Having him in lane when playing a carry is fantastic. I was playing Razor with a TP as support, and we were able to grab such easy kills early on due to constant harass and his heal making it so I didn't really have to leave lane. It was pretty great.

This is awesome!

Fun times last night! Can't get mad at winning one and losing one!

Hey guys, I've got a decent amount of free time at work, so I thought I'd try and revive the guides Archaos had been putting together. Figured I'd start with a hero I play a lot, Viper. Input would be great! If people like these, I'll write a few more for a few other heroes I play pretty often.

As with any skill build, this is all SITUATIONAL!! Too many players follow skill/item builds exactly instead of seeing what they're team needs.

Viper


Viper is a mid-game carry that requires moderate levels of farm to be useful.

Skills:

(Q)Poison Attack- Just what it sounds like. Adds poison to attacks (10/16/22/28 per second) as well as a 10%/20%/30%/40% slow.

(W)Nethertoxin (Passive)- This makes Viper extremely dangerous. Basically, Viper deals more damage the more injured a hero, unit or tower is.

(E)Corrosive Skin (Passive)- Makes Viper a bit more tanky and helps a bit with escaping in the mid game. When Viper's attacked he deals damage, as well as slowing his attacker.

(R)Viper Strike- Viper's Ulti. Basically just a really strong Poison Attack. It's a larger slow (40/60/80%) as well as a larger DPS (60/100/145) over 5.1 seconds. The cooldown is relatively short (80/50/30/*12) as is the mana cost (125/175/250/*125) especially with a Scepter.

Skill Build:
(S=Stats)

1. Q 7. E 13. E 19. S 25. S
2. W 8. W 14. E 20. S
3. Q 9. Q 15. S 21. S
4. W 10. W 16. R 22. S
5. Q 11. R 17. S 23. S
6. R 12. E 18. S 24. S

In my opinion, you must absolutely have level 3 Poison Attack before you get your ulti. At level 3 your poison attack has no cool down. Coupled with your Viper Strike, you should be able to kill many of the hard carries (Void, AM, etc.) due to your slow, and the poison over time.

Items:

Viper's item build emphasizes early game tank followed by DPS. He doesn't need a ton of farm to be very useful. Here's the build I like to go with (going to try the new item codes):

[item=1] ->[item=34]x3 -> [item=36] -> Wraith Band (no item ID) -> [item=335] -> [item=206] -> [item=368] -> [item=339] -> Butterfly -> [item=273] -> [item=342]

Basic Play Style

Viper is strong mid game hero that needs relatively little farm to be very successful. Much in the vein of Drow, Viper is a right click hero.

Viper can easily solo a lane, but works best in a dual lane with a support with a dedicated stun like VS. Early in the match, Viper should be both last hitting and harassing the lane with Poison Attack. It's a relatively strong attack early on and will force them to use their regen items.

Once you hit 6, it's killing time. Ideally, you can get your Viper Strike off, followed by a stun from a support, and you can just spam your orb to kill them. Throughout most of the mid game, enemy heroes will melt. Nethertoxin makes Viper ideal for helping to clean up heroes trying to run. Most guides suggest Power Treads on Viper. If my farm is going well and I get a quick Vanguard, I'll usually go phase boots to make up for how slow Viper is.

In the late game, Viper's ult will melt carries. Having Aghanim's Scepter will allow you to spam Viper Strike as well as Poison Attack making sure that your team gets the kills they need.

Viper's biggest strength in the late game is once again to help catch fleeing heroes as well as quickly take out supports.

Hope this helps!

Stop playing Diablo and come back to DOTA!

Or at least, wait until I buy Diablo this weekend.

Completely agree. I usually hold off, since the Vanguard usually gives me enough survivability, but yeah, there are definitely times where the Ulti Orb is the way to go.

I crumbled!!

I bought D3 tonight. Downloading and will be on this weekend.

Bnet: FallenElf

Not sure I'f I'm the biggest fan of it either. It's pretty annoying to cycle through heroes. They did keep the grid UI, but once you click on a hero, it zooms in on them so you can't see any others.

I too will be taking a vacation. I think a few people here have taken a similar vacation.

To New Tristram.

This too.

Super appreciate the offer, but I don't think I can handle another addiction.

So it's like dota?

I couldn't get these to work...

As someone who needs a lot of improvement myself, I thought I'd make a quick comment.

The best thing about playing with you, and Bear does this as well, is you're great at staying very calm, no matter how heated everyone else is getting, and making us play as a team. You definitely have a way of getting everyone on the team to work together and therefore, win games, or at least have fun. Never losing your cool and getting us to actually act in someway, rather than just sit around is awesome.

Also, always willing to play support and constantly ward. Awesome sauce.

So I'm sitting here at work, procrastinating quite a bit, and thought it might be fun to get a small doobs tournament going. Sitting on the mumble server a lot and playing with lots of different people made me realize that there we span into a few different age/country categories. I was thinking it might be fun to have an Age Tournament.

It would work something like this. Teams would consist of players either 21 and over or under 21 (just picked an arbitrary age, we can change if necessary). Going one step further, your team must be comprised of people from your region, i.e. USA/Canada and Europe.

I think we could get 4 or 5 teams out of this, based on the people who regularly play on Mumble. Of course, if numbers run low, we can get rid of the region filter.

I was thinking we could do the tournament the last weekend in June. Maybe have Love is Dead/essem/Kerpath/whomever cast a couple of the games.

Ideally we could get at least 4 teams. Best 2 out of 3. Regional teams would play each other first with the finals being the winners of each region.

Prize could be some Steam cash for the team or something like that.

I'm more than happy to organize the back end by setting up rosters and stuff via a google spread sheet. If this works for people, we could create a few team channels in mumble so that way a team can play together in there without anyone bothering them.

Thoughts?

Works for me. The more teams we could get in the better!

we had a good run of games last night where we worked together well and got some good wins. I'll post the ids when I get home.

I'm not against this idea. I was thinking the age rule might make it a little more interesting setting up the teams, and would randomize them decently. I think just signing up and randomizing would be a bit weird, because some people's play styles just don't go well together. I'd probably try to have teams sign up within 2 weeks of deciding to do this, the 2 weeks later have the tournament.



I actually see it taking place over at least 2 days, not necessarily consecutive days though. It all depends on the number of teams we actually get to sign up. I'm imagining we'll get about 4-7, meaning that there will be 3 sets of matches going on at once. Ideally, we could get one or two people to live cast these games. This should take about 3 hrs.

The second day would be the finale portion. This would also be a best of 3 set. So another 3 hrs.

Thoughts? I'm totally up for changing the format up. I'm also thinking we should try to keep this little tourney in house for right now, with maybe one exception per team just to fill slots.

I played 2 games with Chaos Knight, and man is he awesome! The randomness really forces you to think before each engagement, and his Reality Rift is great for removing a hero from a team fight. I used to to stop initiators like Tide, SK, Enig. It totally messed their initiations.

Man, I watched all 3. VP is one of my favorite pro team at the moment. Their play style almost balks the current meta (despite the constant Lesh pick up).