Powerful Carry Heroes in Dota 2 Patch 7.35d

Every Dota 2 patch has its own overpowered heroes. In Dota 2 patch 7.35d, the meta favors some carry picks more than others. In this guide, I will explore seven formidable heroes that you can play to gain MMR.

Phantom Lancer

Phantom Lancer has largely been forgotten by the Dota 2 community. His current pick rate is just 7%, but his win rate remains high: 51.3%. That’s because his toolkit can be quickly upgraded with relatively cheap items to make him a fast farmer that’s really hard to kill.

When you play PL, time usually passes in your favor. In the late game, this hero destroys almost any other carry. The only thing he needs to be careful about is heroes like Zeus, Enigma, Anti-Mage, and Earthshaker, who are naturally good at dealing with illusion-based heroes either because of their natural abilities or because of their item build.

Phantom Lancer excels thanks to his illusions, which can multiply simply by attacking valid targets. If those illusions are tanky enough and deal enough damage, their effectiveness is so high that nothing can deal with them without having a lot of AoE damage and great initiation.

This is why Phantom Lancer tends to be unbeatable in the late game against most lineups. But unlike many other carry heroes, he starts to be strong in the laning phase. This means that he’s less likely to lose his lane. In most cases, he will dominate the enemy offlaner and then farm his own jungle with ease and efficiency thanks to his illusions, which both tank and deal damage.

When playing PL, you must gradually improve all of your abilities and build items like Power Treads, Diffusal Blade, Manta Style, and Heart of Tarrasque. If you want and feel safe enough, you can replace your Heart with Eye of Skadi or even Butterfly. It all depends on your playstyle and what the enemy has.

PL is one of the few Dota 2 heroes that don’t want to buy a Black King Bar. You could potentially buy Linken’s Sphere instead and also Manta Style. When your Linken’s gets activated, you must immediately use Manta or Doppelganger to confuse the enemy team and prevent easy detection.

This hero thrives when the other side cannot identify the real PL in the first few seconds of a fight. If you manage to create enough tanky illusions, your opponents will be forced to flee because there is no way of dealing with so many enemies at once.

If you own Diffusal Blade, your illusions will put a lot of pressure on the opposing heroes because they will quickly burn their mana. Without mana, fighting becomes impossible.

Phantom Assassin

Phantom Assassin is one of the deadliest heroes in Dota 2. Her burst damage is spectacular, reaching incredible heights during the late game, and her protection against basic attacks is greatly enhanced by Blur. This ability can also be activated to provide invisibility while farming.

Phantom Assassin has a lot of mobility built into her toolkit. Thanks to her Phantom Strike ability, she can jump 1000 units every 5s and gain 190 attack speed for 2.5s after landing at the chosen location. This means that she doesn’t need extra mobility or attack speed and can simply focus on damage and survivability.

PA’s Stifling Dagger deals lots of damage and more importantly, it slows the target by 50% for 4s. The cooldown is only 6s. This means that a good PA player will usually get two Stifling Dagger hits and two Phantom Strike hits in the span of around 6-8 seconds. Most opponents who want to fight PA will get killed during that time window without support from their allies.

PA’s ultimate greatly increases her damage output by giving her 200% – 450% critical damage. At level 18, instead of one attack, every one of her crits will deal 4.5 attacks. With two crits in quick succession, PA will deal the equivalent of 9 attacks.

This hero should generally be played using a Battle Fury build. You can add Desolator, Basher, and other powerful items that turn PA into a killing machine.

The most challenging part of the game for Phantom Assassin players is the first 10 minutes. That’s when this hero is quite vulnerable and cannot do much to fight back. But after around level 7, she starts to become strong. The key moment is the one in which you finally complete your Battle Fury. After that, you can farm much faster and have all the regen you need.

Morphling

Morphling is one of those carry heroes that can destroy entire enemy teams if played well. In the laning phase, he struggles because his attack range, HP, and mobility are all very poor. But as he gains levels and gold, he becomes one of the strongest heroes on the map, even at an early stage.

Thanks to Attribute Shift, Morphling is generally hard to kill. He can make himself a lot tankier than most heroes are in the laning phase, at the cost of 5 – 20 mana per second. Generally, he will need around 50 mana to gain a lot of strength or a lot of agility, which isn’t that much.

When playing Morphling, items like Phylactery, Linken’s Sphere, Dragon Lance, Manta Style, and Butterfly should be considered. This hero has a fantastic toolkit and all he needs is a bit more mobility, as well as stats and damage.

One of the most challenging aspects to learn when playing this hero is his ultimate. Using Morph, Morphling can transform into a target enemy, gaining his basic abilities. The duration of this transformation lasts for 24s. During this time, Morphling can change his form back to normal.

The usefulness of this ability is hard to grasp at first. But just think of a Rubick that can steal three abilities instead of one. He can’t steal ultimates, however.

If Morphling gives himself a lot of agility and then turns into Slark, he will be deadly. If he gives himself a lot of strength and then turns into Earthshaker, his Enchant Totem will deal an enormous amount of damage.

The potential to have an impact is great. The main bottleneck is your ability to make the right choices under pressure and also your ability to play a lot of different heroes well enough to know how to use them if they’re on the other team and you have the ability to morph into them.

It doesn’t really help to morph into Pudge if you’ve never played Pudge. That’s one of the challenging aspects of playing Morphling. To make good use of his ultimate, you need to be very versatile.

Faceless Void

Faceless Void is a hero that can get one or two kills on his own during the late portion of the game. If he traps the right heroes in his Chronosphere, that will give him more than 4s to deal uninterrupted damage to them. If his teammates are close, they can join and help him finish the job.

Faceless Void is like Magnus or Enigma but instead of being just an initiator, he’s also a great damage dealer. With a bit of help from a hero like Zeus, Invoker, Witch Doctor, Lich, Sniper, or many others, he can easily help his team win every single fight.

Void’s abilities are some of the most powerful in the game. Time Walk gives him the option of backtracking all the damage he took in the last 2s. At the same time, this ability is almost as good as a Blink Dagger because its range is 800 at level 4. If you select the appropriate level 10 talent, you can go back to 2.5s ago instead of 2s ago when it comes to negating incoming damage.

Thanks to Time Lock, which is a passive ability, Faceless Void will stun enemies for 0.5s and deal extra damage to them roughly every 2s. This makes it difficult for them to use TP scrolls to get away. It also makes it difficult for them to cast channeling abilities.

Time Dilation completely destroys heroes with lots of abilities, especially if their strategy relies on casting the same spell twice during a fight. Such heroes will have their cooldowns extended and their attack and movement speed slowed significantly.

When playing Faceless Void, the most important thing to pay attention to is your Chronosphere. How you use it will often make the difference between success and failure. You don’t want to use it in a way that allows enemy heroes to just blink away. Or on your teammates. Or when there’s no one around to help you deal more damage.

Chaos Knight

Chaos Knight gains more and more power as the game progresses, partly because his illusions become very powerful and almost impossible to fight against. Other illusion-based heroes tend to have weak illusions. But CK’s illusions, called phantasms, deal 100% of his damage. They take 325% damage in return, but as long as they’re attacking, they are deadly.

If you buy Manta Style on this hero, at level 18 you can have a total of five illusions, three of which are as strong as you are in terms of damage output.

To make things even easier, Reality Rift allows you to essentially blink toward an enemy with all of your illusions from a range of 750 units. When you land, you decrease the armor of your target by 7 and hit him with all of your illusions. You can also stun the target for 2 – 3s using Chaos Bolt. This will give you the chance to attack 3-4 more times.

In most cases, CK will easily kill a target this way before anyone on the enemy team can react. Because of that, he is a feared carry in Dota 2.

To make your illusions even more powerful, you can buy Armlet of Mordiggian. This item costs just 2500 gold and will give you amazing damage and strength bonuses, as well as lots of armor, attack speed, and HP regen.

Naga Siren

Naga Siren may not look deadly at first, but she certainly is. Using her illusions, she can farm multiple jungle camps at once or push multiple lanes at once. In team fights, her ability to ensnare her enemies tends to be very powerful. Being rooted for 5s is not exactly fun. You can’t blink and you cannot attack as a melee hero.

While being ensnared, Naga will surround you with her illusions and deal massive amounts of damage. Riptide will guarantee that her attacks are deadly because you will lose a lot of armor for 4s while suffering from its debuff.

Naga’s ultimate, Song of the Siren, is one of the most reliable abilities for starting fights or running away from them. It lasts for 7s at level 1 and will put to sleep any hero that doesn’t have debuff immunity.

Because of this, buying BKB against Naga tends to be essential. But if you use it while your teammates are vulnerable, you might end up being the only one awake, just like in Dark City.

Luna

Luna is known for being a stable carry with high movement speed and excellent abilities. She’s a quick farmer and can fight really well in the early and late game. Her weakness is the mid game because she doesn’t have enough damage to kill enemies with physical damage, while her ultimate can easily be dodged or blocked with a BKB.

Once she is farmed enough and has established a sieging position, Luna is very hard to stop. Her glaves deal massive amounts of damage to structures and heroes alike. And the fact that they bounce multiple times is extremely annoying for her enemies.

When playing Luna, you can make use of items like Mask of Madness and Dragon Lance to speed up your farm. During nighttime, this hero has great advantages, so you might want to gank while conditions are favorable to you.

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