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11 Votes

Luna - The Wind Rider (Extreme DPS build for version 6.88)

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Build Guides Discussion (25) More Guides Report

The Wind Rider

DotA2 Hero: Luna

Purchase Order

Starting Items

Early Game

Ring of Aquila

Boots of Speed

Band of Elvenskin

Gloves of Haste

Core Items

Shadow Blade

Yasha

Sange

Diffusal Blade

Butterfly

Moon Shard

Core Extensions

Dragon Lance

Hurricane Pike

Aghanim's Scepter

Black King Bar

Silver Edge

Hero Skills

Talents

Luna - The Wind Rider (Extreme DPS build for version 6.88)

1.	Introduction
2.	Build Conceptualization
3.	The Build
4.	Closing Notes

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Introduction

Hello, my name is Melphina, and this is my first time writing a guide here on Dotafire. Although this really isn't so much of a guide as it is a build recommendation and the justifications behind it. It's very different from the other Luna builds that have been posted so far, but when I looked through each of them I couldn't help but feel like they all missed out on something important. I used solid logic and reasoning when I created this build, and I intend to explain that reasoning as I go. I'd like to suggest other people try out my Wind Rider build, as I'm very interested in hearing your feedback on it.

On a slightly personal note, one of my hobbies is studying game design and philosophy. I have a very analytical mind, and when I find a game I enjoy I always try to learn how the underlying systems and mechanics work alongside one another, and also how they combine to produce the results you see in actual gameplay. In some cases I find that learning about a game is almost as enjoyable as playing the game itself. I've applied those same thought processes when I created this build, and customized it with just a little bit of personal playstyle preference. It feels very solid and once again, I welcome your feedback.

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Build Conceptualization

The concept behind this build is simple. Luna is an early game nuker, but as the game goes on she becomes more and more of a pure DPS hero. As HP pools grow larger and larger the relevance of her Lucent Beam's damage diminishes in relation to the importance of the stun utility, and while that's happening the relevance of her glaive's damage output grows rapidly. Both of her passive abilities are DPS oriented, and because of the way her ultimate works she doesn't have any way to reliably pour large amounts of burst damage into a single target. She has the highest base movement speed in the game, the highest agility stat growth in the game (save one exception, and the difference is 3.4 versus 3.3), but she has to stand still to throw her glaive and is pretty frail whenever someone gets close to whack her. Thus her true strength mid game onward is as a pure DPS character. I've designed this build with that character archetype in mind.

The core of my build is designed to maximize Luna's greatest strengths, which are her movement speed, attack damage, and attack speed, and use those same strengths to cover up her weaknesses. The objective is to use Luna's high mobility to maintain superior battlefield positioning, and then burst down the enemy before they get a chance to retaliate with extremely high DPS. In this case the best defense is a powerful offense. The fringe benefit is that it also provides a noticeably significant increase to Luna's already massive pushing and farming potential. This is a highly optimized build designed around Luna's core features, and in practice I've found it to be extremely effective.

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The Build

Starting items

Tango - 8
Clarity - 2
Circlet
Town Portal Scroll

I like to bring enough tangos to hopefully last me through the laning phase, as well as a few clarities to charge up Lucent Beam for some decent early game harass. The Circlet provides a welcome initial stat boost and upgrades into the Ring of Aquila, while the Town Portal Scroll is self explanatory.

Early Game

Ring of Aquila
3 Strength, 9 Agility, 10 attack damage
(60 HP, 3.29 armor, 19 attack damage, 9 attack speed, 36 mana, 0.77 mana regen)

This is a fantastic item up through mid game. The Ring of Aquila is cheap and gives a very large attack damage increase for this early phase of the game, plus an important source of mana regen. It is however just a temporary item, and once you complete your fourth core item I recommend selling it to make room. By that time your mana pool should be large enough to hold you over between fountain visits, so you won't need the mana regen anymore, and there will be better DPS items accessible to you by that time.

Power Treads
7 Agility, 25 attack speed, 45 movement speed
(1 armor, 7 attack damage, 32 attack speed, 45 movement speed)

No other boots synergize with Luna like these do. This is a cheap source of three important DPS stats, and will last you until the game ends. However, I recommend building the Ring of Aquila first since you'll be close to the towers during the initial laning phase, and the ring will help you last hit better.

Core Items

Shadow Blade
22 Attack Damage, 30 Attack Speed
Active ability: Shadow Walk

This is the second core item you'll want to build. Not only does the Shadow Blade come with some very useful DPS stats, but shadow walk provides Luna with a form of escape. Shadow Walk lets you turn invisible after a 2 second phase period, granting you a 20% movement speed bonus and the ability to walk through units. It lasts for 14 seconds, disrupts your enemies ability to attack you, and if you attack someone to break the invisibility you gain 175 bonus damage on the first attack. This is a fantastic tool for pushing, initiating, and escaping, and it raises DPS to boot!

Sange and Yasha
16 strength, 16 agility, 16 attack damage, 16 attack speed, 16% movement speed,
Passive ability: Greater Maim!
(320 HP, 2.29 armor, 32 attack speed, 32 attack damage)

Compared to the Manta Style, Sange and Yasha has only 5 less attack speed, but it also has 6 more movement speed, 6 more strength (120 health), 6 more attack damage, and a passive that synergizes perfectly with this build's design methodologies. Greater Maim procs 30% of the time and applies a 13% movement and attack speed debuff on enemy heroes. Since Luna will be attacking extremely fast with this build you should proc Greater Maim on almost every hero you engage with. This is another great DPS piece that comes with a built in defense mechanism.

Note: I prefer to complete the Yasha before I start working on the Sange, which is why I added both individual recipes to the build order rather than the finished Sange and Yasha directly. The end result is still the same, but you get more stat boosts earlier by finishing one blade before starting the next.

Diffusal Blade LVL 2
35 Agility
(5 Armor, 35 attack damage, 35 attack speed)
Active ability: Purge
Passive ability Manabreak!!!

Thanks to Manabreak this is one of Luna’s most devastating weapons, and the level 2 upgrade only costs 3850 gold. Manabreak burns 40 mana from enemy heroes, and then converts that to 40 damage, which is calculated by raising Luna's base attack damage by 40 directly. This means the Diffusal Blade actually affords Luna 75 points of damage to enemy heroes. During the mid game this is a fantastic tool to harass mana dependant heroes like Juggernaut, Axe, and Sven, but the damage increase is universally great all game long. It’s literally the most cost efficient item you can get to upgrade Luna’s DPS. I tend to make the upgrade from level 1 to level 2 immediately. It only costs 700 gold to go from level 1 to level 2, and you get 10 agility for the trouble. That's an extremely cost efficient DPS upgrade, and in my opinion is worth the loss of the extra purge charges. That's a personal call, but it works for me.

Butterfly
30 agility, 30 attack damage, 30 attack speed, 35 evasion
(4.28 armor, 60 attack damage, 60 attack speed)
Active ability: Flutter!

This is another amazing DPS piece, and it's around this point that Luna's DPS really starts to skyrocket. You can literally SEE the difference. What's more, Flutter is excellent for roaming. By activating flutter you trade the 35 evasion for a 35% movement speed increase that lasts for 4 seconds. That's probably a bad thing in teamfights, but with such a low cooldown it's a perfectly spammable way to move around the map faster outside combat.

Moon Shard
120% attack speed

Said to be a tear from the Lunar goddess Selemene herself, how wouldn't this be perfect on Luna? This is the final coup-de-grace to my DPS core, and if your farm is going well you should be able to finish it shortly before the game ends. Since you can buy it directly from the secret shop I save it for last and sell my town portal scrolls to make room for it. By this point in the game most if not all of your towers will be down anyway, and I'd much rather have the substantial boost in DPS to help with the final assault.

Summarizing the stat gains and what they add up to

Let’s add up the total stat increases and put this build into perspective

Attack damage + 156 + 40 more against heroes (from manabreak)
Attack speed + 309
Armor + 12.57
Movement Speed + 61

At level 25 when you add in the base damage bonus from maxing out glaive, and the agility stat gains at levels 15 and 17-25 you get the following TOTAL stats.

533 attack speed (0.32 seconds per attack)
347 attack damage + 40 from manabreak == 387 damage to enemy heroes
31 total Armor
440 total movement speed

NOTE: As of 6/13/2016 in patch version 6.88 Luna got a buff that raised her base movement speed by 5, which brings the total movement speed up to 440 from what would have been 435 prior to this date.

That’s insane DPS. Absolutely insane. With the core fully assembled Luna attacks three times every second for 347 base damage to structures and 387 base damage to heroes before the glaive bounces. The base DPS alone is over 1150, and bounced glaives will typically raise it to the roughly 2000-2500 DPS range.

Core Extensions

Dragon Lance and Hurricane Pike– This increases Luna's throwing range by 33%, and the pike's active ability can not only push Luna away from an oppressor, but the sudden movement jump can counter projectiles as well.

Aghanim's Scepter – This is a situational upgrade with no synergies whatsoever to my core build. It increases Eclipse's beam count by 1/3, doubles the frequency they fire at, and removes the 5 beam limitation on a single target. That sounds pretty fantastic, but there are about half a dozen ways to counter Luna's ultimate, and it's on a long cooldown timer. Since my build revolves around maxing out Luna's DPS I wouldn't get this very often, but I also wouldn't overlook it entirely either. It may be worth picking up depending on how the game is going.

Black King Bar – Do I really need to explain why this is here?

Silver Edge - This is the Shadow Blade's natural evolution. Unfortunately it's also an extremely expensive upgrade, and it will be a very difficult to farm up enough money to complete my core build and still have enough left over to upgrade this as well. The DPS stats are nice, but the cost they come at is steep. I consider this the ultimate luxury.

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Closing Notes

This is a different style of gearing Luna from what the other guides propose, and in my experiences it's a very effective one. Most of the other Luna guides here on Dotafire will tell you that Luna is a strong mid game carry, but that she quickly hits her peak going into end game and loses her edge against the other heroes thereafter. They say that Luna can't stand up to other equally farmed heroes during end game. But I disagree with this completely. All of the other build suggestions make unnecessary sacrifices or uses sub optimal items. I've run the math, and my core build has 40-45% higher DPS output than any of the other builds listed here on Dotafire. With that much stopping power YES Luna CAN and WILL maintain her presence straight through ultra late end game. Luna is a high DPS late game hard carry, and with the proper equipment she can put out just as much damage as the other carries.