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Power Treads
Drum of Endurance
Soul Booster
Skull Basher
Aegis of the Immortal
Abyssal Blade
Refresher Orb
Bloodstone
Black King Bar
Radiance
Vanguard
Gauntlets of Strength
Circlet
Iron Branch
Iron Branch
Tango
Healing Salve
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The Chaos Knight has one of the highest damage potentials among strength heroes. He is capable of dealing out a lot of punishment with his powerful critical hits and illusions. In addition, he offers good mobility and a strong stun. Chaos Bolt, as indicated by its name, is a strong but random ability. It deals a random amount of damage over a set range, and stuns the target for a random length of time based on the level of the skill. It can either be very effective or mediocre, depending on the Chaos Knight's luck. Similarly, his critical strike has a fairly low chance of activating, but when it does activate it's the highest of any non-ultimate critical hit. The Chaos Knight is quite mobile for a strength hero. His Reality Rift instantly teleports you, any images you have and the target unit to a random point along the line between the two of you, while giving Chaos Knight a damage bonus. Finally, the Chaos Knight's can use his Phantasm skill, which summons several illusions of the caster. Each illusion deals the full damage of the Chaos Knight. The amount of pain these images can dish out is among the highest physical damage potentials in the game, especially with Critical Strike. If surrounded by these phantasms, just hope Nessaj's luck doesn't hold.
The refreshers orb takes the worst part of your ultimate away. It gives you no cool down. This also allows you to use it twice giving you 6 illusions instead of 3 at full. The down side to this wonderful thing is that the refreshers orb costs around 5000 gold so you shouldn't be treating it like a core item. Get it towards the end of the game just to make sure your on the winning side or if your team is lacking that small punch when their pushing. The refreshers orb also adds to your health and mana regen along with damage and attack speed, why would you want to not have this. A good time to get this item other than at the end of the game would be when your forced to jungle because the enemy team is overfeed and that way you'll show them that your a force to be reckoned with.
The Aigas is an amazing item. Don't steal it from a wraith king or an ursa, because they both should get it no matter what but if you don't have either of those heroes on your team by all means take it. The aigas gives chaos knight an amazing gift, the ability to come back to life. You've been pushing and then the whole enemy team ganks you, so very annoying, but they forget you have the aigas, you use your ultimate and keep on pushing, so very annoying.
Your first skill, Chaos Bolt, is the simplest thing ever: a single target stun/nuke. But since we've got this whole RNG thing going on, the damage you will deal is random, and the stun duration will be random too. Min and max values for both of those will keep improving with levels so it's very important to max this spell first - rank 4 gives you a guaranteed 2 second stun, which makes you a decent disabler even if the lady luck dishinherited you and your whole family. Things to note: DO NOT rely on this skill for damage, even on the max rank the maximum damage is 275, and the minimum is so pathetic that you won't even see their health bars shrink. Therefore: THIS IS YOUR DISABLE AND TREAT IS A SUCH, YOUR DAMAGE COMES FROM YOUR CUDGEL/STICK/BASEBALL BAT THING. What's even more important is that this spell costs a whopping 140 mana, which basically leaves your sacks dry after casting it once early. Be shrewd with your Chaos Bolt, try to save it for a guaranteed kill - when a lanemate has a follow-up stun ready, or when someone else is coming to gank your lane. DO NOT hesitate to use it to save your or your ally's sorry *** - being dry is better than dying at full mana.
Reality Rift is one of my favorite abilities in the whole game. What at first glance looks like a boring Blink/Phantom Strike, turns out to be much more devastating, and, more importantly, fun. Basically, instead of your sorry *** teleporting all the way to the enemy, you pull both yourself and your target to a random point between you (hello RNG).
It looks sort of like this:
(CK)________________________________(Enemy Hero)
REALITY RIFT!
________________(Enemy Hero)(CK)_________________
As you can see, CK ends up closer to his enemy's starting position and vice-versa. This might be useful for blocking off their escape paths.
After a succesful Rift, both you and the enemy unit will end up facing each other and you'll automatically keep attacking the poor sob with your spikey black bat, dealing 100 bonus damage on max rank on the first attack. That bonus damage lasts for either 1.2 second or 1 attack - meaning that if for some reason (ghost scepter, decrepify) you can't attack the rift target immediately, your bonus damage is lost. Tough luck. Also, pay in mind that you can only blink to the enemy - no pulling allies into uncofortable spots. Be careful to not pull yourself inbetween trees either, you have no easy way of escaping unless you have a tango or a quelling blade on you.
This ability has one more gimmick that I'll explain along with his ultimate.
Chaos Strike - regular critical strike, 10% chance to deal triple damage on max rank. Now uses the pseudo RNG system, so even the unluckiest mothers can get their grubby hands on occasional crits. Nothimg much to explain, really.
Laning:
Nessaj should play conservatively during the laning phase. He should spend his time farming for his core. Nessaj should generally lane with a ranged ally. If his ally has a disable or slow, opportunities for kills can arise in lane.
Take advantage of opportunities that arise in lane, but play conservatively and do not force it; your mana pool is extremely constraining at this point in the game. You should lane at least until you have boots and bottle.
Ganking:
Once you have items somewhere between boots+bottle and your entire core, it's time to find yourself a target. Keep in mind that, unlike many other gankers, Nessaj has a very low mana pool and low burst damage. This should inform the ganks you go for; in particular, you should almost always gank with allies and only go for sure kills.
Abuse the fog of war and try to approach from behind. When you reach your destination, quickly analyze the situation: Important things to consider include allied slows/stuns/disables/nukes, the target's lane partner, the inventories of all heroes involved, enemies missing from the mini map and HP/mana levels (you can and should analyze these as you are traveling to the destination). Proceed by informing your allies of your intentions with a ping and target. Remember that managing mana is important; take only ganks that will grant your team a kill.
Be sure to bottle any runes you come across. While they're all useful, Double Damage and Illusions are the most helpful for ganks.
Try to enter a gank from areas of low visibility (hills, jungle, night). In most cases, you should Reality Rift in, attack once or twice and then cast Chaos Bolt. Obviously, you'll have to adapt as necessary to the enemy's disable or escape skills and to your allies' help. If you get unlucky with a short stun duration, use your judgment to decide whether or not to chase (incoming TPs, health levels, distance to tower). After a successful gank, stay and farm a few creeps while you look for your next victim.
When there are two targets, the gank is a little more tricky; again, analyze the situation. The only significant difference is that sometimes it is better to stun one opponent (to prevent interference - usually heroes with long/many disables or nukes) while attacking the other.
Beyond Ganking:
At some point, the game will move away from ganking. You will then have to transition into the role of a DPSer with a nice stun. Once you have a couple of levels of your ultimate, you can push down buildings with ease (preferably after one or more enemies have been killed). There are two ways to leverage this ability:
The first is to push with your team and threaten a building. In this case, you are trying to force a team clash. Once the team clash occurs, you should bolt someone and rift in. If possible, spawn your images just before this for maximum chaos, but ulting right after rifting is good too. If your team has sufficient initialization, save bolt for later. At this point, you don't do much beyond auto-attacking. The images do not last very long, but it is more than enough for a team fight and razing the building afterward.
The other option is to have your team push one lane while you push another. Your ultimate will allow you to easily destroy any undefended building you come across. If enemies do come, your images can be left attacking the building for heavy damage while you yourself escape. If it's a lone enemy, you can even stun them while you continue taking the building down. This strategy's most successful scenarios are: 1) all 5 enemy heroes go to meet your 4 allies (your team retreats while you raze a building); 2) more than one hero comes to deal with you (your team gains an advantage in the clash).
If your team does not have a harder carry than Nessaj, you should aim to end the game as early as possible - Nessaj is decent late-game, but mid-game is his strongest phase.
With every hero, you might do badly on CK for one reason or the other. You've farmed for too long, you got ganked a million times, or you did everything perfectly but were unable to end before that pesky Sven managed to get pumped up enough to 1hit kill you and all your horse-riding buddies. This is when the fundamental collective representative presses the RESTORE ORDER button. Do not despair, you still have a few options left, but you gotta be smart about it. As a feeding ck, your goal is to get a BKB asap. Chances are, you're *** is their prime disable target. If this is really the case, then getting BKB straight after your treads/drums will make your life a bit easier. You won't contribute as much damage as you would otherwise, but it will be quite respectable. You won't be able to rambo in as much as you'd like to. Basically, you're gonna have to rely on your teammates a bit more - horrible situation in pubs, but, hopefully, if you've died alot that means the enemy has put alot of their resources in keeping you down - which, conicidentally, SHOULD mean someone in your team is having freefarm. If all your teammates are feeding too... well, you can try to go for a miracle, hope for an insanely lucky teamfight or just try to smoke up and catch their farming carry alone - but CK is not a hero known for comebacks, he's the best at getting ahead (or at least even) and staying there. You STILL have one option left. Get BoTs, go push a tower with your ult, tp back/die trying. A splitpushing CK is not the most effective thing ever, but if you can't win teamfights and can't find any pick-offs, you're not in a position to complain.
Silencer. Oh god, the Silencer. If you end up laning against him, ask for a lane swap ASAP. An enemy Silencer will mercilessly exploit your main weakness - low mana pool. His Curse will force you to cast a spell in order to prevent Hp and mana loss, which in one way or another makes you go dry. And once you have no mana, he'll keep spamming it on you even more. Thankfully, he's less of an issue lategame, just don't let him steal your INT!
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