Weaver
The fabric of creation needs constant care, lest it grow tattered; for when it unravels, whole worlds come undone. It is the work of the Weavers to keep the fabric tight, to repair worn spots in the mesh of reality. They also defend from the things that gnaw and lay their eggs in frayed regions, whose young can quickly devour an entire universe if the Weavers let their attention lapse. Skitskurr was a master Weaver, charged with keeping one small patch of creation tightly woven and unfaded. But the job was not enough to satisfy. It nagged him that the original work of creation all lay in the past; the Loom had done its work and travelled on. He wanted to create rather than merely maintain--to weave worlds of his own devising. He began making small changes to his domain, but the thrill of creation proved addictive, and his strokes became bolder, pulling against the pattern that the Loom had woven. <br><br>The guardians came, with their scissors, and Weaver's world was pared off, snipped from the cosmic tapestry, which they rewove without him in it. Skitskurr found himself alone, apart from his kind, a state that would have been torment for any other Weaver. But Skitskurr rejoiced, for now he was free. Free to create for himself, to begin anew. The raw materials he needed to weave a new reality were all around him. All he had to do was tear apart this old world at the seams.
Base STR
16 +2
Base AGI
17 +3.3
Base INT
20 +2
Move Speed
275
Attack Range
425
Base Armor
1
Attack DMG
37–43
Projectile
900
Innate Abilities
Threads of Fate
Whenever Weaver deals damage to an enemy hero with an attack or ability, if he remains within 700 range of them for 1.5s, he establishes a Thread of Fate that briefly slows the enemy and ties Weaver and the enemy together. Each established thread of fate grants bonus damage to Weaver.
THREAD DURATION:
6
THREAD BREAK DISTANCE:
900
DAMAGE PER THREAD:
10%
SLOW DURATION:
0.2
MOVEMENT SLOW:
100%
Abilities
The Swarm
Cooldown
44 / 36 / 28 / 20s
Mana
110
Weaver launches a swarm of 12 young Weavers that latch on any enemy unit in their path, attacking and reducing armor until it is killed.
ATTACK DAMAGE:
18 / 23 / 28 / 33
ATTACK INTERVAL:
1.2 / 1.05 / 0.9 / 0.75
COUNT:
12
ARMOR REDUCTION PER ATTACK:
1
DURATION:
16
ATTACKS TO DESTROY:
6 / 7 / 8 / 9
- When a beetle latches on a target, it will remain there until it is killed or the duration expires.
- Beetles are Spell Immune, but can be killed in 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 attacks from a unit. Heroes deal double damage to beetles.
- Beetles provide vision.
Skitskurr opens a gap in the space time fabric, allowing young Weavers to slip through and aid him in combat.
Shukuchi
Cooldown
15 / 12 / 9 / 6s
Mana
65
Weaver shifts out of visibility, gaining max movement speed and doing harm to any enemies it passes through.
DAMAGE:
100 / 130 / 160 / 190
RADIUS:
175
FADE TIME:
0.25
DURATION:
4
MOVESPEED:
550
- Can only damage the same unit once per cast.
As the Weavers worked in the fabric of creation, small wormholes allowed them to slip through time to better work their craft.
Geminate Attack
Cooldown
9 / 7 / 5 / 3s
Allows Weaver to dispatch two attacks at once.
BONUS DAMAGE ON GEMINATE:
20 / 35 / 50 / 65
- Additional attacks leave Weaver 0.25 seconds after the previous one, and have no range limit.
- Bonus damage only applies to the geminated attack and not the original attack.
Skitskurr's relationship with time is somewhat variable, causing his actions to be witnessed - and felt - more than once.
Time Lapse
Cooldown
70 / 55 / 40s
Mana
150 / 75
Weaver warps backward to whatever position it was in five seconds earlier--regaining the HP and mana from that time. No effect on cooldown, gold or experience. DISPEL TYPE: Strong Dispel
- Removes most negative buffs from Weaver.
- Time Lapse disjoints projectiles.
If Skitskurr does not deem the current reality of the world to fit his desires, he simply crawls back in time to right what was wronged.
Talents
Aghanim's Scepter
Time Lapse
Time Lapse may target allied Heroes with 500 cast range.
Aghanim's Shard
Shukuchi
Shukuchi puts a mark on enemies it damages that last 0 seconds. 0s after Weaver exits Shukuchi, enemies with a mark within 0 range will also be attacked with a secondary Geminate attack
Hero Performance
Median across all public matches · OpenDotaForm
46%
Win rate in recent matches
Performance
100%
KDA ratio (kills + assists / deaths)
Laning
44%
Last hits per minute over full game
Farm
62%
Average gold per minute
Fighting
33%
Average kills + assists per match
Experience
81%
Average XP per minute
Strategy
When to Pick Weaver?
Let me tell you something about Weaver that most guides completely refuse to acknowledge, because it requires being honest about what makes this hero so miserable to play against. Weaver is not strong because he does a lot of damage. He is strong because he is genuinely one of the HARDEST heroes in the game to actually kill. Not the tankiest—hardest to kill. There is a difference. Axe is tanky. Weaver is slippery, and those are two completely different problems for the enemy team to solve. Shukuchi makes him invisible, passes through units, and disjoins projectiles on cast. Time Lapse rewinds him five seconds back—full HP, full mana, strong dispel—with no effect on his cooldowns, gold, or experience. Do you understand what that means? He can dive into a fight, take a near-lethal amount of damage, cast Time Lapse, and be back at full health as if nothing happened. And then Shukuchi backed out. For a support trying to babysit kills on this hero, it is a genuinely infuriating experience that feels unfair the first time you see it happen. It is not unfair — it is just very well designed. And in the current patch, with the new Threads of Fate innate that ties Weaver to enemies he damages for a 10% bonus damage per thread—the hero is faster, stickier, and hits harder than ever.
Now here is what you need to understand before you lock him in. The current meta on patch 7.41b is a high-tempo, durability-focused environment. Pro items for Weaver right now include Divine Rapier, Daedalus, Monkey King Bar, Linken's Sphere, and Satanic — and that item progression tells you everything about what kind of game he wants. He wants the game to go long enough for him to turn every Geminate Attack into a crit-proccing, lifesteal-triggering, armor-reducing nightmare. The meta is not explicitly punishing him the way it was for passive farmers like Medusa—he has early-game lane presence, real harass power with Geminate from level two, and The Swarm reducing armor from the very start of the game. He has enough early-game tools to survive the dangerous laning phase and get to his first item without falling completely behind.
Pick him into lineups with no reliable silence and no AOE that can catch him in Shukuchi. Lifestealer is the perfect example of a bad matchup for Weaver's ENEMIES—Open Wounds doesn't work while Shukuchi is active, Lifestealer has no lockdown, and Weaver kites him effortlessly for the entire game while The Swarm shreds his armor and Geminate hits him twice every few seconds. Undying has literally no way to catch him—Zombies disappear when he goes invisible, and Shukuchi dodges everything Undying has. Pudge is the same story—Meat Hook is a projectile that Shukuchi disjoints on cast, and Weaver can hit Pudge's enormous body all day while the hook goes wide into the trees. He pairs beautifully with Crystal Maiden—Arcane Aura lets him spam Shukuchi more frequently, and CM's slows and stuns set up kills for Weaver to freely right-click people who suddenly cannot move. Any hero with an armor reduction aura or ability stacks beautifully with The Swarm, Vengeful Spirit's Wave of Terror, or Alchemist's Acid Spray because every stack of armor reduction multiplies Geminate Attack's physical damage output.
The heroes that make Weaver's life genuinely miserable are heroes that can either lock him down before he reacts or track him through invisibility and force him to burn Time Lapse before his HP is actually critical. Bloodseeker with Rupture is the hardest counter in the game bar none—Rupture persists through Shukuchi AND through Time Lapse, which means the one escape tool Weaver has to cheat death does not cancel the Rupture debuff. If he time lapses, he is back at full HP but still ruptured, and if he moves fast, he still takes the damage. Thirst also reveals him at low HP through Shukuchi, so Bloodseeker always knows exactly where he is. Faceless Void is equally terrifying—Chronosphere reveals invisibility and completely removes Shukuchi and Time Lapse as options for the duration. He is just standing there, frozen, while Void hits him twice per attack cycle. And Axe deserves a specific mention because Berserker's Call catches Weaver even inside Shukuchi, Culling Blade removes the possibility of Time Lapse saving him at low HP, and Battle Hunger pops Linken's Sphere on a 12-second cooldown—which means Weaver's primary protective item is irrelevant against Axe.
Tips & common mistakes
- Shukuchi has NO cast point. Zero. It is instant. This means you can use it to dodge incoming debuffs AFTER you see the animation begin—not before, after. Most pub Weaver players panic and try to preemptively Shukuchi before the stun lands, which means they waste the cooldown and still get stunned when it ends. The correct play is to watch for the cast animation of something like Lina's Laguna Blade or Lion's Hex and activate Shukuchi at the exact moment the animation starts. The projectile will disjoin. Practice this. It is the single most important mechanical skill on Weaver, and almost nobody at average MMR executes it correctly.
- · Time Lapse does NOT reset your cooldowns. This is the most common misconception about the ability among players picking up Weaver for the first time. If you used Shukuchi three seconds ago and you time lapse, Shukuchi is still on cooldown for the remaining cooldown duration from five seconds ago. What it DOES do is strongly dispel—meaning it removes most negative buffs, disjoints in-flight projectiles, and gives you back the HP and mana you had five seconds ago. The correct use of Time Lapse is as a REACTIVE tool the moment you realize you are going to die, not as a panic button after you are already at 5% HP with no escape route.
- · Geminate Attack procs ALL on-hit effects — lifesteal, crits from Daedalus, the slow from Eye of Skadi, stun from Skull Basher, everything. This means Daedalus is one of the most disgusting items on Weaver in the current meta because every Geminate proc can trigger a 235% critical strike separately from your main attack. Two attacks, each can crit independently. In a single attack cycle on a high-armor enemy with The Swarm already reducing armor, this creates a damage spike that kills almost any squishy hero in one interaction. Build Daedalus earlier than you think you need it once your survivability items are sorted.
- · TOGGLE Geminate Attack OFF when denying your own creeps. Geminate does not activate on denied creeps, but the animation still plays and reveals your intent. More importantly, toggle it off when last hitting under your tower — if Geminate procs on a tower hit while the creep is already dying, it wastes the charge. On / off awareness of Geminate is a small thing that separates average Weaver players from good ones.
- · Linken's Sphere and Time Lapse together makes Weaver one of the hardest heroes to assassinate in the game. Linken's blocks the first single-target disable. Time lapse survives the second. This means the enemy team needs THREE separate disables to successfully kill Weaver in sequence—first to pop Linken's, second to CC him so he cannot Time Lapse, and third to actually finish the kill before his HP resets. In pub Dota below a very high MMR bracket, most teams cannot coordinate three sequential disables on the same target. This is why Weaver feels unstoppable when played correctly — not because he is tanky, but because the kill conditions against him require a level of coordination that most pub teams simply don't have.
- · Play around with your Threads of Fate innate in the new patch. After you deal damage to an enemy hero and stay within 700 range for 1.5 seconds, you establish a thread that slows them and gives you 10% bonus damage per thread. This means you should NOT immediately SHUNKOCHI away after getting your first hit in—stay close for that 1.5-second window to establish the thread, THEN SHUNKOCHI if you need to reposition. Most players are treating Weaver exactly as he was played in older patches, running in, hitting once, and Shukuchi out. In 7.41, that approach leaves massive damage on the table.
Summary
Weaver is the nightmare scenario for any support in this patch — and I mean that literally. You cannot catch him, you cannot burst him, and if you somehow manage to get him low, he just rewinds time and is back at full HP before your next spell comes off cooldown. He is not the highest-ceiling carry in the game at the professional level right now, where teams have Bloodseeker and Faceless Void specifically ready to ruin his day.
But in pub Dota on patch 7.41b, against teams that have no reliable silence, no Rupture, and no Axe to call him in the middle of Shukuchi—he is one of the cleanest carries you can play.
Pick him into lineups with no lockdown and no invisibility detection, build Linken's into Daedalus, respect your Time Lapse as a REACTIVE escape rather than a combo finisher, master the Shukuchi disjoint on incoming disables, and then watch the enemy support spend the entire game typing in all chat about how he is broken. He has always been like this. He will always be like this.
The question is only whether the enemy draft is equipped to deal with it — and in most pub games, it is not.
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