Sven is an unusual carry hero in the sense that he is both durable and has the potential to deal incredible amounts of damage. His good stun and his capability to make his whole team more survivable (by using Warcry) mean that he could occasionally fit in a utility/support role as well. Even though he is one of the strongest man-fight heroes in the game, he has a big problem sticking to his target. He easily ends up being kited, so to actually be effective, he needs his teammates to control the fight and give him space.

Because of his versatility, it is hard to say what the usual role of a Sven is. Nevertheless, he is most commonly played as a Hard Carry or a Utility Core. As we mentioned, he could also be a support, typically as a part of a roaming duo. 

In terms of strategy, Sven is fairly flexible, but he excels in 5-man Dota strats more than in others because of his team fight presence and Warcry.

When looking at the general picture, Sven is neither the best ganker nor the best lane dominator. Yes, he is a versatile hero and could fit in different situations; however, his real strength is team fights, where he could deal massive amounts of AoE damage. So, when you draft him, always try to build a team that will be able to control team fights and provides Sven with the freedom to end them favorably.

In team strategies, a carry Sven is mainly drafted as a part of wombo-combo aimed to dominate team fights. His incredible AoE DPS potential means he is a natural five-man hero. He does not thrive in chaotic fights and games with lots of ganking and split pushing as he lacks the means to fight by himself - he needs his teammates. With this in mind, when you have Sven, you want to be able to overpower your opponents in a 5vs5 clash. If you have this ability, you could walk together, push towers, force fights and win the game.

Unlike most carries, Sven is not weak in the early and mid-game, which means that he could fit a more aggressive play style from early on. He could have a big impact with much less gold than most hard carries, which means he is not as farming-oriented and could afford to actively look for fights rather than for creeps.

Nevertheless, when picking Sven, you are not forced to be overly aggressive in the early-mid game as you have some serious carry potential and you can farm decently fast. Provided your team has team fight potential in the later stages, you could safely take the game at that stage.

Drafting a support Sven is mainly viable when you need to diminish the physical damage output of the enemy team in fights and at the same time, you could use a roaming/ganking support. A support Sven is great for aggressive early-mid game 5-man strats.

Safe lane:

In the safe lane, Sven will probably have access to free farm. This means that he will be able to get to his core items very quickly. With quick core items you will start flash-farming sooner and could potentially snowball out of control. From this position you could transition to very aggressive play in the mid game (usually pushing as 5).

In addition, having a potent stun means that the lane will have very good kill potential. Because of this, with some good creep equilibrium control you could prevent the enemy offlaner from getting XP and Farm.

Offensive lane:

Sven is not an ideal hero for an aggressive trilane as he has big mana problems in the early game. In addition, he is melee, isn’t the strongest last-hitter and doesn’t do much damage other than his stun. Nevertheless, if you see that the enemy team has a weak defensive trilane, combining Sven with two strong trilane supports could give very good results.

Depending on which your lane partners are, some damage spells combined with a Storm Hammer and attacks could prove enough to kill most heroes in the early game. With such a strong kill combo, you could effectively zone out the enemy carry, which will give you a very good start in the game.

Even with less farm Sven could be useful for his team not as a main damage dealing carry but as a utility hero thanks to Warcry.

In the support role, Sven is usually used as a roamer. The reason is that his Storm Hammer is decent at level one and could set up for some early kills. Also, while moving between lanes, he could recharge his mana with a clarity potion, so having mana just for one Hammer isn’t that big of a problem when roaming.

He is a decent ganker early on, but he needs help, so he is usually part of a roaming duo. Some effective ganks could give you an early lead and hinder the development of your opponents, especially of their solo mid. Having Warcry means that you will be useful in the later stages of the game as well, especially if the enemy team focuses mainly on physical DPS. For a support, as Sven, you will be comparatively durable and with your ultimate in some situations, you could even provide some potent DPS. An Agh’s build is also possible if you want to buff your cores not only defensively, but offensively and with Dagger you can provide decent initiation.

If you draft Sven before your other carry, this could serve as a surprise element. Your enemies will expect to fight against a carry Sven and are likely to try to counter him. Using Sven as support and picking a smart carry (which is not countered the same way Sven is) could ruin your opponents’ game plan.

As mentioned, thanks to Warcry, a support Sven is great in 5-man drafts that want to play aggressively.

Good friends to have are:

Being one of the strongest attack-forward heroes in the game, Sven works very well versus certain types of heroes. At the same time, some good control could make Sven close to useless.

Strong Against:

Weak Against:

The skill build is determined by your role in the game. A carry Sven would prioritize his own farming speed (Cleave), while a utility Sven will prioritize his fight contribution from early on - Warcry and Hammer.

Sven is a strange hero when it comes to items as he doesn’t need as much as most carries to be effective, yet he is a very fast flash farmer and usually can afford a lot. This means that you should get the items you need relatively easily.

Since Sven has a particularly strong synergy with a couple of items, usually his core item choices don’t change much (Madness, Blink, BKB). Nevertheless, beyond the few core items the hero is open to versatile item builds.

The suggested item build is one of the most usual carry Sven builds. First it boosts your farming output a lot with Madness and Echo Sabre. Then you get Blink + BKB to be able to participate in fights much more easily. You can squeeze a S&Y in between these items if you think you need help sticking to your targets. In the late game your choices are relatively open, but a Daedalus for ridiculous physical nuke damage in addition to some tankiness items (like in this case AC + Heart) are great choices.

The game plan of a utility Sven is a bit different than a core Sven. You don't want to passively farm - you want to actively contribute to team fights. Moreover, you wouldn't be the main damage dealer in your team. Because of this, you want to use your gold early on to get utility items for your teammates. These are usually Vlads (which also helps you farm) and Crimson or Pipe, depending if you are facing physical or magical damage.

In the late game, you can transition into more traditional Sven luxuries to start dealing damage.

Sven has a decent attack animation (neither bad nor good, with 0.4 sec attack point) and an average starting damage for a melee hero. This means that you should not be denied last hits easily. However, it is the job of your lane partner(s) to give you the space to farm freely by harassing and zoning out your opponents (unless you are alone) and also don’t forget to remind your teammates to stack ancients as much as possible, because you are one of the best heroes to farm ancient stacks even only with Mask of Madness and Power Treads.

You shouldn’t use the Storm Hammer for last hits especially early on in the game as you don’t have the mana pool to support this. Provided you are without mana, you lose your kill potential and you are much easier to kill.

Maximizing your farm:

When you get two levels of Cleave AND a Quelling Blade, you can auto attack the creep wave to kill it off faster. This will buy you enough time to go to the closest jungle camp, stack it and return on time for the next creep wave.

While you are doing this, you can rush a MoM (buying Boots of Speed first is smart as it will make stacking and going back to lane without missing creeps much easier). With MoM, your ultimate and two levels in Cleave you can easily clear even very big stacks.

Preserving the creep equilibrium:

Provided your supports in the lane pull, you can afford to tank the creep wave in front of your tower with the help of Warcry. If you have a Stout, you will not take much physical damage. Consequently, you will guarantee that you get all last hits rather than risking last hitting under the tower, which is much harder.

Active harass with the Storm Hammer is almost never a good idea as you don’t have enough mana to sustain it. Try to save the spell for kill attempts, or for when you desperately need it to run away.

Passive harass is not your thing either since you are a melee hero and you need to focus on last hits. Nevertheless, if another melee comes to contest last hits and exchange harass with you, you could activate Warcry to buff your survivability and commit to the exchange - you might get the better end of it with about 10 buff with one point in Warcry. Afterward, you get more levels on your Cleave against melee heroes - it can be very useful to keep them away from last hits while farming.

Your kill potential is all about the Storm Hammer. You should use it to initiate as it is a targetable “impossible to miss” spell (if you can, hit multiple targets, ofc.).  (This doesn’t hold true only if you have other instant disables like Hex or Rubic’s Telekinesis. In such a case you should follow up with your stun).

With 13sec cooldown you might get a chance to use the Hammer again, especially if you are chasing through the jungle/River or other long routes. Don’t forget to switch your Power Threads to INT if you just don’t have enough mana (with Sven this is often the case for the second Storm Hammer.)

Getting the kill, however, largely depends on your lane partner(s), and whether they have decent damage and other disables to follow-up. If you are not certain you are going to get the kill, throwing the Hammer anyway might be a mistake. In case you lose your mana, you will also lose your kill potential.

After the disable on your target ends, activate Warcry. It will give you and your ally’s movement speed to get in some auto attacks and finish the kill or simply to chase.

After lvl6 besides initiation, you can provide decent damage as well (thanks to your ult). This is most useful if your lane partners have other stuns so that they can give you some time to auto attack. Again, if you are not certain you will be getting the kill, it might be better to save your spells. For example, you can push a lot faster with God’s Strength activated.

Ganking

You should start ganking from lvl1 as a support as you get most of your kill potential at that level - your Hammer stuns for 1.7 seconds. With further levels you get a bit more damage and MS and survivability from Warcry, but that is rarely crucial for taking a kill.

As a ganking Sven, you are incredibly dependent on your allies. Provided there is nobody to follow up your initiation it is impossible to finish a kill, so try to predict the situation before it happens. Try to gank with a support partner or gank lanes where the laning ally has kill potential himself. If that is not the case, you might be better off pulling to get some farm rather than attempting impossible ganks.

When rotating between the lanes, use clarities to replenish your mana and, especially during the day, use Smoke of Deceit as otherwise, you might never get in range to initiate.

Counter Ganking

With Storm Hammer, it is quite easy to save allies that are being ganked (if you are in position). The spell is very easy to land and the 2 sec AoE stun (gankers tend to clump up when they are chasing a single target) buys enough time for your ally to run away. Warcry is also very helpful as it gives additional survivability and increases the MS of your allies.

Therefore, if you are a support Sven and you see that an ally is being ganked, try to TP to that lane as fast as possible. As a farmer, helping the other lanes is not your priority, but sometimes it is profitable to join the fight as a Storm Hammer might turn it and you might get some kills.

Starting with Storm Hammer, so he is able to fight for the rune and helps his teammates secure a kill.

On level 3 he opts to take 2 points in Cleave to clear Nature`s Prophet’s units easier.

Level 4, Warcry is great for chasing people and also very good against NP`s summons to reduce their harass damage.

Getting a mask as quick as possible for the sustain in the lane and rushing MOM helps him clear waves and camps as fast as possible.

After lvl6 with MOM, he is using his ultimate to speed up his farming – as a position 1 his top priority is to out-farm his opponents, so he is not afraid to expand the ult for this purpose. He abandons the lane as soon as he sees that a lot of heroes starts rotating there – dying will slow down his farm a lot.

Thanks to this more careful and farm-focused play-style in the early game, he manages to be on par in terms of farm with the enemy carry, despite there being a lot more pressure in Sven’s lane (the enemy roaming CK came to his lane very often).

As a Sven, your first big timing comes with your BKB. This is the item that will allow you to fight more freely, and without it, you will have great difficulty hitting your targets in fights. Consequently, getting your BKB + a DPS item (MoM or/and Crystalys) is your clue that you are ready to fight. Even though you scale well with additional items, you are at a timing that should allow you to dominate most opponents, so you shouldn’t delay fighting for the sake of passive farming after that point.

After a good laning stage, you should reach this timing fairly fast, which will allow you to push and force fights before your opponents step on their feet in terms of levels and items. If you cannot afford to force fights (your opponents have a very strong 5-man line-up or very strong anti-push), you should focus on farming the lanes and jungle. The more damage items you have, the faster you will be in that - you could possibly out-farm severely the enemy hard carry if it is a hero that cannot flash farm.

After a bad laning stage Smoke ganks into farming the lanes and jungle is your best option. You don’t want to force fights as you will not have your core items at that point, so you want to catch up, but at the same time, you have good ganking potential, and you want to stop the snowballing of the enemy carries. So, finding the right mix between ganks and passive farming is your best option.

In team fights most of the times you want to jump with Blink and kill someone immediately. The problem with this is, however, that if you go in first, you will likely get disabled and kited, which will diminish your effectiveness.

So, as a Sven who wants to deal damage, you basically have two choices. The first one is to wait for your allies to initiate the fight and then to enter and deal the needed damage when you have the space to do so. The second choice is to initiate the fight yourself. If your enemies get on top of you, this will give your allies a chance for a very good counter-initiation, which is more likely to catch a large number of opponents. Such a counter-initiation could allow you to kill them all effortlessly. This is a riskier tactic though as you might die before the counter-initiation, so it is a good option only if you are farmed.

As Sven, your real fear is not of dying, but of being kited. Not many heroes would like to fight against you, but most heroes will be glad to use their disables on you (and then kill you, if possible). So, in order to be effective in team fights, you rely heavily on your allies. In this sense, you are a reactive hero - whenever your allies provide you with an opportunity to deal damage, you should take it. However, going in by your own initiative is usually not ideal.

As a support Sven, you might want to initiate the fight with your disable or wait for it to break out and then use a better-targeted Storm Hammer that could disable multiple opponents. Don’t forget the Warcry which will make the whole team more survivable against physical damage. Finally, try to hit targets with your ultimate. You wouldn’t have much farm, but you will deal significant damage anyway.

5-man Pushing:

One of the best ways to force 5 on 5 engagements is to push. This means that after you get your core items, you should get together with your team and start pushing the enemy towers. You, as Sven, should be on the front lines. Nevertheless, in order to be successful, it is very important to have an initiation hero waiting to counter-initiate.

If you have another pushing hero to hit towers when you have Dagger you can stay hidden in order to counter-initiate your enemies and easily kill them. This is usually a superior tactic with Sven, as this way you will be much more difficult to kite.

Once the enemy team is dead use the leftover time on God’s Strength to claim objectives.

After a successful gank, Sven’s team tries to push HG. Instead of hitting the tower and allowing enemies to cancel his blink and to start kiting him, he immediately jumps in with Blink behind the enemy tower.

Split-Pushing:

You usually want to participate in fights rather than split-push. Nonetheless, when you are in a position where you cannot reliably win fights, split-pushing is a decent alternative. You clear waves fast and you can even use your ult to bring down towers quickly.

Ganking with Sven is pretty straightforward - you cast your buffs on your allies and yourself, and you initiate the gank with a stun (since it is likely to be one of the most reliable disables on your team).

As a carry Sven, you are usually better off forcing fights or farming rather than searching for a gank.

Provided you have good initiation items (like Shadow Blade or Blink Dagger), getting in position for a good Storm Hammer initiation will be much easier, which means that you will be much more effective in ganks - this might bump it up on your priority list.

Sven uses his ult and initiates on the enemy support Disruptor with Blink + Stun, which leads to a solo kill. His team tries to take a fight out of this situation and with the help of Slardar’s ultimate Miracle one-shots the enemy Batrider. This is the ideal start to a fight for Sven – when you have the element of surprise on your side, it’s much harder for enemy heroes to position themselves well and to kite you, which leads to easy kills.

If you are successful at being aggressive and pushing towers in the mid game, you should be able to gain map control. As Sven, you could very efficiently farm the enemy jungle, thus denying one source of farm to your opponents. Do not do this on your own, or when you do not have the proper map control (vision), though, as you might end up feeding your life to your opponents.

The most important thing to consider about farming with Sven is his huge sustained AoE damage. Sven is probably the best hero in the game for clearing efficiently jungle or Ancient camp stacks. When you have life steal from your Mask of Madnesskilling such stacks becomes even easier. Using your ultimate to clear Ancient stacks in the mid game (before you have good DPS items) is a great idea because otherwise, you might have problems killing the stack fast enough.

The fastest way to farm with Sven is to push out one lane and then enter the woods, where ideally your allies have stacked some camps for you. Even if there aren’t any stacks, you could stack yourself or just farm the camps one by one.