Introduction to Hero and Role:
Banehallow is a powerful melee strength hero who has some under-appreciated benefits as a creep buffer. He is often seen dealing fearsome DPS in teamfights and chasing down survivors with his inescapable movespeed while in wolf form. Pushing teams can use his extremely powerful Howl skill to buff large numbers of creeps controlled by Broodmother, Enigma, or Furion and help them to kill towers and bases. Lycanthrope is a superb farmer from Level 1 because he can hunt neutral creeps in the jungle and quickly build up his items. His basic roles are semi-carry, push assist, and ganker. His item dependence is medium to high.

For detailed information on this hero's statistics and abilities, please visit his hero page:
Lycanthrope - DotA Hero Details

Early Game - Jungle Farming
I'm writing this guide assuming you are going to jungle with Lycan. This means that you will be farming neutral creeps in the forest and avoiding the lane except to pull or if your ally needs you (more detail later). Make sure that your team is okay with having 2 people in their own solo lanes.


Starting Items for Jungle

We are going to start with the following items:

Cost: 590

Your wolves cost 125 mana to cast, and they last for 55 seconds. You want to use them for nearly the full 55 seconds if possible to maximize your mana efficiency. When you are killing creeps in the jungle, your wolves will do much of your tanking for you. In order to jungle in this manner, you need mana and you need to buff your wolves' armor, both of which are provided by basilus for a cheap cost. To control which of your units the enemy is attacking, simply move the others away out of range for 1 second and the enemies will change targets to the nearest unit.

Stacking creep camps is a slightly more advanced jungle tactic.

As quickly as possible (and using your team's courier to bring you items without returning to the fountain), build your inventory to include the following.

Boots and TP scroll are needed to help escape if you are ganked in the jungle, and also to speed your farming. Your team's support hero should provide you some wards along common gank routes to help guard against this.

Quelling blade is an all-purpose jungling tool. It will speed your farming significantly by allowing you to kill creeps faster and also cut holes in the trees so that you can run a more efficient route between camps. This is particularly important on the sentinel side, where you can cut 1 tree to open up the bottom camp. Normally the bottom camp requires you to run around the edge of the C-shape of trees, but you can cut 1 tree down and attack the camp directly from the top to save time. There are other places where this is useful but I won't go into too much detail in this guide.

Ring of Regen provides trickle regen which is terrible if you are laning, but quite useful for jungle creeping, especially if you have your wolves tanking for you 50% of the time. This will help your jungle endurance and it leads to Vlad's, our core item.

Starting Skills for Jungle

We will take the following skills early game:

Purple overload. Wolves are picked simply because they are Lycan's most useful skill and enable him to jungle and gank effectively. They scale upward in power for the same manacost of 125 at all levels. Feral is taken over Howl because we need to conserve mana and it is a more efficient DPS skill for jungling.

Basics of Jungling with Lycan

Jungling with Summons

Lycanthrope can jungle quickly due to the fact that he is a summon hero with 2 wolves, which lets him use his summons to "tank" the neutral creeps and not take much damage himself.

When you are jungling you need to manage both your mana and health. Each time you cast wolves will reduce mana, and each time you tank creeps will reduce your health. You need to balance these 2. You don't want to recast wolves too often; rather you want to use the full 55 seconds of duration. This means you will let the wolves tank till they hit red health, but after that keep them alive so that they can continue to help your damage while your hero is tanking. If the wolves tank till they are red health, that means you prevented all that damage from going to your hero, and if they attack for their full 55 seconds of summon, that means you got the maximum damage you paid for with ur 125 mana summon spell.

Stacking Camps

Stacking camps is a slightly more advanced concept but easy to accomplish with Lycan. When you kill the jungle creeps, they will respawn every 1 minute (except the very first spawn which is 30 seconds). How this actually works is the game will check whether there are any creeps in the "camp zone" where the creeps are supposed to be. If there are none, then it will spawn new creeps in the camp. What you can do is "pull" the creeps and make them chase you outside the "camp zone" around the 1 minute mark. The game will detect no creeps in the zone and spawn new ones. When the original creeps stop chasing you and run back to their camp, there will be double the number of creeps there. This is called a "stacked" camp.

Stacking should be used on camps that you don't have time to kill before the 1 minute marks. What you can do is use one of your wolves to stack the camp, while your hero and other wolf are still killing another camp. Stacked camps are best used by heroes with lifesteal and AoE to kill many creeps quickly... Lycan is NOT one of these so make sure you don't stack the camps too much or you won't be able to kill all those creeps at once. Start by stacking the pullable camp (your lane creeps will help you tank this) and the weak camp. When you get to level 5 you can start stacking medium camps, and beyond that you can stack hard camps and even Ancients.

Midgame - Finishing the core build and entering the game:

Cookie Cutter Build

Core:


Extension:
( OR )

The cookie cutter build is a DPS build through and through. Vlads and BKB are the core, because in team fights and tower dives you will be a high priority target to be stunned and killed. Vlads buildup enables you to jungle, and gives the wolves a substantial boost to DPS.

Desolator is easily the best orb on Lycanthrope, see the hidden text for math showing just how much DPS it adds to your wolves alone.

Armlet can be quickly farmed and its benefits to strength heroes are well known. Since we are getting Vlad's, the degen is acceptable during battles because we have lifesteal. Lycan gets this a bit later, as most Armlet users get it as a first item, but the value is still good.

Heart needs no explanation.

MKB or Basher would replace armlet based on your preference. Both capitalize on Lycan's very high attackspeed in his ult form. Pick one or the other for preventing TP escape and boosting your damage while incapacitating the enemy.

Zoo Build
Core:


The Zoo Build capitalizes on the fact that Lycan's ultimate boosts the speed of ALL of his units to maximum. Yes, that means if you have a dominated centaur or necronomicon summons, then they will be given maximum move speed during your ult also.

The Zoo Build is a stunt, and while it can be very effective it is not considered to be a true competitive build. While it is worth mentioning briefly, I won't go into more detail or replays of the Zoo build in use.