DotA2 - Original Thread

I really love Timbersaw and I'm much better with him than most other heroes, possibly because I'm just good at him or possibly because he's fun and so I've had more practice with him. He's a really strong hero with great burst damage and high mobility and his personality is great. He's somewhat of a pubstomp hero if you know how to play him since his early burst damage comes completely out of left field for most people.

 quick guide to timbersaw

There is a large emphasis on positioning with him that some other heroes don't have as much as he does because you have to be mindful of both where the trees are, where the enemy is relative to you and your allies as well as relative to the treeline, and where you'll end up if you timberchain. There are some really awesome things you can do with him though. You have a casual 640 pure damage in an AoE when you hit level 6 which is enough to burst down most heroes. Take Timberchain at level one and max it first, take Whirling Death at level 2 against a lane that you think is going to engage on you but take Reactive Armor at level 2 if they're more focused on harass. Take whichever one you didn't take at 2 when you hit 4. Usually max out Whirling Death after Timberchain (taking Chakram whenever possible of course) but a couple more points into Reactive Armor may be a decent idea if they've got a ton of physical damage and you're getting focused down very easily. While it may be tempting, don't forgo levels in Reactive Armor for stats to get your mana pool up. It really isn't worth it.
Get Magic Wand then Arcane Boots (ofc with consumables and TP's when necessary) and then your item build is relatively open. Valid items at this point include Bloodstone, Scepter of Divinity, Rod of Atos, Orchid Malevolence, and Linken's Sphere. You really need to get your mana pool and mana regen up. After that you can pick from any of the other above items, or you can get a Heart of Tarrasque, Shiva's Guard, Pipe of Insight, Mekanism, Drum of Endurance (this can actually come before the first big item if your team needs a drum carrier), or even a Force Staff. I wouldn't recommend Blademail because of your naturally high armor because of Reactive Armor. While you can disassemble your Arcane Boots for your Bloodstone if you want it, I really don't recommend doing so simply because you need all the mana you can humanly get. The only situation I would recommend it in would be if you're kinda behind and really need Bloodstone up for the next fight. I would then recommend getting a new Energy Booster and re-making your Arcane Boots.
Some tips on your skill combos:
If you get a force staff you can push enemy heroes right into the treeline for a quick Timberchain+Whirling Death combo (make sure to get a tree or two into your Whirling Death AoE so you get that precious, precious pure damage), otherwise you have to either target heroes by the treeline or simply deal with the damage from Whirling Death being magical which is sub-par but it's not the worst thing in the world. Use Chakram to lock heroes down for your Timberchain and for your allies if you can, otherwise just use it for the quick damage on the pass-through. Your Whirling Death reduces their primary stat by a percentage for a bit, this pierces BKB and is therefore super effective against str heroes (but also quite effective against int heroes, functioning as a manaburn in essence). Just basically zip across the enemy team in zig-zags dealing as much pure damage with your Timberchains as possible. Currently Timberchain is a bit glitchy in that if you get stunned or something while you're casting Timberchain, the chain will still keep going and you'll move with it. Abuse this if you can.
Keep in mind that Timbersaw does start falling off in relevancy as heroes get larger health pools to mitigate your damage and BKB's start popping up as you're pretty useless against magic-immune targets since you have no true disables, let alone BKB-piercing disables. This is why you consider Atos or Eul's so that you can actually keep even a very mobile target like AM, QoP, Puck, or Morphling under control but really any hero with any measure of mobility. Chakram prevents you from attacking and you have no real incentive to attack so you can't really transition yourself into a hyper-mobile melee carry with AoE lockdown.