The power of Broodmother

Opening thoughts

Sup

First off, introductions. I go by the tag FroZen or FroZeniNside. I have been playing since version 6.67 of DoTA and transitioned into Dota 2 as soon as I got a beta key. I am by no means a pro player I do have a fair amount of gameplay under my belt and more than a few games of Broodmother.

Advanced warning, there will be many walls of text and it is a work in progress. If you want to know how to play this hero then read on.

Also another warning. If you see any brood counters being picked by the other team just don't pick brood. When she gets shut down she is utterly useless. So if you see any of the following heroes on the enemy team seriously reconsider picking the spider.

- Dark Seer
- Axe
- Sand king
- Centaur ehhh kinda, he is somewhat mana dependent
- Meepo(believe it or not)
- Dirge
- Magnus if you expect him to go sidelane


I have finally decided to write a guide on a hero that I believe to be exceptionally powerful in pubs but often misplayed. Why is brood so powerful in "pubs"? Several reasons actually. First and foremost, brood is vastly underestimated in the laning stage(this is pubs keep in mind) and can often be found crushing all semblance of life out of the enemy carry before any kind of coordinated response is made. Second, the lack of zoning and detection, what many people don't understand is that brood is very weak in the very earlygame(levels 1-3), a brood who is allowed to get level 3-4 and a soul ring quickly can easily decimate a trilane with no help at all. The problem is that it is a fairly simple kill or keep the brood off the lane early.

But how is brood so strong in the laning phase? Spiderlings. Unless you are against some very good creep clearing abilities(such as ion shell, anchor smash, ect) you can basically just mass up 5+ spiderlings then send them on the level 2 support and he will have to back or be killed and often he will back and still be killed. A brood's earlygame after soul ring should consist of the following actions: MAKE MORE SPIDERLINGS. It is really that simple. Using the spiderlings is fairly simple just right click on an enemy hero, of course you can get much more creative than that but if you take Sexybamboe's broodmother play as an example he pretty much just right clicks his spiderlings on the support then goes to doing other things. I prefer to be a bit more conservative and micro intensive and try to keep as many spiderlings alive as possible while harrasing and once you reach a critical mass and proper creep equalibrium you can easily dive towers and get kills with them.

Items and skill build justification

Alright this seems to be a point where I end up facepalming when I see some players brood play and even some of the popular guides.

Item justification

First off, here once again is the starting item I suggest.

- 3 GG branches
- 2 Salves
- 2 Clarities
- Soul Ring Recipe (not used to this guide maker how do I add this to the grid?)

The only thing I really suggest you start with is a soul ring recipe and some clarities. Whatever stats and hp regeneration you prefer to start with is up to you but this is my build.

Branches

Why? Because. They make for good games.

But seriously, ironwood branches are cheapest stats in the game and are a fantastic addition to any hero early on. They also build up to the ever so useful magic wand should you want that item.

Salves

Why not tangos? Your webs. You already have slow regen and so the only time you will need hp is when you need a lot of it at once, thus salves. I have a tendency to dive pretty early so the salves are are great for getting right back in the action after you do something ******ed.

Clarities

Having 2 clarities will allow you to use several spawn spiderlings and build up a small army of bugs to protect yourself and harras with early before you can get up the soul ring.

Soul Ring Recipe

This one explains itself. You want to get the item that wins you the lane ASAP and taking the courier away from your mid or supports early before it is flying can delay critical items such as a bottle or sentry wards.

After you do the laning for a bit you will want to grab your treads and completed soul ring. I don't think I need to elaborate on this much. you can just leave your boots normal to get travels later for some crazed deep web split push shenanigans but treads give you all kinds of useful stuff like attack speed and a good chunk of stats. Phase boots suck obviously, when you phase you lose web movespeed and end up going slower.

Orchid Malevolence

Orchid is a fantastic item for brood mother. If gives you most everything you want. Attack speed, mana regen, damage, and a silence. The only wasted part of the item would be the 25 intelligence which by no means is bad to have but being as that you are an agility hero you don't get the damage off it.

But besides its direct benefits to the hero does it give? I'm glad you asked. What an earlyish (13-18 minute) orchid does it makes the brood very dangerous. Before this happened you could easily leave a support to sit by the tower and keep it alive, a carry might even be happy to have a brood pushing on his tier2 tower. Sure he might take some harras but in a pinch he has spells that allow him to live, right? Right...? Nope. As soon as that orchid comes up the enemy team is forced to directly deal with the brood push, if they send down a random Jakiro to nuke some spiderlings he will die if you leave your chaos knight in the lane to farm he is at risk of dying or will take heavy damage. Your opponite is forced to either kill you(a difficult thing to do) or leave 2 heroes to stop you. Both of these responses are fantastic as it means less pressure if being applied to the rest of the map and your team is allowed to freely farm, push, or even gank.

Yasha

I'd like to briefly say that picking up fast yasha can be very useful even if you don't upgrade it to manta. The amount of movespeed, attack speed and damage you get does not seem like that much but it is a massive boost to your survivability and killing power.

Beyond these items it is largely up to preference. Some like to get a very early bkb and help in fights and just be hard to kill. That is fine. A good point to bring up though is that after you have your first 2 tier2 items up(say orchid+bkb) if the game is not largely if your favor or ending soon, be afraid. Brood loses a lot of power lategame when supports start to get tanky and maneuverability items come up. When this stage hits your spiderlings become largely a non-factor and your split-push abilities dip down sharply.

Skillbuild justification

Levels 1-5

Web
Spawn Spiderling
Spawn Spiderling
Web
Spawn Spiderling

I don't think many people will argue this. Pretty standard. You need webs. You want triple spiderlings.

Level 6

Web
This is something that I believe needs explaining. "Why not Insatiable Hunger?" you ask. Lets take a look at the skill. I am going to talk about it for a bit as this is a point of debate.

At level 1 this skill gives you 60 bonus damage, 40% lifesteal, and lasts for 14 seconds with a 60 second cooldown and 100 mana cost. This seems like a great skill to have early but it is deceptive. lets go through the components of the skill.

- The damage
60 damage early is fantastic there is no denying that. The damage is simply amazing.

- lifesteal
Honestly the lifesteal is negligible believe it or not. You can do some cool wodota stuff by living on 12 hp lifestealing but honestly if you start hitting someone, they will stun you.

- Duration and Cooldown
Not much to say here, the duration is pretty good but does not matter much to say. The cooldown is pretty stinking long though.

- Manacost
This is what biggest weakness of taking the ultimate at level 6. You are going to be using every single point of mana on spawn spiderlings. There are very few occasions where you will have 100 mana to spare. Even if you do have mana, is Hunger better than Spawn spiderlings? I have to say no, the spiders are ******edly strong and its a high damage nuke so I believe that it is mana better spent.

So basically, you just get a good amount of +damage and some lifesteal that may or may not be useful. In my opinion this is simply not worth the skillpoint. Having more webs, movespeed and regen is very useful. basically, the more webs you drop the more chasing and escaping ability you have. One way you will be killing is sending 10+ spiders on a hero then you just follow them out of spell range and wait for them to get low, if you have a large amount of webs they simply wont be able to escape the spiders.

On the other hand, the skill DOES give a lot of damage and allows you to fistfight, heres the problem, nobody is going to fistfight early. You walk up and hit the CM? She stuns you and walks away, and pretty much every hero will do something like this. You get like 2-3 hits off. A spawn spiderling would be way more useful. On the off chance a void starts hitting you and you decide to hit back you might not even get anything done here, you will get stunned and if the enemy hero decides he is not winning the fight he will simply walk away and you can do nothing to stop it.

In conclusion, your skillbuild depends on how you play and what the situation is. There is always be times when Hunger is the best choice, I have come across very few of these situations but they do happen. If you prefer to go Hunger at 6 then by all means. You know my build and you know why I do it.

Levels 6+

Beyond this I don't think many will argue the skillbuild, perhaps you will want to take Bite at 7 and take it over more levels of web instead of maxing your nuke and web. This is a perfectly viable build but I prefer to have big nukes.

Early Game

What to do at the start of the game.

First off, brood requires at least a solo lane preferably the hardlane and I will give you 3 reasons for this.
- Brood requires solo experiences and thus needs a solo lane
- There are many superior mid heroes who can make use of the runes and be much more effective in that lane
- When the tier 1 tower drops your pushing ability goes down slightly and it becomes more dangerous to be in the lane, when this phase hits you want to be able to duck into the jungle to farm up. This is much harder to do if you are in the easy lane.

Alright, once you have gotten to the hardlane drop a web in the trees to knock them down. This makes it easier to spot incoming ganks, gives you more room to move, and allows you to drop another web laterally to get away from sentries. Odds are the creep wave will push early and you will need to put another web by your tower. Generally I like to take out every tree in sight to keep the lane open and safe as seen in the screenshot below.

What do you do once the lane starts up? Try to survive and cs. If your opposites are skilled at all they will harras you and deny most creeps(brood has garbage base damage but that's ok). Your goal is cs up to your soul ring, use spawn spiderlings(this is why you have clarities) at levels 2 and 3 and try to build up a few spiders and use them to harras.

Once you hit level 4+ and get soul ring without anything going horribly wrong you are pretty much home free, you just got past the hardest part of the lane. At this point use spawn spiderlings constantly amassing spiders and attacking the enemy heroes with them and try also to attack every creep that dies with the spiders to create even more. Do your best to keep them alive but if they are doing significant damage don't be afraid leave them attacking the hero even if some die(try not to straight up feed them though as they do give a good bit of gold). Using this alone (make bugs, attack with bugs) you can win the lane.

At this point you should consistently have spiderlings out and attacking the creepwave and thus be pushing. This is good. When you have the creepwave under the enemy tower and you have 10+ spiders you can do one of two things.
- Push the tower
- Kill them
Early in the game I much prefer killing because it is just so easy. Do you know what happens if you are a crystal maiden and 14 spiders start attacking you? You die. You can't run away, and unless you somehow got xp for a high level nova you can't kill the spiders. You just die. So what you do is just send your spiders on a weak hero and stand just out of range for them to cast anything on you and wait for them to get low then just nuke them. It really is that simple. There are not that many heroes who can deal with 10+ spiderlings and if the enemy team happens to have these heroes you probably should not pick broodmother.

So here's the tl;dr of the earlygame
- Get soul ring
- Get LOTS of spiderlings
- Harras with said spiderlings
- Kill and or push with spiderlings.

This alone can often win a game because the fact that you are wrecking the carries lane.

Closing thoughts

Alright done writing for now. I may or may not provide screenshots and replays to demonstrate what I talk about.

Keep in mind that this is a work in progress, my first guide, and I have horrible writing and punctuation abilities.

Comment, tell me where I am dead wrong and made horrible mistakes. If you disagree with my antics we can argue, I believe my build and style of play on brood is the most effective way to play in most situations but I can be wrong.

Changelog
12-07-12 - guide created
12-08-12 - added some skill and item build justification