Introduction
“I find myself strangely drawn to this odd configuration of activity.”
Puck is a ranged intelligence ganker and initiator. One of, if not the most elusive hero in the game, Puck is hard to pin down and kill, making it an incredibly irritating hero to face off against.
With strong burst magic damage, incredible mobility, and good crowd control, Puck is an ever-popular solo mid pick-up, and occasional solo sideliner.
You can find Puck's complete character profile here.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Good magic damage
- Great crowd control
- Strong solo mid
- Highly elusive
- Virtually impossible to kill with farm
- Good teamfighter
- Can phase shift to avoid everything from stuns to simple right clicks
Cons
- Somewhat item dependent (really needs a Blink Dagger)
- If caught, quite fragile
- Mana intensive
- Doesn’t scale too well
- Hard to play (outside of micro-intensive heroes Puck has arguably the highest skill floor and skill ceiling)
Item Build
Starting Items
Puck is best played as a solo mid, where you want to get a quick Bottle and some decent experience (and levels) before looking for opportunities to gank. A good all-round starting build is:
- A set of Tangos, 3x Iron Branches, a Circlet, and a Mantle of Intelligence.
This gives you enough regeneration to see you through to your early Bottle (between the tangos and Phase Shift you should be able to withstand any early harassment), as well as solid starting stats, which will allow you to compete for last hits effectively. You’ll also have enough gold leftover to allow you to get a Bottle quite quickly.
Early Game
As already noted, your aim is to get a Bottle as quickly as possible (ideally before the 2 minute rune spawn). Ahead of the rune spawn timer (remember runes spawn every even minute) start to push your wave out. Puck is able to push fairly effectively by using Illusory Orb to assist in farming creep waves. With the wave pushed towards the enemy tower you’re free to check for the rune – and if your lane opponent does choose to contest it they will miss out on valuable experience and gold from the pushed-in creep wave.
After that grab some basic Boots of Speed, and work towards your upgraded boots of choice. This is most commonly Power Treads, although beginners often fall back on Arcane Boots.
At first Power Treads over Arcane Boots may seem a slightly odd choice; Puck is a very mana-dependent hero and all of his abilities make heavy use of his mana pool, so why Treads? A couple of reasons. One, as a very squishy hero you need the health, and Power Treads allow you to get some early health without delaying your Blink Dagger too long. Secondly, with Treads you can always switch to Intelligence when needed and thus gain higher mana regeneration (as well as a higher mana pool).
Finally, upgraded any Iron Branches you have into a Magic Wand, and if you can also upgrade your starting Mantle of Intelligence and Circlet into a Null Talisman.
Core Items
As mentioned above, ideally you want to opt for Power Treads. Get those up and running now that your early game purchases are out of the way.
From here on in your goal is to save up the 2150 gold necessary to purchase a Blink Dagger. It is the core item for Puck, no exceptions. Force Staff, which can often be interchanged with Blink Dagger on a lot of heroes, simply doesn’t fit the bill when it comes to Puck – you need a Blink Dagger and you should aim to get it as quickly as possible.
Mobility is supremely important on Puck, not just for initiation purposes – where it allows you to jump in, dump all of your abilities, and then Illusory Orb out to relative safety – but also for general movement around the map (Puck is a good ganker and so you should be rotating) and for clutch escapes. It synergises so well with Puck’s skillset that it is an absolute must-have.
Luxury Items
With a Bottle, Magic Wand, Power Treads, an optional Null Talisman, and a Blink Dagger you’re set for the majority of the game. The mid game, post-Blink acquisition, is your time to shine and make your hero’s presence felt.
Your luxury item considerations are, for the most part, both expensive and difficult to build into (although there are a couple of exceptions here), and so a luxury item is probably not going to be on the cards for some time, unless your team is way ahead, but Puck’s innate survivability and escape potential, which is significantly improved by a Blink Dagger, means that you don’t really need anything else for quite a while.
Great luxury options on Puck include:
Scythe of Vyse – The ultimate luxury item. Good stats, fantastic mana regeneration, and 3.5 seconds of enemy disable. Scythe is often rushed in competitive Dota straight after the Blink Dagger is bought on Puck. This is harder to do in public matchmaking, where it’s difficult to avoid dying in teamfights and thus being set back too far to make Scythe rushable (although it’s technically very difficult to kill a Puck, pulling off those impressive escape moves you’ll see in competitive Dota on Puck is easier theorycrafted than actually done).
If you think you can get to it without losing a tonne of unreliable gold then by all means grab it. The sooner you get a Scythe the more game-breaking it can be for your team. Most of the time you’ll probably want to get a more affordable luxury item first though.
Eul’s Scepter of Divinity – Absolutely amazing on Puck. Obviously the mana regeneration, move speed buff and intelligence gain are all nice to have, as is the ability to briefly remove an enemy hero from the fight or interrupt their channelling without blowing your ultimate, but on Puck Eul’s has a whole extra level of utility.
Imagine you’re being chased down by highly mobile enemy heroes. Let’s do some theorycrafting: Blink Dagger has a cooldown of 12 seconds. If Puck takes damage from an enemy hero Blink is also disabled for 3 seconds even if it’s off cooldown. If you need to buy 3 seconds you can use Phase Shift (3.25 second duration), allowing for an easy Illusory Orb into Phase Shift into Jaunt into Blink escape. Phase Shift on cooldown? That’s a 6 second cooldown; Cyclone will buy you 2.5 seconds.
Imagine you need to buy 12 seconds for Blink to come back off cooldown then. You could Euls (2.5 seconds) into Illusory Orb into Phase Shift (3.25 seconds) into Jaunt into Phase Shift (3.25 seconds) into Blink. Throughout all of these sequences you need be vulnerable only a second or two at most before transitioning into your next move. You have so many ways to extended your life and buy yourself precious seconds for Blink to come off cooldown, and that’s before even factoring in the potential for Waning Rift and Dream Coil to buy you more time.
In short: a good Puck player with a Blink Dagger and a Eul’s Scepter is almost impossible to kill and the onus is entirely upon them to make a mistake during one of their sequences of movements
Linken’s Sphere - Linkens can be a decent luxury item on Puck. 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 do your job in teamfights, then it’s worth considering. 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.
Orchid Malevolence – It'll give you a decent chunk of mana regen and a lot of offensive stats. Orchid is a great pick-up for any intelligence hero and the active will make your team’s DPS against a single target incredible.
Shiva’s Guard – Shiva’s makes for a great late-late game item on Puck. By this stage you’re likely 5 slotted, and so it becomes a contender for your last item slot. The armour will go a good way to making you tankier, while the aura is great to have for your team. You also gain a nice chunk of intelligence (always helpful for Puck; both as a way to increase damage and maintain your mana pool). You can also use the Arctic Blast AoE nuke whilst Blinking into the fight, ensuring multiple enemies are hit by the magic damage and the slow.
Situational Items
Drums of Endurance – A potential early game stat item, in place of the slot that would typically go to a Null Talisman for example. Cost efficient stats and decent utility; Drums of Endurance are a great option if you desperately want more health because they give your team bonus attack speed and move speed auras, whilst at the same time giving you plenty of stats and being easy to build into (since the components are so cheap you can buy them up whenever you have the spare unreliable gold, meaning you won’t lose much gold when you die).
Dagon – Gives you even more burst damage – 400 to 800. Dagon is a good snowball item, but a terrible item to get if you’re not snowballing because it will gradually taper off if effectiveness over time. Dagon 5 is also the least cost efficient item in the game at 7720 gold for an 800 magic damage nuke. Highly situational (and risky!), but if you do go for it consider following up with an Ethereal Blade purchase.
Ghost Scepter – If you find that you're easy pickings for the enemy DPS'ers and at risk of feeding more than helping your team as the game progresses then get a Ghost Scepter. It will give you 4 seconds of physical invulnerability, which will feel like an age to the enemy carry who should probably be hitting higher priority targets instead, and will give you precious time for your abilities and Blink Dagger to come off cooldown. Further upgrading it into an E-Blade will combo well with a Dagon if you decide to build one.
Heaven’s Halberd – A good anti-carry item thanks to giving you 3.0-4.5 seconds of disarm, and it will also give you a nice health boost and general survivability. I would consider it as a 5th or 6th item on Puck if your team needs to counter a melee DPS’er who’s shredding your team apart in engagements.
Boots of Travel– The best late-late game boots. It combines your TP Scroll slot with your boot slot, freeing up room in your inventory for an extra item when you’re starting to get maxed out. Also always reassuring to have in the late-late game when an enemy team can quickly break the base – if they catch you by surprise in a base rush you will always be able to TP back.
Skill Build
Illusory Orb is skilled and maxed first. A magic damage nuke that doubles up as a positioning ability, Illusory Orb sends an orb out ahead of Puck in a straight path which deals 70/140/210/280 magic damage to any units it hits along the way. The orb will travel for 1800 units and Puck can, at any point, jump to the orb using the Ethereal Jaunt ability.
Prior to purchasing a Blink Dagger it is often used to initiate ganks or teamfights, with Puck throwing the Orb into the middle of the fight and then jaunting to the orb, before casting Dream Coil and/or Waning Rift. It also serves as a fantastic escape tool, as you can throw out an Orb in one direction whilst running in the other and then deciding whether it’d be advantageous to Jaunt or to keep on your present course.
Waning Rift is skilled and maxed second. This is an AoE magic damage nuke and silence ability. It silences any heroes caught within its 400 unit AoE for 0.75/1.5/2.25/3.0 seconds and deals 70/140/210/280 damage. It therefore scales slightly better than Orb, as the silence’s duration is increased even though the damage scales the same.
The reason I recommend maxing it second is that the damage output is less reliable – you need to be within 400 units of the target in order to land Waning Rift, which means putting yourself in a vulnerable position, whereas Orb can be cast from up to 1800 units away and still deal damage.
Phase Shift is maxed last, however I recommend an early point in it so that you can disjoint stuns and projectiles. Phase Shift grants Puck effective immunity for 0.75/1.5/2.25/3.25 seconds and removes Puck from the field of play for that duration. Thus it is primarily used to dodge damage instances and projectiles, or to buy yourself precious seconds for your other abilities or Blink Dagger to come off cooldown.
Phase Shift’s usefulness early on is primarily for avoiding the odd harassment instance or projectile stun, and it therefore doesn’t need to be maxed early on; one early value point is sufficient.
Dream Coil is always skilled (levels 6, 11 and 16). Dream Coil deals initial damage and mini-stuns to enemy heroes caught within its 375 unit radius and attaches a coil to each hero which will break if the enemy hero travels 750 units away from the cast point, If it breaks it stuns and deals damage. Additional levels increase the initial damage, the stun damage, and the damage caused by breaking the coil.
A great crowd control ability and teamfight ultimate, Puck will often initiate with this when spotting enemy heroes clumped together. As most will want to avoid the stun and additional damage caused by breaking the coil it is a great way of keeping enemies in place whilst your team follows up.
Gameplay Tips
Illusory Orb is a great escape tool. Cast it in one direction whilst moving in another to force enemies to predict whether you’ll Jaunt or not. Alternatively use Orb then Phase Shift to avoid being stunned or killed, then Jaunt to safety when the Orb has almost finished travelling. The Orb can travel over terrain as well, allowing for even safer escapes.
| Tip: If you die after sending out an Illusory Orb, you can actually buy-back and use Jaunt to teleport back into the battle. |
Illusory Orb actually provides flying vision, making it a good scouting tool. Since it will travel 1800 units it can be cast from relative safety to scout out areas covered by fog of war or the Roshan pit without putting yourself at risk.
Puck’s bread and butter combo is Blink Dagger into Dream Coil & Waning Rift, followed by Illusory Orb and Phase Shift, followed by Jaunting to safety. This deals huge burst magic damage, initiates the fight for your team to follow up, and also ensures your safety nine times out of ten.
Use Phase Shift in the early laning phase to dodge auto-attack harassment. This allows Puck to go to the lane with just one set of regen and rush the Bottle, since you will avoid much of the harass damage that would otherwise eat through your consumables. Phase Shift can always be used after casting Illusory Orb to ensure Puck’s safety. You can then Jaunt to the Orb’s location to escape sticky situations.
Later on, Phase Shift is great for buying time for your other escape mechanisms (Blink, Illusory Orb, Eul’s) to come off cooldown. It will also often distract the enemy team.
Try to catch as many enemy heroes as possible with Dream Coil so that you effectively trap them close together. By restricting their movements you make them more susceptible to AoE damage from your allies and make it easier to follow up with your own abilities – Waning Rift and Illusory Orb.
| Tip: The mini-stun from Dream Coil goes through Spell Immunity, making it a great counter to TP Scroll escapes or important channelled enemy abilities. |
Last Updated - Patch 6.82.
