Hrmm,

As an oak you should definitely try and communicate to your teammates to buy the currency/building upgrades. Honestly, the quicker you get your two hats, the better.

I've also noticed that I have much less success with oak when I play him as a hybrid. If you're gonna go assasin build 1-10, you might as well go forward with it 11-17. Optimize your item build for Speed and ganking potential even at the expense of your tank. Max out Divine justice, it really allows you to push the envelope by taking on riskier tower dives when you know you can get a great heal after the kill. Don't bother with narmor ring in this build. Get last stand for the inevitible mistake you'll make when your aggressive behavior gets punished.The 1.5k chest piece is better than the 1.7k for assasin build, since if gives you armor to help mitigate tower/rightclick damage.

If you go minion build, you've gotta understand that the demigod ui blows for minion micro... Why does it suck?

A. You can't set control groups.
B. Its difficult to see exactly which units you're controlling(no unit boxes or anything)
C. You can't queue commands,
    1c. if you try to chain too many inputs at once, you run into the "MY FREAKING CHARACTER stopped and couldn't cast, attack, activate wand of speed etc issues.

While your spirits move super fast... they can't attack while moving. Therefore, you would need to micro them(to go where the enemy will be, micro to attack etc)  if you wanted to chase down an enemy demigod. However, since microing is super difficult in DG due to the aforementioned bullet points, I would suggest you to drop the chasing role to other non-minion users, and focus on sustained damage/in your face pushing prowess when playing minion oak.

Sustained damage/pushing requires much less mana since you won't need to be applying/reapplying level 4 penitence. Instead of chasing enemies, you should be making them come to you. Spam those (cheap)spirit wards, they give you and your team aoe armor bonuses. Since you won't need as much mana, you get two more item slots allowing you to stack on tank/minion dps items (depending on opponents). Heart of life isn't as important for this build so it goes from being a core item to a luxury/situational item. You're definitely going to want to get your morale maxed up because when you play in a legit fashion you're looking at 16 minions. (16 minions x 4 Extra damage per minion x 6 levels of morale = very good amount of sustained dps not to mention minion attack speed + minion toughness) Since you've got 2 extra slots for tankage/minion dps, you might want to look at a little used consumable, the sigil of vitality. When not being used, it gives your minions +100 hp. When you use it, you gain 50 percent of your max hp making it much more difficult for enemies to kill you.


You should have amassed a goodly amount of gold from ganking or pushing when the time comes to decide whether or not to upgrade creeps. DG is definitely a team game. You are a very item dependent hero when it comes to late game. You are also one of the most potent late game heros whether or not you went assasin or minion line. Your team should definitely be supporting you and thus contributing more to citadel unless there is a better fed ooze UB/Oak/maybe erebus+reg).

Ah. Pantheon. I play custom games, and usually am the host. I also take the leisure of prescreening my team by either knowing the people who play with me, or gently questioning them to see if they have an amiable personality.  For ganks, its rare for a fight to be fair( well at least it shouldn't), i.e. where both people start off at full hp and duel 1v1. Assasin should be porting all over the place and picking off the isolated engagin in 2v1's. If the other team is butt hugging (all three together), go to another lane and push/capture/ninja lock the cd flag etc.  Don't get me wrong, theres nothing wrong with narmoth for 1v1, its just not good for chasing/ganking. (no damage/no speed, slows etc). It would, however, be good for a minion build since it gives you much more tanking potential.

not understanding why you need that much mana. 

i manage to make do most games with just a Vlemish. if i manage to get a Heart of Life its like infinite mana for the rest of the game.