Solo Queue Journey

chen can be a nightmare from level one if he gets lucky with the jungle spawns(imagine a wildkin tornado 1min into the game. with your hp pool and the tornado chasing you). Once he reaches level 3, 2 jungle creeps are quite the problem at that stage.

You could say chen comes online since min 1 if he gets a mud golem.
Back to topic though, at lvl 5 you can get 3 creeps to push a tower. But, you can probably do that in only one lane (most likely the safelane, mid is going to be defended for sure). If you push a tower that early and have a jungler, someone is going to suffer. Your team's carry isn't going to be very safe farming in the safelane anymore since it will often get pushed out. If he can transfer to the jungle, chen will suffer. He will either have to go to the enemy jungle which is highly risky or get almost nothing.

Unless you have an all in push strat, I don't think chen should be doing much except ganking at lvl 5, at least untill he gets mek.
Bounty hunter's purpose is to delay that mek as much as possible. Also, he can scout for chen ganks easily which will completely shut him down.

The thing with chen is that nowadays, even before the post summit 3 nerf.
Chen needs a VERY early timing window that NEEDS to work or he falls of instantly. You want to get something specific out of the hero and bounty completely is very good at shutting that down.

Go look up some games with both heroes.



Yes he can! And its ****in strong.

That's not strong, that's ****ing OP, IIRC they deal 225(or 275) damage, so you have 650+ damage nuke from level 1. At least he can't get rune first blood with that.

125 magic damage. 650+ would be absolutely rediculous XD. But 375 is still very strong.

You delay his level and item progression . By delaying his level and item progression you delay the push. Delaying the push means you increase the amount of items your team has to fight into the push, which directly weakens the push, and weakens Chen's period of time to thrive. You delay his ability to gank because you are again impairing his level and item progression, so the period of time where you can get two creeps and a smoke is delayed. It's also easier to spot, because you know BH will suddenly be missing the target he's stalking.

So in essence sure, he doesn't shut down the entire hero, but he impairs the financial benefit you otherwise gets from a jungler, he delays a time sensitive hero, and minimizes the impact he can have, through a major delay to the heroes level and item transition.

Also I do not remember the last time I saw a Chen go straight Ag's. Like, sure SF Mek is now considered the best build on the hero for the meta, but Chen still usually builds the Mek for his team, and the SF goes for a different item.

Like seriously, watch games with this interaction between the two heores, because more often, the BH wins at this, rather than the Chen, because if you can't hit your timing window on the hero, the pick is pretty meh.

EDIT; You even prevent his ability to mess with mid, because he does that with a creep at level 1, but you really can't get away with stacking against a BH. He will body-block, or block with sentries after one stack at most, so sending your creep to mess with mid puts you behind with practically no way to catch up.

Exactly. The games I watched were of this kind, where you have a Chen that can't level up nor get money because BH doesn't let him do it, and he was always accounted for - what good is to try to gank as Chen when everybody knows where you are all the time and what creeps you have with you?

And Chen does need XP and a Mechnism to do something relevant in a pro game (unless you are Puppey, he can do whatever he wants lol just kidding).

EDIT: Oops, Caine explained it already. BH is a counter, but only to a certain extent. I'm sorry if I can't give you the exact id matches, I usually watch something like a game per day in youtube at work so I can't keep track of the exact details for everyone. But I do remember a game where the Chen was so good he managed to get ahead a little later, as someone already said here.

I see that bounty hunter is a common counter to jungle lycan, so it seems odd that nobody has picked him in the several hundred games or so that I have played as lycan. Maybe that is something that will change in some of the higher matchmaking skill brackets?

I played a match yesterday where I picked tidehunter first, against a pretty aggressive and pushing happy team with Axe going behind towers and Slark constantly ganking us, who were pushing us right from the start.

I was a bit nervous because I have previously played some bad games against teams who were pushing us right from the start, but tidehunter was managing to defend his tower, and my team was rotating and communicating pretty well, so after I was out of the jungle and took roshan the match turned in our favor, and we won it pretty easily from that point.

Anyway, I'm going to play some games and upload some of the replays, so we have some material to work with.

in lower ranked pubs bounty isnt played as a very early game hero. people play him as more of a damage dealer since he gets more farm and kills.
against better players people buy more sentries and are more prepared for bounty ganks, so you cant play him as a damage dealer because he gets less farm. so there he is better as a support, ganking very early, giving the team information, and placing wards in dangerous places.