New Age of Earth Spirit [6.81b]

Foreword

Those who come looking at this guide probably plays ES before 6.79 and understand how this hero works and now are looking for guide to learn the new ways of playing this hero. Therefore I won't treat you like an idiot and discuss about trivial things such as how the abilities work with the remnants and etc.

The reason I'm doing this guide is because, well, seems like nobody else has any idea about how to correctly play ES. I've looked at lots of ES matches in dota 2 (around 50ish) and found that only 2 out of that many actually knows how to play ES. I've even looked at many ES guides and only one comes close to what I deem as correct.

Also, the one writing this guide is not just another tryhard ES player who plays with veil of discord, arcane, and force staff. Nope! That's not how ES is played.

And to show that my build works and is not ******** as well as to give you an idea of how rewarding this hero really is, take a look at this short video.

Hero Introduction

Earth Spirit - Kaolin
Despite having the lowest win-rate of all heroes in dota, this hero is actually strong and viable. One of the main reason that contribute to its low in rate is many people don't know how to play it. I've seen lots of tryhards still utilizing the old pull roll combo which definitely is not as effective as it used to be. I write this guide to give an idea how ES is supposed to be played and to show that ES is actually still a good hero.

=================================STRENGTH================================================
One of this hero strength is being able to use his full combo at a very early level of 3 making him one of the easiest hero to draw first blood with. As early as lvl 6, this hero can solo-kill escape heroes like AM or weaver and even kill heroes like Invoker. His stun also allows him to do a long-range initiation plus his 5 second silence, he can easily turn around clashes.
=================================STRENGTH================================================

===============================WEAKNESS================================================
His greatest weakness is magic immunity which will totally shut him down. All of his 4 abilities do absolutely nothing under magic immunity which might render this hero to be useless in late-game clashes. His abilities potential are also bottlenecked by his stone remnant. It takes 3 full minutes to regain 6 charges of his remnant and clashes and ganks may happen in much shorter interval especially during mid game. Silence is also a problem for ES but that can be fixed by picking up BKB. Despite being flagged as a carry, this hero is not armed with anything that can make him a decent carry. That makes him a pesudo-carry, carries that carry by slowing down the growth of enemy carries.
===============================WEAKNESS================================================

Having 3 skill shot, it's no wonder that you'd be struggling to master this hero. This hero is not the kind that you can miss with, then wait until the cooldown is over to try again. No. When you miss your Rolling Boulder, you will end up in the enemy's tower range getting rekt. The clos. You need to play "A LOT" of this hero to get a good sense of his combo and skills. But I can promise you that this hero is totally worth it.

What it takes to master this hero ?
-Good sense of ganking
-Cooldown management
-Positioning
-Skill-shot precision

Role :
Support 2/5 - Making this hero a support would totally diminish all its potential, support when you have no support and your team needs to play safe.
Carry 4/5 - Although he certainly cannot out carry heroes like AM, he still can semi-carry the game.
Durable 5/5 - This hero has good STR Growth and he needs to be durable to stay alive in clash.
Initiator 3/5 - Although he has AoE stun, it's very hard to hit multiple heroes when they are spread out.
Ganker 5/5 - Nuff said, slow, silence, stun.
Nuker 2/5 - His nuke doesn't scale well.

Pros and Cons - Drafting

Pros

+Versatile gameplay
+Reliable ganker
+Has silence, stun, and slow
+Fun to play
+Low manacost
+Ult with very big potential damage
+Can save allies from being ganked
+Not many can play this hero, in other word not mainstream

Cons

-Hard to master
-3 skill shot
-All skill potential limited by stone remnants
-Can't do anything against magic immunitiy
-Need level advantage
-Need items in order to be useful later on
-Difficult to target stone remnant
-Your team may hate you for picking this
-Cannot flash farm
-Carry with no carry abilities
-Terrible AGI growth -> Armor issue
-Needs vision to gank well

Drafting

Pick when

Enemies have lots of squishy heroes
Enemies have caster
Enemies have illusion hero
Your team needs ganker
Your team needs AoE spell

Don't pick when

Enemies have lots of durable heroes
Enemies have many silencer
Enemies have magic immunity
Your team has no support
Enemies have lots of armor minus

Skills Advanced Breakdown

Stone Remnant

Your most important skill. Try not to waste it by putting it randomly in places which you know you'll end up not using. Also don't try to intimidate your opponents by spamming this. Nothing much else to say about this.

Boulder Smash

Your initiation skill. Most of the time this skill is used for remnants, kicking heroes are kind of a waste of its 2.25s AoE stun. You can also use it to save teammates early on. Most of the time, this skill is used for combo D -> Q -> E -> W -> R.

Advanced Guide #1 : How to hit accurately with it ?

When you're trying to hit someone with it, always imagine a line stretching between you and your target.
From the point you're standing, put remnants anywhere along the imaginary line.
After you place your remnant, straight away issue Boulder Smash command to the stone and it will travel along the imaginary line.

Note that the remnant will travel more accurately if you place it further away from you. This is because at closer range, even small misplacement of the stone will cause the stone path to divert a lot from its original path.

This is how you can practice the first skill shot. You'll notice that when you keep doing this over and over, you'll soon get the idea of it and you will be hitting your kick without even needing to imagine the line beforehand.

Advanced Guide #2 : How to make use of existing remnant ?

From any point you're standing, just draw imaginary line extending from you to any remnant nearby. The line exceeding the remnant, indicated green, would be the path that the remnant will travel if you issue kick command from the spot you're standing.
The imaginary line will change according to your location relative to the remnant, thus changing the path that it will travel. Above picture is the same as the first, just that the hero has moved. Notice how the line changed.

The idea is, in order to utilize existing remnant on the map, you adjust yourself so that the imaginary line would coincide your enemy thereby hitting it.

Just like before, the accuracy is better when you issue kick command from afar. With enough practice you would be able to adjust yourself in fluid motion and without the need of imaginary line.

Rolling Boulder

Few things to note about this ability :

0.6s before it launches
You can use items/abilities while rolling
Which means you can drop your remnant and even TP
Slows can affect multiple heroes and doesn't affect illusions

There's not much to say about this skill because it doesn't change much from 6.79 and is quite straightforward skill. A good habit to use this skill is to let it roll a while first then provide the stone later on when you're sure it is going hit. The reason is when you start rolling, enemies would start running away and if you put your stone first there is no way you can stop it from rolling. This might cause you to end up at bad position and die horribly. When escaping with this skill, always make sure you have clear path in front, better wait for a clear roll than panic and roll unto an enemy. At late game, try to use surrounding stone to roll with instead of putting another one. At late level you'll notice that you'd run out of remnant to roll with if you don't use it wisely.

Geomanetic Grip

Your only damage ability that scales. Obviously you want to max this out first. Most of the time this ability is used in conjunction with rolling boulder. The 5s silence of this ability is what ES will use to kill escape heroes. However, to make sure that they die within 5s of the silence, you may want to harass them with this before initiating the kill.

Advanced Guide #3 : Saving a teammate.

As you might know this ability can also be used to save teammate. However, due to the new patch it now has reduced radius and pulling a teammate even from its maximum radius may not always save him. This is also partly due to many players tendency to step back a little after they are pulled.
To perfectly secure a teammate from being killed all you need is E -> Q. Pull and kick him further away. The tricky part here is to make sure you kick him in a straight line to maximize the distance away from gankers.
Pay attention to above picture. The red circle in front ES represent the new location of Io after he is pulled. Green line indicates the path that Io will travel. X represents the location of where ES should be after he pull Io. What you want here is to pull your team, then straightaway move forward right after you pull him. You have to do it fast, cancelling the animation of the pull, so you can move without colliding your team. While being pulled unit has zero collision. Note that your location after you pull will determine the direction of the kick.
If you do it right, it should look like this. Next thing you want to do is just to kick him away.
This is after I kicked Io away. Notice how far Io is from he originally was.

All this should be done in quick succession and with practice you should be able to do this easily in fluidly. You'll find this really handy when you're trying to save someone.

Magnetize

Your nuke on early game. Your crowd control at late game. This is undoubtedly an amazing ultimate. Many people mistake that this skill is simply a nuke that they neglect every other aspect about this skill. If a unit under magnetize debuff was afflicted with the slow from rolling boulder or silence from geomagnetic grip, all the other units that are also under this debuff will also suffer the slow/silence. That's what makes it an amazing spell.

I see that many ES players seem to spam his remnant when trying to refresh the debuff. This is very wasteful. The spell is 6 seconds and damage instance is done every 0.5s. To maximize damage you should put it every 5.5s. However this is very risky as you might get stunned and hence the debuff will end before you have chance to refresh it. I'd say that 3.5-4.5 seconds interval is the most ideal as you will still have time to refresh the debuff even when you're stunned. When trying to keep the debuff running, you just have to keep the debuff alive on one unit. When one gets refreshed, all the rest will also get refreshed as well.

There are only two things you need to do when you use this spell.

Get as many heroes as you can under the debuff
Keep the debuff going as long as possible

Advanced Guide #4 : How to get multiple heroes under debuff ?

As you might already know, remnant nearby* a unit under magnetize debuff will explode, refreshing the duration and applying debuff to other unit caught in its AoE*.
* the AoE is indicated green in above picture.
In order to apply debuff to other unit, the unit needs in a proximity within another unit which has the debuff. Take a look at the picture, the first mirana is under the debuff but the other one is not.
Putting a stone in between them will cause the explosion of the stone to apply to the debuff to the other mirana.

Yes I know this is not very complex or advanced. But I see many ES player just randomly put the stone just to refresh the debuff without attempting to get other heroes under the debuff. This technique doesn't need a lot of practice since it is quite self-explanatory. The more heroes you get under the debuff, the more devastating your silence/slow would be.

Advanced Guide #5 : Combo with other spell.

Note that after a remnant explode, it will linger for about 5 seconds before disappearing. During that 5 second you can still use it with your skills. It would be a waste if you put a stone just to refresh debuff without doing anything to it.
The simplest combo is with geomagnetic grip. Simply put the stone near your enemy, let it explode and pull it for the silence + damage. This is quite good as when you silence, you would be silencing the other 2 or 3 heroes who also got the debuff. Another way you can do this is to pull existing remnant toward the enemy and achieve the same effect.
You can also combo it with Rolling Boulder. To do this one, you just need to put remnant near the enemy and roll toward it before it disappears. At late level it would be wise if you always roll with an energized remnant rather than putting a new one. This combo is very deadly as it can inflict a whooping 80% mspeed slow and aspeed slow to multipled heroes. This combo should be spammed the most at late game. Slowing 5 heroes repeatedly can easily turns clashes around.
This one is the trickiest of all 3. The purpose of this combo is to refresh debuff of enemies that are out of your 1400 range. Refer to Advanced Guide #1 and #2 to hit this combo. Nothing much else about this.

Skill Build and Item Build Breakdown

This section is not necessary to read unless you doubt my Skill Build and Item Build.

Skill Build

The first skill you want to max is obviously Geomagnetic Grip. This is because it's your only ability which the damage scales and you really need to prolonged silence duration to help you gank especially for heroes like AM. Once you're level 6, you would be able to solo kill heroes with your Magnetize, however initiating gank would be difficult if your stun is only 0.75s. That's why we take another Boulder Smash at level 7. After that you up your Rolling Boulder to ease your chase and gank. Right at level 10 you want to take another stun. Levelling from 11 to 12 takes 2200 XP and if you don't take your stun, it would be hard for you to do long range initiation and waste your lvl 2 ult ganking capability.

Remember that at early levels, the main function of Boulder Smash
is to help you land your Rolling Boulder. You can either skip or take another level of it if you think that's necessary to help you land your slows.

Item Build

As in Earth Spirit item build, I really stress that Arcane Boots is not a good boot on Earth Spirit. If you look at ES manacost, they're only 100-50-75-100 respectively, and the manacost won't increase later on. ES does have a little mana issue at early level, but that can be fixed just by picking up +INT such as Drum and Blade Mail. Picking up Arcane Boots would be a total waste. Power treads on the other hand can provide +STR and +INT which makes it a very good boots on ES.

Many would argue that Drum is a bad item choice on ES. I personally don't know why they would say that. It provides decent Stat for ES. Most importantly it gives more mspeed which can help him to position himself.

Blademail is not always necessary, however it's a really good item choice as it gives you
some armor which you're desperately in need for.

Sangyash is good as it provides decent STR for ES and AGI for its DPS. It also provide mspeed which also help him to position. However, when dealing against hero like Troll, you might want to replace Sangyash with Halberd. Note : most of the time it's better to build Sange first just in case you need to change it to Halberd instead

BKB might be necessary to buy when you're against hero like invoker or silencer. Manaburn, Slows, and Silences can really mess up ES gameplay.

Midas can be a good pickup when you're snowballing at early. It can boost ES level and give him level advantage.

I also avoid item like Veil of Discord and Force Staff. Veil of Discord cost 2670 gold. Buying it means you're trying to make ES a nuker and if you invest items on nuke alone, it will make ES very useless at late game. Force Staff is also bad as it actually doesn't synergize with his skills. Dagon is also a bad item choice. It costs up to 5000 gold and it nukes one target only. Always keep in mind that ES is more like a Crowd Control hero. The +INT from above items are not helping ES as well.

Blink Dagger can potentially be a good pick up if your hands are fast enough, though I never tried it on my own. For instance when enemies are pushing, you can blink around 5 of them, use your magnetize, then silence, then roll to any hero, resulting in 5 man magnetize, silence, and slow. However, this is only hypothetical thought and blink dagger doesn't give any stats which might delay your core items. All in all, judge this one on your own.

Basic Combo

The most basic combo to gank is D->Q->D->E->W->R or Stun, Remnant, Pull, Roll, Ult. You can also skip the stun and straight away pull roll ult if you have another disabler to help you land your roll. Then you can use your Q to either kickback or stun him later on. However, don't ever try pull roll without any disable, this is the most common mistake that ES players do nowadays as this can make you end up in bad position and die.

This combo is pretty straight forward and deadly at the same time. The only tricky part of this combo is to land your stun and pulling and rolling in time. You can refer to Advanced Guide #1 and #2 to how to land the stun. This combo can be used to gank as well as clashes. Just make sure that your stun and silence hits multiple targets.

Keep in mind that this combo is still viable even when you don't have your ult. You can use this combo to harass or kill in lane as early as level 3. It can deal as much as 500++ dmg at level 3 with auto attack and can deal even more provided you have lane-mate that can help you. This combo takes 325 mana with ult and 225 without. Always make sure you have the required mana before you gank.

In case you really have no idea what I'm trying to describe in this section, you can watch this video.






Clarification
You might be asking why should you waste remnant by putting 2 of them when you can stun and pull the same remnant ? First reason, at early levels it's not likely that you're going run out of remnant since your ability cooldown is still very long. Kicking and pulling the same remnant is also harder to pull off, and might even cause you to fail your gank if you're not used to it. Unless you're really running out of remnants, it's always better to put another remnant to secure your gank. Second reason, at early level your stun is only 0.75s, pulling the remnant you've kicked will require you to wait a little while until the remnant goes over your enemy so the pull will hit. It might take longer than 0.75s and might cause your roll to miss. At later level, doing so will also stack your silence and stun duration which definitely is not effective. You better put another remnant at ideal position to make sure your silence can hit multiple targets.

Laning and Gameplays

For lane ES can play just as well on offlane or safelane. I personally won't recommend you to go mid as ES is not really good at controlling lane. Most of the time you'd probably get outlaned by heroes like invoker. Moreover ES need his team help to secure early kills. If you feel that you're good at controlling lane, you might as well take mid lane since you do need the XP advantages. Avoid Tri-Lanes since ES need XP advantages.

Early Game

Lane : Dual Lane Safelane , Dual Lane Offlane, Mid lane, Tri-Lane

Early Game is probably ES best time to pwn. While everyone else is still dealing puny 75 dmg nuke, ES already has access to its full combo as early as level 3. The first item you want to rush is boots to help you get first blood. It's preferable that ES lanes with heroes that can either harass, auto-attack, or has access to slows/disables.

In lane, ES is played as a very aggressive hero. You want to keep harassing your enemies in lane. When your enemy heroes drop to 400ish HP, straightaway you throw your full combo up at him, most of the time this should always guarantee a kill. The idea when playing ES early is to get kills on every chance you got.

Common misconception is that ES can't deal a lot of damage. You shouldn't think that way just because his skill only deal about 150 damage on average. At early games, you can even kill some heroes when they got 500HP. Just don't miss your Rolling Boulder, the slows is what contributes the most in most kills. Just remember that you do animation cancel when auto-attacking since ES swing back animation is quite long.

In short ES early game is

Get XP to level 3
Play aggressive
Combo on anyone with low hp

However, if you're against a hard lane, it's not necessary that you play aggressively. Just don't die so you can get to level 6 fast.

Early Item

This helps your auto-attack and can provide extra mana with tread switching.

Situational Item :
-Magic Wand - If you're against a spammer hero like PA or Bristleback. The extra stats also help
-Bottle - If you're going mid.
-Urn of shadows - Good pickup if you're snowballing on your kills.
-Hands of Midas - If your farm is going well. Get this before 7-9 minutes, otherwise don't.

Mid Game

Once you get Magnetize, you're ready to solo kill basically anyone and mostly your kills at early-mid game will utilize on Magnetize.

Heroes you want to target is the squishy one and is alone, preferably the carries. Whenever your ult is off cooldown and you have at least 4 stones to use, look out for potential enemies to kill. Anyone with 800ish HP is ideal. To gank, simply use your basic combo -> ult then just auto-attack and keep refreshing the debuff until target is dead. Quite simple right ? If you're dealing against multiple heroes, always make sure you can land your combo on multiple heroes and get them all under the debuff.

When your ult is off-cooldown, you can either gank with your allies or just chill on a lane and get lasthits to purchase your core items.

You also want to stock up on Teleportation Scroll at all times. Whenever you see clashes or maybe your allies getting chased down near towers, just tp in and you'll be amazed by how you can easily turn down the fight around. During fight, don't hesitate to waste some time positioning yourself so that you can hit multiple heroes with your combo.

In short, ES mid game is all about

Ganks
Getting lasthits and XP
Help clashes

Mid-Game Items

Extra mana capacity and movement speed to help you secure kills. +Extra stats.

Extra mana capacity. This is very useful when you're ganking so your enemies will die even faster when they try to fight back. But you can skip this item if you want to.


Either item is very good to stack slows with your Rolling Boulder + extra dps.

Situational Items :
-Orchid - to help you gank slippery heroes. The IAS is very handy as well.
-Medallion of Courage - If you're not snowballing. Extra mana and armor can be helpful as well as the mini-desolator.
-Armlet of Mordiggan - Extra HP and DPS. Not really sure if viable.

Late Game

IMPORTANT NOTE

Finish late game section
Foes and friends
Closing

video intro
video skills how to use + compilation
video #1 #2 #3 #4 $5

revise

IMPORTANT NOTE : Too lazy to finish this. Plus, this guide is very outdated, I've refined my ES play even more and this is apparently not the best way to play ES, I'll probably post a revised version soon. This guide is still quite okay tho, just not the best. Keep tuned for revised version :3