If you’ve got around 50 or so hours logged into Dota 2 and public matchmaking, you’ve probably seen your fair share of games that you and your team thought you were supposed to win. But you didn’t, because the enemy team had too much damage or lockdown in the form of spells and abilities.
Such games tend to unfold like this: Your team allows your hard carry to get a lot of farm, securing kills around the map to create space and to give your other heroes a boost in net worth and experience. This gives you a huge advantage over your opponents—but instead of grouping up to close the game out, you or your teammates start to play for score rather than the Ancient.
The opponents then start to catch up, particularly through their decision to stay grouped up and go for pickoffs with stuns and disables. In an attempt to stem the tide, you and your team go for a final push, which is repelled by the opponents’ high ground advantage and ability to keep key heroes on your lineup from getting their own spells off. The game then slips away from you, leaving you wondering what in the world had just gone wrong.
Chances are, your core heroes—particularly your hard carry—refused to buy Black King Bars (BKB), which could have allowed them to press the net worth advantage that your supports had given them in the first place. Too often, players tend to forget about Black King Bar and the sheer power of magic immunity in Dota 2, in favor of simply building into more expensive DPS items like Daedalus.
Without the protection of BKB, hard carries, midlaners, and even offlaners can get easily focused down with powerful nukes and long disables. Barring those two things, slows and silences can also help neutralize the threat of core heroes, especially those that need to get up close to deal damage like melee carries, or rely on magic to do most of their work in engagements like Outworld Devourer.
All of these can lead to engagements falling apart rapidly, even if you and your teammates somehow manage to take them on your terms, meaning you get the initiation before they can back off or react accordingly. After all, a carry that can’t even move or swing its weapons at the enemy becomes a sitting duck and a total non-factor in teamfights. With the way Dota 2 is designed, picking the carry off during a five-on-five clash typically means that the team that did so will end up victorious in the engagement.
BKB happens to solve most of this problem. Upon activation of its ability, Black King Bar immediately applies a basic dispel on the hero that uses it, thus purging a handful of negative effects such as slows and silences, as well as effects that directly decrease attributes like attack damage or agility. After it is active, it protects the user from a lot of the game’s most powerful spells—except for those that pierce through spell immunity, of course.
This is especially valuable for core heroes, as the spell immunity allows them to shrug off abilities that would otherwise stop them in their tracks or deal heavy or lethal damage. The well-timed activation of BKB can easily decide entire games, so its value should not go over anyone’s heads.
That said, though, it’s also vital for players to realize that delaying the purchase of a BKB is a risk that continues to escalate exponentially as the game goes longer. Not buying it in the mid game or after securing a few core items increases the chances of not having a Black King Bar to use in the late game, and so delaying it unnecessarily should be avoided.
If there is a reason to buy it, just buy it when you can. Otherwise, you could be staring down the barrel of an enemy comeback before you get a chance to build it. Overall, though, it’s generally a lot safer to include it in your cores’ item builds, unless the opponents’ draft contains heroes that don’t really care about the presence of BKB. In such a case, it would be better to buy Manta Style or Linken’s Sphere.
Either way, there’s very little doubt about BKB’s impact on a game and how it can help teams close matches out quickly. Remember—kills mean nothing, and the throne means everything.
