DotA-Hero Strategy Guide: Ezalor, Keeper Of The Light (KoTL)

Master of light and mana manipulation, Ezalor was once viewed as a scholar, and was regarded as a powerful mentor to many. However, his defection and betrayal of his allies during the War of the Magi caused him to be sentenced to banishment to the spirit realm for all of eternity. However, knowing of his tremendous power, the Sentinel granted him a corporeal form within the physical realm in exchange for his alliance against the Scourge onslaught. As such, Ezalor carries his duties of supporting his comrades valiantly despite the treacherous past that most know little about.

Hero analysis
For more in-depth hero stats and abilities descriptions, follow this link to the Dota Allstars Wiki.

Skill analysis

Chakra is by far your strongest skill early game, so we will take 2 levels of Chakra ASAP. Mana Leak’s stun can easily be combo’d with another stunner, ESPECIALLY one with mana drain (Lion/NA). Late game, it should be spammed but rarely relied upon. Illuminate remains a pushing/farming/harassment tool. Your ult is VERY sweet however. It allows you to position illuminate perfectly, provides allies with a Spectre like teleport, & has a late game blinding bonus. Lastly, it costs relatively little mana with a short CD/long duration. You can use Illuminate 3 times, Blinding 2 times, and Recall 1 per ult.

Laning

- KotL can lane with almost anyone, especially those with mana drain or imbal lvl 1 harassment heavy mana skill.
- NA Is the obvious choice. By level 3, even in a dual lane, both should be reduced to 0 mana. By lvl 4 you will produce a 3.5 sec combo stun every creep wave.
- Lion Another mana drainer, but the synergy is not even comparable. Lion wants you stunned only to drain mana, while KotL stun only occurs after all mana is drained. The only real advantage here is that KotL will have a spamable stun in lane.
- Juggernaut Special mention b/c of Bladefury spamming early, recall for ganking, plus Jug’s ult following Illuminate is very strong.
- Axe Hunger is an immensely frustrating DOT, but combined with an Illuminate, it might even be credible. Secondly, Ax + KotL can easily ‘creep skip’ at lvl 1.
- TB, Techies, Huskar, ES, Zeus, Tinker…see definition of mana whores/long range nukers.
- There are several others, but primarily you want hero dominating abilities like a Bolt, rather than a Shockwave. Also, heroes that are creep blocking are easy targets for a good morning illuminate.

Skill leveling

In dual lane it is really variable, but this is the cookie cutter leveling:

Mana Leak (Illuminate)
Chakra
Chakra
Illuminate (Mana Leak)
Illuminate
Spirit Form (Illuminate)
Illuminate
Illuminate (Spirit Form)
....

Items/mid game

KotL can reliably earn $3k gold in ~20 min in most situations, but after 20 minutes of game play he becomes food if laning. You can always jungle and illuminate 2 creeps at once, but this is not as impressive as it sounds. NONE of KotL abilities greatly improve with items. Your main asset is unlimited mana + creep clearing, therefore we are left with 6 items to choose from: BoT, Dagon, Book, Guinso, Vlads, & Meka. BoT is ultimately the best choice because it allows you safe farm and 405 ms which makes you not as tasty. Your main objective at this point is to farm. Around this time if you can adopt BH, you might as well...the poor kid. Imagine a BH with no mana needs, a teleport, & a silence (mana leak)...maybe he'd be able to get his dreamed of Dagon, lol? Who knows. Eitherway, BH always brings the booze so laissez les bon ton roule!

Synergy/late game:

The two things that any KotL can do are: 1) Kill every creep & 2) Prolong the game infinitely. Prolonging the game benefits heroes like TB / Luna or other imbal late gamers, while destroying all creeps is highly beneficial to Luna, Jug, & Lich. Ultimately you will want two of these heroes on your team or Chen/Geo on the the other team if you have KotL, otherwise you are pretty mediocre. Also keep in mind that KotL has a 5 sec miss skill that combos well with any form of silence (especially silence and a slow), rendering them virtually helpless. This makes a hero like Silencer particularly attractive early game, but also Puck, Trax, or Krob. Puck ultimately is the most advantageous of the bunch, but the others are good options if taking silence early and ganking early. Unlike most early/mid game gankers, a ganking KotL can recall Trax, Jug, Luna only as needed, allowing them to maximize their farm...and you will be teleporting a lot and destroying vision (by killing the creeps) making a recall pretty discrete.

In the end, items really don’t matter, making something like BoT, Guinso, Meka, Dagon, Necrobook, & Vlads your ‘crazy’ build. Your farm is more than most heroes, meaning you would either expect: BoT + Guinso or BoT + Dagon5 or BoT + Necro3 come mid game and two upper items by late game (BoT, Guinso, & Book3 for example).

Other random ramblings:

Mana Leak - Heroes move at X units per second. In otherwords if you use mana leak at lvl4 (5% per 100 units = 2000 units and all mana is gone + stun) then a hero with 400 ms will run out of mana in 5 seconds if constantly moving, the buff lasts 8 seconds (400 x 5 = 2000). 2000 units is approximately the width of the screen or from one jungle camp to another. If cast at lvl1 and a hero has 300 ms and the buff lasts 5 seconds, he will lose 52% of his mana (300 x 5 = 1500, 100/3.5% = 2857 units, 1500/2857 = 52%) at most. The most common need of this will be to prevent a lothers/blink escape IMO. A nevermore rarely uses lothers until the last minute and by then he is out of mana if unnoticeably leaked. First targets during 'the approach' to the base are high mana required comboes/ulties or lother/blink users.

Using your ult while farming is basically common sense, but do it. It has the same CD as BoT at lvl16 and makes farming immensely safer. It also allows you to tag the full health melee creeps twice each to get 100% of the kills with illuminate.

If using illuminate during a gank either use at the onset or cast 'backwards' in there most likely flee path. For example if they are likey to run through the woods toward their base, then you can ult+illuminate facing their base, while standing at an alternative route to funnel them along the illuminate path...or use your Blinding skill to knock and stun them long enough to release illuminate. But this won't work too often and you are typically better just farming up. Your most valuable gank assistance is mana leak and chakra.

During base defense you will most commonly ult and cast illuminate twice. Once while the creeps are plowing through your last creeps in the lane, and then again as (if...omg!?!) they reach the ramp. The illuminate in lane is just straight forward, ideally cast out of vision behind your ranged creep, released as the pack reaches the ranged creep. The one cast at the ramp should be in a diagonal of some nature. If on the side ramps, cast diagonally toward the middle, if in the middle ramp cast diagonally toward the right (this is where most heroes gather). Either a lot of heroes will get hit by the ramp illuminate OR heroes will try to avoid it, separating or bunching too much. In either case, they will typically back off and in most leagues this prevents any form of pushing (since creeps are required to be within 600 units of buildings prior to attack...sorta unfair but there it is)...furthermore their tank likely just took two illuminates or 800 magic damage in ~10 seconds. The point is though that heroes rarely stand directly in front of a ramp, in my experience, while they are perfectly happy marching down the lane.

I'm sure there are some unusual strategies based around Chakra, primarily a 'team dagon' strat combined with an early game push. Such a plan would involve NA at the least...and then maybe WD/Dazzle/Necro/BH/Sniper and so forth. This type of strat could prove incredibly strong sense KotL is like an arcane ring on steroids but no comment at this time, Maybe something with Lesh or any other bloodstone candidates.

Blinding light is fairly hard to take advantage of really. It's the only skill that requires you to be remotely close to battle. All other skills have at least a 500 cast range while the blinding skill creates a radius, that at it's maximum cast range still touches your hero. In otherwords you will need to get with in easily targetable position to use this, however it does make a handy escape early game. Late game, if you've used your items, then the blinding skill + distraction is really all you have left to offer This is a perfect time to do the KotL dance (it's sorta like a mentally insane person waltz). This is the only skill that I could see working much better with a blink dagger, but I'm not really feeling it to be honest.

Special mention weird combos:

ES - ES has one of the few early game stuns that effectively traps a hero long enough to take an illuminate. You might be thinking come late game you will be working against each other, and this is somewhat true but ES ult still works on corpses, so no worries.

Like BH, a lot of early game/high mana/non-intel heroes (NS, Bara, Venge, Slardar, BB, Sniper, Tiny...) can abuse Chakra.

And credits to EndJ)Storm(, but if you playing TDA, sharing a Rapier is > than a Guinso most likely lol, with a decent team/BKB

Replays:

http://www.dota-allstars.com/replay/69158/index.html

F4F pro game: H20 vs neXt
KotL summary:
Combines lvl1 illuminate with Naix open wounds during lane, maxes illuminate at lvl13.
Items: Boots, Meka...completing Guinso at 57min...

Thanks for reading.