Broodmother

Black Arachnia the Broodmother is a melee agility hero who is a notably powerful pusher. Her trademark spiderlings, as both an asset and a liability, define her play style. While a possible additional source of income, experience and lane pushes, spiderlings can easily feed opponents when not handled with deft micro and great awareness. Broodmother's abilities allow her to summon those spiderlings to do her bidding, to conceal herself and her spiderlings in an area, and to slow and kill heroes with relative ease if caught off guard, all while staying as elusive as possible with her webs and passives. She spends most of the early game pressuring a lane with little concern, due to her spiderlings and her invisibility/added HP regeneration, but she can also transition into a difficult to kill melee carry, which can dive in on and rapidly kill lone enemies with the right items later on.

Recommended items
Starting items:
 * and both provide needed health regeneration during the laning phase.
 * gives extra armor and can be built into a from the side-shop.

Early-game items:
 * The extra mana burst from allows her to use  to harass the lane rival and safely take last hits.
 * provides attribute bonuses as well as an armor aura for extra pushing power and can be upgraded into Vladimir's Offering later on.

Core items:
 * provide attack speed and more survivability through additional attribute bonuses.
 * The silence from allows her to kill heroes with escape abilities and/or stuns.
 * provides a useful lifesteal effect on both Broodmother and nearby spiderlings, fully stacking with the effects of her ultimate ability. The bonus armor and attack damage greatly increase the ability of Broodmother and her spiders to push lanes and towers.

Situational items:
 * 's magic immunity synergies with the huge lifesteal from and makes her very hard to kill.
 * offers bonus attack speed, damage, movement speed and stats. The active ability,, can be used to dispel debuffs such as , dodge stunning projectiles such as , or to increase Broodmother's ability to push lanes and towers.
 * offers bonus attack speed, damage and armor, increasing Broodmother's carry potential. The only downside is that the enemy most likely purchases on their carries to counter you anyway, making the evasion of Butterfly less useful.
 * is bought to dominate enemies with evasion and the built-in mini-bash can prevent enemies from escaping with a.
 * provides useful area damage that Broodmother can easily apply while invisible and/or unreachable both to push lanes faster and to harass incautious enemy heroes.
 * boosts the attack speed and armor of Broodmother and her spiders.

Tips

 * is a prime choice for going into the offlane, as her webs give her the survivability and the pushing power from the spiderlings can overwhelm a lane without need of her being babysat by an additional hero.
 * acts as a ranged nuke, and is very useful for killing weak enemies that are fleeing.
 * is a great item to have on her as the instant mana boost gives her the ability to spawn more spiderlings and the HP regen from the webs can cover for the loss of HP from the.
 * Going right into a is a good choice as the combination of magic immunity and the powerful lifesteal from  makes the  a very difficult opponent to kill.
 * Casting on top of an enemy tower makes it easy to dive in on weak heroes. The regen and movespeed bonus combined with 's slow is very effective for diving on heroes with no reliable escape or stun.
 * is very effective against solitary targets, but against multiple enemies she suffers; as her lifesteal can generally only replenish the damage taken from a solitary foe.
 * A quick gives her more movement speed to evade ganks and remain a threat for that lane. Then this can be made into a  which gives her a way to remove dust and confuse the enemy to escape ganks and waste their crowd control spells.
 * is not a Unique Attack Modifier and stacks fully with and  and also with  making almost impossible for your enemies to escape on foot.

Trivia

 * In her DotA biography, Broodmother's spiderlings originated from her relationship with Anub'arak, the Nerubian Assassin. In Dota 2, such tie between the two heroes does not exist.
 * Broodmother's Fun/Alternate name was Broodmama.
 * Broodmother's rarer response Broo rare 02.mp3 "some pig." is a reference to the children's novel Charlotte's Web.