes until one of then flinched then heartstopped would be the best skill in the game.
But that's not what dota is about. You want to skip sadist then they're just as likely to kick your teeth in and push you out of the lane because you have crappy damage, a mediocre projectile, and are really squishy. You want to really push someone out of the lane? Get every last hit and deny and hit them with free death pulses and auto-attacks every time they even think about a last hit.
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That is the skill progression I was using. I was going for a different item set though. I'd go for Mekansm first to try to continue on in that support role. I'll have to look at the ones you've described and give it a try.
Can you elaborate? You feel that Heartstopper isn't very useful? I found if I was up against a ranged hero who knew what was up, it was easy for him to push me out of Heartstopper range.
Steam ID
Necro's harassing sucks because his animation is assballs. Which also makes it super hard to lasthit without getting perma-denied.
Heartstopper harass is best harass p10 is just clownin'
it's infinitely more than 0 damage per second and you can focus on last hitting and denying
scrublord
More like PU10
poultry 10
Heartstopper is 'good' at 2v2 lanes, which is a situation that Necrolyte sucks at***.
* Necro isn't actually good as a trilane support in the situation where you'd be contested at all. He works if you are going to be 3v1 or 2v1 supporting the easy lane where he can just sit in the jungle and stack/pull.
** Necro isn't actually good at solo mid either because his base damage / animation are garbage.
*** Death Pulse range and damage is too low for Necro to be a threat in a kill lane. You could make the argument that Necro + another healer is a 'good' lane but it would lose to most good duo lane comps hard (also none of the other healers are good heroes either and likely to be drafted)
I will accept counter arguments in the form of 1v1s only.
That article is pretty interesting. Necrolyte is a fairly terrible character without farm so you generally want to play him a bit greedier with Sadist. Not to mention with the new health regeneration it could be as effective or more in a fight than Heartstopper: as long as you can score kills on creeps/heroes during the fight with your Q/R.
I like to build my characters to fufill the role that the hero should bring to the table. Sadist lets Necrolyte spam his spells more to help his team and gives him more farming potential to become durable enough to be useful in teamfights. Still, that article does speak well for Heartstopper early. Catering your build to the situation in game may be more necessary than I thought for Necro.
... not that I ever play him.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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If you were spirit breaker against a rank 1 heartstopper aura, not counting items, at level 1 it would be almost exactly the same damage as being hit by every other attack from a ranged creep.
I don't know if that actually helps visualize things better, but I found it interesting.
EDIT: Also, even on the squishiest people heartstopper is probably going to get close to 3 damage per second; I don't think that many people (who aren't generally easy kills) go to lane with a health pool of <500 and no stat items.
But that's not what dota is about. You want to skip sadist then they're just as likely to kick your teeth in and push you out of the lane because you have crappy damage, a mediocre projectile, and are really squishy. You want to really push someone out of the lane? Get every last hit and deny and hit them with free death pulses and auto-attacks every time they even think about a last hit.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/178420/dota-2-yep-still-in-beta