Dota 2 Heroes – An Introduction to Ethreain, the Lich

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   November 9th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Ethreain the Lich is a very flexible hero who is picked very consistently on a competitive level. He is a great solo, especially against tri-lane, while also being one of the best team-fight heroes in the game.

Frost Blast is Lich’s first spell. It is a single-target nuke that deals 200 damage to an enemy along with a 150 additional damage in a small Area of Effect (AoE) of 200. This nuke also slows enemy’s attack speed by 20% and move speed by 30% for 4 seconds.

Lich’s second skill is Ice Armor. It is an interesting skill as it does not directly synchronise with any of Lich’s other spells. This does not mean that it is a bad spell, on the contrary actually. It is a single-target spell that you can use on any ally, including yourself, which provides 9 armour for up to 40 seconds. The catch here is that if your ally or yourself are attacked why the buff is applied to you, the attacker gets its movement speed reduced by 30% and attack speed reduced by 20% for 2 seconds. However, keep in mind that this works only against melee enemies. Although the slow in movement speed synchronises with some of his other skills, the added armour is the real benefit here as you can make a somewhat squishy ally much harder to kill.

Lich’s third skill is named Sacrifice. This is the reason why mana regeneration is not too important for Lich. At Level 4, it will create 60% hit-points (hp) of an allied creep into mana. The most important part of the spell is that the creeps that you consume do not give any experience to the enemy. This is why Lich is so popular against tri-lanes as he cannot only deny experience and gold, but can also keep the lanes pushed back so that he will not be in any immediate danger.

Now we get to Lich’s ultimate Chain Frost. It is a great team-fight spell as it deals a ridiculous amount of damage, especially if there are no creeps around. It is a single-target spell that when used will deal 460 damage to the target along with a mini-stun and will proceed to bounce up to 7 times off nearby enemies. You can imagine why having creeps around will ruin the spell as you cannot control where the next bounce will go. As for numbers, imagine you catch 2 heroes close to each other and unleash the Chain Frost. One target can theoretically take 1840 damage from 4 bounces.

Aghanim’s Scepter can be purchased by Lich as it increases the damage of each by 90, which means you can technically deal 630 extra damage by picking this up.

After taking a look at the amount of damage his spells can do, along with the slow attack and move speed debuff that he can apply on his enemies, it hardly comes as a surprise to find him in majority of competitive Defense of the Ancients (Dota) 2 matches, that is if he is able to stay off the ban list.

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