Invoker and the fingers: Dota 2's piano hero

Quas, Wex, Exort and ten spells

Invoker has three reagent orbs (Quas, Wex and Exort) and the Invoke ability. The player sets a combination of three orbs and “invokes” the matching spell. There are ten such spells in total, and with Aghanim's Scepter, as cyber.sports.ru noted, eleven.

The difficulty is that all of this happens in the middle of a fight. In January 2023, Dotesports described the hero this way: “three active reagents and 10 spells to conjure in the midst of battle.” In other words, in a fight a spell has to be assembled first and only then cast.

Each spell is a combination of three orbs plus a press of Invoke, and a fight calls for several such combinations in a row. That is what the finger jokes rest on: the hero is considered hard above all because of how many keys you have to press, and how fast.

27 spells in DotA AllStars

Today's Invoker is actually a simplified version. The hero first appeared in DotA AllStars in patch 6.10 on June 6, 2005, and back then he had 27 spells. In October of that year, in patch 6.18, he was removed from the game, and he only returned in 6.50 in 2008.

Compared with that version, today's ten spells are nearly three times fewer, so the hero was once even more complex.

The year the hero appeared, 2005, marks the birth of Invoker himself, not of the meme. The sources don't say when exactly the jokes about fingers and pianists began.

A hero “for pianists” and “a lot of fingers”

A cyber.sports.ru blog about the old Invoker calls him a hero “for pianists,” a nod to how fast the player has to hit keys. Dotesports ranks him among the hardest heroes and says he is “quite possibly in everyone's top three hardest heroes.”

The specific phrase “you need a lot of fingers for Invoker” has no single author; it is a common player saying with no documented source. Around it live jokes about pianists and high APM, or actions per minute, which, if the jokes are to be believed, an ordinary person just doesn't have enough of for Invoker.

The pianist comparison was made in a piece about the old version of the hero, the one with 27 spells. Today's Invoker is simpler, but ten spells are still enough for Dotesports to rank him among the hardest heroes in 2023, and the finger jokes haven't gone anywhere.

The mage with three orbs in the picture

The catalog image is Invoker's hero art: a robed mage floating in the dark, with three orbs glowing around his hands, one fiery, one icy and one purple.

The three orbs in the picture point to the three reagents whose combinations the player has to keep in mind.

The image is not tied to a specific match or player: it is hero art, not a shot from a game.

Captions about fingers and keys

These examples were made up for illustration: “Picked Invoker, my fingers went on vacation,” “My Invoker: Quas, Quas, Quas and panic,” “To play Invoker I need one more hand.”

These captions are usually built on contrast: in theory it is simple, three orbs and Invoke, but in a real fight the fingers get tangled and a completely different spell comes out instead of the right one.