Introduction
“Death from above!”
Batrider is a ranged intelligence initiator. He is typically picked for his ultimate, which allows him to lasso an enemy, disabling them for several seconds whilst dragging them behind him, which allows Batrider to excel at jumping onto enemies and dragging them back into his teammates.
Batrider's complete character profile can be found here.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Fantastic single-target initiation
- Firefly grants him flying vision and unobstructed movement
- Strong laner in 1 on 1 situations
- Has a disable that goes through spell immunity
- Can quickly catch up farm in the jungle if he has a poor start
- Fairly versatile laner – can offlane, mid, and jungle if necessary
- Elusive hero, and his item build makes him even stronger in this respect
Cons
- Squishy, and his item build doesn’t ever really rectify that
- Needs levels and farm – absolutely needs a quick Blink Dagger
- Relies heavily on teamwork and team follow-through on his initiation
- Fairly mana hungry
Item Build
Batrider is rarely picked in public matchmaking, but when he is, it’s typically as an offlaner. In competitive Dota he is laned as both mid and offlane frequently, so both are viable options.
The advantage of mid laning him is that it allows you to press your 1-on-1 advantage and dominate the lane, securing good early farm and somewhat shutting down your opponent. The advantage to offlaning is that Bat is able to secure experience where many others simply wouldn’t, thanks to Firefly. His ability to quickly clear stacked jungle camps also means he has a recovery method in the jungle should the offlane get shut down.
For the mostpart his item progression is identical regardless of lane, although a mid laning Bat will opt for a quick Bottle, which is more situational in the offlane. He also may be able to forego all but Basic Boots of Speed until he has his Blink Dagger, which is much less common in the offlane. For the purposes of this guide I’ll mostly be assuming an offlane Bat – just be aware of the need for an early Bottle and viability of skipping Tranquil Boots until after your Blink Dagger if you decide to lane him mid.
Starting Items
Typical starting items for Batrider are:
- A set of Tangos, 3x Iron Branches, Clarity.
This leaves you with some spare gold. If offlaning, you can go for a Tranquil Boots rush and grab the Ring of Protection at the start. If mid laning it gives you a head-start on your Bottle rush.
The branches give you good early stats and will later be upgraded, and the Tangos and Clarity give you some all-important laning regeneration.
Early Game
If you’re in the offlane your key priority is twofold: rush some early Tranquil Boots, for the movespeed and health regeneration, then start saving up for your Blink Dagger. It’s fairly common for an offlaning Batrider to have just 3 Iron Branches and Tranquil Boots prior to his Blink Dagger – that’s how important an early Blink is for this hero.
If you’re mid laning you’ll need an early Bottle, so Bottle is your top priority item, giving you plenty of regen as well as the ability to secure rune control. Grab some basic Boots of Speed next, and then save for your Blink Dagger – upgraded boots are optional prior to Blink if you’re mid.
Core Items
So your highest priority item is a Blink Dagger. This is absolutely core – no ifs or buts – and you need to get it asap. The sooner you get Blink, the sooner you’re able to make an impact as an initiator and ganker, picking off a solo enemy hero and dragging them back to your teammates. You may even be able to secure a solo kill against the right hero, using Firefly, Lasso, and Sticky Napalm, followed by right clicks and a Flamebreak to finish them off.
After that you can round out your inventory by upgrading your Iron Branches into a Magic Wand, finishing your Tranquil Boots if you haven’t already, and considering a Bottle purchase. Then it’s on to your luxury items, the first of which should come fairly quickly if you get off a couple of good initiations with your Blink Dagger.
Luxury Items
Force Staff – Virtually core. Force is almost always purchased after Blink Dagger without exception. Why? Primarily because it allows your to Blink > Lasso > re-position > Force Staff, which means you get considerably more range on your initiation and can pull an enemy back great distances to your teammates.
Blink & Force is why Batrider is considered so strong in competitive Dota, such that he’s almost always a top tier pick/ban hero, regardless of the nerfs made to the hero in various patches. It makes his initiation so powerful that it allows you to take one enemy hero out of the fight before it even begins, turning fights into 4v5 affairs.
On top of that you get the utility that a Force Staff provides all heroes - it’s an amazing escape tool for someone who is naturally very squishy and can be used on allies and enemies, making it a great play-making item for clutch saves or to Force an enemy into bad positioning.
Eul’s Scepter of Divinity – Like Force Staff, Eul’s provides Bat with utility above and beyond that which the item ordinarily provides. The +40 move speed will help out your initiations by considerably boosting your movespeed, allowing you to drag enemy heroes even further out of position. It also allows you to cover more ground when initially using Firefly for its unobstructed movement and flying vision.
Outside of initiation purposes, Eul’s is also good for taking an enemy carry out of the fight for a couple of seconds. In that respect it’s sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Scythe of Vyse, the downside being that the hero selected cannot be attacked. Nonetheless, it’s useful for buying your team time. The other downside is that whilst a Scythe use is universally beneficial, Eul’s can sometimes be disadvantageous to your team, perhaps saving an enemy when they would otherwise have died, or trapping an allied hero who would otherwise have escaped. If you’re not confident in your decision making abilities in the heat of battle then don’t go for Eul’s (and for the love of the RNG Gods don’t Eul’s an enemy that you’ve initiated on).
The other upside of Eul’s is the fantastic mana regeneration, which is quite nice to have on a hero that can burn through mana quite quickly.
Black King Bar – Simply put, the spell immunity from BKB will allow you to ensure you get off your Blink > Lasso > Force Staff initiation. It prevents you from being stunned at any point during the process and also protects you from burst magic damage, which can be deadly for Batrider. Black King Bar will also give you some much-needed health.
Post-Luxury & Situational Items
Those four big-ticket items (Blink, Force, Euls & Black King Bar) are the go-to luxury and core items for Bat, and rarely if ever will any of the below take precedence. Following on from them, however, your options are quite wide open. Good luxury extensions include:
Boots of Travel – Hands-down the best late-game upgraded boots. They give you increased movespeed for even stronger single target initiations and pick-offs, and a global teleportation presence which will make your team much more secure in the late game against split push and base rushes. It will also allow you to do some split pushing of your own if necessary, before teleporting to a nearby creep if a teamfight looks likely elsewhere on the map.
Mask of Madness – I’m hesitant to list this in a guide geared towards public play. Mask of Madness is very popular as a post-luxury item in competitive Dota, with the active boosting his movespeed by 30% - again, making his initiation stronger. The downside is it also means he takes 30% extra damage, which is not a worthwhile trade if you do take damage.
MoM is good for those who are experienced with Bat and confident in their decision making abilities and map awareness. Generally I wouldn’t recommend it, though – if you want more movespeed go for BoTs or even Drums of Endurance – the movespeed increase is lesser but the stats are nice to have and the active won’t work against you.
Shiva’s Guard – It will make you more durable thanks to the armour buff, and the aura will also provide utility for your team by slowing the attack speed of enemies. The Arctic Blast active also has great synergy with your own hero role, as it can be cast in the middle of your initiation to hit enemies and thus further increase the impact of your initiation.
Scythe of Vyse – Strong mana regeneration and good stats, but most importantly a very potent 3.5 second disable. Scythe is very costly, so you’re unlikely to be able to afford it unless the game has gone ultra-late, but if you can build one it can potentially have a huge impact in teamfights.
Heaven’s Halberd – Halberd will help you to tank up whilst also providing utility for your team. 20 strength is a nice boost to your health pool, whilst 25% evasion means you'll mitigate a lot of damage. The main reason I prefer it over something like a Heart is that it also has good overall utility for your team, thanks to the ability to Disarm an enemy physical DPS'er for 3.0-4.5 seconds.
Linken’s Sphere – Linkens can be a decent luxury item on Bat. The stats it provides are decent but expensive for its price; you’re really getting it for the passive Spellblock. If the enemy team has a lot of single-target disables, or that one key ability which is really frustrating your ability to initiate, then it’s worth considering (say for example, there’s an enemy Bane which doesn’t give a damn about your Black King Bar and is quick off the mark on his Fiend’s Grip).
The Spellblock ability can also be transferred to an ally if need be, giving you a way of protecting your team’s carry if they’re the focus of stuns as well.
Necronomicon – Great if you’re part of a pushing line-up or your team is struggling to break the base. Also a great item for teamfights and for countering any invis enemy heroes. A level 3 Necronomicon also grants you 16 strength and 24 intelligence, which is always nice to have.
Ghost Scepter – The go-to item if you find the enemy team is able to bring you down quickly with physical damage (typically in the form of right-clicks). Most often this will be the enemy carry taking you out of the fight quickly with a few auto-attacks.
Ghost Scepter will buy you a clutch 4 seconds of physical immunity, which gives you time to create distance between yourself and the enemy carry or at the very least buys your team 4 seconds of distraction time.
Drums of Endurance - Drums of Endurance are a good utility option because they give your team bonus attack speed and move speed auras (and Bat always benefits from added movespeed simply because of his unique initiation role), whilst at the same time giving you plenty of stats and being easy to build into.
If no one else on your team has a set of Drums, they make for a good 5th slot pick up for your team, even if you’re now heading into the late-game. They’re also a safer source of movespeed than something like Mask of Madness, and more useful for Batrider than a Yasha.
Skill Build
Sticky Napalm is an area of effect ability which slows enemy movement and also augments the damage from his physical attacks and other abilities. It is usually skilled second and maxed first by most Batrider players. Sticky Napalm slows an units within a 375 unit radius by 3/5/7/9%, and slows their turn rate by a whopping 70%. Additionally, any attacks by Batrider, including from abilities, deal bonus damage to the tune of 10/15/20/25.
Sticky Napalm actually stacks, up to 10 times, further increasing the slow and damage, for up to 8 seconds. Each new stack refreshes that duration, which is what allows Batrider to dominate lanes in 1 v 1 scenarios, as the enemy player will not want to risk receiving too many stacks of Napalm.
Flamebreak is a projectile nuke and stun. It is always skilled and maxed last. Flamebreak fires a Molotov cocktail at a target destination, dealing 75/150/225/300 magic damage in a 375 unit radius and stunning and knocking back any enemies hit by the blast for 0.5 seconds.
Flamebreak deals bonus damage to any units affected by Sticky Napalm, and also knocks enemies back, away from the centre of Molotov cocktail’s landing point. It has a lengthy 1500 unit range, but its relatively slow projectile speed makes it quite tricky to land at large distances.
Firefly is a unique ability which grants Batrider unobstructed movement and flying vision. It creates a trail of fire which follows behind Batrider. It is skilled first in the offlane for the relative safety it provides but is maxed second most of the time.
Firefly deals 20/40/60/80 damage per second to enemies that stand inside of the flaming path left behind by Batrider, which has a 200 unit radius. The flaming path lasts for 18 seconds.
Flaming Lasso is Batrider’s ultimate and it is always skilled (levels 6, 11 and 16). It allows Batrider to grab an enemy unit and drag them behind him for 3/3.5/4 seconds. Lasso disables the enemy unit, even through spell immunity, and so it is a powerful disable and initiation tool.
Gameplay Tips
You can use Sticky Napalm to really hinder an opponent’s capacity to farm. The turn rate slow is particularly aggravating to deal with as a melee hero, and will make it hard for them to confidently approach the creep wave. Sticky Napalm has a very low cooldown and low mana cost, so feel free to spam it to try and achieve lane dominance.
If you’re able to get several stacks onto an enemy and they don’t have lane support you can use the move and turn rate slow to try and go for a kill, casting Firefly and using the bonus damage from Sticky Napalm to get a quick kill.
Remember that Sticky Napalm essentially magnifies the damage from all of your attacks and damage-dealing abilities if an enemy unit is affected by it. You won’t be getting the most out of your other skills if the enemy doesn’t have at least one Napalm stack on them.
| Tip: Sticky Napalm actually provides vision around the area it’s cast on. You can use it to gain vision of nearby areas covered by Fog of War, such as from the cliff above Roshan or on a cliff you’re trying to deward without vision. |
Flamebreak knocks back enemies away from the point of impact, but its slow travel time makes it hard to hit accurately sometimes. When casting Flamebreak on a retreating enemy try to anticipate their movements and cast it ahead of them so that it knocks them back towards you.
Flamebreak has a brief 0.5 second stun. This isn’t too useful as a form of lockdown but it does all Batrider to interrupt TP Scrolls and channelled abilities that have not been cast under the relative protection of Black King Bar.
A max level Flamebreak actually deals a not insignificant 300 magic damage as well as pushing enemy units back, making it a good way to disrupt an enemy push – bursting down the creep wave and any minions and knocking all units and heroes back, away from the tower.
Firefly grants you unobstructed movement, which means you can move over cliffs, trees and certain inaccessible parts of the map. You can use this as a means of escape, especially early on when enemies will not want to stand in the flames and take considerable damage while chasing you, or can even use it to create a path through the trees that will take you close to the creep wave in the offlane, where you can then leech experience in safety.
Firefly also grants you unobstructed flying vision, which means it synergises superbly with your role as an initiator. You can Firefly into the trees or up cliffs and scout out the enemy team’s position, then Blink in and Lasso your preferred target.
Flaming Lasso goes through spell immunity, which means it’s a fantastic disable for picking off enemy carries that rely on Black King Bar. If they activate BKB not only will Lasso go through it, it will also waste a good chunk of the BKB’s spell immunity duration.
| Note: You cannot attack whilst Lasso’ing a target, so put those precious seconds to use – cast Sticky Napalm on them, or move them closer to your teammates if necessary. |
Your typical combo is as follows: Firefly > Blink Dagger close to target > Lasso > Force Staff them away, towards your own team > Sticky Napalm > Flamebreak to finish or force them back into your Firefly if needed.
Last Updated - Patch 6.82.
