Sand King

Crixalis the Sand King is a melee strength hero with one of the highest area of effect damage outputs in the entire game. All four of his abilities can affect multiple enemy units, and can combo quite well with each other. He is one of the most versatile Heroes in the game as he can push, initiate, support, roam, gank, and even semi-carry if he does well. He is also versatile enough to be able to go to any lane with at least moderate success, but works best as a participant in a dual lane or trilane. His main role in the team is to deliver a devastating initiation, delivering both stuns and slows to the enemy team. Burrowstrike allows him to tunnel underground and resurface in a short line, dealing damage and stunning all targets it hits; it can also serve as an escape tool. Sandstorm is mainly used as escape mechanism to provide brief invisibility and disjoint projectiles. Caustic Finale serves as a strong harassing tool against enemy melee heroes or as a followup after he Burrowstrikes a creep wave, allowing him to farm quite effectively. Finally, his ultimate, after a short channeling time, delivers a vast amount of AoE damage and slow centered around himself, which necessitates the purchase of a Blink Dagger in order to displace himself within the enemy team. A Sand King that is played effectively is one that grinds the entire enemy team into dust.

Tips

 * Use Blink Dagger to extend stun range by blinking in front of a hero and stun as many heroes as possible.
 * Blink Dagger is a commonly built item for Sand King, used to initiate after channeling your Ultimate.
 * The combo of Ulti+shift click blink is a formidable and a very strong way to enter team fights with the element of surprise and deal a ton of area of effect damage. Basically turning the tides of battle in your favour.
 * A full blast of Epicenter at level 3 will deal 1100 damage, easily crippling the opposing team
 * After initiating, Sand Storm will protect you from auto attacks as well as deal damage to any enemy who stays in the area.
 * In early game, hitting each creep once with Caustic Finale, followed by Burrowstrike will deal insane damage in that area and likely instagib any enemy hero who happens to be there.
 * An effective early game combo involves using Burrowstrike on an enemy so they end up facing away from you and then immediately casting Epicenter. If done correctly, the enemy will be unable to stun you out of the channel phase and it will almost guarantee a kill.  You should discontinue this around mid game, as you will need to save your ultimate for teamfight situations.
 * The philosophy behind Sand Storm is that the enemy will grow bored of waiting for you to end its channeling, or will be too busy with the rest of your team to care about you. Note that while you cannot be hurt by autoattacks during its channeling, area of effect spells affect you fully. In the cases where the enemy has an AOE stun such as Lina's Light Strike Array or Invoker's Deafening Blast, it might be better to use Burrowstrike as an escape tool.

Trivia

 * In a very old version of DotA, there was a bug where the final pulse of Crixalis's Epicenter would cause 10,000 points of damage. The only unit that was able to survive this was a super beefed up Pudge that was used to measure the amount of damage dealt by the ability.
 * Sand King's line, "Like sands in the hourglass, these are the days of defeat" is an allusion to the soap opera Days of our Lives's introduction line, "Like sands in the hourglass, these are the days of our lives."