Introduction
“Where ride the horsemen, death shall follow.”
Chaos Knight is a melee strength carry with good physical damage output, lockdown, and move speed, but who has fallen foul of being too luck-based and dependent on good hero combos.
Outside of being partnered up with a Wisp/Io, Chaos Knight is essentially never picked competitively and is almost equally unpopular in public matchmaking, where almost every other carry in the game outshines him. That said, when he is partnered up with a Wisp/Io, his ganking potential goes through the roof and the two can easily dominate a game.
You can find Chaos Knight's complete character profile here.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Very high base movespeed
- Can snowball out of control
- Good base damage
- Good lockdown & control
- Built-in crit
- Decent push carry
- Good partner for Wisp/Io
Cons
- Mana issues
- Stun duration & damage is luck based
- Crit chance is a mere 10%
- No flash farming capability
- Ultimate is lacklustre at level 1
- Not considered a viable hero pick without Wisp/Io
- Very rarely picked and has little place in the current meta
- Leaves too much to chance – basic attacks, critical chance, stun duration & damage, and power of ultimate all have luck-based elements
Item Build
Chaos Knight needs farm priority, and will usually lane with a support like Wisp/Io. It’s not unheard of for the two to lane mid, but in public matchmaking you’ll usually be farming on the safelane or in an aggressive trilane.
A typical starting build would be:
- A set of Tangos, a Healing Salve, an Iron Branch, a Circlet, and a Gauntlets of Strength.
This gives you good starting stats and plenty of regeneration to secure last hits under harassment.
Early Game
Grab some basic Boots of Speed and upgrade them into your chosen boots of choice – either Phase Boots or Power Treads. Chaos Knight doesn’t lack for damage and so the standard option is Power Treads for the strength, damage and attack speed boost.
It’s at this stage you may wish to consider a Hand of Midas – if you’re off to a good early start and you don’t expect to find much opportunity to gank it is a good way to compensate for your lack of flash farming mechanism and accelerate your farm heading into the mid-game. Typically it’s considered a poor item choice of Chaos Knight, as he is that rare case of a carry who thrives off of early and mid game ganking. If the pace of the game is slow it’s worth considering though.
Upgrade your Iron Branch into a Magic Wand, and your Circlet and Gauntlets into a Bracer to round off your early game purchases. At this stage you can take part in engagements if forced to, although you’ll generally want one of your core items first.
Core Items
In order of typical item progression, these are Chaos Knight’s standard core items:
Drums of Endurance – One of the most cost efficient items in the game, it gives you a bit of everything - health, mana (stats), damage, move speed and attack speed. Drums are a great option if you're fighting regularly in the early game – which you should be, as a CK - or if your farm is quite poor.
Armlet of Mordiggian – As with most melee strength carries, Armlet tends to be the go-to core damage item. Armlet gives you a nice damage boost, additional armour and health, health regeneration, and an active toggle ability at a very affordable price.
Despite the recent nerf, which made Armlet toggling slightly less effective, it’s still very much possible to toggle, which is fantastic way of staying alive as a melee hero who will often be kited.
| Tip: ‘Toggling your Armlet’ is the process by which you turn off and on Armlet’s active ability in order to quickly regenerate your health when you’re low, and effectively save your life when you would otherwise die. The key is to turn Armlet off when you’re at very low health and expect a killing blow, but to do so before such a blow hits. Then straight away turn it back on, so that your health pool regenerates. If timed correctly - between instances of damage - you will regain enough health to survive most auto-attacks/abilities. |
Black King Bar – It naturally makes you tankier and gives you some additional damage as well. Most importantly you have the ability to become Spell Immune, which is crucial for CK, who will be at the forefront of engagements trying to deal right click damage, making him a prime target for magic casters and especially stuns. It also helps make you less susceptible to being kited.
Luxury Options
Manta Style – An unusual pick-up for a strength hero, so allow me expand on why Manta is a high priority luxury item on Chaos Knight. Chaos Knight’s ultimate, Phantasm, grants him 1/2/3 illusions, with a 50% chance to grant an additional illusion. This is why Manta Style, despite being an agility-centric item, is picked up on Chaos Knight – you get two additional illusions for 20 seconds, giving you a decent-sized illusion arm that will allow you to steamroll most heroes so long as they don’t have a huge farm advantage over you.
The other stats, whilst solid – 10 strength, 26 agility, 10 intelligence, 15% attack speed, and 10% movement, as well as the ability to disjoint certain projectiles and dispel silences – are not the main reason you purchase it.
Heart of Tarrasque – Heart will turn you into a full-on tank and will make your illusions must hardier (and thus also much scarier for the enemy team). Prior to Heart your illusions are easily dealt with and highly susceptible for burst AoE damage, and so Heart is your next item of choice.
The Vitality Booster can be bought whenever you want (before the Manta Style if you’re feeling too squishy), to give yourself and your illusions a nice health boost and then you can go back to finished the Heart off later on. The incredible health gain, damage increase, and health regeneration makes both your main hero and your illusions very difficult to deal with.
Assault Cuirass – Assault Cuirass is often picked up next. A nice attack speed boost, good auras for your entire team, and a minus armour aura that affects enemy heroes, creeps and buildings makes this a great pick up for CK; he becomes tankier and much more deadly at the same time.
Abyssal Blade – Basher into Abyssal Blade gives you good stats that synergise with CK – strength and damage – and the lockdown a Basher provides will make it easier to wail on your chosen target. The Abyssal Blade upgrade gives you even more damage and a second, active 2 second lockdown. Both also go through Spell Immunity as well, making them great forms of lockdown when Chaos Bolt loses its effectiveness.
Satanic – Satanic gives you direct damage benefits as well as increased survivability. The chance to heal yourself back up when low on health using the Unholy Rage active makes it similar to the health effects of Roshan's Cheese. As long as you're able to attack, you basically get your health pool completely regenerated, and since you should have bought a BKB earlier you almost always will.
Situational Items
Boots of Travel – There are no better boots in the late game. When you need to free up a slot which would otherwise be taken up by a TP Scroll work towards these and replace your Power Treads. With this, you combine your Boots and TP Scroll slot into one, allowing you to put a slot to better use.
Vladmir’s Offering – A strong option if there are other melee cores on your team. You gain some decent all-round benefits from Vladmir’s – lifesteal, damage, armour, and mana regeneration, all of which affects allies in a 900 unit AoE. The main downside is that it’s an item slot taken up by a middling item, and so is usually only purchased on cores in push line-ups; support heroes tend to build it late game so that the cores don’t waste an item slot that would otherwise be available for a high value item.
Heaven’s Halberd – Halberd will make you a lot tankier and will also give you more anti-carry potential. 20 strength is a nice boost to your health pool and damage, whilst 25% evasion means you'll mitigate a lot of damage. The ability to Disarm an enemy physical DPS'er for 3.0-4.5 seconds while you go to town on them can be clutch if they’ve been relying on lifesteal to stay alive in teamfights.
Skill Build
Chaos Bolt is a stun and magic damage nuke. It is always skilled and maxed first. It deals 1-200/50-225/75-250/100-275 magic damage and stuns for 1-2/1-3/1-4/2-4 seconds. As you can tell from that description, the stun duration and damage are both highly variable and luck-dependent. However, the values are inversely related (e.g. if you stun for the max duration you will damage for the minimum, and vice versa), which adds an element of reliability to the randomness.
Chaos Bolt is a decent stun, although the projectile can be easily dodged by heroes with Blink and disjoint abilities. It is a good way of locking down enemies while you right-click them to death and gives you some good lockdown potential in the early and mid game.
Reality Rift is an offensive positional ability that grants your next attack bonus damage. It is always skilled and maxed second (ahead even of a point in your ultimate - so a 4/4/0/0 build). Reality Rift teleports both CK and an enemy unit to a random point between the two of them in a 550/600/650/700 unit range and grants CK an additional 60/80/100/120 physical damage on his next attack.
It is combined with Chaos Bolt to make Chaos Knight a fearsome ganker. Between Bolt and Rift he has plenty of lockdown and chasing potential, as well as good burst magic and physical damage.
Chaos Strike is a passive ability which gives Chaos Knight a 10% chance for a critical strike. It is always skilled and maxed last. Additional levels increase the critical strike damage value from 1.5x to 3x Chaos Knight’s damage, but the chance to critical strike remains a constant 10% across all levels.
Because the chance to critical strike is a flat and tiny 10%, you cannot rely on Chaos Strike to proc and should merely consider it a lucky bonus if it does.
Chaos Knight’s ultimate, Phantasm, is skilled at levels 10 and 11, and then again at 16. Phantasm spawns 1/2/3 illusions of Chaos Knight which last for 42 seconds. You also have a 50% chance to spawn an additional illusion each time you use it.
It is not skilled at level 6 like most ultimates for a couple of reasons: 1) It only gives you one illusion, which is pitiful and fairly un-impactful. 2) It costs a lot of mana to use and at that stage of the game you are far better served using an extra Chaos Bolt than having a single illusion. Instead, it only really becomes useful once you can guarantee you get two illusions and have a 50% chance of having 3. At that stage they give you the potential to steamroll opponents.
Gameplay Tips
Chaos Bolt’s stun duration and damage appears above the unit’s head, so you know how long they will be stunned for.
The bonus damage from Reality Rift only lasts for 1 attack (or 1.2 seconds if you don’t attack the target straight away), so make sure the first attack after using Reality Rift is on the intended target, and not, for example, on a nearby creep by accident.
Any illusions you have (be it from a rune, Manta Style, or Phantasm) will be teleported with you to the target location when using Reality Rift. Although they don’t acquire the bonus damage from Reality Rift, this is a useful way of ensuring all of your illusions are able to instantly attack your main target.
There’s a 50% chance to spawn one additional illusion when casting Phantasm, which means that you can acquire 4 illusions from this ability, on top of the two you get from Manta Style, making for 7 Chaos Knights in total on the field, which can be highly confusing for enemies.
| Tip: Phantasm actually makes Chaos Knight invulnerable briefly for 0.5 seconds when casting the ability. This allows you to dodge stuns and instances of damage if timed correctly. |
Phantasm also dispels most debuffs that are affecting Chaos Knight when used in much the same way as Manta Style is often used to dispel negative effects such as silences.
| Tip: When you’re about to trigger Phantasm be sure to toggle your Armlet on if you have one, so that your illusions acquire the bonuses from the item. |
Chaos Knight’s standard combo is Reality Rift (to close the gap with the enemy) > auto-attack (with bonus damage) > Chaos Bolt > auto-attacks.
Last Updated - Patch 6.83.
