Daedalus

Daedalus is the answer to one specific question every right-click carry eventually asks themselves: How do I make the enemy team actually feel my attacks? It is not about sustenance. It is not about mobility. It is not about survivability. It is purely about raw, single-target damage output—and Daedalus delivers more of it per gold than any other item in the game when the crit procs. A 30% chance to deal 225% damage means every three to four attacks, one of them hits for more than double. On a carry already sitting on 300+ base damage, that proc number is the difference between a support surviving a fight and a support dying in one auto-attack interaction. The 88 bonus damage it provides passively is also not nothing — it is the highest raw attack damage bonus of any single item in the shop.

What you need to understand about Daedalus is that it rewards high base damage more than anything else. A carry with 150 attack damage who crits gets a number. A carry with 350 attack damage who crits gets a war crime. This is why Daedalus works so well on Sven—God's Strength multiplies his total attack damage, including Daedalus's contribution, before the crit multiplier applies, meaning a Sven crit during God's Strength is not 225% of 350 damage; it is 225% of a number that already had God's Strength applied to it. That interaction is why Sven's games at high MMR end in twenty minutes.

Daedalus belongs in the late third-item to fourth-item slot on pure right-click carries who have no other source of crit. The important caveat here is this: if your hero already has a crit ability—Juggernaut's Blade Dance, Phantom Assassin's Coup de Grace, Chaos Knight's Chaos Strike—Daedalus's crit does NOT stack the multiplier with the hero's crit. Both chances exist independently, but when two crits would proc simultaneously, only the higher multiplier applies. Building Daedalus on PA is wasting gold—her own crit at 400% outclasses it every time, and adding Daedalus only marginally increases the proc chance while the multiplier gain is zero. For heroes with NO native crit—Sven, Dragon Knight, Weaver, and Wraith King post-disassemble—Daedalus is the cleanest damage purchase available.

Skip it when the enemy team has enough armor that the crit numbers are getting absorbed before they matter. Against a four-armor-stacking lineup—Shiva's, Assault Cuirass, and Desolator on an ally to offset—the actual raw damage landing per crit is meaningfully reduced, and you are better served building a Desolator of your own first to strip their armor before Daedalus's crits become threatening. Also skip it when you need survivability and you have neither BKB nor Satanic—a dead carry with a Daedalus sitting in their inventory contributes nothing, and there are games where you buy it and immediately regret it because you are constantly dying before the crits have time to swing fights.