A magic centric Queen of Pain guide

Why Qop

Queen of pain, overall is quite a flexible hero in terms of laning, and what she can do in team fights, you have the ability to solo any lane, due to large survivability from blink and a decent base damage. Most typically you will see qop in the middle lane because she does require some levels and farm to fight at her full potential. When playing qop it's often a good choice to help gank overextended sidelanes with your large nukes, blink and a decent slow.

Play Style

For the purpose of this build, your playstyle will go somewhat as follows, sit mid lane and farm while you can, carry a TP scroll to help with counterganking / defending towers. If you see a sidelane very pushed up, or you just grabbed a rune, feel free to try and gank that lane and help out. Make sure you communicate with your team what your doing and where the other hero mid is.

During teamfights, you will want to hit as many heroes as you can with veil, and while on cooldown use scream of pain hitting as many heroes as possible. It isn't required to use sonic wave at the start of the fight, just aim to hit as many heroes as possible, as it does flat damage to all of them. Most importantly, stay alive, if you find yourself dropping low, or you think large amounts of damage are coming your way, blink to a safer position, it's often smarter to save it for defensive purposes.

 

Abilities

Shadow Strike
 

Hurls a poisoned dagger which deals large initial damage, and then deals damage over time. The poisoned unit has its movement speed slowed for 15 seconds. An instance of damage is dealt every 3 seconds.
Range: 400
Duration: 15.1 Seconds
Movement Slow: 20%/30%/40%/50%
Damage over Time: 30/40/50/60
Damage: 50/75/100/125
CD: 20/16/12/8
Mana: 80/100/120/140

Shadow strike is a very effective harassment technique in lane due to its low mana cost to damage ratio, and the fact that it prevents the use of bottle / salve's, making throwing it onto a low hp hero a very strong way of keeping them out of lane early. When ganking, past the first few minutes, this is used primarily for the 30% slow, as you will keep it at level 2 for the majority of the game. Throw it on any heroes that won't die immediately to your burst damage to make it easier to chase them down. Note this is one of the few abilities that allow allies to deny a hero, watch for this.

Blink

Short distance teleportation that allows Queen of Pain to move in and out of combat.
Range: 700/850/1000/1150
CD: 12/10/8/6
Mana: 60

A standard blink skill, often used as a sort of get out of jail free card. Keep note of its short range and early CD at levels, as it won't save you if you're that badly out of position. Blinking into trees and using a TP scroll is a good escape, if you don't have a TP make sure you aren't blinking into places you cant move from. I promise this will still happen no matter how careful you are. Try to avoid using it offensively too much, or you will find yourself in a bad position, use it to position yourself to be most effective in a fight.

Scream of Pain

 

The Queen of Pain lets loose a piercing scream around her, damaging nearby enemies.
Radius: 475
Damage: 85/165/225/300
CD: 7
Mana: 110/120/130/140

Your primary damaging ability. Because of its low cooldown, it allows for large amounts of magic damage outputs. It's also a good way of farming, just hit the creeps low enough to die in one scream, pop scream, entire creep wave worth of gold is now yours. Due to the fact that it's an AoE and relatively low radius, you have to get fairly close to everyone; you have to get a large amount of health and survivability. You will want to be spamming this basically on cooldown.

Sonic Wave

Creates a gigantic wave of sound in front of Queen of Pain, dealing heavy damage to all enemy units in its wake.
Range: 700
Radius: 100 (Starting Radius) / 800 (Distance) / 300 (Final Radius)
Damage: 350/475/600 (350/530/725*)
CD: 135 (100/70/40*)
Mana: 250/360/500
Aghanim's Scepter* -  Reduces cooldown and increases damage.

Your ultimate ability, does huge amounts of burst damage in a large cone. Hit as many people as possible with this, use blink to get into the required position. Don't be afraid to use this to get solo kills earlier on, or once you get ahgs, as it lowers the cooldown to 40s.

 

Skillbuild
1: Shadow Strike
2: Blink
3: Shadow Strike
4: Scream of Pain
5: Scream of Pain
6: Sonic Wave
7: Scream of Pain
8: Scream of Pain
9: Blink
10: Blink
11: Sonic Wave
12: Blink
13: Shadow Strike
14: Shadow Strike
15: Shadow Strike
16: Sonic Wave
17+: stats

You'll want to level up shadow strike to level 2 during the laning phase to help control and harass the enemy hero, I choose to level blink up before finishing shadow strike for greater mobility around the map and surviving in fights. Otherwise its just a standard, do as much damage as possible build.

Items

Starting
     

Standard Salve / Tango, with some branches to work towards a magic wand. The gauntlet could also be a mantle, but qop has a high enough base attack that it shouldn't be an issue, hold on to it for as long as you need.

Early Game
  OR   

Mana boots allow for more usage of spells, either a magic wand or a bottle helps you stay in lane / fights longer and further allow for more spell spamming. You want to pick up a point booster because qop has a very low health pool and surviving during fights is very important, it will be used later on to make an aghs.

Midgame (Core)
  

The core of the build, Veil allows for your scream to scale up a little bit and help your ulti and teammates do larger amounts of damage in big engagements. BKB allows you to get close enough for scream of pain to be used effectively and with blink and bkb, you become almost impossible to kill. Aghs uses the point booster picked up early on to do even more magic damage in fights.

Endgame (Luxury)
    

Shivas just adds to the magic damage and gives a very nice aura and some armor to help live. Sheepstick, while not doing magic damage is just an amazing item overall, well worth the pickup on almost any heroes with spare cash. And finally necrobook, more magic damage and some amazing auras + truesight. Remember to use the mana burn on the ranged necrobook minion.

Closing Statement

Qop can be an easy pickup on most teams, use this build if you think you will be able to get some farm early on and you have a team with some good damaging spells. If you are missing out on some farm, you can skip the point booster until later and just position yourself further back in fights and stay alive.

It also allows for some easy almost insta kills on more squishy supports later on. Veil, shadowstrike scream, ulti will more often than not kill them, or at least leave them low enough for autoattacks, and with aghs, your ulti will more often than not be up for the next teamfight.