Balanar the Night stalker `



LORE-Beware, you who wander the night. Each step you take leads you deeper in the hideous reign of the horrible ruler of the dark. Balanar, elite dreadlord who brought the total darkness of the Nether into this world, haunts these regions. Your heart will pump harder, your legs will shake, and your mind will cloud as the presence of the stalker hunts you in the dark. There's no chance to fight, no way to run, and no place to hide - darkness is everywhere! You can pray, you can cry, but the darkness won't be stopped - until you die.


SKILLS
Void

Creates a damaging void. If cast at night, slows the target for 4 seconds. If cast at day, slows the target for 2 seconds.
Crippling Fear

In the night, the Night Stalker can cause intense fear in enemy units, causing them to miss attacks and be unable to cast spells. This has reduced effect during the day.

Hunter in the Night

The Night Stalker is at home at night. He attacks and moves more swiftly.

Darkness

Creates a period of darkness for the Night Stalker to thrive in. (spam at night!)

Night stalker's skill order is a little flexible with the main build void [1, 3, 5, 7] fear [2/12/13/14] hunter in the night [4/6/8/9] darkness [10/11/16]
The reason for maxing crippling fear last is because it adds only 3 seconds to the silence at night. The reason for postponing darkness if because you want to have more levels in hunter in the night by the first night to assist in ganks.

LANING -night stalker can be played in either the mid lane or the safe lane (rad-bot dire-top) he usually goes mid so that he is able to get thee levels he needs before the first night. when the first night time hits you should have farmed up a pair of boots of speed and urn of shadows these will help in you ganking role. During the first night you want o gank as much as possible diving past towers and shutting the enemy team down.

ITEMS-for starting items on night stalker you want to get tangos,salve,2x gauntlets of strength, and 2x ironwood[gg branches] this helps with some last hitting power as well as building in to the urn of shadows as well
For mid game you want to farm up a bottle urn of shadows and phase boots. The bottle will allow you to control the runes since you will be roaming the map and will also help you keep you health and mana up. The phase boots give you extra move speed and damage to help with your ganking. if you find yourself in a mountain of gold you can purchase a Aghanim’s scepter which passively gives night stalker unobstructed vision in a radios around him making it almost impossible for the other team to get the drop on you. a black king bar (bkb) is also another wise choice as the heath and magic immunity help when you dive past towers and prevent the enemy form crowd controlling you. late game you want to tank up as night stalker going for either a satanic or a heart or even more damage like a Assault Cuirass, monkey king bar(mkb) or skull basher.

TEAM FIGHTS-during a team fight you want to be using void on the carries because of the 40% attack speed slow or anyone who is running away while you want to use crippling fear on a important caster because the 8 second silence can be devastating in a team fight.

FINALE WORDS-Night stalker is a great ganker who excels at being played very aggressive going for kill all night long and shutting down the enemy team. With great team coordination his ganks can put the enemy team so far behind there is no way of catching up.

Nice Guide
The thing I like about Night Stalker is how flexible you can be with your item choices.
I have been experimenting with Orb of Venom and Eul's. Orb is nice for the extra slow in a variety of uses and you can build it into a skadi late game. Eul's is great because it fixes NS's mana problems, bonus movespeed is always great on any ganker especially when when you lose your MS bonus during the day, and the cyclone is great for team fights and splitting up dual lanes when going in for a gank. Just some nice items to help round out his role as a tanky disabler

If u realy mant to add speed you might want to go for a drum
I have never thought about skadi the diving ablity from the slow is great and the hp would not hurt but it may be to expensive
Thanks for the input!

I've played NS once and got absolutely obliterated. I will def be giving him a second shot after reading this write-up. Thanks for the amazing content archaoss.

I promise you guys I've been toying around with getting some tooltip/popups integrated into the board for guide-writing, and we could use that same code in a Wiki or something for guides as well. Just gotta stop playing so much Dota rofl

Awesome guide.

thanks man ill try to do these things on a weekly basis let me know if i can help provide other content for the site

I've seen the occassional Eye of Skadi on late game nightstalkers. It tends to work pretty good. I'd say it's situational.

Nightstalker is a powerful ganking hero though sometimes his strengths aren't readily apparent until you play him a couple times (at least it wasn't for me). When I play Nightstalker - I almost always play him mid. As he's a melee hero, I'm left playing passive until night time when I can either push my lane or gank (or both).