Lifestealer Weapons

When I've been working on my Lifestealer build I have worked out a decent buy order to getting Armlet of Mordiggian, Drum of Endurance (sometimes), Power Treads, Crystalys, and Maelstrom by the Team Fight stage.

I have found I prefer to get Crystalys and Maelstrom both rather than completing Daedalus or Mjollnir first because then I get the Chain Lightning chance and the Critical Strike chance. I build the two base weapons and then sneak over to the Secret Shop to buy Hyperstone and Demon Edge during the team fight.

Now my question becomes, should I be building Battle Fury in addition to the other weapons? If so, when should I be building it? I'm thinking the combination of Battle Fury, Daedalus, and Mjollnir is pretty much gg, but I do know it's a pretty expensive build. Is there some way to tell if I should be getting two of the weapons based on the enemy team? Should I just keep things more standard and be getting Assault Cuirass?

Thanks for your help.

Tyerker

The build that is now used is :

Phase Boots
Drum of Endurance
Armlet of Mordiggian
Desolator
Assault Cuirass
Abyssal Blade

Sometimes Battle Fury is picked up against Phantom Lancer, but the items you specified above are pretty bad on him.

Care to explain how Daedalus and Mjollnir are bad?

Battle Fury on Phantom Lancer makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that.

Daedalus is not worth it, you already have a lot of damage, and critical strike won't help. Especially that a lot of your damage comes from Feast which won't count towards your critical hits.

Also, Mjollnir gives attack speed and that chain effect, but it gives little damage, and you can use the Hyperstone for Assault Cuirass instead, which gives you attack speed, armor, some nice auras for your team and also for the enemy. It's way better in my opinion.

Would something like Orchid Malevolence work well for the attack speed boost + the disable?

That would actually work against heroes like Outworld Devourer, Puck and Queen of Pain, yeah, and it also provides you with some good mana regen that can be useful.

It really depends on the other team's lineup tbh, but imo...

The Damage, Regen and Cleave are nice, but the Cleave is only worth it if you have some way to squish the other team together like Dark Seer's Vacuum or Magnus's Reverse Polarity (RP + Empower + Battle Fury's Cleave can mean GG on a lot of Melee carries 8D ). If you don't have that, then it's not really worth it as you don't really need the Mana Regen and Armlet of Mordiggian will give you more useful bonuses with the same amount of Damage for less Gold.

The only exception to this is if you pick Lifestealer then the other Team decides not to pick any Tanks, limiting Feast's Damage, but this isn't too likely to happen.

Bear in mind the Active, which gives you a 20% chance to deal 200 Damage to 3 nearby targets every time you take Damage, be it a Right-Click a spell like Diabolic Edict, or even Radiance and can be used even while Rageing. Against other high Attack Speed Carries like an Alchemist, this can do some serious hurt.

It's also highly amusing sometimes 83

The thing with Mjollnir is that it is in essence a farming item (like Battlefury, Radiance and Hand of Midas), which a lot of people don't understand - they're great if you can get them fast enough, but they're not worth it after a certain point, since the effects don't scale like the alternatives. If you can't finish by 20 minutes, don't get it at all. 200 magical damage from the active isn't nearly as effective in a late-game teamfight as a -5 armor aura to the enemy team and a +5 armor aura to your team (from Assault Cuirass.

I don't like Mjollnir because it means I'm not getting the early Armlet of Mordiggian, which is the only core item Lifestealer really needs. Once you have phase+armlet (hopefully by 15 minutes) you're ready to stop farming creeps and start farming heroes.

Ya I usually end up with Power Treads and Armlet of Mordiggian by 15 minutes or so. I liked building Maelstrom and Crystalys because of the perceived usefulness of Gloves of Haste and Blades of Attack as I was building them. I suppose a Quarterstaff building into Orchid Malevolence is kind of a 2-for-1, though.

If you're going for what Hades posted as the Race Car build (Phase, Drums, Armlet), then maelstrom is not a good item, because your build should be focused on being unkillable (runs too fast, hits too hard, armlet). This is for fighting.

If you're going more old school jungle Naix that carries late game, feel free to get Midas/Maelstrom and Power Treads, and skip Drums and Armlet altogether. Just farm farm farm.