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Hello, i'm here to talk about my favourite hero in Dota 2; Visage, and how I think that he should be played. In pubs Visage is the second least played hero as of 6.84 beating out Chen by 1000 games. There are 2 reasons why visage is played so little by the Dota community. The first is that his name isn't pudge or sniper and the second is his overwhelming requirement for complicated micromanagement. I'm here to let you let you know that this is a pretty false perception and that the "micromanagement" that you think you need is nowhere near as bad as what you have heard. Before I started playing visage I had no micromanagement experience in Dota and when I started playing him I got the hang of it pretty quickly but I still feel like I am improving every game. He has a high skill cap so playing him never seems to get boring. And if you are as good as me it's even more fun because you win all the time :D.
I have approximately 100 games with the hero and a 63% win rate so I have pretty decent experience and know alot about him. Visage has been a huge help in raising my MMR which I refuse to reveal in case those of you with higher MMR will ignore this guide labelling it as "Scrub Material."
Visage is an absolute power house when it comes to damage if you are able to take advantage of his skills. You can kill supports in a few seconds with the right item set from the early to mid game and can continue to dominate in team fights much later into the game.
The advantage of playing a hero like visage is that you are a support that provides good damage in both the early and late game meaning that you don't have to rely as much on a specific member of the team. For example if you are playing a support like lich you are relying on your carry to farm up in order for your team do win the late game, and if PA only has a helm of the dominator and treads by 40 minutes (Every ****ing time) then you are ****ing screwed. Same applies if you are playing a carry, you are relying on the supports/mid to win the early/mid game in order to create space for you to farm. If the supports don't buy wards and the mid feeds and loses the lane then it will become increasingly difficult to farm.
Visage on the other hand scales much better later into the game compared to most supports to the point where you can carry games by yourself. I have played many visage games in which I have 10 kills more than anyone else in the game as a support allowing my team and I to take down the enemy ancient by 35 minutes.
For those of you who don't keep up with the professional Dota scene, Visage has been picked up more recently by teams since the 6.84 patch. More commonly he is paired with Drow Ranger as part of a pocket strat using Drow's Precision Aura and the familiars to do insane damage.
rave chill is a standard movement speed and attack speed modifier that increases Visages movement speed by 32% and attack speed by 64 while reducing the movement speed and attack speed of the same amount to the target that grave chill is used on. The only ting that changes with this skill as you level it up is the duration of the buff/debuff so its normally best to get an early value point in it and max it out last. Like most slows, grave chill is used to allow other heroes to chase a fleeing enemy or prevent an enemy that is chasing one of your allies. The best use that you will find for grave chill is to slow enemies and allow your familiars to release all of their charges onto the target for maximum damage.
This is Visage's most simple spell so don't try to over complicate it. It's a movement slow!
http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/dota2.gamepedia.com/4/4d/Soul_Assumption_icon.png?version=f25eaa0d4b42c6e6f40c9982fd0d1b5aG
Soul Assumption is Visage's spammable damage nuke that you need to use constantly during a team fight. At level 4 it does 410 magical damage if you have full charges and it has a 4 second cool down! This sounds OP as **** but there is a catch to it. You can only do the damage if you have the charges. You gain a charge every time 110 damage is done in a certain radius around visage (Shown by a yellow bar appearing above the hero). It doesnt matter if the damage is done by you or your team mate or the enemy and it does'nt matter what type of damage is done either. 110 damage will fill up 1 charge and each charge is worth 65 damage. Once you gain a charge you have 6 seconds to use it on a target before it goes away. If you use soul assumption on a target your charge counter will go back to zero. Also if you have zero charges when you use soul assumption then you will do a crazy 20 damage! and for a cost of 170 mana at level 1 that is hardly efficient. During a team fight the damage that is deal around visage is more than enough to fill the charges instantly every time you release the charges so you wont have to sit in the middle of a team fight waiting for the charges to come back.
The scaling on this spell is amazing, the maximum number of charges goes up while the mana cost goes down so its almost always best to max this first. It also has a really long cast range making it perfect for finishing off those slippery heroes that just managed to escape the rest of your team. Like I said its got a 4 second cool down so you need to use this constantly during a team fight in order to make use of it.
One last thing about Soul Assumption. Sometimes you might come across some pudge or sniper on your team that starts complaining about you "stealing all their kills" and add some flaming with foul language. Please do the community a favour and tell them to go **** themselves. The whole idea of soul assumption is that you get to do damage after other people do damage which will often end up in you doing the final blow to get the kill. Also soul assumption has a travel time increasing the delay making it even more likely that you will get the kill. It's quite hard not to get the kill with it unless you just dont use the ****ing spell which will more often than not allow some enemies to escape that could have died if you had used your W. All because some arrogant invoker player needs to have his KDA looking nice every game. Anyway I digress.
http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/dota2.gamepedia.com/c/c2/Gravekeeper's_Cloak_icon.png?version=9044c8594eba3baac1c5909c69b488bb
Gravekeepers Cloak is visage's only passive but like most of his abilities its very unique. Every hero in the game starts off with 25% magic resistance meaning that the magic damage that heroes do, only 25% actually makes it through as full damage. The 2 exceptions to this rule are Techies with 35% magic resistance and Visage with 10%. This isnt a Techies guide because seriously **** that hero so lets focus on visage's magic resistance. This makes visage much more vulnerable to magical damage at the start of the game. However when you get a level in gravekeepers cloak (GKC) this changes thing dramatically. When you level GKC you get 4 layers of shielding. Each layer provides a certain amount of armour and magic resistance. A layer is removed every time Visage takes incoming damage. It doesnt matter its lions finger of death or crystal maiden's crystal nova, they both remove 1 layer.
After all 4 layers have been removed then visage is back down to 10% magic resistance. Good thing the layers take 4 seconds to recharge!
This ability scales pretty well so it is usually maxed out after soul assumption. But it is important to note that if your lane has alot of harass being thrown at you. E.g Skywrath Mage Arcane bolt or lina dragon slave, then getting a few more levels of GKC can really help in lane.
http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/dota2.gamepedia.com/3/39/Summon_Familiars_icon.png?version=4ccc84b5c87c8f37995ea534c24ca25b
Finally we are at his ultimate, the most challenging part about visage as a hero. Summon familiars, when activated will summon 2 small gargoyles. They have free pathing over trees and hills etc and tbh they look really ****. VOLVO PLS REMODEL. Each familiar when summoned has 7 damage charges (YAY MORE CHARGES!!) When a familiar attacks something the charges will decrease and therefore the damage provided by the familiar will decrease until all charges are gone leaving the familiar with a base damage of about 10. At max level with aghs (Which summons a third familiar) the total damage done with all charges adds up to 2080 physical damage!!
In terms of team position visage is usually played as a position 4 support because he greatly benefits from some farm. But often when playing in typical pub games nobody wants to play support so you will probably end up playing the 5 role. Meaning courier, wards, detection and smoke etc...
During the laning phase Visage is best suited in a tri lane because the damage provided by the tri lane is enough to fill the soul assumption charges which will increase your kill potential in lane.
If you want to experiment then you could try going in mid or the offlane but he isn't good at contesting farm in mid and he is a slow ****er which doesn't help when you are in the offlane even if he does benefit from the levels.
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