steamboots and other movement speed items are good cept i dont think its good to start out with buying a 500g marchers, and also its better to walk to your fountain to heal, then buy a tp scroll and tp to your tower. seeing as you cant tp to your fountain and tp to your tower again right afterwords, if you just tp to your tower, you have no chance of being interupted.

i always thought frostwolf skull was over priced, cause some heroes have a better -attack and -movement speed attack, like arachna, and it costs little mana. also a good item is that snake coil thing, which costs 1800 and gives your attackers 25% miss percentage, can be very useful, and its pretty cheap once you start farming a lot

marchers is a bad starting item. tp scrolls are also bad starting items if you get them at all... Usually, i go either 4 minor totems, 1 pretender's crown and 2 runes of blight./hp pots/mana pots, or 2 pretender's crowns, 1 minor totem, and hp pots/mana pots/ runes of blight, depending on what hero i'm playing as. It helps by giving you some good all-around stats, +6/+5 to everything, and also helps for when you stat your early game build by giving you some components to soulscream ring/ fortified bracers or w/e. Otherwise, if you get a soulscream ring or bracers, you actually get less stats, because you'll be behind by 3 on two of your attributes to anyone who does this build. Marchers are basically just useless unless you plan on chase-ganking early game, and are really only good for making them into enhanced marchers/ steamboots.

Hack and slash is decent for some STR heroes if you have the extra money AND if you already have hack. H&S is just plain good on AGI heroes. The str gives you some much needed HP, and the MS bonus is definitely a plus.

I usually start with 2(+3), Pretender's Crown OR 2(+1), a Runes of Blight, and a Mana Potion. Since I usually play ranged-support, I can usually opt out of the Runes of Blight and get another Mana Potion, or I can modify the build to include early Wards of Sight, which would aid in rune-whoring. If I play an INT-DPS Hero e.g. Zeus, Torturer, I'll probably just get a Bottle. If I Random the INT-DPS, I might go with either an early Tube (Mana, unless I am a tank) or (Bottle + Wards).

I agree with you in that the money could more easily and fruitively be used elsewhere, such as a nullfire blade or hell, wingbow, which costs about the same and gets you much more for an agi.

However, the immense amount of agi, 25, I want to say, grants you a ton of dmg and attack speed in addition to your backstab damage which uses agi as well as a bunch of str for survivability (close to 500hp, if I did the math right). As NH, pretty much any agi item is good for you. My staple items in a game are nearly all agi since it buffs so much for NH.

I'm also glad they changed, what was it, geometer's bane? to use slash instead of diffusal like 6.60dota did so you can upgrade that to bane rather than hack n slash if HP isn't your worry.

geometeres bane is one of my favorite items.
starting with minor totems is much better than pretenders crowns cause 2 minor totems is cheaper than one pretenders crown, and you should not need the inventory space in the begining so there a good point in filling up your slots with cheap items.
i think the only hero marchers is good for when starting, is swiftblade. marchers + blade frenzy is a great combo for the begining when all the heroes have low hp. of course, having an ally that can slow the enemy makes the need for marchers low

either way, the beginning of the game also has a lot to do with startegy, such as when i was playing as a glacius the other day, a valk got too close when at a lower end hp, and i got her... The way you play the beginning of the game is as important as what you get.

For a melee character, I would get a buckler and hatchet and a runes or 2x mana potion. The -damage from the buckler creates a lot more pseudo hp then starting off with f.bracers would, unless you are going up against some heavy nukers, in that case it's probably about the same.

i had a game where the final score was 50-8. a wretched hag on my team had most of the kills. anyone know if hag is rigged or not? that was the first time ive seen her play

edit: predator + Insanitarius is amazing

Personally I suck with the hag mainly because I never use her. But she's pretty good if you know how to use her which I don't :{

And yes predator + insanitarius = rape

How bout predator with insanitarius and a heart?

I would rather play Defiler. Sure, she cannot tele, but hey, her main nuke is an aoe skill that deals 350 and has a minimal cooldown of 4 seconds, VS the 600 damage you can achieve at level 3 of Hag's ult. Not to mention 135 seconds of cooldown...

i had a game where i was succubus, and i farmed and ganked like hell until i had a staff of master AND a restoration stone, and it was pretty much gg from there. i went like 17-3

YEAH That's what i get on him, once you get steam boots and insanitarius you start killing people pretty easily. So the heart is just around the corner!

I've seen some people play well as hag, and others just suck...

her main power is teleport, where she can chase/run away, and the fact that she can quickly cast about 800 dmg on a person in an aoe.

God damn KOFT or Tempest with a restoration stone is like hitler! It's an instant genocide every time!

Stop using darned acronyms. What is KOFT?

keeper of the forest... and an easy way to stop both those ults is to not stay bunched together/get a shrunken head. People overlook how easy it is to survive them.

I'm pretty sure Shrunken Head only negates the magic damage, not the effect, sorta like with a Tempest Ultimate.

At least it should, after this patch.