Necrophos: King of the Pubs?

Necrophos, despite not having the pubstomper status that Riki, Pudge or Sniper do, has consistently been one of the pub heroes in the game, having a 57.83% winrate, second only to Omniknight's 57.93% winrate over the last year or so. Whereas Omniknight's success is attributable to his ability to give his allies free bkbs and risk free ghost scepters, I never quite understood what makes Necrophos such a successful pub hero.

Can someone enlighten me on how he's so successful?

He's tanky, his laning phase is really strong, he gets free regen from last hits, has a spammable heal/nuke. Not to mention his ulti, which once with aghanims kills pretty much any hero at slightly more than 1/2 hp, and makes them dead for centuries.

It's very hard to play against Heartstopper Aura in lane if you don't have an organised team. You have to decide - we kill Necrophos or we are *******, and we are losing farm/EXP.

Death Pulse is almost always underestimated, which ends up in triple kills for Necrophos 5 minutes into the game.

Reaper's Scythe is very frustrating and decreases your morale to go on him. Especially after you've spend 70 seconds out of the game when you are level 10. Not cool.
By that I mean, that sometimes you have sick early comboes - like a big nuke + Reaper's Scythe. In early and midgame Finger of Death + Reaper's Scythe basically means a kill, and it's fairly easy to do. Their carry is dead and he can't farm for the extended amount of time, while your #1 is getting gold and experience. Not cool at all.

He also tends to build tanky items, so he isn't easy to kill. Plus Death Pulse of course. It's a decent nuke with very low cooldown.

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How about Abaddon? He also has a very high winrate. Third, I suppose.

Well, to learn about this, we got to draw the line between what pubs do and how Necro exploits it.

A. Pubs lane passively.
Necro is defined by slowing chipping you down. Basically, most pubs have passive as hell laning phases, and Necro can easily take control of a lane if ganks are not coming or if lanes don't go for kills when they have the opportunity to. Thus, Necro secures early game usually, which is huge. Troll losing his lane dominance cost him an 8% winrate drop.

B. Pubs love to teamfight.
Wonder why Undying, Zeus, Omniknight, and Warlock are consistently high in winrates? Because they love to fight, and heroes who can fight in teamfights early benefit tons from this. Death Pulse is one of the most dangerous skills in early fights when it creates ~400 hp difference.

C. Pubs overdive when aggressive
Necro, with his health difference creating skill and Reaper's scythe is one of the best heroes at punishing overdives, especially once BKBs wear off and Heartstopper can do its work.

D. Pubs don't pick a target, and if they do, its either initiator or carry.
Pubs will either target the strong *** Faceless Void or the all important Enigma. Necro has the benefit of not being very flashy, and generally is underestimated, due to taking some time to take effect (like a plague! THEMATIC!). No one focuses him, he gets a scythe off, the fight is 4v5 and with Sadist, now he's impossible to focus down, and the fight is won, and with Aghs, the next fight is also won because BB is down.

E. Pubs let the game drag on even when its not necessary.
Necro is one of the best late game heroes that is not a hard carry. Like a Doom or a Magnus. With his scaling aura and his utterly broken Scythe, getting picked off means you lose in many cases. Necro also happens to be one of the best heroes at playing from behind, a major reason being that when people are winning, they don't get BKBs usually, and he already punishes the hell out of overdiving. Necro is the real late game terror.

F. Margin of error.
Pub winrates are all about margin of error. In the case of Omni and Abaddon, its to increase their team's margin of error so they can screw up and those guys will always bail them out. Necro works in reverse. He creates a lower margin of error on the enemies. If they get scythed, they are out of the map for longer, Necro gets full mana. Deaths are costly when you're against Necro. Map control might normally take like 5 deaths to lose, but against Necro, it could be lost in as little as 3. Conversely, look at Shadow Demon, if you don't snowball him in his very short amount of dominance, he becomes useless, Chen too.

I hope this helped!

Necro is one of the best team fighting heroes that everyone passes over. Also pubs never care to build defensive items like BKB or Linkens in matches.

One of my favorite greedy supports along with Omni.

you are forgetting magic resist. with 25% magic resist it's slightly less then 50% (47% of their hp)

Agree with Cuttle completely. I would also add that he's a great hero in dual lane lineups with 3 or even 4 cores, as seems to be common in pubs. In competitive the big issue with Necro is that he's played as a #1 or a #2, which can be a problem because if you do that you're left with no carry and probably a lack of teamfight lockdown as well. A lot of competitive games with Necro are actually lost because their team has no damage output.

Necro is definitely a #3 utility hero in the way he works : needs levels, needs a few items but not that much, not a main damage dealer (since he relies on his team to deal the damage to get off his ult), natural carrier of utility items like mek/pipe...but he can't go offlane or jungle like #3 heroes go, so that's an issue.

But in pubs you don't have that problem! You can actually play him like a #3. He can go mid, he can go safe lane support and get his farm from stacking jungle, he can dual offlane and shut down the enemy carry, etc. You can pretty much spam Necro every game without even looking at the picks and you'll get a good laning position.

Essentially there's no way you can lose the late game with Necrophos AS LONG as you have a main #1 damage dealer in your team. Because at that point you can remove 2 enemy cores from the game for more than 2 minutes without buyback, and the game is over.

So another argument is that Necro's big weakness is that he relies completely on his team for dealing damage so he can get off his ult, and in pubs there are a LOT of damage dealers so that's not an issue - while in competitive if you have a safe lane Necro, a Lina mid and an offlane Centaur, if the game goes late...GG no damage team.

Unrelated topic, but do you think jungling Necrophos is possible at all?
I mean, some people had tried it and they managed to do quite well, seeing what Necrophos brings into the table don't you think it's remotely possible to be worth it?
Some examples: here or here

There's already been a topic on ancient jungling with Necro.

http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/forum/theorycrafting/ancient-jungler-necro-33621

Can he jungle? Kind of. Should you do it? No. AFK junglers who can't gank suck hard and make you lose games. And jungling with such a strong laning hero makes no sense.

If you want to take advantage of his jungle farming ability, play him as a safe lane support. Sit in lane harassing, pulling and denying, and help your carry farm until you get to level 5-6, and then once your carry is farming well and had a good start, move on to clear the jungle camps you stacked to get your mek, your midas or whatever (IMO mek and midas are the only two first items that make sense on him, depending on whether the hero picks are focused on early teamfighting or on AFK farming). A bit like a Sand King, he can both support and farm his items with a good timing. Alternatively you can solo safe lane or solo mid and stack camps like this as well. He needs levels to jungle effectively anyways.

This is most likely the best necro-analysis i have ever read :D