Upgrade
Butterfly
Stats
Strategy
Why Buy Butterfly?
Most late-game carry items solve an offensive problem—you need more damage, more attack speed, more burst. Butterfly solves a defensive one that most agility carries hit at the same point in every game: you are fast, you hit hard, and a single physical carry on the enemy team is deleting you before you get to do anything. The 35% evasion is the answer to that specific death sentence. Not a BKB, which handles spells and disables. Not a Heart, which just adds HP. Butterfly specifically counters the enemy right-clicker who has been farming all game and now wants to sit on your face and auto-attack you to death. Against that threat, 35% evasion means roughly one in three of their attacks disappears entirely — and on a hero hitting fast with high damage, that is an enormous chunk of their kill potential gone.
But here is the thing people undervalue: Butterfly is not just a defensive purchase. The stat package is elite for an agility carry. You get +35 agility, which translates directly into attack speed, armor, and primary attribute damage all at once. You get +25 flat damage on top. And the new version gives you a +20% base attack speed bonus—not a flat attack speed number but a percentage of your base, which scales better the higher your agility is. All of this combined means Butterfly makes you hit harder AND survive longer simultaneously. Most items do one or the other. At 5450 gold, Butterfly does both, which is exactly why it has been a late-game staple for agility carries for years and continues to be one.
When to Buy Butterfly?
Third or fourth item, after your core survivability and damage foundation is already in place. You do not buy Butterfly to get through the early or mid game—you buy it to close out a game that has gone late or to become unkillable in extended team fights where the enemy carry is their main threat. The typical window is somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes on most agility carries, after BKB if the enemy has lockdown and after Manta or your damage item of choice if they do not.
The draft is everything here. If the enemy has one physical carry and no Monkey King Bar, Butterfly is as close to a must-buy as this game has. You are forcing them to spend 5,050 gold on MKB just to hit you normally again—and until they do, you are shrugging off a significant percentage of their entire damage output. That is an enormous tax on their item path.
The situations where you skip it or delay it are just as important to understand. If the enemy team has already built MKB before you complete Butterfly, the evasion is completely nullified—MKB attacks bypass evasion entirely, no exceptions. Buying Butterfly into a team with two MKBs is burning 5450 gold for +35 agility and +25 damage, which is fine on paper but not remotely worth the slot cost compared to what else you could buy. Against heavy magic-burst lineups—Leshrac, Skywrath, and Lina going full damage—Butterfly does nothing to keep you alive. And if you are a strength carry like Wraith King or Dragon Knight who just wants raw survivability, the agility stats scale poorly with your hero's kit and Heart of Tarrasque or Assault. Cuirass will serve you far better.
Tips & common mistakes
- Monkey King Bar completely bypasses Butterfly's evasion. Not partially—completely. Every MKB attack hits you regardless of the 35% roll. This is the most fundamental interaction in the game around this item and the most commonly misunderstood. The moment an enemy carry finishes MKB, your Butterfly evasion does nothing against their attacks. Plan accordingly.
- · Evasion stacks diminishingly with other evasion sources. If you have Blur from Phantom Assassin and buy Butterfly on top, you do not get 35% + 45% = 80%. The math is multiplicative — you end up with roughly 62% combined evasion. That is still powerful, but the second source always returns less than the first. Know the real numbers before you commit.
- · The attack speed from Butterfly is a 20% BASE attack speed bonus, not a flat number. This means it scales with your agility. The higher your agility at the time of purchase, the more attack speed you actually get from this item. On a fully stacked late-game agility carry, this hits significantly harder than the tooltip suggests to players who are used to reading flat attack speed values.
- · Butterfly has no active ability since Flutter was removed. There is nothing to press, no cooldown to track, no decision to make. It is entirely passive. Players who came from older versions of the game sometimes expect an active player—there is none. What you see is what you get, every fight, all the time.
- · If someone on your team already has built-in evasion—a Phantom Assassin with Blur or a teammate who already bought Butterfly—think hard before buying a second source. The enemy will almost certainly rush MKB in response to the first evasion source, which means your Butterfly evasion is already bypassed before you finish building it. Stacking evasion when the enemy has already countered it is one of the clearest gold-throwing mistakes in the late game.
- · Butterfly is 5450 gold and requires the Secret Shop for Eaglesong. Do not start the build if you cannot complete it in a reasonable timeframe—an incomplete Butterfly leaves you with partial components that provide far less value than finishing a cheaper complete item would. Either commit to the full item or pivot to something you can complete with base shop access.
Summary
Butterfly is the item that makes the enemy's physical carry do the math and hate the answer. Buy it when the game has gone long, the enemy's main damage source is right-clicks, and nobody on their team has MKB yet—because the moment that changes, you need a different plan. Get the full item, stay alive long enough to use it, and let 35% of their attacks disappear into thin air.
Popular On
Lore
Only the mightiest and most experienced of warriors can wield the Butterfly, but it provides incredible dexterity in combat.