Faerie Fire in Dota 2: Price, Cooldown and Valve's Data

7 September 2026 · 7 min read

Vitalij Pobereznik · text prepared by AI · how we check facts
Checked: Claude (AI) — fact-checked against the Ukrainian original; not proofread by a native speaker

Faerie Fire costs 65 gold — that’s the first thing worth knowing, and the figure is confirmed by Valve’s official item feed, not by a forum retelling. The item’s identifier in that same feed is 237.

Below is everything else Valve’s own data says about this item, where that data goes quiet, and how to check all of it yourself in under a minute.

What the official feed says about Faerie Fire

Valve publishes item data through a separate machine-readable feed — the same one the in-client shop pulls prices and hints from. Here’s everything it contains on Faerie Fire:

The first four rows come from the item card; the three shop hints come from the item list.

We’re deliberately saying nothing about what Faerie Fire’s effect actually does: the in-client description is Valve’s own copy, and it isn’t part of our fact set. Read the effect straight from the shop — hover the icon in-game. The presence of a cooldown field in the data tells you exactly one thing: this is an active item you trigger, not a passive bonus that just sits in the slot. How much it restores, what exactly it adds, or whether it’s consumed on use — none of those values exist in our data, and we won’t invent them.

The 65-gold price is the part most people open this article for. It gives you exactly one useful thing: you can plan your starting budget before you’ve even spawned at the fountain. For how to allocate that gold overall, see our separate breakdown of starting items.

A 5s cooldown: what follows from it, and what doesn’t

5s is the gap between two uses of the item. The practical takeaway from that number is modest: this isn’t a button you can press twice in a row at a critical moment. You use it once, then wait.

What this figure does NOT tell you: how many times the item will trigger in a fight, whether it’s worth carrying two of them, or whether the cooldown will “catch up” within a given skirmish’s length. That depends on how long a specific fight actually lasts — and that’s a value that doesn’t exist in the feed, or anywhere else in our data.

Where the straightforward answer gets murkier: shop hints

The most interesting part of Faerie Fire’s data is a set of hints that look contradictory at first glance. Valve flags the item as recommended for play, but does NOT flag it as either an early-game item or a late-game item.

Here’s what that means in practice. The “recommended” flag controls whether the item shows up in the general list the game suggests to a player. The other two flags are narrower filters: they tell the shop which stretch of the match to actively suggest the item in. For Faerie Fire, the first flag is on, and both phase-specific flags are off.

In other words, the game isn’t telling you when to buy it. It’s showing the item as broadly relevant, and leaving the timing call to you. This is exactly the situation where auto-suggested items won’t help — you’ll need to look at your own gold reserve and how your lane is going instead. If that part still feels shaky, start with our guide on last hits and denies, since those are what determine whether you’ll have 65 gold to spend on this in the first place.

One more thing worth keeping in mind: shop hints aren’t a constant. Valve changes them through patches along with the rest of the balance, and the feed shows the current state at any given moment, not a permanent truth. The values in the table above are accurate as of publication; track changes in our updates and patches section.

The “neutral item, level 4294967295” line

This line trips people up more than anything else here, so it’s worth addressing on its own. In Valve’s classification, Faerie Fire is listed as a neutral item of level 4294967295.

Don’t read that literally. The number is obviously too large for any real neutral-item tier — it looks like a placeholder value baked into the data structure, meaning “the field exists, but no meaningful value was assigned to it.” Why it’s set that way, and what it changes for the player, is something Valve has never explained anywhere, so the only honest description is this: the feed populates the field this way, and we’re drawing no gameplay conclusion from it.

The reason we’re writing about it at all, instead of quietly dropping the awkward line, is that if you open the feed yourself, you’ll hit the exact same question. Better to know upfront that it means nothing than to build a theory on top of it.

How to check all of this yourself

You don’t have to take the site’s word for it. Here’s how:

1. Open dota2.com/datafeed/itemlist in your browser with the parameter language=english — you’ll get the full item list along with all three shop hints for each item.
2. Find Faerie Fire in the list and note its identifier — 237.
3. Plug that identifier into the second address: dota2.com/datafeed/itemdata with the parameters language=english and item_id=237. This is the card for that specific item — price, cooldown, classification.
4. Compare what you see against the table above. If the numbers differ, a patch has shipped, and the feed is right, not us.

The same trick works for any other item — swap the item_id and you get a different card. You can use it, for instance, to check the data on Quelling Blade.

What we’re NOT claiming about Faerie Fire

Here’s what our data doesn’t include — and what you won’t find in this article dressed up as advice:

• Specific heroes or positions. The feed doesn’t tie Faerie Fire to anyone. Any “this item is for supports” or “for the mid lane” claim here would be invented. Roles are a separate topic — see our guide on the five positions.
• Numeric effect values. How much the item restores or adds isn’t in our fact set, so we’re not naming a figure.
• Power comparisons with other items. Saying “better than X” requires stats for both items. Price and cooldown alone aren’t enough for that call.
• Win rates, purchase stats, meta status. Valve doesn’t publish any of that in this feed, and inventing it would be worse than saying nothing.
• How many copies to buy. Our data has no stacking limits, and no confirmation that multiple copies even stack.
• Valve’s future plans. Whether the 65-gold price or the 5s cooldown changes in a future patch is something only the developers know.

If you come across a guide that confidently fills in these gaps with numbers, ask it for a source. For Faerie Fire, there’s exactly one primary source, and it opens in any ordinary browser.