Queen of Thorns: The Assassin

I have played against QoT's who seem never to run out of mana for bramble shield. Fairly early in the game.

I played against one who seemed to be holding out against 2 opposing players indefinitely. A third came in and she still was able to effectively challenge us for the lane, though she couldn't outright take the lane from us.

We'd get maybe one or two hits in between bramble shields. She seemed to be effectively invincible.

I kept thinking "She's got to run out of mana sometime" but... no.

If it were later in the game I'd think artifact mana potions, but I think it was too early in the game for her plausibly to have them. (In fact, I don't think she ever went to the center lane at all. This was cataract.) 

Perhaps she was using blade of serpents?

edit:
Actually thats a Assassin only favour item.

Probably just mana helms. Bramble isnt the most mana expensive thing

I likey.

I never could get the hang of mulching Shamblers, so, not having to deal with that's a much nicer proposition. I'll have to try this out right now.

One inportant piece of advice he missed was, even if you don't want to put points into your character's minions, you can still buy Idol minions. I personally believe that the first level Idol minions are the most cost-efficent items in the game, so buying them sometime in the early-mid game is a good plan. Even if you don't hold them in such high reguard, you have to admit being able to use 8-11 item slots will give you an advantage compared to people stuck with 5-8.

I just tried a slight variant of this build, and I like it a lot!

Put all my points into brambles, groundspikes and stats, with priest idols. It was nice not having to micro-manage shamblers, and my k/d ratio was much higher than my normal QoT build

I've seen this kind of build and tried it before, honestly I have to say when you switch out of closed form to do your spike combo (that is still pretty low damage imo) you most the time get squished and die against good players.  I found it very hard to play a queen that was actually good at killing enemy dg's, she could make them leave a spot sometimes due to the strength of bramble but never was i getting a bunch of kills or anything and most the time going into open (even just to switch back later) was a ton of work and i could get stunned while in open and smushed.

Stats for her increases minion stats... IE that's totally useless. Good job breaking it, hero.

   QoT is a good early game support character because Bramble Shield is pretty over the top.  

Besides that really her only other skill imo worth mentioning is her AoE which is real nice for the armor reduction which makes taking down buildings and ganking things easiar.

    The thing is these 2 skills are reaction based skills meaning they are most effective when you cant them on the fly with fast reaction times.   The Caveat being these 2 skills are in her differnt forms so its very time consuming to switch back and forth between forms doing nothing when you need to use one of them.  Which makes her already dismal damage output even lower(because she isnt doing anything when switching forms, and it makes surviving with her a little tricky too)

    People say they love playing with QoTs and she does very well for them,  so its cool if she doesnt get buffed.   But I have a hard time taking them seriously or believing they really know what they are talking about when they say things like, "I have an easy time killing erebus with my build".  LIke the author of this guide said.

   I see her as a 1 trick pony(who's one trick is so effective that its possible to creature a strategy around it) but really whose 1 trick only works early game and then quickly becomes underpowered, who was designed for using minions.. unfortunatly her minions and minions in general havent been found to be very powerful. 

I really wish her minions where melee, it'd make mulch shambler much more useful without crazy amounts of micromanagement... still, I think she can do decent as this support style assasin, I think I'm gonna try it. Fortunately she has tons of abilities to choose between, and just sitting around in closed form has a number of advantages.

That's a good point Rob.  This build really isn't great for killing DGs because there's no nuke.  Ground Spike and Spike wave are GREAT for damaging them, but you'll need a buddy to finish them off.  She's not good at chasing.

The best way to play this build is to use uproot as much as possible, and weaken enemy DGs so friends can finish them.