Dota 2: Playing the Phantom Assassin

If you take pleasure in seeing enormous damage numbers pop up over your enemies, Phantom Assassin is a good choice. She’s all about maximizing critical hit damage, and with the right build and a little luck, can near instantly obliterate targets. She’s not particularly strong in the early game, but by farming gold effectively and snagging powerful items she can turn into a very serious threat.

She gets access to four abilities, two passive and two active. An especially effective ability early on is Stifling Dagger, which lets her toss a dagger from a distance to deal damage and momentarily cut the target’s movement speed by half. Phantom Assassin is a melee agility hero, so having the ability to attack from range is extremely useful for last-hitting at low levels and staying out of the way of aggressive enemy heroes. The dagger has a small mana cost as well, so it can be used often without worry.

Phantom Strike is the second active ability, which lets Phantom Assassin teleport to a friendly or enemy unit. Teleporting to friendly units is useful for escaping a potentially disastrous situation, letting you zip away from a cluster of kill-crazy enemies, but by targeting a friendly unit you miss out on a bonus. By teleporting to an enemy, you gain a limited attack speed boost, so you can dart in for a flurry of fast strikes, and considering the short cooldown on Strike once it’s maxed, could teleport back out shortly after if there are friendly units nearby. So if you’re trying to run away from an enemy hero and a pack of friendly creeps are on the way in, you can teleport to the last in line to get out of harm’s way.

Strike and Dagger are best used together, where a Dagger slows the hero’s movement and the Strike can be used to teleport right beside them for a brief burst of boosted attack speed. Combine this with Phantom Assassin’s passive ultimate ability, Coup de Grace, and you gain an increased critical hit chance and four times bonus critical hit damage at its highest level. If you get lucky, you can jump in and trigger multiple critical hits in a row, cutting huge chunks out of an enemy’s health bar in a very short period of time.

Though damage output is massively increased, Phantom Assassin isn’t durable. She should not initiate fights, as she’ll get shredded if there are multiple enemies beating her up at once. Her other passive, Blur, helps a bit with this, boosting her evasion and wiping her from the minimap when around enemy heroes, but isn’t going to keep her alive long against a focused attack.

To assist in a fight, Poor Man’s Shield can help mitigate damage taken, Black King Bar will assist with survivability by blocking incoming magic damage, and Battle Fury adds a nice area of affect bonus to hits. If you’re rich, you could pick up Satanic for a larger damage boost along with life steal, or pick up Abyssal Blade for better damage along with a stun.

Even with only two active abilities, Phantom Assassin still isn’t best for beginners because you need to be very precise about movement and skill use once you teleport into a fight. Still, with some practice, Phantom Assassin can be extremely rewarding to play as, especially if you’re able to chain a few critical hit strikes together and wipe out an enemy in a blink.



Source : ign[dot]com