Have you ever found yourself jungling for 10 minutes straight and still lack in items? The jungle is a huge part of every Dota 2 game. Being able to efficiently farm neutral camps is an important element to becoming a good Dota player.
This is where items that hasten jungling come in.
In this article, I will discuss the top 10 best jungle items in the current meta (7.92d). The list will be arranged and judged according to the items’ effect and value for gold.
10. Helm of Dominator
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The powerful headpiece of a dead necromancer.
Helm of dominator allows you to take control of a neutral creep that you can use to farm jungle faster. It gives you decent stats, armor, and hp regeneration which are all crucial in jungling.
With a Dominator, you can control the following neutral creeps which are great at farming camps:
Harpy Stormcrafter: has a Chain Lightning ability (140 initial damage that jumps to 4 max targets)
Ogre Frostmage: has an Ice Armor ability (gives bonus armor and slows down movement speed and attack speed of attacker)
Alpha Wolf: has a Packleader’s Aura which gives 30% bonus damage to allies in 1200 radius
Dark Troll Summoner: has a Raise Dead ability which converts corpses into two skeleton warriors
Hellbear Smasher: has a Thunder Clap ability which deals 150 damage, 25 attack speed slow and 25% move slow in a 300 radius, and has a swiftness aura that gives 15 bonus attack speed to allies in 1200 radius
Satyr Tormenter: has a Shockwave ability that deals 160 damage in a straight line and Unholy Aura that gives 5 hp regeneration to allies in 1200 radius
Wildling Ripper: has Toughness Aura that gives 3 bonus armor to allies in 1200 radius and a Tornado ability which slows and deals damage to enemies in a small radius for 40 seconds.
While getting Dominator bumps your jungling potential, it still only remains as a very situational and hero-dependent item. For 2,350 gold, you generally could have bought other items that could translate well in the later stages in the game, unless your hero synergizes with it.
Heroes that usually buy Dominator are Beastmaster, Chen, Clinks, Dark Seer, and Lycan.
Helm of Dominator Details:
Costs 2,350 Gold (Helm of Iron Will, Crown, and Recipe)
+6 to all attributes
+6 armor
+6 hp regeneration
Active ability: Dominate – ability to take control of a neutral, non-ancient unit
Jungling Benefits:
Control a neutral creep to fast-farm camps
Farm camps using the creep while your hero is elsewhere
Controlled units can be used to stack camps
9. Manta Style
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An axe made of reflective materials that cause confusion amongst enemy ranks.
When enabled, Manta Style creates two controllable illusions of your hero. This can be used during teamfights, dispelling disables, pushing waves, and jungling. Using Manta Style, you can send these illusions to neutral camps to farm.
However, much like the Helm of Dominator, Manta Style is also hero-dependent. Most of the time only position 1 heroes build it, and good players often reserve it for teamfights and emergency escape situations.
If you’re going to use Manta Style to jungle, make sure that you won’t be participating in fights within its cooldown and your hero is going to farm in a safe place wherein you wouldn’t be needing it to dispel debuffs.
Heroes that have both Manta Style and Radiance as their items can clear a lot of camps with their illusion. Although you don’t build a Manta Style just to farm jungle camps, you can still use it to do so.
Heroes that usually build Manta Style are Anti-Mage, Luna, Juggernaut, Phantom Lancer, Terrorblade, Arc Warden, Spectre, Naga Siren, and Morphling.
Manta Style details:
+10 Strength
+26 Agility
+10 Intelligence
+8% Movement Speed
+12 Attack Speed
Active ability: Mirror Image – Creates 2 illusions that last for 20 seconds and deal 33% (melee) or 28% (ranged) of your damage.
Jungling Benefits:
You can get a neutral camp or two with strong illusions, while your hero is farming safely elsewhere.
You can send your illusions to farm dangerous camp territory wherein your hero wouldn’t be able to reach, potentially stealing farm from your enemy team.
In some instances, you can send out your Manta Style to areas inside the fog of war just so your hero can safely farm camps.
8. Blade Mail
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A razor-sharp coat of mail, it is the choice of selfless martyrs in combat.
Blade Mail is an excellent item that gives you both offensive and defensive potential in the game. With its new passive ability addition, it is now a great jungling tool especially for heroes who would normally build it. The Damage Return passive, which returns 20 damage plus 20% of the attack damage dealt to you, allows your hero to clear camps faster.
You can ask your teammates to stack large and ancient camps for you. In your attempt to clear it, you can activate your Blade Mail which adds another 80% damage return to the creeps.
At just 2,125 gold, you get a decent amount of armor and damage which also helps for faster jungling. While you won’t get Blade Mail specifically to farm the jungle, it adds a lot of farming potential to heroes who often build Blade Mail and usually have a hard time clearing neutral camps quickly (e.g., Legion Commander, Spectre, Elder Titan, Clockwerk).
Typically, you want to get Blade Mail if your role in teamfights is the initiator who’ll soak up most of the damage or the tank defense-heavy core.
Heroes that usually build Blade Mail are Axe, Bristleback, Clockwerk, Elder Titan, Spectre, and Wraith King.
Blade Mail Details:
+6 armor
+28 attack damage
Active ability: Damage Return - For 4.5 seconds, the damage returned from all sources is increased by 80%
Passive ability: Damage Return – Every time you are attacked, you return 20 damage plus 20% of the attack damage dealt to you
Jungling Benefits:
Extra damage allows you to clear camps faster
Extra armor allows you to maintain your HP on a safe level
Useful for clearing stacks
7. Soul Ring
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A ring that feeds on the souls of those who wear it.
In my opinion, Soul Ring is an underrated jungling item since only a few heroes even ever use this. And those who use Soul Ring don’t buy this thinking “I’m going to get better at jungling with this”.
More often than not, Soul Ring solves the mana pool problems of certain heroes that want to farm jungle with their spells. For 680 gold, you can get a temporary 150 mana bonus every 25 seconds. The temporary mana boost allows you to spam your spells a little more often.
If your hero is skill-dependent in terms of clearing jungle camps, Soul Ring is often a must-buy. Just make sure that when you activate it, you don’t instantly die from the creeps’ attacks.
Heroes who usually buy Soul Ring are Alchemist, Broodmother, Dark Seer, Dragon Knight, Enigma, Mars, Omniknight, Techies, Timbersaw, Tinker, Underlord, and Zeus. All these heroes rely on neutral camps at some point to boost their farm.
Soul Ring Details:
+6 strength
+2 armor
Active ability: Sacrifice - Consume 170 health to temporarily gain 150 mana. Lasts 10 seconds. If the mana gained cannot fit in your mana pool (which means that your mana is full), it creates a buffer of mana that will be used before your mana pool.
Jungling Benefits:
Allows you to use your spells while maintaining a good level of mana pool
Gives decent armor and bonus HP
6. Radiance
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A divine weapon that causes damage and a bright burning effect that lays waste to nearby enemies.
Radiance is arguably one of the best jungling in the game that some players may even put in the number one spot.
The item’s Burn ability deals 60 magical damage per second to nearby enemies while causing them to miss 17% of their attacks. With Radiance, your hero can clear the entire half of the map’s jungle easily. Dealing 60 damage per second to neutral creeps also allows you to clear two camps that are close together.
However, in my opinion, I can’t put it past the top 7. Why?
The item costs 5,150 gold. That’s a lot of networth.
If that’s not bad enough, the first and only recipe that it requires is the Sacred Relic which costs 3,800. Since Radiance is typically your first major item to maximize its farming potential, this means that you’d have to be hard-farming waves and some neutral creeps without anything else besides some basic stat items and boots since you’ll be trying to earn that 3,800 gold as soon as possible.
Having said that, if you can get Radiance at around 12-18 minutes of the game with other basic items, you are in a good spot to farm the jungle and clear creep waves extremely fast. With good Radiance timing, you can get your second to third major items early.
It’s a monster as a farming item but I can’t, in good conscience, rank it high in this list. In the current meta, two of the most popular heroes with Radiance build have even steered away from it – Alchemist and Spectre – as it doesn’t do as much as a five thousand gold item would.
Heroes that usually build Radiance are Spectre, Wraith King, and Alchemist.
Radiance Details:
+60 damage
Toggle Ability: Burn – Scorches enemies for 60 magical damage per second and causes them to miss 17% of their attacks
Jungling Benefits:
+60 attack damage helps clear large neutral creeps
Aura damage deals damage to multiple enemies at once, which helps clear multiple camps at once
Toggle ability allows you to turn off the Burn ability if you want to time a stack pull
5. Mask of Madness
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Once this mask is worn, its bearer becomes an uncontrollable aggressive force.
Mask of Madness or MoM is a cheap farming item that gives you sustain and attack speed which are both useful in the early farming stages of the game. An early bonus 110 attack speed with 20% attack lifesteal allows you to burst down camps with ease.
In my own experience, this is my typical go-to item as a position 1 when we get overpowered in our lane and I need to get a farming item quickly. I have thousands of hours played in Dota 2, and there’d be times that even before the game starts, I’d just know that my lane’s going to suck bad and I must plan the first minor items that I’d buy accordingly, which would often include rushing an early Mask of Madness to farm in the jungle.
You can spam your MoM ability while jungling to quickly farm neutral camps. Since the ability also gives a -8 armor when active, you can kite the creeps if you are using a ranged hero.
The recipe for MoM is Morbid Mask and Quarterstaff which are both useful early items. You can disassemble MoM to get Satanic as well.
For 1,775 gold, this is one of my favorite jungling items for heroes that benefit a lot with lifesteal.
Heroes that usually buy MoM are Faceless Void, Luna, Medusa, Sniper, and Sven.
Mask of Madness Details:
+10 attack speed
+10 damage
+20% attack damage lifesteal
Active ability: Berserk - Gives 110 attack speed and 30 movement speed, but reduces your armor by 8 and silences you. Lasts 6 seconds.
Jungling Benefits:
Having a decent lifesteal allows you to sustain your hero to a safe level of HP while farming.
The massive attack speed burst from Berserk is enough to clear two camps in just a few seconds.
4. Battle Fury
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The bearer of this mighty axe gains the ability to cut down swaths of enemies at once.
Ah, the ever-famous Battle Fury. If it’s not the most sought-after farming item of position 1 melee cores.
Battle Fury is the best neutral creep farming item for melee cores – that is, if it is built fast and early.
Battle Fury gives you three abilities that are very helpful in farming neutral creeps: Chop Tree (I’ll discuss this later on), Quell which gives +18 damage to non-hero units, and Cleave which deals 40% of attack damage to nearby creeps.
This has pretty much the same timing with Radiance. When bought at about 12-16 minutes of the game, you are in a good spot to get those second and third major items at around 25 minutes, which the majority of teamfights are starting to close in, minute by minute.
But unlike Radiance, Battle Fury has a much faster creep-clearing capacity.
As a melee core, Battle Fury would help you farm in two major ways: First, you can shove waves fast and easily with it. This allows you to create a safety net for you to farm neutral creeps. Second, with the Battle Fury at hand, you can immediately clear the neutral camps to get back to the creep wave that will be sent back to you past the river.
While it could arguably be the best neutral creep farming item for melee heroes in Dota 2, Battle Fury lacks in some major areas that cause it to fall to the fourth place of this list.
Battle Fury doesn’t give any additional attribute which is essential in mid-game skirmishes. If the enemy team has a highly aggressive, early game-oriented line-up, forcing to build a battle fury might be a bad idea. You can consider building other cheaper farming items that may still be helpful in the later stages of the game, such as Mask of Madness and Maelstrom.
But, if you can secure yourself an early Battle Fury, you are in a great place to get that MMR.
Heroes that usually build Battle Fury are Anti-Mage, Troll Warlord, Juggernaut, Monkey King, and Phantom Assassin.
Battle Fury Details:
+55 attack damage
+7.5 hp regeneration
+2.75 mana regeneration
Active ability: Chop Tree – Destroys a target tree
Passive ability: Quell - Increases attack damage against non-hero units by 18 for melee heroes, and 6 for ranged.
Passive ability: Cleave - Deals 70% of attack damage as physical damage in a cone up to 650 around the target. Deals 40% against creeps. (Melee Only)
Jungling Benefits:
Gives high attack damage with an additional bonus to creeps
Cleave allows you to clear camps quickly
Gives decent hp regeneration for sustain
Gives decent mana regeneration which allows you to spam spells to clear camps faster
Chop Tree ability (Again, I’ll discuss this later!)
3. Maelstrom
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A hammer forged for the gods themselves, Maelstrom allows its user to harness the power of lightning.
Wanna be Thor for the day?
Maelstrom gives you a huge boost in your entire farming potential, both on waves and neutral camps. For 2,700 gold, it gives you a decent +24 attack damage plus a Chain Lightning proc that has a 30% chance to activate every attack, which deals 140 damage to each target for 4 bounces.
When using Maelstrom in clearing neutral camps, it is always important to hit the creep that has the most HP first. The idea is to clear the camp fastest using this method.
Picture it this way: in a neutral camp, there are three creeps. One has 1000 hp and the two have 500 hp. If you are hitting the creep with 1000 hp, most of your physical attack goes to the highest HP creep while the proc damages the small HP creeps. This way, you can even clear camps without even having to hit the small HP creeps.
Maelstrom is also upgradeable to Gleipnir or Mjollnir – both great late-game items.
It’s a poor man’s Battle Fury that has more late-game potential.
Heroes that usually build Maelstrom are Juggernaut, Faceless Void, Sniper, Pangolier, Monkey King, Windranger, and Gyrocopter.
Maelstrom Details:
+24 attack damage
Passive ability: Chain Lightning - Grants a 30% chance on attack to release a bolt of electricity that leaps between 4 targets within a 650 radius, dealing 140 magical damage to each.
Jungling Benefits:
Decent attack damage bonus
Low cost allows you to clear jungle camps earlier in the game
Chain Lightning allows you to clear camps efficiently and quickly
You can pull camps closer together to let the proc hit more neutral creeps for more efficiency
2. Clarity
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Clear water that enhances the ability to meditate.
Yes. The 50-gold item is the second-best jungling item in the game.
If you’re jungling without using your spells, you’re doing it wrong.
If you’re Anti-Mage, blink to the next camp.
If you’re Arc Warden, use Magnetic Field to clear Ancient stacks.
If you’re Bloodseeker…
You’re getting the point.
Hell, if you’re Lifestealer, you can even consider using Infest to clear a large stack of neutral creeps. I mean, it should work out well if you won’t be using it soon.
If you want to clear camps faster, use your skills. Don’t worry, it will go on cooldown.
Most skills take up a chunk of your mana pool in the early stages of the game. This is where the 50-gold magic comes in.
Using Clarity, you can spam your skills to clear jungle creeps fast. Whether your skill damages creeps (e.g., Drow’s Multishot, Phantom Assassin’s Stifling Dagger, Weaver’s Shukuchi, etc.) or it’s for your mobility in the jungle (e.g., Anti-Mage’s Blink, Faceless Void’s Timewalk, etc.) just use it. Then Clarity to replenish your mana.
It’s just that simple, yet I’ve seen a lot of players who still do not do it.
Even before I go to the jungle to farm, I’d already have my Clarity in my courier on the way to me. Pro players do it, high MMR players do it. Just do it.
Some skills that are exempt from this rule:
Sven’s Storm Hammer – since you typically just put one level in this skill for its stun and max his Great Cleave for farming
Luna’s Lucent Beam – sometimes you can still use this occasionally, but you’ll find yourself often maxing Moon Glaives and Lunar Blessing first. So, it’s not worth spamming a level 1 or 2 Lucent Beam when you have high attack damage that bounces.
Chaos Knight’s Chaos Bolt – too high mana cost and you might end up dealing just 150 damage. Your hero farms camps fast enough with Chaos Strike. Use Reality Rift to farm the jungle, though.
Lifestealer’s Rage – reserve it, you might get ganked.
Clarity Detail:
Use: Replenish - Grants 6 mana regeneration to the target for 25 seconds.
Jungling Benefits:
Allows you to clear camps by spamming your spells repeatedly
Keeps you available while jungling to join teamfights since you’d have enough mana to do so
1. Quelling Blade
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The axe of a fallen gnome, it allows you to effectively maneuver the forest.
That’s right, I said it. I’ll be ranking this higher than Battle Fury. This is the best jungling item in the game. Before you rage on me, hear me out.
First of all, Quelling Blade gives the highest, value-for-money early game damage to creeps, which is 12 for melee heroes and 6 for ranged. This may not seem much at first glance, but it’s a lot especially in the first few minutes of the game.
But that’s not all its value.
At 130 gold, you also get the Chop Tree ability. Cutting trees in the jungle allows you to maneuver the area a lot faster, making your jungle-farming much more efficient. Usually, you cut the trees to create a shortcut towards the next camp or to destroy a tree that blocks your vision to that camp.
Personally, I buy it almost all the time if I’m a core (except if I’m a ranged, fight-oriented mid hero).
In the Role Assistant of Dota Plus, there are currently 26 heroes at the Divine Rank that are usually played at position 1. According to ImmortalFaith guides, 22 of those 26 heroes should buy a Quelling Blade at the start of the game. And even in the remaining 4 heroes (Arc Warden, Drow Ranger, Morphling, and Weaver), I’d even still consider buying a Quelling Blade.
Yes, it doesn’t give you the Chain Lightning procs and the Cleave from Battle Fury. But it’s just 130 gold, man. A hero with a Quelling Blade just farms the jungle camps a lot faster than without it.
I mean, just look at the item lore: it allows you to effectively maneuver the forest.
Quelling Blade Details:
Passive ability: Quell - Increases attack damage against non-hero units by 12 for melee heroes, and 6 for ranged.
Active ability: Chop Tree - Destroy a target tree.
Jungling Benefits:
A low-cost, highly effective item
Allows you to cut trees which enables you to take shortcuts between camps.
