The Dragon and the Drow (D n' D) Draft

I remember a while back I put together a draft called "The Dragon and the Drow" also known as Dn'D. The draft was not very viable in the last patch, due to the limited gameplay options and DK being massively underpowered, but now I think it can possible be viable.
Basically it ran a position 1 mid DK to be comboed with a position 2 safelane Drow, who would be building agility items. DK absorbed Drow's aura for his dragon form and tanks up to dps everyone else down.

DK Build: Bottles (Midas?) Treads SnY BKB Daedalus Satanic Travels Skadi Moon Shard Refresher
Drow Build: Treads, (Drums/Blink?) Manta BKB, Bfly, Travels, Bfly, Ethereal,

the lower positions were all going to be crowd controllers and savers.
3: ET (for late game with an AC) / Tide (for early push with Blink Guardian Greaves) / Windranger (for more damage, but a lot less safe for Drow and DK)
4: Formerly Visage, but then 6.84b happened, but he can still be picked.
At this point, maybe Io (you can dual lane mid this) or Ogre Magi (better ganking) or Chen (better early, good saves)
5. Vengeful Spirit


Basically, if you leave the normal skill bracket, Drow is not really viable as a real carry, but I've tried to play her support as well and find she's not great at it either, since if you're not getting some farm, the aura is not that strong. So, this idea I had was basically "Drow's the distraction while Dragon Knight with her aura is the real deal", and I've seen many teams clump up to chase after a Drow, so the splashing often works out. And the other 3 heroes in the draft are there to keep Drow alive, whether by swapping, or by relocating, or by Ravaging or stomping.

This draft can be played in 2 ways, either for late game, since many of the support and offlane choices are especially powerful late comboed with Dragon Knight, like Titan's Natural Order or Magi's Bloodlust, or DK and Drow also have the option of Early pushing, since they can take a ton of early towers, and with Tidehunter, they can easily breach high ground at 30ish minutes.

DK himself can be replaced with Morphling, Luna, or Gyrocopter, but they are not nearly as tanky, and many of them take longer to come online, so they are less well rounded picks.

So what do you think, is this draft viable?

It is a nice idea, but i what i think is that this team lacks in a clear objective.

Are you going to win teamfights and then push? (bad idea with dorw and DK until DK gets considerably farmed)
Is it going for early push power with dk while drow farms up?
Are you going to 5man down their towers at 15mins? ( not a bad strategy in this patch, and could work with some tweaking of your 3 other heroes)
Are you going to split push? (both DK and Drow are good pushers once they get lvl 6)
Or are you going to go for ganks and pickoffs while gaining a good early lead while taking towers and rax every chance you get?

Well, the whole setup of the draft is a Morton's Fork / Xanatos Gambit as opposed to many drafts which have to go a certain way, if they focus Drow, DK splashes them to death while the supports save her, if they focus DK, Drow rips them apart while the supports save him. If they focus the supports, then both Drow and DK eat them.

If they have mad teamfight, Drow will splitpush them while the other 4 fight under tower, because Drows need no armor. If they have splitpushers, DK and/or Drow can get Silver Edges and go Tinker/Prophet hunting.

The 3 supporting heroes determine whether the strategy will be mid-late push based ~25-35 minutes, supported by a Tidehunter with GG Boots, and a position 4 hero that can be like a Chen, Enigma, Witch Doctor, Shadow Shaman. DK and Drow can easily take towers from 6, as you mentioned, so when you start is dependent on how capable the enemies are of stopping you.

Then again, you can go for the late game if you pick Elder Titan, maybe Magnus as your position 3 hero, and go for a more counter based playstyle, preventing enemies from killing carries with Titan's Stomp or using Magnus' empower to accelerate their farm. Your position 4 can be Io or Ogre Magi, since those heroes are quite strong late in terms of damage boosting or going rat/gank god.

and VS remains the same, because saving Drow with Swap is key, bonus aura for the two cores, and minus armor aura is nice for DK's splashes. If you want, however, you can lane KotL with DK for Chakra Fire, and later, so DK can teleport home and get Recalled and maintain his Dragon form too, is also useful as an option.

Although there are some heroes that might be worth banning, like Omniknight, since all the damage is physical, but going early push can be a solution. Silencer can also be an issue, since he can prevent the "rescue" spells from coming out.

have to admit, this is the first time i heard of this strategy, but it seems quite good to me. Very balanceed -as you pointed out - and good synergy between the heroes (at least between Drow, DK and Venge). Pos#3 and Pos#4 are pretty flexible as i see it. You need some sort of initiator however since, Tide/Clockwerk wont work every game. Blink-Dagger Pos4's like Earthshaker/ Sand King or Lion / Shadow Demon give the botlane nice kill-potential and can form a nice roaming duo with VS ...Actually i would be really curious how SD would fare in this lineup, so feel free to test and report :D.

The ability and objectives of this draft very well depend on the position 3 and 4 that he picks, is that what you meant? If that is the case i can see how this would be a very flexible draft with a solid synergy going on.

Yeah, this draft has some variance in its positions 3-4, but 1-2 and 5 are the same for the most part (unless you want to go Pos 4 VS, a legitimate option).

Also, I realize that it suffers a major weakness of being unable to fight when DK's ult is down, which is why Morph, Luna, and Gyro can be picked up instead. However, it loses its status as a Morton's Fork if its a squishier carry, because then the kill order would be obvious: Carry, Drow, then supports.

I saw a variation of this draft yesterday and it confirmed one of my doubts about drow + DK. http://www.datdota.com/match.php?q=1506620419
You need to win the lane as a drow lineup, and while DK can often keep up with fire spam, he just loses out to common mids who dominate the lane, like SF, qop, viper, lesh, even stuff like puck.

My other doubt was that drow herself is already a very good pusher, and she turns your team into pushers too kind of like luna does, so you dont need another pusher like DK to bring down towers.
So you will better be off by picking something like Qop or puck to abuse the extra damage in mid, win the lane, and dominate the early midgame. Or go a slightly different approach with viper for example, and improve his ability to act like a beefy siege tank.

You bring up good points, however, despite what is seen about DK, he's not necessarily a pusher bashed hero. He is much more of a teamfight winning hero if he survives for a few seconds, because of his splash, his fire, and his low cd stun.

However, laning is an issue for this draft.

Also, I don't find the draft that VB did very effective, or rather, it was very risky, as it lacked any reliable AOE crowd control in order to invest in more splitpushing options.

Havent watched the game, but thats pretty much what i ment in my earlier comment. If you dont pick up an initiator, the enemy team can just pick some depush and your whole pushing strat is gone. NP offlane (at least i assume he was offlane) was 2 greedy of a pick imo as well. Drow and DK is all the "late"-game you need, so this fura pick seems out of place tbh.

drow is no lategame though, since after 25 minutes she hardly gets the chance to actually attack, thats why you need to be taking early objectives.

the DK seemed to be the biggest liability in that game though.