Broodmother: Spiders? Nope. Nope nope nope.

Introduction and Reason For This Guide

It seems that the skill build for BM is relatively set at this point in time, and I really have nothing to add here. But I think people can be building her items in a more effective manner. I do not claim to be an expert, but I do think that the following build gets a little more push out of BM a little sooner than a lot of the builds I've seen around.

Broodmother has a very high skill floor because she spawns so much creep. If you keep feeding all of her spiders to your opponent, they will become absurdly fed absurdly fast. This kills the team.

Pros/Cons

Pros:

• Great pushing ability. If your opponents ignore you, you're taking a tower. Period.
• You can abuse invisibility. Seriously, her webs make her (and her spiderlings/-ites) hugely unpredictable.
• Health regen and vamp provided by her ultimate means you can afford to take a few punches and sack a lot of it for mana.

• If you can't micro your spiderlings/-ites, you're going to feed and lose the game for your whole team.
• BM is squishy. She has a lot of health regen, but she loses it fast as well.
• AOE turns your spiderlings/-ites into free farm for your opponents.
• Teams with detection (Especially dust) will slow you down.
• If you feed your spiderlings, YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE YOUR TEAM THE GAME. COMPRENDE?

Items

Soul Ring: This is the backbone item of any great BM player. BM's biggest weakness is possibly her low mana. One of her biggest strengths is a ton of HP regen. Put these facts together, and you have a compelling reason to rush this item. This should be the first thing you finish building. You'll note I put Sage's Mask in the Starting Items rather than the Ring of Regen. This is because you'll be standing on webs for most of the game which should provide the health regen you need and you're going to need some additional source of mana before you finish the Soul Ring.

Power Treads: A lot of people out there like to see Boots of Travel or Phase Boots instead of the Power Treads. I disagree for a few reasons. One: Brood Mother is best when she's staying on already spun webs and in the lane she's already pushing. Boots of Travel won't bring your brood with you and there's a good chance you won't have any webs where you end up. Two: Brood Mother is at times squishy and mana-starved. In addition, sometimes, she just needs to get that last big shot off. The Power Treads give her the versatility she requires. I don't have a particular beef against Phase Boots, I just think Power Treads are better.

Black King Bar: BM needs this to be useful in team battles. She's a great pusher, but she can easily be slowed, stopped, stunned and nuked. On top of that, while she has great HP regen, this doesn't help when all of your opponents are focusing you down because you hit like a truck! The BKB gives you survivability and gets your opponents to waste CDs on you at the beginning of a fight.

Monkey King Bar: This is the item not in situational that I feel the least strongly about. But I tend to default to it instead of Radiance for a few reasons. One, I like that it comes in more parts than Radiance. This means you'll be taking more incremental upgrades rather than getting a giant "KA-CHING" damage boost at less frequent intervals. Two, I tend to assume that good players will notice if they're taking the burn damage from Radiance and either move their ***es or use a detect on your web if you're getting "free" damage off on them while cloaked. Three, I think that Brood Mother is at her best in terms of combat when she's fighting her+brood versus one other. Team fights aren't her strength, so build to her strength.

Versioning

• 0.0 (1/11/12): First entry. Added initial skill and item builds. Wrote intro, pros/cons, started Items.