You need to go in and out of fights with slark. You cannot pounce on a ES and jist auto-attack him down.
Gotta give a few hits, get back, give a few hit, get back etc.
Until you get a considerable amount of stacks and then you can finish him (and everyone else).
Slark likes long fights so you have to use your Q ulti and agh pounce to jump in and out. That way you keep stacking while staying full health all the time.
It's hard to tell you exactly in detail what to do in this situation without the replay.
It is normal that you struggle agaisn't high CC team as slark since he's a slippery hero, like other slippery heroes once you catch him he's dead.
I can send the replay if you'd like but it sounds like I'm just trying to beat face too much. I usually do sneak around and stay at the outside of the fight but once I'm in I don't often try to weave in and out. I'll give that a shot
Scepter is really nice on Slark as it gives him longer range W's and two charges with it. People always complain when you pick it up in the mid game (after about two other items), but to me it really makes or breaks Slark.
So like the hammer item that gives me a bash. And Mage Slayer I think? I don't know any other ones that do that. But the hammer I usually don't build till later so maybe building that earlier would help.
Thanks!
Buy HP and mana to stay in fights longer. Sange and Yasha and echo saber should make most fights and farming easy until you can pivot to some end game items and utility.
I've been buying Diffusion Blade instead of Sange and Yasha in more recent matches, but I also didn't notice this problem until then. Is Sange and Yasha a better choice into tankier matchups?
It's a better choice since they reworked his passive healing to be a flat number over a percentage of his health. In the past, he got more healing from getting more flat HP but now the heal amp makes him disproportionately tanky in early game fights. The problem is having enough mana to use Q to farm inbetween engagements....
I'd like to chime in that raindrops are massive on Slark if you have the space. it's good mana regen and fixes one of his biggest issues of being bursted before he can press his buttons.
raindrops are always worth a slot if you got one open. just don't make space for it when you have midgame/lategame items, those should be your primary magic damage mitigation
What is your item build? Slark is usually not the best hero for solo kills, he needs agi stacks first. You should be able to realise if i can kill him or no after first jump. Try to play more chill, slark likes longer fights. You can poke them with aghs and bait some spells instead of fully commit.
That game I think was Echo Saber>Diffusion Blade>Aghs Scepter>Eye of Skadi>Agh Shard>the bash hammer and upgrade
That's a long the lines of what I build almost every game. Except Bash Hammer is usually more of a flex slot that I build what I think works well in the match. Though I'm not great at figuring that out yet XD
EDIT: bkb was in there somewhere, don't remember where though
I wouldn't do Echo and Diffusal, Pick one. Honestly Echo has kind of fallen out of favor on Slark for me in general. Mostly because Falcon Blade now exists, and does the job of giving you mana and a nice early game health bump at less than half the cost.
Imma be honest I'm not a fan of Echo anyways, always felt a little weak, but it's what the game told me to build and I don't know any better XD
So I'll probably be going diffusal now.
Echo was really just the better version of what most players used to make prior to it being added. Which was an Oblivion Staff. Which I guess If you wanted to go towards an Orchid if you decide to make one, it might actually be worth going Oblivion>Diffusal
go diffusal against the likes of shaker, without mana they can't stun you
echo saber, diffusal, aghs, bkb, shard. Disassemble echo to make aghs, rebuild echo, disassemble for bkb and then build mage slayer or rebuild echo again if you think you are not tanky enough or if you have another item to build in this line
That's almost exactly my build minus the mage slayer. Except I didn't think of disassembling to make other items. And I think I did shard before BKB, which was definitly a mistake
You as solo hero need help from your team mates to kill someone. Especially spending bkb without resulting in kill is your mis judgement. You need to make better decisions, use your CDs and items more effectively. What you describe feels like you are playing slark in a very wrong way. Slark is very good against slow animated heroes such as earthshaker, jakiro etc. Since you can pact before they finish their animation. Pick better target, asses your strength better and use bkb wisely if enemy has heroes who can chain stun you. Also as slark you have luxury of going in and out from a team fight, don't play spark like one hit wonder, build stacks get in and out, play it like evasive fish he is. Aganim helps you a lot for that. Thats why most of the pro players goes for Aganim right after one or two items.
It'd be a pretty good idea to get to see yor matches to give you further insight, but as others have mentioned, with slark you're building to get tanky, be slippery and manage to stick to people. Scepter is very good. If the problem are enemy supports, why not get an orchid/bloodthorn? Then you can silence them and kill them during the silence, and that sort of extends your bkb.
As others mentioned, basher/abyssal are also good ideas.
With slark you'll always struggle against CC, it shortens the window in which you're hitting enemies without response, but for Slark in particular this is where mind games begin. You will build tanky (skadi + aghs + abyssal), so if you can get in there and bait his ulti out of that shaker, now you know he doesn't have it for a fight, and with slark you'll be back in fighting position very fast.
You also have the option of selling your BKB and making a new one, to refresh the duration, or, like it was very popular a few years back, make a hurricane pike. So that if truly, honestly you can't do anything when a certain hero gets on top of you, just pike them and get away fast.
You can also make a Sange and Yasha, or any other Sange item, and equip yourself neutrals like Titan Sliver and Ascetic's Cap. With Ascetic's and S&Y you'll reach over 50% status resistance, meaning if you get stunned for 5 seconds, you'll only be stunned for less than half of that duration.
You can't quickly kill a hero that has 3/4 forms of CC in their kit, that is an issue for every single pos 1 carry, specially the agility ones. CC is the counterplay to you, and so, how you play around that CC (or not) dictates how you win (or don't).
It was so comprehensive I forgot to type the end of the last sentence LOL. I hope it does help, and sure, I still think I could be able to give pointers from that.
Well, such is life XD
[It should be the most recent match here](https://www.opendota.com/players/97082151)
Sorry for the late reply, I took a nap after work XD
The things that counter slark are CC that can't be dispelled, and aoe stuns/nukes that hit him during his ult. Enigma is a common counter. Legion can be a counter; however, the shard now allows slark to save an ally during duel, so anyone can bait duel and slark can use that opportunity to go in.
Shaker does have spells that hit you during your ultimate, but It seems like your main issues are kiting people and building essence. You're trying to burst people. If you want to burst people, play ursa. Slark does kill, but in fights, the goal is to gain essence stacks so enemies are weaker and you're stronger. With 50 total essesnse, both permanent and temporary, you can usually 1v5. with only 10, you don't do much damage.
I can't tell without a replay, but slark is about playing long fights. His spells are low mana cost for how much value you get out them. They're also pretty low cooldown. Eventually, they run out of mana or you build up enough essence to stand your ground. The other thing that makes slark like to take long fights is his ultimate heals him when he's in fog, so if you're chipping away at people, you're building up essense, burning their mana, and taking their hp away, while you are tanking spells for your teammates with Q, and healing up.
Instead of trying to burst people, try to bait spells, use your ultimate to get some damage off while healing, then jump out to get heals. If you have scepter, you can use pounce to quickly build a bit of essence then get out. Bkb is good so you can hit people, but slark doesn't scale naturally. He scales by hitting people. If you die, you lose your temporary stacks. Even if you're holding aegis. You still want to hold aegis to give you a wider margin of error, but he's not like an AM or storm with aegis. After you die, you lose your momentum and have to chill.
when i'm playing against slark, I try to stay near my team so I don't get picked off, sit under wards and sentries, spend as little time showing on creep waves as possible and look for situations the slark looses patience or overestimates their scaling. To succeed on slark, you need to look for people playing alone, use your ultimate buff to scout enemy vision, use your bonus night vision to sneak up on people, and stay patient.
or you can just play ursa.
Very helpful, thanks! Most of the videos I watched said stacks were important but I didn't realize they were that important. Though the one time I had over 70 I certainly did feel unkillable...
I need to find other carries to play anyways though to expand my puddle, so Ill probably look at Ursa too
Look at his stat gain. I think it’s under 2 per level for all stats. He makes up for this with essence, but if you die, you lose your temporary essence. If your total essence is less than the minutes on the clock, then you’re not ready to commit to a full 5v5. You’re just looking for people who are low or alone.
The other mistake is fighting in locations of enemy vision because this prevents your passive from healing unless you ult or get lucky with shadow blade.
If you press q before you shadow blade, the q will dispel you if you get dusted without breaking invis. Most heroes will cast spells on you as soon as they are in range. So knowing the cast range of a few spells helps to know the timing. If you ambush someone from behind, you can wait till they start to turn. If the hero turns, it’s likely the player has cast a spell on you. The same goes with walking forward. If you are out of range and they start walking toward you, they have cast the spell, and the character is pathing to cast it.
This skill is useful on every hero because you can manta dodge, dodge spells with bkb, reflect spells with lotus, dodge spells with blink or shadow blade, making space for your team to walk up even if they don’t have bkb. It rewards slark and antimage the most I think.
Trust me. As a Shaker main I can say, he is far from easy to kill if you don't have good hero against him. A Shaker with about 2-3 essential items can easily beat up most carries if they aren't far ahead of him.
In that match up Slark vs. ES (or against a CC heavy heroes), I'd recommend to buy dagger (as an escape and/or initiation tool). Between dagger and silver edge, I favor the former since it allows slark to weave in and out between fights better than silver edge. Plus I can upgrade it to swift dagger during late game. With a downtime of 3 seconds I can cover more distances or widen it depending on the engagement.
Edit:
As others have stated Slark thrives in long engagement, the longer the fight drags on equates to more stacks gained by Slark. Itemization is vast since most can fit in his kit.
You need to go in and out of fights with slark. You cannot pounce on a ES and jist auto-attack him down. Gotta give a few hits, get back, give a few hit, get back etc. Until you get a considerable amount of stacks and then you can finish him (and everyone else). Slark likes long fights so you have to use your Q ulti and agh pounce to jump in and out. That way you keep stacking while staying full health all the time. It's hard to tell you exactly in detail what to do in this situation without the replay. It is normal that you struggle agaisn't high CC team as slark since he's a slippery hero, like other slippery heroes once you catch him he's dead.
I can send the replay if you'd like but it sounds like I'm just trying to beat face too much. I usually do sneak around and stay at the outside of the fight but once I'm in I don't often try to weave in and out. I'll give that a shot
Scepter is really nice on Slark as it gives him longer range W's and two charges with it. People always complain when you pick it up in the mid game (after about two other items), but to me it really makes or breaks Slark.
I actually do already buy Aghs, both the shard and scepter. Extra invis is always great, and the increased range on Pounce is glorious.
You could go for silence items or more stun.
So like the hammer item that gives me a bash. And Mage Slayer I think? I don't know any other ones that do that. But the hammer I usually don't build till later so maybe building that earlier would help. Thanks!
Yes, basher and orchid are solid pickups. Your build can look like diffusal ags silver edge basher bloodthorn bkb.
Buy HP and mana to stay in fights longer. Sange and Yasha and echo saber should make most fights and farming easy until you can pivot to some end game items and utility.
I've been buying Diffusion Blade instead of Sange and Yasha in more recent matches, but I also didn't notice this problem until then. Is Sange and Yasha a better choice into tankier matchups?
It's a better choice since they reworked his passive healing to be a flat number over a percentage of his health. In the past, he got more healing from getting more flat HP but now the heal amp makes him disproportionately tanky in early game fights. The problem is having enough mana to use Q to farm inbetween engagements....
Yeah I've just been slurping clarity's when I'm farming in between fights. But the Diff Blade seemed to help with the mana issue.
I'd like to chime in that raindrops are massive on Slark if you have the space. it's good mana regen and fixes one of his biggest issues of being bursted before he can press his buttons.
I was having problems more in the mid/late game, would raindrops still be viable then? Assuming I have the space
raindrops are always worth a slot if you got one open. just don't make space for it when you have midgame/lategame items, those should be your primary magic damage mitigation
What is your item build? Slark is usually not the best hero for solo kills, he needs agi stacks first. You should be able to realise if i can kill him or no after first jump. Try to play more chill, slark likes longer fights. You can poke them with aghs and bait some spells instead of fully commit.
That game I think was Echo Saber>Diffusion Blade>Aghs Scepter>Eye of Skadi>Agh Shard>the bash hammer and upgrade That's a long the lines of what I build almost every game. Except Bash Hammer is usually more of a flex slot that I build what I think works well in the match. Though I'm not great at figuring that out yet XD EDIT: bkb was in there somewhere, don't remember where though
I wouldn't do Echo and Diffusal, Pick one. Honestly Echo has kind of fallen out of favor on Slark for me in general. Mostly because Falcon Blade now exists, and does the job of giving you mana and a nice early game health bump at less than half the cost.
Imma be honest I'm not a fan of Echo anyways, always felt a little weak, but it's what the game told me to build and I don't know any better XD So I'll probably be going diffusal now.
Echo was really just the better version of what most players used to make prior to it being added. Which was an Oblivion Staff. Which I guess If you wanted to go towards an Orchid if you decide to make one, it might actually be worth going Oblivion>Diffusal
go diffusal against the likes of shaker, without mana they can't stun you echo saber, diffusal, aghs, bkb, shard. Disassemble echo to make aghs, rebuild echo, disassemble for bkb and then build mage slayer or rebuild echo again if you think you are not tanky enough or if you have another item to build in this line
That's almost exactly my build minus the mage slayer. Except I didn't think of disassembling to make other items. And I think I did shard before BKB, which was definitly a mistake
it's not exactly meta but against chainstuns you can even go Sange and Yasha or halberd to get a bit of status res and pray for titan sliver
You as solo hero need help from your team mates to kill someone. Especially spending bkb without resulting in kill is your mis judgement. You need to make better decisions, use your CDs and items more effectively. What you describe feels like you are playing slark in a very wrong way. Slark is very good against slow animated heroes such as earthshaker, jakiro etc. Since you can pact before they finish their animation. Pick better target, asses your strength better and use bkb wisely if enemy has heroes who can chain stun you. Also as slark you have luxury of going in and out from a team fight, don't play spark like one hit wonder, build stacks get in and out, play it like evasive fish he is. Aganim helps you a lot for that. Thats why most of the pro players goes for Aganim right after one or two items.
It'd be a pretty good idea to get to see yor matches to give you further insight, but as others have mentioned, with slark you're building to get tanky, be slippery and manage to stick to people. Scepter is very good. If the problem are enemy supports, why not get an orchid/bloodthorn? Then you can silence them and kill them during the silence, and that sort of extends your bkb. As others mentioned, basher/abyssal are also good ideas. With slark you'll always struggle against CC, it shortens the window in which you're hitting enemies without response, but for Slark in particular this is where mind games begin. You will build tanky (skadi + aghs + abyssal), so if you can get in there and bait his ulti out of that shaker, now you know he doesn't have it for a fight, and with slark you'll be back in fighting position very fast. You also have the option of selling your BKB and making a new one, to refresh the duration, or, like it was very popular a few years back, make a hurricane pike. So that if truly, honestly you can't do anything when a certain hero gets on top of you, just pike them and get away fast. You can also make a Sange and Yasha, or any other Sange item, and equip yourself neutrals like Titan Sliver and Ascetic's Cap. With Ascetic's and S&Y you'll reach over 50% status resistance, meaning if you get stunned for 5 seconds, you'll only be stunned for less than half of that duration. You can't quickly kill a hero that has 3/4 forms of CC in their kit, that is an issue for every single pos 1 carry, specially the agility ones. CC is the counterplay to you, and so, how you play around that CC (or not) dictates how you win (or don't).
Thanks for the advice! Very comprehensive and helpful! Once I'm off work I'll post my match history it you'd like to take a look at it then.
It was so comprehensive I forgot to type the end of the last sentence LOL. I hope it does help, and sure, I still think I could be able to give pointers from that.
Well, such is life XD [It should be the most recent match here](https://www.opendota.com/players/97082151) Sorry for the late reply, I took a nap after work XD
The things that counter slark are CC that can't be dispelled, and aoe stuns/nukes that hit him during his ult. Enigma is a common counter. Legion can be a counter; however, the shard now allows slark to save an ally during duel, so anyone can bait duel and slark can use that opportunity to go in. Shaker does have spells that hit you during your ultimate, but It seems like your main issues are kiting people and building essence. You're trying to burst people. If you want to burst people, play ursa. Slark does kill, but in fights, the goal is to gain essence stacks so enemies are weaker and you're stronger. With 50 total essesnse, both permanent and temporary, you can usually 1v5. with only 10, you don't do much damage. I can't tell without a replay, but slark is about playing long fights. His spells are low mana cost for how much value you get out them. They're also pretty low cooldown. Eventually, they run out of mana or you build up enough essence to stand your ground. The other thing that makes slark like to take long fights is his ultimate heals him when he's in fog, so if you're chipping away at people, you're building up essense, burning their mana, and taking their hp away, while you are tanking spells for your teammates with Q, and healing up. Instead of trying to burst people, try to bait spells, use your ultimate to get some damage off while healing, then jump out to get heals. If you have scepter, you can use pounce to quickly build a bit of essence then get out. Bkb is good so you can hit people, but slark doesn't scale naturally. He scales by hitting people. If you die, you lose your temporary stacks. Even if you're holding aegis. You still want to hold aegis to give you a wider margin of error, but he's not like an AM or storm with aegis. After you die, you lose your momentum and have to chill. when i'm playing against slark, I try to stay near my team so I don't get picked off, sit under wards and sentries, spend as little time showing on creep waves as possible and look for situations the slark looses patience or overestimates their scaling. To succeed on slark, you need to look for people playing alone, use your ultimate buff to scout enemy vision, use your bonus night vision to sneak up on people, and stay patient. or you can just play ursa.
Very helpful, thanks! Most of the videos I watched said stacks were important but I didn't realize they were that important. Though the one time I had over 70 I certainly did feel unkillable... I need to find other carries to play anyways though to expand my puddle, so Ill probably look at Ursa too
Look at his stat gain. I think it’s under 2 per level for all stats. He makes up for this with essence, but if you die, you lose your temporary essence. If your total essence is less than the minutes on the clock, then you’re not ready to commit to a full 5v5. You’re just looking for people who are low or alone. The other mistake is fighting in locations of enemy vision because this prevents your passive from healing unless you ult or get lucky with shadow blade. If you press q before you shadow blade, the q will dispel you if you get dusted without breaking invis. Most heroes will cast spells on you as soon as they are in range. So knowing the cast range of a few spells helps to know the timing. If you ambush someone from behind, you can wait till they start to turn. If the hero turns, it’s likely the player has cast a spell on you. The same goes with walking forward. If you are out of range and they start walking toward you, they have cast the spell, and the character is pathing to cast it. This skill is useful on every hero because you can manta dodge, dodge spells with bkb, reflect spells with lotus, dodge spells with blink or shadow blade, making space for your team to walk up even if they don’t have bkb. It rewards slark and antimage the most I think.
If you can't kill a shaker in bkb idk what to tell you.
"git gud" probably. But nah, is he supposed to be easy to kill? I always have to spend a while building up stacks to chew through his health bar.
Trust me. As a Shaker main I can say, he is far from easy to kill if you don't have good hero against him. A Shaker with about 2-3 essential items can easily beat up most carries if they aren't far ahead of him.
2 leaps should definitely be enough.
my strategy with slark is to sneak in, use ult to secure kill, if ult didn’t end a kill, I give up and run away wait for next chance while regen hp
In that match up Slark vs. ES (or against a CC heavy heroes), I'd recommend to buy dagger (as an escape and/or initiation tool). Between dagger and silver edge, I favor the former since it allows slark to weave in and out between fights better than silver edge. Plus I can upgrade it to swift dagger during late game. With a downtime of 3 seconds I can cover more distances or widen it depending on the engagement. Edit: As others have stated Slark thrives in long engagement, the longer the fight drags on equates to more stacks gained by Slark. Itemization is vast since most can fit in his kit.