Darchrow Enigma

The result of a collapsed star entombed within a field of elemental magic, Darchrow is one of the most dangerous beings in existence, consuming hundreds of worlds into the void of his hate and hunger. Now serving the Sentinel for an unknown purpose, Darchrow turns his hatred upon the Undead Scourge, yet is not above using his own allies as portals for his own servants to come through. Capable of manipulating both void and shadow in combat, his greatest pleasure is to release the oblivion within him upon the world, creating an abyss that draws enemies ever closer to destruction.

A Support Hero specializing in disabling the enemy team while dishing out massive AoE damage. He is famous for his Black Hole ability which is so powerful it can easily win a battle for his team. His Malefice ability is good for stopping channeling characters and preventing anyone from escaping ganks. As of 6.59, Enigma can also jungle very effectively with Demonic Conversion.

Darchrow Enigma Skills

Malefice
Focuses Darchrow’s hatred on a target, causing it to take damage over time and become repeatedly stunned.

• Malefice stuns the target for 0.6 seconds every 2 seconds.
• If the target afflicted with Malefice goes out of Enigma’s sight range or turn invisible, the stuns are lost.
  The damage is triggered and won’t be stopeed by this however.
• The damage on first stun is blocked by Linken’s Sphere, stun still takes effect, remaining stuns continue and Linken’s Sphere’s cooldown triggers.
• Malefice deals Magical damage which is reduced by the target’s Spell Resistance and is blocked by Spell Immunity.

Demonic Conversion
Splits a friendly creep into 3 malevolent aspects of itself, coming under your control.

• Conversion cannot target creeps level 5 and up.
• Can also target existing Eidolons and siege units.
• See Eidolons for more details.
• Eidolons will multiply themselves after 6 attacks.
• Unlike with Bone Fletcher’s Death Pact and Lich’s Dark Ritual, the killed unit will give experience.

Midnight Pulse
Steeps an area in dark magic, causing all opponents who dare enter to take damage.

• Midnight Pulse deals Magical damage which is reduced by the target’s Spell Resistance.
• The damage is not blocked by Spell Immunity.
• Midnight Pulse is one of the few abilities in DotA that can destroy trees.

Black Hole
Summons the powers from the darkest abyss, creating a vortex that sucks all nearby enemies closer, dealing damage.

• This skill is a channeling spell.
• Black Hole prevents all affected units from using any spells and items.
• Black Hole grants aerial vision with a range of 500/500, centered on the Black Hole.
• Black Hole deals Magical damage which is reduced by the target’s Spell Resistance.
• The damage is blocked by Spell Immunity but the enemy will still be sucked in.

Enigma Strategy Guide and Item Build by Negi3

Note: This strategy guide was created by Negi3 of Dota all stars forum. All credit belongs to him. So far this is one of the concise and direct to the point Enigma guide ever made.

This is simply a reposted guide on how to play an effective Enigma today. It’s a short 5-10 minutes read and it’s meant to help players pick up the HERO, not the GAME. If you are decent at dota and want to learn how to play a hero that needs high skill to be devastating – this guide is for you!

Preface
Hi and welcome to my completely updated short guide on how to become a competent Enigma player. I guarantee this guide is idiot proof. Forget all those ‘complete’ fancy enigma bullshit guides you see in the current guide contest and all, THIS IS THE ORIGINAL AND THE BEST, and THIS IS THE MOST CONCISE. Finish reading in 5 minutes then TRY IT OUT YOURSELF.

**There has been some changes in the way Enigma is played from the guide’s first inception, and other than the fact that I’m a lazy bastard who has lost his altruism to make guides you need to re-read everything again even if you know the first one by heart.**

Broken down into point form for easy reading keep this in mind:

• Enigma is by and large a forgotten hero in 6.48b, he has been superceded by quick cd AOE stuns and thus he is a rather ineffective hero in dire need of some buffs. The constant purchase of blink daggers in the current metagame also make things even more difficult for him. Nevertheless let’s work with what we have.
• Enigma is the best initiator in the game, period. He does great AOE damage and has the longest AOE disable in the game.
• Enigma, unfortunately, has terrible speed and armor, and while he has respectable hp for an intel hero, he is going to be squishy unless you build him right.

Skillbuild

Conversion
Malefice
Malefice
Stats
Malefice
BlackHole
Malefice
Pulse
Pulse
Pulse
Pulse
Stats+++

and level up blackhole when you have lots of spare mana. Take the remaining levels of conversion last.

Itembuild

To start off you want:

1. 2 pairs tree-eaters
2. Circlets/Branches/Clarity
3. Build into 2 bracers and buy a bottle
4. Dagger of Escape
5. Ogre Axe -> BKB

Spare items include: BoT, Guinsoo, Book. Ignore skadi, ignore refresher, if you really have tons of spare cash lying around I suggest you save them for buyouts as you will certainly die.

How-To-Play

The key to enigma is usage of pulse-blackhole. Practice helps in proper positioning as shown below.

Enigma should be dual laned preferably with another stun-nuker, and he can hold his own against but the toughest of lanes. When the first creepwave spawns you want to convert a treant and use eidolons to block and slow down your wave. Don’t block too much – just out of your tower range is the ideal point the waves clash.

• Last hit and deny as usual.
• Use malefice often early since you’ve nothing else to work with.
• It’s wise to either use malefice after your opponent’s stun has worn off or to initiate, overlapping stuns is a waste unless it’s crucial you kill the enemy straightaway.
• Get a bottle from the side shop. This way you can harass pretty effectively and regen the hits you take. (I need hardly explain how to use the imbalanced bottle, basically use it like you would on any other hero. if you’re being chased use malefice on the offending hero then use bottle, ta-dah full hp again!)
• Search for runes to land black holes if you don’t have DoE yet.

Farm up to a DoE.

You want to be out and about once you got the DoE and try to land black holes where they count. You can catch them as they try to push a tower with team coordination or swing a gank/push in your favor.

• Never leave town without a TP scroll and a full bottle.
• Runes are great to refill bottles with. A great rune is invisibility, as it allows you to land a black hole without using dagger. Another is haste, as you can rush in and blackhole before enemies can do anything about it.
  Regen is…well, it’s useful to replenish. Rest are pretty useless.
• When Black Hole is on cooldown, you can either take the time out to farm to your BKB or gank with malefice and pulse. A mix works best as midnight pulse alone is formidable in ganks – keep TP scrolls handy to either escape or defend.
• Using blink to escape is self-explanatory.

Lategame with BKB and DoE:

• Centerpush. Get vision of enemies, keep the fingers on dagger, be fast and do your combo, that’s all.
• Have balls please. Remember YOU want to initiate, not get initiated on; so DON’T BE A COWARD OR DON’T PLAY ENIGMA. When you see your opening be fast, strike while the iron is hot and do your combo.

Usually you want to GTFO after your black hole to avoid dying unless the enemies are all dead. And rax em fast.

How to do the pulse-BH combo in 2/3 simple steps:

This is the essence of my guide. Read this and learn this and you know how to play Enigma.

Without Dagger or BKB:

Find enemies, midnight pulse to catch as many enemy heroes as possible, then immediately follow up with a blackhole. Know the hotkeys. Here I save dagger for a quick escape instead of using it to initiate as I was low.

With Dagger:

Blink in, repeat steps above.

3 step with BKB and Dagger:

Good use, as I didn’t get someone I think in the bottom who tried to backstab who could have stunned me, but thanks to BKB…

1. Locate, BKB up then blink in
2. Pulse so all get hit
3. Black Hole and watch them go WTF!

Making the most out of malefice:

I’ll be blunt malefice is a shitty spell. There are a few nuances you need to know to alleviate it’s shittiness.

• When ganking try to cast it as the opponent hits orange hp, this prevents him from getting a TP off as he gets repeatedly stunned.
• If you don’t have blackhole up and want to gank cast malefice and then cast midnight pulse IN FRONT of him such that the edge of the AOE touches him. That should get him a good 3-4 seconds in the pulse. Be smart and if there are alternate juke routes just cast it in the middle.
• Use the above technique to defend towers as well, pulse is a good reason for enemies to scatter away.
• Malefice, thankfully, is an instant stun…it’s good to break channeling with.
• And always learn to attack-cancel after you malefice so you can get in several hits on the fleeing hero. Enigma has terrible animation, and even attack-canceling doesn’t help a lot, but do it anyway.

Problems:

The major problem now with Enigma is that everyone and his dog gets a dagger. There are certain spells that can be cast in blackhole, basically any spell without a cast time works:

Guinsoo’s Hex/Eul’s
DoE’s blink
Burrowstrike
Leap
Dragon Tail

These are usually the ones you want to watch out for.

• Dying. This is the real problem with enigma today. Carry TP scrolls and dagger, and master the art of blink-juking and TP. I think that you don’t need to be einstein to know how to use dagger to esacpe.

Even if you know this through and through like me you will still probably die once or more. Well take what comes, you’re playing an underpowered hero that’s satisfying to pull off right.

• Wasting Blackhole. DO.NOT.WASTE. It has a stupendous cooldown right now.

Replays

Amazingly I’ve managed to procure a replay sooner than I thought, this is an IH with average players from all over the world.
I take Enigma and lead my AOE-heavy team against Paladin_knight’s sandking and his team which is even stronger.

Unfortunately for me this game is a terrible one to play engima against, you will see what I mean because they have Potm who can leap out of blackhole, Sand King who can burrowstrike and interrupt me, Specter who has dispersion and interrupts me as well, Rhasta who has tons of disables and zeus with a ministun.

I go 6-1 early with some well timed ganks, but as the game progresses we are somehow unable to stop specter. It’s a good game and we lost after she got farmed but I do get off some nice combos despite my 1 year hiatus from playing a support hero. I also um…use my gosu gank dodging skills and dodge death a couple of times. I end 10-8 and blame how shitty the rest of my team was for losing.

Watch especially the later parts after I manage to farm a BKB at last and decimate the enemy team together with SF. And ignore my misblink why in the hell does the scourge base have all those ledges that can trap you?!?!

FOUND HERE: http://www.dota-allstars.com/replay/18272/index.html

That’s all now go own some faces.

GLHF.

Source: http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=180893

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Tags: Warcraft Frozen Throne DOTA Enigma Strategy

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:39 pmand is filed under Dota All-stars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “DOTA Hero Spotlight – Enigma Darchrow strategy guide and Item build”

1. raj Says:
   September 22nd, 2009 at 1:10 pm

   The result of a collapsed star entombed within a field of elemental magic, Darchrow is one of the most dangerous beings in existence, consuming hundreds of worlds into the void of his hate and hunger. Now serving the Sentinel for an unknown purpose, Darchrow turns his hatred upon the Undead Scourge, yet is not above using his own allies as portals for his own servants to come through. Capable of manipulating both void and shadow in combat, his greatest pleasure is to release the oblivion within him upon the world, creating an abyss that draws enemies ever closer to destruction.

2. ben Says:
   October 21st, 2009 at 10:51 am

   thx very much
   but what version(v) are you using
   anyways, thx. Enigma my fav. hero of all time(apart from starcraft heroes)
   but……i won’t wanna be doing the items you recomended, I rather use Buriza-kyon-Do(i think??)and critical strike my enemies!!!that way, if my melefice dosn’t kill my enemy…i get 200-300+ damage. surely killing him
   and also ring regen.but daggerand TP scrool=GOOD!!!

3. cvrs90 Says:
   February 15th, 2010 at 9:17 am

   thnx for this guide.I was wondering what is Enigma’s item and skill build.but I was trying some items when I dicovered that you can use dagon even when you are casting black hole: black hole won’t be cancelled.Also I dicovered that sometimes all the players will experience lag when Enigma casts his first malefice.
   THAT’S ALL

4. enigma pro Says:
   May 1st, 2010 at 12:52 am

   This guy isn’t what I prefer.. I always maximize conversion and stun first conversion being my prioty
   reason being.. early game conversion creep is so IMBA
   it can take down 2nd tower in 6 min if done properly
   after that, money flows like water and dota is all about skill and money

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