Introduction
I played a few Lycan games over the past week and was rather impressed by the results I gathered. Necro-Lycan does indeed work, and so far all the games were won. Apart from achieving consistent results, I went on to stress test the strategy in various ways as well. Eg with constant feeding and playing with delay. So yeah, this guide will serve to present my findings. Sorry for the lack of colours and presentation style. If there is any beauty in this guide, it can be found in the content.


How does Necro-Lycan works?
The idea is to rush Necro but you wouldn't be using it in teamfights. The necroboys are there to help you in pushes. There are many arguments going around on how max speed necros+wolves can be a beast in teamfights but I doubt it works everytime. Kinda iffy as it relies quite heavily on the skill of the player, and his micro. You see, I'm a lazy person who prefers to win games through the easiest method. Which is exactly the intent and purpose of this guide.

So back to the idea. You will be using wolves+necroboys to assist you in your Solo pushes. You will only summon them when you are taking down a tower or a rax, and for the very reason you do not summon them during teamfights. Necroboys for teamfights means no necroboys for pushes. In fact, you should avoid teamfights altogether! Because teamfights create a perfect opportunity for you to push without much resistance since your opponents are busy with their own battle.


Skillbuild and Item Build?

If you need to check the hero details and abilities, click the link below.
Lycanthrope - DotA Hero Details

Skill Build
1. Wolves
2. Feral Impulse
3. Wolves
4. Feral Impulse
5. Wolves
6. Shapeshift
7. Wolves

You max wolves first. Level 4 wolves are great for farming your crucial items ie Necrobook. Then focus on maxing Feral Impulse, get Shapeshift whenever possible and max Howl after that. Add stats only after you have maxed everything



Item Build
Start off with the following items:

Good mana regen, good armor aura, great for wolves.

Aim for the following items:

First priority is to build your Necrobook. They are key to your pushes. Healing salve is great because you don't have lifesteal (from Vlad's) yet. Also, it can be quite a waste needing to go back base to heal while still having 50%+ mana.

Other items to get in order of priority:
--> --> or
Boots of Travels -- the next most critical item after Necrobook. You need this for the extra mobility. Opportunities to push can spring up in an instant but you need to get there quick to seize the opportunity. To be able to tp to creeps is insta-win.
Vlad's Offering -- Nice lifesteal, bonus dmg aura, etc.
MoM & BKB -- these two comes in a pair. MoM gives you more dps for your main wolf. Pushing outer towers are easy but inner base towers and raxes can be a challenge cos there are usually 4-5 heroes defending it. I usually activate both MoM + BKB and continue whacking them till I die. Yes it's suicide, but worth it.
Manta -- An alternative if you don't like MoM/BKB.

***It is worth to suicide if you have BoT no longer on cooldown and cash at hand for buybacks. Base pushes usually occur around 30th min (for me) and eversince the remade on the buyback formula (it is now time-based rather than level based), you only need to pay around 800-1000 gold at around 30th min which is a pretty good deal if you still need to finish up the rax before it heals, especially Ranged rax. Traditionally, the old system would require you to pay around 1300-1500 gold.

Do I lane or jungle?
Erm, anything goes. It doesn't really matter much as long as you get good farm and levels. However to play safe (and never fail), I usually follow the following method:

-- If you are playing in scourge, head off to top lane cos it has easier access to the forest. There is no need for fanciful jungling. Pull the medium camp at x:42, lane abit then pull again the medium camp once they respawn. By then you should reach level 3.
-- Lvl 2 wolves are strong enough to take most small and medium camps so if you aren't comfortable with laning, you can farm the woods. To kill big camps (centaurs/furbolgs etc), have at least lvl 3 wolves.

The goal here is to level and gain as much gold as you can. Look out for opportunity to push (when you are level 7 especially) as tower gold can help finance an early Necrobook.



Taking down the Towers and Raxes
Here comes the fun part. Playing a Necro-Lycan is like playing a cat-and-mouse game. You must avoid enemy heroes at all cost. You should not attract too much attention. You strike when least expected. Never let your opponents anticipate where you are going to strike next. Easier said then done, but here are some guidelines on how to achieve them

Map Reading
1: Push when the enemy are busy in a fight, especially a teamfight!
2: Look out where the enemy heroes are on the map. If most of them are at the bottom, try pushing top. They might tp. So you wait, till all of them tp in. Then you tp back to bottom and push that lane.
3: If enemy heroes are missing on the map, you can expect them staging a push or trying to initiate a gank. Look closely and spot which allied heroes are farming in lane. The one closest to the enemy base is likely to be ganked first. If that poor guy is close beside you (or you yourself), get out of that place immediately, tp to the other side of the map and push.

Taking down Outer Towers
1: Necro3 + wolves can clear the tower completely even without your main hero present.
2: Wolf summons last 55secs. Summon them way before you reach the tower so that by the time you reach, the ability has already cooldowned (cd is 30secs). Make them tank, let them die, immediately cast a new pair. You can use the tower cycling trick or whatever its called as well.
3: Necroboys are tanky (800hp) and they have uber strong magic resistance (40% reduction). Your wolves will die from AoE nukes, but you can always re-summon them immediately. So worry not of having to micro them intensively to avoid damage.
4: Cast howl only when you are taking down towers. Or when allies are in teamfights. It may look spammable but in reality it is not. 35secs cd, 12 sec duration.
5: Run away from heroes at first sight! The moment you see a hero approaching, expect to be chain stunned/disabled. Pop your ulti and run away. Don't worry, your minions will take down the towers for you.
6: There is no need to clear creeps first before attacking the tower. You Necroboys + Wolves can tank and dps without outside help.


Taking down Base Towers and Raxes
Arguably the toughest part of the push and the most exciting.
1: DO NOT follow your allies in the push. You should push another lane and try to time it in such a way both lanes are pushing towards their base at the same time. Enemy will be forced into a dilemma, which lane do we defend?
2: IF for whatever reason you are pushing together with your allies, you need to stand back and not enter the teamfight. Once the fight breaks out, immediately pop your ulti and rush into their base (and pray nobody sees you in the midst of the confusion). Summon your wolves and boys, howl, then whack away. Someone will eventually notice you. Don't kill him, just continue raxing, once you are done, swing to the other lanes and take out the towers/raxes.
3: Bring a pair of wards before going for a base push. Plant the ward immediately once the tower is down. Helps to give advance warning of incoming enemy heroes.
4: Against chain stunners/disablers, you can suicide push by popping MoM+BKB and continue hitting while in wolf-form for a guaranteed Rax destroyed.
5: Shapeshift has a very low cooldown (40secs). Don't use it for dps, use it for mobility eg to escape or to get into an empty lane fast. This coupled with your BoT makes you extremely mobile to take advantage of your enemy's weak spots whenever they present themselves. You can even get Blink Dagger for additional mobility! (I haven't tried it though, there wasn't a need to)
6: There are more tricks which are kinda hard to explain, watch the replays!



Reading the Flow of the Game

From experience, there is a standard way on how the game will turn out. By that I mean the behaviour and responses of your opponents and your allies are basically similar across the games when you employ such a pushing strategy. It will be in your best interest to make them play 'in-your-game' rather than falling out of your game. Since falling out of your game means their actions will differ from their usual norms and it makes prediction and planning ahead rather difficult for you.

For example, your 4 allies are pushing mid while you are pushing bottom lane. You were expecting them to ignore you since mid is a larger threat but lo and behold, there is a hero standing at the tower waiting to welcome you and your dogs. This deviates from the usual norm and as such you must be quick to come out with a solution to the problem. All in all, it is a good thing as it forces you to actually think of your own counter (and not me spoon-feeding all the tips). Basically, the gist of this section is to show you how the metagame develops within your game. It may vary depending on your demographic and where you play from.

Early Game:
-- Against a stack team of sentinels, they might actually ward your medium camp to prevent creeps from spawning. Worry not, carry on with the usual laning. You can start pulling again around 6min onwards after the ward expires

-- As you start jungling fulltime, they will take notice and send gankers to hunt you in the woods. Keep an eye on the minimap

-- If the enemy team consists of many early gamers, they will be interested in doing an early team push to force you out of the jungle to defend. This is where your first opportunity to push opens up. As they team push, you sneak into their pushed lane and take down their towers. One for one.


Mid Game:
-- Okay so by now you already have a Necro1 and your opponents are probably laughing their ass off looking at your noob item build. That's good cos it's a sure sign they will ignore you which is exactly what you want. Your allies will be bitching as well, fine. Tell them you won't help in teamfights. Pretend to QQ. This is good because you don't want allies to be too hopeful to help them during teamfights. High expectations can ruin games. Make them feel it is a 4v5 and they will play more cautiously, smartly and learn to be self-sufficient.

-- By the time you reach Necro3, your opponents wouldn't be taking you lightly anymore. They know what you are capable of and try to find counters. Well, there aren't many. Necro3 are mighty hard to kill with spells, and the blue guy can be quite scary to kill. Enchantress can enchant the boys but who would suspect during the picking phase that you will be going Necro Lycan, right? HotD & Diffusal can work too but these are items which takes some time to build. It is not like you have warlock on the other team that screams 'must-get-diffusal' right from 0:00 min. Bottom line is, when they realise your One-man army is unstoppable, it is already too late.

-- So what's next? They will most likely anticipate the next tower you are going to wipe. Play their game, but don't fall into their trap. You will be their center of attraction but keep it that way. If you have 5 enemy heroes chasing your tail at every moment, it is a sure sign that your 4 other allies are having a free farm. Or at even a free push. If you have Boots of Travels, it works even better. Make them run and down like little kids playing soccer chasing after a single ball. Chasing and ganking are utter waste of time if you can't take down the target. They will realise it sooner or later, and they will start ignoring you again.


Lategame:
-- Once the outer towers have been cleared, the enemy will be forced to turtle. What you need to do is constantly push all the three lanes to keep your creeps as close to the enemy tower as possible. Make use of BoT and Shapeshift to swing from lane to lane. This is so reduce the time needed to push into their base whenever an opportunity arise (say a teamfight suddenly breaks out at mid) and to avoid people screaming backdoor.

-- The beauty of Lycan is that he doesn't need to push a specific lane. His One-Man Army has the ability to tank towers. You can push in from the bottom lane, and instead of raxing the tower, you dash into their base and whack the top lane tower instead. It makes you like an idiot which isn't a bad thing really. At this stage of the game, you will want to make yourself as unpredictable as possible. Yes, like an idiot. Create as much confusion as possible and avoid the conventional norms. Like ugh, all 5 heroes pushing the same lane etc. 5 vs 5 teamfights are exciting but it doesn't always win games. Remember, this is all about meta-gaming. If you make yourself unpredictable, they can never come up with a suitable counter since they can never read your moves.





Some MathCraft and Theorycrafting
Okay, for this section I will try to convince you why this strategy works through mathcraft and theorycrafting. First off, we need to find the damage output of each individual unit main hero, wolf, yellowboy, and blueboy.

Their raw data can be found below:


Before you do any calculations, identify all the relevant bonuses first. For example, true sight, mana burn, and critical strike aren't needed when running this strategy. You treat them as mere bonuses. So don't go around harping how Necro Lycan is great for his true sight, mana-burn ability etc. It doesn't fit the context here. IF say you are running a Necro Lycan who gets himself involved in teamfights often, then you may use that argument. Anyways, the key point here is to identify the DOMINANT factors.

So now I will form a list consist consisting of Dominant, Relevant and Irrelevant factors. Bearing in my, the goal is to take down towers and raxes and avoid team battles.

Dominant factors (ie most influential)
1) Wolves + Blueboy has Normal attack damage (From attack table, Normal deals 70%, Hero deals 50% and Piercing deals 35% dmg to fortified armor ie towers/raxes). For consistent measurements, you want to convert everything to Hero type. So Normal is equivalent to +40% extra dmg, while Piercing is 70% of hero dmg
2) Feral Impulse. A 25% increase in attack speed and dmg translates to +56% increase in dps. This is as good as having an additional blueboy (so now you have 3!) in terms of dps.
3) Lycan's shapeshift grants max speed to all units. This means greater mobility for your hit-and-run tactics apart from providing an escape mechanism.
4) Wolves versatility in terms of pushing power (clearing creeps), jungling ,farming and raxing potential makes him a strong all-round summon.
5) Wolves have 55 sec duration with 30 sec cd. Which means you can re-summon immediately without any downtime. That said, they make extremely viable tankers.
6) Existence of Boot of Travels to enhance mobility. Since the key to pushing success is to respond quickly to pushing opportunities.

Relevant Factors (mediocre influence)
1) Both boys have 40% spell resistance. Tanky vs spells.
2) Yellowboy grants 9% movement and attack speed bonus aura
3) Howl grants 16 damage to units, 50dmg to heroes (not really dominant because you only have it maxed at 14. Doesn't play a significant role during early game)
4) +15% dmg bonus and +5 armor from Vlad's. The dmg increase is not so significant, the +5 armor bonus does add quite alot of tankiness if youre talking about early game but it doesn't warrant a dominant factor.

Irrelevant Factors (little to no influence)
1) True Sight from Blueboy. Your sole reason to buy the book is to provide pushing power, not hunt invis heroes. If they do exist in game, treat it as a bonus.
2) Mana Burn (both spell and passive) since you won't be hitting heroes much.
3) Critical strike from both wolves and in shapeshift form.
4) Lowered BAT of 1.4 from 1.7 when in Shapeshift form. Doesn't matter much since you are using it to run away, not to dps.
5) Invis for wolves. Towers have truesight, yeah.


So yeah, this is my thought process when it comes to theorycrafting. The key is to identify the dominant factors and from there, you can quickly evaluate the effectiveness/potential of the strategy. Like in this case True sight which is a strong aspect of Necrobook is actually ranked as Irrelevant.


Next up we will work out some mathcraft. The idea of mathcrafting isn't about finding the DPS to the exact 3 decimal places. The final DPS will mean nothing if you have nothing to compare with. That said, the DPS will only have meaning when you start making relative comparisons to other common types of DPS form. Say in this case, you might be interested how this pusher strategy compare to that of Broodmother or a Butterfly + Buriza Bone Fletcher or a Naga with Mantard.

DPS Calculations
All calculations are taken based on a Lvl 16 Lycan with maxed wolves and Necro3.
Buffs: Feral Impulse (+25%/+25%dmg), Howl (+14dmg), Endurance Aura (+9%ias) from Necro. Also Normal attacks will gain 40% overall dmg (for consistency with Hero dmg), Piercing (for Necro Archer) will only deal 70% total dmg. Assume Vlad's hasn't been made yet.


In summary,
Total DPS = 2*Wolves + Warrior + Archer + Hero
= 121.9*2 + 169.3 + 119.8 + 230.8
= 763.7

Lycan only accounts for 30% of total dps.
To give you a sensing of how Lycan fare with other pushers,

1. Naga Siren
Assume the following:
- Lvl 16 with 92-94 dmg
- Manta Style (note: manta images does 33%dmg, Naga's ability does 40% dmg)
- Butterfly (Only agi component transfers to image, raw dmg and Ias doesn't)
- Boots is BoT

Total Dps = 278.9 + 351.4
= 630.3

Dps is lower than Necro Lycan, even though a Butterfly was added to the build.

Bone Fletcher
Assume the following:
- Lvl 16 with 82-88 dmg
- Has BoT, Butterfly and MKB

DPS = (85+110+30+44)*(1.00+0.67+0.30+0.45+0.90)*(1/1.7)
= 525.3

Oh my! Even with the extra MKB, he still can't compete with Lycan's Dps of 750.

In summary, Lycan with just Necro3 way outdps other notable pushers with the same items. Even with an extra tier 4 item, most heroes are still unable to match Lycan's Dps. Initially, I wasn't really inclined to provide a mathcraft proof to show Lycan's dps potential cause I thought it was way too obvious. But the sake of completeness here it is.



Time taken to take down Towers and Raxes
Every tower has different armor. Their HP may differ as well. In order of towers we need to take down, we have:



Time taken to down tower
= [EHP of tower / Lycan's dps (763.7)]*2
Note: Hero deals only 50% dmg to towers thus the *2.

T1: 1300HP/18Armor
EHP: 2704
Time taken: 7.1sec

T2: 1600/18Armor
EHP: 3330
Time taken: 8.7sec

T3: 1600/25Armor
EHP: 4000
Time taken: 10.5sec

Rax Ranged: 1500/5armor
EHP: 1950
Time taken: 5.1sec

Rax Melee: 1500/15armor
EHP: 2850
Time taken: 7.5sec

T4: 1600/30armor
EHP: 4480
Time taken: 11.7sec

Note that T4 refers to the tower defending the Throne/Tree. The pair of towers will remain invulnerable until at least 1 Rax tower (from the 3 lanes) are downed. That means you can go straight for the throne without destroying any raxes at all.




Im not Sold. This is just Theorycrafting right?

First off, I'm not a salesman. And the replays are there to show how it is done. It works for me, everytime. And I'm not using cheesy tactics like stacking my own team with friends to assist me in my games, I played alone. Or suggesting allies to pick summon heroes like Brood to abuse my howl.

NEW Replays:
Here are some replays compatible with 1.24d warcraft version, 6.67c Dota Map.

Game 1:
I played with some known faces from previous game and they were chatting about my lycan strat. So I decided to give a demonstration to the rest. 15min through the game, I formed Necro3 and began to mop up their base.
http://www.playdota.com/forums/attac...1&d=1279492157

Game 2:
Easy game, fast win.
http://www.playdota.com/forums/attac...1&d=1279492157

Game 3:
Won again.
http://www.playdota.com/forums/attac...1&d=1279492157

OLD Replays:

Game 4: Necro Lycan 0-7
http://www.playdota.com/forums/attac...1&d=1270812510
This ones a funny. We were playing against a stacked sentinel team, and scourge had some friends as well. I was laning with Bone at top, but the medium camp was warded. Farming didn't really go so well. I kept pushing and suiciding in the process. Went 0-7 in this game, but it was well worth it. Scourge was calling me stupid at one time, brilliant at another. Feeder wins the day.


Question and Answer Section

The Q&A section is pretty long, so I hid them under the spoiler box. Click to open it. They are mostly replies from questions asked by forumers. Do read it as I tried to answer to most of the doubts people might have on this sort of strategy. Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion; iKrivetko, zaphodbrx99, FunnyWarfare, Lycan, DJRequiem, Cenerae, etc