Gambits and exploits await!

Introduction

Puck is a great solo mid ganker, and an amazingly versatile hero in terms of item build.
With great sinergy between his skills, he can easily initiate teamfights and get out safely
His ultimate is a great set up for other aoe spells, like Void's Chrono or Enigma's Black Hole.
He can also solo the hard lane with relatively ease.

Pros and Cons

Pros

- Good initiator
- Great sinergy between skills
- Very hard to kill with Phase Shift + Illusory Orb
- Can get some easy kills early on
- Amazing AOE nuke with silence

Cons

- Amazingly squishy
- Requires good positioning and good game sense
- One mistake can cost your whole teamfight
- Failing mid usually costs you the game
- Very mana intensive

Items

As I said earlier, Puck can be quite versatile in terms of items, so I'll break down my choices here:

Starting:

Since you should be going mid solo, start with just 3 Branches and a Tango, this will grant you a very fast bottle, your most important early game item.

Early game:

You should have your bottle by the 2 minutes mark if you started with 3 branches + tango.
After your bottle, get your Boots of Speed and your Magic Wand asap.
After that, go for Phase Boots and Blink Dagger
If you're doing well, this will probably be done before the 15 minutes mark, since all this is cheap.
I usually go for a set of Drums of Endurance since they provide your with some nice tankability and some mana, the plus move speed is also great for gankings.

Mid Game

After you finished all your early game items, it's time to choose your next one, and this is where you need to experiment and see what you prefer:

- Want even more burst damage? A Dagon can help you!
- Going against lots of AOE and magic damage? A BKB is your best friend
- Need some more tankability? Rod of Atos is the way to go.
- Facing Doom, Bane, Beastmaster and such? Linken's can make those ults useless.
- Doing poorly and need a cheap but quite useful item? Eul's!

I'm not going to write all of them down, but most are pretty self explanatory.
I usually build Linken's first, since it gives me some much needed HP, and the mana and HP ragen are awesome.
One special mention has to go to Aghs Scepter:
Aghs makes your ult quite better, since it boosts both the duration and damage of your ult.

Late Game

So the game has been dragging on for quite a while huh?
Your late game items don't vary much:

- Shiva's is the cheapest one I listed, but it's great against hard right clickers, and its active skill is a great follow up to your initiation.
- Sheepstick gives you all the mana regen you need, and a full disable on someone.
- Tarrasque makes you almost unkillable.
- Eye of Skadi ultra luxury item, but adds some amazing stats, and the slow is also great.

Gameplay - Solo Mid

Early

I cannot stress enough how much Puck needs to be solo mid.
Putting him in a side lane will slow your leveling, and by the time you get your full skillset it won't do much.
Aside from that, just farm, get your bottle and your boots and get ready to gank

Mid - Ganking

As soon as you hit level 6 go gank! It's what puck is designed to do.
But do it with care. Don't just leave your lane at random times to try and get kills, it'll just make you lose exp and gold. Some tips on when/how to gank:
- Always have tps/smokes, this way you can easily avoid wards.
- Wait for runes: haste, invi, double damage runes are your best friends here, since they can easily net you some kills
- Try to gank when the lane is away from the enemy tower, Puck is too squishy to tower dive right now.
Other than that, when not ganking, return to your lane and farm.

Late

In the later stages of the game, your main role is initiator...
So wait for the right moment, blink in (either via Blink Dagger or Illusionary Orb), ult as many people as you can, and follow up with your silence and let your teammates do the rest. After you initiate, try to get out of the middle of the fight, since you're really squishy and can't tank all that damage.

Gameplay - Solo offlane

The main difference between mid and the offlane is that you won't be rushing your Bottle, or even getting it in some cases.
You're gonna need to be more tanky than usual, since you'll be dealing with a lot more of harass, and that's why you'll also need more regen to stay in lane.
In most pubs games you'll either go against a dual lane, or even in some cases a solo.
A few tips on soloing the offlane as Puck:
- Your Illusory Orb is a great escape mecanism, but is also great for farming, just auto attack the creeps to make all of them killable with just one orb and throw it. This works much lick Windrunner's Powershot.
- Make sure you always have mana for an Orb, it can be a lifesaver.
- You can consider an early bottle for the mana regen purpose, but since you won't be getting runes, you're gonna need to be constantly use the courier to bring it to and back from the fountain.
- Try to not waste your Phase Shift by dodging auto attacks, they should be used to dodge stuns and spells.
- Puck can't solo against a tri-lane, so if this happens, get your bottle as early as possible and start roaming.

If you can, try to stay in lane untill you're level 7 or 8, after that get the hell out and start ganking.
After that, gameplay stays the same as the solo mid version of you.

The end?

This is all for now.
It's 3 AM here and I'm almost sleeping on the keyboard, so I'll come back and finish this later.
This is not the final, I still need to add some sections like friends and foes and skills explanations.

Check back for updates!