Sando's Guide to Kunkka

Welcome Aboard

Kunkka is a flexible carry hero, with a strong range of nukes, teamfight and AOE damage. Capable of landing a potent one-hit wonder, he's the Chesney Hawkes of DOTA.

Buccaneer or Bilge Water?

+ Strong strength growth
+ Good early nuking potential
+ Excellent team fighter
+ Plenty of lane presence
+ Massive AOE damage potential
+ Flexible laning options
+ Strong presence throughout the game

- Weak secondary stat growth
- Somewhat RNG/luck dependent
- Early mana problems
- Passive pushes the lane out
- Abilities are difficult to land without setup
- Level and item dependent

Torrent

Torrent is a useful slow/nuke with a long range and good damage from an early level. However, it is not the easiest to land due to the substantial (2 second) delay between you targeting it, and the torrent arriving.

This is partially dealt with by levelling X Marks the Spot, which pretty much guarantees hits for your other abilities once you have a few levels in it. Even better is having allies with reliable stuns and strong slows to setup for you.

Without setup, landing Torrent is always something of a lottery - you have to hope, outguess or outthink your opponent. To be honest, I find your best chance to landing one without setup is to be outside enemy vision at the time - they won't see your distinctive casting animation, and chances are won't move too far. Practice obviously helps a lot here - get used to the delay, and make sure you know how long allied stuns last for in order to chain properly.

Bear in mind that Torrent does include a stun element - about 1.5 seconds at all levels, and that you can still attack enemies while they are in the air.

Tidebringer

Tidebringer is your passive, and probably most important skill. After cooldown it gives your auto-attacks a huge AOE cleave in front of you, as well as bonus damage. Using this effect wisely is the key to a lot of Kunkka's power throughout the game.

First of all, Tidebringer will trigger whenever you attack an enemy unit or building, as well as neutral units - it won't whenever you deny or attack a friendly unit. If it's off cooldown, it will automatically proc - you have no choice in the matter.

Early Game:

Tidebringer gives you a great deal of lane presence, and if you use it carefully can dish out a fair bit of harassment to most enemies. The secret is to pick your angles carefully to ensure hits.

The downside to this is that it's very difficult to avoid pushing the lane out - one trick is to hit their ranged creep with it, harassing the enemy but causing minimal damage to the rest of the creep line.

Mid Game:

As you start to build up damage and reduce the cooldown, Tidebringer is effective for both pushing, farming and teamfights. Try to time your first attack carefully to hit multiple enemies.

Late Game:

With sufficient damage equipment added you can hit incredibly hard in a large AOE. You're somewhat depend on RNG for crits to line up with your Tidebringer attacks, but with a little luck you can potentially kill the entire enemy team with a single hit. It also makes you fairly effective against illusion based heroes.

X Marks the Spot

This quite an unusual power, and can be used on both allies and enemies. It recalls the targeted unit to the place where they were when you cast the ability, after a delay. This has many potential uses:

- Use it as a setup for Torrent and Ghost Ship

- Stop enemies from escaping (e.g. they can teleport away but will be returned, it will break channelling on return)

- Stop enemies from chasing you (they will be returned to their previous position)

- Returning yourself from risky positions (e.g. cast on yourself, move forward to engage, and then be returned to safety, even if stunned)

- Returning allies to safety, or making quick trips to the fountain (e.g. if they have a Bottle to fill, they can teleport back to the fountain for up to 8 seconds before returning to their original positon - a kind of 2-way teleport)

The delay gets longer with every point you put into this ability, and 2 seconds is generally the sweet spot for setting up your other abilities. You can also manually recall them at any time by pressing the key again, at a small mana cost.

The effect can be blocked by magic immunity, including Black King Bar and Rage.

Ghost Ship

Ghost Ship

Ghost Ship is an unusual team fight power, with good early game damage, and utility that continues late into the game. First of all, Ghost Ship can be tough to land - it has a travel time of about 3 seconds from when you cast it, and always lands 1000 units ahead of you in whatever direction you cast it. This is really important to remember - even if you cast it closer than this, it will always travel this distance - so you need to be positioned correctly to land it.

Obviously big slows, disables and AOE grouping abilities are a big help here - trying to land a Ghost Ship on multiple moving targets is much harder than slapping one into the middle of a Reverse Polarity.

Ghost Ship has a relatively modest cooldown and mana cost, so there's no reason you can't use it for ganks as well as a teamfights. The damage doesn't scale much as the game progresses, but the stun and "rum" effect are both still useful.

The "rum" effect gives your nearby team mates a modest movement speed boost, but more importantly, lets them delay the effects of damage they suffer. This means that 50% of all damage they take for the next 10 seconds will be deferred until the effect wears off. The rest of this damage then arrives via HP Removal, but will not be fatal on it's own.

Keeping an even keel

In many ways Kunkka's builds are quite straightforward - generally you max out Tidebringer first, then Torrent with a point in X Marks the Spot somewhere along the line to help you land them.

When to level X Marks the Spot is probably the biggest discussion point - you might get it as soon as level 3, or leave it as late as level 10 depending on how much setup your allies can provide for you. Generally if you pick Kunkka you should be doing so with allies who can do this for you, so I've put in an average level 8 point. When you're starting off with Kunkka you might well want to level it twice early on to make landing your other abilities more reliable.

Level Ghost Ship every time you can - the damage increase is very modest, but the cooldown reduction is handy.

If you're playing as a part of a "kill" trilane, you will want to level Torrent first instead of Tidebringer - the extra stun time and damage is better for getting kills, and your allies should be providing setup.

The cut of his jib

Kunkka is capable of playing as a #1, #2 or #3 (there are rare instances of pro's playing him as support, but it requires a high skill level and the right circumstances). He can play any of the 3 lanes, but needs to be farming from the start.

Whatever lane or farming priority you are, your builds don't tend to vary that much. Thanks to your nuking damage you're very capable of fighting and ganking from an early stage, (probably with a Drum of Endurance and potentially snowballing out of control. Alternatively, he can do a more focused carry job, rushing a Shadow Blade and Daedalus ASAP and winning the game before hard carries come fully online.

Almost all Kunkka builds are extremely raw damage item focused - you want to stack as much as possible into those big Tidebringer hits, and ideally annihilate them with a crit, rather than man-fighting like a more conventional carry.

Kunkka doesn't have very good agility growth, so we tend to put all our eggs in one basket here - even with increased attack speed, we can still only cleave every 4 seconds. Unique attack modifiers and lifesteal don't work with the cleave effect, so we're not generally that interested in them.

You'll notice we get hardly any stats on him - his primary strength growth is very good, so generally his survivability will be fine with just plain levels.

Booty

Starting:



A fairly usual assortment of basic regen and stats items (you may even want to go for a Bottle rush build playing mid). The interesting bit is deciding which accessory to take with you - a Stout Shield for resisting harassment, a Quelling Blade for extra damage]], or a Magic Stick for regeneration.

Generally I'll pickup the Stick, but there are occasions where both of the others are useful. Bare in mind, you can also ditch the branches and pickup a Circlet and Gauntlets of Strength if you want to make a starting Bracer into Drum of Endurance.

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Core:



A nice simple core, giving us the choice of whether to go directly into Shadow Blade or Drum of Endurance, depending on the situation. You might even skip the wand if you built an early Bracer instead.

The Phase Boots are an easy choice - we want to stack maximum damage into single attacks, so the attack speed boost of Power Treads is much less useful.

Magic Wand is a nice bit of regen and emergency backup for when we need it.

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Extension Options:



Shadow Blade wut? That's an item for n00bs who don't know about detection, right? Well sometimes, but it's almost a core item on Kunkka. The invisibility is obviously nice, as is the damage and attack speed boost, but the real key here is the +150 damage when you attack from invis - that bonus goes straight into your Tidebringer AOE cleave.

Drum of Endurance - a useful all-round item to bulk out your stats, movement and attack speed. It's very strong early game and will help a lot with your mana issues. The choice is whether you need it, or want to rush straight to other items instead.

Crystalys - normally I'd advise against this item until you have sufficient damage/attack speed to really make use of it. Not so on Kunkka - we're looking to stack damage into one attack, and the chance of a crit on top is too good to pass up.

Daedalus - again, almost core, or certainly highly recommended in pretty much any Kunkka build. Big damage, and the potential for big crits. The sooner you get this item, the sooner you can melt an entire enemy team with one hit.

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Luxury:



In keeping with the theme Abyssal Blade offers a big damage boost, as well as some additional health and a guaranteed stun. Obviously the stuns don't go through with the cleave attack, so this is more for when you need to deal with an especially tough enemy carry or disable an important teamfight hero.

Monkey King Bar is against pretty straightforward - a big guaranteed damage boost, plus true strike and mini-stuns against your primary target.

Assault Cuirass is one of the few items I'd recommend that increase your attack speed and armour - generally you're content to land a big crit from nowhere rather than slug it out. However, it also offers a big armour reduction aura for your AOE cleave.

Desolator is cheaper than the other items here, with a nice damage boost and armour reduction for the primary target. Can help against well armoured opposition, and for faster pushing. Also relatively cheap.

Daedalus - stacking isn't usually recommended for any item, and it's true that you won't get full value from this - as you can't crit twice on the same hit, and the % chance of proccing doesn't double. However, you are more likely to get procs, and still get the basic damage from the item. Crit procs can be the difference between winning and losing fights with Kunkka.

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Situational:



The basic premise of playing Kunkka is that you should avoid survivability items in favour of damage ones almost every time. If all goes well, you'll be reasonably tanky from your levels, and the opposition should be in AOE crit hell long before you get dragged into some dreadful brawl with them.

However, occasionally you might have to bulk up a bit or get magic immunity for particular situations. Try to combine this with extra damage items whenever possible.

Divine Rapier deserves a special mention - this is one of the only times I will ever suggest it as an item on a specific hero. On Kunkka that much extra damage, guaranteed as an AOE cleave and possibly as a crit can be devastating. However, as always with this item, be sure you're not going to lose it, or that the situation is so desperate that you're screwed without it anyway.

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Why no Battle Fury?

A lot of people like to build this item on him - increased damage, some regen, and a small regular cleave. Personally I think it's a waste of money - you can already farm extremely fast with a 4 second Tidebringer, and you can get much better items for damage/regen for the same cost.

Kunkka has quite a tight window of effectiveness against hard carries and the like - you're relatively strong early game, and if you can get a reasonably early Shadow Blade/ Daedalus combo then you should aim to end the game ASAP against stronger carries.

Battle Fury tends to encourage you to slow down the game and AFK farm more - I wouldn't say these are particularly in line with Kunkka's strengths.

Trusty Mates

Can't land a good Ghost Ship? These guys make it easy. Also ideal follow ups in Torrent and Tidebringer. Unfortunately Empower doesn't do much for you, as most of your damage isn't primary stat based.



Nice long early game setups make it very easy to hit Torrents.



Armour reducers combine really well with Tidebringer well into the late game.



Her ultimate Stone Gaze offers considerable bonus physical damage if enemies are turned to stone.

Scurvy Dogs

You don't tend to get a Black King Bar unless absolutely essential - so damage reflection can really hurt. Get that magic immunity if the enemy start stacking this up - generally your invis-cleave should catch them unawares.



Both of these heroes can offer their teams considerable protection against physical damage.



Both of these heroes deal well with heroes who rely on invisibility, so as a regular Shadow Blade carrier, they're not ideal to face.



Just cos :)

Generally you'll struggle against heroes with transport abilities as your powers are fairly easy to dodge without proper setup. Very tanky heroes can also cause some issues as they survive your initial cleave.