Posted by : z3lover January 10, 2014

                                       The infamous Pudge ladies and gentleman. According to the statistics, the most played hero in dota 2 ( arguably also in dota1 though we dont have reliable stats for that). Pudge is played in every skill pool, Competitive tier, Elite tier, Normal tier and in Potato tiers.

This guide is NOT for:

  • People trying to play this hero for the first time. There are hundreds of guides on steam/playdota other sites that will teach you the basics spells/descriptions etc much better than I could. Also this will not teach you how to hook. There are better guides with gifs and videos for that purpose.
  • People above 4000 MMR , you probably know all of this stuff below so why bother reading it again?  
So this guide will focus on those players who are already quite experienced in playing pudge but still lack the finishing touches required for perfection.  So its more like a collection of tips rather than an actual guide, highlighting the common mistakes. So lets get started.



Laning:

                Even though pudge needs solo mid lane, he not a good laner. He is a melee hero, with no lane control, no way to harass ranged enemy, zero armor, pathetic movespeed. So remember this, pudge is NOT supposed to win lane by any means. He is redeemed only by the fact that IF he somehow manages to hook the enemy he can easily kill him.
Lot of regen+stout shield will allow you to take enough creeps in lane for a quick bottle. After that its all upto the runes and ganking. If you are a Dendi fan and want to follow his build, he usually starts with 2 salves+1 guantlet of STR. Get early last hits+denies, take a lot of beating in the process. Get back > drop gauntlets on ground and use salve, when salve ends pick up gauntlets and go for some more lasthits. It should go without saying that you should ALWAYS LOOK FOR HOOK OPPORTUNITY.

Midgame:

        Mid-game is where pudge shines the most. 360 pure dmg (equivalent of 450 mgc dmg if you want to compare) Hook damage is devastating and almost no one can survive a full pudge combo at this point. Keep ganking and creating room for your carry, make good use of smoke+tps scroll. Don't be a cheap bastard, buy tps.
Aim for some utility items at this point. Force staff and Blink are good choices.
Tranq Boots instead of Hood of defiance. Tranq cost you 525 extra gold (You already buy brown boots in either case, so total cost for tranq is just 525) and Hood costs 2125. Tranq 10hp/sec regen and hood 8hp/sec.  Tranq gives much needed armor while hood gives a somewhat redundant mgc resistance (pudge already gets resistance from Flesh heap on top of normal 25% mgc resistance. So the actual mgc resistance that hood gives you is NOT 30%, its alot less than that) In short, get Tranqs+bottle+stout+Force staff and you are set for the lategame.

Lategame:

      This is the moment where most of the pudge players fail. You may have raped enemies whole game but if you fail to transition into lategame there is no point in getting all those kills. This is the time where you should hook carefully. DO NOT GO ALONE. Stay with team try to disable enemy carry with your ulti and hope for the best. There are no definite tips to give here, stick with your carry (who hopefully farmed decently whole game) and be a meat shield for him.

General Gameplay:

  • Get armor on pudge. ALOT OF ARMOR. Armor scales with hp, as pudge already gets alot of hp from Flesh heap, he benefits ALOT more from armor than any other hero. Every armor point adds an additional 6% of your maximum HP to your EHP. Consider a pudge with 1000 hp and 0 armor. To kill it one needs to deal at least 1000 damage to it. If we give pudge 10 armor, he gets 37.5% reduction, so it will take 1600dmg to kill him. You can say that pudge now has "600" extra hp. This "1600" hp called EFFECTIVE HEALTH POINTS (EHP in short). 
  • Tranquils boots are the BEST boots for pudge. They give good armor, imba hp regen to heal up after ganks, awesome movespeed but most of all, they are cheap as dirt. You can always sell them for Travels later in game.
  • Always click hook ON TOP of enemy heroes. Many people just select hook and click in general direction of the enemy. The problem with this appreach is that if you miscalculate the range, the hook will fall short and you will miss by inches. By clicking on top of enemy, pudge will not throw hook until he walk in range to make sure the hook reaches where you clicked.
  • A good way to land your combo is to select hook > Click on enemy hero>When hook is lanuched, immediately select Ulti and use it on hero before the hook connect> press rot button. Now sit back and watch how hook connects+pudge uses ulti immediately and stats the rots autometically. Benefit of this method is you keep your mouse on a single place, you immediately use dismember to less time for enemy to react. The downside of this method is that after the Chen+pudge fountain hook fix, this method causes problems if there is fog of war between enemy and you (e.g when you hook a hero through lot of trees. There is a delay when hero reaches pudge. So its better to just hook then manually dismember him when he reaches you)
  • Pudge dont need alot of items during midgame. Buy the wards and smoke, the extra vision+smoke will ensure that you keep getting kills, that 150 gold investment on obs gives good profit . DO NOT BEG your teammates.
  • When its lategame, use Dismember on enemy carry who used bkb instead of that poor Crystal Maiden.
  • DO NOT MAKE DAGON. If you already made dagon DO NOT KILL WITH IT. Use hook or rot to finsh off heroes. The reason is that Dagon range is larger than flesh heap range. You miss out on soo many flesh heap stacks with dagon thats its not even funny. Remember flesh heap range is 450 (its half the range of lvl 1 hook. Yes its VERY LOW range)
  • Your mid enemy is QOP, OD, Quas+Wex invoker, Bristleback or Slark ? Go passive mode. Killing these heroes is hard so just try to get last hits+denies but focus on staying alive and keep your hp high.
  • Lvl 1,2,3 Rot doesnt disable Salve. So when you are rot+chasing enemies early game and they prefer running instead of man fighting you, you can safely use salve.
  • Having problem hooking an enemy who keeps moving? Wait until one of your creep is low hp. This is the moment when he will stay still and try to lasthit it. That's your moment. 
  • NEVER HOOK TIDEHUNTER IN LATEGAME. Its always funny watching a Tide getting hooked and landing a 5 man Ravage on enemies. His kraken shell will always ensure he is able to land his ulti.
  • Try to enjoy playing him.

I will add to this guide, if i come up with something else.

{ 2 comments... read them below or Comment }

  1. I probably know some of these. But it helped me especially the boots. I prefer Arcane coz I am always short in mana. Thanks for these

    ReplyDelete

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