Characters / Dota 2 Intelligence A To M

This is part of the character sheet for Dota 2. This page contains the Intelligence heroes that begins with the letter A to M. Please note that this is sorted not by their real names, but their most common moniker, which will be bolded in the folder.

Strength | A -- M | N -- Z Agility | A -- M | N -- Z Intelligence | A — M | N -- Z Universal | A -- M | N -- Z Personas | Artifact heroes Dota Underlords Neutrals | Others

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Kaldr, the Ancient Apparition

"One day, ice will cover these lands, and it will be as if this war never happened. "

Voiced by: John Patrick Lowrie

Kaldr, the Ancient Apparition, is the embodiment of entropy, a being from the cold nothingness that predated existence. He has always been, and always will be. But the icy specter that Kaldr manifests as upon the physical plane is merely a faint projection of his eternal original self. As the universe grows older, Kaldr grows stronger, and when the end comes, he will reclaim his true form for all of creation to bear witness to. No longer a mere phantom, Kaldr will then use his terrible power to lock the cosmos in his frozen grip for the rest of eternity.

The Ancient Apparition is a support hero who can severely disrupt his enemies with his powerful abilities. His first spell is Cold Feet, which deals damage over time to an enemy; additionally, should the target fail to travel a certain distance before the effect wears off, they will be afflicted with a lengthy stun. Attempts to travel far enough to remove Cold Feet can be hindered by Ancient Apparition's Ice Vortex, which creates a long-lasting circular area in which enemies move slower and have their magic resistance reduced, allowing himself and other allied spellcasters to inflict much more damage on affected enemies. While these abilities are supportive in nature, Ancient Apparition himself is far from harmless, as he can enchant his attack with a Chilling Touch that extends its range and causes it to deal a burst of magic damage alongside a brief but heavy slow. Finally, the Ancient Apparition's main claim to fame is Ice Blast: this powerful ultimate ability sends forth a tracer projectile which travels in a straight line. When it reaches the location Ancient Apparition wants to target, re-casting the spell will launch the real projectile, which explodes upon reaching the targeted area. Enemies in the area of effect take damage over time, but most importantly become unable to increase their HP by any means. Should their health fall below a certain radius, they will instantly shatter and die. Enemies who rely greatly on healing, through regeneration or life-stealing, should fear and respect this ability as it has infinite range.

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• Adaptation Species Change: In the original DotA, Kaldr was the ghost of an ancient mage. The current version of Ancient Apparition is no undead, but something much more alien.
• Alliterative Name: Ancient Apparition.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: He is the vaguely humanoid embodiment of the heat death of the universe.
• Anti-Regeneration: Ice Blast completely nullifies any health regeneration and healing received by enemies. In addition to its burst damage and damage over time, it also removes a lot of potential health that could be gained with regeneration, healing and lifesteal.
• Art Evolution: The 7.07 patch gives him new model and ambient effects.
• Black Mage: All of his spells either deal damage, increase damage taken by enemies, or allow his allies to deal more damage.
• Blow You Away: In their descriptions, Ice Vortex and Chilling Touch are both described to manipulate frigid winds.
• Covert Pervert: He'd never say it, but Monkey King insinuates that even if he's an ancient being, he's trying to hit on Crystal Maiden.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Any enemies caught in an Ice Vortex receive increased magical damage.
• Damage Over Time: Both Cold Feet and Ice Blast deal damage over time. Notably, since Ice Blast also prevents healing for its duration, has a long duration, and causes instant death if the target's health gets low enough, this can spell guaranteed doom for a hero that takes enough damage right before or after being hit unless they can become spell immune or have Dazzle cast Shallow Grave on them.
• Defog of War: Ice Vortex temporarily reveals the area around it.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Ice Blast has a global range, and its area of effect becomes bigger the further it travels. Skillful use of this spell can allow Ancient Apparition to contribute to teamfights from the other side of the map, but this requires considerable prediction skills as one must first target the area with a tracer projectile before launching the real attack.
• Eldritch Abomination: Kaldr represents entropy. The Ancient Apparition you can play as is but a mere shadow of its true form, a being who transcends our dimension and who grows stronger as the universe gets older. As such, it is inevitable that Kaldr will eventually grow powerful enough to freeze the entire cosmos—much in the same way that the heat death of the universe can never be avoided.
• Elemental Embodiment: He is ice and entropy given form and will.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: He's the Anthropomorphic Personification of the heat death of the universe. You do not get a much more literal example of this trope than Kaldr.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Ancient Apparition speaks in a deep, sinister, whispery growl matching the image of the embodiment of entropy.
• Fighting a Shadow: It's stated in his backstory that Ancient Apparition is only an image of the true, eternal Kaldr.
• Finishing Move: His ultimate instakills enemies at low HP.
• Fixed Damage Attack: Ice Blast is this, in effect. Because hitting an enemy with the ball will cause them to instantly die if they fall below 10% of their HP, the debuff effectively removes 10% of an enemy hero's maximum HP for the duration of the debuff, without factoring in the blast itself or the damage over time.
• Ghostly Chill: The embodiment of the heat death of the universe takes the form of a ghost-like creature.
• Harmless Freezing: While Cold Feet does deal damage, it's so insignificant that it's never used as a nuke.
• Healing Factor: One of Ancient Apparition's level 15 talents gives him a very significant bonus of 20 to his HP regeneration.
• An Ice Person: All of Kaldr's abilities are ice-based in some way.
• Ineffectual Loner: Ancient Apparition's skills don't work very well without allies: Cold Feet is useless without a setup since enemies can simply run away from it, Ice Vortex is most useful when paired with allies who can benefit from its magical damage amplification, while Ice Blast, in spite of its very high damage, needs to be followed up with more burst to guarantee that its target falls below the shatter threshold, which AA lacks.
• Lead the Target: Ice Blast requires leading the target, stopping the projectile marker at a certain point, and then waiting for the real projectile to arrive and hit. While difficult to land, it's exceptionally powerful when it hits, easily turning around the outcome of a fight. Firing it from a long range also increases its area of effect up to a whole screen.
• Literally Shattered Lives: The final effect of his ultimate: if someone affected by Ice Blast falls below a certain percentage of their maximum health, they will shatter and die instantly.
• Meaningful Name: His name is Norse for "cold".
• Power Floats: The embodiment of entropy itself has no need for feet; Kaldr floats above the battlefield.
• Power Nullifier: Ice Blast is infamous as one of the two abilities in the game that prevent the enemy from gaining HP through healing for the duration of the debuff. This counters any direct healing (whether from items like Magic Wand and Mekansm, or abilities like Voodoo Restoration and Purification), stat changing (switching your Power Treads, toggling Armlet of Mordiggian), and even the fountain. The only ways to stop the HP loss are with spell immunity (which only temporarily stops the damage over time but cannot remove the debuff), invulnerability and banish (which also only nullifies the damage over time), Borrowed Time (during which Abaddon will not gain any HP either), damage shields (such as Aphotic Shield and Flame Guard), all of which are only temporary measures used to wait out the debuff. Only Weaver's Time Lapse and Terrorblade's Sunder allow you to actually increase your HP while under the effects of the debuff.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Shatterblast Crown Immortal item makes Kaldr's eyes glow red.
• Sentient Cosmic Force: Kaldr is the manifestation of entropy.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Unlike many other heroes in the game who verge on being Large Hams, Kaldr is surprisingly reserved in both tone and voice. He never yells, and his voice is soft and deep.
• Squishy Wizard: The massive damage his ultimate deals, both directly and indirectly, can be a team-wide death sentence, and his other abilities can make the enemy's life hell if his teammates can follow up. This is offset by his pitiful Strength gain and lack of a reliable disable or escape ability, meaning Kaldr tends to melt very quickly if he comes under fire.
• Status Infliction Attack: Cold Feet freezes slow or unaware enemies that don't leave its radius.
• Time Abyss: So ancient that the Fundamentals of the Universe consider him old.
• You Are Already Dead: Getting frozen by Ice Blast prevents one's HP from going up from any source, whether it be natural regeneration, healing spells, or increasing your maximum HP, and deals damage over time, making survival of low-HP units impossible without spell immunity or Dazzle's Shallow Grave.

Rylai, the Crystal Maiden

"It's all fun and games until someone's frozen solid."

Voiced by: Gin Hammond (original, Underlords), Melanie Minichino (Artifact)

As a child, in addition to her fierce rivalry with her fiery older sister Lina, Rylai's unconscious use of ice magic brought her family no end of trouble as she inadvertently froze everything around her. In order to prevent further damage, Rylai was sent to the snow-covered northern lands of Icewrack, so she could learn to better control her abilities. Under the tutelage of an Ice Wizard living at the Blueheart Glacier, the Crystal Maiden's mastery over ice deepened, until her teacher pronounced her ready to learn on her own and succeed him. With her mentor now slumbering deep within the glacier, Rylai continues practicing her magic, and her abilities have grown to be fearsome.

Crystal Maiden is a ranged intelligence hero often considered the quintessential Support Hero, she's fragile by herself and easily interrupted, but her presence can make the difference between victory and defeat, as well as ensuring lane dominance, and she can deliver a good deal of hurt to the enemies rather than just buffing her allies. Her skills are best used in tandem with other Heroes' and she's less than dependent on items to make her support effective. Her first skill, Crystal Nova, is a simple Area-Of-Effect nuke that has her create a burst of ice explosion that damages and slows all enemies in the area, while her second skill, Frostbite, targets an enemy and encases them in ice, immobilizing them for a short period of time. Both skills can be used in tandem with allied heroes' disables and can decimate a helpless enemy hero in quick succession. Crystal Maiden is also valued for her third skill, Arcane Aura, which gives her allies global mana regeneration bonuses, while the bonuses are doubled for herself. Her ultimate is called Freezing Field, in which Crystal Maiden stands in place, channeling a spell that calls forth a wide-area blizzard surrounding her and damaging any enemies on the field. While a devastating skill on its own, this spell is easily interrupted with other crowd controls, thus the Crystal Maiden needs to prepare herself with proper items to ensure the spell won't be interrupted and to position herself quickly so many enemies will be caught on the blizzard. Luckily, as a Support hero, the Crystal Maiden is usually not very item-dependent, allowing many situational itemization.

In Artifact, Crystal Maiden is a blue hero whose Arcane Aura Continuous Effect restores two Mana to the tower in a lane when an allied spell is played in a lane. Her signature card, Frostbite, deals 2 damage to a unit and disarms it for one round.

In Dota Underlords, Crystal Maiden is a tier 2 hero. Her ability, Arcane Aura, passively grants mana to all her allies.

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• Action Girl: Even if she's more a bonafide support hero, she has a lot of damaging utilities and might even score a kill if she's not setting it up herself, especially if she's left alone executing Freezing Field.
• Adaptational Badass: In the New Bloom comic, she is utterly fearless and confident in her powers, and ready to challenge a dragon for a fight. A far cry to her in-game playstyle where she would try to avoid trouble as much as she can. She's also definitely much less naive, choosing the best artifact among Winter Wyvern's hoard for herself when offered to pick one for herself.
• Adaptation Name Change: In the original DotA, Rylai had the surname 'Crestfall', which was removed in Dota 2 to accommodate how she is Lina's sister. Her third skill was renamed to Arcane Aura from Brilliance Aura, which originated as the name of the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Archmage's third skill.
• All of the Other Reindeer: A minor version. The citizens of Icewrack, while still interacting with her, show disdain to her in fear of her tremendous power.
• Anti-Magic: With a level 15 talent, Arcane Aura provides all allied heroes with magic resistance.
• Berserk Button: Being called an Ice Witch. Winter Wyvern's servant learned it the hard way.
• Black Mage: Aside from her passive aura, all of her spells deal damage to enemies.
• Blessed with Suck: In her backstory, Rylai's innate ice affinity caused all sorts of problems for people around her.
• Brainless Beauty: She has a surprisingly low level of Intelligence for an Intelligence hero, which is partly made up for by Arcane Aura. Notably, both versions of Crystal Maiden are blonde. This is also fitting in lore, as Rylai is the naive sister and lost advantage in the rivalry against the smarter Lina. More likely, however, this is an effect of Gameplay and Story Segregation as by herself, Rylai is pretty smart (just less compared to Lina), it's just that if she were given a higher level of intelligence, she would be utterly broken gameplay-wise, and seeing how Dota 2 really values gameplay balance highly...
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: If she kills Lina, she could taunt her as "Hell Bitch" or "Hellfire Bitch"... or "Hellfire Hell Bitch"
• Canine Companion: Aurora, the wolf pup of Icewrack, accompanies Crystal Maiden when she wears the Frost Avalanche Arcana.
• Color-Coded Elements: Blue, in her case, as opposed to red for her sister.
• Death or Glory Attack: Freezing Field is tremendously powerful, capable of dominating teamfights by itself; however, it's also a channeling spell, rendering the already-squishy Crystal Maiden completely defenseless for its duration. As a result, when Freezing Field is cast, it will generally either completely wreck the enemy team or get Crystal Maiden killed immediately.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Freezing Field costs a lot of mana and requires impeccable positioning to be effective: because it's a channelled spell, it can easily be broken with a stun or silence, and since Crystal Maiden is so squishy it might continue to be a problem even after she gets Black King Bar. However, it deals incredibly high damage and has good secondary effects as well, allowing it to absolutely wreck teamfights if pulled correctly.
• Dumb Blonde: Crystal Maiden ties with Enchantress for having the lowest base Intelligence among all Intelligence heroes (even Ogre Magi has more), and even being beat by many non-Intelligence heroes. Unlike Enchantress, she has at least two high mana-cost spells that are spammable, meaning that she's unable to do very much casting in the beginning of matches unless she maxes out Arcane Aura first; at level 1, just casting one spell eats up over half her mana, and it's not uncommon for players to delay leveling Freezing Field so that they don't have to hoard 70% of her mana pool.
• Field Power Effect: Her third ability and passive, Arcane Aura, boosts the mana regen of all allied heroes globally, and is doubled on her (although it doesn't stack with percentage-based mana regen items). At max level, it effectively equals using an Arcane Boots on them every time it's off cooldown, globally, which allows all friendly heroes to cast their spells more frequently (particularly non-Intelligence heroes who have small mana pools and low mana-cost spells). Even with only one or two levels, it can give teammates an edge during laning since they'll almost always have enough mana to cast a spell when they need to, meaning they don't have to spend their starting gold on Clarities.
• Freeze Ray: While not a gun per se, Rylai's first ability, Crystal Nova, deals area-of-effect damage and slows movement and attack speed.
• Friendly Rivalry: If she's put in the same team with Lina, she will treat her rivalry as a friendly one, instead of an Enemy Mine, as they're still sisters.
• Glass Cannon: A well-positioned Freezing Field, if left to channel for its full duration, might potentially wipe out the entire enemy team (or at least bring them down to critically low HP) - a remarkable feat for a starved hard support like Crystal Maiden. On the other hand, so much as sneeze on her and she's dead.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Rylai plays the role of "The beautiful sister" while Lina is "The smart sister": her personality is more friendly and naive, and gameplay-wise she has very low intelligence despite it being her main attribute.
• Good Is Not Soft: The 2015 New Bloom comic, The New Neighbors, shows that Crystal Maiden is friendly and cheerful with the villagers of her realm. She is also known as "The Ice Witch" and has killed several dragons single-handedly.
• Harmless Freezing: While Frostbite does deal damage, it's mostly incidental next to the disable, which lets allied heroes wail on the helpless target.
• Hostile Weather: Crystal Maiden's ultimate, Freezing Field, creates an explosive hailstorm that damages and slows any enemies within a certain radius of her. While it's channeled and the explosions hit in random places, a total of 100 explosions happen over the course of the ulti, and each individual explosion can be as powerful as her Crystal Nova, meaning that if left uninterrupted, almost anything caught within range will die if they don't run for cover.
• Human Snowman: Her Immortal item Yulsaria's Mantle causes any target of Frostbite to be encased in some kind of snowman.
• An Ice Person: All of her abilities involve ice in some form. Even her Arcane Aura, which works by lowering the temperature to stimulate the flow of mana.
• Implied Death Threat: To Winter Wyvern, in the New Neighbors comic:
  Crystal Maiden: Sorry, could you repeat all that? I was thinking about all the dragons I've killed.
• Instant Ice: Just Add Cold!: Her second ability, Frostbite, instantly freezes an enemy in a block of ice.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: With some of the unlockable items.
• Lady of Black Magic: The Ice Witch, with a kit consisting of damaging utilities and a kind, graceful demeanor.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Crystal Maiden's death animation has her turning into an ice statue, which then shatters and crumbles to the ground.
• Magic Staff
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Seems to form a one-sided relation of the trope with, of all people, Sven. She's outgoing, nice and plucky, he's somber and serious (though hammy when it comes to kicking ass). Crystal Maiden also seems VERY curious on him and looking up to Sven like a Stalker with a Crush, but he doesn't treat her with anything special, though he does express regret if he's forced to kill her.
• More Dakka: Crystal Maiden has a level 20 talent which grants her 250 bonus attack speed. However, due to her lacklustre attack damage, it's more like being tickled super fast from the point of view of the enemy.
• Oblivious Adoption: One of Lina's lines upon being killed by her in Dota 2 claims this. May or may not be true, though their eye and hair colors differ.
• Plucky Girl: Rylai seems to take all the misfortunes of her past with a stride, which includes being shunned by her peers because of her ice powers from her original home, being less smart than Lina and getting beaten in their past rivalry (or bullied), the citizens of Icewrack not fully trusting her and so on... She takes it all with a beaming smile and cheery outlook (though if she wants you dead, she'd be more than eager to.)
• Power Floats: With the Arcana item Frost Avalanche.
• Power Incontinence: She herself freezes and shatters in her death animation.
• Precious Puppy: Her Frost Avalanche Arcana features the Wolf Pup of Icewrack. Isn't it cute?
• Ship Tease: Her announcer pack suggests this. She sounds happy to see someone pick Sven, and during a slow period of the game, she might ask if anyone has seen him around.
• Sibling Rivalry: She doesn't get along well with Lina due to obvious incompatibilities. Both she and Lina have numerous dedicated voice lines for meeting each other when on the same team, attacking each other when not, and especially when one kills the other.
• Skilled, but Naive:
  • Rylai is a skilled frost mage and is also one of the best when it comes to Support roles. However, she's not just sweet-tempered most of the time, she's also really naive, not just on losing in her rivalry against the smarter Lina, she even innocently asks if Sven is actually blue-skinned beneath his armor. However, see Adaptational Badass above.
  • Although her comment towards Sven can be perceived that Rylai is smarter than she looks: Sven is a Half-Meranth, a race of merfolk like Slardar and Naga Siren. He's not going to have normal human skin beneath the armor, and Rylai is just making a guess under the armor.
  • Potentially also a Covert Pervert moment as well. After all, she's asking what Sven looks like under his armor... Does This Remind You of Anything??
• Squishy Wizard: Rylai is notorious for being one of the easiest heroes in the game to kill because of her low Strength and Agility, both base and gain per level (meaning very little HP and armor), having no escape abilities, and her awful base 275 movement speed. It's very common to build Strength items like Bracer on her just so that she doesn't (literally) melt in the first two seconds of a teamfight.
• Status Infliction Attack: Crystal Maiden is notable as one of the more powerful disablers in the game due to having a slow and a root in her basic spells, as well as an ultimate that slows enemies on top of the damage (and which can be stacked with Crystal Nova and upgraded by Aghanim's Scepter to apply Frostbite to enemies). She's considered one of the best early-game roamers since she can set up kills for her teammates starting at level 2 and help them regenerate enough mana to set up subsequent kills more quickly.
• What the Hell, Player?: In her Announcer pack, she will call out the player if they pick either Lina (her hated sister), or Lich (fellow ice user that she dislikes).
• Winter Royal Lady: She isn't exactly royal but she's close in design. Some of her purchasable equipment takes it further.

Krobelus, the Death Prophet

"Such a beautiful death. I envy you."

Voiced by: Ellen McLain

Krobelus was a Death Prophet, meaning that she made a living using her precognitive abilities to tell wealthy clients about their deaths. Yet for some reason, she was unable to predict her own fate. Even when she attempted suicide, she found herself thrown back into the land of the living against her will. Frustrated by the afterlife's apparent refusal to give up its secrets or welcome her with open arms, she tried time and time again. But the more Krobelus tried to die, the more she was transformed by the realm of the dead, both in apperance and in ability. Yet despite all this, a part of her still refused to let go of life. Now the Death Prophet wields the powers of the afterlife itself, all while ironically being denied entry. She will not give up her attempts to reach the eternal slumber, throwing herself into suicidal conflicts with increasingly feverish determination to stay dead for good.

Death Prophet is a hero whose skills allow her to rapidly push lanes and destroy towers, although she's no slouch in fights either. With her first spell, Crypt Swarm, Death Prophet sends out a wave of bats which deals burst damage to enemies it hits. This spell is one of her pushing tools, as it allows her to damage an entire creep wave, but it's also good against enemy heroes. Silence, her second skill, inflicts silence on enemies inside of a circular area of effect, which is useful against enemy casters in teamfights. Spirit Siphon, Death Prophet's third skill, slows a target and drains a percentage of their health to heal Death Prophet. The spell can amass multiple charges, allowing it to be cast several times in a row to extend its duration or affect multiple targets. Finally, Death Prophet's powerful ultimate ability, Exorcism, is her best tool for pushing and teamfighting. This spell summons a huge swarm of ghosts which attack nearby targets, dealing physical damage. The large number of spirits will rapidly tear down enemy heroes in a fight, but the spell is especially useful at pushing since unlike most spells, the ghosts can damage buildings. Through good use of these powerful abilities, the Death Prophet can ensure that her visions of her enemies' demise will come true.

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• Adaptation Name Change: In the transition from the original DotA to Dota 2, Death Prophet's first skill was renamed Crypt Swarm from Carrion Swarm.
• Anti-Structure: Exorcism is one of the few abilities in the game capable of harming buildings, making Death Prophet a very strong pusher.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Despite being fascinated by death, she always gets kicked back into the mortal plane after dying.
• Bat Out of Hell: Crypt Swarm is a swarm of bat-like winged beasts that savage enemies; creatures from the afterlife according to the fluff text.
• Black Mage: All of her spells are offensive to some degree.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Aghanim's Shard allows Spirit Siphon to drain armor in addition to HP.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Each Exorcism spirit deals relatively little damage. However, her ultimate has a long duration and enemy units around her will slowly be drained of HP (getting in close helps). Also the approach taken by her Aghanim's Scepter upgrade, as having Exorcism spirits chip away and slow enemies every time Death Prophet tags them with anything will condemn them to a very protracted demise.
• Death Seeker: Except, much to her frustration, death never sticks. Which just turns her into an even more determined one and... You get the idea.
• Fortune Teller: Specifically, she foretells death for others. She eventually decided to try find out about her own death.
• Geometric Magic: The icon for her former ability Witchcraft is a pentagram◊.
• Ghostly Glide: And the animation actually keeps her head completely level while the rest her body sways like a windchime.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Death Prophet is one of the best kiting heroes in the game thanks to Spirit Siphon and Exorcism which slowly wears down enemies near her, and her build which consists of items like Phase Boots and Eul's Scepter of Divinity. Since Exorcism is more effective at closer ranges, her playstyle encourages getting in close and then moving back out.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Her backstory in a nutshell is that the afterlife booted her out with every attempt she made to enter it.
• Lady of Black Magic: An undead female necromancer dressed in a purple dress with all her spells being offensive to a degree.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As you have read above, she is frustrated because she never stays dead, and of course she is a character in a game where everybody respawns soon after dying.
  Death Prophet: Oh dear. This again?
  Death Prophet: You brought me back again? Again?!
• Life Drain: Spirit Siphon transfers health from the target(s) to Death Prophet. Exorcism spirits heal Death Prophet in proportion to the damage dealt when they return to her.
• Lightning Bruiser: For an Intelligence hero, she is surprisingly tanky with her high Strength growth and healing from Spirit Siphon and Exorcism. Despite her slow base movement speed (tied for third-lowest, at 285), Exorcism provides her with a significant speed boost (especially when it's active). With the extra 20% movement speed from Exorcism, and with Eul's Scepter of Divinity and a choice of either Phase Boots or Boots of Travel, she could spend most of the game around 500 movement speed.
• Necromancer
• Our Banshees Are Louder: Her wailing sounds make her seem as one and in her Exorcism skill, the spirits were described as banshee remnants of her former lives. Not surprising at all, as she was based on the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Banshee unit.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Sort of. She's not entirely ghost.
• Power Floats
• Power Nullifier: She can use Silence to prevent enemies from using skills.
• Resurrective Immortality: Much to her dismay, she comes back to life every time she dies.
• Sickly Green Glow: Death Prophet and her spells all have an eerie green glow.
• Spam Attack: Crypt Swarm has an extremely short cooldown and is fairly cheap mana-wise. Early game it can be used both to farm and harass, late game it is a very good pushing tool, able to clear creep waves extremely quickly.
• Walking Wasteland: When Exorcism is active, Death Prophet becomes this. Unlike most other examples of this in the game (Necrophos or Leshrac, for example), where it has the same effect as long as the target is within it's range, it's more effective at closer range, because the ghosts have less distance to travel between her and the target, and less time to return to go out again.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: She's immortal, and not happy about it.

Disruptor, the Stormcrafter

"War is an equation, death the solution."

Voiced by: Fred Tatasciore

Disruptor is an Oglodi living on the blustery plains of upland Druud. In this unforgiving environment, his people face constant attack from the southern kingdoms and venerate the weather, particularly the harsh summer storms that sustain life and leave devastation in their wake. But long ago, the Oglodi of Druud formed a great civilization that harnessed the power of thunder and lightning through stormcraft, a lost art as much magic as it was technology. Although small by his species' standards, Disruptor was remarkably gifted and insatiably curious. As a youth, he would regularly go out to explore the ancient ruins of his people and take whatever surviving literature and technology he could find. After years of studying and scavenging, he rediscovered the secret of stormcrafting, using it to repair and adapt an ancient power coil he had discovered. Wielding the power of once-forgotten knowledge, Disruptor now defends his ancestral lands against all would-be invaders.

Disruptor, as his name implies, excels in disrupting the plans of his opponents. Thunder Strike, his first ability, cause a foe to be repeatedly struck by lightning. Each bolt deals damage in an area around the target, striking those who would stand nearby, and grants vision over the target for the duration. With Glimpse, Disruptor sends an enemy hero back to where they were four seconds ago. This is great for forcing an enemy out of position, or setting up hard-to-land abilities such as his Kinetic Field, which summons an impassable circular barrier after a delay, trapping foes inside or blocking their path. Disruptor's ultimate ability is Static Storm: an area is covered by an electrical storm, silencing foes while inflicting heavy damage over time. The area is just the right size to cover the entirety of Kinetic Field, making for a great combo. With proper positioning, these abilities make Disruptor a fantastic teamfighter.

In Dota Underlords, Disruptor is the Ace of Warlocks, causing the Warlock alliance effect to be applied to multiple targets. His ability, Static Storm, silences foes in a large area while dealing damage over time.

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• Adaptation Species Change: Two ways. In the old DotA, he was in fact the Orc Warchief Thrall, but of course that would not go well with copyright, so he's changed into an Oglodi (similar to Axe and Warlock, both of them also derived from Orcs). The wolf is also switched to a dinosaur-like creature, or others depending on Disruptor's cosmetic items.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: All of Disruptor's abilities can help prevent an enemy from escaping.
  • Thunder Strike reveals the target for the duration of the spell, making juking through trees impossible, and allowing players to land follow-up spells with ease. Not to mention disables the target's Blink Dagger.
  • Glimpse drags a unit back to where it was four seconds ago, and interrupts channeling. Combined with Thunder Strike, Disruptor can easily prevent any enemy hero within visual range from running away.
  • Kinetic Field restricts the movement of all enemies within, making them easy prey for AoE spells for up to four seconds. It can't be Force Staffed out of either.
  • Static Storm silences all enemies within its radius, and prevents the use of items if Disruptor has an Aghanim's Scepter. This means that being stuck in a Kinetic Field + Static Storm prevents enemies from using escape abilities, and they can't activate their Black King Bars to dispel the silence either.
• Armless Biped: Every single of Disruptor's mounts (default or not) has two legs and no other limbs.
• Barrier Warrior: A more offensive variant with Kinetic Field, which traps enemies within it. Although you can still blink out of it.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Rage of the Three cosmetic set provides Disruptor with three selectable insectoid mounts, as well as equipment with an insect motif.
• Black Mage: Disruptor's kit revolves around nuking and screwing up with the enemy team's positioning as much as possible.
• Blow You Away: With Kinetic Field:
  The stryder is immune to the gale-force winds that will consume its adversaries.
• Defog of War: Thunder Strike reveals its victim over its duration, making it impossible to juke against Disruptor.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Three of Disruptor's spells are highly situational or rely heavily on positioning. His only real all-around spell is Thunder Strike, his nuke, but everything else relies on the positioning of the enemy, and even their past positioning, so it takes a lot of planning and anticipation to make the most of Disruptor's spells. But a good Disruptor can block an enemy's movements, stop them from escaping a gank attempt (or even prevent reinforcements from teleporting in to defend), silence an entire group of them at the right moment, and generally make teamfights a lot easier for the rest of his team.
  • Kinetic Field has a long (1,2s) delay and is visible to enemies during its formation, so good placement is essential. However, it's also the key to land a good Static Storm - no competent enemy will stay in the Static Storm unless you force them to.
• Dragon Rider: A wingless, dromaeosaurid-esque variety.
• Four-Fingered Hands
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": 'Disruptor' is actually his given name in Dota 2, as opposed to the hero class in the original DotA.
• Horse of a Different Color: His stryder resembles a small, armless theropod dinosaur. One of his cosmetics is an actual dinosaur called "Gwanji the Thunder Lizard".
• Hostile Weather: Static Storm creates a gigantic thunderstorm that continually damages and silences all enemies in its radius.
• Improvised Lightning Rod: He can turn his enemies into this using his first ability, Thunder Strike, and drop thunderbolts on their heads.
• Lead the Target: Because of Kinetic Field's very long formation delay, good placement is essential to correctly trap enemies inside one.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Including preventing the use of magic, creating solid force fields, and sending enemies back in time.
• Lost Technology: His electric coils, which are the source of his abilities and were found in ancient ruins.
• Magitek: His electric coils.
• Monochromatic Eyes: As with the other Oglodi of this game. His are pure white.
• No Item Use for You: Should Disruptor buy Aghanim's Scepter, Static Storm will not only silence the spells enemy heroes in its area of effect, but also prevent them from using items, one of the rare spells in the game with that effect.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: His people the Oglodi, though he wasn't a warrior himself. It is worth noting that all of the currently playable Oglodi (except Lifestealer) were orcs in the original Warcraft III DotA, another proud warrior race.
• Shock and Awe: Harnesses the power of electric storms using the ancient power coil he found in a ruin. He can throw electrified orbs with his auto-attack, repeatedly zap an enemy with Thunder Strike, create an electric fence with Kinetic Field, or summon a localized electric storm with Static Storm.
• Squishy Wizard: Standard for most Intelligence heroes, don't expect Disruptor to survive in the thick of a teamfight.
• Super-Speed: When upgraded with Aghanim's Shard and used on an ally, Thunder Strike briefly boosts their movement speed.
• Teleport Interdiction: Glimpse can be used on an enemy hero who has just teleported near Disruptor to force them back to where they started (usually either the fountain, or Disruptor's teammates).
• Terrestrial Sea Life: His cosmetic mount Anguilla is a giant electric eel that somehow grew legs.
• Thunder Hammer: Disruptor's hammer throws balls of lightning.
• Weak, but Skilled: According to lore, he's considered weak among the Oglodi (which is justified when you look at another example of the Oglodi, Axe), but his powers come from his knowledge and craftiness.
• Weather Report: Many of his lines are parodies of such.
• Wizard Beard
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Blue, like most lightning in the game.

Aiushtha, the Enchantress

"You know what I love? Everything!"

Voiced by: Gin Hammond

In a world ravaged by disasters, both natural and man-made, the Enchantress roams about, spreading much-needed joy and healing wherever she goes. As she travels from forest to forest, she brings the stories of their inhabitants with her, acting as nature's messenger to those unaware of its suffering and bearing the gift of friendship to all she encounters. While it is easy to mistake her for little more than a carefree creature of the woods, Aiushtha's greatest desire is to one day see nature bloom again as it did in the past.

Enchantress is a hero who excels at pushing and ganking. Strong both in lane and in the jungle, she is a versatile hero who can both carry and support. Her signature ability and namesake is Enchant, a spell whose effect varies depending on whether it's used on a creep, enemy hero: against heroes, it inflicts a powerful slow and purges positive buffs, but when used on a creep, it will fall under Enchantress' command for some time. This is the key to her playstyle, as these creeps can be used to destroy enemies and objectives quickly. Impetus gives her an orb effect that deals additional pure damage based on the distance between her and the enemy. With this, she can rain death from a distance, taking off surprising amounts of health with each attack. Nature's Attendant summons several healing fairies which cast their recovery spells on the Enchantress and her nearby allies: the healing is spread randomly amongst nearby targets, making it more effective when fewer heroes are in range. Her ultimate ability Untouchable wracks anyone who dares physically attack her with guilt, inflicting a massive debuff to their attack speed when they target her. With Aghanim's Scepter, Enchantress also gains the ability to Sproink away from enemies, disjointing any projectiles coming her way. Though she may be a cute and friendly spirit of nature, the Enchantress is a predator, and she's all too happy to remind you of that.

In Artifact, Enchantress is a green hero. Her Continuous Effect, Nature's Attendants, grants her and her neighbors +2 Regeneration. Her signature card, Verdant Refuge, is an improvement which increases the armor of allies by 1.

In Dota Underlords, Enchantress is a tier 1 hero. Her ability, Nature's Attendants, creates a cloud of wisps that heal nearby allies.

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• Achilles' Heel: Though Enchantress is unusually resistant towards physical attacks thanks to Untouchable, a few nukes are often enough to put her down because of her bad Strength growth.
• All-Loving Hero: Very friendly and perky, even to the most wicked of allies.
• Apologetic Attacker: Some of her responses for killing heroes make her this... when she's not being a Deadpan Snarker.
• Bambification: She's part deer.
• The Beastmaster: Enchant, which lets her control a single creep with boosted health and attack damage. If she can't control the target, the skill heavily slows them down.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Yes, she's a Friend to All Living Things, but she can most definitely still bring the pain and convert creatures to do the same.
• Blithe Spirit
• Carnivore Confusion: She's a doe-centaur, but...
  Enchantress (Killing a creep): ''Hey, I'm a predator!''
• Combat Medic: Nature's Attendants summons a cloud of wisps that heal all allied units near Enchantress.
• Developer's Foresight: 6.87 introduced the Hurricane Pike, an item whose active ability gives a ranged hero infinite attack range for a set number of attacks against a single target. Perhaps due to the dev team realizing the amount of damage this could do in the hands of Enchantress, the same patch saw Impetus's damage cap being reduced by about half.
• Fixed Damage Attack: Impetus deals more Pure damage the farther away the target is. On top of this, the distance is calculated once the spear lands, not when it's thrown, so you can deal extra damage by walking away between each attack, and if you have a Monkey King Bar you can potentially insta-gib someone in their fountain if they're at low-enough health during an escape teleport.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Some of the heroes imply that a cheerful doe-centaur isn't her true form and purpose.
• Fragile Speedster: Enchantress is fairly fast on her hooves (she once had the highest movement speed in the game, meaning an Enchantress with no items could outrun many heroes with Boots of Speed) and Aghanim's Scepter makes her even more maddeningly hard to catch. However, her Strength stat is pretty poor throughout the game, which means she'll go down quickly to burst damage.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • Seems to give off this vibe.
  Enchantress: ''You know what I love? Everything!''
  • Even Terrorblade is a friend of hers, if his ally line is of any indication.
  Terrorblade: ''I'm every demon's worst nightmare, but I'm your best friend.''
• Glass Cannon: Enchantress can deal frightening amounts of damage with Impetus, but has absolutely horrid Strength growth. While Untouchable and Nature's Attendants do bolster her survivability, she's still very easy to nuke down with spells, and most carries can simply stack enough attack speed (or build a Black King Bar) to make Untouchable a non-issue.
• Horned Humanoid
• Hypocrite: Thinks killing people is all good fun, until you hurt her at which point it becomes a massive crime.
• In a Single Bound: Sproink allows Enchantress to leap a fairly impressive height and distance (backward, no less).
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Includes her Untouchable ability.
• Irony: In the original DotA mod, Enchantress used the character model of the Dryad, a unit that is immune to magic but weak against physical attacks. Enchantress herself is heavily resistant to physical attacks and put down very easily by magic nukes.
• Javelin Thrower: Her weapon is a javelin which, when Impetus is used, absorbs the power of nature during its flight, increasing its power.
• Long-Range Fighter: Since Impetus deals the more right-click damage the farther Enchantress stands from her target, when played as a core she usually builds a Dragon Lance into Aghanim's Scepter, increasing her attack range to a total of 870 - a significant boost to her damage output when combined with Impetus. On the other hand, she can't do much against an enemy hero standing near her, and though Untouchable gives her some durability, it does nothing against spell immunity or nukes.
• Mage Marksman: Early in the game, Enchantress' contribution consists mostly of heals, creep abilities and slows. As she acquires items like Dragon Lance and Aghanim's Scepter, Impetus empowers her right-click attacks to the point that a well-played support Enchantress can rival her carry teammate(s) in damage output.
• Monster Allies: Enchant can control creeps for 80 seconds.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Weaponized with Untouchable: the guilt of attacking someone as beautiful as Enchantress results in a huge debuff to attack speed. Although for some reason, only auto-attacks trigger this effect: blasting her with magic is A-OK in everyone's book.
• Nature Spirit: Aiushtha herself as well as her Nature's Attendants.
• Nice Girl: She's one of the nicest heroes of the game, being so friendly, caring and pure without any mean bones in her body, minus some obligatory snark that comes from being in a game like this (a lot of her meaner streaks tend to be results of Gameplay and Story Segregation or meme), and she even has capabilities of a healer to save her friends. Even when she's Obfuscating Stupidity, she's at worst Good Is Not Nice.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: As described in her bio, she's not as carefree as she seems.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Her lower half is that of a doe.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud
  Enchantress: ''Sproink!''
• Some Dexterity Required: Good control of the Enchanted neutral creeps and illusions is crucial to Enchantress' success.
• Spark Fairy: The Nature's Attendants are simply depicted as a cloud of points of light.
• Why Won't You Die?: Due to a combination of Nature's Attendants and Untouchable, attempting to focus down an Enchantress via auto-attacks will most often fail, because Untouchable will completely neuter any attempts to attack her, while Nature's Attendants will quickly heal her back up as she takes any damage that happens to make it through. Once she gets Aghanim's Scepter, Enchantress becomes even harder to bring down since she becomes practically immune to projectile-based spells, and can dodge incoming attacks on an extremely low cooldown.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Oddly enough for her, when Enchant ends on a creep or jungle monster, it abruptly and instantly dies. Lore-wise, it's probably meant to represent Enchantress setting it free, with the instant death being a result of game mechanics.

Grimstroke

"The strokes of my brush mark your fate."

Voiced by: Steve Blum

The people of Ashkavor had long bound their souls to an Ascended guardian wielding the power of ink to keep them safe. Grimstroke was the latest to be chosen for this position, a decision which would be their undoing. Grimstroke had always been obsessed with power, and in violation of a sacred law, he used ichor to strengthen his ink. Unfortunately, the ichor also corrupted the ink, and instead of binding the villagers' souls to him, he was being bound to the ink. As he was being suffocated by the ink covering him, he realized a way to turn this situation to his advantage and further increase his power beyond what he ever thought was possible. Without hesitation, he used all his might to reverse the flow of the corrupted ink, turning it against the townspeople whose very souls they had entrusted him. Everyone in Ashkavor was agonizingly slain by Grimstroke's selfish, twisted sacrifice, transformed into an inky phantom and leaving him as the sole survivor.

Grimstroke is a hero who can both support his allies and tear down enemies with his unique spells. Stroke of Fate unleashes a wave of ink in a line after a wind-up period, slowing enemies from a long range while dealing damage based on the number of targets hit. With Phantom's Embrace, Grimstroke sends out the remnant of his beloved to tear apart an enemy. The target takes damage and is silenced until the phantom is destroyed or expires; if it reaches its full duration, the target also takes a large amount of bonus damage while the spell's cooldown is refreshed. The phantom can make for a potent distraction during fights, forcing foes to choose between turning their attention towards it or allowing their ally to take the full silence and damage. Ink Swell is a more supportive spell which covers an ally in ink, silencing them but also increases their movement speed. Enemies near the target are struck by tendrils which constantly damage them, and once the effect expires, it explodes, stunning and damaging nearby foes, with the power of the explosion increasing the longer enemies were within its area of effect. Grimstroke's most unique ability is Soulbind, his ultimate, which binds two enemy heroes together. Not only are they prevented from moving apart from each other, but any single-target spell used on one bound enemy will also affect the other, effectively doubling its power. This has tremendous combo potential with powerful single-target spells such as Laguna Blade or Fiend's Grip. With Aghanim's Scepter, Grimstroke gains Dark Portrait, a spell which summons an illusion of an enemy hero which deals increased damage.

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• Ambition Is Evil: His ambition to reach even greater power than possible to learn from his mentors led Grimstroke to taint the magical ink he uses, ultimately leading to the ink being corrupted and Ashkavor being destroyed by his hand.
• And I Must Scream: The ultimate fate of Grimstroke's people, as phantoms bound to his will that seek to either die or, at the very least, drag him to his fate.
• Art Attacker: His weapon is a giant paintbrush and magical ink.
• Battle Couple: A particularly twisted example. Grimstroke has his lover fighting alongside him as a phantom thrall bound to his will.
• Black Mage: All of Grimstroke's abilities are used for disabling and nuking down enemies. While Ink Swell can be used to escape with its speed boost, it's much more effective for getting up in enemies' faces.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: One his few positive traits. When Grimstroke sacrificed his people to harness the corrupted ink's power, it included his lover (now the phantom summoned by Phantom's Embrace). Her fate was the only one for which he showed any resemblance of regret.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Grimstroke speaks in a deep, throaty, emotionless growl. He is voiced by Steve Blum, after all.
• Fantastic Racism: Hates the three Spirits (Kaolin, Xin and Raijin) for unknown reasons.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: His eyes glow yellow, and he's most definitely an evil person.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Stroke of Fate does more damage the more targets it hits.
• It's All About Me: He is not concerned about anything beyond increasing his own power, to the point that he sacrificed his own people to do so.
• Long-Range Fighter: Grimstroke's offensive abilities have relatively long cast ranges, allowing him to ravage enemies from the sidelines without needing to get up close and personal. And he'll generally want to, as surviving damage isn't his forte.
• Mad Artist: An evil calligrapher that uses his brush and ink to channel dark magic, leaving behind destruction in his path.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Has an interest in the dark and macabre, taking the time to compliment allies like Night Stalker and Shadow Demon.
• Personal Space Invader: Phantom's Embrace summons a phantom that latches onto the target and doesn't let go until its duration expires, silencing them and dealing damage all the while.
• The Sociopath: Grimstroke cares only for gaining great power, breaking the sacred laws of his people and sacrificing all of them to achieve it with no pity or remorse.
• Synchronization: Soulbind links two enemy heroes together, which not only restricts their movement, but also causes single-target spells and item abilities cast on one to also hit the other (with a few exceptions, like Omnislash and Nether Strike). Because of this, Grimstroke can make good use of items like Rod of Atos and Dagon, and pairs well with heroes who possess powerful single-target skills like Lion and Lich.
• Twin Maker: Aghanim's Scepter gives Grimstroke a new ability, Dark Portrait, which creates a powerful illusion of an enemy hero.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Grimstroke's backstory and theme are much Darker and Edgier than almost every other hero before him, and he has no comedic or whimsical traits whatsoever. Considering that the Dota 2 roster includes things like Doom and Night Stalker, that's saying something.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: Grimstroke sacrificed the souls of everyone in his town in order to save his own life and increase his power.
• Wicked Cultured: For all his evil, Grimstroke is surely an art connoisseur, and has the personality of a refined artist. He comments on Monkey King's literary output, among other things.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: He used the sacred bond between his people's souls and his own to first dump the corrupted ink on them, killing them to the last and leaving only their phantoms behind, and later on a return trip to Ashkavor to enslave those phantoms to his own will. And he's not done adding to his collection yet.

Jakiro, the Twin Head Dragon

"Twin engines of your destruction."

Voiced by: Dave Fennoy

Pyrexae dragons are always born in clutches of two eggs, no more, no less. Vicious even from their first moments, the hatchlings will fight their sibling, with only the stronger surviving and passing its strength on. Jakiro is not like other Pyrexae. Born from a single egg, Jakiro possess two heads and two minds in a single body that wields the power of both ice and fire. Equal parts cunning and rage, the twins are able to unleash the full wrath of the Pyrexae species upon any who dare to oppose them.

Jakiro specializes in inflicting heavy damage and powerful disables across multiple enemies, freezing them in place and burning them to a crisp. Dual Breath combines the two into a single spell, unleashing a blast of ice to slow enemies followed by a wave of fire to burn them over time. Ice Path creates a long trail of ice that solidifies after a short delay, freezing and stunning enemies within and making them easy prey for Jakiro's other abilities. Liquid Fire is an attack modifier that causes Jakiro's next attack to burn enemies in an area, inflicting damage over time and greatly slowing their attack rate. This ability even works on buildings, letting Jakiro push down towers with impunity by neutralizing their attacks. Jakiro's ultimate ability Macropyre sets a long section of ground in front of it aflame, dealing intense damage over time to any enemy standing within; Aghanim's Scepter increases the range and causes the flames to deal more damage and last much longer. Aghanim's Shard unlocks a fifth ability for Jakiro, letting him empower an attack with Liquid Frost to slow the movement speed of enemies in an area around the target while damaging them for a percentage of their max health every second. Whether in a push or a fight, Jakiro's power over frost and flame make it a significant threat.

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• Acrophobic Bird: In the same vein as Viper, he actually does fly, but is treated as a ground unit in-game and thus can't fly over cliffs and the like.
• Anti-Structure: Buildings are fully affected by Liquid Fire and Liquid Frost, both the damage and attack speed slow, making Jakiro an excellent tower-killer.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Macropyre deals pure damage that pierces spell immunity with one of Jakiro's level 25 talents.
• Art Evolution: The patch 7.03 update gives him a new model.
• Black Mage: All of Jakiro's spells are designed to be used in teamfights, where he can potentially stunlock an entire team, then follow up with Macropyre, which just by itself does almost 200 damage per second over a large area of effect.
• Breath Weapon: All of Jakiro's spells, as well as his right-click attack, have him unleash various projectiles and gases from his mouths.
• Can't Catch Up: Like Pugna, Jakiro is one of the least hard carries in the game - because he has a mediocre right-click and his spells don't scale very well in actual damage, he falls off hard around the 25-30 minute mark, so usually he has to end the game before that point.
• Conjoined Twins: Jakiro is essentially the Pyrexae equivalent of this: unlike others who are born in clutches of two, Jakiro was born from a single egg with two heads and two minds in one body.
• Damage Over Time: While none of Jakiro's abilities do much upfront damage, he's got a lot of ways to chip away at his enemies' health over the course of a longer fight. Liquid Fire, Dual Breath, and Liquid Frost inflict a damage over time debuff, while Macropyre constantly damages enemies who stand in its area.
• Delightful Dragon: Downplayed as he's definitely not harmless, but fluff text for his Immortal items indicates that Jakiro is revered as a protector by at least two groups of people for coming to their defense in times of need, showing that he's got a noble side to him.
• Disc-One Nuke: Ice Path only costs 90 mana per use, and creates a wall that damages and stuns everyone in its path, with a short cooldown. With Jakiro's high mana pool, it can essentially be cast over and over again in the early game, potentially turning your lane into a complete massacre, and it is still very potent all the way into the inevitable late-game teamfights.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: One of his head breathes fire, while the other breathes ice.
• Flying Brick: Jakiro is a dragon and one of the most durable Intelligence supports in the game.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The lore of Macropyre suggests that it's a combination of ice and fire. Visually as well as in its effect, it seems to be just fire. However, his Pyrexaec Forge cosmetic reskins Macropyre to give it an appearance more akin to the description with icy fissures beneath the flames, and Aghanim's Scepter-upgraded Macropyre creates walls of ice on both sides of the fire trail.
• Giant Flyer: Jakiro is a dragon about the size of a person, and who can stay perpetually aloft just by flapping his wings.
• Harmless Freezing: Ice Path deals very little damage next to the stun. Dual Breath's ice breath slows the targets, but deals no damage at all. Compounded by the fact that the ice breath is released a bit before the fire breath, it's possible to walk away unscathed from Dual Breath if the former hit but the latter did not.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: His normal Macropyre + Ice Path + Dual Breath + Liquid Fire combo makes chasing an enemy hero in a tight group a very bad idea.
• An Ice Person: His right head has ice breath.
• Jack of All Stats: Because of his slow, stun, generally high area of effect damage with his skills, and relative item- and level-independence, Jakiro is most of the time played as a support that fits well in most teams. On the other hand, he is also a rather potent mid, can survive the offlane due to his tankiness and can even be ran as an early game carry in a trilane as well. Because of the 4 second cooldown, 0 mana cost, and tower destruction power, Jakiro's Liquid Fire, which combined with Dual Breath for quick creep-clearing ability, allows Jakiro to push down towers very quickly and snowball his entire team with tower bounty for early wins.
• Kill It with Fire: Liquid Fire and Macropyre deal large amounts of splash damage over time. Dual Breath combines fire and ice to both slow and damage enemies over a large area of effect.
• Mighty Glacier: Can do a lot of damage to groups of heroes, and has good strength growth for an Intelligence hero, the only problem is that his cast point (0.65 seconds) leaves something to be desired and he's not too mobile.
• Multiple Head Case: Both heads appear to think individually, and they seem to get along well. However, they're still not above occasionally bickering among themselves.
• Our Dragons Are Different: A two headed dragon that breathes ice and fire, but his species is one-headed and breathes either ice or fire. Like traditional western dragons he has a lair where he hoards his riches.
  Jakiro (last hitting): "Gold for our lair."
• Playing with Fire: His right head has the traditional fire breath.
• Shout-Out: Jakiro's original lore, which described it as having been found gnawing on the roots of the World Tree, was one to the Nidhoggr of Norse Mythology.
• Single-Minded Twins: Jakiro is technically a pair of conjoined twins, as evidenced by his backstory and the heads' tendency to refer to each other as "Brother".
• Spell Blade: Liquid Fire periodically adds an attack slow and damage-over-time to Jakiro's right-clicks, while Liquid Frost will periodically add a movement slow and damage-over-time.
• Splash Damage Abuse: He can even hit and disable invisible targets with his AOE spells.
• Voice of the Legion: Most of his lines are meant to sound like two people speaking at once. Justified because they are two people speaking at once.
• Volcanic Veins: His fiery half has red ones and his icy half has blue.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Especially with Dual Breath and Macropyre, which combine the powers of both heads.
• You Are Already Dead: If Jakiro can apply both his Dual Breath and Liquid Fire to a target, he can apply a grand total of 500 damage over 5 seconds, which in the early to mid game can end up finishing off an escaping/invisible enemy hero, assuming they don't have a purge, dispel, banish or enough sheer regen.

Ezalor, the Keeper of the Light

"They say t'was I who carried the first light into the universe. They might be right, I can't quite recall."

Voiced by: Nolan North

Appearing as a doddering old man who can hardly remember what he's doing, Ezalor is nevertheless one of the Fundamentals of the universe. Breaking free of the Fundamental plane at the dawn of time, he rides forth upon a pale horse, bestowing the gift of light to all planes and always one step ahead of the chaos that pursues him. But when faced with the creatures of chaos and darkness that oppose him, he breaks out of his unassuming disguise to unleash the full might of his brilliant and benevolent power.

Keeper of the Light is a potent one-man support team, with powerful abilities for aiding his allies and debilitating enemies. Illuminate is a channeled ability that, when released, unleashes a wave of light that deals damage to all enemies in its path; the longer Ezalor channels the ability, the more damage it deals. Solar Bind helps Ezalor lock down enemies, inflicting a slow on the target that intensifies the more they move. Keeper of the Light can keep his allies' mana topped off with Chakra Magic. When cast on an ally, it restores mana and takes a few seconds off their abilities that are currently on cooldown. With his ultimate ability, Ezalor can go into Spirit Form, giving him increased movement speed and cast range, causing Illuminate to be channeled by a spirit so that Ezalor can do other things, and unlocks Blinding Light, a teamfight-oriented spell that blinds enemies in an area and knocks them away, causing them to miss on a percentage of their attacks. Aghanim's Shard unlocks Recall, which summons an ally to Ezalor's position after a short delay, but is interrupted if that ally takes damage. Aghanim's Scepter unlocks a seventh ability, Will-o-Wisp; with it, Ezalor summons an Ignis Fatuus, a spirit of light which periodically emits a charming glow, hypnotizing enemies and forcing them to look at it.

In Dota Underlords, Keeper of the Light is a tier 4. His ability, Illuminate, charges up a blast of energy before releasing it, dealing heavy damage which grows the longer it is channeled.

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• Adaptation Species Change: In the original DotA, Keeper of the Light used the model of the Warcraft III Human Archmage and was described as just a scholar. This version of Ezalor is decidedly non-human.
• Animal Motifs: Horses, which show up as part of a charged up Illuminate and gives it an neighing sound effect.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Ezalor is the humanoid personification of the weak nuclear force.
• Arch-Nemesis: Chaos Knight, who has pursued him through numerous planes of reality.
• Ascended Glitch: When he was created in Dota 2, Illuminate had 25% extra range by a glitch. This was eventually removed briefly before being reinstated and extended back to DotA as well.
• Blinded by the Light: Blinding Light blinds its targets with light.
• Blown Across the Room: One of Blinding Light's secondary effects is a short-ranged knockback based on how close the target is to the center of the blast. However, this can actually displace people up or down terrain, and at least one major game at The International 3 was turned around due to this happening to the other team's core melee carry.
• Boring, but Practical: Chakra Magic is one of the simplest skills in the game, but its ability to replenish mana on demand makes Ezalor one of the deadliest supports in the game since he can keep his whole team in the field for longer without having to return to base.
• Call-Back: Ignis Fatuus used to be Ezalor's ultimate in very early versions of DotA, but with different functionality from the one introduced in 7.20.
• Charged Attack: Illuminate's drawback is that leveling it increases its mana cost (which makes it extremely costly to cast in quick succession even with Chakra Magic), and only increases its channeling time, during which Keeper of the Light is forced to remain stationary and vulnerable to attack, and giving his opponents more time to get out of the way. To get the full 500 damage out of the nuke, the spell has to be channeled for the full 5 seconds, which makes it much more likely to miss unless you tag them with Solar Bind.
• Chivalrous Pervert: He will hit on any female hero who happens to be on his team, up to and including Broodmother. Makes more sense if you realize he's not nearly as human as he looks. However, this is only limited to the older heroes; he has none for any female heroes that were added after Medusa (starting with Legion Commander).
• Cooldown Manipulation: Chakra Magic takes a few seconds off its target's cooldowns.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Although looking and acting like a stereotypical old coot, Ezalor is really the personification of light, and when danger is afoot, he shows it off.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Solar Bind reduces the magic resistance of a targeted enemy.
• Defog of War: Illuminate gradually gives more and more unrestricted vision around KotL as it's channeled (meaning it sees over trees and hills).
• Expy: Of Gandalf. The Dota 2 wiki has more on this.
• Glowing Eyes: His eyes glow brightly when Spirit Form is active.
• Grumpy Old Man: In some of his quotes.
  When denying: Get off my lawn... eh, what's a lawn?
• Holy Hand Grenade: Illuminate is arguably KotL's signature ability. It has an extremely long range, wide radius, and at maximum level can deal up to 500 damage to anything caught in its path. It also only has an 11 second cooldown, which Chakra Magic can easily remove.
• Hypno Ray: Will-O-Wisp summons a wisp that periodically emits a glow that hypnotizes enemies, forcing them to move toward it.
• In the Hood
• Light 'em Up: Virtually every single one of his abilities utilizes light in some way or other.
• Light Is Good: The Keeper is the reason why light exists in the first place, having brought it to the realms after his escape from the fundamental plane. Without the light, the world of Dota 2 would have been nothing but a dark hellscape populated by horrific monsters not unlike the Night Stalker.
• Magic Staff
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Tendrillar, the mount that comes with the Crucible of Light set, is a horse that has ram's horns.
• Mounted Combat: Generally an ordinary white horse, but cosmetic items can change it to creatures like a reindeer or a unicorn.
• Non-Standard Skill Learning: Activating Spirit Form gives Keeper of the Light access to Solar Bind, and is also required to use Recall (his Aghanim's Shard ability).
• Pegasus: His Wings of Daybreak Immortal mount is a winged horse.
• Power Glows: Spirit Form causes Ezalor's entire body to glow brightly while active.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: A lot of his lines make fun of this.
• The Red Mage: Ezalor can regenerate his allies' mana with Chakra Magic and heal them with Illuminate when Spirit Form is active. Illuminate also nukes down enemies, Solar Bind slows them down and reduces magic resistance, and Blinding Light cripples their physical attacks.
• Regenerating Mana: Chakra Magic restores a set amount of mana on a target ally, and can be cast on yourself. In the early laning stage, this allows any lane with a KotL to constantly harass or gank their opponents without worrying about running out of mana.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: His outfit.
• Sadistic Choice: The Blinding Light + Will-O-Wisp combination can force enemy teams into a tough decision. Trying to run from Will-O-Wisp will likely get them dragged back due to its large area of effect, but trying to destroy the wisp is difficult at best when they're blinded.
• Sentient Cosmic Force: Keeper of the Light is the manifestation of light.
• Squishy Wizard: All the phenomenal cosmic power of a Fundamental, with all the durability of a fragile old man.
• Super Mode: Ezalor's ultimate, Spirit Form, turns him luminescent, increases his cast range and movement speed, gives him access to Solar Bind and Recall (the latter if he has Aghanim's Shard), and allows Illuminate to heal allies without having to be channelled.
• Support Party Member: Ezalor is a natural position 5 support, since his spells can cripple enemies in a teamfight and Chakra Magic gives his team all the mana they need and then some, letting him make a huge impact even with no items other than a pair of Tranquil Boots. The tradeoff is that he is extremely bad at manfighting even for a support, since he's very frail and his only form of damage output has to be channeled outside of Spirit Form, and even then, only an idiot would voluntarily stand in front of it; as such, he has to rely on his teammates in order to actually rack up kills and avoid getting squished.
• Teleportation: Recall, unlocked by Aghanim's Shard, brings an allied hero to your location from anywhere on the map.
• Teleport Interdiction: Recall will be cancelled if the targeted hero takes player-based damage during the delay before the teleport kicks in.
• Temporary Blindness: Blinding Light temporarily blinds the affected enemies, causing them to miss 70% of their attacks for 5 seconds.
• Time Abyss: Being a Fundamental, he is literally as old as creation.
• Unicorn: Ezalor's One Horn mount. No points for guessing how it differs from a normal horse.
• White Stallion: His default mode is a white horse.
• Wizard Beard

Leshrac, the Tormented Soul

" The truth of nature is torment, suffering and decay. But only the wisest see this--which is to say, only Leshrac."

Voiced by: Eric Newsome

Leshrac was once a great philosopher who sought the answers to existence itself. To this end, he used the Chronoptic Crystals in order to learn nature's deepest mysteries. However, he was not prepared to see the horrifying truth of the world's order, and was transformed by his discovery into an entity embodying nature's vile and twisted cruelty. Now existing half in our plane, half in another, the Tormented Soul takes great pride in his supreme understanding of the cosmos, holding nothing but scorn towards those who believe goodness holds a special place in the universe.

Leshrac is a versatile intelligence hero who can be used as either a core or a support depending on your playstyle. With his first spell, Split Earth, Leshrac causes the ground to explode underneath his opponent's feet, stunning and damaging them in a small area after a short delay. This spell is hard to land due to the delay, but can be very powerful thanks to the long duration of the stun. With Diabolic Edict, his next ability, Leshrac creates countless magical explosions around him over several seconds. The damage is low, but can add up quickly thanks to the large number of blasts; additionally, this spell can affect buildings, making Leshrac a devastating pusher who quickly melts down towers. Lightning Storm zaps one foe with electricity, damaging and slowing them. The bolt then jumps to other targets, spreading its effect. Finally, his ultimate ability Pulse Nova is a spell which can be toggled on or off: while it's turned on, Leshrac will continuously summon waves of magical energy which heavily damage all nearby foes at the cost of constantly draining his mana until it's turned off. Aghanim's Scepter unlocks the ability Nihilism, which turns Leshrac ethereal and causes him to project an aura that also turns enemies around him ethereal, rendering all of them unable to attack or take physical damage; enemies caught will also be slowed and take increased magic damage, while Leshrac himself gets a speed boost. All of these abilities make Leshrac into a devastating magical damage dealer who can either assist his teammates with powerful stuns and slows, or dish out the pain himself by building items that improve his health and mana pool so he can stay in the fight for longer while his spells tear down his foes.

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• Anthropomorphic Personification: Of nature's dark side. Primarily shown in-game through Lightning Storm and Split Earth.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: While most of Leshrac's abilities are damage over time based, two of them (Diabolic Edict and Pulse Nova) allow him to damage enemies while moving, which make him a powerful chaser. Combined with an AoE stun and a nuke that can slow the target long enough to set up the stun, Leshrac can be very hard to escape, which is especially surprising given that he's an Intelligence support.
• Anti-Structure: Diabolic Edict is one of the very few spells in the game that damages buildings, and in fact gets a damage bonus against buildings specifically. At level 4, a full Diabolic Edict takes off roughly 80% the health of a tier 1 tower and over half the health of a tier 4... and he gets a talent to double the number of explosions, letting him kill towers by himself. It's not uncommon for teams facing Leshrac to save their Glyph of Fortification just to tank a Diabolic Edict.
• Badass Boast: A thousand of your kind have fallen before me!
• Beam Spam: Is a master of this.
• Black Mage: Leshrac at his best is a rampaging ball of magical damage, able to melt heroes, creep waves and towers alike with his four nukes.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Nihilism turns all enemies around Leshrac ethereal, making them immune to physical damage and turning them more vulnerable to magic damage, which tends to be a very bad thing when standing next to Leshrac.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Two aspects of Leshrac's playstyle appear to contradict each other: he's a Glass Cannon with very little health, but his Pulse Nova requires him to be in the thick of the fight in order to be used most effectively. A good Leshrac must know when to enter the fray, and when to retreat.
  • Split Earth is a powerful AoE stun, but has a delay before activating, meaning that it requires either considerable prediction or another stun to set it up.
• Dishing Out Dirt: His first ability, Split Earth, stuns enemies by manipulating the ground under them. It's hard to land since crafty players can simply watch his animation and dodge it at the last second, but it's an area of effect spell that can catch several enemy heroes at once if timed properly.
• Enlightenment Superpowers
• Four-Fingered Hands
• Gaia's Vengeance: The embodiment of it.
• Glass Cannon: He's as squishy as they come, with no escape^note Though the combination of Diabolic Edict and Pulse Nova can make chasing and catching up to him fairly dangerous for melee heroes, and a stun that takes practice to land. But he has an incredibly high damage output and moderate mana use per damage. A Leshrac who manages to farm a Bloodstone essentially becomes a walking hazard that melts anything that comes near him, and his ultimate combined with Diabolic Edict allow him to damage enemy heroes simply by walking alongside him, making him capable of easily chasing down enemies.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Trying to decipher the meaning of existence led to him discovering Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, leading to this.
• Having a Blast: Diabolic Edict creates numerous small, single-target explosions around Leshrac, and Pulse Nova periodically creates a big one that hits everything nearby.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: All four of Leshrac's skills are AOE nukes; one (Diabolic Edict) also affects structures, making him an excellent pusher.
• Insufferable Genius
• Jack of All Stats: Leshrac is viable as a support since he has a stun, a slow, a pushing skill and doesn't need many items to be effective, and also benefits well from farm and levels, so he's usually run as a mid hero as well, taking advantage of the XP at mid to quickly shove down towers with Diabolic Edict and get a quick Bloodstone, which gives him the HP so he can run into the enemy team without being insta-gibbed, and the mana so he could spam Split Earth and Diabolic Edict, and keep Pulse Nova perpetually active.
• Lead the Target: Split Earth must be aimed on the ground and has a short delay, forcing Leshrac players to guess where their target would move.
• Magic Staff: All of the cosmetic items in Leshrac's weapon slot are staves.
• Nature Hero: An unusual villainous example.
• Nature Is Not Nice: He represents the complete indifference of nature.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: He's based on one in appearance.
• Pillar of Light: Pulse Nova.
• Pointy Ears
• Power Crystal: The Chronoptic crystals mentioned in Leshrac's backstory.
• Power Glows: His entire body.
• Pre-Explosion Glow: Diabolic Edict and every flash of Pulse Nova are preceded by a flash of light from his body.
• Random Number God: Diabolic Edict hits random enemies around Leshrac, making it very powerful against lone heroes or towers but loses much effectiveness when a creep wave arrives.
• Reality Warper: According to lore, his ultimate damages his enemies by rending the very space around them.
• Shock and Awe: Lightning Storm, as its name would indicate, is a storm that strikes a target enemy and nearby ones.
• Shout-Out: He's named after a Magic: The Gathering character, and his Diabolic Edict spell was named after a spell from the same.
• Spikes of Villainy: With the Thorns of Sundering and the Twisted Wisdom cosmetic sets.
• Squishy Wizard: His Strength and Agility are fairly lacking and he has no escape mechanism,^note though Diabolic Edict and Pulse Nova, combined with his relatively high move speed, can make chasing him down a painful prospect meaning that he dies relatively quickly under fire, not helped by his item build prioritizing mana over survivability. Of course, that's assuming that the enemy can weather his spells.
• Time Master: With Pulse Nova:
  If necessary, the Tormented Soul can manipulate space time itself, ravaging lesser beings.
• Walking Wasteland: Leshrac's lines show he revels in bringing chaos and entropy wherever he goes, tearing everything apart with his dark elemental powers. This is reflected in-game with his highly damaging pulse spells, which can easily blast everything around him to bits.
• Was Once a Man: Used to be a philosopher who used Chronoptic Crystals in order to learn nature's secrets. What he learned transformed him into his current form.
• Weak to Magic: Any enemies caught by Nihilism will take increased magical damage; given Leshrac's huge magic damage output, this works very well for him.
• Weather Manipulation: His third ability, Lightning Storm, hits the target with a bolt of lightning, slowing them for a short duration, and then jumps from target to target, allowing him to nuke enemy groups easily. On top of which, it has an extremely low cooldown, meaning that anything that's still standing four seconds after he casts it will eat another bolt.
• Wizard Beard

Ethreain, the Lich

"And so the dead will bury the dead."

Voiced by: Gary Schwartz

In life, Ethreain was a fearsome frost-mage whose mastery over ice magic allowed him to conquer many kingdoms. His tyrannical rule was ended when his enemies ambushed him, tied him up with charmed ropes and threw him into the supposedly bottomless Black Pool to sink forever. After approximately one year of sinking, his drowned body was snagged on an outcropping, where it stayed and was preserved. Centuries later, a geomancer named Anhil came to verify the Black Pool's alleged bottomlessness and ended up accidentally reeling Ethreain's body up from the depths. Anhil, unaware of the corpse's identity, used a simple resurrection spell to bring Ethreain back as an undead being in order to ask him about the pool. For this unwitting error of judgement, Anhil was repaid by having his soul consumed by the Lich.

Lich is a hero most often played as a support, as he does not require many items to reach his full potential. His first spell, Frost Blast, strikes a target with cold, damaging and slowing them while inflicting lesser damage to nearby units, useful for ganking or harassing foes. With his second spell, Frost Shield, Lich grants a buff to an ally or tower, increasing their resistance to physical damage while constantly striking surrounding foes with waves of cold, damaging and slowing them. This spell can greatly increase the survivability of a hero or building. He can disable enemies with Sinister Gaze, a channeled spell which hypnotizes an enemy and forces them to walk towards him while draining their mana. Finally, his ultimate, Chain Frost, summons a powerful ball of ice which flies towards an enemy, dealing great damage and slowing them. It then bounces between nearby enemies, potentially dealing massive damage to several foes if timed properly. With this arsenal of freezing spells, Lich can chill any foe to the bone.

In Artifact, Lich is a black hero. His innate Active Ability, Sacrifice, condemns an ally, then lets you draw one card, or two cards if the victim's Attack was 6 or more. His signature card, Chain Frost, deals 3 damage to a unit, then 3 damage to a random unit to its left or right; this latter effect is repeated 7 times, and you also get Initiative.

In Dota Underlords, Lich is a Ace of Mages, increasing his team's mana generation. His ability, Chain Frost, fires a ball of cold which bounces between foes, damaging and slowing them.

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• Adaptational Name Change: During the switch from the original DotA to Dota 2, Lich was renamed from Kel'Thuzad (which is the name of a Warcraft character) to Ethreain, and his first three skills were renamed from Frost Nova, Frost Armor and Dark Ritual to Frost Blast, Ice Armor and Sacrifice (although the latter two have since been replaced with new abilities).
• Affably Evil: Lich has a large amount of dedicated voice lines for support actions, and even for buying wards (which makes him unique among even support heroes). All while being an Evil Sorcerer.
• Bald of Evil: Granted, he's mostly skeletal now, and skeletons don't usually come with hair.
• Chained by Fashion: A leftover from when he was overthrown and tossed into a bottomless pit.
• Combat Medic: The appropriate level 25 talent makes Lich into a serviceable healer by granting targets of Frost Shield a notable boost to health regeneration.
• Death-Activated Superpower: One of Lich's level 20 talents causes Chain Frost to activate upon his death.
• Elemental Armor: Frost Shield has Lich place a round, icy barrier around himself or an ally, which lowers all physical damage taken by its target while slowing and damaging nearby enemies.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: Ethreain was once a tyrant wielding ice powers. This was all the more fitting following his death and resurrection.
• Evil Overlord: He was one in his past life as the tyrant of many kingdoms.
• Evil Sorcerer: In life, Ethreain used his mastery over ice magic to conquer many kingdoms.
• Expy: Three of Lich's four original spells were lifted directly from the eponymous hero in Warcraft III, with the only real change being his ultimate ability, which was changed from Death and Decay (effectively a channeled version of Enigma's Midnight Pulse, which also affected buildings) into Chain Frost. The original DotA didn't even bother with the pretense and straight-up gave him Kel'Thuzad's name and voice lines. Yes, that Kel'Thuzad. Patch 7.20 diminished this by replacing Ice Armor and Sacrifice with new abilities.
• Glass Cannon: While Lich is very squishy and easy to kill, his Frost Blast nuke does a lot of damage and has a very low cooldown, allowing him to spam it. On top of that, Chain Frost can deal massive amounts of damage to crowded enemies, making it one of the most feared ultimates in the game.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: He’s an undead frost mage, and his eyes glow red.
• Human Resources: Lich's Sacrifice ability in Artifact condemns an ally, then lets you draw one or two cards. Prior to its replacement by Sinister Gaze in Patch 7.20, it allowed him to instantly kill a friendly creep and convert a percentage of its current HP into mana for him, as well as converting it into experience for any hero (regardless of team) within the XP gain radius.
• Hypnotic Eyes: Sinister Gaze hypnotizes an enemy, forcing them to walk towards Lich while it's being channeled. And with Aghanim's Scepter, he can use it on an area-of-effect, which can really ruin an enemy team's day if he just so happened to Chain Frost them beforehand.
• An Ice Person: He was a fearsome frost-mage in life, and death did not do much to weaken his power.
• It's All About Me: In previous versions, this was how he felt about using Sacrifice on allied creeps.
  Lich: "For the greater good-- mine!"
• Mana Drain: Lich's Sinister Gaze drains mana based on the percentage of the enemy's current mana, up to 25%. However, Sinister Gaze drains mana in numerous ticks and checks the target's mana on each tick, meaning the actual mana drained will be slightly less than the stated value.
• Mutual Disadvantage: Lich has no control over Chain Frost after it launches, so unless he chooses the talent at level 25, heroes with summoned creeps or illusions can take much of the bite off his ultimate by having much of the damage be taken by them instead. On the other hand, after he gets the talent, it becomes much more difficult to split your minions up, because they can no longer eat the bounces for you.
• Not the Intended Use: Chain Frost can be cast on spell immune units. It doesn't actually damage them, but it will still continue to bounce. This previously meant that a Lich with an Aghanim's Scepter could lock down ancient camps and kill anybody who tries to farm them. No longer possible due to the Ancients' spell immunity being replaced with spell resistance, meaning that Chain Frost will kill them off eventually.
• Our Liches Are Different: A sorcerer-tyrant of ice, who was killed untold centuries ago and revived by a curious geomancer.
• Pinball Projectile: Chain Frost hits up to 10 enemies via bouncing if another enemy is close enough to it (take the appropriate level 25 talent, and the bounces become unlimited as long as there's another target nearby). It's fairly common for a savvy Lich to pull off multi-kills against gankers, or during teamfights.
• Pointy Ears: Has these, either as a sign that he’s malevolent and evil, or perhaps because he was an elf in life.
• Power Floats: He commands vast magical power over ice, and always floats a few inches over ground.
• Pungeon Master: The vast majority of his lines reference ice, cold, and death.
• Random Number God: Because Chain Frost will bounce to random targets after each hit, you can get extremely varied results if there are more than two enemies within the bounce radius.
• Really 700 Years Old: Ethreain has been imprisoned for so long that even the descendants of his enemies were forgotten by time.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: His eyes glow red, and he’s a fearsome, malevolent undead and potent spellcaster, whose ultimate can wipe entire teams.
• The Red Mage: He can both wear down enemies with Frost Blast, burst them down with Chain Frost, hypnotise them and drain their mana with Sinister Gaze, or protect and possibly heal his friends with Frost Shield.
• Run or Die: If Lich takes the appropriate level 25 talent, Chain Frost never stops bouncing until there's no one left to bounce to - in other words, until the enemy either scatters or gets annihilated. Hilarity Ensues if it's thrown at, say, Meepo or Chaos Knight, as the hapless player desperately tries to micro his many units away from each other.
• Sorcerous Overlord: Before he was overthrown, he was a frost mage conqueror and tyrant.
• Squishy Wizard: While he can alleviate this somewhat with Frost Shield, Lich has very low Strength gain and can be squashed quite quickly if caught out of position.
• Status Infliction Attack:
  • Besides his nuking power, all of Lich's active spells serve to slow the enemy's attack and movement speed. An enemy hero under the effects of the debuffs from Frost Blast, Frost Shield and Chain Frost will have their movement speed slowed by 90% (which is more than enough to guarantee minimum movement speed) and attack speed by 60 (more than a Shiva's Guard). In older versions, he even had a talent that added a slow effect to his auto-attacks - basically a free Eye of Skadi!
  • He can charm enemies with Sinister Gaze, forcing them to slowly walk towards him.
• Stay Frosty: He says this when casting Frost Shield.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Lich’s chest is completely bare, since he came back exactly as when he was thrown into the Black Pool. His undead and skeletal nature means he’s not exactly played for fanservice, and some cosmetics cover him up completely.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • There are two ways to counter Chain Frost: either walk into a group of allied or neutral creeps, as they will take some of the bounces, or run away from any allied units, which, done fast enough, may mean the spell won't be able to bounce even once. This means that to get the most use out of the ultimate, it is necessary to lock down the targets' movement speed and engage in an area without creeps.
  • Without any other units in the area to bounce to, Chain Frost becomes all but useless, just a simple one-time nuke that isn't even that strong, leaving him very vulnerable to a one-on-one situation. This is basically what his Shard upgrade is for, creating an icicle that not only slows the enemy, but provides something for the spell to bounce to, so that attacking him one on one, when Chain Frost could otherwise only bounce once, becomes very dangerous.
• Weird Beard: Made of frost, apparently.
• You Will Not Evade Me: Sinister Gaze forces a target to walk towards Lich.

Lina, the Slayer

"One little spark and before you know it, the whole world is burning."

Voiced by: Jen Taylor

Lina is the older sister of Rylai the Crystal Maiden, and their childhood quarreling was the stuff of legends in their homeland, although the fiery, yet clever and cunning Lina always had the advantage over Rylai's naivete and guileness. However, because of their rivalry, their parents kept losing their homes, one from fire, and one from ice. Eventually, their exasperated parents thought that these troubles would end if the sisters were just separated. Lina was sent to the south to live with her aunt at the blazing Desert of Misrule, a most comfortable place for her and her practice of fire magic. Though she made a great impression on the locals with her arrival, many would-be suitors left with their fingers scorched or eyebrows singed off by her. Lina is a proud fire sorceress and there's nothing that can dampen her flames.

Lina is a ranged Intelligence Hero often run as a solo mid due to her exceptional nuke damage and Intelligence growth. She specializes in burst magic damages, thus enemy heroes will be more inclined to buy magic-resisting items to stave her off. Her main first spell is Dragon Slave, and had her channel a breath of a dragon to be launched at the enemy in a line, damaging everyone in sight. Her second spell, Light Strike Array, is more tricky as Lina calls forth a sun ray to blast a circular area stunning everyone caught in the blast. Her third skill, Fiery Soul, is a passive skill that grants her bonus movement and attack speed temporarily after she casts a spell. This bonus stacks, so a Lina that can keep up with the spellcasting will be granted with massive normal attack bonuses. And lastly, her ultimate, Laguna Blade, has Lina shoot out a massive bolt of lightning that strikes the enemy with a powerful blast of damage, able to take out unprotected squishy heroes in one shot.

In Dota Underlords, Lina is a tier 3 hero. Her ability, Laguna Blade, deals heavy damage to an enemy.

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• Action Girl: On both sides, no less. Her nukes and auto-attack can be very potent killing tools, so Lina is often played in the mid lane.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: With a level 25 talent, Laguna Blade deals pure damage (meaning that magic resistance will no longer help) and is able to damage the enemy through debuff immunity (meaning that activating BKB will not save you).
• Black Mage: Lina's kit almost completely revolves around raw damage: three of her abilities are nukes, while the final one boosts her right-click attack.
• Color-Coded Elements: Her hair and clothes are red, fitting with her fire-elemental powers.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Light Strike Array is very tricky to land for new players, and her skills are almost entirely focused on raw damage, and she's very mana-hungry in the earlier game before her Fiery Soul can optimally buff her right clicks. She can be an unholy terror in the right hands, but food in the wrong ones.
• Dude Magnet: Lore-wise, after moving to desert, Lina has gotten so many would-be suitors for her attractiveness... and proudly rejected all of them.
• Elemental Hair Colors: Even without the Fiery Soul of the Slayer equipped, Lina is a redhead, fitting with her fire-element powers.
• Expy: Very obviously to Lina Inverse of Slayers. In fact, in DotA, she was mean to be the Lina Inverse.
• Evil Counterpart: Lion is one to Lina. Both are two of the very first heroes in the game (since version 0.60) and fearsome nukers with an ultimate capable of dealing massive damage to a single target. Compared to Lion, Lina is a better carry, has higher damage output and scales better to the late game, but needs more levels and isn't as good of a disabler.
• Fiery Redhead: Played with. In her quotes, Lina shows a lot of cockiness, bordering on arrogance, but not necessarily anger or hot-bloodedness. The only thing in game that seems anything close to ruffle her feathers is her sister. However, in her arcana's description, it's said that Lina DID have quite the temper when she was younger, and her literal flaming hair was a sure sign of her rage surfaced; she later learned to suppress such display (thus making her hair look normal) as she learned to control her own temper.
• Flaming Hair: With the Fiery Soul of the Slayer item. It also used to be her old Dota 2 model.
• Friendly Rivalry: She will still be friendly on Rylai if they're in the same team. When compared to another bloody rivalry like Kunkka-Tidehunter, it's a big "improvement".
• Gender Flip: Perhaps unknown to most players, she was formerly a male hero named Link Inverse.
• Glass Cannon: At max level, her ultimate, Laguna Blade, deals the largest amount of burst magic damage in the game, beating out even Lion's Finger of Death,^note Though Laguna has the higher base damage, Finger gains damage for every kill it does, so it often ends up with the higher overall damage and with a level 25 talent can even bypass spell immunity. Combine with her good intelligence growth and attack speed from Fiery Soul, she can tear down enemy heroes quickly if her burst hasn't done so already. On the flip side, she's easy to put down if focused down by the other team.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Lina is the smart and more guile one compared to Crystal Maiden, giving her advantage in parental preference than Rylai. She's more the loner sister lore-wise.
• Hot Witch: She's a powerful magic user who's renowned for her good looks even in-universe. Bonus points for living up to the "hot" label in more ways than one.
• Lady of Black Magic: A prideful fire sorceress whose kit is focused on unleashing large amounts of magical damage on enemies.
• Mage Marksman: Lina's passive, Fiery Soul, ramps up her attack and movement speed the more spells she casts. This allows her to actually deal a surprising amount of physical damage for an Intelligence hero, so right-click items like Mjollnir and Eye of Skadi aren't uncommon on her.
• Ms. Fanservice: While DotA is less sexualized for the girls, it's worth noting that Lina used to take the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Sorceress model, which is very sensual. Come Dota 2, Lina is given a rather Stripperiffic outfit that bare a lot of her shoulders, and gets a rather sensual voice (toned down from the Sorceress voice set, but still there). Thus if there's a "hottest DOTA girl" topics in the internet, Lina would definitely be mentioned, aside of making "hot" Puns with her powers. In fact, a boob chart that also gives analysis with the in-game model shows that Lina is the second bustiest DOTA 2 lady just behind Queen of Pain. Ironic, considering her former namesake is flat-chested.
• One-Hit Polykill: When upgraded with Aghanim's Shard, Laguna Blade will always travel its full cast length and hit all units along its path.
• Only One Name: Once her full name was Lina Inverse. To accommodate her rivalry and relation with Rylai, her surname was redacted.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragon Slave:
  In the scorched barren of Misrule, Lina learned to manipulate the fiery breath of the Desert Wyrm as a form of entertainment.
• Playing with Fire: Nearly all of Lina's abilities involve fire. She can send out a wave of fire with Dragon Slave, smite foes with solar flames by using Light Strike Array, and the more she casts, the more her Fiery Soul burns, increasing her speed. Even Laguna Blade, which is lightning-based, can be seen as an extension of her fire abilities, as its description mentions that the heat surrounding her is what lets her create that bolt of electricity.
• Power Floats: Fittingly for a powerful sorceress, Lina floats around instead of walking.
• The Power of the Sun: Light Strike Array burns air with the sun's energies.
• Related in the Adaptation: In the original mod, Lina and Rylai had nothing to do with each other lore-wise. The transition to Dota 2 made them into sisters.
• Shock and Awe: Laguna Blade, which is a blue bolt of lightning.
• Shout-Out: Lina's given full name used to be Lina ''Inverse''. The background information was also written to be as close to the Slayers version of Lina as possible. The spell names are still derived from spells of the show.
• Sibling Rivalry: She doesn't get along well with Rylai due to obvious incompatibilities.
• Spam Attack: Dragon Slave and Light Strike Array both have extremely low cooldowns (and the cooldown of the former can be reduced even more with talent), allowing Lina to deal huge amounts of area-of-effect damage the longer she survives.
• Squishy Wizard: She can bring a lot of pain with her fire spells, but can't take it in turn.
• Super-Power Meltdown: Lina goes up in flames when killed.
• Tsundere: Several quotes directed against her imply that Lina is this, she actually blamed her parents for separating her and actually wanted to apologize and make up with Rylai. Except her excessive pride will not allow her to do any apologizing.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Laguna Blade is blue, like most other bolts of lightning in the game.

Lion, the Demon Witch

"When the demon betrayed me, I took its very arm. Imagine what I'll do to a mere hero."

Voiced by: Tom Chantler (original), Glenn Wrage (Artifact)

Lion, as a Grandmaster of the Demon Witch tradition, stood out among his fellow practitioners for being a heroic mage who fought on the side of good. However, the resulting fame, along with his sheer ambition and great power, got the better of Lion, and a demon managed to seduce him to the side of evil by promising even greater prestige at the cost of his soul. But Lion never got what the demon promised him, and after committing countless unspeakably evil deeds, he was betrayed, as the demon abandoned Lion to strike deals with his enemies. In an act of furious revenge, Lion tracked the demon straight to Hell, killed it, and took its arm to replace his own. Although the new graft gave him the demon's powers, Lion was wholly disfigured by the process and soon returned from Hell on a murderous rampage against enemies and former allies alike. Lion is now the only remaining practitioner of the Demon Witch school of magic, taking the lives of all who are foolish enough to come study under him.

Lion is a simple support hero with a versatile set of abilities, allowing him to stun his enemies, disable a particularly troublesome foe, drain his enemies of mana and land a devastating nuke. Earth Spike causes spikes to erupt from the ground at a target area or enemy, stunning and damaging all enemies caught within it. Hex transforms the target enemy into a harmless little critter, disabling them for a short while. Mana Drain slows an enemy while sucking away their mana and transferring it to Lion, giving him more opportunities to cast spells without worrying about running out of mana. Finger of Death is his ultimate, and perhaps his most famous spell. Finger of Death is a single target nuke that deals massive magical damage to the unfortunate victim, likely finishing them off. If the target dies within 3 seconds of being his by this spell, Finger of Death's damage is permanently increased. While the cooldown on Finger of Death is initially very long, it gets much shorter as it's leveled, to the point that it can be cast in every teamfight. With an Aghanim's Scepter, the cooldown on Finger of Death is shortened even further, the damage is increased, and now damages all enemy units standing near the target for the same amount of damage, turning Finger of Death from a useful finishing spell to a powerful teamfight ability. Lion may be frail and slow, but if played right, he can disrupt multiple enemy heroes with Earth Spike, disable the most dangerous foe with Hex, stop a low intelligence opponent from casting spells with Mana Drain (as well as the target being slowed, making it decent if not outstanding at preventing a hero from running from your partner), and immediately kill or weaken anyone with a well-placed Finger of Death.

In Artifact, Lion is a black hero. His Active Ability is Finger of Death, which deals 8 piercing damage to a unit, and his signature card is Mana Drain, which steals 2 mana from the enemy tower and grants it to yours.

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• Adaptation Name Change: Lion's first skill was renamed from Impale to Earth Spike during the switch from DotA to Dota 2, presumably to avoid confusion with Nyx Assassin's skill with the same name.
• Ambition Is Evil: Lion's ambition led to him making a deal with a demon, and one thing led to another from there.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: Lion is one of the game's more notable heroes due to having two hard disables (Earth Spike and Hex), as well as Mana Drain, which can prevent heroes with small mana pools from casting any spells or using certain item active abilities. Mana Drain also inflicts a low-level slow during the channel - only 35% at most, but even the lowest level (20%) can be the difference between escape and death for an opponent if your allies are chasing them. Most other heroes in the game will have only one reliable disable.
• Anti-Magic: With Aghanim's Shard, Lion becomes debuff immune and gains 50% magic resistance while channeling Mana Drain.
• Appendage Assimilation: Creatively referred to as "demonoplasty".
• Art Evolution: Prior to a redesign, Lion used to look like an obese half-demon◊, but was updated to a more agressive, slightly feline appearance prior to game release. Prior to even this, he was spikey yet somewhat feline-looking, or simply a purple blob◊.
• Bald of Evil: Lion has no hair at all, only a bunch of spikes on his head that resemble hair.
• Beam Spam: Aghanim's Scepter drops the cooldown on Finger of Death down to twenty seconds at max rank, an extremely short cooldown for such a damaging spell. Additionally, an upgraded Finger of Death will fire one beam at every enemy inside the area of effect.
• Black Mage: Lion is known as one of the most fearsome nukers in the game, being able to burst down heroes extremely quickly in the early- and mid-game.
• Body Horror: Finger of Death. It deals a huge amount of damage because it is attempting to turn the target inside out. In other words, if he kills someone with the spell - it succeeded in doing so!
• Crutch Character: Once he hits level 6, Lion becomes a powerful nuker that can reliably remove any hero from the map. However, Finger of Death falls off in the late game (unless if Lion's team has stomped and he managed to accumulate many charges of bonus damage), and his lack of anything that goes through debuff immunity means that he's powerless against a carry with a Black King Bar. Being a support hero, Lion isn't going to accumulate enough money for durability items, meaning that in the late game he will outright melt if the enemy carry so much as looks at him funny; although if said carry's BKB duration is reduced to 5 seconds, Lion does regain some usefulness, as being hexed for 4 seconds and stunned for 2.6 seconds can be devastating.
• Cycle of Hurting: He's one of the few handful of heroes with 2 hard, reliable Disables (others include Shadow Shaman and Bane Elemental). Getting hit by Earth Spike followed by Hex means you're getting disabled for a very unhealthy 6 seconds, not to mention his Earth Spiike has the potential to hit multiple targets.
• Deal with the Devil: Also resulted to a Faustian Rebellion and killing the demon.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Lion is one of the most squishy heroes in the game, because of his slow speed, short effective range (Hex, for example, only has 500 range), poor HP and lack of armour. Your positioning has to be strong, and you have to be wary of strong enemy combos.
  • While Earth Spike can be targeted on units up to 500 range away (1000 with a talent), its actual effect range is 825. Add in the 125 radius on the spikes, and you can potentially stun enemies up to 950 range away, almost twice the targetable range. So while regular Lion players can reliably stun enemies at the usual 500 range by directly targeting them, good Lion players can hit people twice as far by ground-targeting the spell instead, relying on manual aim.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • To Lina; they are two of the very first heroes in the game (since version 0.60), both are fearsome nukers with an ultimate capable of dealing massive damage to a single target. Compared to Lina, Lion is a better ganker and disabler, needs fewer levels and items, but can't be played as a carry and scales to the late game worse than Lina.
  • To Shadow Shaman: both are extremely squishy Intelligence casters with a relatively spammable nuke and the honour of having more than one non-ultimate hard disable, as well as an ultimate with the potential of dealing massive damage. Compared to Shadow Shaman's Mass Serpent Wards, Lion's Finger of Death does its job faster and has a shorter cooldown at higher levels, but only works against a single hero, is of doubtful usefulness against Roshan and completely useless against towers.
• Evil Sorcerer: Though he used to be the only good practitioner of his art.
• Evolving Attack: Finger of Death scales slightly better to the late game than the standard magical nuke, since its damage is permanently increased every time an enemy hero dies within 2 seconds of being hit.
• Face–Heel Turn: Once a respected archmage, now an Evil Sorcerer.
• Fallen Hero: Remember kids, when a demon offers to make a deal with you, just say no.
• Finishing Move: Finger of Death is often used to finish off enemies, as it permanently gets more powerful if an enemy dies to it (or shortly after it hits).
• Forced Transformation: He can do this to his enemies with Hex, turning them to a frog (or fish, with a cosmetic item).
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Usually accompanied by said someone evaporating.
• Glass Cannon: His health pool is pathetically small, but Finger of Death is one of the most powerful burst-damage spells in the game.
• Gonk: The demonoplasty certainly didn't improve his looks.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: While only Earth Spike can hit multiple enemies by default, all of Lion's other spells can be upgraded to affect multiple enemies: Hex can be talented into a ground-targeted area-of-effect ability, Aghanim's Shard lets him Mana Drain up to three units at once, and Finger of Death hits enemies around the target if Lion has Aghanim's Scepter. This can make Lion a very dangerous late-game disabler, as he can potentially hex, stun, and nuke an entire enemy team at once.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Units hit by Earth Spike.
• Loincloth
• Mage Killer: A villainous variety, in his backstory. In the actual game, Lion is quite adept at nuking down fragile intelligence heroes with Earth Spike and Finger of Death, or preventing them from casting spells with Mana Drain and Hex.
• Magic Staff
• Mana Drain: His third ability, named this. Used properly, Lion can maintain his mana pool without having to go back to base by siphoning mana off creeps (including the ranged lane creeps, which possess a mana pool that they have no use for), meaning that he can roam and gank very effectively. It also has utility in teamfights, since draining an enemy Hero's mana pool (usually coupled with a disable to keep them from breaking the tether too early) can prevent them from casting their escape abilities or using their big teamfight ultimate.
• Non-Indicative Name: Lion's name is very bizarre for a squishy burst mage support that one would think that he'd be more of an aggressive melee carry. In the original DotA, the only allusion to his name is his backstory which compares him to a predator. Meanwhile, in Dota 2, his current model strongly resembles a feline in comparison to his other models which are more of a fat man/demon.
  Monkey King: Lion, your name is very misleading.
• The Right Hand of Doom: His demon arm, which is the source of his hideous appearance and Finger of Death.
• Spikes of Villainy: On his face.
• Splash Damage Abuse: Due to his ultimate becoming an AoE targeted spell if an Aghanim's Scepter is purchased, a good grouping spell such as Magnus' Reverse Polarity or Dark Seer's Vacuum can allow you to drop your nuke on multiple enemy heroes at once, to say nothing of the short cooldown.
• Squishy Wizard: His spells are extremely powerful, being able to inflict massive amounts of damage or disable an enemy, but he has very low health and is one of the squishiest heroes in the game.
• To Hell and Back: Judging by Visage's surprised reaction, he did it multiple times already.
  Lion: "I've been to hell and back, and back to hell… and back."
• Tranquil Fury: For a guy who mentions a lot about wrath and vengeance in his lines, he's quite held back when he speaks.
• Vampiric Draining: His third skill, Mana Drain.
• Volcanic Veins: His stolen demon hand.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: He never wears anything on his top half barring a mantle, although his flabby appearance means he doesn't look any better for it.
• Was Once a Man: His background lore makes it clear that he was something else before his transformation, though it's unclear how dramatic the "demonoplasty" altered him.
• Wings Do Nothing: The Legacy of Infernal Wings set gives Lion a pair of small bat wings that do nothing at all.

Muerta

"What fable of Muerta were YOU told? Whatever cruelties you've heard... the truth is far worse."

Voiced by: Margo Rey

Many different tales surround one named "Muerta", and the many graves she has left in her wake. What these stories have in common, is a woman so consumed in hatred of the one who took her life, she refuses to die. So much so, that Death himself took interest in this poor woman, making her his subservient. With a pair of ghostly guns handed to her, she hunts every soul whose time has come to its end, bringing them to their final fate.
Muerta is a ranged Intelligence hero, who has the rare opportunity to be played as a carry, scaling well with damage items. Dead Shot has her fire a bullet that ricochet off trees or enemy targets, damaging them and everything the ricochet shot passes through, stopping at the first enemy hero, inflicting fear upon them. The Calling applies an area of effect slow with the rotating spirits silencing and damaging units that are hit by one. Gunslinger passively grants Muerta the opportunity to attack a second random unit near her, prioritizing heroes. Her ultimate Pierce the Veil renders Muerta immune to all physical damage, alters her basic attacks to deal magic damage and even attack ethereal enemies, and gives her phased movement for the duration, while also providing a basic dispel upon cast. It does, however, prevents her from damaging buildings and magic-immune targets.

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• Armor-Piercing Attack: When Pierce the Veil is active, Muerta's right-click attacks can target ethereal enemies, rendering defensive abilities like Ghost Scepter or Necrophos' Ghost Shroud useless against her; indeed, it's not unheard of for Muerta to build Ethereal Blade to help right-click down enemies faster. Additionally, attacks during Pierce the Veil deal magic damage, meaning that all the armor in the world won't protect the enemy's carry from being mown down.
• Back from the Dead: Her lore states she was so consumed by hatred in her final moments that Death itself was so impressed with her refusal to die that he struck a deal with her; she can cross between the worlds of the living and dead to see her family in exchange to carry out Death's work. She gladly accepted and was gifted a pair of ghostly weapons.
• Blood Knight: Despite her disdain for taking part in the War of the Ancients, she nonetheless revels in the destruction it brings.
  Muerta: Ahh, I love a good battle. Who am I kidding, I love a bad one too.
• Boring, but Practical: Her third ability Gunslinger gives her the chance to attack a random enemy whenever she makes a basic attack. A rather mundane ability compared to the flashy Improbable Aiming Skills of her first ability or the whirlpool of spirits she summons with her second, but it forms the crux of her late-game damage output.
• Calacas: Her aesthetic as a whole, with a full-on skeletal appearance as well as a fitting background.
• Chess with Death: Supplementary material released with her update reveals that, In-Universe, Chess is by default the game played against Death. However, Muerta discovers while combing through Death’s legal paperwork that she’s allowed to pick the game…and she picks none other than Artifact, a game considered so confusing and obtuse that she beats Death over nine times in a row!
• Double-Edged Buff: When Pierce the Veil is active, Muerta gains bonus damage and becomes ethereal. Unlike every other source of ethereal, Pierce the Veil does not disarm Muerta or make her more vulnerable to magical damage (while still granting physical damage immunity), but it does prevent her from attacking buildings and also causes her physical attacks to deal magical instead of physical damage.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Other characters may have foreign languages thrown in for fun, but her lines have a lot of Spanish added in, as a nod to her aesthetic.
• The Gunslinger: A Trick Shot type of gunslinger, able to ricochet a spectral bullet off a tree or enemy.
• Guns Akimbo: Dual wields a pair of pistols, and her passive Gunslinger gives her a chance to shoot two enemies at once.
• I Call It "Vera": Her pistols are named Mercy and Grace.
• Intangibility: While Pierce the Veil is active, Muerta turns ethereal and becomes immune to physical damage.
• Mage Marksman: Muerta is one of the few Intelligence heroes who scale well as a right-click attacker, with Gunslinger allowing her to shoot two enemies at the same time and Pierce the Veil providing physical damage immunity.
• More Dakka: Because Pierce the Veil gives her massive damage potential with a short duration, Muerta tends towards building attack speed so that she can make the most of it and try to gun down as many enemies as possible with Gunslinger procs before it wears off.
• Multiple-Choice Past: In some of her monologues she states there were many fables and legends as to how she had come about, even to a point where she forgets what her true story is. The only constant is her family was massacred and she was left clinging to life due to sheer rage.
• Summoning Ritual: The lore of The Calling states she calls upon the spirits of her deceased family in order to slow and silence her enemies.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Befitting her scary nature, her Dead Shot will cause heroes to run the opposite direction the ricocheting bullet hits them, allowing her to put them in undesirable spots.
• Vengeful Ghost: In her default form, she is more of some walking being pulled from the brink of death to serve him, impressed by her display of vengeance, which almost metaphorically qualifies her for this. Her ultimate allows her to transform into a more literal one, rendering her immune to physical damage, like an Ethereal hero, without the limitation of being unable to right-click enemies.^note If she's targeted by any other source of Ethereal, such as Ethereal Blade or Decrepify, Pierce the Veil overrides them.
• You Killed My Father: Interactions with Mortred and Asan implicate the Sisters of the Veil has the ones responsible for her family's massacre. She also has a particular hatred for Oracle as well, as she claims he was the one who ordered their deaths so to have her participate in the War of the Ancients years later.

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