During the early game, Lion’s most important weakness is his low health and armor, while his most important strength is his ability to dominate a lane with a combination attack composed of Impale and Mana Drain. When properly done, the Demon Witch can keep his mana pool full and his opponents’ empty. With no mana, your opponents won’t pose much threat to either you or any other lane they might gank early on.

Your first skill points should be in Impale, followed by Mana Drain, so that when your hero reaches level 7 you have 4 points in Impale, 2 in Mana Drain, and 1 in Finger of Death. At level 2, DotA AutoScript will recognize the hotkeys for Impale and Mana Drain and prepare a script combo that presses the “E” hotkey, followed by the “R” hotkey, clicking where your mouse cursor is for each one. The most effective way to use the combo is with the “Queue Cast” hotkey (default key is “5″ on the top number row). Simply hover your mouse over a target enemy hero and press “5″. DotA AutoScript will queue Impale, followed by Mana Drain.

In the screenshot above, the Earthshaker is forced to retreat after recovering from an Impale, all while Lion steals his mana. This is possible because the Earthshaker does not have enough mana left to retaliate with a Fissure attack. Note that the Impale also dealt a killing blow to an enemy creep, yielding 45 gold. You should try to catch weak creeps in the path of your Impale.

You will want to be highly aggressive with the Impale/Mana Drain harassment to minimize the threat posed by your enemies. Occasionally you may find yourself laning against 2 heroes who are capable of retaliating against you. In this case, you may choose to only harass under one of the following conditions:

• Both enemy heroes are in the path of the Impale stun
• The enemy heroes are concentrating on “last hitting” or denying a creep
• An enemy hero just leveled up and may be focused on selecting a new hero power

If you find yourself laning center, it can be difficult to fully exploit Mana Drain because you can easily lose visibility of the enemy target as your creep wave is killed off. The following screenshot illustrates the use of observer wards after the hill proved to be a problem against sniper:

The ideal way to compensate for Lion’s incredibly low health is to build bracers first. The following build order shows a dagon rush, followed by scepter:

In an AP or RD game, Lion will begin with 603 gold, 454 hp, and 286 mana. As shown above, an efficient opening inventory is 1x tango, 2x gauntlets of strength, and chicken courier, leaving you with 13 gold remaining. The 2x gauntlets of strength bring Lion’s starting health all the way up to 568 hp, a 25% increase! You also gain a slight improvement in Lion’s passive hp regeneration, and when combined with tangos is usually enough to keep Lion near full health. You don’t need to “preserve” your tangos, you can constantly use them because you can easily run more out to Lion using the courier. As shown in the second part of the inventory picture, your courier will be running bracer components anyway.

Choosing the scepter as a late game item also keeps Lion beefy because of the extra hp provided by the Point Booster and the Vitality Booster. This image shows the effect of Kardel the sniper’s Assassinate ability on Lion at several points during a game where the above build was used:

This build is ideal when you are facing a team of heroes that don’t have much health or armor because it gives you the firepower you need to “1-shot kill” using a combo attack of Impale, Dagon, and Finger of Death. DotA AutoScript will queue this combo on an enemy target when you hover your mouse over the target and press the queue-cast hotkey. Here is an illustration showing how the damage is done:

First, the Impale stun disables the target. Then the Dagon strikes him as he is lifted into the air by the Impale. Next, as the target begins to fall, Finger of Death strikes and instantly deals its damage. Finally, the target hits the ground, dealing the damage from the Impale ability.

DotA AutoScript notices that you no longer have Impale, Dagon, or Finger of Death ready to fire, so it quickly makes a new combo attack script available using your remaining powers that you could use on any other opponent that threatens you. In this case, it would be Voodoo, followed by Mana Drain. As your powers finish their cooldown, they will be incorporated into a more powerful combo prepared by DotA AutoScript.

There are several key times of the game that you should be aware of where Lion’s power makes a huge jump. Exploiting this “power play” time can give you a huge edge:

• Lion reaches level 6 and acquires the Finger of Death skill
• You complete a Dagon around level 11, when you can upgrade Finger of Death
• You complete the scepter