Thoughts on Drow?

Soooo

merlini currently playing drow on stream and it got me thinking.

when is it a good time to play drow?

currently you have this INSANE DPS hero that loses all her DPS if you get close.

and with Axe Puck Cent and others really strong in meta atm shes basically a really situational pick. looking at DAC win/loss ratio she isnt doing that well.

builds ? do you max silence second? manta over everything?

whats the deal? she can do so much damage yet i hardly ever see her.

y no love for daria?

manta and force staff seem to be the top item picks

Well she does have this problem: like squishy heroes she is vulnerable to gap closers. And the mechanic of her ulti makes it even worse.

She needs a draft to be build around her. Well yeah she does have her aura (which is earned from her enlightenment when the holy Gaben spoke to her during the holy steam sales)and many people draft her from this.

But i think the most she needed is team that has a melee damage dealer: someone who can tank/deal the damage from the front. This so that she could deal the damage from afar.

Hey smuggles you remember the draft i suggest to you some time ago?

Example draft:

Drow Ranger
Vengeful Spirit
Ogre Magi (not sure what to add here. feel free to add your own)
Axe
Death Prophet

Deathball strat. End the game early. You also got a pusher. Sure, not many heroes there are capable of utilizing the aura, but she got the most utility out of this team. If you only consider the damage from aura, then you can just be like one of those characters in a video game that has lots of damage but 0 utility.

Now.. Gust. This is a good skill I must say, but it needs some buff. Because many heroes can just blink stun her.

My idea: Keep the knockback and make it an aoe around drow. Also, add a slow after the knockback. And keep the silence. And also, increase the cast time to that of riptide.

Gust is a very good skill already, no need to buff it. Her ulti is what needs buffing, either decrease deactivation range or make her lose half of AGI bonus like it was before.

Well it is a good skill, but she still needs turning and some cast time

But yea really good skill

Drow starts falling off after 20 minutes. If you dont have a big advantage at 25 minutes there is a VERY big chance the enemy will wreck you.

BUT, there is one thing that makes your team really strong when you have a drow. Visage!!!!! that guy starts carrying the ****ing game if he stays alive throughout fights. You dont even need the drows DPS at that point.

Drow is not a reliable source of DPS. If you snowball, she's very effective as she rips towers to shreds.

If not, you're actually going to be spending a majority of fights running away. This is why I find she's best drafted with ranged heroes that do lots of right click and are much tankier. Visage comes to mind as we all know, and I've had a lot of success with Drow Dragon Knight (DK loves that damage). She also loves Vengeful and Force Staff carriers for being able to bail her out if enemies jump on her.

Tanky ranged heroes? Viper and Razor are both tanky, ranged and also mek carriers, so I think they're perfect on a team with drow.

I seriously think that drow should be played as a nature's prophet style pusher, with blink dagger and necronomicon and the elk.

My build on pusher drow would be : Blink Dagger, Necronomicon, Mask of Madness, Mjollnir, Boots of Travel and Manta Style.

that would be pretty legit since your necro archer would get the bonus damage.