I'm not saying that Heart of Tarrasque is a bad Item. I Love it. And It makes your health bar Dauntingly unconquerable. But it's not the only answer to being tougher. A Largely overlooked Item is Eye of Skadi. Especially when your character has low armor (under 15). Another note is that if you're already tough from spells via Black King Bar Eye of Skadi can do more than a Heart by slowing the attack speed of the opposing Carry by 20% essentially increasing your combat time by ~20% (that time gained just from the slow.)

Eye of Skadi compared to Heart of Tarrasque:
Builds better than a Heart!
Point Booster is an amazing Item, more bang for your buck than both Vitality Booster and Energy Booster
Orb of Venom is amazing if you are a melee hero.

Costs 175 more gold
offers -335 HP
3.5 more armor. about 6-7% more damage reduction (this percent is bigger if you have low armor, smaller if you already have a lot of armor)
+25 Attack Speed
+25 damage
(if STR hero, -15dmg)
+250 mana
An…
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I'm fairly new to Dota (5 months) so when deciding which items to build, I started as a blank slate. I used math and logic to decide which items to build on different heroes for different reasons. But even as a noob, I'm surprised to see better players use weaker items and use poor builds! One example is a Razor building Vanguard! So I though I would offer some reasonable substitutes for these Items.

I still implore the use of a stout shield in early game. So it's then 1,975 gold to build vanguard. Vanguardlet's say I'm a lvl 6 Clockwerk by the time I build vanguard:

Pre vanguard:
Armor: ~4 armor (probably have an iron branch)
Stout Shield: 53% to block 20dmg. (due to pseudo random distribution)
Expected dmg reduction:
19.4% dmg red. from armor
assume attacks are for 80 dmg.
With stout shield and Armor I'm stopping an expected value of 24dmg per attack of 80 dmg.
Remember that the shield stops damage before the armor, so it's not really adding an extra 20 dmg reduced.

After Van…
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