DOTA 2
Guides
Sir Action Slacks helps us, help you, beat Aghanim’s Labyrinth: The Continuum Conundrum on the hardest difficulty, Apex Mage!
Aghanim’s Labyrinth: The Continuum Conundrum is a surprisingly deep game mode. Unfortunately, even as you play more and more of it, it can seem like it never gets any easier. Check out Esports.gg’s Aghanim’s Lab Guidehere.

And so, in collaboration with SirActionSlacks, we’ve compiled a list of advanced strats and tips for Apex Mage difficulty. Of course, these tips won’t guarantee you may clear every time (You’re still at the mercy of your teammates for the most part), but they’ll certainly help.
Always play for the Final Boss
The point of Aghanim’s Labyrinth: TCC is to defeat the final boss, the Primal Beast. Therefore, selecting any talent that helps you get to the Boss but is not that good during the boss fight is a wasted talent. Instead, pick shards that help will make the Primal Beast easier or even defeatable in the first place.
For example, shards for Witch Doctor’s Ward are excellent for clearing rooms. But you’re never standing still in the boss fight. So investing in damage or range without the talent that allows you to drop it and move is worthless.

Why spend 90 minutes making it to the Boss, then losing. So, let that decision guide you. How does this Blessing or Elite Shard help me kill the last Boss? As long as you can answer that, go for it. But if you can’t, pass and hope you get a better combo later.
Aghanim’s Blessing Choice
Even if you can’t make it to the Final Boss, there’s a point to playing without getting to the last Boss. Aghanim’s Labyrinth is a roguelike, which means every time you play, you get stronger. You get Shards every game you play, which you can spend on permanent buffs from Aghanim’s Blessing. There are many options, but your first goal should be to unlock all the big inner circles.
Related articles
The overall BEST Blessing
Bottle speed increase. Re-rolls are fantastic because they let you reduce the randomness of the mode, but Bottle speed increase is the best. Here’s why:
Every room you complete, you get one bottle charge. Every boss room you fill your bottle. Now again the bottle is uninterruptible, does % regen this is great. But speed is life.

“The crazy thing about this speed boost is it ignores ALL effects If you’re hit by Chilling Touch or slowed by a mob and about to get hit by something massive your Bottle Speed instantly purges that slow until it is empty. That’s FOUR times,” .
SirActionSlacks
Lives cost 1000 gold, but this speed boost saves lives, so you’re basically buying four get-out-of-jail-free cards for 4,000 gold, each section.
“It is a GOD TIER UPGRADE and it should be your number 1!!”

Later Blessings
After you’ve completed the inner part of the Blessing ring, go for theShard re-rollsandElite Shard upgrades. Do this while moving in the direction of a hero you wish to unlock. RNG is life or death in roguelikes. Giving yourself more chances to get a good roll increases that RNG, but limits the possibilities of a useless roll.
Blessings to avoid
Minus 15 seconds death timeis useless. You wanna be dead for as long as possible as many of your allies should have spells to cheese the mobs over your corpse, or if you died to Primal Beast you want to stay dead during his split attack for as long as possible till he stops, this one actively makes your life worse avoid till the end.
Apex Mage Strategies
Apex Mage has a few wrinkles that makes it far more difficult than all the other difficulties. And to beat it, you basically 100% have to cheese the game, break it, practically cheat, and use every advantage you can get.
To do that, you need to abuse cheese and high ground. In apex games, it’s pretty common for everyone but one person to die, and they will need to clutch the room. In the basic tips guide we mentioned the “Slack’s Circle” but there are better ways to go about this for certain heroes. The key is understanding how enemy Aggro works and ground target AoE spells.

For this you need to know the three ways enemies Aggro in Aghanim’s Labryinth:
And with that you should be able to cheese just about any room in Aghanim’s Labyrinth, even on Apex Mage difficulty!


![]()