Your Life is Mine Now

Introduction

To begin this is my first build, so I decided to make it on ome of my most played heroes that is a lot of fun to play with. The ever elusive Naix, or Lifestealer. Lifestealer is a very good hard carry that can also snowball out of control if played correctly. He has a great ability at jungling from level 1 thanks to his ability Feast. He is usually played in the hard carry role or position 1 in professional DotA matches. Overall Lifestealer is very fun to play. It is common for Lifestealer to build towards those high damage and attack speed items such as Abyssal Blade and Assault Cuirass because it allows him to due serious damage and wreck entire teams.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

[+]Jungling from level 1
[+]Has good killing potential through most of the game.
[+]A good job at farming albeit not as good as flash farmers like Anti Mage
[+]Free Black King Bar ( Rage)
[+]Team up with good initiators to use Infest and destroy

[-]Is very vulnerable when Rage ends
[-]Can have some mana problems (easily fixed by supports buying Arcane Boots)
[-]First few minutes will be a problem because it is difficult to jungle with only one level in Feast
[-]Is easily countered if ganked early in jungle

Skills Overview

Rage is the first ability for Lifestealer. This skill is great because it means that you don't need to build a Black King Bar which allows you to build more items towards damage and attack speed. The extra 80 attack speed it gives you also greatly increases the amount of life you can steal with Feast. You should always pop Rage right when you are about to go into a team fight.

Feast is what gave Lifestealer his name. This is the main skill that Lifestealer is known for having. Feast gives you up to 7% health of lifesteal which is different from other lifesteal modifiers. This is why attack speed is much more important than damage at first with Lifestealer because when you attack more often, you steal more health, which allows you to survive much longer in fights and dish out a lot of damage to other players.

Open Wounds is a great spell for closing the gap and also providing a lot of good lifesteal for not only you buy also for your teammates. It's always a good idea to use Open Wounds on Roshan because Feast does not work on him at all and because your teammates also get the lifesteal, it allows for some very early Roshan kills if done properly. Very strong skill throughout all parts of the game.

Infest is Lifestealer's ultimate and it allows him to go inside either a ally, neutral, or enemy creep or an ally hero. While inside a creep, Lifestealer has the opportunity of controlling the creep and he also is able to use the skills of the creep that he infests. This can be useful when using the troll creep to net enemy heroes or the centaur leader to stun a group before popping out and dealing lots of damage. Also having any hero on your team that either has an ability that allows them to get close like Storm Spirit or a usual blink dagger carrier such as Centaur Warrunner it can be a very good reliable aoe nuke to start your carnage with.

Item Selection

Starting Items

Stout shield is a must whether you are laning or jungling, as it is very useful against auto attacks from enemy heroes or to block some damage from jungle creeps.

Tangos because regen is necessary and while jungling, is much more useful than a healing salve, plus you get 4 of them!

Quelling Blade will help you do more damage to creeps which will let you kill jungle creeps faster and make it easier for you to last hit lane creeps.

Hand of Midas is a great item for Lifestealer as it helps him keep up with the other carries in experience and gold in the late game. This helps because Lifestealer is very dependent on farm and requires big items to carry hard. As a bonus, 30 attack speed is also pretty helpful.

Power Treads are my preferred boot of choice on Lifestealer because of feast allowing him to heal every single attack, which allows him to survive for longer and dish out a little bit more hits than Phase Boots would allow. They also help with some mana problems when you switch to intelligence which allows you to save some mana when casting spells.

On the other hand Phase Boots are definitely an option for players because they allow Lifestealer to chase more and deal more damage earlier in the game. The choice is up to the player, but I prefer Power Treads.

Armlet of Mordiggian is one of my favorite items in the entire game, and Lifestealer is one of the only heroes where there is no debate on whether or not to get it. It is an amazing item that gives you more health, damage, and attack speed at the cost of losing some health every second. However, as long as you're hitting creeps or heroes, you will lifesteal most of the health that you're losing. Definitely first item after your choice of boots and Midas.

Skull Basher allows you to keep that nasty Weaver in place while you just bash his stupid bug skull in a bit more. Not only is it great for the passive, but the bonus damage and slight health boost is also a great boost, even when you aren't getting the bashes.

With the bigger items there isn't a necessary order that needs to be followed, it's more or less of a 'get what helps you or the team the most'. That being said, Assault Cuirass is a great item and a very good item to get right after the basher. Make sure you get the Hyperstone first for the major boost of attack speed which will allow you to feast more, bash more, and kill faster! Once you finish the whole item it's great for your team because it gives your whole team a small boost of armor when you're close to them and also gives a negative armor aura for the enemies, which means that they will take more damage from your menacing claws.

Abyssal Blade is a good disable item, but sometimes can be difficult to obtain because of the 3800 gold cost for the Sacred Relic. On the bright side though, buying an Abyssal won't take up any extra space because it is just a nice upgrade to your Skull Basher. Abyssal Blade is good because it gives you an active to instantly stun one enemy for a few seconds which allows you to have some time to hit that hero freely.

Heart makes you even tankier and allows you to tank a bunch of damage. Another good benefit of Heart is that it lets you heal very fast, as long as you haven't been hit by another hero or Roshan in the lsat 4 seconds. This means you can farm creep waves or camps with your armlet on and lose no health at all.

Sange and Yasha is a good movement speed item and is recommended if you went for Phase Boots instead of Power Treads. The 16% bonus movement speed works great with Open Wounds and couples well with its own chance to slow an enemy hero when you attack them, allowing you to chase very far and very fast for kills. Not to mention the stats are decent and help solve some attack speed issues when you have Phase Boots

Drum of Endurance is good if you are having trouble in lane and you need the extra mana pool, and works well when you have Phase Boots just like Sange and Yasha. Despite this build being kind of old, it is still viable and can definitely still work in the right situations.

Crimson Guard isn't necessarily the best item on Lifestealer but it isn't horrible, the damage block is very good and if your team doesn't have anyone that is a good carrier, you might have to build it if faced against a team with a lot of physical right click damage. If you see heroes like Sniper or Drow Ranger and your team doesn't have a good holder of Crimson Guard then it can be a good pick up.

Very situational but once again very good if you are against a lot of right click and need to stop them from attacking you for a little bit. On top of that the 25% evasion is useful and helps keep you alive more often in fights.

Mjollnir is another good attack speed item which also allows for some good aoe damage because of the chance of chain lightning to get cast. This can be a good item when against heroes with multiple illusions like Phantom Lancer, Naga Siren, or Terrorblade.

Monkey King Bar is a very high damage item that only truly needs to be picked up if you need a sixth item to finally get 6 slotted, or if there is some high evasion heroes that have either picked up a Butterfly or you believe that they will eventually, or if they have innate evasion like Phantom Assassin or Brewmaster.

Boots of Travel are a good item to pick up if you are either running out of space to carry both your Teleport Scrolls and your boots or if you need to be able to teleport to a creep wave to maybe attempt to split push the enemy team. The lower teleport cooldown is useful and the movement speed coupled with Sange and Yasha can make you move near maximum movement speed.

Feedback

This is only my first guide that I have created and I would appreciate the feedback on it and any suggestions on what I can add to make it better would be very appreciated. I plan on expanding the amount of content on this guide as I continue to work on it.