Oh, what fun Disruptor is. He doesn’t care about the glory, but he does care about making everyone on the enemy team be exactly where they should be for them to all die horrible, while he looks on stoically. Perhaps he’ll nod. Perhaps he won’t. You never know with a giant red orc sitting on a raptor. Along with Undying Dirge, Disruptor is the newest hero to grace Dota 2. He’s live now.
Despite having a surprisingly useful damage ability on his Q, almost all of Disruptor is geared around living up to his name, ruining both the enemy team’s positions while isolating their weakest members. Kinetic Field, a reasonable sized AoE that lasts for 4 seconds at level 4, and sits on your E key, is the best of his abilities for this, creating an impassable barrier that has a moment of chargeup time, but more than makes up for it by effectively corralling anyone from the enemy team unlucky enough to be caught in it, while keeping the rest of them on the other side, preventing melee heroes from coming to the aid of isolated nukers.
That Q I was talking about is Thunder Strike, which ties a ball of lightning above your target’s head, striking both them and everything around them in a small AoE three times. It’s great for lobbing on a running target with hardly any health, because you know it’s probably going to finish them off. Also not bad for clearing out creep waves in the later game.
Glimpse, though, on your W, is mostly just funny. It sends target enemy heroes back to where they were 4 seconds ago, which sounds a lot like Kunkka’s X Marks The Spot until you realise that this one is instantly cast, rather than pulling them back after a certain duration. Which means… well, it means that anyone who just TPed anywherenear you can be sent back to where they came from. Wasted TPs, Nature’s Prophet teleports reset, the possibilities aren’t endless but they are very amusing.
And then, after all that, there’s Static Storm, a pretty big AoE that increasingly damages all targets within it, as well as silencing them. At which point you might realise the kind of syngergy that all Disruptor’s abilities have. Let me walk you through it. You lay down your Kinetic Field on Lina, but she slips out of its radius just in time to not get trapped. So you use Glimpse and she’s back where she belongs, at which point you drop Static Storm to stop her casting, and then Thunder Strike to properly screw with her health bar. Of course that’s a bit overkill, but if you’d already trapped two or three other heroes in the Field, it becomes a master play.
It means that getting Force Staff on him makes a whole lot of sense, not least because that kind of movement is allowed by the Field, which does work both ways, but you’ll want one anyway. As for the rest, just grabbing utility items like Mekansm and Arcane Boots isn’t going to go wrong, and later on items like Pipe and Shiva’s, or even Necro make sense depending on the situation.
Disruptor is one of those heroes that you start playing and can instantly feel that, even though you aren’t necessarily doing all that well, his abilities have some amazing play in them, somewhere, waiting for a pro player to come along and show you how it’s really done. Personally I can’t wait to see him start getting used in some competitive games. Imagining Dark Seer dropping Vacuum, then Disruptor Kinetic Fielding on the gathered team before Wall of Reflection slams down just has me smiling. And laughing a little.