Shadow Shaman Dota 2 Guide – Hex Your Foes in Patch 7.07d

Shadow Shaman is a support hero that excels at disabling enemy heroes, destroying towers and killing creep waves.

• He can deal 140/200/260/320 magical damage to 1/3/5/7 targets using his Ether Shock ability.
• He can hex a target for 1.25/2/2.75/3.5 seconds, silencing, muting, disarming it and setting its base movement speed to 100.
• He can stun a target for up to 2.75/3.5/4.25/5 seconds using Shackles, dealing a total of 120/200/280/360 magical damage.
• He can assault and defend towers with great efficiency thanks to his Mass Serpent Ward ability.

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Shadow Shaman Item build

When playing Shadow Shaman in Dota 2 esports, your item build should improve your mobility, mana pool and sustainability, and allow you to help your teammates in a variety of ways. Subsequently, these are some of the key items you should consider buying:

• Arcane Boots: they greatly improve your mana pool and your ability to regenerate it.
• Magic Wand: this is a good early game item on any hero.
• Infused Raindrop: gives you good mana regeneration and protection against magical damage.
• Urn of Shadows: gives you good mana regeneration and the ability to heal your allies for great amounts. Every charge is the equivalent of a Healing Salve.
• Glimmer Cape: good for escaping, initiating, increasing magic resistance and helping allies in difficult situations.
• Blink Dagger: gives you a lot of mobility and turns you into a much more reliable initiator.
• Force Staff: an excellent choice on any support hero. The HP regeneration, intelligence and added mobility are always very valuable. This item also gives you the ability to save allies from time to time.
• Aghanim’s Scepter: improves your ultimate ability, allowing every snake to hit from a longer distance and deal damage to two targets instead of one.

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Shadow Shaman Abilities Explained

Ether Shock

Hits 1/3/5/7 targets for 140/200/260/320 magical damage.

Hex

Applies hex on a target, silencing (disables active abilities), muting (disables items), disarming it and setting its base movement speed to 100. The spell’s duration is 1.25/2/2.75/3.5 seconds.

Shackles

This is a channeled ability that can stun a target for 2.75/3.5/4.25/5 seconds and deal up to 120/200/280/360 magical damage.

Mass Serpent Ward

Spawns 10 wards that last for 45 seconds. Each of them deals 40/70/100 damage and can be destroyed with 2 hits. The damage is not reduced by damage block, so items like Poor Man’s Shield will not protect heroes against them.

This ability can be upgraded with an Aghanim’s Scepter, which makes it about twice as strong, causing each ward to hit 2 targets per hit instead of one.

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Best Shadow Shaman Talents

• +20 XP gain / +200 health – The first talent is more valuable, but you will often have to take the second one in order to boost your survivability during fights.
• -4s Hex cooldown / +125 cast range – Take the first option and build an Aether Lens to improve your cast range. Having a 3.5s disable every 9 seconds is extremely useful.
• +1 Mass Serpent Ward maximum HP / +3s Shackles duration – Shackles can already be channeled for 5 seconds, so a longer duration on that spell is not very valuable. You’ll rarely have the chance to stun a target for such a long duration. So the first option is usually much better than the first.
• +400 Ether Shock damage / +60 Mass Serpent Ward attack damage – Given that this talent becomes available towards the end of the game, the second option is generally better.

Skill build

When playing Shadow Shaman, you should start with a point in Shackles followed by two points in Ether Shock and then one point in Hex. At level 7 your skill build should be 4-1-1-1. Afterwards you should alternate between Shackles and Hex, putting points in your ultimate and taking talents whenever you can.

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When to pick the hero

Shadow Shaman is a very good pick whenever you want to have long duration single target disables, excellent sieging power and good creep wave clearing capabilities. The hero tends to make your laning phase pretty strong as well, being able to deal a lot of right click damage to the enemy offlaner (74 at level 1!) and disable him for a long duration. Roaming and ganking can also be done quite effectively thanks to his abilities.

Siege Enemy Buildings

Shadow Shaman is a support hero that can improve his team’s laning phase, sieging potential, creep wave clearing and crowd control capabilities.

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