Roaming/Support PA. I wish I was trying to cosplay Slahser, but I’m afraid to say that I’m quite serious. This has become a niche trend in high mmr pubs, with players such as Wings.Innocence using it: http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2657346499

I’ve found that playing PA with a playstyle like obnoxious roamers such as Bounty Hunter, Riki or Ogre is not only hilarious, but effective and can potentially win the early game for your team and cause so many problems for the enemy. It is also versatile in what kind of pressure you can apply on the enemy.

Usually if I play this roaming PA, I will pick PA first 3 and tell my team I am roaming. Buy courier, OoV, tango and 2 clarities at the start. Now here comes the most important part: choosing which lane you’re going to GOON UP. Because let me drill this in: you have a 1200 range dagger on short cd that applies OoV. You can literally sit away from XP range and spam dagger on the enemy mid while creating a huge advantage for your mid laner. If you think BH is the bane of mid heroes then you’ve never had to play against some tryhard retard spamming daggers on you from every angle possible. As long as you have vision, you can continue to spam dagger and use clarities until the 2 min rune. You should secure runes every chance you get, and you will since the enemy mid will get too low HP to dare venture out from his lane. If you get DD or Arcane, be greedy and take it (arcane rune PA is actually abandon-worthy and in no way balanced <8min ).You will still be LVL1 since you SHOULD NOT be leeching XP from mid, but you’ve created chaos and possibly forced a support rotation and/or sent mid back to base. Proceed to roam around and poke people with daggers, maybe set up a kill on the offlane, or do a pull to get some XP. If they have a jungler, it might be worth it to sit in his jungle from 0:30 and sap his XP and tilt him by getting last hits on his jungle with dagger, then move on to prod at mid some more.

Be smart. Look at their heroes and the lanes you have—be the equalizer. If you see an Invoker, SF or Alch mid with that garbage 1 armor, have fun winning midlane with your dagger spam. If you see they are tri-laning and bullying your offlane, go poke that Lion or Disruptor with dagger a few times and burn their regen while they struggle to starve the offlane. This is the mindset you should have. You cannot deal with this kind of guerrilla warfare strat without giving my cores huge space. You aren’t going catch up to a PA putting OoV on your ass from a 1200 range away as a support in the first few minutes.

They are many uses for PA as a support that aren’t obvious unless you’ve played PA core. Examples:

1) Your blur will allow you to sniff out invis heroes or positions in a 1600 radius. Carry dust vs invis, pop it when your blur suddenly deactivates, then dagger-jump the poor fool.

2) Similarly, if you know you are blurred, they won’t see you on the minimap unless they are manually looking over the portion of the map you are (if they even have vision there). You can use this to plant deep wards and control the map, or even ward under their ward without being noticed at all. Hell, just positioning aggressively in the treeline near your cores can turn PA’s passive into a free smoke.

3) Split-push aggressively when you can, then hide in trees and judge from the map if you can keep going for a wave or 2, or if you’re better off tping back to your team to push an objective on the other side of the map. You have far less to fear compared to others when doing this if you pay attention to Blur. And even when you get caught, you’re just a support PA, so it’s a PLD death.

It’s hard to really go into crisp clear detail about the game flow of a support PA, because I feel that you have to be a core PA player to understand how to play this hero as a greedy 4 position. Basically my whole plan revolves around creating enough space and chaos early that I can catch up in levels and farm in downtime. The single biggest tip I can give is to watch the map, and whenever there is a free lane (ex: safelane or offlane is jungling), go get your xp and farm. Even if it is a dangerous lane, you can get easy CS with daggers and hopefully get your level 6 at a reasonable time. Early game items are : boots, windlace, raindrop, wand, blightstone and the sort. After that, either get vlads/medallion-crest/halberd, or if you’re stomping get yourself a core item like deso, diffusal, sny, silveredge (use it mid-flight of the dagger to apply the debuff) or stack 2-3 crystalys in your inventory if you’re feeling lucky. At that stage, you play like a Riki who has had a good game and can now terrorize supports with his diffusal blade and backstab.

Have fun!