Lich

When to Pick Lich?

Tips & common mistakes

• Sacrifice on cooldown is not a suggestion — it is a mandatory discipline that separates a Lich who understands the hero from a Lich who just happened to pick him in the hero selection screen. The two-minute cooldown means you get it roughly every two minutes in the laning phase — use it every single time it comes off cooldown without exception. Missing even one or two Sacrifice casts in the early game is falling behind on the exact advantage that makes Lich worth picking in the first place.
• Frost Blast's slow is the entire reason the enemy carry cannot trade efficiently against you in the laning phase. The moment it hits, they are moving at a fraction of their normal speed and taking extra damage from the AoE cold around the impact—use this to force the enemy carry away from creep kills, to set up your own carry for early right-click harassment, and to keep the lane pushed under the enemy tower where they have no comfortable farming position.
• Frost Shield is criminally underused in average games, and it is one of the most impactful defensive tools any hard support has in the entire game right now. Slapping Frost Shield on your carry the moment someone initiates on them reduces all incoming damage by 70% for several seconds and slows everyone attacking the shielded target—in a meta of right-click-heavy carries trying to burst your carry down in two seconds, this literally saves their life in fights that would otherwise be unwinnable.
• Chain Frost's bouncing behavior is entirely dependent on how many heroes are grouped together—the more heroes clumped in a tight space, the more bounces Chain Frost deals between them and the more total damage it deals. Do NOT use Chain Frost on a single isolated hero in an empty area of the map—save it for team fights where multiple heroes are standing near each other and let the bounces stack up into something genuinely terrifying. Unlimited bounces at level 25 means a late-game Chain Frost into five grouped heroes is basically infinite damage until everyone is dead.
• The level advantage from Sacrifice means you should be using your stronger spells more aggressively than a typical hard support would — because you are one to two levels ahead of the enemy support, your spells hit harder, your mana pool is slightly bigger, and your cooldowns feel comparatively better. Lean into this advantage rather than playing passively like you are a normal position-five hero—you are ahead on resources, and you should be making the enemy pay for it.
• Stop using Chain Frost as a panic button when you are already dying in a bad position. It is your most important teamfight ultimate, and it should be used proactively when the fight starts in a position where the bounces can chain between multiple targets—not reactively when you are already low HP and trying to get one last spell off before you die, having contributed nothing meaningful to the outcome.
• Build Glimmer Cape and Force Staff as your primary utility items in the current meta — both items extend Lich's survivability and usefulness significantly beyond just his spells. Glimmer Cape saves his life when he gets jumped, Force Staff lets him reposition for Chain Frost or escape a bad initiation, and Guardian Greaves provides the team-wide healing that makes him genuinely valuable in extended fights beyond just his damage output.