Crystal Maiden (Quick Guide)

Introduction

Crystal Maiden is a situational support. Although she has terrible movement speed, poor stat gain, and is next to useless late game, she is one of the strongest level 2 nukers with 2 disables in the game. If she is played properly, she and can easily get first blood, greatly disrupt enemy farming, and create space for your carries.

Pros / Cons

Skills

Crystal Nova: Large aoe nuke that also slows and reduces attack speed. At max level, try to hit (with auto attacks) the ranged creep once and melee creeps to half health before nuking the wave for an easy four to eight lits hits.

Frostbite: The is a micro-stun (stops TPs and channeling abilities) combined with a lockdown. Keep in mind that people can still cast spells like Frost Arrows and Arcane Orb and use items. It does 700 damage and disables creeps for 10 seconds at all levels so keep this in mind against a Chen or Enchantress. The damage and disable don't scale particularly well so stats are prefered at later levels.

Arcane Aura: A global mana regeneration aura, it gives you double mana regen so don't max it until you have all your stats maxed out, +1 mana regen per second is plenty for you and +.5 is good enough for you team.

Freezing Field: This is a very powerful spell that often gets you killed when you use it; try to combo with Black Hole or Reverse Polarity. You can also use it to clear mega creeps very fast late game since you probably cannot ult since you are too squishy (unless you get a ghost scepter). I skill this early to clear jungle stacks.

Warding (not long)

There are plenty of warding guides so there is no need to waste our time. Remember to refresh wards every 6 minutes. Do not go to ward on your own. You will often get bursted down and counter warded. Here is a short video on warding. Keep in mind, it is more important to know why to ward there rather than placing wards at certain intervals.

Handy YouTube Video
The first part is for the radiant, and the second is for the dire.

Remember wards save lives!

Items (Standard Maiden)

Standard Starting Items

Cost: 593 gold This is a good support build but you are not saving money for potential Sentry Ward in case your pull gets blocked. Try to get an early TP scroll and gank other lanes. Using a Smoke of Deceit will help counter Maiden's low movement speed for ganks.

Cost: 7259 gold Maiden's biggest problem is how quickly she dies in team fights. These items as designed to help increase her longevity. You more than likely cannot farm all these items so prioritize what you will need. If you need additional stats, consider a Drum of Endurance or a Vitality Booster.

Luxury Items

Arcane- Provide fantastic movement speed and mana regen is nice.
Blink- Usually Force Staff is better overall, but blink provides more mobility to self.
Ghost- This will prevent you from getting one shotted by the enemy carry late game.
Medallion- This will allow for taking on early roshan. Don't forget to use it in team fights.
Tranquil- Provides +10ms compared to Arcane Boots. Activate heal, disassemble into arcane boots.


(more to come)

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

Updating this guide, its a bit outdated in current meta.

Thanks for reading my guide guys; this is my first and I would appreciate it if you can vote it up. Also give me feedback on what I can do better. As with any guide, please do not follow this point for point; different heroes require different skill and item builds. If there are no one on your team that badly need mana you can leave your aura at 1 skill point. If you are having problems with invis heroes then getting more dust and sentries will be a good itea. Keep in mind that you peak early so play to your advantage as you are better of picking a Vengeful Spirit, Lina, ect. if you want to drag the game on longer as they hit their peak later in the game. In the end, you won't have the best KD ratio as CM, but if you do your job right, you should have lots of ***its and keep your carry from death, which should make them very happy :D