Dota 2 Support Guide: Shadow Demon

Shadow Demon Guide

This guide will be about the support hero shadow demon. Very strong defensively, and capable of strong set-up for other hero’s, this guy can shine with great team coordination and be a huge impact on any teamfight. The first hero to contribute to the decline of antimage after the first international, he has been a high tier pick ever since.

Most commonly played as a position 5 hero, the hard support with little to no farm in the average game, Shadow demons major strength comes from his first spell disruption. Far more versatile than it would seem from first glance, the quick thinking involved with deciding who and when to disrupt is what will make or break any SD player.

Picking and laning Shadow Demon

The major reason to pick up a shadow demon for your lineup is to provide strong setup in the laning phase for hero’s with hard to land stuns, such as leshrac, lina and kunkka. You also need heroes who do their damage within a short period of time to benefit from his soul catcher. Disruption will commonly be used to initiate aggressively in lane, followed up by soul catcher and your ally's spells to start fights on your terms.

The spell itself doesn’t do damage, but the illusions created can be a huge threat. As with any illusions, they gain passive orb effects of their origin, the best example being disruption on antimage, the illusions burning his mana at double the rate of antimage himself. This ability to turn the strength of enemy carry's back on themselves is what lets disruption scale very well into any game, with or without items.

Shadow demon will also function well as a counterpick to many ganking orientated lineups, with disruption and demonic purge as strong defensive spells letting him shut down tower dive attempts single handedly.

The other major application of disruption is as a strong defensive spell, either removing on enemy hero from the fight for two and a half seconds, buying time for help to arrive or even dodging major spells. A shadow demon sitting on the back lines can allow any carry to farm without fear, in a similar way that a defensive earthshaker can deny kill attempts with fissure. The major difference between the two heroes is shadow demons ability to adapt between aggression and passive play while not needing any items aside from boots to contribute all game long.

 

Item Discussion

Usually played as the position 5 on a team, shadow demon is very item independent, really only requiring boots and money for wards to contribute. However, extra utility items such as a force staff can never be bad. Usual starting items include your teams courier or wards, branches for quick stats, and an abundance of regen items, since you will almost always be in lane or roaming for most of the early game and having spare healing to pool too your carry is on of the best ways you can provide support.

Early gold should go towards upgrading the courier and picking up your boots asap, as well as ensuring you always have a tp scroll. After that, as previously mentioned, you don’t really need any more items. As long as your team has you map coverage, you can feel free to upgrade your boots to arcane's or power treads, depending on your needs, and start saving up for the parts for a force staff, always a useful items and giving you either some initiation range for disruption or an escape.

After that, you can make an adequate mek or pipe carrier if no-one is farming it quickly, or you could try for another utility item such as a necronomicon, euls or a ghost sceptre. A cool option for late game is a blink dagger since you can get where you need to be to land disruptions and purges, and do the cute trick of disrupting yourself and then immediately blinking away if you get into trouble.

 

Playstyle

Skill builds on shadow demon have a small amount of adaptability. Disruption is your go too level 1 spell, maxing soul catcher after that purely for the damage boost. As a support, shadow poison can be used as a powerful scouting tool on a low cooldown at level one, but more than one point in it will drain your mana faster than you can support with no items.

Shadow Demon's ultimate has lot of potential uses, but you will find yourself using it primarily for the strong slow effect, which will work through any magic immunity and prevent melee carry's in particular from impacting a team fight for the duration. The purge portion of the spell can be powerful against certain heros who rely on buffs, such as broodmothers insatiable hunger, but purge does not work on everything you would like. The exact mechanic behind the different types of buffs and how they are removed is complex, the best way to find them out is to play and learn.

Your role on the team will almost always be as the position 5 defending your carry and pulling your safe lane. This is a role which people can find difficult, and will commonly feel like they are wasting their time. Throughout the laning phase your positioning is crucial, ideally treading the fine line of being always close enough to support your carry if they get initiated on, and being constantly out of sight.

If the enemy hero’s cannot see you they have to be a lot more cautious, while if they know where you are, they have a lot more of an advantage against you. Remember, always be aware of where you can teleport too on the map to countergank any tower dives. As the hard support you are the member of your team responsible for moving around and helping where needed, and shadow demon is well equipped to turn those ganks around.

The other common laning situation to be in as a shadow demon is paired with a strong hero who requires strong setup to be effective. The best example of this is mousports's infamous kunkka shadow demon lane. The idea with this pairing is catching a hero with disruption, using soul catcher, torrent and tidebringer to do huge amounts of damage to a singe hero, on low cooldown.

Other potential combos for this setup are with lina, leshrac or mirana, but the reason the kunkka combo works well is that the enemy’s response to this will always be to stay away from your disruption, and kunkka can benefit greatly from the free farm this should provide against a single hero in mid.

 

Pulling

Since shadow demon as a support is a laning hero, he will usually take up the role of pulling to help out the carry's lane, so I will try and go into a little more detail on this role. First of all, the main thing the enemy team will do to counter your pulling is warding your pull camps with observer wards.

The choices here is to either place the wards to block as well a give vision of your movement, or to position the ward inside the trees, making them a lot more tricky to remove but meaning they won't give vision. The former will usually be very easy to find, but if the ward is not instantly found and destroyed, try not too get fixated on it, since you will know they have no vision of you. In this situation, try and get behind them and gank instead of pulling. As long as your last hitter in the lane understands the importance of keeping the lane static, you can still gain the upper hand without pulling as long as you pile on the pressure.

As a general rule, always avoid pulling a single camp that is not stacked, although there are situations where it can be worthwhile, perhaps if you need a little exp to get that important level 2 or 6, or if you want to set up a push with the wave after If your paying attention to when the siege units come out.

Pulling a stacked camp is the way to go if you want to keep the creep wave safely next to your tower, but make sure your carry's has a way of preventing the tower getting beat on a little to much, and again be careful of pulling when a siege creep is on its way, you want to avoid any unnecessary damage to your tower. The best position to be in during these pulls is just too the right when radiant, or left when on the dire, just to have good vision of any hero’s coming in to disrupt your puling.

When they do inevitably come in to mess with you, unless you have support from your team, its usually best to avoid a fight and focus on securing the deny's and last hits on your own creeps and the jungle while being as close too an escape route as possible. If your team is on the way, go ahead and initiate on the enemy hero, the pull area is generally a great place for your team to fight, just because of the availability of free vision as well as the nearby safety provided by the tower.

 

Stats and things

Shadow demon has reasonable stat gain for an intelligence hero, and none of his spells increase in mana cost at all, which is the main contribution to his strength as a itemless hero, never having to wory about running out of mana and allowing him to focus on utility items when he does get them.

The illusions aquired from disruption retain some of the passives and orb effects from the heros they are summoned from, most notably antimages mana break. Due to this, it is advantageous to spam disrution on an antimage in lane, burning his mana though the ilusions or forcing him to blink away. An antimage without mana will find it hard to farm as hard as he needs too. This can also be used on other hero’s , such as turning around a venomancer's harass, or temporarily stealing the aura effects of some items or passives, like inner beast, drums or assault cuirass.

Shadow poison is a great spell, but needs at least 3 stacks on a target to be effective. Usually as a support you wont last that long in a major teamfight, or early on, you wont have the mana to sustain this, but if the situation arises, spam away. The majority of the time, it is most effective to release the poison as soon as it reaches 4 stacks, unless you plan on lining it up with a soulcatcher.

Shadow poison can also be used to kill stacked creep camps, if you want to try and jungle shadow demon, pick up a fast bottle and stack a large camp as many times as you can. Although this is rarely applicable in a competitive game, it can get you plenty of free levels in public’s and gives more free-farm to your solo lane as long as your still pulling.

Next up, vengeful spirit, with general advice on roaming and warding.