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Tango
Stout Shield
Iron BranchIron BranchIron Branch
Clarity
Boots of Speed
Ring of Health
Magic Wand
Poor Man's Shield
Power Treads
Phase Boots
Perseverance
Battle Fury
Desolator
Diffusal Blade
Butterfly
Heaven's Halberd
Monkey King Bar
Helm of the Dominator
Mjollnir
Satanic
Skull Basher
Vladmir's Offering
Radiance
Assault Cuirass
Abyssal Blade
Linken's Sphere
Divine Rapier
Eye of Skadi
Shadow Blade
Veil of Discord
Necronomicon
Manta Style
Daedalus
Dagon 1
Ethereal Blade
Ghost Scepter
Eul's Scepter of Divinity
Armlet of Mordiggian
Refresher Orb
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10 | 12 | 13 | 14 |  |
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2 | 4 | 7 | 9 |  |
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1 | 3 | 5 | 8 |  |
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6 | 11 | 16 |  |
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15 | 17 | 18 |
Of all the heroes in the DotA 2 World, Bounty Hunter (BH) is perhaps the only hero capable of safely falling into any niche on any team. He can act as a powerful ganking component from lvl 2 on, can build to tank, can simply supply vision and true sight, prepare and carry out a carrying format, harass to no end, and even function as a pushing power. Above all else, however, BH should be noted most for his ability to subtly shift the power curve, steadily or even suddenly dowsing his teammates in gold lost to any number of mistakes, and restoring a fighting chance.
An interesting aspect of BH is that he is a very capable (if fragile) long lane (Suicide Lane) hero. A long lane is any lane that does not contain your team's tower in its elbow. These lanes are often difficult because they are open, and there is a large danger of being flanked or ganked in any number of ways, and the distance back to your nearest tower is quite long.
The obvious reason for bounty being able to survive such a lane is that he can become invisible at any time. However, such a defensive playstyle means that last hits will be few, and the chance of actually getting a kill are limited. Mana becomes a precious resource that cannot be wasted. For that reason, I advocate the negligence of the Shuriken Toss ability.
My reasoning is that in such a defensive lane, harass will be better done by combining the damage from your Jinada and Shadow Walk abilities. You can wait until Shadow Walk is about to expire; by then Jinada will be off cooldown, and you'll have had to come out of invis anyway to reset the Shadow Walk if you have it on. This costs half the mana of using the Shuriken Toss, and allows you to continue on in anonymity while you wait for an opportunity to finish a hero, or receive a gank on your weakened opponents. Many may argue that at least 1 lvl of the Shuriken is a necessity, as you never know when someone might TP away (ST contains a ministun, cancelling TP's) or when someone will simply walk away free. I would counter that a well thought-out gank or killing assault rarely fails, especially once the Track ability is available and BH has boots.
The worst fear of any bounty hunter player is that the assaulting lane carries 
Sentry Ward and/or 
Dust of Appearance. These obstacles, while deadly, are certainly not unbeatable.
While suicide laning bounty, I have found that it is best to never stay in sight of the enemy. Even if you are stealthed, your character should rarely be "visible" in the event of ward placement or random dust popping. However, you still want your BH to be receiving as much experience as possible from the opponents. For this, I recommend using tangoes and/or a quelling blade to cut side pockets into your lanes. Paths for you to walk when no opponent line of sight is on you, and wait. In this manner, you may fool your opponents into thinking that you are 1) not in lane. 2) Stealthed at all times. 3) Jungling or something stupid that also is not true. They will also most likely waste precious resources attempting to hunt you down.
Always scan your opponents while waiting in your pockets, checking to see if Sentry Wards or Dust has come into their hands. If you feel safe enough, use your stealth ability to last hit. While advanced teams will never allow this, many less experienced players will be frightened of you, or unwilling to spend money attempting to hunt someone that is generally hard to kill.
Laning with Bounty Hunter should be relatively simple. There is no need to emphasize your Shadow Walk ability as you will not require it for your defense. You have teammates for that.
While laning, it is a good idea to combine your Shadow Walk with Jinada to harass enemies into submission. It is even better to simply walk up to them, hit them with Jinada, and Shadow Walk to safety. Your goal is to use your harassment to either keep your teammate alive by suppressing enemy aggression, or to get them to a point where they feel confident enough to stay in lane, and you feel confident enough to slay them.
Once you hit six, you must know that you are obligated to free yourself to the entirety of the map. Your track ability is needed somewhere, and your job is to find out or announce where that location is, providing your team with small bits of direction and creating order and strategy. This will build up gold, and keep enemies frustrated.
Once you are lvl 6, and your Track ability is ready, it is important to begin calling for ganks, or ganking immediately. Your track ability is the most important ability that your character has. Right off the bat, it provides a small but noteworthy advantage in melee combat by reducing opponent armor, and providing sight at all times, mostly eliminating jukes and discouraging opponents in general. As a secondary factor, far more subtle and overlooked, you and all of your teammates receive bonus gold for the kill. For teammates assisting in the kill, this can result in gold gains beginning at 150, and soaring to 400 late game. For teammates completely uninvolved, a gain of 50-100-150 depending on the level of your track. For yourself, your minimum bounty for assisting in a kill with a tracked victim is 200 Gold. This bonus gold can soar to 700 and even a bit beyond when you have made the killing blow yourself.
Remember that opponents on killing streaks give massive amounts of gold. Now imagine that you are playing on a team that is being constantly pounded in small ganks and teamfights. There are three players on the opponent side that have considerable killing streaks. Enter a teamfight. If you manage to track those heroes- just those three- in any succession, and in any way before they die- even if all of your teammates die, they receive all of their gold back just from your bonus gold, and receive more in assists and kill streak gold. Your track has nullified most of the negative effects of their deaths. Now imagine winning that teamfight outright. Tracking just those three will give your teammates the gold they need to complete items, build a bit of tankiness, or do whatever is necessary to re-enter the playing field.
Track is the key to success, and it is absolutely important that above all else, every enemy that is about to die has been tracked by you and has that debuff on them when they die. In this way, you secure gold on your team. They can afford to leave the lanes for large whiles and not be farming. The supports can actually afford to support and still build for their personal needs and luxuries. Your team is always capable of getting the items they need from intelligent play and the conjunction of your track. For this reason, Bounty Hunter is a valuable aspect in any team that is capable of getting a kill, and they all are.
Your skills are relatively self explanatory.
Shuriken Toss is your main finisher/nuke and is also quite useful for cancelling any channeled spell, including Scrolls of Town Portal. Note the manacost. This spell is quite hefty in that aspect, and it is important to remember that in using it, you may find yourself unable to do much else.
Jinada is a more powerful nuke, in my opinion, because not only does it double your damage, but it also slows for a small time and is completely free to use. Later in the game, this ability does far more damage than your first skill. The short cooldown is also quite useful for harassment or chasing.
Shadow Walk This ability does little damage, but allows stealth, a great defense as well as a powerful offense, especially when combined with the effects of Jinada, which will trigger automatically if you mind your cooldowns. Remember that there is a fade time. Even re-casting Shadow Walk will trigger this fade time. While the fade time is small, 1-.25 seconds, you should keep in mind that there are people in existence with frightening and powerful reflexes, capable of casting several spells in that tiny window of time.
Track The ultimate, as I have mentioned earlier, is the core of this hero, and the only reason the hero can change the shape of a match.
Using these skills requires quick thought, or forethought. Any thought will do, as long as nothing is thoughtless. Remember that casting any ability removes your Shadow Walk, even re-casting the Shadow Walk while still under its effects.
Items in this game are largely up to the Bounty Hunter himself. Every game is different, and I won't suggest that any build will create a winning game every time. There are many ways to help a team out, carry, and win a game, but in order to do this, you must forget the ridiculous concept that this game is about maintaining an obscenely lopsided Kill/Death/Assist score. Your goal is to push into the enemy base and destroy the ancient, in any way possible.
The only item that I will highly suggest one goes for, every game, is the Battle Fury. My reasoning is that every aspect of this item complements Bounty Hunter. The steady stream of mana provides nearly endless invisibility and ensures you will rarely find yourself unable to cast any of your skills. The health regen is useful as well, allowing you, when wounded in a skirmish or large battle, to wait patiently on a side and sieze an opportunity to burst burst or track someone, or do something to help your team rather than simply run to the base. It is encouraging to see that you regenerate at a reasonable rate. The damage and cleave is helpful in battle and monumental in helping you farm. The item has plenty of use. But there will always be games where the item is simply unattainable for a large while, unnecessary or not as valuable as something far more important. In these instances, I would consider the following:
Smaller, cheaper items such as 
Urn of Shadows or 
Bottle will help with survivability, and also provide a small amount of support for your teammates if you choose to use the items in this manner. Urn has the added bonus of being capable of dealing small amounts of damage over time, making it doubly useful.
For the rest of your choices, it is simply important to consider what your are facing, how you are doing, and make your best choice based on what you think you can make happen. For instance:
Are you dominating?
In this case, it may be more useful to make sure that you secure dominance. If you are having no trouble killing people on your own without significant item help, then you probably do not require a Divine Rapier to finish the job. I would instead suggest creating items that benefit your teammates that are not on the same level. Assault Cuirass provides an attack speed and armor boost to all in range, as well as an excellent de-armor aura to opponents. Even 
Shiva's Guard can prove useful to teammates by providing a powerful slow as well as significant damage and attack speed reduction for foes. In a team where ending the game quickly is a concern, Necronomicon provides pushing power while giving significant revelation for BH to track with.
Is Riki, Windrunner, Void, Panda, or Phantom Assassin opposing you?
Instead of getting a desolator, which provides redundant armor reduction and can be replaced by 
Medallion of Courage, it may be wiser to beat your opponents to the punch, grabbing Monkey King Bar and ensuring that your attacks never miss once the animation is complete.
Is there someone you want dead, but can never quite kill?
In this case, 
Orchid Malevolence may prove useful. Its silence completely ruins the plans of pesky casters like Invoker, Tiny, Lion, and Leshrac, allowing you to dispatch them in relative ease using your own abilities, the extra damage, the attack speed boost and the 25% damage amplify. This item is also very helpful for taking down tanks, as your team's efforts will be rewarded by the 25% amplify inflicted on the target, allowing them to cut 1/4 of the time it would normally take to kill.
Do you have tons of crazy AOE magic monsters on your team?
In this case, Veil of Discord provides substantial boosts to any team fight, causing magic damage to absolutely slaughter opponents in a short amount of time. The armor from this item is also significant for your small 1v1 scuffles.
Are your teammates woefully poor?
If your teammates need help with wards, buy them for them. Trust me, the amount of gold you'll get back from the information provided by sight is far greater than what you invest.
Hopefully this information has given you a far better understanding of what this hero is capable of, and what may be required by both common and even completely unique situations across the battles you will face. This hero is all about your wit and your interactions with your teammates. An angry BH with a 32-0 score, and lvl 6 teammates is still perfectly useless when his teammates no longer have the will to continue playing. For this matter, is important to see BH as more of a guardian than a carry. He oversees the long term, caring for his teammates and making sure they are financially secure. He spots potential problems in the rising ranks of the opponents and silences them before they grow strong enough to wreak havoc. He ensures that no teammates walk into a trap that will ensure their demise, and most importantly, he makes bank.
As a final caution, I do not recommend playing with the skill orders I have provided. By this, I mean, you will either have a BH that prioritizes Jinada and Shuriken Toss, or a BH that prioritizes Jinada and Shadow Walk. A BH with only Shuriken Toss and Shadow Walk is completely silly, there being no benefit to not having at least one level of Jinada (which is, in my opinion, far superior to Shuriken).
You'll notice that I have labeled my item selections. These are merely suggestions. One must never consign himself to the rigidity of a list. Think outside the box! With that said:
Start: Your starting items. I wouldn't stray from these builds, made specifically for suicide and laning.
Things to Farm First: I reckon these are the things to farm first. Mainly because the section is titles "Things to Farm First".
Core Items: These are items that I believe you will be most likely to be in need of within the first 18 minutes of the game. They can be mixed and matched. The only reason the two builds differ in this section is that I am assuming the Suicide Bounty will have less gold than the Laning Bounty Hunter.
Your Main Tool: As I have stated before, I believe this item complements Bounty Hunter in its completeness, and I believe it will be rare to find a situation in which it proves useless.
Your Final Choices: These are all items that I believe will be most commonly needed. There are so many because there are so many situations that one might face. In any event, these items may generally be placed on your hero without drawing unwanted attention from your teammates.
Weird Situational Voodoo: The placement of any of these items on your hero will draw immediate attention and horrified stares from your teammates. That is because your teammates are looking out for you and want to make sure that you are not stupid. These items can all find their usefulness on your hero given the right situation, even 
Bloodstone. The key is not to explain their usefulness to your mates, but to prove that usefulness to everyone in combat. If you cannot do this with an item you have chosen, then you must simply accept that you took a risk and were completely and utterly wrong.
Personal Note: I find the items Divine Rapier, Radiance, and Refresher Orb to be almost completely meaningless in every way on your hero. The Divine Rapier is an unnecessary risk, if you have managed to farm the gold to buy it. Radiance does not provide enough damage to couple with Jinada to justify its effectiveness, and the Refresher Orb is almost a complete waste, since you only have one nuke, and all of BH's cooldowns are incredibly short, ranging from 5-15 seconds at maximum.
I do hope that you found this guide helpful, and I do hope you'll continue enjoying and playing this marvelous game.
-ncmycelium
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