Five Amazing Mid Heroes in Dota 2

Dota 2 mid heroes are both fascinating and challenging. They usually require more than 100 games to play properly and many more games to master. In some cases, by the time you’ve reached your 500^th game with that hero, you’re barely starting to be fluent. Invoker, Meepo, and Templar Assassin are definitely on that list.

In this guide, you will discover five Dota 2 heroes that are not necessarily fun to play at first, but they do become fun to play once you’ve learned the basics. All of them, when used against the right lineups and with great skill, can help you gain a lot of MMR.

Death Prophet

Death Prophet is one of the best heroes for taking Roshan and siegeing enemy buildings. When her Exorcism is active, nobody on the opposite team wants to be near her.

Death Prophet has the perfect combination of abilities. She can cast a long-duration silence on multiple enemies, clear creep waves with ease, take Roshan, and push relentlessly with her ultimate. Her only weakness is on the defensive side because the opposing team can bait your ultimate and then retreat. But when you’re the one attacking, nothing can stand against you.

DP’s Crypt Swarm can be cast every 6s and its damage is substantial: 325. This means that you only need to cast it twice to get rid of an entire creep wave, even if it’s large. That’s around 7s per creep wave. After that you can go and farm the jungle, or possibly go on the offensive with your team.

The W of this hero is phenomenal, possibly one of the best skills in the game. It can be cast quickly, has a low cooldown (12s), covers a 450 radius area, and applies a debuff that lasts for 5s. That debuff silences opponents and slows their movement speed by 25%. Both of these effects are devastating.

DP is also strong in the laning phase thanks to her Spirit Siphon, which prevents enemies from trying to dive you or to stay near you in general. Ganks against this hero have a low chance of succeeding without multiple stuns.

When playing Death Prophet, you need a combination of movement speed, stats, sustainability, and survivability. Items like Shiva’s Guard, Eul’s Scepter, Eternal Shroud, and Kaya and Sange work very well. Ultimately, it’s up to you to pick the items that give you the highest chance of winning against the particular hero composition you are facing.

Templar Assassin

Templar Assassin is one of the fastest farmers in Dota 2. This hero tends to reach several power spikes before the 10 minute mark, which allows you to put a lot of pressure on your opponent and simultaneously farm multiple jungle camps between the creep waves. You can also stack Ancients or, ideally have someone stack them for you.

Templar Assassin is currently the lowest win rate hero in Dota 2, sitting at 44% and a pick rate of less than 4%. But that’s not because the hero is bad. She’s just difficult to play. If you don’t know what you’re doing and fall behind, it is difficult to recover.

When you have a massive farming speed, you’re supposed to put it to use, gain a substantial gold lead and then push relentlessly, securing Roshan and destroying towers. This is not a hero that you want to be passive with.

Your teammates should be aware of the fact that you want to end the game before the 30-minute mark. After that point, TA starts to fall off. A lot of powerful carry heroes, like Anti-Mage and Terrorblade, tend to do well in the ultra-late game against TA because she’s not equipped to deal with them at that point without massive support from disablers.

But if you force favorable fights early, you will typically win them and extend your lead to a point where you’ll be able to siege the enemy base with an Aegis. At that point, playing the game correctly should give you the victory.

TA’s abilities are great for keeping trap of enemy movement, blocking damage instances, attacking multiple targets with your basic attacks, and dealing massive amounts of damage. You will also lower armor by 8 – 11 with Meld. Buying an additional Desolator allows you to remove half of a target’s effective HP against physical damage, which is quite helpful.

This hero’s item builds usually include a Blink Dagger, a Dragon Lance, and a Dadelaus. You should also buy a Black King Bar if the enemy has good disables. Just make sure that you don’t let the game go beyond the 30 minute mark because you’ll run into a lot of problems after that point.

Invoker

Invoker is probably the most sophisticated hero that you can play in Dota 2. You must learn how to use 11 different abilities and he often uses items with active abilities on top of those. This makes Invoker a formidable hero but also a challenging one to learn.

To be an Invoker player requires around one year of experience. You will essentially need to accumulate 500 – 1000 games to be competent with this hero and even then it’s not always easy to use his combos correctly.

Invoker’s pick rate is above 15%. But his win rate is just 47%, mainly because you cannot win with him without being reasonably good. Each ability you invoke is composed of a combination of three different keys: Q, W, and E. These keys are associated with your Quas, Wex, and Exort orbs. Depending on what combination you choose, you will invoke a different ability.

Remembering all 10 combinations is not that difficult, even though it can take several days to do it. What is difficult, however, is knowing what to invoke in every situation and doing it fast enough.

When a fight breaks out, what do you do? What do you invoke first? How do you use your abilities? How do you position yourself? Invoker is not for people who can’t think quickly and make optimal decisions based on the specifics of each situation.

Invoker gets stronger as the game progresses. This hero desperately needs levels, and his laning phase tends to be weak. Because of that, you risk losing the mid lane badly to a much stronger opponent. But if you survive this stage, you will quickly catch up.

When playing Invoker, some of the best items that you can buy are Hand of Midas, Boots of Travel, Octarine Core, Black King Bar, Shiva’s Guard, Eul’s Scepter, Aghanim’s Scepter, and Scythe of Vyse.

Outworld Destroyer

Outworld Destroyer currently has a win rate of nearly 51% and a pick rate of 8.5%. This hero can have a huge impact on the game and is one of the most reliable midlane farmers. To become scary during the mid portion of the game, all you need are some mobility and durability items.

Usually, players love buying Blink Dagger, Hurricane Pike, Witch Blade, Parasma, Black King Bar, Shiva’s Guard, and other such items when they play OD. The damage you deal is based on your mana, so anything that gives you mana or intelligence is very useful.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to build items that give a combination of mana, intelligence, and other stats that can make a big difference in your games. It’s always fun to deal a lot of damage per attack, but you must also keep in mind that you won’t be able to attack enemy heroes without having good range, debuff immunity, and some tankiness.

OD is typically one of the main targets for the opposing team in every fight. To avoid getting killed early, you need to turn yourself into a tank with high mobility, and long attack range, that relies on his mana pool to deal most of the damage.

This hero should be picked primarily against strength-based lineups with a lot of melee heroes. Against such heroes, one ultimate can be devastating. Consider the fact that you will deal 200 – 400 + 40% of the mana difference per ultimate. If you have 2000 mana and the opponent has 600, that’s a massive amount of magical damage in a 600 radius.

OD can easily restore his mana using Essence Flux, and then use that mana to deal a lot of pure damage using Arcane Orb. This ability has a 0s cooldown at level 4 but consumes 20% of your current mana per hit. This means that you will be able to spam it but the damage you deal will be significantly reduced by your decreasing mana.

The problem is fixed to some extent by Essence Flux, which gives you a 30% chance to restore 55% of your maximum mana whenever you use an ability. Just cast two spells and you will typically gain half your mana pool back.

Using Astral Imprisonment, OD can escape from dangerous situations or set up kills for his team. If you also have a Mirana on your side, the combination between Astral Imprisonment and Arrow is often lethal. This ability also steals a lot of mana from your opponents and the effect lasts for 60s. So you’re similar to Slark.

Just cast this ability two times on an enemy and then use your ultimate. The effect will be devastating. The cooldown is only 12s, so you can do it with ease. And each time you cast it, the target loses 22% of their maximum mana for 60s.

Necrophos

Necrophos is one of the most dangerous heroes in Dota 2. At first, you don’t feel his impact. But as he becomes tankier and more mobile, you start to realize how difficult it is to deal with him.

When you play Necrophos, you need to make sure that you are tanky enough to be able to stand near your enemies and slowly tear them down. If any of them loses more than 50% of their HP, you can use your ultimate to secure the kill.

Some of the items that are really useful to have when playing this hero are Blink Dagger, Shiva’s Guard, Eternal Shroud, Heart of Tarrasque, Radiance, Boots of Travel, and Kaya & Sange.

Thanks to his natural toolkit, Necrophos is very successful in Dota 2 patch 7.35c, having a win rate of 52% and a pick rate of 11%. His Heartstopper Aura deals 2.4% of an opponent’s max HP per second. This applies to all enemies in an 800 radius.

When a creep or a hero gets killed by you, you gain 4 – 7 HP and mana regen per second for 7 seconds. Because of this, your laning phase tends to be quite easy.

Necrophos also has a way of making himself immune to basic attacks for 4.5s using Ghost Shroud. This ability offers him 75% restoration amplification, which can be further amplified by the right items. Nearby enemies are slowed by 25% for the duration of the buff. The only downside is that you can’t attack either and will take 25% more magic damage.

Death Pulse deals 280 damage and heals you for 130. You can use it every 5s, which basically means that you can create a 410 HP difference between yourself and your opponent every 5s. Combined with basic attacks and Heartstopper Aura, this ability allows you to 1v1 almost any hero in the laning phase without having to worry that you might get killed.

When playing Necrophos, you have an easy way of killing key targets using your ultimate, Reaper’s Scythe. Thanks to this ability, even the most scary enemy carry will need to play a lot more prudently. In turn, this gives your team all kinds of advantages that can lead to a victory.

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