[Daily Hero tl;dr #28] Shadow Shaman

Shadow Shaman is an excellent pusher, laner, and ganker. We've been seeing him a lot in competitive play and he's definitely fun in recreational games. Note - he's named Rhasta in DotA, so I refer to him as Rhasta.

TL;DR

• Skills - Ether Shock (2,3,5,7) Voodoo (4,8,9,10) Shackles (1,12,13,14) Wards (6,11,16)
• Items (lane) - branches, regen, Urn
• Items (early) - boots (upgraded to Treads or Mana), Blink Dagger, BKB
• Items (later) - Aghs (can grab point booster earlier), Sheepstick, Refresher
• Tips - place wards before fight near towers, crowd control with multiple disables
• Counters - silences, stuns, DPS

When laning you're probably going to be in a solo. You have good harassing capabilities with your nuke and good base attack. But keep in mind that you're ganking power is exceptional. Gank the side lines often, you have two strong disables and some burst damage. I usually grab one Shackles at level 1 for an early first blood if possible.

Early-mid game you are ganking and pushing. Pick a lane, gank the hero, ward the tower, get kills make money. Most players like rushing a quick Dagger for easy positioning for all of this. An alternative to Dagger is Eul's which does basically the same thing, but gives some nice stats but costing a bit more.

Grab BKB afterward so you can happily get your wards down and shackle an interesting person for almost 5 seconds. You're able to take two heroes out of fights with Voodoo and Shackles, take advantage of that. Additionally, don't stack your disables. If someone is hexed, you don't need to shackle them!

Take advantage of the early and mid game. Roam the map a lot, grab kills, and quickly push down towers. Your wards do splash, so they can take creeps with relative ease. Be a little careful, if an enemy kills your wards they can get some decent gold, which isn't necessarily something you want.

// 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