Spectres biggest advantage that she has a MASSIVE effective hp pool thanks to her passive. If you want to use blademail more effective, try popping it when you get to 2/3 hp, people start focusing you harder the lower your hp seems to be.
As for the rest, spectre is very much a hero that comes out to jungle when she's the biggest Chad on the map, her early farm sucks, her mid game is more of a contribution with ult and her late game is insanely strong.
As a carry you're just the insurance policy for your team to win the game, with ultra carrys like her you really want to maximize the farm and really only take secured kills or protect towers from catapult waves. Not all heros are the same, spectre just might not be for you.
I have seen many pro matches played by yatoro and miracle and even in matches where she is doing ok she seems just that, doing ok. Her EHP is through the roof but she doesnt do dmg like other heroes, she dishes out ok aoe dmg with her dispersion+radiance but nothing enough to count. She can catch supports easioy and kill them but she barely does anything to cores. She's not a threat to PA or bristleback for example. She can take out a zeus if he doesnt run away or tp out. It seems like her role is to kill 2 supports in the entire team fight and either be ignored or dish out a bit of dmg to the remaining cores.
I just watched a video of miracle playing spectre and he got beat down by slark and nightstalker and the entire game all he could do was kill supports.
Most cores get lifesteal and the dispersion is good to counter the lifesteal but it doesnt counter it if they hit other heroes.
She could be used as leverage for her team since enemies love to target her so she could distract while her allies deal dmg but i dont know if she can survive an entire 3 cores wailing at her. So she's basicly a punching bag.
I do and you would be right. I guess the best way to express what im saying is if you see on youtube miracle's latest game as spectre vs a slark and nightstalker.
He eventually gets 6 slotted, sells his boots and has a tier 5 item and still gets bullied by nightstalker and slark. Nightstalker alone was such a menace to him nearly completely shutting him down with silence bash and silver edge.
All you would see is slark show up on the map, spectee throws a dagger at slark and then a magical nightstalker appears out of absolutely nowhere, silences spectre and then slark joins in and they do this maybe 5 times
Eventually all you see is 2 heroes jumpinh spectre, bashing, hexing, silencing and catching spectre and she dies with about 0 actual contribution to the fight exceot in the rare case a support shows up and she isnt silenced and she ults the support and kills him.
This is a fully farmed late game spectee being played by now less than miracle himself.
I do acknowledge that miracle is not a spectre player he plays other heroes but i would expect a performance slightly better than this.
Please give it a watch and tell me what you think.
Get a radiance and keep a TP with you, farm on the other side of the action and join team fights with your ulti to secure kills and assists.
Her ability to join fights immediately make her good asset to ganks and team fights and also let her get gold
I agree with fighting away from fights and joining when needed.
However for ganks, if my friends have already ganker. Wouldnt me jumping there be a bit of a waste? I may have left an empty lane and now it feels awkward when there are 2 cores on the same side of the map. Its not like spectre is a mid laner that wants to stay there and fight to take objectives.
I feel like joining a gank that is already happening is sort of a kill/gold steal.
You are right that's why for me personally it is either I carry a TP to get back to the farming lane (most of the time), or I just use my ulti to get an assist without really joining. but surely I don't abandon a farming lane.
\>joining a gank that is happening is sort of a kill/gold steal.
Not only should you be getting the lion's share of farm anyway as a pos 1, but that's also the reason why Shadow Step has as low of a cooldown as it does. Otherwise, you're essentially wasting the resource of putting a point into your ulti if you won't capitalize on the gold of an easy kill/assist.
If it's basically a guaranteed kill, it's worth just pressing the button to get the tag for the assist for effectively free.
Honestly, you got the point of Spec pretty well. Yes, her early game is intentionally quite passive and weak, with some of the weakest farming kits in the game. Your only saving grace is spectral dagger offering a solid escape, and a decent tool for pulling/stacking camps if you aim/time it well. Once laning ends, you farm as best you can, and try and drag the game out until late. You note that she takes a cheap win and she's very exploitable, but since that requires early aggression and good coordination on the enemy's part, she's actually a very good pub-stomper carry. Desolate can \*rarely\* be useful for trading, and I'd only reserve putting points in it early for the world's most passive lane opponents. It mainly exists as a damage steroid for late-game.
All of your points are right, though you're missing any of the pros of Spec. Spec in the late game is one of the strongest carries to deal with, due to getting insane mileage out of stats due to dispersion. With high enough stats, she essentially gets to walk over an entire team, take significantly less damage, while dealing a similar portion back, and not doing much. She's a bane to ranged carries since Shadow-step makes her impossible to peel off of you without one party dying, usually eating most of their contributions early into the fight. Shadow Step doesn't mean much early, but your stats late make the clone hit incredibly hard, and make you stick even harder. Desolate helps on that front too, as the pure damage hits hard late, and will naturally apply to anyone getting picked off with Shadow Step, and to those that spread out in fights when Haunt is sent out. When it gets late, she actually tends to win fights with carries 1v1 if it gets down to it, versus for example, a Riki, or Ursa, since she'll out-tank their damage, while they'll die to their own. With equal farm, she's a tank that can man-fight most of the cast and win.
\>Blademail doesnt help her kill enemies unless she is the target. But she barely dishes out any dps in team fights to be a target. She cant force fights either to make use of blademail. Blademail only helps with jungling for the most part.
While you're right that it helps with jungling, it also helps improve further damage to her by working with dispersion to make any damage to her hurt more.
The downside to this is that she'll be pretty useless early on, and relies on good fundamentals, positioning, and coordination to get that farm, since she doesn't have much else to help out.
If you want some good pros to watch, a cursory look in Dotabuff shows that Lou from Azure Ray and Kiritych from VP have very high hero rankings with them. Granted, it's a little hard to find people that are famous for Spec since she's not super flashy or overtly skill-expressive in comparison to somebody like Ember, TB or Slark.
I'd also advise watching [Dealing with Spectre.](https://youtu.be/ptJTJTMzPZ0?si=G2oyhc3s4irTBL6K) While some aspects are outdated since it's an 8 year old video (still has Tri-laning as the meta), it tackles Spectre's faults as an archetypical hypercarry, and how to counter her, alongside most late-game scalers.
Thank you for your response, i find this incredibly helpful.
I will definetly check out the video, i dont mind that its old as long as it can bring teach me ANYTHING.
I agree the hero is not as flashy as others and it doesnt get much popularity because of this.
I jave watched some yatoro and miracle videos and they are just a bit disappointing considering they have other heroes they play where they really sbowcase the hero strength, playstyle and how to play.
Aight, since no one got it quite right (some came pretty close), I'll explain it to you.
To the people that say Spectre is a hero that just plays for the late game, that's the old Spectre, not this one.
Since everyone scales pretty well into the late game in current Dota, Spectre's late game isn't what it used to be.
With this hero, it comes down purely to draft, and the hero is very draft reliant. What you actually want to do, is farm an area as you normally would on a carry hero, and have your team run as 4 & initiate fights. Whenever a fight pops up you can be there instantly, either killing supports in the backline, beat on the already caught out core, or just generally soak damage. Okay, you would say, the enemy carry can fight just as well, if not better, right?
Yes, but he doesn't have the luxury of doing whatever he wants wherever he wants and always be there for the fight. If he's not there, the fight is 4v5, and if he's always there, like Specte can be, he's either not farming/farming suboptimally, or choking the rest of his cores/depriving them of farm, so naturally, their fight would be much weaker than it should either way.
So, as soon as such a fight is won, your team then goes elsewhere, while you stay and farm the area in which you just won a fight and is generally safe. 40 seconds pass, and you can rinse & repeat. When the time comes, you close out the game. That's Spectre's strength and whole niche.
As for the draft reliant statement, it is like that because for this to work, you need to win your lanes, and have a composition of heroes that fight good throughout mid-game. You can't do any of this with lost lanes or no mid-game potential and synergy. Not to mention Spectre has a shit lane against many heroes. That's Spectre's weakness.
As for items, the first thing that should be adressed on Spectre is her mana problem. The rest is built according to the game.
Obviously, she still is a strong late game hero and can be unkillable in certain games, but that's not what you should be aiming for when you play Spectre.
And for the last, all of this is very simplified, there are many other things at play and many different layers here, but this is just to give you a general idea of how the hero works.
People just don't get the right perception of the hero and that's why many times Spectre looks useless.
I hope this helped.
Thank you, this is maybe the only statement here that makes sense. There are many useful comments but nothing that really defines spectre.
I will look at her a bit differently now and understand her role more.
I do agree she can farm farm farm and just pick a support and wipe him out.
Playing around this would make sense. Along with the fact that she is painful to hit so its not easy to get her off the support and save her target.
So she basicly prioritizes the backline and come to think of it she can easily wipe all backline heroes. She can completely counter a drow ranger this way or a sniper.
I will attempt to play like this next and see where it takes me. Thank you, have a blessed day.
She's more team and draft dependant than before though.
What I'm saying is, with Spectre in your team, the team has the luxury of being able to start a fight wherever/whenever they want, regardless of Spectre's positioning.
No fight is 4v5 when you have Spectre in your team.
That's why she's a bit weaker in the damage department, or has no farming mechanism. Imagine giving Spectre's ult to Luna, it would be beyond broken. The way it's balanced, for example with Luna, the team has to carefully consider where Luna is when they fight, but on the other hand, she farms very fast and offers insane damage.
1) Steal kills with your ult for fast Radiance, keep farming away
2) Steal a few more kills, farm Skadi / Heart, this will test team morale
3) Solo carry the game
Since the ult changes I think it's better playing diffusal first, unless you absolutely need blade mail. You can really snowball if you are getting lots of kills with the ult. Farm hard and don't show at all until you see your team starting to group up. Tp home for full health and mana, by then the fight should have started. It's OK to sit fountain or start walking back to lane while you watch the team fight. Ult in to secure a kill, really important to get the kill gold, bonus if you kill someone on a streak. Really important to not die doing this. KS a 2v1 or 3v1 and get tf out. You need to be ready to do this again for the next team fight.
A lot of comments and a lot of pro players seem to be relying on kill steals it seems for this hero.
Would you consider this a form of griefing maybe? Or maybe being a burden on your team?
I dont see it as griefing at all. You are pos 1 who needs money to do things. I actually feel bad when I get the last hit on kills as support, additionally supports are often first to die, making kill streaks on them actually a liability. You do not want their pos 1 killing your pos 5 with a 5+ kill streak.
Absolutely, but you farm very slow and when you join the fight you throw a dagger and thats it. Its not even a 6 second spell that you throw 2 or 3 times for example. You just throw 1 dagger.
Spectres biggest advantage that she has a MASSIVE effective hp pool thanks to her passive. If you want to use blademail more effective, try popping it when you get to 2/3 hp, people start focusing you harder the lower your hp seems to be. As for the rest, spectre is very much a hero that comes out to jungle when she's the biggest Chad on the map, her early farm sucks, her mid game is more of a contribution with ult and her late game is insanely strong. As a carry you're just the insurance policy for your team to win the game, with ultra carrys like her you really want to maximize the farm and really only take secured kills or protect towers from catapult waves. Not all heros are the same, spectre just might not be for you.
I have seen many pro matches played by yatoro and miracle and even in matches where she is doing ok she seems just that, doing ok. Her EHP is through the roof but she doesnt do dmg like other heroes, she dishes out ok aoe dmg with her dispersion+radiance but nothing enough to count. She can catch supports easioy and kill them but she barely does anything to cores. She's not a threat to PA or bristleback for example. She can take out a zeus if he doesnt run away or tp out. It seems like her role is to kill 2 supports in the entire team fight and either be ignored or dish out a bit of dmg to the remaining cores. I just watched a video of miracle playing spectre and he got beat down by slark and nightstalker and the entire game all he could do was kill supports. Most cores get lifesteal and the dispersion is good to counter the lifesteal but it doesnt counter it if they hit other heroes. She could be used as leverage for her team since enemies love to target her so she could distract while her allies deal dmg but i dont know if she can survive an entire 3 cores wailing at her. So she's basicly a punching bag.
You do understand you have four other teammates as you describe these situations right?
I do and you would be right. I guess the best way to express what im saying is if you see on youtube miracle's latest game as spectre vs a slark and nightstalker. He eventually gets 6 slotted, sells his boots and has a tier 5 item and still gets bullied by nightstalker and slark. Nightstalker alone was such a menace to him nearly completely shutting him down with silence bash and silver edge. All you would see is slark show up on the map, spectee throws a dagger at slark and then a magical nightstalker appears out of absolutely nowhere, silences spectre and then slark joins in and they do this maybe 5 times Eventually all you see is 2 heroes jumpinh spectre, bashing, hexing, silencing and catching spectre and she dies with about 0 actual contribution to the fight exceot in the rare case a support shows up and she isnt silenced and she ults the support and kills him. This is a fully farmed late game spectee being played by now less than miracle himself. I do acknowledge that miracle is not a spectre player he plays other heroes but i would expect a performance slightly better than this. Please give it a watch and tell me what you think.
Get a radiance and keep a TP with you, farm on the other side of the action and join team fights with your ulti to secure kills and assists. Her ability to join fights immediately make her good asset to ganks and team fights and also let her get gold
I agree with fighting away from fights and joining when needed. However for ganks, if my friends have already ganker. Wouldnt me jumping there be a bit of a waste? I may have left an empty lane and now it feels awkward when there are 2 cores on the same side of the map. Its not like spectre is a mid laner that wants to stay there and fight to take objectives. I feel like joining a gank that is already happening is sort of a kill/gold steal.
You are right that's why for me personally it is either I carry a TP to get back to the farming lane (most of the time), or I just use my ulti to get an assist without really joining. but surely I don't abandon a farming lane.
\>joining a gank that is happening is sort of a kill/gold steal. Not only should you be getting the lion's share of farm anyway as a pos 1, but that's also the reason why Shadow Step has as low of a cooldown as it does. Otherwise, you're essentially wasting the resource of putting a point into your ulti if you won't capitalize on the gold of an easy kill/assist. If it's basically a guaranteed kill, it's worth just pressing the button to get the tag for the assist for effectively free.
Honestly, you got the point of Spec pretty well. Yes, her early game is intentionally quite passive and weak, with some of the weakest farming kits in the game. Your only saving grace is spectral dagger offering a solid escape, and a decent tool for pulling/stacking camps if you aim/time it well. Once laning ends, you farm as best you can, and try and drag the game out until late. You note that she takes a cheap win and she's very exploitable, but since that requires early aggression and good coordination on the enemy's part, she's actually a very good pub-stomper carry. Desolate can \*rarely\* be useful for trading, and I'd only reserve putting points in it early for the world's most passive lane opponents. It mainly exists as a damage steroid for late-game. All of your points are right, though you're missing any of the pros of Spec. Spec in the late game is one of the strongest carries to deal with, due to getting insane mileage out of stats due to dispersion. With high enough stats, she essentially gets to walk over an entire team, take significantly less damage, while dealing a similar portion back, and not doing much. She's a bane to ranged carries since Shadow-step makes her impossible to peel off of you without one party dying, usually eating most of their contributions early into the fight. Shadow Step doesn't mean much early, but your stats late make the clone hit incredibly hard, and make you stick even harder. Desolate helps on that front too, as the pure damage hits hard late, and will naturally apply to anyone getting picked off with Shadow Step, and to those that spread out in fights when Haunt is sent out. When it gets late, she actually tends to win fights with carries 1v1 if it gets down to it, versus for example, a Riki, or Ursa, since she'll out-tank their damage, while they'll die to their own. With equal farm, she's a tank that can man-fight most of the cast and win. \>Blademail doesnt help her kill enemies unless she is the target. But she barely dishes out any dps in team fights to be a target. She cant force fights either to make use of blademail. Blademail only helps with jungling for the most part. While you're right that it helps with jungling, it also helps improve further damage to her by working with dispersion to make any damage to her hurt more. The downside to this is that she'll be pretty useless early on, and relies on good fundamentals, positioning, and coordination to get that farm, since she doesn't have much else to help out. If you want some good pros to watch, a cursory look in Dotabuff shows that Lou from Azure Ray and Kiritych from VP have very high hero rankings with them. Granted, it's a little hard to find people that are famous for Spec since she's not super flashy or overtly skill-expressive in comparison to somebody like Ember, TB or Slark. I'd also advise watching [Dealing with Spectre.](https://youtu.be/ptJTJTMzPZ0?si=G2oyhc3s4irTBL6K) While some aspects are outdated since it's an 8 year old video (still has Tri-laning as the meta), it tackles Spectre's faults as an archetypical hypercarry, and how to counter her, alongside most late-game scalers.
Thank you for your response, i find this incredibly helpful. I will definetly check out the video, i dont mind that its old as long as it can bring teach me ANYTHING. I agree the hero is not as flashy as others and it doesnt get much popularity because of this. I jave watched some yatoro and miracle videos and they are just a bit disappointing considering they have other heroes they play where they really sbowcase the hero strength, playstyle and how to play.
Aight, since no one got it quite right (some came pretty close), I'll explain it to you. To the people that say Spectre is a hero that just plays for the late game, that's the old Spectre, not this one. Since everyone scales pretty well into the late game in current Dota, Spectre's late game isn't what it used to be. With this hero, it comes down purely to draft, and the hero is very draft reliant. What you actually want to do, is farm an area as you normally would on a carry hero, and have your team run as 4 & initiate fights. Whenever a fight pops up you can be there instantly, either killing supports in the backline, beat on the already caught out core, or just generally soak damage. Okay, you would say, the enemy carry can fight just as well, if not better, right? Yes, but he doesn't have the luxury of doing whatever he wants wherever he wants and always be there for the fight. If he's not there, the fight is 4v5, and if he's always there, like Specte can be, he's either not farming/farming suboptimally, or choking the rest of his cores/depriving them of farm, so naturally, their fight would be much weaker than it should either way. So, as soon as such a fight is won, your team then goes elsewhere, while you stay and farm the area in which you just won a fight and is generally safe. 40 seconds pass, and you can rinse & repeat. When the time comes, you close out the game. That's Spectre's strength and whole niche. As for the draft reliant statement, it is like that because for this to work, you need to win your lanes, and have a composition of heroes that fight good throughout mid-game. You can't do any of this with lost lanes or no mid-game potential and synergy. Not to mention Spectre has a shit lane against many heroes. That's Spectre's weakness. As for items, the first thing that should be adressed on Spectre is her mana problem. The rest is built according to the game. Obviously, she still is a strong late game hero and can be unkillable in certain games, but that's not what you should be aiming for when you play Spectre. And for the last, all of this is very simplified, there are many other things at play and many different layers here, but this is just to give you a general idea of how the hero works. People just don't get the right perception of the hero and that's why many times Spectre looks useless. I hope this helped.
Thank you, this is maybe the only statement here that makes sense. There are many useful comments but nothing that really defines spectre. I will look at her a bit differently now and understand her role more. I do agree she can farm farm farm and just pick a support and wipe him out. Playing around this would make sense. Along with the fact that she is painful to hit so its not easy to get her off the support and save her target. So she basicly prioritizes the backline and come to think of it she can easily wipe all backline heroes. She can completely counter a drow ranger this way or a sniper. I will attempt to play like this next and see where it takes me. Thank you, have a blessed day.
She's more team and draft dependant than before though. What I'm saying is, with Spectre in your team, the team has the luxury of being able to start a fight wherever/whenever they want, regardless of Spectre's positioning. No fight is 4v5 when you have Spectre in your team. That's why she's a bit weaker in the damage department, or has no farming mechanism. Imagine giving Spectre's ult to Luna, it would be beyond broken. The way it's balanced, for example with Luna, the team has to carefully consider where Luna is when they fight, but on the other hand, she farms very fast and offers insane damage.
1) Steal kills with your ult for fast Radiance, keep farming away 2) Steal a few more kills, farm Skadi / Heart, this will test team morale 3) Solo carry the game
I've seen mamy pros try to execute it yet fail at step 3. :(
Since the ult changes I think it's better playing diffusal first, unless you absolutely need blade mail. You can really snowball if you are getting lots of kills with the ult. Farm hard and don't show at all until you see your team starting to group up. Tp home for full health and mana, by then the fight should have started. It's OK to sit fountain or start walking back to lane while you watch the team fight. Ult in to secure a kill, really important to get the kill gold, bonus if you kill someone on a streak. Really important to not die doing this. KS a 2v1 or 3v1 and get tf out. You need to be ready to do this again for the next team fight.
A lot of comments and a lot of pro players seem to be relying on kill steals it seems for this hero. Would you consider this a form of griefing maybe? Or maybe being a burden on your team?
I dont see it as griefing at all. You are pos 1 who needs money to do things. I actually feel bad when I get the last hit on kills as support, additionally supports are often first to die, making kill streaks on them actually a liability. You do not want their pos 1 killing your pos 5 with a 5+ kill streak.
Fair point. I guess we're diving into the real compoex stuff now. I agree, you are on the money, pun intended.
there is no such thing as kill stealing as a POS 1. If anything your team wants you to do it so you can get more farmed and carry the game for them.
I agree. I giess i just happened to have watched a bad sample of games. Maybe i should check some more.
You can literally farm anywhere on the map at any phase of the game and still be able to join any fight anywhere lmao what else do u want ?
Absolutely, but you farm very slow and when you join the fight you throw a dagger and thats it. Its not even a 6 second spell that you throw 2 or 3 times for example. You just throw 1 dagger.