Juggernaut is not a good hero in this part. He is currently under 45% win in Divine+ games and feels completely out of place in the current meta. Despite this, some players are finding good success with the hero, opting for a more coveted late game oriented build. Today we’re going to analyze this approach, while also discussing exactly why Juggernaut is so weak right now.
There are currently two types of transport heroes that are viable. Dominators of lanes like monkey king,
Ursa and
Slark, or flash-farmers like
Medusa,
Alchemist or
Terror terror. Technically, you can consider
Juggernaut to be one of the first, but in reality, when playing against the people early
Vanguard, he can’t reliably get kills unless he snowballs from minute zero.
Its agricultural potential is also limited. Common Maelstrom’s first item still leaves him unreachable when compared to dedicated farming heroes and doesn’t provide the necessary physical damage scaling.
However, what the hero does have is one of the best BAT values in the game, one of the most reliable crits, and one of the strongest support abilities in the Healing Ward. This is what is being exploited by the strongest Juggernaut players right now.
The new Juggernaut build is actually the old Juggernaut build, before Aghanim’s shard on the hero became mandatory. We’re playing a strong late game right-click scaling machine that has crits built in and came at level twenty, it also has very strong lifesteal built in through talents.
Basically, the idea is to make Juggernaut invincible through the combination of Healing Ward, Blade Dance lifesteal and Omnislash immunity. To achieve this you need high attack speed, high physical damage and a good amount of HP.
What it means is that you get Power steps in place of
Phase Boots.
Battle Fury instead of
Maelstrom and a
Derivative Yasha, instead of
Shard of Aghanim.
Further progress involves going to each of them Eye of Scud or
Butterfly for survivability and extra DPS, and then you want to get ideally
Scepter of Aghanim and end the game.
This is as old as it gets and was the default Juggernaut build before the introduction of the Shard. With this build, the Juggernaut is quite dense, can come to the front line, especially if it is in front of the enemy carry, and can surround very well with the help of Ward of Healing.
If the game can’t be closed in time, he might as well go for one Abyssal Blade or
Cancellation. Accompanied by
Swift Blink allows him to kill priority targets early in the fight, creating an early advantage in teamfights.
So when does Juggernaut come into play? Juggernaut is a relatively weak hero, but he has his uses.
He’s great against heroes that limit your movement if you don’t have BKB. Heroes like Disruptor can often force bad use of BKB, but Juggernaut doesn’t really care – he can always spin and TP or move away. Same thing with characters like
March,
Pangolier or even
Under God.
There is also a point to note about playing against characters with high magic damage. One of the biggest problems with the current BKB is that it doesn’t give you enough magic damage resistance. Heroes like Crystal Maiden,
Venomancer or even
Skywrath Mage can deal a lot of damage even through debuff immunity if left unchecked.
Juggernaut solves this problem easily by surviving their magic damage with impunity, killing them quickly courtesy of Swift Slash and also keeping his team alive Ward of Healing.
Depending on the enemy draft, Juggernaut definitely has games where he can be considered the absolute best pick, and they aren’t as rare as some might assume. Building and playing it correctly, focusing on killing enemy shots and evaluating the advantages of building the item, however, is very complicated.
In the end game your task is to create conditions where you are numerically superior to the enemy carriers. Juggernaut is unlikely to kill the committed enemy outright, in a fair 1v1 fight. But he can quickly remove enemy supports while protecting his team, and if played well, Juggernaut can be undeniably powerful.
The problem is that you can be just as powerful playing the meta in a default way and it will generally be much easier and just as powerful as a perfectly played Juggernaut.