Ogre Magi

When to Pick Ogre Magi?

Tips & common mistakes

• Buy strength items — not because they are support items but because every point of strength increases your Fireblast damage through the 1.5x scaling, increases your Multicast chance slightly through Dumb Luck, and gives you mana and mana regen simultaneously. Vanguard, Pipe of Insight, and Crimson Guard are not just tanky—they are functional stat items that make Ogre Magi significantly more threatening offensively at the same time as they make him harder to kill. This is a hero where tank items and damage items are literally the same items.
• Bloodlust's Multicast applies to random nearby allies—which means the correct cast target when you want everyone to receive Bloodlust is the ally that has the most other allies nearby, not always your carry specifically. In a grouped teamfight where five heroes are standing close together, Bloodlust Multicast can potentially land on four different allies in a single cast. Position near your team before casting.
• Fireblast stuns for a short duration and deals damage that scales with strength—which means the longer the game goes and the more strength items you have purchased, the harder each Fireblast hit lands in absolute damage terms. Most Ogre Magi players never think about Fireblast damage late in games because they assume it stops scaling, but a high-strength Ogre Magi late hitting a Fireblast Multicast on a squishy support is doing genuinely significant burst damage that cannot be ignored.
• Spiked Carapace—wait, wrong hero. Spiked Carapace is Nyx. Ogre Magi has Ignite, and most Ogre players cast it once and forget about it. The second Ignite projectile targets a random nearby enemy automatically—in teamfights where multiple enemies are grouped, this means a single Ignite cast spreads the slow and damage to two heroes simultaneously, which is a meaningful AOE harass tool that most players are not maximizing. Cast Ignite on the enemy that has the most other enemies nearby for double value.
• Multicast chance is a pseudo-random distribution—meaning after a long sequence without a multicast proc, the next cast is increasingly more likely to proc. Track your recent cast history mentally and use more important spells like Fireblast after several non-proc casts rather than burning them. Fireblast when you know you just proc'd three in a row and the probability is temporarily lower.
• Ogre Magi has 285 base movement speed — one of the lowest in the game for any hero. Buy Phase Boots or Power Treads early and accept that you will never out-chase anything without Bloodlust active on you. Use Bloodlust self-cast proactively when rotating between lanes rather than only in fights, because getting to fights at 285 movement speed means arriving after the fight is already over.
• Fire Shield from Aghanim's Shard gives an ally a damage-absorbing shield that fires back small fireballs at attackers—in the current meta of physical damage carries right-clicking everything, Fire Shield on your carry in a fight provides both a damage barrier AND a harassment source that proc-fires off every attack the shielded hero takes. Buy Shard when the game is going reasonably well and you have extra gold.