Dota 2: Best Roles/Positions For Techies (7.31) | Screen Rant
Techies have been the bane of many cores over their lifespan in Dota 2, but their recent rework has caused a change in role and position that may be for the best. In the past, players would often dislike both playing with and against Techies due to their tendency to extend the length of the game while having a weak early presence. Fortunately, these days are over.
The hero now has a strong laning phase that scales into the lategame. Sticky Bombs are a huge nuke on a low cooldown with a useful movement slow, and they even were recently buffed in the 7.31b mini update. Reactor Tazer and some base stat buffs also allow the hero to trade efficiently in the lane while being relatively safe later on as well.
The new list of abilities makes a lot of sense on both cores and supports, so players have been experimenting with Techies in both types of roles. While Techies in general has a pretty low winrate at the time of writing, the winrate is similar for both types of roles. Even the skill builds tend to be fairly similar between roles.
Here's a list of the positions or roles ordered from best to worst. Note that like all things Dota 2, updates, meta developments, and situations can change this ordering.
Techies have many of the characteristics that midlaners tend to care about in Dota 2: ability to quickly farm nearby jungle camps and push out the wave, ability to contest runes, ability to initiate early ganks, strong scaling with items and levels, strong trading in the laning phase, and an ability to contest ranged creeps. Sticky Bomb is the reason for most of these coming into existence, as it's an incredibly strong spell due to its combination of low cooldown, high damage, and strong utility. However, the fact that Techies has Sticky Bomb in addition to its other 3 abilities is what makes its trading, ganking, and scaling so deadly. Techies no longer has to spend most of its time setting up minefields; instead, Techies can use an early lead that comes from the mid lane to snowball through pickoffs and terrorize the map.
Soft support Techies can do many of the same things a mid Techies can do in Dota 2, but with lower impact and higher risk. This isn't a bad tradeoff, however; freeing up the farm for someone else is always beneficial, and Techies doesn't lose that much impact from the sacrifice. All of Techies' basic abilities are strong laning abilities, so the enemy carry is going to have a rough time. In particular, when combined with any kind of extra nuking potential such as a Primal Beast, enemies are very unlikely to survive without strong escapes.
Hard support Techies is nearly the same as soft support techies, but simply has less money to work with. Some heroes are perfect for this role due to their independence from items, but Techies tends to want items to improve their impact. It doesn't require them, but the hero's impact is increased much more than a hero such as Crystal Maiden getting the extra items. That being said, being a 5 position opens up new strong lane partners to work with, such as Tiny and Juggernaut.
Techies as an offlaner in Dota 2 isn't necessarily bad, but Techies can't fulfill the role that many offlaners want to fulfill: frontlining. This might not be a problem if other heroes on the team cover that role, but Techies itself can't effectively create space for the other cores due to weakness when playing aggressively. Of course, this doesn't mean that Techies can't play aggressively, because the core item build is perfect for that, but it's much more likely that Techies will be taken out in a counter-gank than a hero such as Axe or Underlord, and offlaners are a high priority target for ganks to secure the carry's game. That being said, the right offlane combo will make the enemy carry's life terrible, and this alone can be enough of a reason to run Techies in this position.
Carries typically want to focus on strong right-click attacks to avoid falling off when Black King Bars come into play, but unfortunately, Techies gets next to nothing to assist with that. The level 25 talent comes far too late to make building right-click items effective. While having a magic position 1 can sometimes work effectively when the team's goal is to end Dota 2 games quickly, Techies will have issues due to their relative frailty compared to a hero like Leshrac that's played in this way. The only upside of Techies in this role is that it can be paired with disgustingly strong support combos such as Grimstroke with Ink Swell or Crystal Maiden with her Crystal Nova and Frostbite to utterly shut down many common offlaners.
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