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Attack modifiers are modifiers which apply an effect to a unit's basic attacks. These effects can widely vary, from healing, to damaging or even disabling effects. Most of these modifiers have their own rules. For example, some modifiers may not stack with others, some may fully stack, some may be for melee units only and others for  ranged or both for some abilities. Attack modifiers can be active, in which case they require to be used manually, though most have an option, but they also can be passive, proccing, or having a chance to proc on each attack.

Mechanics
There is no set rule of how attack modifiers stack, most different types of attack modifiers stack with each other, whereas for the same type, it depends on the mechanics of the modifier itself. Note that most attack modifiers' description are only a general outline and different abilities may have specific additional rules or exceptions hard-coded.

Besides the common attack modifiers listed below, many heroes, units and items have attack modifiers which are unique to them, meaning they can be only found on those units or items. To correctly understand and predict interactions between these various mechanics, on-hit effects have a different definition from attack modifiers.

Attack Modifiers
Attack modifiers are applied to an attack at its inception. In some cases this is visually apparent on the attack projectile for ranged heroes (e.g.  or  projectile), but not all attack modifiers have visual effects. As these modifications are calculated at the start of the attack, changes during the airborne time of an attack projectile (i.e. while picking up an item) will generally not affect these attacks that were launched earlier.

Therefore, attack modifiers are not applied if the attack is missed. Since the attack modifier is carried on the attack, if the attack fails, the modifier fails as well.

Multishot abilities that apply modifiers (e.g.  and  ) will generally apply all attack modifiers, but generally not on-hit effects. This is because most on-hit effects are specified to happen only on the "first" or "next" attack, and only the attack landing on the primary target will meet this condition. The other attacks will check for on-hit effects, but as separate instances.

On-hit Effects
On-hit effects are only applied at the time the attack arrives at its target. Since the projectile is airborne and the effect has not been applied and only applies on-hit, these on-hit effects does not have a visual effect. Conversely, value changes during the projectile airborne time can influence on-hit effects — In fact, the on-hit effect is not even tied to any particular attack, rather it is tied to an ability or item. The effect have an opportunity to perform actions before evasion, but it may still be coded to take evasion into account.

For example, the attack breaking out of invisibility that disables passive abilities cannot miss; while  explicitly does nothing when the attack is evaded.

Common Attack Modifiers
Common attack modifiers are attack modifiers which are not unique abilities, but are seen commonly on many heroes and items. The only differences between them are their values and how they are activated or acquired, some being applied on each attack, others being chance-based.

Abilities which simply grant or reduce attack speed (e.g. or ) or attack damage (e.g. ) are not attack modifiers, as they directly enhance the attack, instead of granting a modification.

Critical Strike


If an attack procs more than one source of critical strike, only the highest multiplier is applied.

Bash
Multiple sources of bashes do not stack at all.

Toggleable Abilities
Active Attack Modifiers abilities are attack modifiers must be actively used on each attack to apply its effects. They also can be set to, causing each attack to apply the effect if the hero can support their costs. Typically they use different attack range values if the cast range is different than the hero's attack range.

If the ability is cast manually, using the designated Hotkey, the ability uses the cast range. When using, it uses the hero's attack range. The cast range of these abilities can be further increased by other attack range bonuses based on the hero's range type. However, it is not affected by cast range bonuses.

This is because when set to, these abilities count as a regular attack; when used manually, they partly count as an ability cast. Therefore, unlike regular attacks, casting these attack modifiers do not cause any aggro from lane creeps. However, they do not count as abilities in any other scenario, meaning they cannot be used when attacking is restricted (i.e. disarms) and do not proc nor trigger any on-cast effects.

Units Abilities
Most attack modifiers on units are passive abilities with some exceptions.

Orb walking
Issuing an attack command on an enemy hero causes all nearby enemy creeps and towers to switch their aggro to the attacking unit. This is not the case for casting spells on enemy heroes. Orb-walking is the act of manually casting active attack modifiers like other active abilities, instead of using autocast and right-click or auto-attacks. When used manually, the attack is partially treated as a spell cast. This causes the hero to not draw aggro from nearby enemy creeps, making it possible to harass an enemy in the lane without the creeps and even towers refocusing their attacks on the harassing hero as they normally would when using regular attacks or autocast. However, the effect still counts as an attack and not a spell cast in regards of on-cast effects. It still uses the hero's attack speed and animations and still puts the attack on cooldown normally.

Origin of the term "orb"
In Warcraft 3, unique attack modifiers are called " orb effects ". This is due to the items which grant the attack modifiers commonly being orbs (for example, Orb of Venom, Orb of Darkness, Orb of Lightning, Orb of Corruption, etc). A characteristic of these orb effects is that they do not stack with each other. The items being portrayed as orbs serves as a metaphor, as stacking real sphere-shaped objects is very difficult to do. Since DotA is a custom map on Warcraft 3, it made use of the abilities of these orb items, and the term "orb" was used to describe that attack modifiers based on those items do not stack. Therefore, unique attack modifiers are referred to as "orb effects" in DotA, just like how they are in Warcraft 3. The term was changed to "Unique Attack Modifier" in Dota 2, while "orb effect" was dropped, however, many players which came from DotA still refer to these modifiers as orb effects. The term "orb walking" originates therefore from Warcraft 3, describing the same technique as described earlier.

Later usage of the term
A later usage of the term "orb walking" refers to using attacks or active attack modifiers to achieve stutter stepping. "Stutter stepping" is the act of cancelling the backswing animation of an attack, allowing the unit to move between attacks, following the target, instead of standing and waiting for the backswing to finish. This old technique, which originated from Starcraft and carried over to Warcraft and therefore also to DotA, was commonly used together with the orb-walking technique. This is because of how manually casting active attack modifiers behaves, as compared to regular attacks. During the cast time of a manually cast active attack modifier, the player can spam the move command, which does not cancel the ongoing cast, but the first move command after the cast point is reached cancels the backswing, so the hero moves almost immediately after the attack launched. However, doing that during a regular attack does cancel the regular attack, causing the unit to move immediately, so the player must time the move command after the attack launched. This means stutter stepping was much easier to do with casting active attack modifiers, as timing for the move command was not required, allowing for much more effective stutter stepping. Due to this, orb walking and stutter stepping were very commonly used together, so commonly that players started to call the move just orb walking, even though it was orb walking and stutter stepping together. This resulted in the community to commonly refer to stutter stepping as orb walking, even though stutter stepping can be done with regular attacks as well. The term stutter stepping became less known as a result. However, outside of Dota, the technique is still called stutter stepping, which may cause some confusion when mentioning the technique in other communities (like Starcraft, League of Legends, Command and Conquer and other RTS and Dota-like games), as they most probably only know it as stutter stepping.

Trivia
Unique Attack Modifiers (abbreviated UAM; formerly known as Orb Effects) were attack modifiers that could not be used simultaneously with each other—one always took priority.

Unique attack modifiers did work simultaneously with non-unique attack modifiers.

Multiple unique attack modifiers did not stack. One always took priority, as follows:
 * Stacking priority
 * 1) Unique active attack modifiers that were cast manually.
 * 2) Unique active attack modifiers set to auto-cast.
 * 3) Unique attack modifiers granted by items.

In Ability Draft, the first obtained UAM ability always overrid later ones. Items held by a hero prioritised by age. Items held by illusions prioritised by inventory slot in reading order.

When attacking units that were invalid targets for certain Unique Attack Modifiers (such as spell immune heroes or buildings) with an auto-cast modifier, other UAMs that it was vulnerable to would be used, even if they were lower in priority. For example, spell immune heroes are immune to, but if the hero was carrying a , it would proc instead. This did not apply to non-autocastable UAMs like —they still followed the above priority order regardless of a target's spell immunity.

Modificador de ataque Модификаторы атаки 攻击特效