The helm of the dominator active has many purposes and there is a significant difference in how players use it as they become more comfortable with the item. This guide has a number of tips which are generally easy to execute regardless of your skill level. It will give you a better understanding for the active and give you more value for the same amount of gold. Some of these tips can be used for any heroes that can summon units too e.g. Invoker forge spirits and Nature’s Prophet’s treants. Even if you are a player that doesn’t buy this item you can get some insight on how to play against players who utilize this item to its fullest. (Last updated 7.06)

Dominating a Siege Creep

When you are pushing a tower you should dominate the enemy siege creep, this gives you significantly more pushing power in the early parts of the game. When the creep wave dies you can send the siege creep back and use it’s damage once the next creep wave comes. This is effectively giving you a siege creep each wave.

Even when you stop pushing with your hero, players often don’t notice that the siege creep that is pushing the lane is dominated until it gets a mind of its own and runs away (you can tell by a different color icon on the mini-map).

Cut the Creep Wave

Send your creep behind the tower before the creeps come. So if you are pushing a tier 1 around xx:10 mins you should be sending the creep behind and get it to aggro the creep wave. Doing this will allow prevent your lane creeps from getting aggro on the enemy creeps so they will maintain focus on the tower.

Send the enemy creeps in a new path and eventually bring them back to you. Don’t send the creeps to a jungle camp unless you are going to farming the camp and the creeps together after taking the tower. otherwise you will lose gold and experience.

Doing this tower pushing tricks can be that little extra thing which prevents your enemy from denying their tower.

Farming With Big Satyr Creep

The big satyr creep has enough mana to use shockwave 4 times (160 magic damage), this is more than enough to clear an entire creep wave. This can be used to increase your efficiency by farming aggressively with the satyr creep while you kill jungle camps with your hero.

Doing this will allow to farm quick while still maintaining a safe position. Arteezy nearly always uses this trick even with his manta illusions. If you have auto attack on standard you can focus on using the creep as your hero auto clears the creep camp.

Stack and Block Creep Camps

With 7.06 comes the return of neutral camps spawning every minute. Typically block camps is not that effective but if the enemy is stacking their ancients for a Sven or Luna, using the creep for an ancient block is going to hinder your opponent and waste their time. Alternatively you can use your own creep to stack your ancients, but every knows that.

Deny Enemy Runes

You can use your creep to scout a rune before you go to take it. If an enemy gets there before you or if its too dangerous to contest, you can deny it with your creep.

Vision for Roshan

One of the strengths of Clockwerk’s flare and Venomancer’s wards is to provide vision of the roshan pit. Putting your creep into the pit can sometimes be that little bit of information that turns the game around. Regardless of how lazy or low skill of a player you are, if you bought helm at least leave a creep inside the pit. This is the simplest but sometimes the most effective use of helm.

High Ground Vision

When a fight breaks our in the river or when the enemy have a high ground advantage it can literally win a team fight when your team mate can cast their spell with a small amount of high ground vision. So Put the creep on the high ground during team fight for better vision.

It is also a great idea to keep move the creep up onto the high ground when you take a fight at the enemy’s tier 3.

Walking up High Ground

If there is a position where you think the enemy might be, let your creep go first. Be careful about this one though, because against high skill players they might use a smoke when they see you do this and the creep doesn’t break smoke. Using a smoke against a helm player is basically how you counter play this type of movement.

Vision When Playing Aggressive

Moving the creep into a position where it gives you vision of the enemy in an area where you expect them to come from. This can help you farm the big and small camp in the enemy’s safe lane safer.

Some players will chase the creep and you can use the creep when they find it running around their jungle. You can use this as bait to set you up a kill. It takes a long time for players to kill the creep because of its tremendous move speed and health.

It’s safer to farm aggressively by getting vision in an area where you expect the enemy to come from.

Purge Creep

The purge creep is incredibly useful against ghost forms, roots and silences, as all or nearly all of them are dispelled with purge (a basic dispel). This creep is not as effective against stuns as most of them require a strong dispel like Abaddon’s Aphotic Shield. You can check if an ability is dispellable in the tool tip. (Ghost forms: Ghost Scepter, Eternal Blade, Ghost Shroud and Decrepify).

If the enemy has a hero who is constantly being buffed in fights, consider getting this creep. An Ursa who is buffed by his team mates that has: surge, ion shell, living armor, overpower and solar crest buffs is astonishingly hard to kill. But without bkb and the purge creep on your side he loses all of those buffs along with being slowed which can help to kite him.

The slow which the purge applies is incredibly useful when players don’t have an escape or mobility item or their item is on cooldown like glimmer, force staff or blink. As they now rely on movement speed to catch you or run away from you.

Currently in 7.04: The slow deceases in 1 second intervals, so it slows for 50%/40%/30%/20%/10% during the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th/5th second.

This creep as well as the Harpy can also be used to break linken’s. But this purge does not work on euls.

Cancel Enemy Blink Dagger

Helm units count as hero damage i.e. cancelling blink. So let your creep attack a hero who wants to engage or even re-engage in a fight with their blink.

Troll Creep to Catch Mobile Heroes

Players often get caught off guard by the trolls ensnare (the net). They will try kill the creep and then get rooted. This can be the iniaton your team needs to set up a chain stun on a mobile hero. This is often happens when playing against Visage’s fimilars. You try to kill them, then they stun you and it beings a chain disable on your hero resulting in your death.

Use Creep With Boots of Travel

If you have a hero with boots of travel you can teleport onto your creep. If you are playing in a party you can enable share control with your units. This can allow a tinker to play more aggressively and you don’t even have to do anything.

Buying a helm later in the game when you are 6 slotted is also incredibly useful. Hide the creep somewhere in the trees near the enemy base and you can do some rat dota. Keep the helm in your back pack so when your creep dies you can swap out an item and quickly get a new creep.

Dominate Enemy Creeps

If the enemy has a Chen, Enchantress or their own helm you can steal their creep and use it against them.

Switch Aggro

Switching Roshan’s aggro between the creep and your hero can prevent your hero from getting bashed during an important spell like Troll’s ultimate. Troll will do more damage during his ulti, so it’s important to make sure Troll doesn’t get bashed for the duration of his ulti. But, don’t let the creep die as it’s aura will disappear.

Each creep has its advantage when it come to killing Roshan Alpha wolf: you will have low hp with an early roshan but this creep is the fastest of all creeps Wildwing ripper: less risky than the alpha wolf as have more armor Hellbear smasher: roughly the same speed as the Wildwing, the 15 attack speed aura is not much. Ogre frost mage: this is the safest creep for early roshan as the armor will block a large amount of damage. This creep is only slightly slower than the Wildwing and Hellbear.

For a sub 20min Roshan you should either use the alpha wolf to kill Roshan faster or the ogre creep if you want to be slower but safer.

Phantom Assassin’s Phantom Strike Unit

You can farm more aggressively and leave a creep behind you, this will ensure you have always have a better escape when the enemy comes to gank you. Use Phantom Strike on your creep and always keep it within range of you.

Also as you are running away, make your creep go another path similar to yours to out smart your opponent and maximize the 5 second cooldown of level 4 Phantom Strike.

Clinkz Death Pact

Clinkz can benefit greatly from eating a helm creep as they have 1400hp, the item is very situational on Clinkz and in my opinion it costs too much. A situation where the item is useful is when you need a creep nearby when your team has lost control of the map, this ensures you have the death pact buff when taking a fight inside of your base.

However Clinkz is actually a hard counter to players who buy helm. You can easily kill the enemy creep and you get a massive buff. If you know the enemy has a helm creep nearby it is nearly always better to eat their creep rather than a creep in the jungle.

Wake your hero up from Bane’s Nightmare

Keep your creep nearby when bane uses nightmare, issue the creep to do an attack command on the hero who is effected by nightmare. Not only can it save you but your teammates too.

Scouting invisible heroes

Use the creep to scout for heroes who are invisible and do damage in an AOE like an Alchemist effected by moonlight shadow (or shadow blade) and radiance. If the creep takes damage or the debuff shows then you know there is an invisible hero nearby.

Kill Techies Mines

Pretty simple, walk your creep into them and clear the mine field. You can even get the bounty killing the mines if you right click them.

Block Clockwerk’s or Pudge’s Hook

Have the creep block the line between the hooker and you or your ally. If you are running away it can be as simple as getting your creep to follow your hero.

Clockwerk Battery Assault

This spell is spread out over nearby units randomly. Have the creep follow you can save you from some damage and even escape Clockwerk’s ministuns. This also works for other spells like Gyro’s Rocket Barrage and Luna’s Eclipse.

Tiny’s Toss

Toss an enemy to the creep.

Bloodseeker’s Blood Rage

Deny your allied helm creep and gain 350hp.

This guide doesn’t go into too much into the detail of neutral’s abilities and passives as they are bound to change in future patches. To see up to date information on neutrals use the wiki. Helm of the dominator shouldn’t just be used for stacking and getting critical damage from the alpha wolf as it has so much more potential. If you have trouble with micro, remember you only need to right click the ground once for your hero not 3-5 times a second. However it is very important to not feed the helm creep as they give 125 gold currently in 7.04. Don’t roll too safe, some creeps will die, you need to make mistakes to learn.

If you liked this more advanced guide I will be making more like this soon so please give me a follow on twitter to keep up to date.