yeti's watery defender's build

(glorn helped me some with this)
Skills

Off- Shockwave
Def- Watery Defenders
Misc-AMS
Innate- some like mana regen im partial to abolish magic or life
Ult- Mana Shield

basically equal level all 3 skills until you hit 9 then start maxing shockwave (AMS if needed when you feel you autoattack farm well enough) and defenders, take mana shield at 15 and 16 then whenever its available.

Basically what you do is cast defenders (they have a hefty mana cost) and ams yourself. then spirit link yourself with them if they are level 2 or higher. Move your group together all the time and use taunt a lot. Spirit link reduces damage 50% and that gets reduced again by mana shield. AMS is for nukes and if they decide to focus on your defenders(LOL).

Countered by lightning orb and vortex, however lightning orb isnt the strongest counter against you. Unlike traditional mana shield builds you dont focus as much on mana but more on DMG hp life regen and armor. You can farm super well just by stacking dps items because defenders tank amazingly well and with mana shield you will hardly have to return to base to heal. Unless you have to purge get a scepter of the primarch (another reason i like abolish its not as strong as light orb but will hurt rally cry and rejuv just as much). Leave mana shield off at the start of the fight once you reach 66-75% hp toggle it on once you get up to ~90% hp shut it off again. Rinse and repeat.

Although it is countered by vortex very hard, defenders take multiple casts to take down and your farming power thanks to being a pure dps machine should let you stay in the race to a point.

As a coup de grace once defenders hit level 4 they gain a moderate slow aura and level 5 defenders have a stronger slow aura as well.

Utilizing defenders is the most important part, keep them equal leveled with your farm skill and at relatively low levels you will be able to take down elementals yiff and archons with moderate ease (normally yiff at 15 elementals at 20 archons at 24 with the normal items I use). They are made to die so dont be afraid to let them do just that. When they get a slow have one shadow your opponent and farm with the others, as they will be hampered in movespeed or have to spend the time to kill it (easier said than done).

more or less you go super glass cannon for the early-mid transition then start amassing survivability in the form of hp, regen, lifesteal, moderate armor, then mana (most of this will come from just +int but shell is also very nice if you are farming very well) as you progress to late game stack more mana and more hp/mp regen, but as is you shouldn't let the game last this long once elementals get a slow if you even have a minor edge on your opponent start taking his creeps and harassing him.

its pretty gay and its hard as hell to counter... the only way i can think of is out farm it with skele's and endurance aura max... with a few points in soul burn... but otherwise its pretty unstoppable. you could try countering it with vortex but if he picks up a lightning orb its gg.

I actually used a build alot like this a while ago.
Necromancer

Soul burn
defender
parasite
demon spawn.

parasite and soul burn were main lvled. Defenders were lvled to lvl 1-2 or so

I think i might bring that build back in a differnt form. might be fun

ya if you play this one right i'd say its pretty much the strongest mana shield build out there. with mana shield, though i feel since its one of those ultimates that always is getting stronger as the game goes on, i feel you need a direct counter or mass outleveling in order to win regardless. I'd have to say that even the outleveling one is very tentative if only by a few levels in the late game. I question if the extra dmg from abolishmagic, vortex, or purge done to your elementals is done to you. if it is i would go as far as to say attack the watery elementals first (burning them down with massive purge and dps) at the same time this deals damage to you and your opponent has eliminated the threat. I can see where charged is going with summons b/c honestly if he doesnt take the time to deal w/ summons as well hes gonna have plenty of problems to deal with as well. i'd see skele's w/ vortex or gobs w/ vortex seeing as it nulls his spells against you and your gobs, burns his mana, clears the spiritlink, and still leaves your own summons alive for dps.


I dont know how you could have skeles and endurance aura (unless ur talkin bout speedset) but ya~

nice build yetikoon

as far as items of mana shield go, im starting to think reverting back to the old way of int stacking and getting alot of mana and damage first is the way to go, then falling back and grabbing some survivability.

attacking the minion's wont do squat with spirit link there is a reason i have ams skill

LOL nice this is stronger then most will ever know.

aye but there is no reason to let you have those on the field to begin with. burning them down should be easy enough early game with votex, purge, or abolish

Eh depends if your solo playing perhaps sure. If your team playing and he is running this in a pub you would use spirit link against him. Spirit Link is a double edged sword.

Sharky wrote:

LOL nice this is stronger then most will ever know.

Lol, notice he said that I helped him a bit with this build. It isnt by accident that a few things came together on 1 build.

Personally, I feel a good AGI build would be really powerful against this build. If an AGI hero can keep up in levels, and uses ele mastery with say... tents.. to farm... That AGI hero should be able to claim victory. Without spelling it all out, I would like to see if anyone can point out a few simple ways in which this would work.

Yeti, you should post your badger build next; or have you already and I missed it?

I don't remember my badger build it was wolves something something badger though

I use something similar to this with G Ward over AMS which I feel helps a lot, Defenders get countered pretty hard by Corruption and G Ward only increases your farming.

mine is

Soul Burn, Defenders, G Ward, Mana Shield on Necro

your level 1 farm is a bit weak as g ward takes a second to kill mid spawn, but once u get lvl 2 you have yourself + g ward + defenders hitting a spawn makes it farm fast

only problem with that is anyone with a real farm skill should out farm you

they need every advantage they can get vs me

what happes if i cast ams on defenders after me? Then they take less damage from vortex right?

very good question; and yes, AMS will block spell damage on anything you cast it on; and dispel damage is spell damage.

^.^ Tried the build on some public games. I lvled everything equally excpet I used Chain Lighting and Stom Bolt(on a Team Brawl). I loved the fact I never died =). Also, I AMSed the defenders on a game where my opponent had vortex and no defender ended up with less than half their hp on a duel =) Oh, and I lost no mana cuz they kept vortexing the defenders and not me XD

I will keep working on it though, but I loved it. Trying different item builds. Build is mana intensive =D.

I go tiara and boots and crown of the mind(+5 int only, but it gives 100-something mana) in the beggining. Plus, that crown is used for basic mystics cloak later on.

Just ran this against random, its kind of junky Fire orb completely rapes it. Essentially if they have any longer term disables your shafted because you cannot spam ams, which defeats part of the purpose. Also, to make this work into late game you need maxed out defenders, which means you can only have ams hover around 2-3, and give up leveling shockwave... which takes down your dps and farming ability... Too many skills needed to be leveled to make this work against a tough build.

It is easy to come back a year and a half after a build was posted and claim what should kill it. (the biggest difference at that time was that spell damage was superior to auto attack damage in a way that made casters much more popular and powerful) When Yeti ran this build; ohh so long ago, it was amazingly powerful and gave everyone a hard time.

MS blocks spell damage at the same rate as normal damage; so the AMS is for early game; and for summons. AMS only needs to be rank 3.

The minions at a higher level give off a slow aura; and are a pain in the ass to kill. Under an auroric set, 3 of them will deal damage.

The thing I would change about this build if used today, would either be to replace AMS with a 1-3 point skill, or to swap out the ultimate. I think demon spawn would work great with this combo also.

Ya, and I know it was made for a different version, just warning it doesn't really work that well anymore.

I actually want to try this out; with some modifications. I have always been one of the worse MS build users, so dont think I can give it fair credit. we should try it though.

Another idea though completely crazy would be to perhaps bomb start and rely entirely on defenders to farm. Say a restore defender with soul burn probably would fail out right but it be something to try for fun.

Edit: Defenders only fail in that regard.

chain light+restore with it seemed to work very well; though I didnt get late game enough to really abuse my defenders; I got their 50% spirit link on my MS.

I decided to look back into this build near as I can tell he went about it in the wrong way.

First off placing skill points completely even simply does not work unless your already in the lead and well by that point just about anything works... Passive attack to victory you know?

Second he simply just didn't go into how to play this build correctly;
Game Plan;

You run up to a creep camp cast shock wave lowering their hp and auto attacking them to death. Take this time to quickly glance at the opposing team. What are they running?

Are we looking at a cookie cutter 1 nuke/summon/passive attacker? Yes
About a 9 point investment in Shockwave taking whenever available
2 point investment in AMS
and dumping the off points into Watery Defenders up until level 18 where your throwing all points its way.
For those who didn't catch that simply look below.
Shockwave (1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17)
Watery Defenders (6,10,12,14,18,19,20,21,22,23,25,27,28,29,30)
AMS (2,4,31,33,34,35,36,37,38,39)
Mana Shield (8,16,24,32,40)

Are we looking at a spell heavy combo caster?
In that case we're still taking about 9 points in Shockwave.
We are going to invest about 7 points into AMS.
and invest points into Watery Defenders much later...
A look how this will go down below.
Shockwave (1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17)
Watery Defenders (19,20,21,22,23,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,33,34,35)
AMS (2,4,6,10,12,14,18,36,37,38,39)
Mana Shield (8,16,24,32,40)
Essentially having a low level invested AMS won't work in this case due to either heavy burst or the very likely hood of eating disables to the face making recasting AMS very difficult. In theory spamming a low cd 700 damage spell block is imbalance. In practice however your eating disables and are generally unable to recast or their burst is too heavy and you recasting it on yourself watching your allies die just to ender a 3v1 fight. Good Luck!

tl;dr: The current build is fine as is. Can other builds beat it? Yes Can it beat other builds? Yes What more do you want its a game you got a 50/50 chance of winnig.

As I mentioned above; in todays market, I would suggest dropping AMS. The idea then was that AMS+spirit link=you dont take damage from spirit link. However, 90% spell damage reduction+MS=you pretty much dont take damage from spells (turns 10,000 spell damage into 250)

Swap out AMS for almost anything; I would suggest a simple 1 point skill; force push would work; or restore mana. Defenders have a lower mana cost now than they did during this posting; and have a longer duration.

In this case, you force your opponent to go light orb to purge the spirit; and the defenders are a better boss killing skill than corrupt flesh. Under auroric they will easily tank rag at max level. Their DPS late game is also pretty noteworthy, under auroric. With taunt and all that; there is some serious damage mitigation.