General DiscussionAnnoying Strat From Radiant. Early till Mid. Just Sharing.

Radiant did a level 1 rosh and an Earthshaker creep block strategy.
They took so long at rosh and was all so low hp I'm surprised Dire didn't go and contest. Would have been 3 kills straight away and maybe steal the aegis too.

The ES block strat was in a Navi video I think and after that it became quite "popular". Really though using ES/Clockwerk to block creeps has been around for a while. The ES Dire ancient jungle strat is similar to this as well.
Players in VH bracket should know there's some kind of pulling/blocking going on as soon as creeps stop appearing, even if they have never seen this specific ES trick.

It would be interesting to see the win rate of this strategy in VH bracket, I think it would have a very low win rate. The same thing happened to me 4 days ago.

http://dotabuff.com/matches/312291564

Only this time while the ES is blocking there is a seer in the lane tanking our creeps with ion shell on and generally made it hard for us to dive pass. After getting the Seer a bit lower I dived pass the T1 and used tango on a tree. They already blocked 4-5 waves of creeps by then though. I nearly died to unblock the creeps but they dived me so hard and ended up giving first blood to Timber. Then you have a level 1 ES with a quelling blade and only clarity potions, basically a big melee creep in lane. Seer had used a ton of regen to stop us from going over to unblock the camp so he could barely lane as well.

The ES player has over 1.2k games and 54.5% win rate in VH bracket, he knows how to play the game but doing this trick made him feed horribly.

Edit:
If there's an aggressive tri-lane there to protect this strat and mid is ready to help radiant top as well then it could be a really annoying strat. Casually doing things like this in pubs is like other "tricks" such as Medusa/Invoker ancient jungling from level 1. Anything where you start with unusual items is basically an all-in with a low chance of success, most of the time players who aren't new to the game would shut it down easily. After it's been shut down if the match making is somewhat even, you won't be able to lane as a medusa/es/invoker with a quelling blade and basically no HP regen.

Its one of those insanely risky strats that can sometimes catch the other team off guard but it fails alot more than it works