Blink Dagger

Blink Dagger is the most widely built item in this dataset. Twenty-eight heroes rank it near the top of their build at some stage, ahead of Arcane Boots and Blade of Alacrity on twenty-four. For an item that grants no stats at all, that is a remarkable breadth of use.

The interesting part is not the total but the split. Blink Dagger appears in three different stages, and the heroes buying it at each are doing something different with it.

In the mid game it is the first-ranked purchase for Axe, Dragon Knight, Batrider, Doom, Enigma and Legion Commander — initiators, every one. For these heroes the Dagger is not an accessory to the plan, it is the plan. Their abilities require being somewhere specific at a moment of their choosing, and until the Dagger is bought they largely cannot do their job.

In the late game it is first-ranked for a completely different set: Dazzle, Dark Willow, Grimstroke, Ring Master, Windranger and Hoodwink. These are supports, and the reason they buy it so much later is almost certainly economic rather than tactical. A 2,250-gold item with no combat stats competes badly with wards and consumables on a support’s budget, so it arrives once the budget stops being the binding constraint.

A small handful of heroes — Tinker, Earthshaker, Sand King, Dragon Knight — rank it as early as the fourth or fifth early-game pickup, which is about as early as 2,250 gold can realistically be assembled.

There is a fourth group this page cannot see, and it is worth naming. Blink Dagger builds into Overwhelming, Swift and Arcane Blink, and a hero that upgrades will stop showing the base item in its late-game list even though the blink is still central to what it does. Some of the mid-game-only entries above are probably heroes that bought the Dagger and then moved past it rather than heroes that stopped wanting it.

One data note worth recording. OpenDota files Blink Dagger under the “component” quality tier, because it builds into Overwhelming, Swift and Arcane Blink. That tier is a shop-category label rather than a measure of consequence, and taking it literally would have excluded the single most widely built item in the game from consideration entirely.