Keeper of the Light is a rather unique support hero. He is, hands down, the best anti-pusher in the game thanks to his long-range, spammable AoE nuke- Illuminate. In addition, he is one of the very few heroes who can provide his allies with mana sustain, creating an opportunity for interesting combinations and contributing to a powerful lane. Finally, he has great team-fight potential thanks to his ultimate.

The hero excels in 5-man Dota strategies thanks to his ultimate and possible Agh's push timing.

KotL is mostly picked because of a few possible reasons:

- Because of strong early-game Chakra Magic combos with heroes with spammable spells
- Because of his ability to flash farm (get more items than enemy supports), out-push waves and stall pushes
- Because of the possibility to go for a early-mid game push timing with Aghanim's
- And most importantly, because of the team-fight control he provides with his ultimate

KOTL is a good babysitter because it is very hard for your opponents to pressure your carry. They will have to fight through Illuminate blasts, which is a big problem. In that sense, KOTL is not the perfect babysitter in a 3v1 situation as he doesn’t excel in zoning out a single target (hard to land Illuminate on someone playing defensively). Nevertheless, he is one of the strongest heroes to relieve pressure against offensive dual or tri-lanes. In addition, having unlimited mana could make any lane partner of KOTL a much stronger laner (thanks to the possibility to spam spells). In that sense, KOTL is an ideal hero to protect carries who under normal circumstances are weak laners.

So, having KOTL in your safe lane will make your opponents think twice before contesting it with an offensive trilane. Even if your carry is not the type that can fight early on, Illuminate has the potential to punish tri-lanes severely and could win a 3v3 situation even if the other lane partners are not particularly strong fighters. If your opponents don’t commit to a fight, they risk being out-leveled, out-farmed and even zoned out by Illuminate. If they commit to a fight, they risk tanking a fully charged Illuminate on multiple heroes, which is very likely to turn the fight around.

If you are having a free lane, with KOTL you can stack two caps at once and later on help your carry to farm them with Illuminate.

Because of his ability to give mana and because of his serious nuke, when coupled with strong laners, KOTL can be the ideal hero to challenge a trilane. The continuous usage of spells as a consequence of Chakra’s mana sustain, and the huge AoE nuke makes facing an offensive KOTL lane very hard.

Usually, when you choose this, it is a good idea to couple KOTL with either a hero that can latch and use nukes (Chaos Knight, Sven), so that it is much easier to hit your Illuminate, or a hero that massively benefits from Chakra (Bristle, Necro, Beastmaster).

If can dominate an offensive lane by constantly harassing and pushing on the creep wave. This way you can force your opponents to farm under tower while you are using the free time to stack camps and take bounty runes. By using this you should be able to out-level and out-farm your lane opponents by the late laning stage, when you farm the prepared stacks with your lane partner and Illuminate.

Good friends to have are:

KOTL is more of a strategic pick and therefore, is better/worse against whole lineups rather than single heroes. He has only one big direct counter (Nyx). Nevertheless, when talking about individual heroes, he has the same problems as most spell caster supports.

Strong Against:

Weak Against:

The build of KotL consists from team utility items (usually saves for your teammates like Glimmer and Force Staff) in the early-mid game and Refresher Orb in the late game. Aghanim's could also be very powerful, but it is situational: if you are a part of a 5-man pushing strategy, get Aghanim's and use the daytime push timing to try to break the enemy base. If the game plan is not to push from early on, then skip the Agh's in order to get the Refresher faster.

The proposed build is common for KotL. The Glimmer + Force help you and your teammates survive early-mid game engagements. Will-O-Wisp with Refresher helps you win 5v5 fights. It is possible to skip Gimmer or/and Force to get the Refresher faster if the game consists of many 5v5 fights. In most cases, however, the utility of the two support items outweighs the cost of a slower Refresher.

The best thing you can do to farm up with KOTL is stack jungle camps and Illuminate them. Early in the game, your blast will do only 200 damage. Consequently, it is best to stack 1-2 times a camp and bring it down with 2-3 blasts, which will give you quite a lot of resources.

You can stack two camps at once thanks to the long range of your blast. At the 52^nd second, you can cast and release Illuminate right away in the direction of the camp which is further away from you and then immediately use auto attack on the camp close to you (and run away). This way when the spawn time comes, both camps will be outside of their spawning box and will stack.

When farming with Illuminate, because of its AoE potential, it is best to stack camps before you use it. The more low HP units there are, the faster you will farm. Another thing to remember is that with the 2000 range it has if you position yourself correctly, you will be able to hit two camps at once.

Passive Harass:  Your high range and high movement speed means you are quite good at passive harass. What you are not good at, however, is trading hits as you have very low HP and low armor. However, ideally, you want to kite and hit without getting hit yourself.

Active Harass: Illuminate harass is quite powerful not only versus single enemies but versus dual or tri-lanes. Because of the very high damage and high AoE, if you hit multiple enemies 2-3 times, you might force them to use all their regen and even get back to base. The most important thing to do, as we already mentioned, is to cast it from where you are not seen. Otherwise, it would easily get dodged. If you know your opponents expect it, you might cast it a bit behind them, so that when they back off to dodge it, they actually get hit. Most of the time, however, aiming at the actual heroes is your best option.

You should be very careful about your mana. Don’t overdo it, as Chakra early on, especially if you want to use it on your allies, wouldn’t be able to sustain constant Illuminate spam.

Finally, if Illuminate hits the creep wave, you will push out the lane, so try not to do it when you harass. When you are fighting, though, you shouldn’t think about it.

Your kill potential resides in Illuminate. Thanks to Chakra and harass spam, your opponents will often be below max HP. If they overextend, this will be a great opportunity for your allies to latch with some disable. All you need to do is aim the Illuminate at the target and release it before it runs out of the hit radius. Afterward, try to chase for some auto attacks.

Without setup, you have a very low kill potential as even if you hit your blast the targets will simply run away. Aim for kills only when you know you can get them. Otherwise, try to babysit/harass/zone out or farm the jungle.

In the early laning stage, the most important timing is your second level in Chakra magic as it will allow you to sustain more Illuminate spam, in addition to recharging the mana of an ally who is spamming a spell as well.

• Ganking

Ganking with KOTL is very hard as you have no way to latch onto your target. Most of the time you are much better off staying in the lane, or if you have off time, farming the jungle so that you get more items and levels faster, and you can start pushing as 5.

If you need to gank for some reason, stay outside of vision, channel Illuminate and tell your allies to latch. Afterward, you can help by pushing the target back with Blinding Light.

• Counter-Ganking

You can use Blinding Light to create some space between your ally and his attackers, which might be enough to let them get away.

• Anti-Pushing

Anti-Pushing is your forte, so always try to be in a position to do it. If you see that your opponents at some lane are beginning to push, teleport to that lane and start channeling Illuminate. Early on in the game, if your opponents don’t dodge your blast (which is fairly hard), it is almost impossible for them to push through the wave as it kills off the creeps and damages them severely. This means you should be able to save even your T1 towers for a rather long time.

Of course, you should channel Illuminate from a safe distance - it has 2000 range, there is no need to expose yourself to any kind of danger.

In a defensive lane, you want to create space for your carry to farm and farm yourself, if possible.

Either one is OK for KOTL since he is both good at zoning out and at farming the jungle efficiently. You want to do both things if possible; however, your priority is to babysit your carry and create space for him/her to farm - especially if the offlaner is pressuring or if there are multiple enemy heroes in the lane. You should use both active and passive harass to drive the enemy offlaner backward as often as possible.

If there is a better hero at zoning out than you in the lane, you should leave this job to him and take advantage of the speed with which you farm the jungle - stack camps for yourself and blast them down. You are also very efficient at defending towers from early on, so if a tower is pressured TP there to defend it.

Starts with Boots and his team use smoke in the base, because they know that KOTL with boots and smoke can outrun anyone on the Dire side and place the ward before they come.

Notice how at 1:17 KOTL drags the creeps behind the tower and farms them with the small camp. After this, at min 2 he stacks the big camp and controls the bounties. With the constant pressure coming from KOTL and Beast, they manage to kill the Underlord twice.

By pressuring and pushing out the wave KOTL creates a lot of space for himself and he is able to stack the big camp. Unfortunately, in this example, the enemies manage to take over control of that area and to farm it. This is a relatively big mistake and if you are worried this could happen you need to bring your allies to fight back the enemies and take the stacks.

KOTL is a good partner for a dual lane and usually is used to babysit a farming core while pressuring the enemy lane. Dual lanes with KOTL usually don’t attempt to kill, but to disrupt the farm of the lane opponents. Push-out the wave (while harassing the enemy heroes) and use the free time to stack camps, control runes, etc.

Cores with spammable spells:

As your goal in the lane is both to create space for your core to farm and to pressure your lane opponents at the same time. Your best partners are cores who can use farm well but in the same time have spammable spells that benefit from Chakra.

If you are playing in a 5-man pushing strat, your big timing is your Aghanim’s and every daytime after that. During the day you want to fight and take objectives (Rosh, towers, eventually the high ground).

Another importat timing is Refresher - it makes your team fight control potential even stronger, which could help your team win engagements.

The laning doesn’t have a great influence on Keeper’s play style. Regardless of the laning outcome, you want to stick to your priorities (mentioned above). Because of your flash farming potential, if the laning stage goes badly, but you have space on the map (e.g. enemies are farming up instead of applying pressure), you have the option to stack camps and farm your items (Refresher) quickly. This will allow you to fight more efficiently as a team. In that sense, KOTL is a rather good catch up hero, and getting nothing during the laning stage isn’t the end of the game for him.

Use Illuminate to push-out waves and stall the game. Anti-push and slow down pushes by the enemy team.

If your carry doesn’t have items with which to kill creeps fast (i.e. a Spectre without a Radiance), you can use Illuminate to help him/her bring down the creeps. Nevertheless, you need to be careful not to get the last hits as your carry needs the gold.

• 5-man Pushing

When you are pushing with your team, your task is pretty simple. You must stay further back in a safe position and spam Illuminate so that it is difficult for your opponents to defend (it is hard to engage in the Illuminate blast heal/damage). Always try to push in the daytime if you have Aghanim’s. 

If you cast Chakra before Illuminate, you will have it again right away. Don’t go too far in - your team relies on your heals and possibly on your saves if you have defensive items. You don’t want to die early because if you die it might be the end of the push.

Always be ready to counter-initiate with Will-O-Wisp and possibly Blinding Light.

• Split-Pushing

You rarely split-push yourself since you are squishy and have low tower damage, but you can out-push the waves very fast if you need to.

• Anti-Pushing

Generally, the most efficient way to stall pushes is to spam your Illuminate so that it hits as many targets as possible and drives them away from the tower, and even cast Blinding Light to push heroes away from the tower and give a miss chance, making their DPS output weaker. Make sure that you are doing all of this from a safe distance.

Use Will-O-Wisp if the enemy team commits to a fight.

As a support, it is your task to win the Ward wars against the enemy supports. You are a very squishy hero without escape mechanisms, so be very careful not to overextend. It is a good idea to ward and deward while sticking to your team.

You can use Illuminate to scout high grounds. This is most useful when you suspect your opponents are killing Roshan. You can stay at a safe distance and cast Illuminate towards the Roshan pit. After a few seconds of charging, you will gain vision in the pit and with it - valuable information.

You are a terrible ganker. Your main contribution is the Illuminate damage if your team has tons of disables and the ability to push the target back with Blind slightly. If you are ganking a key target, don't be afraid to commit Will-O-Wisp if your team lacks disables.

You are a back-line hero in team fights. Unlike most supports who need to stay safe in fights, but at the same time need to enter them at the right time to use their disables, which exposes them to danger, you don’t have any incentive to get in the middle of the fight. All of your spells have a very decent casting range, which means you can be useful from a safe distance.

Use Blinding Light optimally: this generally means to take advantage of the knockback - to create space between the enemies and one of your allies, to clump up your enemies so that they are susceptible to AoE spells, or to push them over an edge in order to separate them from the fighting and disable them from contributing too much. Even if you don’t have a great opportunity to exploit the knockback, cast it for the sake of the miss chance on enemy right-clickers. Don’t forget to release your Illuminate if you see a good opportunity (enemies are leaving the AOE or you have to heal allies ASAP).

Use Will-O-Wisp at the right time - usually when the enemy team commits deep to the fight. This will make it very hard for them to disengage and leave the ult range or to kill the wisp. Protect it with Blinding Light if needed. Use Refresher if you have it to make your ult even stronger.

Use Illuminate to deal damage from a safe distance. Combine it with AoE control - your ultimate, Void Chrono, Ravage, RP, etc., to ensure the blast lands.

Example:

(pre 7.20)

Yapzor uses Blinding Light and Force Staff to save his carry and then uses his other abilities (Blast and Mana Leak) to help his team secure two kills - on the enemy Slark and Sand King, who were the initial aggressors in this situation. Blast and Blinding Light make KOTL great at such defensive fights.

Farming with KOTL is quite simple - you channel Illuminate for 4-5 seconds, release it and then take all last hits. Alternatively, you can stack jungle camps and get them down with Illuminate spam.

Rather than how to technically farm, what you need to think about is when it is a good idea to farm. You don’t scale too well with items after Refresher, so farming is not a priority for you. There are limited resources on the map, and it is highly likely that some of your allies need the farm more than you do. If you are taking every opportunity to flash farm any incoming lane waves rather than leave them for your allies, you might end up starving out your carries, which is a negative contribution to the overall goal - winning the game. So, always bear in mind that farm is limited. The more map control you have, the more space you will have to farm (three lanes, 2 jungles). Otherwise, you will have to leave farm opportunities to other heroes.