Introduction
I was unhappy with the guide written currently in the premium guides for the hero soulstealer, it states it's meant for higher levels of play but it doesn't touch much on a lot of the advanced aspects you should know and expect when playing with the hero. Sure, obviously you'd expect players playing in high levels of play to know these things, but from what I've run into in even very high levels of HoN play is astounding to say the least. Some things I'll be touching on are as follows:
-Basic lane control
-Optimal warding positions
-Basic skill usage
-Advanced bottle techniques
This is not a right click hero, he requires good positioning and map awareness to effectively use your skills and survive in competitive play. He has amazing potential for late game damage and early game lane control, but suffers low hitpoints and no escape mechanism. On top of that, if ganked, you're basically inviting the enemies to push down towers or raxes due to an inability to defend after losing souls.
Skills
Demon hand is the bread and butter of this hero through-out most of the game. It allows him to harass, it allows him to farm, and it's his main source of damage all they way through up until late game. Three well-timed and placed strikes in succession can easily lead to the opposing player to give up first blood, even when the skill is only level two.
Soulsteal is the skill that pumps his early game damage through the roof, allowing him to outfarm pretty much any opposing solo middle hero, with the additional of before-mentioned nukes. There are a few downsides to this skill, however, it just simply wouldn't be balanced to give a hero a free relic(+60 damage) after he kills a mere thirty creeps. Because of this skill, his base damage is one of the lowest in the game, comparable to CM's base damage. Also, it's the skill that fuels his ult, which is where another good portion of his damage comes from. When you die, or are ganked, it's hard to defend a push because he requires souls to use his ult properly.
Dread is Soulstealer's basic steroid spell, giving him yet another skill that can turn the tide of a team battle. Essentially, it just increases the team's physical DPS, but it comes in many other uses throughout the game. It cuts through Rosh's defenses like a hot knife through butter, allowing you to quickly kill him should the opportunity arise. It also, just by standing in a lane, allows your creeps to overwhelm the opposing creeps. For this very reason alone, the skill should not under any circumstances be taken early. It's simply not worth it, it doesn't add anything other than a slight increase in DPS(over stats anyways), and makes it harder to hold a lane in equilibrium.
Soulburst is by far one of the most entertaining skills in the game. It is one of the most influencing and devastating skills in the game during a team fight, if landed properly, is capable of completely wiping an enemy team. While it is most effectively used against opponents who are currently stunned or disabled by an aoe hero like Axe or Enigma, it can be used in conjunction with just about any disable or even in it's vanilla form by itself. You after all, should have a blink dagger, which can be used to surprise opponents with a quick blink+ult.
Skill build
1. Soulsteal/Demon Hand
2. Soulsteal/Demon Hand
3. Soulsteal/Demon Hand
4. Soulsteal/Demon Hand
5. Demon Hand
6. Soulsteal
7. Demon Hand
8. Soulsteal
9. Soulburst
10. Stats
11. Soulburst
12-15. Stats
16. Soulburst
17-20. Dread
21-25. Stats
Now, this may seem a little confusing, but I'll do my best to explain myself and how I decided to order this skill build. Soulsteal is almost always the first choice, but contrary to popular belief it's not ALWAYS the first skill you will get. In high levels of play, most of the action starts before the creeps even spawn, when teams probe each other's jungles in an attempt to ward the rune, pulls, and gain control of the first rune(which spawns when the clock stops ticking down and starts ticking up). Assuming the opportunity arises, you can more often than not skill Demon Hand over soulsteal to add that extra 225 magic damage during a gank at the rune. Now, I'm sure you've all noticed that the first four skills are pretty much up for grabs in terms of how you place them. Obviously, if you get Demon Hand first, you're want soulsteal second, so you can start collecting souls. Generally, if I already have 8 souls by the time I'm 3 I'll allocate another point into Soulsteal so I can additively increase my advantage over my opponent by increasing my damage. However you place these first four skills, you no longer gain this freedom once you hit level five, because you'll always want to place your skills into Demon Hand. It's your offense and your defense, and provides far more utility than the extra ~15 damage from Soulsteal.
Item builds
Basic starting items
So you're probably thinking, bottle first is good? Well I'm here to inform you that bottle first is never viable in high levels of play. You have the worst base damage of pretty much ANY solo mid, so you're already fighting an uphill battle. Sure, you can't control runes as well without a bottle, but I never said anything about not getting a bottle. Generally my first 600 gold is allocated to buying a bottle. This is my end all be all of starting items, it provides the highest base damage, moderate hitpoint/mana increase, and enough for me to always survive until I can farm 600 for my bottle.
End game items
As you can obviously see, I've posted two different builds for end game items. They are very similar, in fact they're almost the same things, one however offers more hitpoints while the other offers more damage and attack speed. This is core items, anything else is a luxury item, this is what you NEED to farm to be able to end a game. A lot of the times you'll find that you require more items, or that you have just an excess amount of gold in which you need to dump money into. What you get all depends on what you need, but generally there are three items I will get to finish off my inventory.
"Tiered-out" items
Tiered-out generally describes when you've completely exhausted every item you could possibly want. Gold is no longer allocated to buying items, but to being saved for buy backs in the case of you dying and the opposing team pushing. While these instances are few and far between, if you find yourself with core items and are unsure as to what to buy, this is what I buy on him. Deso is my next item, as BKB provides adequate protection against any spells or disables that might be directed at me. I'd rather spend that 5-10 seconds melting someone's face off than absorbing damage. However, after this item, I need to assess the threat that is currently killing me. Am I being nuked down by spells and aoe? Am I being hit by a ton of physical damage? Generally, if you're being out-carried by physical damage wingbow is the way to go, as it provides protection in the area of evasion and adds a TON of damage. Where as, if you're still unable to survive aoe with BKB, a heart is a solid option. Eventually if gold permits I buy everything shown here.
Starting the game
Choosing a lane
When deciding which lane to choose, you shouldn't under any circumstances pick anything other than solo mid. This hero doesn't lane well with other people, he's fragile and thus requires the safety of the middle lane to not get wrecked. He's a powerful hero, but another con of the hero is his inability to use a side lane effectively. You have to build differently, since you cannot use a bottle effectively, and thus delay key items. Also, pushing these lanes are FAR more deadly than pushing the middle lane, as there are far too many areas to get ganked from. More importantly, these areas aren't going to be warded so you have no protection. Dying early on is a bitch, you've farmed souls, but now they've effectively been cut in half and you once again have to work your way up. To finalize why you should never be in any lane other than middle, is dual lanes are VERY dangerous in comparison to a solo lane. Solo lanes generally score kills off the mistakes of their opponents, where as dual lanes can get kills just by chain stunning or disabling you.
Scouting the first rune
This is one of the most important things you do early on, and it should be done by every team regardless of hero makeup. If you have an offensive team with a lot of disables, you can afford to play more aggressively at the runes. Still, if your team can't score first blood, the least you can do is see which rune actually spawns to prevent a first blood situation. I'll go into a little more detail as to what you should skill first. You skill nothing, you save it, if you see an opportunity where Demon Hand could possibly score a first blood you can quickly click on it and use the skills. However, if you don't, simply skill Soulsteal and walk into the lane and begin your game as you normally would.
Starting to lane
At level two, if you're having trouble scoring last hits because your base damage is so low, do not despair. You have a clarity, and you have mana and a skill that should basically outdamage any opposing player's auto-attack. This is most effectively used when combining multiple purposes(for example, harassing an opponent too close to a creep and last hitting the creep at the same time), but can be used to exclusively last hit as well. Denying is very important, you shouldn't be harassing your opponent, rather you should be playing off of his mistakes. Probing your opponent for how they function in a lane is your main goal here. Does he stand up by the creeps and try to keep you out of last hit range? Does he play very far back and only come into range to deny and last hit? If you run towards him does he run back, or 1 for 1 you in harassing hits? These are important questions to quickly answer, but as a basic rule, always farm before going for kills. First blood aside, you can make the gold from a kill simply by killing ~1 creep wave, and creeps give you souls which help you lane. If someone walks up to your creeps and moves to harass you, obviously you should harass them back, as they're taking both your damage and creep damage where as you should only be taking their damage.
Most effective positioning when laning?
There are two basic positions where laning is the most effective, and one or the other will be true depending on who you're laning against. If your opponent can simply walk up to the top of the hill and control the lane, something that might happen against an arachna or zeus, you'll want to have the creeps as they are positioned in the picture. This leaves you out of sight, so unless they've warded, it's impossible for them to time their last hits properly unless they're atop the hill. If they're on top of the hill, it leaves them way out of position in you can simply wreck them with autos and Demon Hands. However, if you're in a position where the opponent is unable to stand atop the hill, the best possible position is displayed by the colored lines. Red is your creeps, and blue is the opposing creeps. This gives both denying and last hitting a miss chance(due to higher ground) on the opponent while offering you neither of the penalties. This pseudo-evasion can easily make laning against someone who can out lasthit you but cannot stand up to you much easier. You can manipulate the lane by right clicking an enemy, the creeps will agro to you and eventually drop off and attack your creeps, significantly closer to your side of the field.
Controlling the runes and using your crow effectively.
Your crow is a very important tool, once you farm a bottle, it acts as a tool to refill your bottle without the dependence of running back to base or finding a rune. You obviously do not want to do this when the 2 minute marks are arriving, as crows are used extremely aggressively and offensively when it comes to runes. As previously stated, runes pretty much run the early game in terms of how well a middle lane solo can do, and can easily be used to gank or score first-blood on opponents. So, controlling the rune, how does one do it? It all depends on what your team currently has up in terms of wards, and what your opponent does when faced with a rune spawn. Let's get the basics out of the way, I'm going to assume everyone knows what the runes do. Runes spawn every two minutes, starting when they game timer first starts counting up(at 0:00). So obviously watching the clock is very important, as runes are very important. There are a lot of ways to get a rune, but the most important and relevant way of getting and denying runes are with a crow. Becoming accustomed to how the crow works is key to becoming a good player, so I suggest anyone who doesn't know how it works or how to use it to specifically take as much information from this section of the guide as possible. I'm going to list basically all of the ways to get runes, and then tell you how to counter what your opponent is doing:
Waiting for the rune to spawn and then running down to which side it's at, or randomly guessing which side in the case of not having wards.
This is by far the easiest one to counter. You have a crow, it moves at max movespeed, simply run it down the lane he's choosing(if it's the correct one) and steal it. If he chose poorly, then run yourself(if you have a bottle) or the crow(if you don't) down to the correct lane and deny him the rune.
Preemptively moving down near the rune before the two minute mark, so that you can grab it as it spawns.
The counter to this is very simple, and you can do it in multiple ways. Generally if I have a bottle, I'll send my crow over to the area my opponent went to. Since my crow can move at max movespeed and become invulnerable, it has no danger of getting killed and can ninja an opponent's rune. Essentially it becomes a click battle. I can also now grab the rune bot with my hero, and deny it this way, strengthening myself and weakening the opposing solo. I can use it in the lane, I can use it to gank, I can save it in my bottle just to use it later if the need arises. However, if I do not have a bottle(think arachna), I can simply call for someone to go bot and grab the rune(as it'll benefit them more) or run my crow down to grab it. The crow moves at max movespeed with burst on, and no hero can outrun it.
Preemptively running to a rune location, and using THEIR crow to go to the other location.
This can be tough to counter, it becomes a battle of whoever grabs it first. I generally tend to counter their hero position with my crow, and farm the lane. If it happens to spawn by their hero, I can try and ninja it from them. However, if it spawns down there I can run my crow down to force the rune to gain no effect(buffing a crow is hardly a positive effect). The way this counters this strategy is while their hero is off in rando-land waiting for a rune, you're gaining experience and farming.
Moving to a rune location and asking for a teammate to move to the other.
This almost always assures the opposing team a rune, however you can do multiple things to attempt to stop them. You can call for a gank if it happens more than once, you can use your crow to guess a side and try to ninja, or you can even just stay in your lane and farm. Remember, you're gaining experience and gold while they're going to grab a rune. Runes aren't all to dangerous if you KNOW who has them, and what rune it is.
Early game item progression and goals
Item progression
Your first item is obviously bottle, it provides your staple mana and health regen, as well as burst healing when juking or running from opponents. In addition to the flask you bought at the start, assuming you didn't use it, it can easily turn the tides of a battle. An opponent tower diving early on at the hopes of a kill, can easily find you've regenerated a good 300 health in the matter of 2-3 seconds. The goal by the end of early game is to have Boots, Blink, 2x Bracers or Bands(depending on if you need hitpoints or damage), and bottle. In between these items, you should basically always carry TPs. They're one of the most important items to have, and you should never be without one once the game gets going, until you farm your travels of course. TPing to a tower or creep to ward off a gank can easily turn two deaths of your allies into a triple kill for your team. It also creates a sort of mindfuck that'll ward off ganking near towers or even near creep waves depending on how many travels your team has.
When to gank?
Well, ganking is important for the solo lane to do, especially if one of your lanes really needs a gank. However, as previously stated in the guide at some point, ganking provides little benefit other than meager gold/exp and denying opponents gold/exp. Ganking should not be avoided, just know a failed gank can easily tip the tides of a middle solo duel in your opponent's favor. So the question comes up, when should I gank? It's a viable and good question to ask, and from experience I feel the best times to gank are when your opponent is back healing or ganking. They're gaining no farm or experience while out of the lane, and you can afford to leave it open as no one is in the lane. Also, they're far less likely to call mia if they themselves are ganking. I tend to avoid ganking, unless a lane REALLY needs a gank, and my opponent has left the lane. I pick up on ganks and such once I farm my early game goals, or more importantly a blink dagger. One of the best times to gank is when you get a rune, or when you first hit level 9 with a blink dagger. Your ult is devastating, having an ally throw a stun(for example, hammerstorm), blinking to the area you presume he'll be stunned at when the stun catches up with him and instantly starting to cast your ult can leave the opponent pretty much instantly dead. If it doesn't, you have 3x 300 damage nukes which move perfectly in order to damage them if they are running away. It's as easy as right clicking them and hitting the hotkeys in order.
Defending pushes and counter ganks
If you find them trying to push down towers, you're one of the best heroes capable of stopping a push in it's tracks. With the ability to two hit a creep wave for 150 mana, you can easily stop a push, however you are a very fragile hero and have to be careful to not get stunned or snared in the process. Generally a tower dive is pretty suicidal early on, especially with competent opponents. This links into counter ganks, one might ask what a counter gank is? It's pretty self explanatory, when you have vision of an opposing gank you move as a team to gank the gankers. Another example is when opposing players tower-dive seemingly one opponent, you have two or three allies TP in as they're past the point of no return, and then mass disables and damage. This is a very important tool in turning the tides of early game gank strats, which only requires teammates to have good positioning(as to not get caught in an area where no one can TP to) and to carry TPs. Even if you have very little mana, just TPing to the fight can prove to sway the enemy into moving away. They can't tell your mana until you show up, and as such, they won't be able to know who is actually TPing to join the fight.
Team leadership and communication
Anyone who has played with me in a higher level game will know that I tend to boss people around a bit. Buy wards, upgrade the chicken, TP to top, etc. This is key for a carry player to learn to do. Your team cannot support you if they don't know what they need to do. Tell your team to buy your wards, where to place them, every bit of information you can possibly give out will be helpful. Tell your allies wards are about to expire, call for ganks, lead the team. One of the best ways to get things done is to simply tell an unknowing player what to do, regardless of how they react or how you say it, it might just dawn upon them that it is a good idea.
Advantages of Blink vs Lothars
First I'd like to point out I hate Lothars, and the reason I'm so biased against it is it's a bad item. Now, with that being said, this comparison may seem biased and honestly I don't care. Blink dagger provides a far better escape mechanism, as it disjoints projectiles and causes them to miss. Also, in HoN, you do not have to explore(in DotA, you had to actually go somewhere before you could click targetable skills there) areas to actually blink to them. This allows you to blink beyond the outer border trees of the map to be pretty much safe from everything except other blinks(and even then, they don't know exactly where you are) to TP away. Blink provides instant results, and isn't countered by 200 gold. There are very few counters to blink, a the few damaging global skills like Zeus's ult are the only ones. In terms of mechanics, it's a far better choice as it provides instant results and perfect precise positioning to lane the perfect ult or Demon hands. Lothars is more expensive, but builds in easier pieces, though all of the pieces provide very little to aid early on. Blink adds no stats, but as stated, it's effect is far superior and as a whole it's a lot cheaper. I would never recommend going lothars except in a low level pub, in either case, blink would be more effective anyways.
Mid game item direction and goals
The goal here is to rice your travels as soon as possible, which leaves farming your BKB relatively easy. I personally buy the 1k strength item first, as it fills the void(previously taken by TPs) and gets my hitpoints up to about 1.3-1.4k. This is generally enough to survive the aoe at this stage in the game, and even enough to allow for being focused. Obviously you won't be able to withstand getting focused for long, hopefully you wipe them before you die. Once you get a BKB, it's push push push. Gank and push, or just straight up push. Abuse that BKB prevents just about every magic skill in the game, and ALL magical damage. Use it as you're blinking in, it's very important to not get interupted by anything, even a ministun. Your perfect ult could be fucked by something as simple as a zeus's nuke if you don't BKB. It's extremely easy to fast nuke down side lanes at this stage of the game, especially when towers are down. The first sign of trouble blink off of the map and start to TP back to base.
Team pushes, neutrals, ganking
At this stage in the game, assuming you've farmed your core items, you're basically ricing as much as possible until you effectively gank an opponent or have the team synergy that you can straight up push. Most of the times you'll have a hero that can stay up in the front, baiting for a hero like Axe or Tempest to blink in and hold them for you to blink and ult. In the odd happenstance you don't have an aoe disable, just about any disable will do. Have your team start to push, the second you see a target you want dead disable blink ult. Your goal is to quickly take the fight into a 4v5, and obviously to deal as much damage as possible to the opposing team. It's important that you try to focus on the outlying towers before moving on to the base towers and raxes. These provide a large amount of gold, and pushes are best performed when multiple lanes are going in. You can cause secondary damage from your creeps on enemy buildings, making a subsequent or a backdoor/legit switch to the lane being hit in the chance of a wipe much easier. This doesn't mean if the opportunity arises to not push a base rax down. Lots of players can't seem to know when they can and can't finish a game, and really all it takes is awareness of their spawn timers and buybacks. Another fatal flaw players make is getting greedy, a 4-0 wipe on the enemy team can easily be thwarted by getting greedy at base towers and losing half of your team, or worse your entire team. It can open up counter pushes, and makes you lose any advantage you just took from the opposing team. Lots of heroes make pushing extremely hard, a good example from recent memory was a 25-2 game that quickly turned into a 28-15 game because we were too cocky. Remember, regardless of how bad or how under-farmed the opposing team positioning is the key to the game. Good positioning assures wins, you don't have to force a team fight if they have the advantage. Most of all, your initiator(be it you, or another hero) needs to be on his toes. The second that opportunity comes he needs to go in. Most good players won't remain in bad positions for long, and by the time you've told your team the opportunity generally has passed. Go in, play confident and aggressive, and hope your team was paying attention. Neutrals can be a very effective, and safe(depending on your wards) way of getting your souls back from a death. Obviously if they're pushing, you shouldn't leave to go neutral, but try and get as many creep kills and denies as possible before the push comes in. The more souls the more damage you deal, and without souls you're not nearly as strong as you're supposed to be. Soulstealer can neutral faster than about any other hero in the game once he hits 7, he can also pull two to three camps at once due to his long range aoe nuke. You should use the neutrals to your advantage in every game. Finally, ganking is one of the most important tools in the game at this stage. Most of the time you'll find yourself unable to push a base, regardless of level or gear advantage. Picking an opponent and then pushing is a surefire way to quickly down a rax before they recover, especially if it's an important hero in their lineup. A good method of preparing for a push is warding up the surrounding area around their jungle and where you plan to push(even up on their base, so you know positions near the tower). This allows you to troll each lane, pushing until one of them gets out of position and you can gank, opening their team up for a push you'll hopefully win 4v5.
End game
Item progression and farming
Unlike previous item progression areas, this one you do NOT have to follow to the letter. Soulstealer isn't a very strong right-click and win type of hero, and at this stage of the game farming actually becomes harder, you're no longer able to two raze opposing melee creeps. While you can tri-raze them, it's really a hard feat to do because your own creeps hit them once and they die. There are several decisions I make when deciding on what I need to finish the game, and this is all dependent on how well the opposing team is allowing me to farm. If they're on the defense, unable to do much because they're constantly taking care of their lanes, you have free roam to move about and farm effectively. It's easier to plan ahead on what you'd like to buy in this situation, where as in another situation where they are trolling around for ganks you have to be VERY careful. If they pick you at this stage in the game, you've effectively lost the match for your team. Even with buyback gold, you won't have souls to fight. While your goal should be to obviously farm it up, you should concede creeps at this stage in the game to other heroes that needs important items(again, you have core items, other heroes may not). A tempest may need to finish his BKB to land a better ult, or other support heroes are only a few hundred gold off of their guinsoos. Anyways, back to which items you should choose, it's all variable as to what you're actually dying to or unable to accomplish. If your opponents are all sitting around ~10 armor, a deso is going to provide the most team damage(especially when in conjunction with pseudo-carry like madman) since as you all should know reducing armor to zero is the most effective way of doing so. Reducing it further into the negatives is when you start to run into diminishing returns for negating armor. If you find yourself not taking much damage in fights, and not being focused, damage is the way to go. If I'm being out carried by an opposing carry, Butterfly is a very good item. It grants evasion which makes opposing carries' lives miserable. And finally, if you're dying to spells even with the BKB a heart is the way to go. If the opposing carry has a buttefly, it's generally my rule of thumb to buy one next, as it cancels out his evasion in a sense.
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