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Circlet
Slippers of Agility
Stout Shield
Wraith Band
Wraith Band
Boots of Speed
Town Portal Scroll
Boots of Speed
Orb of Venom
Stout Shield
Power Treads
Wraith Band
Wraith Band
Wraith Band
Town Portal Scroll
Phase Boots
Stout Shield
Orb of Venom
Radiance
Vladmir's Offering
Skull Basher
Assault Cuirass
Daedalus
Monkey King Bar
Black King Bar
Butterfly
Boots of Travel
Daedalus
Ghost Scepter
Eye of Skadi
Monkey King Bar
Satanic
Scythe of Vyse
Abyssal Blade
Gem of True Sight
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1 | 3 | 5 | 7 |  |
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10 | 12 | 13 | 14 |  |
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2 | 4 | 8 | 9 |  |
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6 | 11 | 16 |  |
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15 | 17 | 18 |
Hey guys, welcome to my quick jungle guide for 
Lone Druid. This build can work with slight changes to the starting items in lane but for this jungle guide I don't start with regen items because frankly in the jungle Lone Druid doesn't need them. I'm not going to explain how to jungle or how to properly play Lone Druid because there are a myriad of guides written by much better Lone Druid players than myself already available out there. What I AM going to do is present my preferred build order for Lone Druid and explain why I think it's the best.
Please keep in mind however that no character build is the best for absolutely every situation; but that's okay because that's one of the things that makes DOTA so interesting. I am confident enough to guarantee that using this starting build will positively affect your win rate with Lone Druid, provided your mechanics with him are decent.
When I study a hero that I like to play, I like to look closely at the features that make that hero unique from all the others and what kind of tricks, advantages and disadvantages those features will present to me.
One neglected feature of Lone Druid is the fact that he has 12 item slots available to him. Now I know lots of players are aware of this feature, but it has become apparent to me over the years that not much thought has been put into how to most efficiently make use of these extra item slots. Let's face it: Lone Druid will hardly, if ever, complete 12 expensive items over the course of one match. So why is it so common to build him and his bear just as you would build any other hero with their limited 6 slots? So often LD players start the game by rushing a 
Hand of Midas and/or a Radiance on their Spirit Bear and completely neglect to build anything on the druid until the mid/lategame. This is a MISTAKE.
It's been proven that it is better to stack the Spirit Bear with powerful items first, but you can be sure that the enemy will be focusing YOU in teamfights. You can be so much more effective/survivable by stacking cheap, cost-efficient items on your druid in the early game and still be able to hit fairly early radiance timings or not feel like a complete nuissance early/midgame if your bear drops in battle and resummon is on CD. You're never gonna get 12 slotted with expensive items on LD, so why not get some cheap/cost-efficient items and put those extra slots to use? The only reason other carries don't do it is because they don't have the space, but that's not a problem for Lone Druid. The benefits are numerous:
-Druid is tankier; less susceptible to ganks and the resulting gold loss.
-You do more damage than if you built a Hand of Midas.
-Once you get Radiance you can farm two separate locations much more efficiently than if you had built nothing on the Druid.
-You can push towers faster early game.
-You can actually effectively gank in the early game instead of being useless till radiance.
Now the most efficient items that I have found for LD to stack in the early game are Wraith Bands. I usually stack 2-4 of them (usually 3 to leave a slot for consumables/ Gem of True Sight/
Aegis of the Immortal) on the druid, get a Teleport Scroll, upgrade my boots and THEN start working towards Radiance (if the game is going ok), or Vladmir's Offering/ Skull Basher (if the game is going bad and the team really needs me to help a lot). Try it out, you will find that with your extra stats, less deaths and farming speed you will be able to farm a radiance almost as fast as if you had started with a Hand of Midas and you won't have to wait until Radiance to become relevant.
The expansion items I listed are all the options that I consider to be viable choices on LD but are purely situational based on how the game is going, what your team is building and what type of heroes the enemy team has. Just make sure you fully deck out your spirit bear before you start selling Wraith Bands and building on the Druid. The only exceptions I can argue for are if you are getting killed way too fast later in the game on your druid and you decide to build a Ghost Scepter and/or a Black King Bar for some survivability.
The one popular item that I decided to completely leave out is 
Mjollnir. Despite common belief, I argue that it is a terrible item for the spirit bear. It actually interferes with its Entangling Roots and reduces its proc chance significantly; thereby reducing your kill potential. If you want aoe/farming speed then just build a Radiance.
I wrote this argument as part of the guide discussion below but I have decided to include it in my guide because it took a lot of effort for me to write and it goes a long way toward explaining my logic behind this build.
"The very definition of cost efficient implies that for the money it costs it gives you more stats/damage etc. than another item for the same money spent. 1500 gold towards 3 Wraith Bands gives you more stats (and at least similar raw damage) than 1500 gold towards a Radiance does (even assuming that you could buy the 17 damage + 14 AOE DPS that the 1500 gold could get you). The only point in time at which Radiance provides more power per each gold spent is when you have the completed item, because it also gives you AoE (which you lack) and allows you to split push safely; these are the only reasons it is built in the first place and is also why rushing it straightaway is a perfectly viable strategy (though it leaves you lacking in other departments for quite awhile). However, that 1500 gold spent towards 3 Wraith Bands sure gives you ALOT of stats/damage for the money spent compared to other items you could be building towards. There's only two reasons you don't stack such items on other heroes:
1) The stats/damage it gives contributes little to enhancing the strengths of the hero and covering its weaknesses (i.e. the stats don't benefit the hero playstyle).
2) The stats may be great for the hero early on but the item becomes inefficient when the hero is forced to sell it back because it doesn't build into anything he wants and he has run out of item slots.
The only reasonable argument against stacking Wraith Bands is that the damage/stats they provide do not aid the hero much in his playstyle (don't cover his weaknesses and enhance his strengths). Because we know for a fact that lack of item slots is not a problem for Lone Druid. My premise is that these early stats do help the Lone Druid alot. It's undeniable that Radiance does alot to enhance the Lone Druid's playstyle, this is why it can be built first. But building Radiance first is contingent on alot of things going right in the game: You have to not die to ganks much (which can be hard because without stats even your bear form can be relatively squishy early on), your team needs to be able to hold pushes without you for 15+ minutes, you can't/shouldn't go ganking because even if the enemy makes a mistake and a good opportunity arises you will probably not be able to run them down or if you can you probably won't do enough DPS to kill them, you can't put alot of tower pushing pressure because if a teamfight erupts you'll probably die and if a lone defender comes to repel you you won't have the strength to 1v1 them yet etc etc.
These are the reasons we choose to build items other than Radiance straight from the get-go. Why do players build Hand of Midas and then Radiance? Because they discovered when building Hand of Midas first that they can still build Radiance in a time period close to what it took them to build it if and they still get some attack speed and faster farming of subsequent items (which they will still need to cover Lone Druid's other deficiencies before the hero is effective). This strategy works too, in fact it's better than straight up rushing Radiance because it helps the Druid hit similar Radiance timings while also speeding up subsequent items. But this strategy is also contingent on pretty much the same things that the straight-up Radiance build depended on as well.
Now here's the kicker: why was 
Armlet of Mordiggian so effective on Lone Druid before the nerf? Because on the Spirit Bear it could be turned on indefinitely and when turned on it provided a high amount of cost efficient stats....that's all it gave...stats! So why was it so good? Cause stats make Lone Druid effective and Armlet of Mordiggian cost very little for the stats it provided! Guess what though...2600 gold worth of Wraith Bands gives MORE stats than even an activated Armlet of Mordiggian does (and without the health drain, so on a cost efficiency basis Wraith Bands even beat Armlet! There's two reasons though why our mind doesn't go straight to stacking Wraith Bands instead of Armlet of Mordiggian; first, the Wraith Bands go on the Druid, not the Bear (I believe this is the major reason) and second, we can't stack 2600 gold worth of Wraith Bands due to item slot constraints (even double the slots of every other hero has its constraints...). But are Wraith Bands more cost efficient than Armlet? Absolutely. And do more stats make the Lone Druid more effective at any stage of the game? Absolutely as well. Furthermore, through extensive testing I have found my 2-4 Wraith Bands build to hit similar Radiance timings to Hand of Midas into Radiance (within 2 minutes on average) without any of the drawbacks of that build.
That's why I wrote this guide; it WORKS and it does so with alot less risk involved. More importantly, it does so by taking advantage of a very often neglected advantage that Lone Druid has: 12 item slots. It allows you to be much harder to kill, farm fast (and even farm 2 SEPARATE locations fast when Radiance is complete), it allows you to gank early and effectively, it allows you to 1v1 and sometimes even 1v2 early on, it allows you to punish your opponents' mistakes while making it harder for them to punish yours, it allows you to farm ancients earlier and it doesn't even make you weaker in the later portion of the game because you never have to sell these cost-efficient items you bought. If someone could think of an even better way to make use of these extra slots both early and lategame then this guide will have done its job; getting people to think about how to use those slots to make Lone Druid even more successful as a hero.
This guide/discussion however has gotten ME thinking about the lack of inherent regen early on with this build. In my games I just buy consumables as needed (because I don't like the risk of 
Tranquil Boots breaking during ganks or early teamfights) and I find that I really don't usually need so much regen early on that I need to dedicate an item slot to it. But the lack of inherent regen DOES present some quite large problems when facing a very aggressive gank-heavy lineup early on (since having to buy regen all the time or returning to base or waiting for it to get to you) can severely dampen your farming speed....I need to do some testing on a build order that could help alleviate the problems that that scenario presents. But either way the Wraith Band stacking would still be a great way to go because as the Armlet of Mordiggian exploit proved, early stats DO matter." -Pano
I pretty much start every Lone Druid game by purchasing the same core items in the early game. Once I get my Wraith Bands, Boots, Teleport Scroll and Orb of Venom, my Lone Druid is perfectly capable of impacting the game in significant ways; whether it be through pushing, defending, ganking, Roshan, tanking in teamfights etc. It's at this point though that I will have significant variations in my build depending on how the game is going.
If my team has been giving up a lot of kills in the early game, hasn't been CS'ing well and/or have lost many towers then I will often opt for quick "battle items". These items include Vladmir's Offering, Skull Basher and Assault Cuirass. In these kinds of scenarios I may opt to build one or more of these before working towards my Radiance or I may decide to forego Radiance altogether if the game has gotten past the 20 minute mark without me even starting on it. Now which "battle items" do I usually build first? Well once again that depends, do I have supports that would like to/are well suited for Vladmir's Offering? Then I will probably skip it altogether. Is my team lacking in CC and/or I spend most of my time getting kited? Then I'll get a Skull Basher first. Are my team mates squishy and/or we're doing ok in teamfights but want more pushing power? Then I'll prioritize Vladmir's Offering (or Assault Cuirass if someone else is building Vladmir's Offering).
If I'm having a pretty equal game however or my team is winning, then I ALWAYS go for Radiance after my core items. It's a great item on Spirit Bear (probably his best) and it doesn't take too long to farm it even without a Hand of Midas because my core items improve my farming speed so much (and if I get lucky with some kills and/or towers it comes even faster). Truth be told a Radiance is very effective on Spirit Bear at any point in the game, but it is especially effective if it is completed anywhere between the 15-30 minute mark; so if you're having a decent game definitely aim to get it done within that time period.
As for Daedalus and Monkey King Bar? I always get them AFTER I have Radiance, Vladmir's Offering, Skull Basher and Assault Cuirass on my Spirit Bear. Now which of the two do I choose? Simple, if the enemy has evasion (either through skills or items) then I build an Monkey King Bar, if not then I always build a Daedalus.
I'd like to mention that I never complete an Abyssal Blade on my Spirit Bear. The extra damage is nice but the Spirit Bear cannot use the active and at this point in the game you'd probably be better off investing that money in the Druid (since the Bear should have no problem killing targets once it's six-slotted and if it IS having trouble then that means it's getting killed....which means I should be increasing the Druids' power anyway).
Finally, for extension items on the Druid I tend to prioritize survivability over damage in the late game. Items like Ghost Scepter and Black King Bar work great on the Druid once the Spirit Bear is decked out. Usually by this point over 90% of your games will have ended, but if they have not then I like completing an Abyssal Blade on the Druid for some damage and that incredibly powerful active stun that goes through Black King Bar.
Thanks for reading my quick guide. I hope you try it out and enjoy it. Please feel free to comment on your experiences using this build. If you DO try this out and have some suggestions on how to make this build even better please leave your suggestions below.
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