Gonna try some Dragon Knight tonight. Any tips for a newb DK player? Do you guys usually jungle with him early game and do you generally avoid suicide lane?
There's numerous ways to play DK, these are the ways I've had success with him.
You can play him mid or in a lane with a baby sitter. If mid, you get bottle and bottle crow/harass other mid out of lane with your dragon breath. If you go sidelane you can go for soul ring instead. DK isn't an excellent suicide laner with a babysitter but he is still pretty durable in lane.
Skillbuild:
Spend your first point on stun, then max nuke and regen, putting more points into regen if you're getting harassed out of lane, or more points into nuke first if you're not. You can max stun after you max the other two but I prefer to just dump all my points into stats.
Your first dragon form has a dot that affects towers, making it great for pushing. Dragon form 2 kind of sucks unless you're ancient stacking, so some people hold off on leveling it up until all tier 1 are down or tier 2.
Items
Dragon Knight has a lot of great items on him. These are my personal favorites;
Early game:
Treads, Helm of the Dominator, Armlet, Maelstrom, Soul Ring, Drums, Urn, BKB, Midas (If in a good lane, before 6 mins)
Late Game:
Daedalus, AC, Satanic, Possibly Mjol (after some experimenting I feel as if most of the value of mjol is from maelstrom, and that its better just to get ac + mael instead of mjol)
Stacking ancients:
Use a creep dominated with your HoTD to stack ancients. Stack them as high as you can, then once you have your second rank ult, clear the stack. Try to dominate an alpha wolf if you can for the damage aura.
Alternative strats:
A lot of eastern teams have built an early pipe on him, or vanguard. I don't really recommend this for pubs.