6.86b is here

He needs a really safe lane because he is as reliant on his early items as Anti Mage for example so you need to make sure your lane will be uncontested and the enemy won't gank early.
You should also be aware of invis heroes and other heroes that can sneak up on you. Like Natures Prophet, Riki and others because they can pose a threat to you while being behind your allies and will make Divine Rapier a really hard choice.
That are just my 2 cents but Arc Warden is not there for a really long time so the best thing is to let the others find out his real strenghts and weaknesses.

If you get rapier on him, you don't even show your scum face. You just sit in base and spam Tempest Double and push with your illusion.

Ok a few new things about Arc Warden :

- Skill build is 4/1/2. Every game. Alwayx max Flux at 8 at most. It's a huge nuke and the cast range is a really big deal to catch out the people who wander off. Spark Wraith is a "2-value point" no real benefit maxing it since you don't have the mana to spam it early anyways, and anyone maxing Magnetic Field beyond a value point should stop with the weed :)

- Buy a Blink Dagger or a Silver Edge. AW has no way to jump people so if you want to get solo kills that's the way. Typical item build : Midas -> Necrobook -> travels -> blink or SB.

- Buy a Diffusal Blade. 8 free purge charges with zero cooldown for *each and every clone*? Permanent max slow sounds perfectly fair and balanced...especially on a hero who buys necrobook. OSFrog.

- No point buying Bottle on this hero. First off, Bottle is super weak in this patch. Second, keeping a Healing Salve and an Enchanted Mango on the main hero and casting them with the clone on the hero does exactly the same job of infinite sustain for way less gold, so it doesn't delay your midas unnecessarily. Besides, it also works in the safe lane.

- Flux is actually the OP part about the hero. Costs no mana, slow is way too long and way too good at low levels, and a huge (double) nuke on top. And lasts 6 f****ng seconds, 12 with the clone. This is old Terablyat level, even better than that by far. If you don't hug your creeps you're dead, if you do you get harassed to no end...OSFrog. His other skills are fine.

- Divine Rapier is great if you have a way to constantly push out the lanes and keep the enemy heroes in their base. In that case buy a rapira, buy a BKB, and poke towers for free. Rapira is awesome in the Naga style radiance/manta build because it pushes out lanes. It's pretty mediocre in the necrobook build though. IMO the necrobook build is actually more about snowballing with kills than it is about ratting.

- Refresher Orb is great as a luxury 7th slot item to keep it in base and get a free clone once in a while. However Octarine Core gives more uptime than refresher. The only real benefit of refresher is that you can keep it in your base.

Bottle sustains you before level 6 and lets you actually spam Flux and behind-the-wave Spark Wraith, and since you have one of the best rune controlling abilities, you'll always have a rune ready. It's really good for your early game before 6, the part where you are at your weakest.

He is actually not that good of a mid, better than I though initially because I didn't get into the hero, but there are plenty of heroes who can just fight him under Flux - Lina, Invoker, Shadow Fiend if he gets some souls early etc. Magnetic Field has a cooldown of 50 after all and is not a problem for most nukers anyway. It's just people are too scared of Flux and some do not even know how it works. If you've seen Vaxa's(top 1 Zet atm) streams/replays you'll get what I'm talking about.

Blink and Silver are not core at all. The point is, for lategame aimed Arc Warden Necrobook is the best build, it just heavily outclasses Mael, Diffusal rush etc., whatever you can come up with, and when you have 2 Necro III 20 minutes into the game, you don't need to catch up. Towers can't run, and Flux has 900 cast range anyway, so you can pick off people very easily with your team.

IMO Octarine sucks, though Ive never tried that. You basically only get it for clone uptime, while it gets completely wasted on clone and your clone having good items is essential if you want to win lategame and actually push the base.

Agreed with everything else.

You mean necrobook is the best build for *mid* game Arc warden?

Because in the late game there's absolutely no way to deal with a radiance/manta AW who always keeps all 3 lanes pushed and pokes towers with rapira and a *permanent 10 second BKB* (yep, even if the main's BKB depletes, the clone's is always 10 seconds). Pretty much Naga on steroids.

Octarine Core is great in the radiance/manta Naga build, for clone uptime and manta uptime. You know, that build that I kept flaming on Alchemist because uptime on Alch ult doesn't do anything while 33% additional uptime on Tempest Double is completely gamechanging. And octarine is more uptime than refresher while also giving HP.
Besides by the time you buy rapira you can't commit with the main hero, only the clone can do the work, so uptime is essential.
I still wouldn't go octarine in the necrobook build, because if you go necrobook you have no way to push out lanes so it's better to buy damage items like mjollnir and such.

Ok maybe I hate Bottle a bit too much in this patch because of completely unfair nerfs...I guess it can help in a difficult mid matchup.

Of course Necrobook will be replaced later as they will just be free 200 gold creeps, but yes, whatever you're aiming for, Necros are insane with Arc's farming speed and they are just like an additional hero for him - even if you don't intend to fight or push lanes. Just send them farming yours or enemy jungle, camp by camp, from Necro II onward they just cut through neutrals. I'd say any core Zet build is Necroboom build so there's really no such thing as a non-Necrobook build, it's never the center part of any build, but it still should be there. You don't say "BKB/non-BKB Luna build" for the same reason.

Why would you even get Radi-Manta on him anyway? They only reason Naga goes Radi over other farming/pushing items is because it works on illusions just as well as on the main hero, but Arc doesn't spam illusions and farm all the map with them, he creates another hero for a brief period. That's the entire point. Give him Mjollnir and he will do the same job, even better since creeps kill themselves on the shield instantly. Really, if you want to go full cancer with BKB and Octocore, just get Mjollnir instead of Radiance, it does the same job better and gives actual tower damage. Manta has pretty low impact unless you go stat focused Zet, which I love, but Octocore-BKB is hardly even close that a stat-focused Zet).

Bottle nerfs suck tho, I agree.

Not exactly. With Mjollnir he can right-click for 20 seconds and then die. With radiance/manta his clone can apply radiance for 20 seconds and then summon his manta illusions to apply radiance for 20 additional seconds, so 40 seconds in total. Nectarine brings his ult cooldown to 41 seconds so that's almost 100% uptime of ebola :)

Oh, this. Didn't think of that. Guess you;re right then, as long as nobody kills the illusions it;s insane.

How do you deal with counter pushers like Ember tho? I've only tried him in unranked in the first days of his release and in AP it's almost impossible to get him last, you always have to firstpick him there. And even if you don't, you'll get some counter pushers in your face for sure since ppl will wait forever to counterpick(Counterpick in unranked. In High, ****ing, Skill bracket. Pls die). Then your team goes all nuts since you picked a 37% avg winrate hero and refuses to cooperate at all so you can't even abuse the double Necrobook 20 mins in.

Does Manta-Radi build deal with that early enough?

I don't think counterpush is a major problem. AW is not Chen, he doesn't rely on finishing the game early. If the enemy team is focused on counterpushing you can just farm. I honestly think that defensive turtling against AW is exactly how you should NOT play. Cleaing waves only delays the game while AW is freefarming and still poking towers, that's a losing battle.
The only way to beat a rat is to kill the rat. If you only clear the wave you lose.

Manta/radiance Nagawarden is a major greed build and has all the advantages...and downsides of playing naga. Except you get it significantly faster than naga, you have better laning than naga, and you don't care about naga counters...but otherwise same.
Nagawarden doesn't care about counterpushers for the same reason Naga doesn't. Naga only cares about illusion killers like Lion or Pugna...but Tempest Double is not an illusion so NagaWarden has no counters AFAIK. Well except bugged Track that works on the double (volvo pls fix).

Does it give the bonus gold even if the clone dies his own death?