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Largo (The Frog Bard) is out!
After months of speculation and a little trolling from Valve, Largo is finally released as the newest hero in Dota 2. He comes by the end of 2025 and people were starting to worry. This would be the first year without a hero release in Dota 2, but Valve made it through with only 2 weeks to spare.
Largo is a support hero that brings an all-new game mechanic to Dota 2: rhythm skills. Let's dive deeper into how his skills work and interact with allies and enemies. In the meantime, we will also speculate a bit on who could be his best combos and how to play with them.
Largo's Abilities
Q — Catchy Lick
Largo's abilities are frog bard themed, as one would expect, and the first one is "Catchy Lick". Largo pulls an enemy or an ally with his tongue and applies a basic dispel on allies or damages enemies. If you dispel an ally, Largo gets a temporary health regen boost. This skill would work wonders to pull heroes uphill to evade enemies on the river.
You can pull allies over terrain and if they are rooted, but not from strong locks such as Chronosphere, Black Hole, Duel, and Lasso. Items such as Phylactery should work wonders with this unit-target skill if you're going for a more offensive approach on the mid to late game.
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W — Frogstomp
His second skill, "Frogstomp", is the most offensive of them. He tosses his friends to an area where they stomp the ground every 1 second. This skill lasts from 4 up to 7 seconds, damages, mini-stuns, and slows enemies inside a 350-unit radius. This could be a great combo with Gleipnir, Refresher Orb, and maybe Meteor Hammer.
In terms of hero combos, Underlord would be my first pick to lane with Largo. Pit of malice is a problem in itself but paired with this ability would render any heroes inside basically useless for the duration of the combo. Throwing Underlord's Firestorm on top of this is a death sentence to all enemies involved.
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E — Croak of Genius
Croak of Genius is his third skill and allows Largo to buff either himself or his allies to get 15% reduction in mana cost. This skill also makes part of the damage from skills used while buffed by it reverberate over the next 5 seconds. This means this is a great support skill to add damage over time and keep disabling enemy Blink Daggers for a while.
Every time a buffed hero uses mana, this buff loses 0.5 second of its duration. There are lots of options to pair with this buff but abilities that have a high magical damage output such as Zeus' Thundergod's Wrath seem to be the best way to take advantage of this. Lina's Laguna Blade and Lion's Finger of Death would also optimize the ticking damage output.
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R — Amphibian Rhapsody
Finally, Largo's ultimate brings a new unique mechanic to Dota: rhythm skills. When Amphibian Rhapsody is activated, your other skill slots become songs called Bullbelly Blitz, Hotfeet Hustle, and Island Elixir.
As their names suggest, the first one increases magic damage, the second one increases allied unit speed, and the last one heals nearby allies. All of these effects happen on a 750-unit radius around Largo. Heroes that benefit from magical damage increase and movespeed such as Dark Seer and Batrider take the best advantage of this skill but it is a pretty agnostic buff overall.
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It is also important to note that rhythm isn't just an optional gimmick when playing Largo. Every time he strums successfully, he gains a stack of Groovin'. Every stack gives you extra armor and reduces the mana cost for every stroke. This means that playing on rhythm will allow you to tank better and play for longer.
Aghanim's Shard and Scepter
Largo has already come in with Aghanim's Shard and Scepter upgrades right from the start. His shard buffs his innate skill called Encore. By default, it increases the duration of buffs he applies to himself or allies. When upgraded, the innate also mirrors buffs to allies on himself and buffs to himself on the nearest allied hero within the skill's range.
The best part of this shard is that it also affects items. This means you can cast Linken's Sphere, Lotus Orb, Urn of Shadows, and many other defensive items on allies and also get them replicated on yourself. Being a tanky strength support and aided by this will make Largo a hard target to burst during team fights.
Aghanim's Scepter buffs his ultimate ability and adds two mechanics to it. First, instead of one, Largo can play two songs per beat while holding the Scepter. This means that you can heal and increase your allies' move speed while running away from enemies or increase move speed and magic damage during a pursuit.
Beyond that, with the Scepter buff, every strum deals 50 + 10 magic damage per Groovin' stack to enemies inside the radius. This means that enemies chasing you will potentially take up to 100 damage per second from the Amphibian Rhapsody alone. This should be fun to pair up with other sources of radial DPS such as Radiance or the damage and debuff of Shiva's Guard.
How to Play Largo
Despite his complicated mechanics, Largo's intended gameplay loop seems to be pretty straightforward. If you're going to play him as a support in lane, focus on buffing your core with Croak of Genius and repositioning enemies with Catchy Lick to set up kills while preventing their escape with Frogstomp.
To have a bigger impact in lane, focus on leveling his first and second abilities. Also build cheap items like Urn of Shadows and set yourself up to choose between unit target defensive items such as Linken's Sphere, Lotus Orb, Urn of Shadows and Glimmer Cape.
As the game progresses, if you want to be more offensive, build Radiance and Phylactery to capitalize on his abilities. His tanky nature as a strength hero paired with the ultimate's buffs would benefit from having damage over time ticking from radiance and his Catchy Lick gets buffed both by phylactery and by your talents.
It is still too early to set in stone the right or the wrong way to play Largo but he seems like a very fun hero. At the end of the day, the best way to find out what works on the hero is to play him consistently and adjust your itemization and skill usage to your own style.
Combos and Counters
Finally, considering Largo's abilities, we are going to speculate a bit about his best combos and counters. Considering that his buffs favor magical damage and his skills cover an area of effect, intuitively, Dota 2 heroes with these same characteristics should be interesting combos with Largo. At a first glance, Kunkka and Underlord come to mind.
Both of these heroes have AOE skills that would greatly benefit from Largo's Catchy Lick repositioning enemies inside their radius, the mini-stun and slow of his Frogstomp keeping them inside, and from the damage over time from the Croak of Genius. This is a first impression, but I am sure there are countless iterations that we will find over time.
On the counter side, I would add heroes that either have the capability of bursting him, which is really hard considering he will most likely always have a full health bar and is a strength hero, or heroes that could disable his abilities for an extended period of time. On that front, Silencer comes to mind, along with Shadow Shaman and Lion.
Cores that could lock him would most likely face a variety of countermeasures, considering that defensive items such as Linken's and Lotus should be on his suggested progression. The most likely nemeses for him would be heroes with a longer range of action such as Sniper or natural damage dealers with lots of physical damage like Templar Assassin.
Closing Thoughts
Largo is a very interesting hero that earned his namesake (meaning wide in Brazilian Portuguese but long in Spanish, interestingly enough) and will definitely be a welcome addition to the hero pool in Dota 2. His unorthodox mechanics and strong support characteristics will definitely be explored to their best in the coming weeks until a new patch rolls out.
In the meantime, we maintain the "tradition" of a mid-DreamLeague patch and approach the end of 2025 with an abundant collection of events overlapping in Dota 2. If you want to stay informed on all the latest and greatest Dota news, check the news section on the Strafe website!
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