A few questions:

1. Has anyone played them against humans?
2. Has anyone succeeded in playing them?
3. If you have succeeded, do you have advice/guides?

I've only played them against medium bots. And while I went 11-8, I don't think it's indicative of anything. The rule of thumb seems to be to buy support items, a TP and a bunch of clarities, go to offlane, block camps, put a bomb on the rune spot and run back to safe lane and help your carry. Then you can put bombs at the secret shop and in your jungle to prevent and turn around ganks. At least, that's what I did.

The most difficult part seems to be team fights. You do have your ult, but it has a crazy slow animation time, and not a great range. I feel like you have to anticipate team fights a lot, and/or set one up with a stasis trap.

Almost any hero can fuck you up 1 on 1, so your best bet is to have amazing map awareness and not run into anyone. I can imagine you could fuck with jungling heroes really easily too. The way their mana pool works, even with soul ring and arcanes, I think they're designed for you to eventually suicide yourself in a fight so you can go back to fountain, because you run out of mana far too quickly otherwise. People have been saying to use a blood stone, or get a Eul's. I think Eul's would be great, because you're faster, and have mana regen.

I think the biggest issue when I play with Techies is I don't know how to synergize with them effectively. I'm not usually watching to see where they're dropping bombs, so it's hard to know where to run or set up a team fight.

I can't help you, but Wagamama just did a 24 hour stream of techies, maybe check out bits of it to see what's going on? He's a highly rated player and you might be able to glean some info about it from his marathon.

http://www.twitch.tv/wagamamatv/profile/past_broadcasts

Edit: Crap, just noticed vods require a subscription. I think they'll be up on his youtube for free eventually.

@dusker: Purge recently did a video on techies. He admits that he did not do a good job in showing techies' team ability, but he has some interesting ideas on how to use the heroes. One of them is using techies' land mines to farm stacked ancients.

I haven't played techies against humans, but I can see some nice synergy with some other heroes. For example, you can use pudge's hook shot to drag an enemy hero to a mine spot or use dark seer's vacuum to bring an enemy team to a land mine location. So, if you can combo with some other heroes, you can really help out in team fights.

Yeah, I watched the Purge video. I'm more interested in talking about Techies on the forums than just watching streams. I kinda did all that before I got here: not this guy's first rodeo and shit. I'm more interested in whether anyone has actually been successful using them.

Purge plays kinda poorly in that video. The only reason he was able to do any of that was because Slark was snowballing out of control. In a more balanced game, I feel like he would've had a much more difficult time. Ancients stacking is pretty cool, and good to know, since it's hard to farm with techies it seems.

Eh, Ancient techies, like ancient most heroes barring Tinker, is useless. Keeps you out of the game for too long.

Offlanne techies works great. Why? Because you can't be ganked. As soon as the game starts, run to the offlane, and mine all the gank passages. Stack mines on top of each other. It's a guaranteed kill and you don't need to worry about warding for vision. You can also mine just in front of the pull camp to be super annoying.

Then, just get levels, a soul ring, and rush ags.

Only ever put 1 point in suicide to deny enemies kills. And make sure to max stasis mines early as they're so damned good.

I don't know. Maxing stasis mines seems weird, because it's hard to see how you'd have the mana early for them. You're sacrificing potential mine trap kills for, what?, an escape route? It's really hard to set up a fight with stasis mines, though I do agree that they're OP if you can catch a bunch of the other team in them and you aren't already dead.

I think ancients can be good if you dont have a lane to farm. Almost every other hero will take priority over techies in the lane, and your last-hitting is garbage, so maybe ancients isn't terrible? Like, it works for Tide when he can't stay in the offlane, for example.

Techies did basically win the game for a team I played against just recently. Their PA was fed to fuck, but kept throwing by blinking onto high ground under tower without support. So, we ended up killing them off mostly, pushed mid right into a fuckload of remote mines on the high ground. I lived, as Razor, with half health, but Jugg and Bloodseeker almost immediately died. And, so, push was fucked. This happened another time because we didnt have a gem. I shoulda bought a gem. Anyway, Techies won that. If that push had worked, we may have won.

You need to be dropping your arcanes and any other int items then soul ring, which leaves you at the percentage mana you get from soul ring. Try it out, makes spamming mines really amazingly nice.

For some clips of techies and some synergy with other heroes.

Techies are awesome.

>Enemy chooses Techies

>buy gem

>????

>you play 5v4 now

A good Techies is a goddamned mad man though, you can never predict those people. If you don't walk into their mines, they kill your towers like crazy.