Introduction
"My quiver and bow are ready!"
Traxex the Drow Ranger is one of the most popular hard carries in non-competitive Dota 2. She deals tremendous damage from afar even without items and has an incredibly powerful slow that allows her to heavily punish anyone out of position and dominate the lane.
But her lack of mobility and escape skill makes her a vulnerable target if the enemy can get close, doubly so given that a lot of her damage is removed if an enemy comes in close and she has a slow wind-up on her attack animation. As such she is almost never picked competitively.
You can find Drow Ranger's complete character profile here.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Very high damage, even without items
- Abilities allow her to chase down heroes and bully lane opponents
- Insane agility gain
- Global damage aura
Cons
- No escape skill, poor mobility
- Fairly squishy
- Good positioning skills required
- Loses damage from Marksmanship if enemies can get in close (400 range)
- Poor attack animation
Item Build
Drow Ranger has a fairly stable set of core and luxury items, but there are a couple of situational pick-ups you can opt for as a fallback plan or if the situation allows. I'll start by outlining your core item pick-ups and then follow up with an explanation of the various luxury and situational items you can also purchase.
With your starting gold you want to go for: a set of Tangos, a Healing Salve, 1x Slippers of Agility, and 3x Iron Branches.
Moving into the early game, upgrade your Branches into a Magic Wand, grab some Boots of Speed, and upgrade the Slippers of Agility into a Wraith Band. You can further upgrade the Wraith Band into a Ring of Aquila.
Towards the post-laning stage you'll want to have upgraded your Boots of Speed into Power Treads and made a decent start on a Manta Style, which is your first big item pick-up. Start by building the Yasha, then grab the Ultimate Orb and Recipe.
Luxury
With that you're all set, your inventory should look like this: Power Treads, Magic Wand, Wraith Band or Ring of Aquila, and Manta Style. Now you can start working on a luxury item pick-up. The options here are:
Black King Bar - The ultimate defensive item for any carry. This will prevent you being locked down in teamfights by stuns or killed off with burst magic damage. The strength bonus increases your health pool a touch and the damage is always handy, but the main reason you buy this is for the Spell Immunity active, so make sure you use it for teamfights.
Butterfly - The ultimate luxury item for any agility carry. Drow is no exception here. Butterfly gives you lots of agility, damage, and evasion - three stats Drow thrives on.
Daedalus - Drow hits pretty damn hard just with basic items thanks to her passive skills. You can multiply that damage even further with a Daedalus, which gives you a nice chunk of damage and a passive chance of Critical Strike.
Satanic - It's the most expensive item on this luxury list but it doubles up as both a fantastic offensive and defensive weapon. You get a nice chunk of health, life steal from your attacks, and the chance to heal yourself back up when low on health using the Unholy Rage active. I like to liken this to the health effects of Roshan's Cheese. As long as you're able to attack, you basically get your health pool completely regenerated.
Monkey King Bar - The other solid damage item option. Get this if the enemy carry is likely to build a Butterfly or has built-in evasion.
Situational
Things don't always go to plan. Sometimes you'll be kept down with ganks, or you'll unintentionally end up feeding a couple of kills and losing a lot of unreliable gold, which puts your item progression massively behind.
The good news if you're playing as Drow in this situation is that you still do a decent amount of right click damage even without items. So, unlike a lot of other carries in the game, you won't necessarily automatically become a huge liability to your team; you can still hit hard.
...But you may want some added survivability. So if you are struggling consider upgrading the Wraith Band into a Ring of Aquila and grab a Drums of Endurance. Drums will give you sold all-round stats at an affordable price.
Another situational item is Shadow Blade. Ever popular in pub games, Shadow Blade used to be core on Drow but it isn't any longer. Why? Well, firstly, if you play at an anywhere near competent level the enemy team will buy detection. Secondly, the recent stat nerf to the item means that you really are buying this for its invisibility active - if that is negated by detection then you invested a lot of gold for mediocre stat gain.
It does give you some measure of escape capability and mobility, but the more you play the game and the higher your matchmaking rank becomes, the less viable Shadow Blade becomes on Drow.
Skill Build
As with her item build, Drow's skill build is also fairly standard almost regardless of how the game is progressing, although there are a couple of options at certain points.
The first such decision you need to make is between skilling Frost Arrows or Precision Aura first. Go for Frost Arrows if you are heading to a lane where you expect to be aggressive or defensive, and thus expect take part in level one fights. If you're going to the safe lane to farm (which you almost always should), and don't expect to fight at level 1, go for Precision Aura to help with last hitting.
| Tip: If you manually cast Frost Arrows you will not aggro the creeps. This is called Orb-Walking and allows you to easily bully enemy heroes away from last hit or even experience range. |
Put your second point in whichever skill you opted to skip at level 1. From here on out max Frost Arrows and put at least a point in Gust at level 4 - it may be worth investing more points in it early on, depending on the enemy line-up.
You always want to get your ultimate, Marksmanship, because of the ridiculous amount of damage and attack speed the bonus agility gives you.
The second skill you will typically max is Precision Aura and leave Gust for last, although it is acceptable to level up Gust first if you really do need those extra few seconds (if, for example, the enemy team has a high priority hero that relies on a mobility or escape skill to ensure their safety, such as Queen of Pain or Anti-Mage).
Thus by level 11 a typical Drow will have the following skill build: 4-1-4-2.
Gameplay Tips
As the safe lane farmer don't be too distracted by the offlaner. Your poor attack animation has a long wind-up which can make last hitting tricky; spend too much time harassing the offlaner away from the creep wave and you won't have enough time to get off the shot for the last hit. Your priority should always be farming over harassment, unless you feel that they have over-extended and you can finish them off by chasing with Frost Arrows.
As mentioned earlier in the guide, Frost Arrows can be triggered manually (if you click Q then attack) and not just automatically. If you use it manually you can attack enemy heroes without taking creep aggro. This means you can stand much closer to creeps and still, in effect, auto-attack opponents.
Whilst Drow has tremendous base damage from her passive abilities alone, the agility gain from Marksmanship will be lost if an enemy manages to come within 450 range of Drow. Be careful to keep your distance from enemies and attack from afar!
| Tip: You can tell when an enemy is within 450 range of you because you lose a particle effect (it looks like Traxex is covered in dry ice). The particle effect vanishes when an invisible hero is within 450 range as well, so you can tell if you're being pursued by someone under the cloak of invisibility. |
Get an early level in Gust so that you can put a halt to the aggression of spell casters or prevent mobile heroes from easily escaping ganks. Also try to cast it on multiple heroes at the start of teamfights to assist your team.
Your carry counters are those that are able to close the gap between you quickly, thus de-activating the bonus agility you gain from Marksmanship, like Anti-Mage, Faceless Void, and Phantom Assassin.
Last Updated - Patch 6.82.
