Best Late Game Items in Dota 2

In Dota 2, the late game starts at around the 30-minute mark. After that point, core heroes will have their abilities maximized and most of their talents chosen. The only question that remains is this: what should you buy to maximize your chances of winning?

This is a stage of the game when farming the jungle is easy, as long as you have good vision and map control. You can move very quickly from neutral camp to neutral camp and gain hundreds of gold in seconds. Even the mighty Ancients can’t do anything to you.

Most of the powerful items in Dota 2 cost around 5000 gold. Gathering 5000 gold in a late game scenario usually takes around 6-7 minutes. So every 7 minutes, you can afford to buy a new item that will substantially enhance your capabilities. This guide discusses how to make that choice so that you won’t end up regretting it.

Principles to Follow

The first thing you need to do is ask yourself: what do I need to do to win? Don’t buy what feels good. Buy what is required or what makes sense based on your analysis of the situation.

In some cases, you will simply need to make yourself tankier because the enemy team has superior initiation tools and can kill you before you even get to react.

In other cases, you will need to buy fancy items like Scythe of Vyse, even if your hero is not intelligence-based, simply because you’re dealing with an opponent that can easily escape and regenerate back to full HP in less than 10 seconds.

Perhaps you’re dealing with heroes that have a lot of evasion and you need to buy a Monkey King Bar to stop missing half of your attacks.

If you’re dealing with a team that has lots of disables, a Linken’s Sphere or a Black King Bar will often be mandatory. Sometimes you’ll need to buy both of them just to stay safe. Ideally, you should have your BKB long before the 30-minute mark. But if you don’t, then now it’s the time to buy it.

It won’t feel good because a player’s natural inclination is to try to make himself stronger in damage or stats. But that’s just a potential that you’ll never get to use if you’re chain stunned. Making yourself immune to debuffs is often much more valuable because it gives you a guaranteed way to attack and use your abilities.

Knowing that you can activate your BKB at any time, enemies will be less aggressive and they will respect your options. But if they know you can’t defend yourself from certain combinations, they will play with a lot of confidence, even if you can deal a lot of damage.

When buying items in the late game, ask yourself: do I need more offense or more defense? What is my opponent’s primary source of damage? How does my opponent try to win fights? What would enable me to reach the enemy base sooner than he can reach mine?

Late Game Dota 2 Items to Consider

Here are some of the items that you should consider when playing Dota 2 after the 30-minute mark.

Daedalus

Daedalus is one of the most aggressive options to consider when playing Dota. It enhances your attack damage enormously, which in turn allows you to kill enemies very quickly. But it also leaves you open to all kinds of problems.

Your opponents can buy evasion in the form of Butterfly or Heaven’s Halberd. But if you can rely on the fact that it’s too late for them to do that, you could go for this aggressive choice and try to win the game with superior offensive capabilities.

One of the great advantages of buying a Daedalus is that it can be purchased gradually. A Crystalys costs just 2000 gold and will give you enormous benefits. The remaining components can be bought either immediately after or much later, depending on how the game goes and what you need to succeed in the immediate future.

Shiva’s Guard

Shiva’s Guard is an amazing choice for a lot of heroes, especially intelligence-based ones. It gives great protection against physical damage and the ability to slow your enemy’s movement speed considerably during fights. For around 5000 gold, it’s one of the best defensive items you can buy.

Assault Cuirass

Assault Cuirass is a mix of offense and defense. It gives you and your team excellent protection against physical damage but it also weakens your opponents against it by lowering their armor. You also gain attack speed from it and so do your allies. Never underestimate this item, especially if your enemy’s main source of damage is physical.

Let’s say you’re playing against a Templar Assassin and a carry like Ursa. Both of these heroes have nothing by physical damage. If you pick a high-armor hero and double down on defense by purchasing even more armor, your protection will be phenomenal and you’ll reduce all physical damage by around 80%.

Black King Bar

Black King Bar is important for the reasons I already mentioned. If you can’t act freely, all of your damage and abilities won’t be of any use. You risk getting disabled by support and even by enemy cores, to the point where you won’t be able to attack even once in a 10s fight.

To prevent this unfortunate scenario, in which all of your networth is negated by a few basic abilities, you need to make yourself immune to debuffs.

Monkey King Bar

Monkey King Bar is the perfect choice against enemies like Phantom Assassin, who have lots of evasion, or enemies who bought items like Butterfly, Radiance, or Heaven’s Halberd, which give lots of evasion.

This item is not fun to buy. But if you know that your enemy will try to use evasion against you, you can counter his strategy by purchasing this item as early as possible.

Harpoon

Harpoon is an excellent choice if your enemies are constantly getting away from you thanks to their superior movement speed. This item is like Blink Dagger but instead of allowing you to skip more than 1000 units of land, you pull your opponents toward you and strike them very quickly, also slowing their movement speed for 1s.

To make good use of this weapon, your hero needs to be strength-based and it also needs to have some kind of slow mechanism built into his toolkit. Or, you could just by items that slow movement speed to give yourself an easy way of slowing opponents down after pulling them toward you.

Butterfly

Butterfly is a great choice when you notice that your opponents are heavily invested in physical damage and don’t have anything to counter evasion. Eventually, they will probably buy an MKB. But if they spent their gold just a few minutes ago, they will need another 5 – 10 minutes to gather enough gold to buy an MKB. That window can be used to win the game.

Blink Dagger Level 2

Blink Dagger Level 2 is one of the three available Blink Dagger upgrades. It’s often a good idea to make this upgrade because it’s very powerful. But you won’t afford it until you reach around 25.000 networth. If the game goes on for long enough and your inventory is full, just know that you have this option at your disposal.

Arcane Blink gives you a lot more mobility, while the other two upgrades give you excellent stats.

Boots of Travel

Boots of Travel is an important item to buy in the late game because mobility can win games. If you want to split push or gank with ease, having this item will allow you to play without worrying about the distance between yourself and your allies or opponents.

Another great benefit of this item is that your TP cooldown will be much lower and your movement speed will be much greater. Your normal boots cost around 1400 gold, so you will only need to spend 1800 gold after you sell them to buy yourself a pair of BoTs.

Satanic

This item gives your hero the ability to regenerate quickly and essentially gain a second life every 30s. Its importance and value for heroes like Phantom Assassin or Terrorblade is huge. Any hero that deals lots of damage should consider this item because it is very good in team fights.

It also gives you lots of HP and damage, which are necessary in this stage of the game. If your hero is strength-based, you will benefit from the item even more.

Eye of Skadi

Eye of Skadi destroys most ranged carry heroes, especially if they don’t have a good escape mechanism. Once a hero’s movement speed has been reduced by 50%, they can no longer do anything. The effect lasts for 3s, which is a very long time in the late game because everything happens a lot faster. Most heroes can attack two times per second at that point.

Slark players usually love this item but you can buy it on a wide variety of heroes and it will work really well. The stats you get from it are amazing. Medusa, Terrorblade, and other heroes should always consider this option.

Linken’s Sphere

Linken’s Sphere is useful when an opponent has powerful targeted spells that he can use in a way that makes it hard for you to activate your BKB. This item blocks such spells very effectively and with excellent frequency. On some heroes, such as Slark, having this item allows you to immediately activate some of your defensive abilities after it gets triggered.

Enemies who play against a hero with Linken’s Sphere will try to use two abilities in quick succession. The first one is designed to break or to trigger Linken’s Sphere while the second one is designed to go through. If you understand this tactic and have fast reaction times, you will know what to do to protect yourself.

Khanda

Khanda is a great choice for heroes that naturally buy Phylactery early to enhance one of their targeted abilities. Examples include Morphling and Queen of Pain. This item provides excellent stats and will increase damage output enormously, not just for basic attacks but for abilities as well.

All that’s required for this item to be effective is a low-cooldown target ability that you can use every 6s or so. Of course, you don’t want to buy this item if you never right-click your opponents because of all of its physical damage and critical strikes will be useless. Buy it when playing hybrid heroes that love to attack and also use spells frequently.

Divine Rapier

This is the ultimate late-game item in Dota 2. When you buy it, you’re essentially taking a huge risk in an attempt to either save or win the game in the next fight. Its damage is enormous and its price is quite reasonable these days. In the last several major patches, IceFrog changed this item significantly to be more affordable and better suited even for intelligence-based heroes.

Divine Rapier is by far the most powerful damage item in the game. But the fact that you lose it when you die makes it very risky. Buy it only if you have the Aegis of the Immortal or if your hero is naturally tanky to the point where it’s almost impossible for you to die. Examples include Medusa and tanky Weavers.

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