Early game stats:

i believe for some heroes it is best to level stats early game.
these are the heroes that need to tank up early, and can only really benefit from one skill.

for example: Jug, Vs, Sven, Pandabrew.

jug for example has his spin.
this is his main ganking skill early game. to gank with this you literally need to run at the enemy.
his other 2 skills are based on his level of damage and his level of hp.
for this reason they are not so useful early game. most people level the crit, now given jug has 70 damage, a lvl 2 crit at lvl 6 will do
an 18% chance to do double damage. so a 18% chance to hit 140 damage.
his ulti does 3 attacks, and costs 200 mana.

because of all of these things, i believe if you level spin and stats, then you will have +4 on all stats at lvl 6/7, and a larger mana pool to spin and ulti, more str to run in2 them with, and more agi points so last hitting is easier.

the same thing applies to the other heros.

because of this, when i play jug, at lvl 11 i have around 15oo hp. so i am able to take a lot of damage, have the mana to attack, and the agi to creep well.

looking foward to feed back.
also:

http://www.playdota.com/guides/i-am-juggernaut-bitch
http://www.playdota.com/guides/poetry-in-motion

"We max out bladefury first. Why? I think its pretty obvious...good damage for early game and mid game and an escape tool that grants you spell immnunity.

Stat Bonus...reaaaaally? Not crits? Yes, your damage isnt so significant early game so lets leave damage dealing to mid and late game. And as I mentioned before Jugg has mana problems and Stats will fix it up a little.
All after that is I think pretty obvious.

But if you feel confident that you have enough mana without getting a lot of stats early on OR you just switched your treads to int then get skills earlier. Go for it."

oh I always read guides at playdota. it's really useful imo.

Yeah....I must say I don't really like early game stats, I think it's pretty rare to have a move that's not as good as stats.

In Jug's case, the critical strike has the same effectiveness pretty much all game as HP is always proportional to damage so that's not a valid arguement. And personally, I go boots salve jug to start and then I just grab 4 branches to give me enough extra INT to cast both omni and spin at lvl 6 which works fine for me and the critical gets me at least 3 last hits I wouldn't have otherwise got as well as some nice crits on heros.

Occasionally I will get 1 or 2 levels or stats at say level 2 and 4 if it's a hard lane and I'm not doing so well, but for the most part I don't see it as being worth it.

I mean, essentially for one level in stats, you're getting

+0.06 hp regen/sec
+38 max hp
+2 attackspeed
+0.28 armor
+0.08 mana regen/sec
+26 max mana

Nothing over exciting IMO....I'd much rather critical stirke/howl/command aura/warcry/druken brawler...

What does everyone else think?

ok, this is also related so im going to paste it here.
last time we played make you QQ, we lost. simply we got out ganked.

they warded hard, and had better builds. our hero picks were strong and our carry did his best but the rest of the team let him down.

i believe this is because of bad item builds, skill builds, warding and general fail ganking.

this is our skill builds:




and this is their sks build, who would initiate the ganks:



the difference was felt at mid game, when vs was the tankest in our side... and their whole team was over the 1.5k hp mark.
stats can make a huge difference, especially for gankers.


if you want to have a look at the replay just message me

Ah yea, but sk's different again as a ganking sk has no use for caustic or sandstorm past the first level.

My example was mainly regarding jug, there are definitely other times when you take stats but it varies from hero to hero and game to game, in GENERAL I don't think it's the best option...