Thars by Sernyx

Aghanim's Scepter

Eternal Fire deals 50% of the damage in a 250 radius around the target.

Aghanim's Shard

Each stack of Immolation also grants 2% Spell Amplification.

Skyflame is designed to be a unique approach to a hard carry. It's quite an unorthodox role for an Intelligence hero, and he performs in it in a different way than other heroes.

Eternal Fire is his bread and butter. It gives him a unique method of scaling fitting an Intelligence hero, allowing him to perform both as a spell-caster and as a right-clicker. Moreso, the scaling magical (potentially pure) damage autoattacks make him a good tank destroyer, as armor values are usually higher than magis resistance later in the game. The cooldown reduction allows him to use active items more effectively than other heroes, and rewards the good usage of Blazing Strike in teamfights.

Blazing Strike is his main spell for the early parte of the game. It gives him lane presence, harass potential, and its low cooldown makes it a useful farming tool - an essential requirement for a hard carry. During the ultimate, it has a larger area of effect, which helps hitting more enemies with it for more cooldown reduction and healing from his passive.

Immolation is a very high risk-high reward ability. It incentivizes the player to keep it on for prolonged period of time for maximum benefits, but leaves him very vulnerable by burning away his health. Carefully managing your health to keep up reasonable levels of strength and not falling to low is crucial. Additionally, Skyflame doesn't have any means to sustain his health without the ultimate - so in order to be a strong ranged carry that doesn't die to a couple sneezes in his direction, he either has to invest into lifesteal - or go deep into fights from time to time. This is where the magic resist comes in handy - it protects you in the heat of things, making you harder to take down in close combat.

His ultimate has a wide array of potential purposes. It can be used as an engage or a disengage tool with a very solid range, as a hard-hitting nuke in the mid-game, or even as a dispel through its Spell Immunity period. The tricky part is to stop the charge in time to go precisely where you want to, or letting it go preemptively if you're about to get hit with an enemy disable. No cheesy escapes allowed unless enemies brought no crowd control - in that case this is pretty much an alternative to a TP-out.

Being an Intelligence hero and having his damage scaling built into his abilities, Skyflame's item build is a field ripe for experiments. He can go for almost any item in the game, as he can make use out of anything - damage, utility, tankiness, etc. He can ramp up his damage output with Intelligence items giving him double the effect, raw damage or proc items to go along his high attack speed from Immolation, or a more magic-focused build with active items coming off quickly thanks to his passive. He can tank up and not be afraid of diving in with Path of the Flame, or losing too much health from Immolation and keep it maxed up continiously. And utility items work just as well if he can utilize the cooldown reduction to its full potential.

Study your opponents, gather up a deadly arsenal, and be your team's searing fist!

Hero art and icons made by me