Madsen’s Guide to Chaos Knight

The Gambling Addict Formerly Known as Nessaj, in patch 7.27d

Contents:

• 1 | Introduction
• 2 | Hero Stats
• 3 | Skill Overview
• 4 | Skill Builds
• 5 | Itemization Overview
• 6 | Other Notes
• 7 | Conclusion

1 | Introduction

For a long time now, CK has been stuck in core hero limbo. Sure, it’s nigh impossible to forget the CK+Io pairing of yore barreling down towards the Na’Vi ancient after Dendi was stopped in his tracks by s4’s million-dollar Dream Coil, but I’d wager a vast majority of the people reading this right now weren’t around to witness this happen live.

We’re all used by now to the revolving door IceFrog stands firmly planted in front of, bidding adieu to one busted carry as another ascends to an inevitable sky-high contest rate — hell, as I write this we await the middle of December so we can finally wave the likes of Spectre and Sven off, eager to see if Wraith King or perhaps Gyro might resurface in the metagame…again.

Again and again. The rotating cast of carries “allowed” to be good seems fairly consistent over the years, while others are bound to sit in the corner, praying that it might be their turn. CK’s been warming that bench for a long, long time.

If you’ll excuse the melodramatic introduction, it’s nevertheless true that CK has kinda been in the shitter for a while. Sure, he’s had brief spells of being somewhat viable (though the best he usually gets to be is not a complete liability), but for years now the overwhelming — and very true — fact of the matter is that there’s usually a better hero to pick. CK lacks a reliable farm mechanism, doesn’t really want to build farm accelerators, is highly reliant on an ult that is far less reliable than other hero options, and generally struggles to find himself in a draft situation where he’s superior to those other options.

My name’s Madsen, and I’m a thoroughly mediocre Dota player in the grand scheme of things, as a mid-to-high 5k Immortal carry player. I have an on-and-off affinity for CK, and as with my (now abhorrently outdated) Razor guide, I’ve decided to share some tips on another mediocre hero who’s fairly likely to get changes that make this entire writeup completely useless. It ain’t easy being dumb, but here we are. In any case, you should take what I say with a grain (or fistful) of salt — this guide is intended to familiarize people with the hero and hopefully some smaller tips and tricks to maximize what you get out of it. Past that, I’ll be establishing a sort of basic foundation on how one should approach the hero, which you should ideally build upon by playing the hero yourself and watching high-level replays — something that I can heavily recommend websites like dota2protracker.com and dotamastery.io for. In terms of individual high MMR players to keep an eye out for, Badman probably plays the most CK of any 7/8k+ MMR player, and you can get a lot out of watching him play the hero.

As I get into the stats of CK, it’s worth noting we’re seeing CK get some attention lately due to his incredible Aghs upgrade, which has rejuvenated prior attempts at running the hero as an offlaner. This new role is something I’ll talk about in this guide, though as a carry player, I’ll be focusing mainly on playing the hero in a farming role.

Now, CK’s winrates are a mixed bag. He tends to do decently well in sub-6/7k MMR pubs, largely in my opinion due to the average pubbie’s inability to punish all the very very punishable aspects of the hero. He sports a 51.93% overall winrate in pubs according to Dotabuff, being most successful in the Ancient bracket with a 53.13% winrate on 7.26% pickrate — though his highest pickrate, interestingly enough, is in Divine+ pubs (which I’ll attribute to people playing more offlane CK, something that is significantly more rare in lower MMR brackets).

Move up to 7k+ pubs, however, and we’re already talking about a sub-50: in the last 8 days, CK’s been picked about 840 times in 7k+ pubs with a 49.6% winrate. Jump a couple stairs and we’re talking about professional Premium-tier events, and we see the issue highlighted: tier 1 Dota has no place for this hero. In the more than two years since the release of patch 7.20 (November of 2018), the hero’s been picked a total of 190 times in 4827 Premium-tier matches, with a staggering 46.32% winrate on top of that 3.9% pickrate. For context, within the same criteria, Sven’s been picked 616 times with a 53.08% winrate (12.76% pickrate), Terrorblade’s sporting a 51.1% winrate across 456 matches (9.4% pickrate). Mainstays like Jugg and Naix have been picked upwards of 650 times (meaning that both sport upwards of 13% pickrate), Troll’s been taken a similar amount of times, Gyro’s at about 550, Faceless Void’s at 450ish.

“Well okay, but that’s just the Premium tier events. There’s a fuckload of tier 1 Dota being played under the Professional tier!”, you might rightly claim.

If we include Professional tier events as well, CK’s pickrate falls again, being picked 417 times in 10712 games, making him the 18th least picked hero in the last two years. Rough, right? Shoutout to Noxville for running (and helping me maneuver) the excellent datdota.com that I used for these stats.

But, luckily, this doesn’t matter for us. The downfalls of a hero in the pro scene definitely don’t directly apply to us and our pubs, so after whining about it for a while, we can get into the guide portion of this, uh, guide.

Why do I like CK? CK is, simply put, a fun fucking hero. You click your ult, pull kids in and crunch their bones up in one fell swoop. Click your Pull button 5 times when you’re ahead and you’ll kill 5 heroes — it’s really great fun. The hard bit is getting to have that fun. To get there, you need to understand and then apply (read: abuse) the hero’s timings and power spikes, because if you hit those power spikes when you’re supposed to, you’ll be the strongest hero in the match for the next 15 to 20 minutes…unless the enemy team has one of the two dozen counters. Oh, also, if you haven’t basically won the game in that 15–20 minute window you’re, uh, kinda fucked.

What’s CK’s deal? CK’s whole design shtick is that he implements some epic random chance which is something absolutely everyone loves to see in their inherently skill-based competitive video game that people compete in for literal millions — especially the mid players, they absolutely adore coin flips! For example, his stun does a random amount of damage and stuns for a random amount of time, with these two values being inversely related, so when you get more damage, you’re getting a shorter stun and vice-versa, the amount of crit for is a dice roll; it goes past just his skills — CK has the largest attack damage range in the game as well.

Luckily (hah!), CK’s gameplay isn’t very dependent on the RNG elements of the hero’s design, but rather on the balancing act of his role in a given match as a core hero. He does a fuckload of damage, but that damage crossing necessary thresholds depends on your power spikes. In that sense and understanding that CK wants to play fairly aggressively, one might say he’s a tempo setter, and I think he definitely leans that way, because even though the hero can function as a win-condition, performing that role for CK comes with some asterisks and extra requirements.

From here, looking at CK’s stats can help us grasp some ideas that’ll be helpful for concepts later on.

2. Hero Stats

I won’t go too into detail about what each stat does, but rather what the implications of each relevant value are for CK as an individual hero.

STR: 22+3.4 — Despite being on the lower end in terms of base strength for a STR hero, CK has very good strength gain. This is part of why he benefits from levels — each extra point of STR goes a bit further for CK than the average hero due to his reliance on bursting enemies, via his innate crits and illusions. This high STR gain also makes him pretty beefy early on.

AGI: 18+1.4 — After a somewhat recent buff, CK sports a decent base 18 AGI. The low AGI gain is a bit rough, but a lot of CK’s damage output comes in the initial swing of his illus after a pull, so later into the game, the lower attack speed isn’t a massive dealbreaker. The main benefit CK derives from AGI buffs is in the early game, where extra AS makes it significantly easier to contest CS and eventually move into the jungle, where extra AS helps you proc more Crits, which in turn makes you and your illus farm faster and allows you to sustain your patterns.

INT: 18+1.2 — Two changes made having low INT less troubling for CK; namely, the manacost of his Ult was reduced significantly, and Echo Sabre resurfaced as a viable option due to the change on the Crit from being cooldown based to being a constant chance. Overall, you won’t have mana issues far past the laning stage, where a couple of Mangoes can cover you well enough, and the occasional Clarity makes sustaining your farming patterns and rotations quite easy.

Movement Speed: 320 — Blessed with one of the best base movespeeds that has him tied with a couple others at 13th highest, CK gets a decent bit of mileage out of it. Admittedly, with how good a spell Reality Rift is, the relative benefit of base 320 MS diminishes later into the game, but especially early on, it gives him many benefits. You can get into the lane very fast to scout for wards or lane setups, you have very good chase (in part because a high MS can somewhat offset a lower AS, since heroes can’t just run away when you’re cancelling your backswing), you move between camps fairly fast, etc. It’s also worth keeping in mind that you’re a speedy hero when trying to get spells off, since you can afford to move in closer before committing to a fairly lengthy cast animation without risking getting fogged — but more on that later.

Base Armor: 2 — A base armor of 2 is actually pretty good, as you go into lanes with 5 armor at level one with your 18 AGI. This makes trading in creepwaves favorable for CK in many matchups, but CK nevertheless can melt to high physical burst later on, as his armor doesn’t scale very well, making this a stat that’s more abusable early on.

3. Skill Overview

The aim of this section isn’t to pointlessly go over each value for each skill — this is something you can go through on the wiki or in-game. Instead, I’ll be focusing on the more niche points and uses for skills, outlining things you should be aware of, what you should be trying to achieve with each skill, and how they influence your play on CK.

Chaos Bolt | Q

What you need to know:

• Chaos Bolt is a single, point target Stun with a magical damage component. The duration of the stun, as well as the amount of damage it inflicts, are randomly chosen from two values each which scale with levels in the spell. A level 1 Chaos Bolt can do anywhere from 90 to 180 damage, and stun for anywhere from 1.25 to 2.2 seconds, a level 2 Chaos Bolt does 110–220 damage and stuns for 1.5–2.8s, level 3 is 130–260 damage with a 1.75–3.4s stun, and finally level 4 does 150–300 damage while inflicting a 2–4s stun.
• All of this makes Chaos Bolt an incredibly strong spell in the early laning stage, as an average stun duration of 1.725s and average damage of 145 outclass a massive chunk of other similar spells. It’s somewhat hard to spam at 110 mana cost, but if you have enough mana regen, it’s only a 13 second cooldown.
• The actual values of the damage and stun are tied to each other and are inversely related. More damage means a shorter stun, a longer stun means less damage — the specific numbers scale per levels in the spell, so for each additional 0.1s of stun, the damage goes down by 9.47/8.46/7.88/7.5.
• The stun duration gets rounded, so a level 1 Chaos Bolt doesn’t stun for either 1.25 or 2.2 seconds, but rather some value inbetween. Once the stun lands, a popup above the target indicates the duration and damage, but the true value of the stun duration isn’t shown exactly.
• Chaos Bolt has a couple of things that make it somewhat hard to land reliably. Firstly, the spell has a maximum cast range of only 500, which is about 100 units less than a Force Staff push, for example. This means that you have to be fairly close to the target, but more often than not, you’d prefer to do so anyway. Why?
• That’s because the Chaos Bolt projectile travels at a speed of 700, which might sound decent enough, but is slow enough to provide more than ample reaction time if cast from further away. To illustrate, the fairly slow Nullifier projectile travels at 1000 speed. On top of that, Chaos Bolt has a fairly significant cast animation, consisting most importantly of a 0.4s cast point. It also has a 0.73s cast backswing, meaning that if you don’t issue a command after casting the spell, the hero will spend an additional 0.73s doing essentially nothing — get into the habit of starting to move right after the projectile leaves the hero.
• The scaling on Chaos Bolt is pretty decent; while the average damage only increases by 30 per level, the average stun duration goes up by 0.425s, and generally you’ll get either a fairly significant nuke or a lengthy stun. The cooldown starts at 13s, and is reduced by 1s per level, down to 10s — meaning that on average a level 4 Chaos Bolt has a 30% uptime on the stun. The manacost, however, starts at 110 and goes up by 10 per level, up to 140, which isn’t something CK can easily sustain.
• Your real hero isn’t revealed by using Chaos Bolt, as all of your illus within 600 range of your real hero also cast a fake Chaos Bolt animation. However, if you have illusions within 600 range and cancel a Chaos Bolt during the cast animation, your illusions will finish the animation (albeit without launching the fake projectiles), which can be a hint for attentive enemies as to which unit is your real hero. Additionally, illusions which are moving or attacking will play the fake animation without stopping their movement or attacks, which will reveal your main hero.
• With your level 25 talent, the minimum and maximum stun duration is increased by 1s, making the range 3–5s. Paired with the level 15 CDR talent, you average a 4s stun on an 8.6s cooldown, making for a potential 46.5% stun uptime on a target.
• If you lose vision of a target you’ve clicked stun on while moving towards them to cast it or while in your cast animation, it won’t go off. This can leave you trying to get through the 0.4s cast point without actually managing to use the spell (and as I’ll mention multiple times throughout the guide, CK is very susceptible to getting fogged), so you should consider whether your target has options to get out of your vision and react accordingly before committing to your stun.

Tips:

• The point about the low projectile speed and cast range of Chaos Bolt might imply that it’s better to use your pull first and then stun, and while that’s certainly sometimes the better approach, usually it’s preferable to still start with the stun when possible. This is because of the 0.4s cast point of Chaos Bolt, which leaves you stationary for that time after you pull your target in. You want to get your attacks in right after the pull (especially with illusions) to get your full burst volley off, so it’s often better to start with the stun, based on the options of your target for reacting to the stun. You don’t always have to stun, even — often it’s better to just pull in and burst a hero. No better disable than death, right?
• I’ve mentioned before that Chaos Bolt is very, very strong early on in the lane; however, even when shipping out Mangoes regularly, it’s hard to sustain consistent use of the spell in the lane (without stifling your item progression, at least), so your ability to use it to harass is somewhat limited, since you want to have mana to preserve kill threat with your support. This is where the concept of the threat of a spell being more important than the use of it comes into play — you can use 0.3/0.35s of your 0.4s cast point on Chaos Bolt to fake using the spell and potentially force a defensive reaction, without ever committing the spell. This is particularly useful when contesting CS, since you can steer someone away from contesting a creep with the animation. It’s important to take note of how your enemy responds to this, though, and switch it up sometimes — they’ll catch onto what you’re doing and might stop getting faked out by it eventually. That’s where you actually use the spell when they commit. Bonus points for any mental damage this elaborate game of rock/paper/scissors might cause.
• With a 0.5 turn rate, you might get caught off guard by how slowly CK turns around, especially when doing so to cast a stun. On top of the 0.4s cast point, CK needs about 0.18s to do a 180 degree turn, which means you commit 0.58s to click a stun on someone while moving away from them.
• 500 cast range might be fairly small, but — especially when playing offlane CK — it can be enough to cast Chaos Bolt from fog (usually from the trees in lane), mostly useful to reduce the reaction time window for your target. When doing this — or really whenever using your stun with a skillshot followup on your lane partner — make sure to communicate that you’re going to use pull afterwards for the armor reduction. The exception to doing this is when you’re going to pull your target away from your partner and out of the range of their followup, or in specific scenarios, such as when you’re laning with a Mirana and the pull might cause your Mirana to lose an arrow angle or not have enough time to chainstun.

Reality Rift | W

What you need to know:

• Reality Rift (which I have and will continue to refer to as your “pull”) is another single point target ability, which upon resolving relocates both you and your target to a consistent point along a line between your original locations, in accordance with the level of Rift. In addition, it reduces the armor of your target by 3/4/5/6 for 6 seconds. It’s also your most versatile spell, and probably my favorite skill on CK.
• When you use pull, all of your illusions within 1375 units are teleported alongside your hero to the destination. Your hero and the illusions will surround the target from random angles, but all from the same distance to the target as the main hero. After the relocation happens, your hero and all his illusions that were included in the pull (ie, were within the 1375 range) will instantly issue an attack on the target — you do NOT need to rightclick your target after pulling. Additionally, as with Chaos Bolt, all of your illus play the Rift animation.
• Rift has a cast point of 0.3s, with a (cancellable) 0.5s backswing. Much like with Chaos Bolt, if you lose vision of your target during this animation, the pull will be canceled and you will need to reacquire vision to cast it. The pull will automatically be recast if you reacquire vision of your target without issuing another command, but you’ll, uh, you’ll want to issue that command, usually to move towards your target and assure that you’ll have 0.3s to get the spell off on your next try.
• The cast range on Rift scales with levels — 550/600/650/700 cast range for levels 1 through 4, respectively. This is a massive part of the reason why you’ll want it maxed first in most games — at least on safelane CK, though the other very important part of the spell’s scaling is the cooldown reduction, starting at 15s at level 1 and being reduced by 3s per level, down to 6s at level 4. This makes the spell spammable and allows you to pop multiple targets and change who you focus, and on top of that, lets you have almost 100% uptime on the armor reduction which lasts for 6s (not quite 100% due to the cast point, but easily possible to achieve with the cooldown reduction talent at level 15).
• Rift does not cancel channels, disjoint projectiles, or stack with itself (instead refreshing the debuff when cast before the debuff from the previous use expires).
• Another part of Reality Rift that scales with levels is the distance across which the target is pulled, increasing by 50 per level, starting at 250 (and therefore ending at 400 units at level 4). Rift pulls the target towards CK by a certain distance from the target’s original location towards CK; this distance scales with points, dragging your target 250/300/350/400 units away from the target’s initial location (towards CK). The target is placed about 60 units in front of the end location, so you’re actually dragging them about 190/210/290/310 distance from their original location, but this won’t come up much.
• What might come up, however, is that there is a brief visual indicator of the end location while the pull animation is happening. You (but more importantly your teammates) can therefore tell where you and your target will end up after the pull resolves.
• Reality Rift doesn’t pierce magic immunity by default, but does so with the (very, very, very good) level 20 talent. Also, casting Rift on Roshan will reduce Roshan’s armor but not relocate him. The armor debuff is dispellable by any dispel.

Tips:

• Most people massively undervalue Reality Rift as a lane domination and harassment tool. Once you get 2 to 3 points in it, you have a low cooldown, low mana cost armor reduction spell, and — especially in 1v1 scenarios (which most commonly occur when the lane supports on both sides are rotating or fiddling around with trying to get off and/or prevent pulls) — you should abuse it. When you pull your target, you have an innate damage output advantage over them since their armor is reduced, which lets you get in a lot of significant harass damage, especially if you get a crit which does more damage due to the armor reduction and makes the trade even more favorable due to the lifesteal. On top of that, trading with your target in a creepwave will cause both sides’ creeps to attack, and with your solid early armor, you’ll take significantly less from that creep damage than your target. Spamming Reality Rift in this way just inevitably skews the balance of the lane in your favor with the strength of your trades. Even in 2v2 scenarios, pulling a target means the right clicks from both you and your lane support do extra damage.
• The repositioning value of Reality Rift is limited only by your comfort and creativity in using the spell. You can disrupt your opponent’s CS by pulling them away from the low HP creep they’re trying to attack. You can salvage failed neutral camp pulls by running towards your creep wave and Rifting the neutral into the aggro range of your lane creeps. You can get very late camp stacks off by using Rift to get the last creep outside of the camp boundaries. When your enemy is playing close to your tower, higher levels of Rift can let you (with some practice) pull them into tower range and follow up with a stun. You can use Rift as a last-ditch escape — target an enemy creep which is away from the enemies trying to kill you and you can often dodge a spell. While jungling, you can often Quelling Blade certain trees to get vision of camps across a cliff and then use Rift to end up on that side of the cliff — this is where the visual indicator of the final Rift location can become useful. You can snap an enemy Tether, or pull someone out of your allied Puck’s Dream Coil for a lengthy stun. You can pull creeps that you’re too far away to last hit in to secure the CS — though it’s worth noting that any projectile already headed for it won’t disappear and the aggro of — for example — a tower, will linger on the creep for a bit. In any case, with Reality Rift, the sky’s the limit.
• Reality Rift is a good farming tool in your jungle rotation. Again, it’s a cheap and low cooldown spell, and you can spam it essentially off CD to target down larger neutrals with the armor reduction. It also helps you get to camps faster (and get the neutrals in it to aggro you sooner), which — while minute — is still a difference-maker if you get into the habit of using it regularly, and can often be the factor that dictates whether you get a camp down before the respawn timer or not. On top of that, the armor reduction makes your crits stronger, which then improves your sustain in jungling via the lifesteal. For what it’s worth — and please do NOT do this — you can get surprisingly high GPM and XPM jungling from level 1 on CK while prioritizing attack speed items and skilling Rift and Crit, due to the damage and sustain it provides. But, like, please don’t.
• Much like Chaos Bolt, you can use the 0.3s cast animation of Rift to fake out enemies and potentially force a spell — or make them less prepared for when you do actually commit.
• Rift is very crucial to CK’s playstyle, largely because it includes your illus and instantly issues an attack order. Your job as a CK in teamfights is to target and burst down viable targets, and Rift lets you do that when your illusions are up. This makes it very important to keep detailed track of each opposing hero’s response options, and to prioritize accordingly. In general, you want to look first towards the heroes that you can straight up delete in one swing with your illusions (prioritizing cores that that applies to, but it’s usually supports), but as the game develops and opponents get items, your priority list needs to constantly update. What I’ve found helps significantly with improving your ability to prioritize correctly is to always have a mental checklist of your targeting priority, and you should use your downtime (usually when farming very safely) to consider what the order looks like. What are the enemy heroes? Okay, what can they do to prevent you from bursting them? What can they do to prevent you from bursting their allies? The last point is particularly important when playing into a number of supports that are very annoying for CK, like Lich, Jakiro, Dark Willow, CM, etc. It’s all well and good if you can burst an enemy core down in one swing, but any halfway decent Jakiro will make sure there’s an Ice Path under you after the pull, so your priority list updates to put Jakiro at the top, since his options for responding to your aggression are fewer when you target him instead (due to his lengthy cast animations which prevent him from getting a spell of before you swing down). That Dark Willow might look appealing, sitting at 900 total HP, but she can instantly get a Shadow Realm off before you can stun her, which will leave you sat there with your Rift on a 6 second cooldown while she places a Cursed Crown on you, so she’ll go down on your priority list, since her response options when you target an ally of hers are delayed past the time that your target is already going to be dead. A CM has no innate and instant response — sure, she can freeze your hero or an illu, but she still dies, and her ult gets canceled by a stun, so a CM, for example, might be very high up on your priority list in fights…until she gets a Glimmer or Ghost Sceptre, giving her responses that are faster than your stun, which will lead to CM dropping on your target prioritization checklist when you see those items on her. This is honestly a very important part of fighting well as CK, and whenever possible, you should be checking for new items on enemy heroes that give them an additional response option. This prioritization list needs to keep evolving throughout the game, based on item progressions (and it’s a habit that you’ll get a lot of benefits from developing on other cores as well).

Chaos Strike | E

What you need to know:

• Your crit has a very high proc chance at 30%, and is pseudo-random, meaning that the chance to crit increases slightly each consecutive time that you don’t get a proc. Essentially you’ll be getting a crit slightly more than each 3 hits, and overall it increases your attack damage, on average, by 9%/13.5%/18%/22.5%. This is due to the scaling of the crit damage, which at all levels is a minimum of 120%, with the maximum being 140%/170%/200%/230% for levels 1 through 4 in the skill.
• Each crit proc will provide you with a lifesteal based on the damage you do, starting at 25% lifesteal, and increasing by 15% per level, up to a max 70%. When you roll a higher crit multiplier, you’ll heal more.
• The crit and lifesteal work for your illusions.
• The crit cannot proc on allies (which comes up against Wyvern).
• If you have another source of critical damage (such as a Daedalus), both Chaos Strike and that source will stack in the way that they roll for the proc when you attack. If both crits would proc on the same hit, the higher crit multiplier takes priority. Non-Chaos Strike crits do not provide you with the lifesteal.

Tips:

• One of the most useful parts of CK’s crit is the lifesteal, and this is largely because it allows you to sustain your HP after trades or fights. It’s very easy to just back into the jungle (or to an extremely safe lane wave) and just slap some creeps to heal back up. When you win a fight and end up on somewhat low HP while pushing afterwards, it’s often worth asking your teammates not to kill the incoming enemy creep wave so that you can heal up on it a bit — alternatively, you can run over to a nearby jungle camp to do the same.
• When you’re trying to sustain your HP with the crit, it can oftentimes be worth switching your Treads to Agility for the extra attack speed. This does slightly decrease the damage your crit does, and therefore the actual amount of lifesteal you get from it, but it allows you to get more hits in to get the proc. Past that, it’s generally better to play on STR Treads for the extra crit damage — though I’ll note here that switching to AGI for the faster attack speed can often be VERY useful to kill a very low HP creep, both in the lane and when trying to finish a neutral before the respawn timer.

Phantasm | R

What you need to know:

• Phantasm creates 1/2/3 illusions of your hero, ALL of which deal a full 100% damage that CK does (excluding bonus attack damage, so no Rapiers and whatnot). On the flip side, they take 325% damage, which makes them fairly squishy against magical burst. However, these illusions are what’s called “Strong Illusions”, meaning that they can’t be instakilled by spells that usually do so to illusions, like Glimpse, Hex, Mana Drain or Life Drain.
• Phantasm takes a fairly significant time to create these illusions. On top of a 0.4s cast point, the actual split time (that starts once the cast point is completed) takes 0.5s. The split timer we can get some use out of, the cast point not quite.
• The cooldown of Phantasm is a static 75s at all levels (down to 64.5s with the CDR talent), and starts at a 75 mana cost, up to 125 and finally 175. The illusions last for 30s (38s with the level 20 talent), which gives you a 40% uptime without talents (46.5% with the CDR talent, 58.9% with both the CDR and duration talents).
• The resolution of Phantasm applies a basic dispel to CK. This is very important.
• The 0.5s split time turns the main CK hero invulnerable and hidden (making him untargettable and magic immune). Upon the cast, you also disjoint incoming projectiles.
• Using Phantasm clears attack and spell commands issued on your hero, but also clear your attack or spell commands, including those given during the 0.5s split time.
• CK and his illus always spawn in a certain formation, but the location of the real hero in that formation is random.
• Phantasm illus don’t “stack” — recasting Phantasm while you still have previous Phantasm illusions up will kill those illus and spawn new ones.
• Phantasm is upgraded by an absolutely amazing Agh’s which creates an additional CK illusion, but also creates an illusion of every living allied hero — globally. All of these illusions are under the CK player’s command, and each allied hero notably has the same basic dispel applied to them when Phantasm is used. This also affects clones, so you get illus from the Arc clone and all Meepos. Despite applying the dispel, however, allies affected by Phantasm don’t disjoint projectiles, aren’t turned invulnerable and hidden, and don’t have their previous commands cleared. They follow the same formation pattern as CK, and as with the main hero, the final location of the real hero is random.

Tips:

• The very short cooldown of Phantasm, as well as the 100% damage output, makes it an excellent early farming tool. Similarly to a Sven’s ult, you want to use your Phantasm off cooldown to farm. Despite taking 325% damage, the illus inherit your current level of crit, and therefore can lifesteal, so it’s generally quite safe to send individual illus to a camp to kill it. There are many things you can do to boost your farm with the illus; you can send either the hero or the illu to a lane and micro either to get the last hits while the other afk kills a jungle camp, you can send them to separate jungle camps, you can keep both together to clear stacks or ancients, where you can boost your damage by using Reality Rift. Reality Rift is also very useful to improve your farming patterns with the illusion — for example, you can clear one camp with your illu, one with your main hero, and then use Rift on a camp between the other two camps to get both of your units to the same location. You should generally stop using Phantasm to farm off-cooldown once you start joining fights around the midgame, or often around the time you get Aghs. This is mostly something you have to get a feel for by playing the hero, and it’s something that’s hard to draw a definitive line in the sand for.
• Due to the 100% damage output of the illusion, opposing players who don’t see it take damage can often assume it to be real, which can lead to tanking spells with your illu throughout the game when not using the ult to fight. It’s worth noting as well that the CK taunt shows on individual illusions, which, paired with the damage output, can make baiting spells even more reliable. (Shoutout to Haraway!)
• The basic dispel and disjoint that Phantasm applies is insanely valuable. You can use it to turn a gank and buy time for your allies to help, dispel a slow or DoT, dodge spells — this is another one of those elements of CK’s gameplay where your creativity is the limiting factor. I’ve turned countless 2v1 dives at level 6 by popping Phantasm and dispelling and disjointing spells.
• The nuttiest part of the dispel, however, is when you get Aghs (largely a core item on offlane CK, but not at all a rare pickup on safelane CK at the moment). Applying a GLOBAL dispel to all heroes is incredible, and against some heroes, nigh game-winning. Enemy Treant got a 5-man Overgrowth? Click R and that’s done. Enemy Silencer popping Global for a teamfight? Dispel yourself with a Manta or BKB and clear the Silence from all your teammates with a Phantasm. This is all without mentioning the damage increase you get from having not only an extra illusion of your real hero, but 4 (or more!) extra illusions from other allied heroes, especially if they’re heroes that have generally strong illusions, like a Terrorblade or PL (your PL illu gets to create more illus!).
• When entering a teamfight, you generally don’t want to be front and center when using Phantasm — especially later into the game — as you take 0.9s to get the illusions. Most often, you’ll want to create your illus either out of vision or from a safe distance so that you won’t get instantly targeted by some AoE spells, and then get to work on popping enemies one by one.

Talent Overview:

Level 10: +20 Movement Speed vs +5 All Stats

• The definitive go-to here, in my opinion, is the stats. The +5 at level 10 is fairly useful, since it’s where your low AGI and INT gain will start becoming somewhat notable, and as an illusion hero you generally benefit a lot from stats. Past that, however, you’re also not nearly as reliant on Movespeed due to Rift, and +20 MS isn’t significant enough to warrant picking it over the stats in the vast majority of games.

Level 15: 14% Cooldown Reduction vs +12 STR

• This one can be a bit of a tossup, but I significantly prefer the CDR. 12 strength is a decent chunk, but that’s about 3.5 levels worth of strength gain, compared to increasing the uptime on all your spells and items. The CDR makes you feel noticeably less cooldown-reliant with the greater uptime. Your BKB, Blink, Silver Edge, whatever else you buy, also has a decreased cooldown. Overall I’d suggest picking the CDR in the vast majority of games.

Level 20: Reality Rift Pierces Magic Immunity vs +8s Phantasm Duration

• Now, this is a bit of a weird one. On the one hand, the Rift talent adds extra functionality to the spell, and makes playing into BKB carries (or heroes with innate magic immunity) a lot easier. On the other, increased Phantasm duration, especially with the CDR talent, gives you amazing uptime on your Ult. I’d say this is probably the most situational choice.
• Even when the enemy team doesn’t have BKBs (or innate magic immunity spells), pre-choosing the Rift talent means you’ll be far more prepared if they do eventually start buying them. That said, you might also end up being stuck with a useless talent if your opponents just straight up never buy a BKB, while you’ll always get some use out of the Phantasm talent.
• One notable issue with the Phantasm duration talent is that, at the point where you’re level 20, the enemy team will — in a majority of games — be equipped to clear those illusions by that point, unless they’re playing a very bad draft. On top of that, the duration doesn’t do much for the value of Phantasm early on into a fight — ie, the dispel and the initial rounds of burst. It is, however, very helpful when sieging after fights, or in situations where your opponents just don’t have a way to clear your illus.
• With all of that said, despite the somewhat higher winrate the Phantasm talent sports according to Dotabuff, I’d say there’s about a 70–30 split in favor of choosing the Rift talent in my opinion. The games where you’re playing against 5 heroes that don’t want a BKB (or where having the ability to focus a magic immune target) are exceedingly rare, and I often find myself wishing I’d picked the Rift talent when I do commit to the Phantasm talent. That said, if you’re just not dealing with magic immunity, or potentially don’t want to be pulling in a magic immune hero that you can’t then further disable, and/or don’t feel like your illusions are getting killed on top of that, then the Phantasm duration talent is perfectly viable and will help you siege after the conclusion of a fight near the enemy base.

Level 25: +1s Minimum/Maximum Chaos Bolt Duration vs +10% Chaos Strike Chance

• This is another fairly situational choice; while most people tend to opt for the crit talent, the stun talent gives you a 3 to 5 second stun on an 8.6s CD with the CDR talent, and in the lategame where BKBs are pretty short, getting a 4 second stun on a core can be absolutely gamewinning. The crit talent does a fuckton for your damage output, and when you feel like you’ll benefit significantly from that increased damage output, it does a good bit — but then again, if by the time you’re level 25 you can’t manage to get those burst ranges, you might have more significant issues, at which point having the extra disable time could very well do more. With all of that, I’d lean towards the stun talent.

4. Skill Builds

It’s my opinion that CK is very flexible in terms of skill builds, and there are many reasons to do many various builds. Therefore, I won’t dwell on this section too long, but rather try to present a baseline skill build progression and attempt to explain why and when you might deviate from it.

The Baseline:

This is the build I’d generally default to, but nonetheless one that I deviate from depending on the situation. The aim is to have a decent amount of sustain early on for trading and farming, while still maxing out Reality Rift fairly early on.

Q — E — W — E — W — R — W — W — E — [+5 Stats] — Q — R — Q — Q — [14% CDR] — E — R — [Rift Talent] — [Stun Talent]

The stun is by far your most potent level 1 spell and there’s little reason to get anything else. A point in crit at level 2 allows you to trade and sustain yourself on top of the HP regen you started with, and by the time you get to level 3 you’ll have used your courier once or twice to ship out small items (or components for them) as well as extra regen, at which point you can get a bit more aggressive. A second point in crit makes it a lot more potent in terms of sustain, and from there you max out Rift, as this window of time from level 5 to level 8 is where you generally get a lot of use out of it. I don’t think there’s any reason nowadays to skip ulti at 6. After 10, I max out the stun as I think you’ll get more out of the stun’s scaling as the laning stage disolves — the tradeoff being that you farm slightly slower with one less point in crit.

From here, rather than presenting other individual skillbuilds, I’ll talk about situations where you might deviate from the above one.

• Additional early points in stun: in some situations, specifically when playing in the offlane, it’s very good to get additional early points in your stun for the extra duration which will exponentially increase your kill threat with a lot of pos 4s. This will generally delay points in Rift, and having a lower cast range on it feels pretty bad.
• Maxing crit by 7/8: in very rough, aggressive lanes where you can’t create favorable trades, the best option might just be to fuck off to jungle, and you’ll generally benefit from having extra points in crit to sustain that, especially if you have to leave the lane early. Value points in stun and rift early, then max rift afterwards (or leave crit at 3 and max rift).
• Prioritizing Rift over crit and maxing it by 7: when you’re playing a very aggressive lane in which your support has good disable, maxing out crit by 7 and having 2 points in it by level 3, as well as 3 by level 5, will increase the rightclick damage output of both you and your support. You’re missing out on some sustain here, but you’ll opt for this when the lane is already skewed in your favor and you want to be the aggressor, rather than trade resources and whittle opponents down.

I’ll note, at this point, that you don’t have to be very static with your skill build. Once you play enough of the hero, you’ll start feeling the differences between each individual point in each skill, and will be able to adjust and create “non-standard” builds (though I think all of the skills and their scaling are good so would argue that there’s no singular best build to default to anyway) on the fly. For me personally, the spikes and differences in skill points that I notice a lot are going from level 2 Reality Rift to level 3, where the cast range and cooldown start feeling really nice compared to previous levels, as well as the jump from level 1 to level 2 crit, largely because the lifesteal goes up to a respectable 40% from a negligible 25%, but also because going up to a max 170% crit from 140% definitely becomes noticeable. This is the reason why my baseline build has a 2nd point in Crit at 4 (and occasionally at 3, when I don’t see much value in the level 1 Rift). In any case, this is something that you should experiment with and see what feels good — it’s my opinion that having Rift maxed out fairly early is the best, but certain situations will call for deviation from that, at which point it’s nice that the scaling of all the spells is pretty good and you’ll rarely end up with a build that feels straight up bad.

5. Itemization Overview

This section will be far less exhaustive than the skill overview, largely because it’s hard to say which build is best — and generally because proper itemization is hard as fuck. Another part of it is that CK just isn’t played that much by the best players (which is probably why they’re the best players), so the hero and his itemization hasn’t really been developed and theorycrafted as much at the top level as something stronger and more popular. Rather than trying to tell you what to do every single time, I’ll again go over a sort of baseline, then go over notable options for certain situations, as well as some interactions and uses for certain items.

Starting Items

I won’t complicate too much here. You just want to start off with some regen and basic stats. A fairly normal starting item build for me looks something like this:

Tango — Salve — Quelling Blade — Gauntlet of Strength — Mango — Branch

The basic idea is that you have plenty of regen and some stats; with your first 1–2 courier usages you can ship out another set of tangoes, more mangoes, maybe finish up your Bracer.

There are many perfectly viable alternatives to this, though; in lanes where you don’t expect heavy early harass, or a massive trade at the Bounty rune, you can forego the Salve to get an additional Mango, then ship out another set of Tangoes after the Bounties. In the offlane, you could skip the Quelling Blade or Gauntlet to start with more stats and mangoes instead (though I’d recommend against it due to the usefulness of QB). If you’d prefer to get a Wraith Band over a Bracer (I’ll get into all of this in a bit), you can start with a Circlet or Slipper instead of a Gauntlet (though the former means you’d have to skip the branch without other adjustments, such as skipping Salve to instead get an additional Mango and Branch with a Circlet start). With the recent focus of carry players on getting cheap HP regen for the lane, you might be tempted to get a Ring of Regen, but I’d recommend using Mangoes instead (5 Mangoes cost the same as 2 Rings, take up the same number of slots, give you the same amount of HP regen while also giving you burst Mana regen for kill threat) if you want to go that route.

Baseline Item Progression

I’ll go over a VERY basic run-of-the-mill item progression here, and rather than analyzing different routes, I’ll then talk about individual items.

Safelane: QB — Bracer — Wand — Treads — Armlet — Echo Sabre — Situational

Offlane: QB — Bracer — Wand — Treads — Aghs — Situational

Now, one comment you might have right off the bat is, “But this isn’t what [x] does!” — and you’re right. Especially for the safelane, I don’t actually think this build will be the ideal one in many games. Common variations include going straight into an Aghs after Treads (something that, for example, Gorgc is a fan of); skipping the Armlet and getting the Echo Sabre as your first item and building it straight into a Silver Edge (a build that Badman notably does very often, usually followed by an SnY); some players often opt for a Midas as a first item (like Ramzes). This isn’t to say that Armlet into Echo is rare — for example, it’s the build Mason defaults to.

The reason I outline it as a foundation is that it’s fairly simple to execute, consists of cheap items that are built up out of smaller components — which lets you be fairly active early on and supplement your farm with kills. From here, I’ll be looking at individual items, and explaining what they do for the hero — and you can then apply that to various situations you find yourself in. I’ll start by talking about more common items, going over your options for small items, core items, extension items and situational pickups.

Small Items

Quelling Blade: The trusty old QB is, in my opinion, an incredibly valuable item, especially for safelane CK. The obvious benefit is that it helps you CS, offsetting the large damage range that CK has, but this isn’t the primary use of it — since you tend to have a lot of damage due to good stats and good STR gain. The actual major benefit of QB is the active, which lets you do a whole bunch of things — cut trees for your support to get hard camp pulls off, cut trees for your support to weave in and out of the tower’s passive armor and regen bonus when trading with the enemy 4, carve out a path during your jungle farming patterns that make your movement more efficient. Honestly, I could — and am likely to — write a full guide on the usefulness of QB as an item, and won’t get too into it here. One worthwhile note is that offlane CK can consider skipping QB in favor of more stats, which makes denying easier.

Bracer: A casual early bracer makes you slightly tankier and serves as a nice holdover until your STR gain really starts kicking into gear, and just generally makes your trades a bit more favorable for a very cheap item built from at least one component you can start your lane with. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily consider Bracer a core item, but I’ve lately become more partial to it than before.

Magic Stick/Magic Wand: Another top 10 item in the entire game, I think it’s hard to justify skipping a wand, especially on a low mana pool hero such as CK who tends to fight a lot. One helpful note is that about 8 Stick/Wand charges are enough to give you a stun if on 0 mana, especially when paired with treadswitching. While not related to Wand, I’ll mention that the same is true for Mango (1 Mango gives you a lv1 Stun without treadswitching from 0 mana, and gives you a higher level stuns if you treadswitch — which is to say, pop your Wand/Mango on STR/AGI treads while on 0 mana, then swap to INT treads).

Situational Small Items

Wraith Band: Many of you will remember a trend from a couple of months ago where STR safelane carries would pick up one or more WB’s instead of a Bracer or two, most notably on things like WK. The idea here was that STR heroes innately benefit significantly from a cheap source of extra early armor and AS, and while I’d say in hindsight this trend way caused in large part by the removal of Magic Resistance from Bracer, I still feel like WB is a viable option for CK. Warrants more experimentation, so I can’t definitively recommend it over the perhaps safer choice of a Bracer.

Infused Raindrop: I feel like this can be mentioned as a situational early small item on just about any hero, and CK really isn’t much different in that regard. It makes you a lot more survivable against nukes in the early laning stage, and the mana regen is nice (though not a massively significant aspect of the item). The issue with Raindrops is that they cost a not-insignificant 225g, which you could be using to build into stats, so you should carefully weigh how much use you’ll get out of a Raindrop rather than picking it up mindlessly.

Orb of Venom: In certain laning situations — specifically those where your support doesn’t have a great slow or stun or other kind of disable, but you nonetheless want to play the lane aggressively because the enemy offlane consists of weaker heroes, you can pick up an OoV to keep up your aggression. The tradeoff is that you’re spending 300g on an item that you won’t get a massive amount of use from later, and you might instead consider using that gold to ship out multiple mangoes to sustain your own Stun use. Still, OoV lets you conserve mana by focusing your aggression on spamming Reality Rift and getting extra right clicks off with the OoV instead.

Blight Stone: In scenarios where you and your lane partner have a free pass to slap the absolute shit out of your opponents — which comes up somewhat often in the offlane with aggressive early 4s like Lina — Blight Stone gives you an extra 2 armor reduction on top of the 3/4/5/6 from Reality Rift, which can let you absolutely melt certain low armor carries. It can also very situationally build into a Medallion, though I haven’t experimented enough with that item to have an opinion on it.

Wind Lace: At 250g, Wind Lace is a great cheap movespeed item which most notably can improve your speed in moving from one camp to another, but due to the flexibility of Rift, Lace is mostly relegated to a nice early component for the situational Drums, sometimes built in the offlane.

Core Items

Power Treads: I’ve experimented with Phase occasionally, but Treads are the definitive go-to for CK. The core stats and the attack speed benefit him greatly in many ways, and treadswitching is something that CK gets a boatload of use from. There might be an argument for Phase against stuff like Furion so you can phase through units, but that’s a strenuous argument at best.

Echo Sabre: I think that Echo is, at this point, a core item for CK; it gives him some nice extra STR, covers the vast majority of his mana issues, is a cheap item built from fairly cheap components and upon completion gives CK one of the early power spikes he relies on, as the Echo proc gives him extra burst, largely by providing another chance to land the 30% crit. It builds into Silver Edge, which CK also really likes.

Aghanim’s Scepter: Perhaps a debatable inclusion in the core items section as I’d argue it’s only really core in the offlane (while still being a very, very good option from safelane), CK’s Aghs is an incredible upgrade for many reasons, most of which I outlined when talking about Phantasm.

Situational Core Items

Armlet of Mordiggian: For a very long time I was dead set on considering this an unskippable core item on at least safelane CK, because it just does so much for you — you love the attack speed and armor, but more than anything, activating Armlet before creating your illusions means your illusions inherit the massive Strength bonus, making them insanely strong very early on, as Armlet is a cheap item. While this is still true, Armlet’s main benefit is still just an increase in damage, and oftentimes you won’t really have issues with your early game burst damage, and instead want to look to something that gives you extra functionality (or more consistent bonuses, rather than the illusion focus of Armlet). It’s still very good, largely because it provides CK with one of those power spikes I talk at length about, but potentially better on paper than in game. There’s a lot to say about Armlet on CK, but — for a change — I won’t go over everything in this guide.

Blink Dagger: While you ideally want to be able to get on top of your targets using Rift, sometimes it’s just not possible, and you have to increase your initiation range, and there’s really no better solution to that than Blink Dagger. This most often comes up when you’re trying to get to a heavily protected baseline to fulfill your target prioritization checklist. You’ll want to get this after at least 1 smaller damage item, like Echo Sabre or Armlet, and then pop your ult out of vision, then blink in and rift a target.

Hand of Midas: Lacking a great built-in farm accelerant, and disliking other common ones like Battlefury or Maelstrom, a lot of players look towards Midas on CK. However, I look at Midas as being an XP accelerant, rather than a gold accelerant, and while that’s certainly useful for CK, it also delays your bigger power spikes, the use of which often results in accelerating your XPM anyway. Still, in games where your early spikes wouldn’t be as effective, or where the game looks to be at a slower tempo, Midas is nonetheless a decent pickup, just one that I’ve gone to less and less.

Drum of Endurance: Especially in the offlane, where you’re not going to build around cheap damage increases, it can feel necessary to stop off for a smaller item before heading into Aghs, and Drum is a decent option in the transition out of the laning stage.

Assault Cuirass: The most expensive of the items I’ll list as a potential core item, AC is an absolutely amazing item for CK, and tends to be the first larger item he goes for after finishing up smaller items to create spikes. It’s very expensive, but especially when you’re doing well early on, you can get it at a decent time as your 3rd item and it turns you into an absolute steamroller and massively increases the number of targets you can burst down very quickly.

Sange and Yasha: Some players are big fans of SnY on CK, most notably perhaps Badman who picks it up after Silver Edge in most of his games. It gives you many useful stats, but in my opinion it doesn’t provide a significant power spike or add enough functionality for me to consider it go-to core item. Really nice when paired with Satanic, though.

Battlefury: Look, I’ll be real with you, I haven’t tried enough of this to know for sure whether it’s a massive meme or potentially viable. It slows down your spikes in exchange for a massively significant farm accelerant, and it can potentially lead to you being an Alch-lite, with later, but stronger power spikes, as you can grab 1–2 cheap damage items within 3–6 minutes after finishing your BF. Probably a meme, but one I want to experiment with more in the future nonetheless.

Extension Items

Black King Bar: As it turns out, CK isn’t safe from often needing the best item in the game. It’s not something you really want, because it does nothing for your illusions, but in many games, it’s unavoidable if you want to even have a shot at getting your spells off and at contributing to fights.

Shadow Blade/Silver Edge: Past building out of a core item in Echo, Silver Edge does a number of useful things for CK; it gives him surprisingly decent solo-pickoff potential, an occasional escape mechanism, a way to sneak under vision, a break for the very prevalent Sven/Spec/PA (which especially with the former two can be a game-changer) and many decent stats, amongst other things. It’s also worth mentioning that in the late game, slots for detection become very limited, increasing the value of the item.

Pipe of Insight: In the offlane, your team contribution comes largely from Aghs, but occasionally you’ll also need to grab some other standard offlane items. Pipe is one of those, and it’s also fairly nice for CK, as it helps slightly with illus getting bursted — but the main purpose of the item is to help your team.

Manta Style: Pretty self-explanatory; extra illus, decent stats and a self-dispel. Honestly though, I think Manta is worse now that it used to be, largely because there are better alternatives in many situations, but some scenarios call for having an extra dispel on top of your ult without that dispel being a BKB necessarily.

Heaven’s Halberd: An excellent item in many matchups, Halberd provides you with seriously great stats and a very valuable active against opposing right clickers. The main issue with Halberd is that it’s more reactive than proactive, slowing down your tempo, but it’s nonetheless very important to keep in mind against some heroes that you don’t want to manfight, especially when they have BKB’s, since BKB doesn’t dispel the disarm and they still have to deal with the evasion and status resistance. Halberd’s recent-ish dominance was undercut a bit by the prevalence of MKB, though. Speaking of which…

Monkey King Bar: Ruh roh there’s a PA/TB on the enemy team!

Orchid Malevolence: I’ve had more than a few games where I felt like I’d have infinitely more midgame kill threat if my disable was instant, and the instant cast of Orchid can, very situationally, allow you to lock down insanely mobile heroes like a Storm, Ember, Void Spirit, what have you. The general idea is that you can disassemble your Echo Sabre to already have 1 Oblivion Staff, at which point you’re just about 2k gold off finishing an Orchid. Still, more often than not, the general philosophy of not trying to do a job that’s not yours makes Orchid suboptimal, but it’s an option worth considering occasionally. It also builds into Bloodthorn eventually, which is a massive damage increase with your illus, though the issue there is that the situations in which you have a Bloodthorn and your targets don’t have a dispel are exceedingly rare.

Nullifier: We’ve talked about shifting your target prioritization dynamically through the game; Nullifier again shifts that around because it makes Euls, Force, Glimmer, Ghost and many other responses to your aggression useless. That said, it’s an expensive item that doesn’t do very much past the aggressive purge, and CK tends to prefer to get other items and just adjust and proactively adjust his targetting throughout the game. It’s sorta the same idea as Orchid — you want to play to your strengths, rather than expending many resources trying to cover your weaknesses.

Heart of Tarrasque: Including Heart here purely to mention that it’s a dead item and you shouldn’t buy it. If you want extra HP/tankiness, get something like…

Eye of Skadi: Truckload of stats for you and your illus, a BKB piercing MS and AS slow, and an occasionally super valuable health restoration reduction, making for an incredible manfighting package that also gives you an item option for when you’re at a loss on what to build later into the game.

Satanic: Also known as “Better Heart”, Satanic gives you a good chunk of damage and HP, and while you don’t get insane mileage out of the lifesteal and active as other carries might, you do like the status resist and STR. Not a massively important item for CK, though.

Abyssal Blade: Some games you just need one; generally CK doesn’t really want Basher and Abyssal since he’s not working with insane amounts of attack speed, but later into the game it gives you a BKB-piercing stun to catch slippery heroes (which aren’t often the tanky sort!) or cancel channels.

Refresher Orb: Despite the relatively low cooldowns CK works with, Refresher Orb is still an excellent super-lategame item (I’m talking like, 7th/8th), which lets you get another Phantasm after your first wave expires or is killed, as well as refreshing the cooldowns of all your items.

Moon Shard, Aghanim’s Blessing & Boots of Travel: Again, late-game items to pick up when you’re full slotted. Situationally can replace your Treads with BoTs in the late midgame if you want to join more fights and rat a bit, but you’ll usually be playing with your team anyway.

Neutral Items

I’ll focus mostly on briefly outlining which items in each tier CK likes to have; a general trend is that CK likes a decent chunk of items per tier, and you should therefore figure out if some item you might want is better on a teammate instead and then take another item that’s decent.

Tier 1

CK likes basically all T1 items. The best is probably Iron Talon because it’s just generally an insane neutral, but you definitely won’t say no a PMS, Broom Handle, Ironwood Tree. You like getting a Jelly and are usually one of the two best targets for your team. Honestly, you’ll get some use out of just about any T1 — even stuff like Keen Optic and Arcane Ring are surprisingly good on CK.

Tier 2

The absolute best T2s for CK are undoubtedly Clumsy Net (you can net someone, then dispel your own net with ult) and Vambrace (great stats, especially the magic resist), but again, you’re pretty happy with a lot of the options here: Aquila and Pupil’s are great stats, Imp Claw is a nice damage boost, Dragon Scale is nice for the armor, and Essence Ring is just generally a VERY good neutral (but chances are there’s a better carrier for it on your team).

Tier 3

The standouts in T3 are Titan Sliver (excellent stats), Orb of Destruction (increased burst and sieging) and Paladin Sword (improved manfighting ability through extra sustain). Spider Legs (this mobility thing is pretty good in Dota), Enchanted Quiver (extra burst to melt heroes) and the Mind Breaker (for slippery heroes, especially when paired with a Shadow Blade/Silver Edge) are situationally extremely valuable. You also won’t say no to a Greater Faerie Fire or Quickening Charm if it comes to that.

Tier 4

There are a LOT of very good CK items in this tier. Illusionist Cape gives you another illusion, with 100% uptime, which is just amazing no matter what, so it’s probably the best T4. I’d say Havor Hammer and Minotaur Horn are also very very good; if you have something like Skadi or generally a large mana pool, Witless Shako makes you very very beefy; you definitely make use of Prince’s Knife and Spell Prism (though these are items that you’ll often want on a teammate instead). Ninja Gear can be cool for looking for pickoffs, and Leveller is okay, though it sounds better than it tends to be in practice.

Tier 5

Uh, just take whatever I guess. If you get to T5 items on CK you’re probably in a rough spot, to be honest. Apex, Stygian Deso, Pirate Hat, Trident are probably the best options.

6. Other Notes

This was going to be two separate sections, but then I realized how utterly insanely long this is already and decided to just simplify these two sections and put them together.

On CK’s Roles:

• I think CK’s best role is probably offlane right now; too many other safelane carries do what CK wants to do but better, whereas in the offlane he has the fairly unique utility of a global teammate dispel, which means that there are actual situations where you’d want CK as your offlaner. Not too many of those for the safelane.
• CK mid is pretty dead. I think it was decently viable before the crit was changed back to a proc chance, since you could use the cooldown to secure the ranged creep, but lacking that mechanic or any wave clear, it’s just kinda…straight up bad.
• Support-wise, CK could maybe function as a 4, but I’d recommend against it, since I don’t think he contributes enough in that role with his kit. Meteor Hammer Aghs pos 4 CK sounds like an insanely fun meme when stacking with friends though!

When to Pick:

• Realistically, the only genuine scenario in which I could recommend picking CK in a serious game would be as an offlaner to counter to an enemy Treant or some shit. Past that, when talking about pubs, chances are you’re picking in the second phase and see two supports, so in that regard, you can just pick the hero if neither of those two supports ruins your game; I’m talking stuff like Lich, Jakiro, Shaker, KotL — things with good response options to your aggression.
• There are many heroes you dislike playing into and can’t really deal with (shocker, I know!). You’re fairly bad against other illu heroes, like Naga, PL or TB, massive teamfight AoE wipes you out so you don’t want to see stuff like Dark Seer or Tide or Kunkka or Pango — or, ugh, Underlord.
• On the flip side, you really like playing into things that are single-target oriented, especially if they’re physically burstable. Your Clinkzs, Skywraths, Dooms, Oracles, etc, will fucking despise you.
• For your own team, more often than not you’ll want a couple of things: someone to soak up frontline attention while you pick off people one by one, extra disables on your team so that you can just sit there and click down cores, and then either a more farm-oriented second core that scales better than you and can serve as a secondary win condition if you don’t win the game with your power spikes — or another extremely uptempo core that tries to steamroll the enemy team alongside your power spike.
• Anything more thorough than that would probably warrant another couple thousand words, and only really provide extra insight to people who play in structured Captain’s Mode games regularly, which I don’t expect is very many people in the grand scheme of things.

7. Conclusion

In my Razor guide, I said I’m likely the only person who would write a 6.5k+ word guide to Razor; I can say I’m certainly the only person who’d write a 12k+ word guide to CK, then. Still, I thoroughly enjoy writing about Dota and the Dota communities I participate in, and personally feel like there’s a notable lack of in-depth written content about the game. After writing the Razor guide over a year ago I definitely came to understand why that is, but I got the motivation to write again and wanted to contribute to expanding the pool of those kinds of written resources. I think it’s generally very interesting to learn things that aren’t instantly noticeable or talked about much in Dota, and while I might be the only idiot who’d write a short book’s worth about a hero, I’d wager that many experienced Dota inherently do these small advanced things on their best heroes, so it’s a bit of a shame that more don’t take to sharing it — but I can perfectly understand that, considering the obscene amount of effort it can take sometimes. That said, I still appreciate the lovely positive feedback I got for the Razor guide, and will admit it was a large part of inspiring me to write this one.

On a different note unrelated to the guide, I’d highly encourage people to take a stab at playing in amateur Dota leagues, because it’s such a vastly different (and, for me, much more fun) Dota experience. I’ve written dozens of content pieces for a league I personally participate in over on my second Medium page, largely because it’s an incredible experience.

While I’m already plugging stuff: my writing routine is usually to go for a walk then grab a coffee and sit down and just write — so if you want to support my content, you can do so by buying me a coffee.

Thanks for reading!