Why Crystal Maiden is played in 15% of all Dota 2 matches

There was a time, which lasted for years, when the Dota 2 community had zero interest in Crystal Maiden. Everything about this hero was awful. But now she’s popular again and around 15% of all Dota 2 pub games include her.

The reason is not hard to grasp. All you need to do is analyze what IceFrog did to CM over the last several patches.

Crystal Maiden’s strengths

Crystal Maiden is strong in the laning phase and remains strong throughout the game. Her biggest weakness is the lack of any ability that can pierce spell immunity. Everything else about this hero is promising.

During the laning phase, you can cast Crystal Nova to slow movement speed by 20% – 50% for 5 seconds, as well as attack speed (30 – 75). This ability can be used every 11 – 8 seconds, which makes it extremely potent against melee heroes who have poor mobility skills. A Troll Warlord, for instance, will detest playing against CM.

The damage dealt by Crystal Nova is substantial: 110 – 260.

Another ability that makes CM powerful is Frostbite. It deals 100 damage per second and lasts for 1.5s – 3s. This means that you can deal 150 damage with it at level 1 and cast it every 9s – 6s for 125 – 150 mana. That is absolutely insane. This hero is perfect for getting lots of kills in the laning phase.

To make things even better, Frostbite can be cast on a neutral creep and will deal a total of 1000 damage over 10 seconds. This means that CM can easily farm neutral camps and enrich herself quite rapidly. All you need to do is move from camp to camp, cast this spell, and wait to get the gold and XP without doing much else.

Arcane Aura is CM’s best team ability. She receives 2.4 – 6 mana per second from it, while her team receives 50% of that. When you have a hero like Storm Spirit on your team, playing CM is very useful.

Freezing Field is not exactly reliable because it’s channeled and hits random targets in a 320 radius area. But it’s still very powerful if enemies can’t get to you or you are using your Black King Bar while channeling it. This ability works well with an AoE stunner, especially if you have a Blink Dagger.

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