Assuming I'm not already serving NS, I'll most likely be looking forward to playing CAPL Open in the Winter Season.

Well, we never expected so many major tournaments to come up during the 3 months of exam period right after WCG. WGT, CAPL, Batu Pahat Resurgence v2, is about a potential 7K worth of prizes we're missing out on. We hopefully can send an incomplete team for WGT though.

Our trivial writeup for today has me discussing what everyone already knows yet again. Prompted by gross inactivity though, I feel tempted to write something.

Today's topic is about our friendly late game heroes.

Generally a late game hero is simply... a hero that has an advantage over other heroes in the late game mostly because it can deal more damage to opponents using physical attacks before getting taken down. Duh. Now lets go on to less trivial stuff.

As with everything else, your late gamers run from high-risk to low-risk late gamers. Risk is basically the chance of your late-gamer being useless in the game. There are usually 4 factors involved in this. How fast the hero can farm, how difficult it is to take down the hero, how well the hero can lane control, and how useful the hero is without items.

Generally the faster a hero can clear creeps the faster it can farm. Heroes with AoE spells can generally farm much faster because they can farm quickly and run away with less risk of being backstabbed, and when all else fails they can neutral very quickly. A difficult to kill hero farms more by simply not dying... with the added benefit of the opponent not backstabbing him much since he's so damn hard to kill.

Lane control is a no-brainer. You can't be farming free lanes all the time. A late gamer that is useful without actually needing to farm is practically a risk-free late gamer as the late-gamer farming is merely a benefit. Without being farmed, the late gamer still has a high utility. A prime example would be Silencer, who actually is pretty damn useful without any items because he has awesome utility simply pressing one button the entire game.

On the other side we have late-gamer effectiveness. Basically this measures how much a late gamer needs to farm in order to be effective. Warlock as a late gamer, for example (for whoever uses it) needs to farm... MKB Treads Guinsoo... or something like that, to be able to match up to a Faceless Void with one Butterfly. For the most part, risk is proportionate to effectiveness. A hero that is more risky as a late gamer usually also is much more awesome given the same amount of farming.

Which is why we don't see much of Naix. Naix is the epitome of high-risk late gamers. He has no lane control, no fast farming, absolutely no damn use without items (a living observer ward is not a valid use) and perhaps the only silver of hope left is that he isn't that easy to take down with Rage. Then again, he's an extremely effective hero when farmed. A single Heart increases his effectiveness in battle by a hundredfold.

Let's then take a look at our favourite Queen Of Pain and Bristleback. QoP is superbly low-risk. She pretty much fulfills all 4 low-risk criteria. Her AoE skills make farming a breeze, she has good lane control, is one of the hardest damn heroes to take down with Blink, and is actually pretty damn effective in the event that she actually can't farm anything. Blink (arguably the best spell in the game) also makes her so notoriously difficult to kill that her damage output as a late gamer grows higher simply by her staying alive and shooting enemies for so damn long. Thus, her effectiveness level is also quite high.

Bristleback is yet another low-risk hero. Superb lane control, AoE skill for farming, is insanely difficult to take down, the only drawback being that the Bristleback isn't very useful without items... but he's so damn good at the other 3 areas that him not farming is a travesty. BB is surprisingly good with few items. His absolute tankage makes him effective with a simple Heart Radiance even very late into the game, not to mention that he's probably going to farm a lot more.

In fact, most heroes you see are low-risk with moderate effectiveness. They can farm early game but given the same amount of farming as other late gamers they wouldn't be effective. This makes perfect sense since few teams would like to take the risk of their late gamers being completely useless.

Naix is an extreme, on the other end of the spectrum, an extreme-high risk. Occasionally we do see rather high-risk heroes being used however, because they have extreme item efficiency, being really effective with few items. An example would be Phantom Lancer. Quite honestly he doesn't need many items to be rather insanely powerful, but he has almost no lane control but at least isn't too bad because he can save himself with Dopplewalk.

Shadow Fiend is probably the extreme for the low-risk spectrum. A Shadow Fiend more or less relies only on items in the late game. Generally a high-effectiveness late gamer will have a skill to boost its damage output or survivability. QoP has blink, Viper has Frenzy, Sven has God's Strength. SF has none of those, and is a late gamer simply by virtue of his insane farming rate and lane control. Okay, maybe +60 damage and -5 armor helps a little... but not as much as Critical Strike or most other late gamer skills.

High-risk but high effectiveness farmers usually cause a lot of pressure from both teams. One team will usually do all it can to protect the farmer, the other will do all it can to keep it from farming (because it is so easy to do so). The best counter to high-risk farmers is simply to... not let it farm.

Low-risk farmers often have low item efficiency. Often it is possible to counter those simply by having a farmer with higher item efficiency farm at the same rate, to be more effective in the late game. Usually this is mixed with some form of attempting to at least slow down the low-risk farmer's effeciency.

Then when you meet a low-risk farmer with quite high item efficiency, you just have to try to enact some form of super controlling on it and waste about half your heroes trying to take it down before it farms. Which is why Bristleback is so damn imbalanced.