WARNING THIS GUIDE IS HELLA LONG AND NOT FOR CASUALS

Elder Titan is a support, disabler and initiator. This means that he is one of the more ideal heroes to start a fight if he uses his skills correctly. As a disabler he also excels in halting a key target's actions. Elder Titan's skill set requires a heavy amount of team coordination so make sure you can communicate properly with your team before you charge down mid stomping and splitting left right and centre. Elder Titan can be played in a few different ways but this guide will focus on laning him solo mid or potentially offlane.

For a nice outline of Elder Titan's skills, Dotacinema has released a nice spotlight video to showcase them.

The good things

• Has good strength gain, giving him good survivability early game.
  
• His skills scale well through all stages of the game.
  
• Can be an active member of any lane, be it dual lane, solo or even trilane.
  
• Very dynamic, his item build can change fluidly every game.
  
• Sounds a bit like Spock, this can turn the tables in many fights

Tis a shame

• Magic immunity causes you muchos painos.
  
• Skills are relatively hard to land.
  
• Not as tanky as other stength heroes, falls to hard CC.
  
• An ill coordinated team can ruin the chaining of your skills.
  
• His weapon is a staple gun, it's not intimidating or that effective but he gets by.

This is my preferred skill build for Elder Titan. Ancestral spirit will be your main source of damage and harass on your opponent. You get 3 levels in it as soon as possible to capitalise on this damage and level echo stomp alongside it. Take your ult at level 6, why wouldn't you? That ♥♥♥♥ is crunk. Once you have your ult, don't max spirit just yet, get your third level in stomp. This is because stomp's duration at level 2 is touchy if you want to put your ult down. If you are going to, decide beforehand because it must be as fast as possible, even then, if they are someone like Slark or Mirana they may escape with pounce/leap. Once you've got level 3 stomp, max spirit and finish stomp after. Now go and max your aura but be sure to take your ult whenever you can. You've left your aura till late game, this is because it reduces base armour which there will be more of late game. This means that while it would impact your early game damage somewhat it will make more of a difference in the late game in terms of armour because in the late game people have more base armour. That said, you can easily justify taking it earlier for a nice bonus to magic damage. But you should only really do this if your team is caster heavy and even then I think the benefits of having your other skills maxed outweighs the benefits of your aura.

The most important part of any hero guide. Without items son, you gon' lose. This section will have two sets of starting items, one for the preferable mid lane and one for solo laning. While I've seen people dual lane or trilane Elder Titan, I think he functions better mid to late game if he can get a level advantage easily, that's why I'm only covering the mid and solo lanes. My Early game build for the mid lane is as follows;
If you've laned mid before often, you'll know this starting build well. It's a bog standard build for most mids who buy a bottle. But you can add things to it, like if you fear sniper's rightclicks a stout shield is good and a magic stick is good against other heroes. The branches give you a nice boost to your stats, a total of 3 strength/agility/int. That's 57 health and 39 mana, in a game about postioning and min/maxing this could save your life.Tangos are just to tie you over till you get your bottle which you should have by 2:30 at the latest (provided you only got 3 branches and a tango). Once you have bottle, get your brown boots. I shouldn't need to justify but for you, I will. They help you control runes, chase and flee if necessary. Buy them you silly goose. Now you can deviate a little bit. is there a heavy caster mid? If yes, buy a magic wand. If no, just get your arcane boots. These will make sure you have the mana to survive, harass and gank and are an absolute necessity. These are your go to boots.
This is your goal for if you are solo laning. Before we go on I'll say one thing important, this build says go for arcane boots. This is okay if you're soloing against another solo, but if your lane is taxing (which the soul ring can attribute to). You can easily pick up some tranqs. You can later disassemble them into a vlads or a force staff and a basilius. The two iron branches are good stats and cheap too. Two sets of tangos are to ensure you have enough sustain to survive on your own, remember to embrace the tranqs if necessary. You buy the soul ring recipe at the start so you can finish it in the sidelane shop. Now that leaves you some gold, save it for now and go to your lane. When you get there, survey your opponents. Lots of spell casting going on? Buy a magic stick from the sidelane as well. You could also invest in a stout shield, but seeing as you will be using your ancestral spirit to farm safely from a distance you may not need it after all. Build the soul ring in whichever order fits the situation. Is the lane fairly safe? Get the sage's mask, if not get the ring of regen. Once you have the soul ring you can ensure that you will constantly have the mana to farm or defend yourself in a sticky situation. Now both of these item builds have the same core item, and the same situational build. And once you have your arcs and your bottle/soul ring. You shoot for the stars...




By the shaper's will boyo you want this item (uhh, one of them, not six, just to clear that up. emphasis and whatnot). Call it in chat beginning of the game to make sure no one else buys it. Everything about it synergises so well with ET. The movement speed stacks with the bonus movement speed from his spirit, giving him incredible chasing power (or fleeing power). If this isn't enough, you can drop one of the charges to help you and a teammate make an even swifter getaway. Don't be too choosy with those charges by the way. Use them for pushing, fighting, chasing, fleeing, going back to fountain quickly. They can always be recharged if you really want. So by hopefully the 20 minute mark, you want your Arcane boots, magic wand, bottle/soul ring and sacred drums of endurance.

Elder Titan doesn't need much to be effective. This means the main parts of his item build are situational. And I'll cover all the nice bits you might choose to pick up in this section, albeit in a bit less detail, this guide is gonna be super long so might as well shorten it where possible. Below you is a slew of items which you might pick up during your adventure in the land of dotes.











Euls: My most commonly built item, even more move speed, mana regen and an active that can make people think twice about targeting you, juke some spells or set up your skills
Force staff: A nice active that can augment you and your teams survivability, and some int for you, you can also catch people off guard by forcing them out of position and into your team/skills
Urn: An excellent choice if you are roaming and ganking a lot, or there is a jungle farmer that needs shutting down
Medallion: Similar to urn above, but you can also buy it against heroes like Dragon Knight, it'll put a ♥♥♥♥♥ in their armour which means you can drop them just a bit faster in a fight.
Necrobook: Good if you're part of a pushing team, or have lots of auras. Also gives you a bit of int and tankability.
Orchid: A well timed silence can make or break the next 10 seconds, you can stop Void's chrono, Warlock's golem or if you're quick even an RP! It also give good attack speed and mana regen to maximise damage from spirit.
Mekansm/pipe: Just because your Ancient Apparition isn't playing support, that doesn't mean you shouldn't either. They both make you harder to kill in skirmishes, which are common for when you have bonus spirit damage and can increase your team's survivability hugely.
Rod of atos: If you find yourself needing health and/or chasing down lone heroes, this is a great choice, it can also make getting away from your earth splitter a lot harder.
Vlads: It's a common misconception that only carries buy this, it's an aura, everyone near you gets it. So if your PA is tied up with building other items, get this to help her out. You benefit from it as well being a melee. If you're not around make sure your spirit can get to the action and give the aura!.
AC: Another great aura for ET, the attack speed can give him some good dps in a fight, not to mention increasing your whole team's. The armour also works great to increase survivability.
Elder Titan loves auras.
Shiva's: The armour can make you a good bit tougher, a lot of bonus mana and the active is great for weakening their team in a fight, all in all a very solid late game pick up.
Scythe: When they have heroes that need to be disabled and you can't rely on stomp, this is a great choice. It also gives GREAT stats and regen for anything you could need inbetween big fights.
Refresher: The go to item for when the game is dragging on into the 2 hour margin. When you know your first ult will land, refresh and put down another, they won't be able to escape both and it'll drop them 70% of their max health (before resistances).
Rapier: 40 minutes in and void has a pair of tranqs, a quelling blade and a mask of madness...
*sigh*, when you want something done...

Elder Titan's skill set lends itself well to people who know the finer points of his skills. There are many ways you can use them to give you an advantage. Most of these tricks involve your spirit placement and movement. Let's cut the waffle and just get straight down to the tricks o' the trade.

Laning, Mid lane
The mid lane will probably be relatively safe for the worldsmith on the go. Chances are your opponent is a squishy nuker like Puck or Mirana. These are your prey, you can probably survive their burst, but they won't be able to stand against your constant harass. What you want to do is lay the smack down with your spirit, get your bottle. Then once you have them down to a low margin of health, get a rune, if you got a good rune, like haste, invis or DD you can make your move. Put them to sleep, with use of the spirit or not. But if you haven't nuked them down with the spirit yet do so (it won't wake them). Get in position and recall your spirit with it's bonus damage. If you got a DD they're probably already dead, if you got a haste you can probably dive them a little, but be wary of stuns under the tower. Know your opponent and you'll be fine. As for general laning, Be aggressive but don't over extend, don't follow your creeps onto their side of the river, just farm them with the spirit. Be ready to capitalise on your opponent over extending, you never know when they may dun goof.

Rune control, No wards? No problem
Elder Titan revels in midding against those with less health than him. Most of these mids need the rune just as much as you do and have helpful ways of getting them. QoP has a blink, Mirana has leap and Puck has his orb? HOW CAN YOU COMPETE WITH THAT? Well there is a way. That spirit of yours gives you a good boost of movement speed. So put it down on your opponent and his creeps at about 53 seconds on the clock, just before the rune spawns. Then you should have just enough time to walk it to one of the rune spots to check if it has spawned. Once you've found out where the rune is, recall your spirit and it will get back to you and it'll give the movement speed you need to win the rune race. If they're still beating you to the rune, be sneaky. Cut them off with the spirit's stomp at the stairs into river then take it from right under their nose. One way or another, worldsmith gon' get his runes.

Laning, Solo offlane
This lane is very different to the mid lane. Because you don't know what you might be up against. Chances are you've got a tri lane or a jungler, the other team can just as easily drop a tri lane on you. Anyway, down to gameplay. On mid you're supposed to be aggressive, don't go doing that on the solo lane against a tri lane. If they are tri laning you want to be as passive as you can, stay ot of the way of their supports and their carry, farm up your soul ring as safely and as fast as you can. You'll want to stay in exp range but instead of going in for last hits, just drop your spirit on a couple of low health creeps. When you're soloing against a tri lane, you don't win by getting lots of kills and farm (but if you do heck, well done). You win by not dying. Just stick around and do what it takes to farm and survive. If you're soloing against a dual lane, you can be a bit more reckless, and if you're soloing against another solo, it's like midding minus the runes. Be dynamic and adapt to your situation.

A little farm on the side
Okay, so you can't check the rune with your spirit, (well you can but you won't be getting them atleast). That doesn't mean there's no cool ♥♥♥♥ you can with your spirit on a solo lane. When you pick up higher levels of it. Walk it through as many jungle camps as possible, with multiple placements you should be able to completely wear down a camp and kill it over a short time. Your spirit is also fantastic for contesting pulls. When you know they'd pulled you just march it down there and chances are you get atleast 2 last hits. They literally can do nothing other than watch it waddle over, reach it's hands into their pockets and wave good bye as it flies back to you with 100 of their carry's gold. What's that? Your mid called SS? Well that was unexpected, just like this popping up in a tip about farming (unexpected stuff happens all the time, be on your toes).
Don't sit on lane like a sponge waiting to be ganked, whenever it isn't busy, send your spirit into the jungle and have it patrol. Be watchful of the noise it makes walking through someone and you may catch them with their invis up, and their pants down.

Mid/late game tips and cool stuff.
Choke point stomping, nobody expects the Spanish Titan
I don't see this done at all really and I can understand why, it's situational. We all have those times where the enemy mid has come to gank and is just sat there like a brick waiting for an opportunity to make a move and you know he's still there cos you actually have wards, This can allow you to turn the tide in a similar situation. The stomp has quite an impressive radius, and by putting it in the trees the spirit can be completely invisible to the enemy! Swanky huh? Position the spirit in the trees near the offender and stomp away, just like in the pictures below. On the left is what you see while the right is what the unsuspecting enemy Elder Titan sees. Notice how the spirit is only visible on the left.

Exploiting the fog, YOU WARNED THEM ABOUT STAIRS
You most likely know now that at 6 minutes in it becomes night time, This means it gets 'orrible and dark and you can't see anything. Luckily your opponent probably can't either. This means that if you're being chased or want to get the drop on someone you can do some interesting things with stairs. I'll demonstrate with some more pictures.
Landing a successful stomp in this situation will probably allow you to make a safe getaway or get a kill if your team and you can jump them quickly. Left is what you see, right is what they see. This tactic isn't restricted to stairs, you can also stomp while juking in and out of trees. If they can't see you, it's fair game.

Initiating, two ways about it
But Big D, surely I have to land the stomp to land my ultimate on multiple heroes. WRONG. There's another thing you can do, but it's a little risky and works best if your team knows what's up. Picture the scene, (this one was too hard to screenshot). Their team is pushing top, your radiant team is there waiting for an initiation, they call to you, "get down here and initiate ET". You say, "chill, I got this", and from your secret shop you put down the earth splitter on them. Your team wait patently and don't scare them off, Kunkka throws down a torrent to make sure 1 of them is locked down, but by the time they see the crack in the earth it's too late, they've already been zapped for a lot of health and slowed, your team move in and clear out the resistance. Unlike the classical stomp initiation, this is harder to avoid but can be easily messed up if your team initiates pre-emptively, or the enemies just decide enough is enough. Only do it if you're sure they're gonna stick around long enough. Most of the time you should favour a classic stompy/ult combo

Bloody Counter Picks
If he's jungling, you'll probably get a rune and kill him once or twice and think "What the heck, this guy aint no counterpick". But come late game, he'll dodge your stomps and your ults then feast off your relatively high health pool while you do nothing to defend yourself. Make sure you buy a Eul's so he can't keep attacking you and try to exploit his moments of weakness, where he is without rage/infest. While you can probably gank him once or twice, ask your team to chip in and help shut him out.

An unconventional but on the rise mid hero, Brewmaster is a counter because while he will have a hard time killing you on mid, so will you be unable to kill him without help. Sure you can gank mid but his skills lend to dealing with yours. A well timed primal split can negate an echo stomp or earth splitter. And he can cancel your channeling/mess up your chains with one of his brewling's disables.
As a hero who thrives on gaining an advantage over his opponent, Brewmaster is hard to beat and not fun for you to mid against.

Good god I hate this guy, you get a lovely haste rune and go to gank his lane. You try to stomp one of them but Omniknight escapes it's clutches and suddenly his lane partner is nigh invincible. Ad if that isn't bad enough, you get 8000 bonus damage in a teamfight and try whacking someone only to find that they're immune to physical damage. Make sure he's disabled in fights, if not by you, by one of your team mates. Maybe you can still win.

This guy is a tough cookie on mid. He can't defend himself against your harass. But with his burst he can probably kill you very quickly. Contesting him for the runes is very risky because of this. Make sure you can either beat him to them, or lock him down before he gets there. Don't bother trying to go ham with bonus damage, craggy exterior WILL proc when you're under tower aggro. If you really want to kill tiny call for help, there's no shame in it. But otherwise just remain either far away from him, or near your creeps

Nightstalker is your worst nightmare on mid. He's so tanky, you will be completely incapable of killing him on your own unless he seriously messes up. You can't even stop him from farming because if his lane gets too hard he will use void to last hit. Gank him with help before night time as much as possible (with help from your supports). If you don't he will walk over you, ministunning or silencing you when you try fruitlessly to defend yourself.

I ship these heroes with ET
Faceless Void is a carry who has pretty obvious synergy with Elder Titan, if you land a 5 man stomp, your team has more than enough time to clear the area while void plonks down his chrono and wails on them. You put your ult down to suck them all within cleave range of eachother, and you can even leave your spirit in chrono so they suffer the armour reduction penalty. The good times will roll as void time walks all over you, and if it's more like a one night stand thing, you can backtrack it and pretend it never happened

When I get Dark Seer on my team as ET, boy do I surge. Elder Titan relies on people being clustered and Dark seer knows how to do that. He can vacuum people into an echo stomp or earth splitter. ET can also combo his ult with the wall to make sure the illusions will continue to wail on the unfortunate enemy team. When these two get together you need more than a vacuum to clean up the mess.

Magnus is another great hero for working with ET, one of the nicest things about these two is that they can do whatever the other one isn't. Mag can offlane if ET want's mid and vice versa. When it comes to teamfighting, Magnus will have no trouble landing reverse polarity when the enemy team is snoring loudly. But make sure mag knows whether to skewer or not before you pult your ult down. Magnus will skewer ET and carry him along for the ride of his life

These guys have a similar style, splitting the earth and riling up the sand and ♥♥♥♥. (Okay, not that similar). But 5 seconds is more than enough time for Sand King to channel epicenter and nail a good 2-3 with his line stun. If you have a friend, you should try this combo. I'm sure Sand King will burrowstrike his way right into your heart like some kind of beautiful parasite.

My favourite combo for ET. Kunkka Titan is a thing which has to be seen to be believed. If you land a stomp, in comes a gush of water and huge ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ghost ship. And if Kunkka want's to take things into his own hands, torrent or boat leave more than enough time for you to position a spirit. Just make sure Kunkka doesn't cleave all your sleeping targets. Other than that though, Kunkka can set my jib any day of the week.

This guide is hella long, so I will be damn surprised if you didn't learn at least something from reading it. But I hope you will play Elder Titan and stomp or split your way to victory. You have my blessing. Oh and for those of you who couldn't be asked to read the whole guide (I understand if you didn't). I summarised it below in one sentence

ELDER TITAN IS THE BEST HERO IN DOTA 2

Thank you for reading and thank you to;
Pianofruit, for his vigilant proof reading <3
Fizzletwist, for coining the name Big D <3

Remember, it was only right that you were cast into this world, for you had a hand in breaking it. Please give criticism and rate/fave. If you want of course