How effective are aura carries? When do you use them?

 

How effective are heroes that build a lot of tanky and aura items? I've seen a lot of Doom who go Mekansm, Shiva's Guard, Assault Cuirass for example. I am also thinking of going this route for my beloved Abaddon when I am not playing a support role.

I assume that in team fights, going aura means you increase the survivability of your team while reducing those of your enemy. However, since you are building aura, your DPS is not that high. My question is does the benefits I give to my team with aura offset the lack of damage of my hero?

If the enemy team, for example, have heroes that scale a bit better than my team damagewise, will my aura build be useless because my team does not have enough damage to win fights?

Generally speaking, you don't go for an aura build if you're the team's primary carry for exactly the reasons you've specified - you sacrifice direct damage output in favour of buffing your team.

In a multi-core lineup however (with two, three, or four heroes who have late game carry potential), an aura carrier can make that team significantly stronger.

That said, it doesn't work on just anyone. I know you said not to discuss Doom, but let's just quickly go over why it works so well on him:

• He farms quickly, so he can get those aura items up early.
• He's very hard to focus down, meaning your auras have good up-time (in particular he has high base HP, which synergises well with all the aura items that give +armour).
• Even when he doesn't build damage, he's a very costly hero to ignore in a fight thanks to the effectiveness of Doom Bringer,  Scorched Earth, and LVL? Death
• He already has an ability (Devour) that can give him an aura - not essential, but complements going for a tanky aura build.

A few heroes that I'd consider to be good aura carries for similar reasons are Wraith King, Necrophos, Dragon Knight, and Abaddon (if played as a semi-carry).

Doom is the best example of this, but his case is really rather specific. The items he chooses are less for the auras (though they are a huge bonus), but because of the armour. Doom has awful base armor, and as a STR hero with bad AGI gain (only 0.9) it needs to be patched up by items. But, conversely, going full-on tanky on Doom is a build that synergises with his strengths. Doom has amazing STR growth--3.2, third of all heroes behind Centaur Warrunner and Treant Protector, and he farms very quickly with Devour. So, with his raw HP from STR, regen from Scorched Earth, and how quickly he can get his items up, Doom can become basically unkillable. And with his ultimate and the constant damage he does through Scorched Earth and the occasional  LVL? Death, you want to kill him.

Centaur is another hero to consider this on once you've got Blink Dagger. Centaur's STR growth is stupidly large (0.5 per level more than any other hero) so if you add armour he becomes extremely hard to kill. The thing is, his skills scale with STR, so you instead stack STR items (it's legit to stack Heart of Tarrasque on Centaur).

There are a few heroes who are strong early and drop off later on; they are the ones stacking auras are really best on. Axe, Undying and Treant are the best examples, since neither their stat growth or their skills allow them to scale into the late game but their brute killing power in the early game can allow them to farm up these items through kill/assist gold to stay relevant later on.

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