@Obscenitor, dont get "siege" hat so early, you can take another rank of hammer instead, which is way more usefull(remeber that siege hat only does like 40 dps) .
It does 500 damage per shot to structures, which is quite a bit mroe than 40 DPS. Against players it's usually hitting for around 130, if I hit an enemy DG twice with it between hammer cooldowns it does about the same damage with greater utility.
Also you may want to get boulderrol earlier, although in my experience having Rook Roll I is ussually good enough if you are fast enough.
You mean the later ranks? I get the first one at level 5, though I do get rank II late.
Also, towers 4? Im not sure really, getting maxing hammer a level earlier is way more usefull imho. I do agree with your orb of defiance, very nice synergy with staff of renewal.
This goes back to people's perception of towers doing shitty damage late game. Rank 4 towers do about 210 damage per shot, I don't have an exact number because there's a damage range on it. That's a good 150 damage per hit on most players. For me though it's not even about the damage, it's about mana. The cost drops from 400 to 200, so I end up doing more damage with rank 4 towers and rank 2 slam than I would with rank 4 slam because I'm casting slam twice as ofter as I otherwise would due to the mana I'm saving.
A rook must work with teammates, otherwise his speed will mean he is easily ganked on, even with high hp and orb of defieance.
Also remeber that minion builds will smoke your towers since they distract ower fire.
Minion builds are hard on rook regardless. Spirits are a pain to connect with if you depend on hammer slam and a good player is going to surround you with nightwalkers rather than leave them on one side of you, making it difficult to really connect with all those on a good slam unless you lead with a boulder roll which puts you short on mana and two important cooldowns. Then you have Sedna's minions which can't be defeated by max rank hammer slams due to their HP and QoT's which are purely ranged (well except for minotaurs) and can be instantly resummoned.
There's no perfect counter to minions, but I find that the most helpful counter to them for me whittling them down with the tower dance and then finishing them with a slam. Also esacpe works well if EB doesn't warp in and bite to allow them to catch up. Having towers is a much greater deterrent to that than hammer slam in my experience, as warping in ahead of the minions means EB is going to be focused fired and the dispersion minions cause is a non-issue. A boulder roll on the EB while half a dozen towers are hitting him can take off half his life and tag the minions behind him to stall their assault.
But this could go on for a long, long time. I've played a ton of games and had a lot of victories and losses against minion swarms. The build I use is the one that gives me the most versatility and that is the most generally effective with my playstyle.
Well I always take exactly 2 ranks of towers since they are powerful early game, but I rarely build "farms" with them.
With a 6-8 second cooldown on towers I would say that any time you spend about 40 seconds in one place you can have a reasonable farm built. Any time I move near the front line I leave a little trail of towers behind me. That to me is tower farming and it happens quite a bit.
You say it's easy to take them down or go around them and that's not true. Late game towers get 2400+ HP, most players do at best 300 DPS by level 10, meaning they can only drop them as fast as you can build them if they spend all their time attacking them while creeps, your allies, you, etc. advance on them. Awareness of your opponents' abilties is key here. If you stack up your towers against a regulus with mines and AA you'll lose all of them in a heartbeat. If you put them all together against a QoT who drops them to -1500 armor and then does 600 splash damage on each hit they're going to go down practically instantly. However the most popular DGs cannot take down a properly built farm all that quickly without injury to themselves.
As for going around them, that is impossible on any map buy prison. You can go through them, but not around them without passing through high visibility areas like passing the exp flag and approaching from the back of the lanes on Cataract.
