How to beat Antimage: a tactical analysis.

So, who's hero everyone hates? Techies! But in dota 2, it's currently Antimage. A combination of there being an incomplete hero pool, and his natural ability to survive against less than perfect coordination makes him an exemplary pubstomper and competitive pick. This little guide is not going to cause the fall of antimage as a pick, but it will give you a fighting chance if you're playing against someone who's got less than perfect dota skillz.

Early Game

Antimage has a complex early game. He has a good starting strength, but tends to have only one point in blink. This means he will go down to slows and stuns so long as the one blink he gets every 12 seconds is not sufficient for him to escape.

To escape, an antimage only needs to blink to an unreachable location, such as over a cliff, or through trees. This behavior pattern is quite predictable though, and with planning, it's fairly obvious where he's going to blink. Predicting this and lying in ambush can prove very effective. Before rushing for him as a team, consider the likely blink locations, and attempt to pre-emptively cut him off. It'll act like he's done the initiation for you, as he's jumped into the middle of your ursa or whatever you've decided to throw at him.

Mid game

This is Antimage's time to farm, because he's so hard to kill. Your team hasn't farmed up any orchids or sheepsticks, meaning you're working with your bare skills and early items (blinks and vanguards). With around 60% magic resistance and a 5 second cooldown blink, how can you kill him without perfect chain stunning and high physical damage? The best advice I can give is that you don't need to kill him, you just need to hamper his farm. Despite his penchant for a fast battlefury, he cannot farm that quickly if the lanes are closely monitored, and you constantly harass him out of the lane.

Heroes like broodmother and nightstalker are very good at scaring enemy farmers, because they can pose such a rapid and constant threat. Brood tends to camp in one lane, and unless their entire team shows up to dispose of her, she'll keep preventing the lane from being farmed by dominating anyone who shows up solo. Night stalker has powerful ganking tools, especially against antimage, who dislikes being silenced immensely. If timed right, an antimage can be unable to blink for 13 seconds (silence him not straight after he blinks, but just before it comes off cooldown.) Antimage also wants to avoid getting a bkb, because his natural magic resistance can shrug off the magic damage. This means stuns and slows will always prove useful against him, even if they aren't hurting him that much. However, the one thing that he cares not for are low duration stuns. Heroes like clockwerk and sniper, who thrive off ministuns, will have a hard time against AM, because the magic damage is negligible, and the stun duration does next to nothing.

Late game

Usually, how fucked you are against antimage is proportionate to his farm by this point. With manta battlefury and heart, there is little that can be done to stop him from tearing through your team. Heroes he dislikes are those who can out-dps him one on one, but these heroes aren't in dota 2 yet. The one exception is faceless void, who, with equal farm, has a chance to win. With void's chance based abilities, victory is always a somewhat random event.

Also, at this point antimage's ultimate can tear through any hero on your team. Even during the midgame, being on low mana can be a deathwish. The thing to remember is that he only gets to use it once in a fight, and it's his only mechanism for interrupting channeling. If you tp before he can kill you in 3 seconds, he will be forced to use the ultimate or give up the kill. Ghost scepter combined with a tp can work wonders, because he is forced to use the ultimate against even support heroes, which he is loathe to do if he's going up against another well farmed carry.

Another thing to remember is that antimage's mobility will most of the time outmatch your own heroes, but also his own team's. This means that while chasing, antimage tends to isolate himself from his team. An unsupported antimage like this gets to interrupt one tp if his ultimate is off cooldown.

It is also worth mentioning that BKB prevents AM from burning mana, which allows heroes like skeleton king and ursa to go toe-to-toe and win against him for a few seconds. It also pretty much negates the damage output of an illusions he has going on you, as they will no longer burn mana which is their main source of annoyance.

TL;DR predict his blinks early, slow his momentum mid, play to his weaknesses late.

protip

Scythe of vyse is obviously good. Orchid not so much. He isn't a caster hero, he's a dps hero.