Spectre 6-slot / Skadi stacking doto

Hello guys,

I've been thinking a lot lately about our beloved Purple Ghost :



and on how to optimize her item build, especially towards the late game 6-slot build, to take the maximum advantage off her hard-carryness and scaling.

Spectre is one of these carries that people tend to build wrong. One of the worst ways to build her is to focus on direct right-click damage, because Spectre doesn't have a single steroid that synergizes with right-click. If you play right-click Spectre with items such as Butterfly, Daedalus, Mjollnir, Abyssal Blade etc, you actually get a pretty poor carry who gets outcarried easily since any carry with a steroid can manfight her and win. This leads to some pretty absurd stuff like Spectres snowballing hard off the mid-game by chasing isolated heroes around with Desolate, and still losing the late game because of bad builds and misplays.

So, what makes Spectre such a hard carry is these two things :

- She doesn't need any damage items to have high damage output, since the damage from Desolate and Haunt scales with your agility. Agility makes both your hero and your illusions hit harder and faster, meaning more Desolate procs so more damage. She's a purely stat based hero and you only need to build stats, LOTS of stats. Besides Monkey King Bar is completely useless on her since Desolate cannot miss, so that's a free item stot you don't need compared to other illusion carries like Phantom Lancer or Chaos Knight who will need MKB eventually.

- So she can focus purely on building tankiness. Dispersion is her true late game scaling skill, since killing a high HP Spectre hits the whole enemy team with huge AOE damage so after a point she's almost completely immortal. In the mid game Spectre has no way to deal with a team that 5-mans in a close pack, but in the late game she can simply run in and tank damage.

So bearing that in mind, I've tried a lot of stuff in lobby...and the build I settled with as the best 6-slot is something that might look ******ed to anyone not used to the hero :



with those as spare items (in stash, and in your belly) :



Yes, that's a Satanic and 4 (yes 4) Eye of Skadi. I'm not joking, or trolling. I truly think that it's the best build and you can't do better than that.

Why stacking Skadis? Because Skadi is the best stat item in the game, and the only thing Spectre needs is stats. Skadi gives 725 health and 25 agility. It's better than Heart of Tarrasque in every way since heart gives 1060 HP, but no AGI. Spectre needs AGI to buff herself and her illusions' right click and get more Desolate procs. Skadi >> heart since it's better to have a little less HP but an Eaglesong's worth of AGI. And Satanic gives her 2 lives, and also gives the sustain that heart would give by lifestealing creeps (so no point in getting heart for the regen).

This makes an ultra-tanky Spectre who sits at 5178 HP. 6627 effective HP when you take into account the 28% effective HP from Dispersion (yes 28 and not 22 because you divide by it, 1/(1-0.22) = 1.28). Killing this Spectre deals 1449 AOE pure damage to the entire enemy team.
But you'd have to kill her twice. Since she has Satanic to heal back all that damage.
And she sits at 32 armor. So it's really not easy to kill her :)

So if she manages to use Satanic well, this Spectre has theoretically 13255 effective HP.
And if he uses Satanic to heal up, killing her "twice" deals 2899 AOE pure damage to the enemy team. Nobody can live through that.
Which is ridiculous :)

The Skadis are also there to give her some right-click (+25 agility each, it's actually a lot), so she deals enough damage to heal up with Satanic. With this build she recovers about 3/4 of her HP from a full Satanic usage.

Refresher Orb is great on her but it should be kept in stash/on a courier. The item gives literally no stats in this patch and having it in inventory is useless.
Black King Bar helps against heavy lockdown teams to get off your Satanic duration without getting stunned. Replace a skadi with BKB if you feel that you need it. Keep it in stash otherwise.
And always eat that Moon Shard.

So the playstyle is :
- If initiating from base, use Haunt to initiate, then immediately drop an item to get Refresher Orb, refresh, get back your item, and Reality in
- If initiating from the battlefield, don't use Haunt, just walk in as your team's front line hero.

Then walk in the middle of the enemy team, get focused, and tank all the damage (yes, there are tanks in dota). So, not only will the enemy team expend a lot of effort to bring you down, during which your team can deal tons of damage itself, but Dispersion will damage them all.
With your 6K effective HP, you will survive the initial burst. Then, activate Black King Bar, use Satanic, and lifesteal back all that sweet HP. Then Haunt to clean up and get a teamwipe.

I've been searching all this time for heroes on which stacking Eye of Skadi is legit. I tried it on Medusa, Chaos Knight, Sven etc...but only now I realized that our favorite ghost is the best candidate by far.

And then, have a Weaver buy Aghanim's Scepter and Refresher Orb to Time Lapse you twice for two extra lives...and dealing 4K+ AOE damage to bring you down. Immortal Spectre...how can you even lose a game of dota with that :)