Anti Mage Mana Burn Underestimated

^ With exception to enemies over extending, and team fights :)

You do realise how squishy AM is early game right? Yes his harassing potential is good, but lets say he gets close enough to hit one enemy, they would go all out right there to just kill you. There would be no reason for them not to, seeing how you would destroy them late game. So its always best to keep your head down and farm. You are only allowed to go in for early kills if absolutely certain if you can kill them and escape, or else you're wasting EXP and gold.

New here, but, whenever I play AM, I find that if you go in for the kill or to drain mana early game (being agility) your health isn't great for durability. If you are playing against decent players, they will shred your health by the time you get to them, making you have to back off before you get the chance to do some damage.

So IMO unless in a team fight, it is much safer to farm. (Completely from a noob's opinion)

I think that first blood should be given to the teams hard carry. The supports should set it up for him as this boosts his farm a lot. Ater first blood I think that farming becomes priority as farming is priority until its time to get that first blood. Magina is great at scoring first blood just because of blink. The heroes have to run a long way to be safe from an AM.

I like what DirtGrub said, but don't be too aggressive just for a first blood. If you get a first blood, then die afterwards, you lose more gold and EXP than you earned.

Laning isn't just a battle of right clicks. It's a battle of wits between the 2-6 people in that lane, depending on the kind of lane it is (1 on 1 to 3 on 3). For example, knowing when to go disturb the enemy pull and steal experience from them or knowing when to harass the enemy back and when to stop so you don't over extend while the enemy waits for the perfect moment when the distance between you and your team is just enough for them to initiate on you. When you're playing a hard carry, you want to keep distance between you and the enemy heroes. Especially when you're melee. I can't even recall how many times I've shut down carries with wind runner simply because they decided to respond to my harass almost immediately, often forgetting that I'm not as farm intensive as they are. And these are 1v1 lanes.

Anti-mage is an even more peculiar case because of the fact that he has terrible strength gain but immense farming potential, in front of which the early game harass seems but a meager trade off for the magic endurance and subsequent gold that comes from being able to stay on the lane. He's just that sort of hero.

Most games, you'll see teams focus on the AM and do everything they can to keep AM in check. Even if they don't kill him, they get him to stop farming. For this reason, most AM's will max their mana shield over their mana burn. You'll rarely find an AM who maxes mana burn in high skill games.

The AM doesn't really become a threat to any hero with a respectable mana pool till he hits level 5 and even then it's not likely that you'll be facing off against an enemy you can easily beat. The trend is to place a counter pick in the AM lane and not a hero that AM can easily suppress.

All in all, the early game harass you're talking about comes at far too great a cost and it's not even as effective because you harass the enemy to keep them away from the lane but that's only effective if you can afford to miss last hits yourself. Which, if you're an AM, you can't. Not even a little bit. The levels you deny them can be made up through ganking and you're both missing last hits while this goes on.

The real power of his mana burn comes into play when you acquire a Manta Style later in the game. But as far as early game goes, your responsibility is to survive the lane and farm as much gold as possible and let your lane partner help if he can. Naturally, it's always good to get kills in the early game but it should not come at the cost having to step out of your lane entirely.

Remember that your creep-to-hero interaction ratio in your lane is determined by the kind of hero you're playing. Morphling, AM, Trax, and so on need to focus on the last hitting and harass if possible, such as when the enemy lane has been cleared and the hero is in range to take a couple of hits. As opposed to that, Windrunner, PoTM or Lina would not be as negatively influenced by attacking the heroes in their lanes because they need to get levels and gank and through that they gain most of their gold. Not as much by creeping.

-Lars