Io - Slardar Combo - Increase Your MMR!

Tether

Tether, this ability is essential to playing Io. Tether alows you to connect to your carry. You can use Tether to move with your carry and to heal your carry. Tether increases the movement speed of Io and the unit they are Tether to.

Spirits

Spirits can be used to harass enemy heroes in the early game and to stack camps in the late game. If you stand in between the camps you can stack 3 camps at once by sending your Spirits all the way out at 53 seconds. This is very helpful in the late game where you don't want to be standing around in the jungle.

Overcharge

Overcharge is the ability you use to keep your carry alive during team fights and ganks. Overcharge gives damage reduction to the Tether unit;however, it also does damage and costs mana over time to Io. When in a fight always make sure to have overvharge on so that the enemy team has a harder time killing your carry.

Relocate

Relocate is Io's ultimate ability. Use relocate to bring your carry onto unsuspecting enemy heroes for easy kills. Relocate will only take an allied hero or unit with you if you Tether to them. The same applies to bringing them back to wherever you Relocate them from, you must Tether to bring them back. You can leave them wherever you Relocate to by canceling the Tether. This can be useful if you are both going to die, you can Relocate out the carry and then cancel the Tether.

Pros / Cons

Pros-
[*] Good area stun
[*] Snowballs quickly
[*] Good movement speed
[*] Good escape
[*] Good initiation
[*] Good at ganking
[*] Increased farming potential for Slardar
[*] Fun to play
[*] Gets easy commends
[*] Can rosh once Slardar gets armlet
[*] Good minus armour
[*] Good survivabity
[*] Slardar is a tank in the late game
[*] Wins games

Cons-
[*] Need a good Slardar player
[*] Need a good Io player
[*] Needs good chemistry between players
[*] Needs communication between players
[*] Needs practice to work at full potential
[*] Shut down early game = bad late game
[*] Viper counters
[*] Ember Spirit counters
[*] Hard time against a duel mid

Why pick this combo?

Now that the abilities and items are out of the way, we can move onto the combo. First of all Io, when played well, is the best hero in Dota 2. Now, why play Io- Slardar over the more traditional Io - Tiny or Io - Chaos Knight? The reason you want to play Io - Slardar is the movement and survivabity of Slardar in all stages of the game. Tiny and Chaos Knight rely highly on the Io for their survivabity: therefore, if the Io dies, they most likely will too. Slardar on the other hand has both movement speed and survivabity even without the Io. Another reason to pick the Slardar is because he has much less of a mana shortage than a Tiny or a Chaos Knight. As an Io player it's much more fun, and a lot easier, to play with a carry who has good movement speed. This combo will not work unless you are playing with an experienced player who you have good chemistry with. (being in a Skype call or something of that nature is also recommended.) If you have played a good bit of Io before you know about the Blink Dagger + Tether combo, if you don't know about this it's pretty easy to learn. All you have to do is Tether to someone and while you are moving towards them, assuming you are a good distance away, they Blink Dagger away from you and then the Tether will carry you all the way to the Tether unit. This is very useful when initiating without a Relocate as it alows the Io to stay right with his/her carry.

First time on Io?

When you play Io don't worry about your own record just use the record of your carry to judge how good or bad you are doing. Don't worry about how much you die on Io or how much farm you get, in this case Slardar, your carry, is the most important thing to you. When I first started learning Io I was far from good, believe me, and it took many games to become a better Io. One of the most important things I learned was to never worry about how I look ok the score board. As long as you understand Io's abilities and play enough games with him you will become and amazingly useful player. If you have never played Io before I highly suggest reading through my description of what the abilities can do and the ability description for Io that are in dota. Learning to be a good Io is one of the hardest things you can ever do in dota. You need a good and experienced carry player and you need to have patience. When you play Io you will receive a lot of hate in the picking stage but, as long as you do well, you will be getting friend requests and commends up the a**! And that is one of the best feelings to have on dota. Another thing to note is you always need to be looking at the mini map for Relocate chances and communicate that to the Slardar.

Tips for playing Io

I'm guessing that if you have read this much you are an Io player yourself or just want to learn to play Io. From personal experience your item choices are essential to how your carry performs in the late game. A good thing to learn and practice when you play Io is body blocking enemies while tetherd to your carry. When an enemy is standing on the Tether they get move and attack slow, that on top of some good body blocks will get kills when in other cases the enemy would survive. Something I have learned is that if you have to buy courier on Io the game goes much much much worse for you and your carry, so always try to get someone else to buy the courier. Depending on the skill difference between you and your carry it is better that the carry buy courier instead of Io, if needed. During a team fight you want to stay on the outside of the fight with your Spirits in the middle of the fight. You want to keep Overcharge on and you want to make sure that you don't break the Tether. If your carry gets a BKB be careful! Tether does NOT go through BKB. Avoid missing your Tether by communicating with the carry and or initiator when they go in. BKB does not cancel Tether and Overcharge still works through BKB. If you miss the chance to Tether to your carry, find the next most important hero on your team and Tether to them. When ganking or using Relocate on a hero you want to be in between the enemy hero and their base. Just be careful when you near a tower, as Io you can't tank a tower so always let the carry initiate a dive. If your carry is diving always dive with them and go as deep as they go. It's perfectly fine if you die but, if they die you've failed as an Io. When you use Relocate its useful to ping where you are going to Relocate to so that your carry knows. You may also want to tell your carry if they need to blink or if they can just stun right away so that they know and you can get a quicker, more efficient kill. After getting a rune as Io always tether back to lane so that you get there as quick as possible to help your carry. Before you go to get a rune you should always try to stack a camp for your carry to farm at a later point. This also gives your carry a little bit of solo XP. When you are Dire side you should stack ancients when going for bottom rune and the hard camp when going for top rune. When you are on the radiant side you should stack ancients when going for top rune and any camp when going for bottom rune. You should always try and stack the hard camp starting at the first minuet of the game. In case you didn't already know camps should be stacked at 53 seconds with the exception of the camp near Radient T1 Mid tower, and Dire T2 Top tower which should be stacked at 55-56 seconds along with both pulling camps. If you play Io in a tri-lane situation you should let the other support harass while you stack, collect runes, and help the mid. When playing an Io combo make sure that you understand the other heoro's spells or abilities. My last tip for playing Io is that Overcharge will only take you down to 100Hp, it won't kill you.

Success!

In this current patch,6.84, I have a win rate of over 95% on Io out of over 40 games! I have only lost one Io game this patch and it was when my Slardar player, Juiced, was disconnected for the first 4 minuets of the game. Some of you may have already read his guide on Slardar (link in a bit hold your horses and keep reading). If you haven't and you want to run this combo, make sure that you, and whoever you are playing with, read both of these guides to have a good understanding of the Io - Slardar combo.I play with 5k MMR players, and the only reason I'm able to play with them is my Io play. As long as you learn to play Io well, there isn't anyone you can't play with! Want proof that this combo works? I raised my MMR by 300 In 3 days! That's 100 MMR a day! I did this by using the Io - Slardar combo, and you can do the same! If you want to learn more about this combo check out Juiced's Slardar guide on the combo here - http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guide/slardar-and-io-increase-mmr-1000-in-three-months-22449

Note -

I'm sorry if this guide was a little all over the place but this is my first time ever making a guide. I would appreciate feed back on my guide so that I can make any future guides better. Thank you to those who have already given some feed back, it is much appreciated.-Mlapa