4Game

I've been playing a lot of Sand King late, and I've been having a lot of success as offlane. One question I find myself debating is "When do I pick up Caustic?".

On one hand, caustic makes controlling the wave easy. You can zone out some melee heroes and force them away from the creep wave until all of their creeps are dead.

The downside of this is two-fold: They get to last hit relatively safely under their tower, and they basically get every creep for free. It also limits you killing power (by a bit) in that early points in stun are powerful, and sandstorm scales nicely as well. With 2-2-0, depending on the support, I can easily secure a few early kills, and I also get to deny creeps and hold the lane near my tower.

Caustic seems great if you don't really care about the enemy and just want to shove wave and maybe take the hard camp while you're at it, but I feel that giving the enemy carry each wave uncontested basically can put them in a far better position.

What do you guys think, do you reliably skill caustic, or is it better to focus on other skills?