The Anti-Guide to: Riki

Introduction

Over 10,000 views... Holy hell I did not expect that. I posted the Anti-Guide to Drow Ranger on a slow day at work, after having wasted my one game of the morning playing with teammates who constantly fed Drow and made me cry terrible tears of sadness and pain. I then raged for more than half the day and eventually the Anti-Guide to Drow Ranger was born. Then came the other anti-guides; Pudge, Anti-Mage (Anti-Guide to Anti-Mage is still my favorite name of the bunch), and I realized: ****, now I have to make another one... Anyways, I'll tell you that this one, about our ever lovable invisible ******* Riki, will be less biased, but hopefully still funny enough to make keep you all entertained, and factual enough to actually help you beat the SoB a couple times.

So, before I go on another bloody rant, here's the Anti-Guide to: Rikimaru (lol that rhymes)

Pro's vs. Con's

Riki is one of those heroes that many people say is simple to counter. I tend to agree, but that doesn't make the pub games with him any less irritating, so here we go. Riki's biggest parlor trick is that he is invisible. All the time. Forever. I like to imagine that the other heroes feel really bad about how weak he is that they all just act like they don't see him. It's like playing peek-a-boo with a baby except the whenever you put your hands over your eyes the baby stabs you.

Pros

• Invisible, like Kirsten Stewart's acting talent
• Deals insane amounts of burst right-click damage
• He's invisible forever; kinda sad when you think about it...

Cons

• Really, REALLY, REALLY squishy
• Is fatally allergic to Dust of Appearance
• Being permanently invisible makes it hard for him to get chicks at parties

As you can see, Riki's greatest strength is his greatest weakness; his invisibility lets him take enemies by surprise and reenact the final scene of Braindead with his knives, but all of the bartenders hate him because they keep trying to hand glasses of Vadka to thin air.

Skills

Riki's skills are all about being a sneaky little SoB. Here's a list of all the ways he can F you up.

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Smoke Screen
Unbeknownst to the Dota community, Riki is a dedicated cosplayer. He seriously loves dressing up like a ninja and riding the city bus to restaurants where he orders a table for one and cries lonely in a corner booth where families of four and dating high-schoolers try not to make eye contact. This is made much easier seeing as how they can't actually see him, because he's invisible...

Anyways, while cosplaying, he rarely pays for his meals, so he invented a smoke bomb that I choose to believe emits poisonous chlorine gas. While in real life, this would kill people or at the very least cause severe brain damage, the Dota universe is not as wimpy as the real one so everyone just moves slower and has a percentage-based chance to miss him, and are magically silenced through the magical inhaling of magical chlorine gas. Needless to say, you do not want to fight a little invisible goat dude inside a cloud of toxic chlorine gas. It's just common sense. GTFO as soon as possible, because nothing is more humiliating than your badass level 25 hero suddenly forgetting how to use a sword.

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Blink Strike
This is Riki's most prized skill. Its an escape and chasing ability that allows him to teleport (sorry, Blink) behind you, quickly tap you shoulder, then Blink in front of you to laugh in your face because you turned to look. Then he stabs you. I'm all over the stabbing part, but the first part just seems unnecessary and cruel. In the end he just stabs you in the back like the coward he is. In fact, Riki is so dedicated to the idea of stabbing people in the back that he even has a skill completely dedicated to stabbing people in the back. Its called

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Backstab
Remember when I said that Riki likes stabbing people in the back? Riki has an invisible PHD in backstabbing from Penn State University, and he's very fond of shoving it in people like Sven's faces and going "Ooh look I have a PHD, bet they never taught you that at Manly Man's School for Men", where upon Sven proceeds to smash in Riki's invisible little face. All in all though, Riki tends to stab people in the back more than he shows them his degree in backstabbing.

With all of his collective knowledge of the most ticklish spots of the human body, Riki can proceed to tickle his enemies to death, although eventually he gets tired of that and goes back to stabbing people again. Riki knows that Agility is at the core of tickle fights, so the more agility he has, the more effective he becomes at reducing his enemies to laughter with his weak little scratches. That is until he gets enough agility from feeding on the hearts and crushed dreams of better, more professional heroes. Once this has happened, Riki becomes a beast of beastliness, dealing damage in the hundreds with every backstab.

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Permanent Invisibility
Permanent Invisibility
The invisibility I've been complaining about for this entire time is based on this skill. The developers at Valve were so bored with this character that they couldn't think up of another, better, more interesting name for this skill. Its not that hard, see, here's one: "Ninja Cloak". How about "Shadow Blend"? All of these names are ****, but Permanent Invisibility just sounds like we're in a bloody spelling bee.

Oh, did I just go on a rant? Well, the description of this skill is as simple as it's name; it turns Riki invisible for the rest of the game, so that he can be free to backstab whatever bloke he feels deserves it.