Is it past time to nerf Slark?

You need to destroy him before level 6.

I've found his laning to be quite weak - none of his skills are good unless he's on the offensive. He can pounce away, but if you can burn all his regen before he hits 6 then you're a good way towards shutting him down for a while.

He has like a 25% pickrate across pub games according to DOTAbuff, hovering about 50% winrate at all skill levels, save for 5k+ where he's at 47%. Just for people interested.

I would be happy with a Silver Edge nerf, because I think the item is stupid right now. Without it the hero still has defined windows of strengths, and defined weakpoints. He's **** in lane, can fight into 5 man DOTO, and needs time to come online. And is somewhat weak to AOE disables and silences.

Silver Edge being so good undoes the last one, makes a poor lane less punishing because he can catch-up more rapidly, and just in general makes him come online sooner than he should.

He does not need the hammer right now. Personally I don't think there is a hero who needs the hammer right now. It's still too early into the patch to tell about any of the big broken stuff. Except maybe Invoker since 50% pickrate + greater than 50% winrate at 5k+ games? pffft

EDIT; Isn't Axe stupidly good against him in the laning phase?

Depends a lot on convincing your team to run enough aggro, and even then, he's not terrible. Good escapes from early levels, can steal stats. He's certainly not terrible 3v3. His recovery farm speed can be very good too.



I wouldn't say he's **** - has considerably more presence than most carries at this stage. 3.5 second leash at level 1? That's you dead versus a trilane. Even a reasonable dual lane is sufficient with a few levels. He can compete pretty well with most melee heroes due to Essence Shift, and you can forget about trying to harass him after level 6 - few seconds in the trees and he's fine.

Axe can do quite well against him 1v1...but even 1v2 it's looking bad. If you haven't got creeps attacking you to give you spins, Essence Shift hurts a lot.

Afaik only bad slarks or lots of AOE really works against him - he can generally shrug them off without difficulty thanks to Dark Pact - hence you don't see many Black King Bars around.

To be fair, your pickrate stat is probably about right - looking through my recent history there weren't actually that many Slark games, it's more of a thing of expecting to see him a lot - like Invoker. The nerfs I suggested are actually pretty minor, they just make purges a tad more skillful and require him to have a few more levels in Pounce to get the super long leash time.

An important tip against Slark : buy Manta Style. Manta breaks Pounce because of the invulnerability period. This is especially big now that Slarks don't buy Skadi as much as they used to : you can kite them fairly easily with that even in the late game.

Of course I'm not saying play manta Crystal Maiden but DO play manta Weaver for example. The Fish is more kiteable than you might think.

Is building Bloodthorn or Echo Sabre any good on him ?

Bloodthorn is situational, echp sabre is more or less a solid 2ND or 3Rd item

Has the shadow blade + echo saber exploit been fixed?

Doesn't look like it, the bug(or is it) was still working when I last played 2 hours ago

Last I checked it was fixed though, with echo sabre + silver edge in a lobby.