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4 Votes

Ice In Your Eyes - A Competitive CM guide

January 9, 2014 by TheKey
Comments: 2    |    Views: 12083    |   


Pos 5 Support

DotA2 Hero: Crystal Maiden




Hero Skills

Crystal Nova

2 4 6 8

Frostbite

1 5 7 9

Arcane Aura

3 12 13 14

Freezing Field

10 11 16

Talents

15 17 18


Ice In Your Eyes - A Competitive CM guide

TheKey
January 9, 2014


Ethos - Credibility

Hi! I'm Key,
About myself:
-I play position 5 support for ThomasJefferson(tj).
-I played medic for 3 seasons of UGC Silver in Team Fortress 2.
-I support the cure to lancer

Why play support?
Support is the perfect role for all skill levels. New players with half a brain (that's >5% of the Dota community) pick up supports first to leave farm on the map for more experienced players. On the opposite end of the spectrum, playing support at the professional level is one of the hardest roles to fill.
Support also teaches at all levels. New support players quickly learn the importance of positioning, lane control, and vision. For more experienced players, playing support increases map awareness, team-fight control, and objective based maneuvering.
Every stage on the game is based on the previous, especially in Dota 2, where snowball is extremely potent. Excellent support play secures early game advantages that will put your team in a superior position for the rest of the game.

Why Crystal Maiden?
Crystal Maiden has always been a strong hero. In the most recent (as of this guide being written) 6.79 patch, where aggressive support play became easier and more rewarding, CM rose to become a top tier support.
CM offers enormous ganking utility and lane control as well as the option to increase xp disparity by easily taking out large creeps in the jungle. In addition, CM's aura provides amazing mana regeneration globally, the power of which cannot be underestimated. Once even lanes are easily won when CM's team can spam their spells.

Why this guide?
I hope this guide proves in depth, comprehensive, and accurate. If it isn't leave me a rude comment and stop wasting your time.

The battle begins, behold the scourge of Icewrack!
-tj.Key

Item Explanation

Starting Items:
Please keep in mind this guide is for competitive play, where the supports agree on item choices before the game.
In almost every situation, a team needs the following items out of the gate, or they are already loosing.
-wards
Vision is incredibly important. It wins and looses more games than anything else.
-sentries
When asked "to deward or not to deward, that is the question." The answer is always yes.
In addition to dewarding, sentries are also useful for blocking opponents pull camps.
-courier
If the courier was 600 gold, I would still buy it.
-smoke
Optional depending on lineup. If your captain has drafted a CM, there is most likely another ganking support on your team, such as an alchemist. Smokes allow for easy ganks on mid and are undoubtedly worth the 100 gold.

Each support should spend 300 of their starting gold on either the courrier and wards or the sentries and a smoke. The remaining gold is conveniently enough for a tango-salve-clarity. If for some reason there is no other support on your team (quad-core line-ups, new meta), buy wards courier smoke salve and a clarity. A smoke gank will more than pay for some extra regen for lane.

Early Game items:
As the position 5 support, you should probably up the courier so the other support can rush their boots, midas, medallion, whatever. This is especially true if you were the one to draw first blood. Buy new wards sentries and smokes as needed.
Boots are very nice for CM, because her base move speed is infamously low. If you are being outplayed early game, ask your other support to share the consumables load so you can get some boots ASAP.
Stacking and pulling is nice, but the gold and XP gained from farming a small and medium neutral camp (assuming you pull through) is inferior to farming heroes. A simple smoke, and you have a very good chance to kill their mid for easy gold and XP.

Mid Game items:
Wow, I listed a bounty of midgame items! Crystal Maiden is very item independent, however she can benefit from some extra ehp in the form of a mek pipe or drums. Alternatively you can invest in utility items like force or eules to save yourself or teammates. Finally, you can opt to keep yourself alive by helping burst enemy heroes down with your team using a rod of atos, orchid, or veil.
If you find yourself rolling in gold after a successful teamfight, BKB has a very nice buildup and utility, and a ghost scepter is excellent for kiting the enemy carry. Urn costs about the same as a drum, and gives you healing utility. Sometimes your carry might want to go drums for the straight int, and you don't want to stack the drum aura. Halberd is also an excellent choice against a hard right clicker like OD or Weaver.

Lategame:
If the game goes super late, your job is very difficult. Often you simply wont be able to avoid death if the other team's carries focus you at all. Make sure you keep up vision, especially around key objectives like rosh. In teamfights, mind your positioning as a timely pipe or disable can turn the fight in your favor.

Not Recommended:
Shadow blade is extremely expensive for what it offers. While activating it does not interrupt your ultimate, it is a very situational use of 3000 gold that could be used for different items.
While the slow on your ult with aghs is very nice, it is hard to survive through the channel lategame when you finally complete the item.
Arcane boots are inferior to tranquil boots because your mana aura is sufficient, and tranquil boots give much needed movespeed and armor.

Skill Build

Save your first skillpoint for when you need it in a level 1 skirmish of some sort. If nothing of note happens, you should seek first blood with your smoke and other support. If for some reason you get level 2 without skilling anything, put points into both q and w. Max out q first because it is a good aoe nuke and debuff. Only one point is needed in your passive to help win lanes; levels are more useful in q and w for killing power.
While your ult is an amazing source of damage and slow, it is very hard to position for, and hard to survive through. Use it judiciously because the high mana cost will often leave you without mana to spam your low cooldown disables.

In Conclusion

Crystal Maiden will always be a strong hero. She promotes the aggressive support play IceFrog promotes patch after patch, and her game impact scales well with player skill even at the highest levels. Her early game presence is amazing, and should not be ignored. Nothing makes me more sad than a CM babysitting a lane. So much space can be made for the carry with a few smoke ganks. Never be afraid to buy more consumables. The importance of vision cannot be understated, and it is always worth dewarding the enemy.
You know there is a good CM on your team if the smokes are always out of stock. CM is certainly squishy, but this can be countered with careful agression. CM is a hard target when she has several levels over her opponents, and impressive map control.

No guide should ever be complete. I look forward to adding things, please feel free to criticize.

Your fate was always crystal clear... Go play some crystal maiden
-tj.Key

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