LogFAQs > #962059394

113 - Huskar (ranged Strength)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/0/AAAACbAAC2PI.jpg
Base Abilities: Inner Fire, Burning Spears, Berserker's Blood, Life Break
Shard Ability: upgraded Inner Fire - now casts quicker, slows enemies in the radius, heals Huskar, and can be activated under most non-Silencing debuffs.
Scepter Ability: upgraded Life Break - increases cast range and taunts the target for the duration of the debuff.

Next on the pubstomper list is a victim of power creep. Huskar's base stats, save for his strength, are in the gutter for good reason - a fed Huskar will steamroll anything and everything given half an opportunity. In his heyday, Huskar was the "if you don't specifically counterpick him, you lose" hero. Changes to his kit then made him even more offensively frightful, if he manages to get up close to you, with a huge swath of both Magical and Physical damage, and later Pure damage. So why is he this low?

Like many other pubstomp heroes, he *needs* to get his early-game going, so he's stuck solo lane mid hero in a meta that is leaning very heavily into 2-1-2 for the lanecomps, and almost any other standard mid will wipe the floor with him. See, at the start of the game, he is slow - slow to move, slow to attack, slow to have his damage ramp up, and almost all of his early game damage is tied into Burning Spears, which gradually hurts you the more you use it. Also, he is deceptively frail until his passive starts ramping up, and if you go too hard in to levelling that, you're going to lose or draw a 1vs1 fight and cause your enemy to snowball much, much harder than you ever will. A dead Huskar that didn't clinch the kill postmortem early is a lost game.

This ties into his other core identity problem: if he's ever not on the offensive, he's a sitting duck. His armor and agility growth are both extremely bad, so if he ever runs into heroes with Break to remove Berserker's Blood bonuses, or someone that rushed a Spirit Vessel, Desolator, or Heaven's Halberd, his role for the rest of the game is going to be "Life Break, maybe Inner Fire, then die, then feed," and there's no real coming back from that. At least old Huskar's method of regenning an inch from death was once able to be used on allies, but a selfish hero from behind nowadays is just a free 200+ gold biscuit after 10 minutes. I will concede that he is absolutely terrifying if he *does* snowball but never to the extent of "the game is actually lost" some other heroes higher on this ranking have.

Also, as a final quibble, Inner Fire feels like one of the most "whatever" abilities in the game ever since he received it and feels like it's only there so he has an excuse to use his pitiful mana pool. Even the Shard upgrade on it is "meh," since the Heal is mostly anathema to how Huskar works, even if hard-disabled, and one value point in Inner Fire as it is should be enough of a deterrent to solo-ganking him with a rightclicker. I *guess* it does some okay damage when maxed early, but if you're not maxed on Berserker's Blood and/or Burning Spears by 7, you're not getting anything out of your hero choice.

TL:DR; Scary berserker initiator that dies to common item choices and hard CC. Wins games if hard CC doesn't exist early or those items aren't picked up.

Next hero hint: awfully bold of you to arrive to a fight with no direct damage.