How to be a dirty Brood abuser - a tactical guide

(You double posted, might want to fix that.)

I completely agree that any hero with Vanguard belongs in the "mildly annoying" tier, even if he has no AOE. Yes, Vanguard shuts down Brood completely, especially since the rework that puts the proc chance at 100% instead of 75%. Yes, a hero with the item takes no damage from spiderlings.

But the thing is, it's all about item timings. Say that for example the enemy mid Night Stalker is freefarming his lane and comes to your lane to mess with you with a 6 minute Vanguard (nobody buys vanguard on NS, but let's just say he does that to deal with Brood), then yes he's going to be mildly annoying

But Spectre is completely different. If the enemy team has Spectre, you are essentially 100% sure that she'll be laning against you. If the enemy team tries some cheeky stuff to dodge your lane with a Spectre pick, then it means that you'll be laning against a solo, and well if it's the typical stuff that people do to "counterpick" Brood like a solo Tide or Axe you should be dumpstering that matchup with your ult and punishing them hard for doing that. So you are laning against Spectre + 1 or Spectre + 2. And that's a really, really good thing, because the Spec should get absolutely nothing from this lane.

Brood comes online extremely early, she kills at level 3 or level 5. Essentially there's no way a Spectre that's laning against you should ever be able to farm a Vanguard before 20 minutes. She shouldn't get a single last hit :)

Essentially a hero is only good at countering Brood if he can do it with no farm. By the time they get farm, it's already too late.

I have no doubt however that you were able to deal with Broods as Spectre by buying a Vanguard. But then if the Brood allowed you to farm a Vanguard in the first place, this means he played horribly by not going for the free kills when Spec is just a melee creep and Desolate does nothing because of the spiders (and Dispersion damage early game is pretty negligible no matter how many points you put in it).

I remember winning lanes against Brood with heroes that shouldn't even have a chance! I remember a game where I was freefarming against a Brood lane with a solo Clinkz when my supports were sitting mid all game, and I was like why is this Brood farming my jungle when he could be buying dust and just right-clicking me, which would own me completely... But the only thing this means, is that those Broods sucked. It doesn't mean anything else. Almost every pub Brood sucks, at best they dominate their lane and start feeding hard later, at worst they are literally useless all game. That's why I wrote a Brood guide, something has to be done :)

This is my favorite Brood guide of all time, props to that. However, I disagree with Spectre as easy food. Spectre is probably my best, albeit not favorite, hero, and if I see an enemy Broodmother I get bonus points in Dispersion, and rush a Vanguard ASAP, after that, Broodmother isn't too much of an issue. I recommend moving her to the Easy/Mildly Annoying, or maybe even Problematic group.



But still an amazing guide, very well done.

Soul Ring is core on Brood. You'll just have to trust me on that, or look on dotabuff, any top brood player buys it. Every game, no exception. Gives far more mana output than any other item (twice as much as arcanes, for example) and comes online much faster than any other item as well. Regen from webs completely compensates for the HP loss.

Thanks for the kind words on my other guides :)



Yes. Brood an definitely punish the enemy team if they're diving your other towers. She cannot "gank", but she can punish diving with a well timed TP.

i would prefer in most cases to go
orchid->bkb->boots->HH or mkb or daedalus or necro(if pushing seems reasonable)
or
mana item->medalion or basher->bkb->boots->HH or mkb or daedalus or necro(if pushing seems reasonable)

if not rushing orchid arcane boots seems to be s free Q for the all game, i know it's a soppurt item and definitely not for solo laner but the active+the stats its not bad, any other int item build seems unusefull for the early game
also like any item can be disassmbled and sold, soul ring its not very good for chasing to do the last q :), havent try that yet because if I dont go orchid my skill build is not focused on spiderlings.

to be honest i had never bought a soul ring is seems like he takes the mana back after u use it and the web will not restore the hp so maybe a tango should be used after using a soul ring

btw after playing wind, clinkz and brood (hundrends of matches) and then going to your guides i cant find myself disagree even with a single sentence.

yesterday i lost a match, i was doing very good, but bot lane was doing very very bad, do u cary a tp scroll to def other unsuccessful lanes ?

i find a medalion (1200 gold item) very effective against him in the early game .

Oh yeah, my bad. 50% to towers and 100% to heroes.

So tower damage got buffed from 40% to 50% (still a 25% increase) and hero damage is the same.

Spiderites, however, deal normal damage, so 70% to structures.

By the way, Lone Druid's bear is normal damage? WTF? So this means he has further bonus building damage amplification over Demolish, but hero damage reduction compared to heroes?

God dota armor types are confusing. And completely undocumented in the game itself unlike Warcraft 3.

I think it got changed from Chaos to Hero.

Which is still better, it's 100% to all types, except 50% towers. Still not as deadly as Lycan wolves, who do use Normal Attack, thus only do 75% to heros, but 70% to buildings.

Yep. Mama comes.

Sidenote : it may look from the list of previous patch changes that Brood got nerfed, because her slow and nuke damage got toned down, but she actually got a really big net buff.

Her spiderlings' damage was changed from "chaos" to "normal" which essentially means that they do almost twice as much damage to towers now. "chaos" damage to towers was 40% and normal damage to towers is 70%. OSFrog?

Counters 70% of hero pool by herself. Le nice balance icefraud.

I've played this matchup multiple times, and Vipers always maxed Corrosive Skin against me. They were absolute food, so I'm really talking from experience.

Corrosive Skin has absolutely no impactful effect on spiderlings.

It slows movement speed, but spiderlings are still at 385 MS when affected by a *max level* corrosive, compared to Viper's 335 MS with boots. Besides spiderlings' attacks slow Viper, your Orb of Venom slows Viper, etc. Essentially you still have easily a 100 MS advantage over a Viper with corrosive maxed. There's absolutely no way he can kite you.

And that's a level 7 Viper who's maxing corrosive. In a real game, Viper won't even have time to reach level...3! Because you'll be killing him when *you* reach level 3. Which means, he'll probably be level 2. Level 2 Viper generally doesn't even have a single point in corrosive!

Corrosive slows attack speed, but spiderlings are supposed to use "attack-move" tactics when chasing, not static attacking. In other words, attack speed is pretty irrelevent since it's a chasing battle not a manfight.

And the damage? 25 damage/second. Spiderlings have 450 HP! A max level corrosive will take 18 (!!) seconds to kill spiderlings. If you've ever played Brood, you know that heroes die from spiderlings in 4 seconds tops. Example : Necrophos can't even get two Death Pulses off before dying to spiderlings, so it may look like he can deal with Brood but he actually can't. Just as a comparison, Double Death Pulse = 110 damage/second, compare to corrosive's 25.

Corrosive removes the free pathing? AGain, this changes nothing, on the contrary even. Spiderlings will spread out instead on stacking up, which is actually a good thing becaue it allows you to surround and bodyblock him. There was a change about a year ago that gave free pathing to spiderlings (before only Brood had it), and most Brood players viewed this change as a big nerf because it prevented bodyblocking.

Corrosive is just a complete non-factor. It slows a bit but not enough, it deals negligible damage, and free pathing loss actually has "please bodyblock me" written all over it so Viper is actually screwing himself up.

If you can't kill the spiderlings, you get destroyed in lane by Brood, it's really that simple.

I don't understand why people think Viper is food for Broodmother. Personally, I've never really played either side, but from purely a theorycrafting point of view, Corrosive Skin should mess with the Spiderling's free pathing and therefore reduce the amount of damage done to Viper (because they can't stand next to each other and hit him).

Can you explain?

I do, but never considered brood a hero 4 me. Now i wanna try ;) Just to test it.

I sometimes use dotafire to find new heroes for me.

Like i used Chichi's ench guide to play ench offlane worked well :)