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26 Votes

Long Live The Queen

March 2, 2013 by MR_1747
Comments: 9    |    Views: 255818    |   


Build 1
Build 2
Build 3
Build 4

Black King Bar - Scythe of Vyse (Competitive Build)

DotA2 Hero: Queen of Pain




Hero Skills

Bondage (Innate)

Shadow Strike

1 12 13 14

Blink

2 3 9 10

Scream of Pain

4 5 6 7

Sonic Wave

8 11 16

Talents

15 17 18

Introduction

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Overview

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Foreword
Hello everyone, and welcome to my Queen of Pain guide. To start with, this is my second guide on a specific hero on Dota Fire; which the first one covers about the agility hard carry hero Phantom Assassin. If you are interested with the hero, you can check out the guide at any moments given. Without further do, let's get straight into the point regarding to Queen of Pain, the ranged intelligence hero. As usual if there are anything that need to be fix or added, just let me know and I will try to keep the guide updated and relevant as possible for the competitive level.

Queen of Pain is infamous for her ability to get up close and deal huge amount of AOE damage to the enemy. Due to this case, her play style can be very aggressive; where she can stand in the middle of a team fight and deal chunks of burst damage in quick succession. She can also hunt down any fleeing heroes with ease due to her Blink ability. As a ganker Queen of Pain is very well adept at nailing kills at the early phase of the game, where if she has a good start she can snowballs hard and transition into semi carry hero later on.

Pros & Cons

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Pros

+ High mobility with Blink
+ High burst AOE nuke
+ Excellent rune control
+ Strong mid solo






SKILL SET
Cons

- Level dependent
- Mana problem early stage
- Needs good positioning
- Fragile

Ability Explanation

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Shadow Strike: The first skillset in QoP's arsenal is Shadow Strike, which is a very good skill for harassment. The damage over time is dealt to the affected unit every 3 seconds during the 15 seconds duration. Within that 15 seconds period, the affected unit will slowly regain their original movement speed as every second passes. Plus, if the affected units HP is dropped 25% below their maximum health, they can be deny by their allies at any given time. Shadow Strike is a solid skill overall at level 1 because it dealt 200 damage which is amazing.

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Tips and Tricks
  • For the purpose of lane control this skill should be taken at level 1 because it will force the enemy to use their consumables heavily. The manacost is quite low as well.
  • Shadow Strike can also be used to slow down fleeing enemy in order to score a kill. While slowed you can get couple of right click before finishing them off with your nuke.
  • Due to the damage over time mechanic for this skill, you can use it to cancel salves, clarity or regeneration from bottle if needed. It is also quite effective against Templar Assassin's Refraction.



Blink: Blink is probably the best escaoe mechanism in DotA; and luckily QoP has this at her disposal. You can use this to dodge projectiles in order to prevent harm or just for the sole of chasing wounded enemy heroes. Note that this skill has 0.33 second teleportation delay before you actually fully reach to the blinked spot. If you click on the spot further than its maximum range, you will only reach 4/5 of the distance.

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Tips and Tricks
  • Depending on the enemy line up and yours as well, there is a certain situation where you have to skill Blink over Shadow Strike. If you are on the offlane, then it is the best bet to level up this skill first.
  • At level 1 the range for you to blink is very short so you have to be very careful and have a deep understanding of the distance. If you miscalculate the range, it could spell death.
  • Usually you would only take one point of this early on because the priority are on Scream of Pain and Sonic Wave. After Scream of Pain is maxed out, it is a good time to level this up this out later on.



Scream of Pain: This is the bread and butter skill that defines QoP herself. With a cooldown as low as 7 seconds even at max level with 300 damage, you simply cannot go wrong with its killing power. Scream of Pain has an instant cast time, therefore it is impossible for you to miss those targets around your 475 AOE. Other than that, this skill also can hit invisible units and units inside the fog of war.

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Tips and Tricks
  • This will be your priority skill to max out as soon as possible at the early stage of the game because the damage is huge. You can take out squishy support heroes at the side lanes very quickly with a proper use.
  • Due to the low cooldown nature of this skill, it is very spammable once you purchase some regeneration items such as Linken Sphere or Scythe of Vyse. It also allows you to flash farm as well.
  • When you are blinking in within the range, cast Scream of Pain as quick as possible. This will allow you to cast another one while it is on cooldown.



Sonic Wave: The most exquisite of all torments, which makes QoP a very dangerous force to reckon with. This ultimate is the heart of a team fight that will put her foes out of their misery. Sonic Wave start with 100 radius, with 800 distance and 300 final radius. Furthermore, it can also hit units up to 1200 range away; which is quite absurd.

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Tips and Tricks
  • You can level up this skill as soon as you reach level 6 or holding on into it until you maxed out Scream of Pain. It's totally personal preference; I tend to max out Scream of Pain first. However if you need that extra burst damage and will be able to maximize your mana pool usage, feel free to go for it earlier.
  • In a team fight, try to get a good position with Blink and cast Sonic Wave. Try your best to hit as many enemy as possible. The most common mistake that always happened is by using Sonic Wave to finish enemy heroes; which is ineffective because with its huge damage you can take out most enemy HP within the AOE at an instant.
  • By purchasing Aghanim Scepter, the cooldown on this skill is greatly reduced to 40 seconds; which will allow you to use it 3 times faster rather than the default 135 seconds cooldown. This is handy if you are focusing on soloing enemy heroes that are out of position.

Items Build

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Starting Items

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Explanation
  • This is the most common starting item build for a solo mid lane QoP. This economic build will allow you to get your bottle up online and start controlling rune.
  • Generally it is a bad idea to spend all your starting gold purely for bottle. This is because those +1 stats from iron branches give some nice stats for squishy hero like QoP.
  • You can convert the iron branches into Magic Wand later on to free up some space. Those stick charges can come in handy if you need some HP or mana.

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Alternative Starting Items

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Explanation
  • The difference between this compared to the first build is that one of the iron branches was swapped out with a Mantle of Intelligence, providing a little bit of right click power for easier last hitting.
  • You can go with this starting item build if you are going on the safe lane (Radiant Bottom/Top Dire). With one salve and couple of tangoes, you can withstand some harassment or last hitting better under the tower than usual especially if there is a Dark Seer offlane using his Ion Shell.
  • With this starting items, you can decide whether to keep the Mantle of Intelligence to convert into Null Talisman (Pure Dagon Rush?) or simply just selling it later on if you have no use of it.

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Mid Game Items #1 (Black King Bar-Post Scythe of Vyse Build)

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Explanation
  • This build has been proved and verified effective in a high level competitive play. With Black King Bar, you can blink into the middle of team fights, pop the BKB and cast your spells.
  • In order to build the Scythe of Vyse, it is always wise to purchase the Ultimate Orb first because the +10 stats is huge for QoP survivability.
  • A TP scroll is as important as ever for squishy hero like QoP. You can easily blink into terrain unreachable by the enemy and TP out to safety. Make sure you have this in your inventory at all time.

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Mid Game Items #2 (Orchid First Build)

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Explanation
  • The Orchid rush build will provide you quite a lot of right click power plus an excellent mana regeneration. The downside is that it does not provide you the survivability.
  • The 'Soul Burn' active ability is very useful to prevent certain pesky heroes from casting their spells. It also amplifies the damage they took which quite handy to bring down tanky heroes.
  • As usual do not forget to carry a TP scroll at all time. Danger can come from any direction and you will never know when you will get ganked.

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Mid Game Items #3 (Sheepstick First Build)

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Explanation
  • This sheepstick rush build is almost the same as the BKB-Post Scythe of Vyse build but with one downside; it does not provide you the magic immunity early on.
  • In a very highly situational case even in high level competitive play, this build is still viable if you are getting an extremely good start and will be able to rush it; or there is almost no stun nuke from enemy lineups.
  • This build will also allowed you to be very aggressive around the map. The probability of netting a kill is very high due to the priceless Hex ability.

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Mid Game Items #4 (Aghanim First Build)

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Explanation
  • This build will allow you to drastically reduce the cooldown of your ultimate so that you can use it faster for the next engagement. It provides you a nice HP and mana pool plus some survivability but the downside is that you does not have the mana regeneration.
  • Since Sonic Wave consume a lot of mana, this means you have to go back to fountain quite often in order to sustain. In my opinion, this build is very mediocre thus I do not recommend going for it too often.
  • The reason for its ineffectiveness is because Scythe of Vyse overshadowed the Aghanim's Scepter in terms of the game impact. You only get some HP, mana and damage boost rather than 3.5 seconds hard disable.

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Late Game Extension Items

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Explanation

Monkey King Bar: Grab an MKB if there are heroes, skills and items that can cause you to miss your right click attack. Notable examples are Rikimaru's Smoke Screen, Brewmaster's Drunken Haze and Drunken Brawler, Tinker's Laser and heroes who have Talisman of Evasion, Butterfly or Heaven's Halberd in their item slot.

Shiva's Guard: QoP can make a very good use of this item by blinking in and cast Artic Blast which will slow the enemy movement and attack speed. QoP is low on armor thus Shiva's Guard can solve the issue quite well. Generally a good anti-carry item to purchase on QoP if you can go for it. In addition, it provides some survivability and extra nuke damage.

Manta Style: Manta Style provides a little bit of defensive mechanism. This item is rarely seen to be build on QoP but it is viable and can be very effective. It provides you some nice stats from the Ultimate Orb. Since QoP has a decent agility gain for an intelligence hero, this item can also enhance your attack speed which subsequently increasing your damage per second if combined with the illusions.

Necronomicon: Another great item for QoP to purchase. Due to the ability of QoP to flash farm using Scream of Pain, she is one of those few heroes that farm this up to level 3 quite fast in order to make the item's strength reach its peak. Nowadays Necronomicon is rarely build on QoP in high level competitive game (mostly they prefer sheepstick instead) but it is very devastating if use correctly. If you have the micro skill of that 6.48 ganking era Vigoss, this item is for you.

Daedalus: This item provides you with lots of DPS that you neeeded. With Daedalus you can pretty much snipe down the support heroes in the blink of an eye especially when the critical procs. It also works well on tanky carry heroes that are problematic for your team. Daedalus is a good alternative apart from the Monkey King Bar if you does not need the True Strike.

Eye of Skadi: If QoP needs an orb for her right click attack, Eye of Skadi definitely would be the perfect choice. The slow that it provides stack with your Shadow Strike, meaning your enemy will crawl trying to escape from you. It provides you with lots of stats hence boosting your survivability. If you have Scythe of Vyse, you can pretty much take out any melee heroes with no casualty at all.

Mjollnir: This is an alternative item if you does not want to go with Manta Style in order to increase your attack speed. Since Mjollnir provides you with the highest attack speed in the game, this will abuse your above average attack speed that you get from the Agility gain to increase your DPS. It is also a very rare situation to see a QoP bulding a Mjollnir but if you want some utility against illusion or summoned based heroes, you cannot go wrong with it.

Desolator: Another great DPS item choice for QoP to purchase for dishing that extra damage. If you does not have the luxury to get Eye of Skadi, this will be a viable choice as well. The armor reduction that it provides will help you take down high priority targets faster in team fights or simply bringing down Roshan. The little downside is that it gives you raw damage without any stats; meaning less survivability.

Veil of Discord: Basically this item is best carried by heroes that can initiate (or support heroes) without dying along the way. In my opinion, you can build this if you really want to tack up your magical damage but it is not recommended due to QoP fragility. Usually QoP is not an initiator for team fights. It is a high risk for her to blink in and cast Veil of Discord (unless you have BKB). This item is acceptable but not too important.

Divine Rapier: The most excellent cost effective damage item in the game, plus the highest as well. Generally it is a very risky item to purchase especially for a squishy intelligence hero like QoP. However, if you have some sort of survivability items and very confident that you can use your blink properly to escape from harm, by all means go for it. In high level competitive games, it is not recommended because the enemy will definitely hunt you down for the free rapier.

Highly Situational Items

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Possible but limited use

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Explanation

Linken's Sphere: The spell blocks every 20 seconds is nice but the problem with Linken's Sphere build on QoP is that the build up for this is quite terrible in my opinion. Even if you get an early Perseverance, it offers inadequate regeneration for your HP and mana for nearly a 2000 gold item. You can obtain better regeneration from proper rune controls plus the Ultimate Orb can be build into the much higher impact Scythe of Vyse instead. Linken Sphere rush is viable but just do not do it too often.

dagon Dagon: Probably one of the infamous item in pub games followed by Shadow Blade. Dagon absolutely provides you with the extra high burst damage nuke but note that as time passes by, players will eventually bought items to increase their HP pool or magic immunity items in order to survive. If your team is snowballing hard, then go for it. But remember as the game drags, the value of this items rapidly fall off.

Ethereal Blade: Since this item has been reworked which now deal damage based on your primary attribute instead of just Agility, it is now viable on another heroes but highly situational. Ethereal Blade will increase your nuke damage potential which is useful to take down enemy heroes with high DPS but in a long term run you have to take concern about the Black King Bar. By the time you have this in your inventory, the enemy might already have their BKB up and running. Unless the DPS hero does not purchase the BKB 30-40 minutes in, then this item might be the way to go.

Eul's Scepter of Divinity: Another highly situational item for QoP. It provides movement speed, mana regeneration and most importantly the active ability 'Cyclone'. Cyclone can be very useful as an offensive or defensive maneuver. If your Blink is on cooldown while trying to flee from the enemies, just Cyclone yourself to buy a few seconds. This can (and will) save you from dying better than you could have imagined.

Bloodstone: Not a very common choice item for QoP to purchase but it definitely has its use. It provides significant durability plus a fast Soul Booster will give her a very strong early to mid game. In my opinion, you can go for Bloodstone if you build Arcane Boots in the early game which you can disassembled later on to get the Energy Booster. If your team snowball, you can get nearly endless mana regeneration from the Bloodpact.

Boots Comparison

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Boots

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Explanation

Power Treads: This is the most common boots of choice for QoP. With Power Treads, you can switch it to Strength to provide some nice HP pool while laning. You can switch around betwen Strength or Intelligence if you want HP or mana respectively. Other than that, you can temporarily switch it to Agility to make a full use of your bottle charges; and then switching it back again.

Phase Boots: So far I never seen people build this boots on QoP. Generally, QoP does not need the 'Phase' active ability to escape because she has Blink which is superior. The +24 damage provides an easier last hitting capability overall but her Scream of Pain is much better and deal damage around her AOE too. Not a very common boots on QoP.

Tranquil Boots: This boots is the cheapest compared to all other boots available. To be honest, QoP does not need the HP regeneration from 'Rejuvenate' active ability. With Blink, she can easily control the rune spots which bottle charges deserved as the better candidate that restores HP and mana simultaneously. Probably the worst boots of choice on QoP.

Arcane Boots: This boots can provide you with extra mana that you needed in the early stage of the game. The combination of mana cost for all her skills is quite high in order for you to execute something and Arcane Boots can solve the problem temporarily. You can also disassemble the boots later on to build a Power Treads or even going for a Bloodstone. Overall the second boots of choice for QoP.

Boots of Travel: Simply the late game boots of choice. If the game drags longer than you have expected, then it will be the best scenario to replace your current boots with Boots of Travel instead. It helps you to farm, push the map or join team fights as soon as possible. Basically this boots will help you to teleport to the right place whenever you needed to. It also will free a slot in your inventory; which will allow you to get another items.

Synergies

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Disablers

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Initiators

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AOE Sonic Wave Setup

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Counters

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Disablers

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Silencers

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Mana Burners

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Summary

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Competitive VOD Matches

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  • In this VOD Lions Pride's Massacre is taking the role as the Queen of Pain. His opponent on the mid lane is FOTA Stel's Puck.
  • Massacre did a great job of controlling the rune towards his advantage which gave him a great start. He also manage to not die even once during the whole game plus a lot of assist gold as well. After boots he straightly went for the BKB followed up by Linken's Sphere and Daedalus.

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  • In this VOD 4FC's Noez is taking the role as the Queen of Pain. His opponent on the midlane is TCM Quix's Shadow Fiend.
  • Shadow Fiend is very prone to gank in the mid lane due to the lack of escape mechanism. Noez make a good use of this opportunity to kill him few times with the help of the support. The double damage rune proved to be very deadly for QoP to bring down Shadow Fiend paper HP pool. Noez has not died once in the whole game. He finished his BKB but does not even have it in his inventory.

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  • In this VOD Orange's Mushi is taking the role as the Queen of Pain. His opponent on the mid lane is MUFC Ling's Shadow Shaman.
  • Mushi really shows the capability of QoP right here. The Naga Siren ultimate sets up a perfect timing for Mushi to position himself and land the Sonic Wave successfully in every team fights. After boots he went for the Aghanim Scepter first, which will allow him to contribute large portion of damage whenever team fights occured. The item follow up after that is a Shiva's Guard.

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  • In this VOD NaVi's Dendi is taking the role as the Queen of Pain. His opponent on the mid lane is Empire Scandal's Puck.
  • In this particular match Dendi plays quite aggressive, trying to find some opening in the side lane whenever he bottled up an invisibility rune. In addition, one thing to note that Dendi purchase an Ethereal Blade after his BKB and Scythe of Vyse despite of the BKB on BlowYourBrain's Gyrocopter and Funnik's Clinkz. These two heroes really have high DPS so Dendi try to bring one of them as quick as possible.

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  • In this VOD Liquid's Korok is taking the role as the Queen of Pain. Instead of the usual mid lane, he went for the safe lane against Trixi's off lane Weaver. He is supported by Fluff's Wisp.
  • Korok plays a very aggressive QoP; he harassed the hell out of the Weaver plus putting the Sentry Ward in the lane to get the most out of it too. The combination of Queen of Pain and Wisp proved to be very deadly, which lets Korok netting kills few times which give him a good start. He got 15 minutes full Orchid Malevolence which is quite insane. After that he proceed with the Scythe of Vyse.

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Pros On Pubs

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  • In this VOD Dendi is using another nickname which is 'Something Weird'. His opponent on the mid lane is Venomancer.
  • Dendi won his lane very convincingly. He shows certain items purchase order that you normally would not seen in competitive play like buying his own Gem of True Sight to counter Nyx Assassin or as simple as buying wards to mark certain choke points to net some kill. You can also notice how important the TP scroll is all the time.
  • He went for the Linken's Sphere first to negate any surpising stun especially from Nyx Assassin. After that he went for the Scythe of Vyse, Black King Bar, Daedalus and finally the Divine Rapier. The only unlucky player that get hit by those +300 damage is the poor Meepo; before the throne get destroyed.

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Conclusion
  • Thanks a lot for taking some time to read my Queen of Pain guide. I really appreciate it.
  • As always if you have suggestions, comments or criticism; feel free to let me know. It will definitely help me to improve whether the guide or my gameplay itself.
  • If I have free time, I might write more guide like this on another heroes. Till then, thanks a lot again!

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Changelogs

20/2/2013 - Draft guide was started
23/2/2013 - Added basic info and item builds
28/2/2013 - Added boots comparison, synergies and counters plus VOD matches
01/3/2013 - Guide completed
02/3/2013 - Fix some minor errors, added more VODs on the summmary section including pros on pubs

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