When thinking about items, key things to note with Huskar are:

1. He has enormous attack speed (when his health is low) due to his Berserker's Blood passive ability
2. He is vulnerable mainly to physical and pure damage, i.e. right-click attacks and certain abilities of other heroes.

The repurcussions of these facts should be obvious:

1. You should generally concentrate on items which do damage, not items which increase attack speed. Damage/second = damage x attacks/second, so if your attack speed is already high it's better to increase your damage per attack (do some math experiments if you don't believe me).
2. Protection from physical damage should be a high priority (and general tankiness doesn't hurt in this regard). So, strength, armor and evasion are all good to have.

With this build you turn Huskar into a shotgun - dealing a lot of burst damage very quickly. The key with this build is to combine the use of Ethereal Blade with your ultimate and a Dagon in order to instantly kill most heroes.

Build the urn early, for extra strength and healing while you do some early ganks to work up enough gold for the rest of your items. Follow this up with a dagon (if you get it early, you may already have enough to shotgun weaker opponents by following up your ultimate with a blast from the Dagon). You'll also want to grab a Ghost Sceptre for some nice stats and an escape ability, should you need it.

You then build the Ethereal Blade (which requires the very expensive Eaglesong, to combine with your Ghost Sceptre) and Aghanim's Sceptre. You might want to build Aghanim's first as it gives you a lot of nice states and extra health, and this is certainly an option, but the Ethereal Blade is really the core of the shotgun build.

Your gank procedure for this build is:
1. Ethereal blade your opponent. Both you and they take on ethereal form, and your opponent is slowed and takes some damage.
2. Use your ultimate. If you have Agh's this deals 65% of their remaining health as damage, amplified by 40%, before being reduced by magic resistance (25% for most heroes, depending on items). This will not be enough to kill them, but they won't have a huge amount of health left.
3. Dagaon! and they die. You mayneed to upgrade your Dagon once or twice as the game progresses to deal a little extra damage.

In terms of later items, a heart adds 40 strength which means your ethereal burst does 80 extra damage. This small amount of extra damage is probably not worth it by itself, but you also get a ton of extra hit points and a reasonable boost to your right-click damage. A Daedalus will greatly improve your right-click damage also. If you get this far, it might be time to transition away from the shotgun build and focus more on other damage items.







As the skill build above shows, I put a couple of early points in Burning Spear; it's an incredibly powerful harassment capability. Push your opponent(s) out of lane as much as possible and farm, farm, farm your items. Opponent harasses you? Punish them with Burning Spear. Opponent moves in for last hit? Punish them with Burning Spear. Opponent moves in for deny? Punish with the spear. I'm sure you get the drift.

In a gank, the procedure is:
1. Use Inner Vitality on yourself (even if you are at full health, the effect continues for the duration of the ability), and then immediately:
2. Life Break your opponent.
3. Activate any pertinent items - BKB, blade mail, halberd etc.
4. Throw at least a few burning spears at them.
5. Continue to throw spears at them until they die. With the lifesteal build, toggle burning spears off if you need to recoup health (this isn't necessary since 6.81, as burning spears are no longer a unique attack modifier, meaning they work with lifesteal! There's hardly any reason to turn them off at all now).
6. Use your magic wand, or toggle your armlet, if your health gets dangerously low.

Prior to 6.81, burning Spears was a unique attack modifier which didn't stack with lifesteal (furthermore, it slightly depletes your own health). This is no longer true, so once you have lifesteal, there's hardly any reason to turn the burning spears off.

Note that you can activate your BKB before Life Break in order to prevent yourself from taking any damage from it. However, you then won't get the benefit of improved attack speed from Berserker's Blood, so this is a situational move: do it if you really need to tank some damage rather than just make a single quick kill, e.g. if you are the initiator in a large team fight.

The Berserker's Blood passive gives you protection from your own ultimate if your health is already low, so don't let low health stop you from using your ult.

If you're in a team fight but have another initiator, you may wish to hold off on using your ult. Instead, contribute to the fight by throwing burning spears from a distance, and healing any ally that needs it with your Inner Vitality. You can then use your ult to prevent a fleeing enemy from escaping, or as a slow to allow teammates to escape should the fight be going badly.

One further thing to note is that Life Break slow goes through magic immunity. Have an ally being torn up by enraged Lifestealer? ult him in the face and then you can both run away (that is, before you turn around and disarm him with your halberd and tear him down with burning spears!).