[Daily Hero tl;dr #5] Pudge

Ahhh fresh meat.

TL;DR

• Skills - Hook (2,3,5,7) Rot (1,4,9,10) Flesh Heap (8,12,13,14) Dismember (6,11,16)
• Items (lane) - regen, minor stats, boots, bottle
• Items (early) - phase, urn, force staff
• Items (later) - Aghs, AC, Shiva, Heart
• Tips - Land hooks to prevent turtles and to screw up formation, ult goes through BKB

My observerations with Pudge is that people don't play him wrongly, they're just bad at it. If you are playing Pudge, make sure you kind of know what you're doing, because it's very easy to screw over your team. Although you should be cautious with your hooks, you should throw them often. Who knows, you might get lucky.

To explain my item choices, I like Phase for the chasing abilities. If you're out of position, you may not need to throw a hook to catch up to a target if you're moving quickly. Force staff also helps this because you're not allowed Blink Dagger.

Grunt (player for mTw) said that if you get Cuirass on Pudge, you accidentally win the game. Pudge naturally has a lot of health due to high strength, but that doesn't mean he has enough armor to sustain a lot of damage. Bottle and Urn are nice for regeneration (mana and HP) and the rest are just luxury HP items.

Max out your hook ASAP so you can grab heroes from far away. Rot at level one is nice to assist last hitting and possibly get early kills. Flesh Heap early (at level 8 or so) is nice so you can start stacking up your strength.

Basically, "initiate" team fights by hooking enemies, forcing them to go in. Prevent turtling and cause the enemy to fall out of position. Hooking even seemingly useless heroes can still cause the enemy's initiation to fall out of place.

// I'll answer questions in the comments and take suggestions for tomorrow's write up.

/// I am compiling a list of my threads (until something better comes up) on my profile at GG.net