Underrated Io Combo Duos

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon that Io pairs very nicely with Chaos Knight and Tiny, since he accelerates their farm rate, fixes their regeneration issues, and makes them snowball easily with global ganks, and in Tiny's case, also grants him some crazy ratting ability.

This thread is not about that. What combos with Io do you feel are under appreciated or at least worth a try?

Sven seems popular, since he functions kind of like CK and Tiny, although his laning is not quite as strong.

Necrophos is also an effective lane due to the doubled power of healing from death pulses, which can allow him to dive the hell out of enemies.

Slardar should work too, just like those guide suggested a while back, since Io grants regen, movespeed, and attackspeed, everything Slardar wants.

Dragon Knight also seems like it'd be good match, for a non-early pusher approach to the hero, as the MS lets him get easy stuns off and the bonus IAS and dmg resistance is nice, also to push towers faster.

Leshrac can also benefit quite a bit from an Io, being able to demolish towers globally is scary. As is a Leshrac taking less damage and prancing even faster than usual.

Ursa becomes more resistant to kiting with an Io, and global jumping lets for easy bursts on certain targets.

and once, I played with a Skywrath Mage as my midgame snowballing buddy, the even higher speed on the dude as well as some extra mana prevented the enemies from fleeing. That game ended well for us.

IO Huskar
IO Medusa( my favourite draft for rapira rush)
IO Legion commander
IO WK

all are workable.
But the very fact is this: None of this even compares to an io tiny wombo combo.

The Phantom Assassin dual mid lane is one of my faves.
Also wisp Morphling, even though morphling is kinda meh now, its great if you get ahead early. You can be everywhere you want with replicate relocate, you have waveform into teather slow, and you become almost impossible to get bursted.

From your list i always like to watch necro io, dk io, and sky io.

Gyro and bristle io are also really common in professional games, gyro because of mad stack clear and bristle because he becomes a superspeedy extremely hard to kill clubbingmachine with infinate mana.

Also riki io used to kind of be a thing. But the changes he got made him a worse carry, i really hated that ult and blink change and MS nerf.

VP likes to run Io with Slark,it's not that great at the start but later on it's quit powerful: Slark is already hard to kill add Relocate and Overcharge and he's almost immortal,bonus attack speed is great to get Essence Shift stacks and bonus MS during combat is great to stick on target,at least before you get Eye of Skadi.

Is it just me or have I not seen the Io + Bristleback?

That combo is really good, let me tell you that.

Some things that are needed for someone to be paired with Io:

• Does not require solo EXP
• Can benefit from the regen (eg. Mana-intensive heroes, huskar, etc.)
• Can benefit from the attack speed ( Tiny, Slark)
• Can benefit from the global presence of Relocate (DK, Pony)
• Already has a high EHP pool to benefit from the regen (and not +health) of Io

You just don't see as much Bristleback lately.

But yeah, Io-Bristle was a fairly common dual off-lane, because it basically gave Bristle a great start whilst disrupting the enemy safe-lane farm.

Also, Io doesn't need to have a dedicated partner anymore in drafts. Like, it's most common to have one, but he's equally good as just a support because he just excells at keeping people alive. But that's a different issue entirely.

Have you seen the Io + Earthshaker (core)? It works wonders.

A lot of the times people underestimate the movement speed provided by tether. Io SB works too.