Dota 2 Heroes – An Introduction to Morphling

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   August 28th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Morphling is a ranged agility late-game hard carry who is heavily reliant on items. Luckily for him, he has excellent escape mechanisms that allow him to stay alive until he gets in a position from where he can take control of battles.

His first ability is called Waveform. When activated, Morphling turns into a wave and surges up to a distance of 1000 units, dealing 325 damage along the way. He can also use this skill to disjoint stuns as well as go through terrain. This is his escape mechanism number one. It also helps him to chase his enemies down as well as close in the gap when facing other ranged heroes.

Although Morph is Morphling’s third skill, we will talk about it now in order to make more sense of his second ability.

Morph is a very unique ability as it basically boosts your strength or agility gain. At Level 4, you can turn 8 strength into 8 agility, which costs 20 mana per second, or do the opposite, i.e. turn 8 agility into 8 strength per second. The way you use this skill is what shapes which items you go for during the course of the game. You can either be strength-based and go for damage-per-second (DPS) items, or you can do what people usually do, i.e. go for agility boost by getting tanky items. It is very common to start converting your agility to strength while trying to get away on low health, which makes it his escape mechanism number 2.

Morphling’s second skill is named Adaptive Strike. It is a single-target spell that is placed on enemies directly. The effect it has on them depends on how much strength and agility he has. If he has 50% more agility than strength, then casting Adaptive Strike will deal 80 plus two-times the agility in damage while mini-stunning the target for 0.25 seconds. On the other hand if you have 50% more strength than agility, then it will deal 80 plus 0.25 of your agility in damage while stunning the target for 3 seconds.

Lastly, Morphling’s ultimate is called Replicate. It allows you to create an illusion of any target hero, be it an ally or an enemy. This illusion deals 50% damage but takes the normal amount as a hero. One of the most important part of this ability is that you can take the place of your illusion at any time, thus allowing you to jump literally to the other side of the map with little worry. This is escape mechanism number 3.

As mentioned before, Morphling is heavily reliant on items and thus needs to farm for quite a bit of time before he really begins to make his impact in the game. Wave Form allows him to clear waves of creeps easily, though it uses a significant amount of mana and thus does not allow you to spam it. A well-built Morphling is extremely hard to take down.