Excellent Dota 2 damage items – TOP 11

When playing Dota 2, one thing you need to do to be successful as a team is to deal a lot of damage to your opponents. This doesn’t mean that everyone on your team needs to be a great damage dealer. Usually, one or two heroes will play that part. But someone certainly has to deal damage to heroes, structures, and Roshan. Otherwise, the lineup doesn’t work.

So what exactly do you buy when you want to deal more damage? A Daedalus? A Butterfly? An MKB? Or something completely different?… It all depends on your hero and what you’re up against. Here are some of the best damage-enhancing items in Dota 2 patch 7.35c.

Radiance

Radiance is an excellent choice for some heroes because it gives excellent protection against right-click attacks and at the same time, substantial DPS in a large area or around 700 radius.

In addition to that, it also gives you 55 bonus damage. The total amount is 115, out of which 60 is DPS. As for the protection you receive, it is around 32% in total, which comes in the form of evasion.

If your hero already has good AoE DPS, Radiance greatly enhances that effect. Just don’t buy it on heroes that already have evasion because the effect does not stack additively, which means that you will lose plenty of evasion points in the process.

Spectre, for instance, has excellent damage dispersion thanks to his abilities. You can add a Blade Mail to further increase the effect but you can also add a Radiance. Heroes like Necrophos are Radiance carriers too because of their natural AoE DPS.

This item costs 4700 gold, which is quite a lot, so it will generally take you 10 minutes to build it, assuming you do not get killed and have enough space to farm.

If you want to go for a Radiance build, make sure you get the item before the 25-minute mark. If you get it later, its effectiveness is far lower. Heroes tend to buy BKBs and Pipes during the mid portion of the game, so the sooner you have it the better.

In some cases, players manage to buy themselves a Radiance before the 15-minute mark. That, of course, is ideal and will lead to tremendous advantages between the 15 and 30-minute marks.

Daedalus

This is one of the most aggressive damage items that you can buy in Dota 2. And the great part about it is that it can be bought in small pieces.

Daedalus costs 5100 gold and is made up of one Crystalys, one Demon Edge, and a 900 gold recipe. The bonuses you receive are substantial: +88 damage and a 30% critical strike chance with 225% critical damage. This means that 3 hits out of 10 or nearly 1 hit out of 3 will deal 125% bonus damage.

You can think of Daedalus as 88 damage + one extra attack for each 3 attacks. The amount is substantial, especially if you’re lucky enough to hit two critical strikes in just a few seconds. For heroes like Templar Assassin, whose damage is already massive and who can lower target armor substantially, this weapon is incredibly potent. But it’s also a bit risky to buy.

When you purchase Daedalus, you tend to leave yourself open to evasion-based strategies and you also tend to neglect your mobility or debuff immunity. Because of that, few players will choose this item before the 30-minute mark. But the ones who do will have a substantial advantage.

The optimal aggressive build in many cases is to purchase just the Crystalys first in combination with some other damage item, such as Desolator, and then go for a Black King Bar or a Blink Dagger before completing your Daedalus.

Desolator

Desolator is another hyper-aggressive choice when it comes to damage items because it doesn’t provide anything else. You get +50 damage, 6 armor reduction against heroes and buildings for 7s, and the ability to increase the weapon’s damage by 2 per kill, up to a maximum of 30.

This means that if you can buy your Desolator early enough and have a good game, you will gain +80 damage from it and the ability to decrease a target’s armor by 6, which is the equivalent of 360 damage from the first hit for every 1000 points of HP that they have.

If you’re dealing with an enemy with 2000 HP, the simple fact that you have a Desolator means that their effective HP against your physical attacks is lowered by ~720. So in total, with all the bonuses, Desolator is quite cheap at 3500 gold. The item doesn’t have a recipe, so you gain a lot more than the sum of the parts when purchasing it.

Nullifier

Nullifier is an excellent late-game choice against heroes that love to make use of their items. If an enemy has invested heavily in items like Black King Bar, Force Staff, Ghost Scepter, Scythe of Vyse, and so on, Nullifier can help you to negate most of their gold advantage by casting Nullify on them.

This ability sends a projectile that travels at a speed of 1800. When it hits the target, it applies a debuff that makes it impossible for them to use their items for 5s. It essentially mutes their inventory instead of their abilities. And for some heroes, that is devastating.

Nullifier has a 10s cooldown, can be used from 900 range, and costs 4375 gold. However, it provides substantial benefits: +75 damage, +10 armor, and +6 HP regen. For a hero that needs to tank a lot of damage, it can be the best possible late-game item. And, in fact, you can buy it quite early because the price is not that high.

Those who aren’t afraid of taking risks should consider buying it instead of a Black King Bar and then seek to negate the opponent’s BKB advantage using Nullify.

To purchase Nullifier, you will need to buy a Helm of Iron Will and then gather enough gold to buy a Sacred Relic. This item costs 3400 gold, which means that for around 7 minutes, you will play at a disadvantage. If you can afford it, go for it. If not, choose a different build.

Mjolnir

Mjolnir is a great item to buy against illusion-based heroes because you can apply a powerful shield on yourself that lasts for 15 seconds. This shield has a 20% chance of being triggered when you get attacked and deals 225 magical damage to up to 5 targets. The search radius is 900, so you can be pretty sure it will hit a lot of heroes.

If you are tanky enough, this item will offer you an excellent way to increase your farming speed and damage output, as well as a way of deterring enemies from attacking you during fights.

The complete list of benefits provided by Mjolnir includes: +25 damage, +90 attack speed, and a 30% chance to release Chain Lightning when you attack. This ability deals 180 magical damage and can hit up to 12 targets in a distance of 650 units.

The only problem with Mjolnir is the cost. The item is quite expensive, requiring 5250 gold to buy. But if you manage to do it early enough and you’re tanky enough to absorb dozens of hits, you will completely destroy the enemy team in the mid game.

Phylactery

Phylactery gives you +7 to all abilities, as well as 200 HP and 200 mana. The recipe costs just 200 gold and the whole provides considerably more than the sum of its parts. With this item, every 6s you get a buff for one of your targeted spells. That spell will deal 150 bonus damage and slow movement speed by 50% for 1.5s.

Combined with its stats, this ability, called Empower Spell, provides great utility to heroes like Morphling, Zeus, and Tinker.

Pylactery costs 2400 gold and you can upgrade it into a Khanda, which offers even better bonuses and deals high amounts of damage because it includes a Crystalys.

Butterfly

Butterfly is a solid item for agility-based heroes. But it’s risky to buy it too early because the enemy could simply respond with a Monkey King Bar. Case in which, most of the +35% evasion bonus would be negated.

This item provides tremendous attack speed, as well as damage, and armor. Its bonuses are: +35 agility, +25 damage, +20% base attack speed, +35% evasion. To an agility-based hero, it gives +60 damage and a lot of attack speed, because you get 35 attack speed from the agility bonus and even more attack speed from the 20% base attack speed bonus.

This is the item that you want to buy against heroes who went all-in and bought themselves a Daedalus or some other aggressive damage item.

Monkey King Bar

Monkey King Bar is considered to be the safe or conservative choice for carry heroes that want to increase their damage output. It provides +40 damage, +45 attack speed, and an 80% chance to deal an additional 70 damage while piercing evasion.

The cost of an MKB is 4700 gold. But you can build the item gradually because it’s made from 3 major components and a recipe. All of those components give you something valuable that will greatly speed up your farm.

Against certain heroes, like Phantom Assassin and Windranger, MKB is a must-have. Without it, your ability to deal right-click damage will be greatly diminished by your enemy’s toolkit.

Diffusal Blade

Diffusal Blade is a great choice when dealing with heroes that can easily escape. It’s also a great choice when you have a combo that can be lethal if you are able to hold the enemy in place for just a few more seconds. Riki, for instance, has such a combo available. All he needs to do is to cast his Smoke Screen and use Inhibit, and his opponent will die there in most cases.

Diffusal Blade is also a great choice for illusion-based heroes because it provides high amounts of mana burn. Phantom Lancer, for instance, can burn 40 mana with each attack and 8 mana with each attack of one of his illusions. This can easily result in 100 mana burned per second and 100 damage dealt per second just from this effect.

Diffusal Blade provides +15 agility and +10 intelligence in addition to the 40 mana burn per hit and the Inhibit ability, which slows enemies for 4s by up to 100%.

Skull Basher

Skull Basher provides 30 damage and 10 strength at a cost of 2875 gold. More importantly, it provides the ability to bash targets every 2.3s. The damage dealt by each bash is 100 and the bash duration is 1.2s. The melee proc chance is 25%, while the range proc chance is 10%. However, once you’ve bashed a hero, you can no longer bash for 2.3s.

Investing in a Basher can be a good idea against heroes with great mobility or the ability to teleport away. One example is Nature’s Prophet. If you can’t stop his teleportation attempts, he will always get away without investing anything significant.

Basher can be upgraded into an Abyssal Blade, which provides defensive stats and the ability to stun a target for an additional 1.6s. This gives you a total stun duration of 2.8s against an opponent, which can be sufficient in the late game.

Orchid Malevolence

Orchid Malevolence increases the output of intelligence-based heroes by a lot. It provides +12 intelligence, +10 damage, +40 attack speed, +6 Hp regen, +3.5 mana regen, and the ability to silence a target for 5s. At the end of that duration, the target will take 30% of the damage it received during those 5s.

For 3275 gold, Orchid offers a lot, which makes it an excellent first weapon on heroes like Queen of Pain and Storm Spirit. The stats you receive are amazing, but the ability to silence opponents is even more important.

Header: Valve