This is the first of a series of posts I've been preparing for a long time ever since I made a post here asking what sorts of things people were having trouble with during their plateau periods of self-improvement. Today I will go over an extremely useful technique for anyone with some sort of Hex ability (although I will note here that it applies to any hero with instant-cast hard CC [silences, stuns, hexes, and Eul's Scepter] and is not limited to Lion and Shadow Shaman) which allows you to counter-initiate on any initiator without a BKB.
The execution is pretty simple: say you're a Lion against a team with a Tidehunter who has a Blink Dagger, and your two teams are in some sort of standoff/seige situation. You know your team is under the constant threat of being blink-ravaged, so how do you deal with that possibility? Here's what you do; whenever you have vision of the Tidehunter, cast your Hex on him, no matter how far away he is. You will notice that your hero will begin to walk towards the enemy Tidehunter in an attempt to hex him. As soon as you walk out of the safety of your team, stop-cancel your Hex, or just walk back toward your team's back line. Repeat this process for as long as the standoff takes.
The purpose of this technique is to instantly shut down an enemy's blink initiation with whatever instant-cast CC your team has. If the enemy Tidehunter attempts to blink-ravage in while you are in the process of walking towards him to cast Hex, you will, without ANY DELAY, hex him as he blinks into your team, giving you perfect counter-initiation every time until they get some kind of magic immunity. This technique, as mentioned above, works for all single-target silences, Euls, hexes (including Sheepstick), and Rubick's Telekinesis.
The one caveat I can offer is to not let your hero walk too far forward during the first step because two things can happen: 1) the enemy initiates on you and your team loses the ensuing 4v5 because you get blown the fuck up, or 2) the enemy initiator blinks behind you and your turn animation is not fast enough to let you turn and hex before they can get their initiation off. But as long as you avoid this pitfall, you should be golden.
I hope this is useful to a lot of mid/support players who are trying to work on their teamfighting; leave me some feedback about whether you found this useful and what I can do to improve for the future (formatting stuff, potential video accompaniments, etc).
Cheers!
