Illuminating the Darkness: A Guide to Keeper of the Light

Keeper of the Light is one of the best support heroes in the game. He has high utility with his chakra magic, and mana leak. As well as pretty good damage output with illuminate. When you combine all of these with his ultimate, which gives excellent team fighting abilities, Keeper of the Light is a great pick in almost any lineup!

Stats

HP: 454
Mana: 286
Damage: 38-54
Armor: 1.1
Attack Speed: 0.67

 

Abilities

Q: Illuminate- Channels a ball of light energy; building power the longer it’s channeled. Once released, the ball deals damage and gives vision in a line. The longer it is channeled the more damage dealt.

Illuminate is Keeper of the Light’s bread and butter when it comes to farming, harassment, and all around damage output. Much of Keeper of the Light’s effectiveness comes from the ability to land a well placed illuminate, it can be used to harass heroes out of lane, harassment before a team fight, or to catch a fleeing hero with minimal health.

W: Mana Leak- Weakens an enemy’s magical essence, causing them to lose mana as they move. If the enemy loses all of its mana, it will be stunned. Mana leak is a skill that scales really well with levels, dealing a 2.2 second stun at level four, as well a 1000 unit cast range, coupled with a 5% drain of the targets total mana. This is a skill that most people grab when KotL hits level four, but I recommend grabbing a couple levels of it early if you’re laning against someone that is mana intensive.

E: Chakra Magic- Restores mana to the target unit. With a range of 900 and a 300mp heal at level four, chakra magic is the reason everyone loves laning with KotL!

Ultimate: Spirit Form- Ezalor turns his body luminescent temporarily, gaining various abilities. Illuminate is now channeled by a separate spirit, and gains the Blinding Light and Recall abilities.

Recall- After a short delay, teleports the targeted friendly hero to your location. If the targeted friendly hero takes player based damage during this time, the ability is interrupted.

Blinding Light- A blinding light flashes over the targeted area, knocking back and blinding the units in the area,causing them to miss attacks.

KotL’s ultimate has a cool down of 60 seconds at level three, which means you don’t exactly have to wait for massive team fights in order to use it, which many people wait to do. It’s a fairly spamable ultimate with a 100 mana cost (easily recovered with a chakra magic).

Ability Build:
E/Q/E/W/E/R/E/Q/Q/W/R/Q/W/W/stats

Early Game:
Ezalor is a master laner, his arsenal has him equipped to handle pretty much any situation that he may encounter. He is one of the best elements of a tri-lane, capable of harassing heroes back to their tower, and maybe even then some, enabling your babysat carry to farm to their hearts content. You’re going to want to start your build off with either courier or wards (get both if you’re the only support, you’re incredibly item independent), a set of tangos and two clarity potions because your chakra magic is good for other heroes early on, but at level one it only heals 75 mana while costing 25mp to cast, meaning your effectively only healing yourself for 50/105/160/215. Depending on whether or not you had to buy both wards and courier, get a gauntlet of strength and spend the rest of your money on ironwood branches.

Ezalor has one of the highest base move speeds in the game, clocking in at a whopping 315ms initially, his trusty steed will get you to places on time. So if you have two supports at the beginning of the game I suggest grabbing the wards immediately and bounding out to drop them for your mid player in order to keep rune control (as well as helping avoid ganks on your lane since you’re incredibly squishy at all points of the game). Typically I play KotL in a tri-lane, but he can also serve a purpose in a solo lane situation, as well as a dual lane.

Tri-Lane:
In a tri-lane your main function is to ensure that all of your allies are fully stocked on mana, stacking and pulling creeps since they are going to get pushed (if you and your lane partner are performing your roles correctly), as well as keeping heroes scared to even get close to the creep wave in order to last hit.

Side note: For those of you that don’t know what stacking and pulling out please check out this useful link.

I cannot emphasize this idea enough; you must stack the creep camps before you pull them! If you don’t, the wave will not die to a single camp of creeps, so you’ll have a massive amount of creeps the next wave, which will push the lane again. The only time you don’t want to stack the camp is if you’re going to be going for a push, then it can be a good idea to not double stack the creeps. Once the mega wave starts going use KotL’s illuminate to destroy the creep waves early and ensure that your team has the maximum amount of creeps possible while pushing.

Dual- Lane:
You’re typically going to be going the bottom lane, but with the right hero composition you can dominate the top lane with heroes that have spamable abilities that keep your opponents out of lane (Axe’s battle hunger, Dark Seer’s ion shell, ect.) Your role in a dual lane is fairly similar to that of a tri-lane you’re going to be stacking and pulling in order to keep the creep wave closer to your tower than the opponents (this is done in order to keep the threat of being ganked to a minimum, while making it easier for your carry to farm.

Solo Lane:
It’s pretty rare for keeper of the light to solo a lane, due to the fact that his only spammable ability pushes the lane towards their tower, but not completely unheard of. Personally I enjoy going mid KotL, it really gives you a chance to shut down heroes that typically would snowball with good farm in the mid lane, but keep in mind that there are many heroes that KotL is completely useless against, or is easily countered by. Templar Assassin because of her refraction and Pudge due to his hook at flesh heap are examples of heroes that you’re just going to allow to free farm or feed early kills to. In the suicide lane (soloing the long lane), I suggest only buying courier or wards off the start because you’re going to need the gauntlets or ironwood branches for extra survivability.

Mid Game:
Once you reach level 6 you should get your ultimate. You should have at least 3 levels in chakra magic as well as a level in illuminate. The main reason for grabbing your ultimate is not for the extra ability to use illuminate without physically channeling it, but for recall. This spell allows your heroes in other lanes to join you for ganks without giving away the fact that they are actually missing from their lane! The way to utilize this is to find a fogged of war area of the map (so the opposition cannot see the hero being teleported in) and alert your teammates, preferably beforehand, that we are going on hero X as soon as middle has joined us.

Once you’ve teleported the allied hero in, you want to make sure all of your allies have enough mana to complete the task at hand, and if they’re full up, make sure you have enough as well. Communicate in some way, either through chat or pinging the map where you want the battle to engage, because a well placed illuminate during the end of the laning phase will take almost any hero down to half health, so get that illuminate channeling (remember you now have a ghost channeling it instead of you, so it’s not vital that you stand right next to the channeling unit, in fact you’ll want to make your presence known because that will alleviate the threat of being hit by illuminate in your opponents eyes.

If you have the mana for it and the team either turns to run once they realize what’s happening, or they stay to try to duke it out, use your blinding light to either push them back towards your chasing heroes or in the middle of them in order to get them out of position. Your blinding light also gives an 80% chance for the enemies to miss attacks for 3/4/5 seconds. If they immediately react with right clicks, then they’ll be missing them anyways! You also want to initiate the targeted hero with mana leak as soon as the engagement is about to begin, ensuring that if they run it will eventually cause a short stun. Mid game is when you want to start working on your boots of tranquility, as well as your mekanism.

Late Game:
Keeper of the Light, like most support heroes, begins to fall off towards the late game. His overall squishiness makes him a prime target during team fights, as well as the desire to keep him from casting blinding light every 12 seconds and healing hero’s mana pool. Your blinding light is a great way to initiate team fights; it shuts down heroes that have been farming those big DPS items for a few seconds to allow your team to burst them down without taking too much damage themselves.

You also have another role that allows KotL to completely change the tide of team fights, and that is recalling heroes that have bought back after dying in a team fight. Communicate with your team that if one of the vital roles of your team fight is taken out early in a team fight that if they buy back, you can have them back in the fight within seconds! Remember during team fights though, an out of position Ezalor, is a dead Ezalor.

Your right clicks are negligible late game, once heroes have their armor up. So you want to make sure that once you’ve cast your blinding light you are retreating to the back of the fight to follow up with an illuminate that will catch the entire enemy team (since you’re now a boss with Ezalor)!

How to use your illuminate during the laning phase as well as during team fights:
 In this first picture is how you want to position your illuminate to hit the enemy heroes during the beginning of the game. You don’t want the illuminate to hit the creep wave, because that would cause the lane to push, and pushing the lanes means fewer CS for your carry. So make sure you’re hidden within the fog of war, and pick a spot that will still be feasible 1-5 seconds into your channel so you can hit for max damage.

This second image demonstrates how to use your illuminate while escaping from enemy units. You fortunately don’t have to select your ghost in order to activate the channeled illuminate. So while you’re in your ultimate form and are fleeing an enemy hero, make sure you cast your illuminate in the direction in which you are running!! The red arrow represents where you are running to, and the yellow arrow represents the direction from which your opponents are chasing you, if they continue to cahse, theyre going to eat a lot of damage!

Item Build

I went over the opening items that you’re going to want to buy with Keeper of the light, but what about later in the game? The first items you’re going to want to get is either magic wand or a bracer, depending on whether you got ironwood branches or a gauntlet of strength at the beginning. After that you’ll probably want to either get wards again, or boots of speed, based on how much gold you have and whether or not you’re being ganked a lot, or doing the ganking yourself.

Next you’ll want to get boots of tranquility, why these over arcane, treads or boots of travel? Boots of tranquility give you that extra survivability that you so desperately need in lane. Ezalor’s armor is pretty laughable and the ring of protection gives a little extra health versus those right clickers, plus you never have to leave the lane again once chakra magic is effective enough.

After your boots are done you hardly need any more items to retain your effectiveness throughout the game, but let’s face it, KotL is a farming machine late game with his huge pushing and anti pushing prowess. So how about those luxury items? Your first item after boots should be mekanism, and if your team is already building that, then I tend to favor force staff in order to push heroes into your illuminate or assist teammates in positioning during team fights.

Eventually you’ll want to disassemble your boots of tranquility and opt for boots of travel as your anti push powers will allow you take care of enemy split pushes while your team readies to engage in a team fight. If the game goes even longer than you farming boots of travel, I suggest grabbing a scythe of vyse in order to disable enemy carries even further, or perhaps catch an out of position hero by surprise so your teammates can burst him down to ensure a 4v5 team fight. 

Now get out there and start spreading the good word of luminesence!