Poof Meepo - the mid game carry

Introduction

Meepo was one of my favorite heroes in Dota 1 and now hes been released in dota 2. He is one of the best farming heroes in the game. He can split push all by him self due to his ultimate ability allowing you to keep all the lanes pushed up if needed.

Pros/Cons

Pros

Fun
Huge Nuke damage
Sorta a Carry
Earthbind is boss
ability to farm multiple lanes
easily able to clear jungle

Squishy
Micro oriented
Some times tricky to land skills
can be easily countered with high burst
extremely low base damage

Play Style

When you first start out in a lane youll notice you have a really low base damage. This makes farming at this stage rather tricky. However, because Meepo is very level dependent rather then item dependent this isn't such a bad thing. play extremely safe from levels 1-6 because of the low amount of HP you have and your low base damage. You really will only be able to harass if you are laning with some one who has a slow or if they initiate on you at this stage. One thing people usually miss when they first play meepo is that poof can be used with out a clone as an effective aoe nuke. This makes it easy to kill some one who is tower diving you and melee.

When you hit level 6 you'll be able to start moving around and doing more things. If you can land an earthbind (or your lane partner lands a stun) try to get up as close as possible then spam poof with your main hero and your clone. The idea here is that because you are in melee range you will get both the entrance and exit damage effectively doubling the damage of the spell, I.E. 140 becomes 280 and with the clone it becomes 520. With a point in geostrike you'll be able to slow them from here and eventually use the poof combo again to finish them off. If they are a particularly fast hero or have invisibility make sure to use both of your earth binds in succession to keep them from running away.

When you either start to loose towers or the other team starts teaming up, start to split your clones and hero up into different lanes. I tend to have my clones all in one lane or split into 2 if I have 4 of them and my hero in another. Even if you aren't the one farming the gold here you should be able to get double or even triple the xp that a normal hero would get just by being in the lanes. This gives you a huge advantage. If you aren't the highest level hero in the game after doing this then you are doing something wrong. Also when you get 2 clones it becomes extremely easy to push a lane by your self. You can use your poof to simply kill all the creeps. Doing 800 damage in an aoe makes this extremely easy. Also at this point your geostrike will make finishing off stragglers a breeze.

Advanced clone tactics and skill explanations.

A few people have suggested skilling earthbind after poof and then geostrike. IMO this is extremely situational. If you are faced with invis heroes or heroes with great escape/movement, this can be good to force a hero down into its place as the range on a maxed earth bind is ridiculous. Maxed Geostrike on the other hand allows you to maximize the damage your clones and hero does because all of them stack. (with 2 clones you get 3 separate instances of geostrike on the target, with 3 you'll have 4 etc.) When coupled with an AC you can slow people better then the zombies from undying's totem. Imagine getting one strike from 5 meepos on one hero. This is technically a 100% movement slow. This is exactly why when I go for a Geostrike early build ill rush a Scepter.

Because of the nature of this hero, some more advanced tactics can involve sending in a lone meepo or getting a blink dagger and blinking on top of a lone hero while poofing your clones to your meepo to do a surprise amount of damage. This is an extremely effective way of ganking some unsuspecting int/support hero and or low HP carry. This is also the reason why meepo is up with undying on the "anti-gank" category. When some one trys to take out a clump of meepos who are pushing a lane far into enemy territory, it is very easy to poof away and keep pushing a different lane. Think of this like the Morphling ultimate except there is no time limit.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on the reason why i chose Str treds to be the core boots for this build. Meepo has a really low amount of HP naively and because his clones only get the benefit of auras and his boots, using Str treds to boost their hp is very important. Even if you were to get a reaver on meepo, it would only add 8 str to each clone while str treads grant 10 str.

Advanced Blink Dagger Play.

To pull off some of the magic that you can do with a blink dagger requires quite a bit of micromanagement. Due to this, I have decided to devote a complete section to this area. A lot of the other guides for meepo center around getting a blink dagger as fast as possible, but i think for pubs, this is wrong simply because the skill required to pull off such a tactic is extremely demanding, that being said, i think its still a reasonable way of playing meepo.

So youve decided to get a blink dagger on meepo and you probably don't really know where to start with it due to the fact that the original hero only gets its benefits. the Blink dagger meepo gives a lot of versatility to how you can play however, because of its general nature. Imagine if you will seeing a lone meepo running around. Very tempting to gank. But then out of know where, 3 other meepos poof in and you die from the burst or you at least come close to dying. This is the idea behind this tactic. Whether it be offensive or defensive, the blink dagger can be a great tool for meepo.

Here's the basic technique. activate Poof on all your original meepo, then blink in. If timed correctly when your hero meepo arrives next to the hero you are ganking, the clones will also arrive with a lot of damage. Again, I said this was a difficult technique, to get all of those poofs going at once while blinking in and possibly netting the person you are ganking is a very micro intensive thing.

Teamfights

Your goal in team fights is to get one of your "heroes" into melee range, whether through earth bind spams or a blink dagger, you can then pull off a full rotation of poof to do a ton of damage to their entire team if they are clumped up enough. Beware though, if one clone dies you die. If one clone starts to loose HP fast, make sure to micro him back out of the fight. If they have high burst you will probably have to make sure you initiate with the main hero and then fall back to a clone you've left behind. This can be a very effective method of doing lots of damage and keeping your self alive.

Anyhow, I will continue to update this as I continue to play this hero. Have fun guys.

Im working on formating the guide. Since this is my 2nd guide excuse the lack of graphics.