Tinkering About

The Basics of Playing Tinker

As Tinker is becoming more popular, I thought I’d go over some key points about how to play him. We’ll talk about farming, laning, and itemization. I’ll assume that you already have a general familiarity with Tinker and his playstyle.

Farming

We’ll start a bit out of order and talk about Tinker’s farming first. One of Tinker’s strengths is that he is able to farm very quickly. This is all thanks to March of the Machines, which deals a tremendous amount of AoE universal damage.

Mechanics

March robots travel in a straight line in the direction that you cast march. Because of this, you should cast March in a direction perpendicular to the direction that your target is moving in. This enables you to maximize the amount of damage you deal to your target as they’ll get hit by more robots.

As a quick example, suppose you’re farming the Dire ancients. They’ll probably be walking up and down. This means you want your March to go right to left (or left to right) to maximize the amount of damage you deal.

There are some other less important details about March. The AoE goes a bit further in front of Tinker than from behind, and it takes a few seconds for the robots to travel the entire distance. This allows you to do some cute things like using March to stack ancients from the low ground at the Radiant mid lane. However, these details aren’t that important for farming.

Technique

Farming quickly on Tinker is based off of rapidly clearing creeps thanks to March of the Machines. His immense mobility almost always guarantees that there will be somewhere for him to farm. Tinker’s basic farming pattern is simple:

1. TP to an area with creeps.
2. Cast March of the Machines to farm those creeps.
3. TP back to your fountain and repeat.

This is only the basic pattern, and doesn’t net you gold very quickly. To increase your farm drastically, add the following into your farming pattern:

• Farm multiple camps with each March of the Machines.
  When farming the jungle, you should be able to hit at least two camps with each March. Naturally, farming multiple camps at a time will increase your farm.
• Farm multiple areas before returning to the fountain.
  It takes relatively little mana to clear one wave of creeps. You only cast one or two Marches and will have plenty of mana left (with proper soul ring usage). With this mana, you should dip into the nearest jungle and farm some of the camps there. You could also TP to another lane and farm creeps near there before returning to the fountain.
• Stack neutral camps.
  One of Tinker’s strengths is that he can do stacks of any size with ease. Every time you stack a camp, you’re increasing the amount of gold you can farm. Try to stack a camp every minute, preferably the ancients.

Smart Farming

If you haven’t already realized, Tinker is able to farm a lot of the resources on the map very quickly. Although this is generally good for you, there is a potential downside: you steal farm from your teammates.

It’s important to consider where you should farm rather than teleporting to any convenient creep wave. When possible, you should farm lanes that your teammates will not want to farm. Typically, this consists of lanes that are already pushed out. For most heroes, it’s dangerous for to farm these lanes alone. As Tinker, you can easily blink into trees and teleport home as your March of the Machines clears the creeps.

Additionally, when farming the jungle, try to farm your opponent’s jungle. This way, your team can continue to farm its own jungle. Additionally, you reduce the farm that is easily available to the enemy team.

As a final point, try to steal your opponent’s stacks! If you know that your opponent is stacking ancients (for Luna, Gyrocopter, etc.), try to steal part or all of that stack. If you have a blink dagger, you’ll be able to do this with very little risk.

March Locations

Here are a handful of ways that you can cast March to farm neutral camps. All of these jungle Marches hit at least two camps.

March here to farm Radiant ancients.

Radiant inner jungle.

Radiant outer jungle.

Dire ancients.

Dire inner jungle.

Dire jungle.

Dire outer jungle.

Laning Phase

Our primary goal during the laning phase is to get our core items. There are three core items on Tinker: bottle, soul ring, and boots of travel. (We’ll talk more specifics about items later.) Getting these items then allows us to farm globally, as described in the previous section.

Because we start lacking levels and gold, we obviously can’t use all of the techniques described above to farm our core items. However, there are still some of these techniques that we can use during the laning phase.

The strongest lane for Tinker is the Radiant mid lane. As a mid hero, you’ll have a lot more mana through runes and bottle crowing. On Radiant mid, Tinker also has easy access to ancients and some jungle camps. This allows Tinker to stack ancients and/or jungle camps, then March them down once he’s gotten some levels.

Note that if the lane is in equilibrium, you can March the lane creeps (at :44 seconds) and get to the ancients in time to stack them (at :53 seconds). You can also head directly from the ancients to the top rune spawn every other minute.

The best way to learn the timings necessary to stack camps is by playing practice games.

Skills

There are a few guidelines I have for selecting your skills. Take Laser at level 1. By level 3, you should have two points in Laser. By level 9, you should be 2-2-4-1 (two points Laser, two points Heat-Seeking Missile, maxed March, one point Rearm).

Laser is a powerful harass tool (it does pure damage). Moreover, it causes your opponent to miss every attack, preventing them from getting last hits or denies. The second point in Laser makes it extremely annoying; a 160 damage nuke is quite powerful. In addition to using Laser to harass your opponent, remember that you can also use it to secure a last hit on a creep.

We want to max March of the Machines so that we can farm rapidly, as discussed before. March is useful during the first few minutes to push out the lane, giving you some time to stack or check runes. You’ll need at least 3 points in March before you’re able to easily clear ancients. Remember also that March is a very powerful spell if you’re getting ganked.

Note that I recommend having 2-2-4-1 by level 9, not 2-0-4-1 by level 7. You can and should take a few early points in Heat-Seeking Missile if it enables you to get kills. If you’re ever unsure of whether or not you’ll need to put points into Heat-Seeking Missile, just save your skill points. Since Tinker’s skills are all actives, you don’t actually need to use your skill points until you want to use a skill.

Some players will go for the max Laser, max Heat-Seeking Missile skill build. The strength of this build is that you have a lot of burst damage. The downside is that you’ll be very far behind if you aren’t able to get any kills.

Core Items

As mentioned, there are three core items on Tinker: bottle, soul ring, and boots of travel. As the Radiant mid, I will buy a bottle, brown boots, soul ring, and boots of travel in that order. Here’s some general advice:

• If you’re mid, you’ll want to get a bottle before boots of travel.
• If you’re in a side lane, you’ll want to get a soul ring before boots of travel.
• If you’re going to be farming neutral creeps before you get your boots of travel, you’ll want to get a soul ring.

The reasoning for the above points is straightforward. If you won’t be controlling runes or bottle crowing, a bottle is largely useless. If you’ll be farming neutrals, a soul ring gives you the mana to sustain this; it also allows you to Rearm for free.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tinker, there are two related questions you might have:

• Why does Tinker need a soul ring and a bottle?
• When/why would you buy a soul ring and a bottle before boots of travel?

A soul ring is absolutely crucial to playing Tinker because of its interaction with Rearm. Your Rearm will often be level 1 for the first 20-25 minutes of the game; at that point, it costs 150 mana. Soul ring gives you 150 mana and its cooldown is reset by Rearm. This means that having a soul ring will allow you to cast Rearm infinitely.

The bottle is important outside of the laning phase because it gives you some more mana and health. This is particularly strong because your bottle will be refilled every time you return to the fountain. Additionally, having a bottle allows you to regen mana more quickly while at the fountain.

You’d buy a soul ring in addition to a bottle before boots of travel if you plan to use several successive marches to farm. In particular, the soul ring is useful to march down ancients. You might be concerned that it will delay your boots of travel by 800 gold, but this shouldn’t be an issue if you are stacking camps.

Standard Itemization

Thanks to Rearm, many items become very powerful on Tinker. However, several players buy poor items. We’ll go over the standard itemization on Tinker.

These standard items are very simple: get a blink dagger, then get a scythe of vyse. Ideally, your blink dagger pickup should be by 14 minutes, and the hex pickup by 23-24 minutes.

The blink dagger enables Tinker to be extremely mobile and position himself properly. It also allows you to blink to safety by hiding in trees; you can then teleport back to your fountain.

Several players opt not to get a scythe of vyse as their next item; instead, they opt for something such as a dagon. Although dagon’s burst damage is appealing, being able to hex one of your opponents is much more powerful. Furthermore, the scythe gives much more mana and mana regeneration.

Tinker’s itemization can and should diverge after the scythe pickup to adjust to your opponent’s composition and items. I don’t want to go into strengths and considerations on when to buy these items, but additional strong items on Tinker include: dagon, bloodstone, shiva’s guard, eul’s scepter of divinity, ethereal blade, manta style, BKB, and force staff.

I personally view aghanim’s scepter to be useless on Tinker unless you need to turtle very hard. Although I think the Laser buff can be useful, the Missile buff doesn’t do much. This is because March is already an effective zoning tool. Moreover, a dagon will actually allow you to burst down a hero; additional Heat-Seeking Missiles just allows you to spread more damage across the opposing team.

I hope this article helps you with your Tinker play! I’d appreciate it if you shared with your friends!