Dota – Longest illusion in Dota2

Nature's Prophet's ultimate begins bouncing with the nearest visible non-allied unit (it also hits neutrals) to where you targeted. It then bounces to the closest such unit and repeats until there are either no more un-hit units or no more bounces.

Obviously, the later bounces deal extra damage and so you want to manipulate the ultimate so that whatever hero you're trying to gank or lane you're trying to push takes as late of a bounce as possible. This is actually hard to intuitively do: when a teamfight starts that you're in the middle of you're almost always better off casting the ultimate far away from you using the minimap.

There are only four AOE damage items which are:

Battle fury (cleave)

Mjollinir (lightning jumps)

Radiance (burn)

Shiva's Guard active (ice and slow)

Realistically your best bet is with battlefury as that is based of hero damage rather than a damage over time or proc chance of lightning, so will show a bigger difference of health loss between the real PL and illusions.

Normally, however, by the time PL gets fully up and running you need to have heroes that can counter him (OD, sven etc) rather than relying on items.