Sadly damage items do not escalate as well as HP items. The only advice I can give you is to do that yourself since everyone can. Then focus fire on one demigod at a time, using stuns and slows.

Crits increase your DPS by like 10% (or with Ashkandor, 30%, I think.) It's really not a huge amount, but it is easier to spike somebody wth huge crits.

It's all of 2250 to stack boots of speed and wand of speed, and that lets you outspeed anybody with an active wand of speed, boots of speed, and a swift anklet (and if you are playing as UB, even that won't be enough as long as the debuffs from diseased claw are active and they don't have slowing skills themselves).

Stacking up to a good speed is cheap. Wasting a favor item on Swift Anklet, which only lets you get out of early game overextensions faster is not.

No offense, but if somebody is having problems killing the other team, the solution isnt to get an 18k item.  That takes forever and then some if you arent killing the other team a lot.  Even if you wait for cheaper crit items, you are still going to be several levels behind on war rank before you can start to do much at all.  Thats still a huge problem.

Thats the real issue: you can probably even things out eventually with smart items, but you cant do much early on and will thus always be behind on war score at least.

If the other team is smart enough to all stack HP, chances are they are smart enough to use teamwork also.  As people have pointed out, the problem is that its much easier to stack HP than attack speed and damage early on.  You just cant get enough DPS out early on to match a HP stacker.  By the time you get several crit items in the 3000+ range, you are several levels of war rank behind.  If you mix in many support DGs, then good luck doing enough damage to do much against several HP stackers.

Beating HP stackers doesnt really have any easy or obvious solution.  Its probably the most powerful strategy in all honesty, and the only way to beat them might be to join them.

Because you are going to lose every early game fight, be pushed out of the lane, and the enemy will get EXP and gold while you heal? I think that's a pretty valid reason; whenever I see Swift Anklet on my opponents, and they aren't Tower Rooks, I immediately think "I'll be at level 5 while they are at level 3." It's just that much of a detriment to have 800 health and 5 less health regen than your opponent early game when the difference in DPS between two people is like 30 or 40 DPS.

The only reason it is useful is to get away. If you have to get away, you are losing the lane. If you are losing the lane, you are going to be outlevelled, outcashed, and eventually all that speed won't matter when the opponent can just break your towers.

EDIT: Also, the swift Anklet is even worse against UB/anybody who gets slowing effects, because then you are still going to be caught and killed (UB can beat most other Swift Anklet + Wand + boots characters with just the wand, boots, and inner beast, honestly. Diseased claw just crushes them.) It's not even a useful favor item once people start getting slowing effects, and it only allows you to lose less than you would otherwise early game; it's not going to help you get any kills against smart opponents (if you have swift anklets and are outkilling somebody who doesn't early game, something is wrong, honestly, but it's not hard to realize that you are dying and run to the safety of towers; with your HP at less than 2000, towers would easily keep you at bay early on when the swift anklet might make a difference in chasing down enemies.)

not to derail too much, milskidasith, but there are other favor items that are excellent that don't give any real buff to combat: amulet of teleportation. On a large map, as Sedna, I can cap two flags before any other DGs even get to the front lines, then after waiting a few more seconds I can port to capture another 2, all while creeping. Amulet of teleportation is basically the ultimate quick xp tool, quick getaway tool, and quick reinforcing-a-friendly-DG-who-needs-help tool.

True; blade of the serpant is also good because it allows you to health stack while running a mana heavy build, and Heaven's Wrath is good for allowing Regulus to see for a quick second (for sniping), sniping foes, and getting free EXP. However, Blood of the Fallen is the only way to get lane staying potential early (besides a mana increasing favor item and being a QoT chainshielder/Sedna chain healer), and an amulet of teleportation really doesn't help you get away when you consider it can be interrupted past level 5 (or earlier, for some characters!) and on smaller maps like Cataract the bonus is decreased (considering your only real option is to teleport back to the health crystal, because there will be enemies in both lanes and you get less time saved, whereas on something like Zikarut or... Mandala?[health crystal in the middle map] where there are possibly open lanes to farm, a health crystal in the middle you can teleport, capture (if necessary), and heal at.

Basically, an amulet of teleportation is good for big maps with a lot of lanes that could be open, and bad for small maps where all the lanes will be covered and you don't save as much time teleporting.

HP flag?

I pretty much agree with what you said

Alot of people have realised this fact, and thats why there are mostly HP-stack builds now, alot of them.

I think health stacking is too powerful and more and more everyone is doing it.  I'm not sure the best course of action but its pretty easy to see that adding 25 damage per second would take 16 seconds of extra auto attacks (at 1 per second which isn't the case early game) plus have to negate the 5 health per second on the starting armor.  And most the damage items that are lower level don't even have 25 damage, its more like 15.  I would really like to see more damage based builds viable but at the moment there is only a few if any that work when your enemies health stack.

That being said in a normal custom game with teams (usually 3v3 at least) I found the anklet to be quite powerful in terms of getting extra early kills.  True in a game of all skilled, all good aware players maybe you wouldn't get that kill, but in a normal 3v3 or more I seem to get a ton more kills from being able to get those last few shots on players who over extend, even those who bought blood of the fallen.  Just because they have 800 extra health doesn't mean that some creeps wont hit them, or a teamate, then they think they are going to get away and dont run early enough only to get caught.  Again, just saying that in the team setting I sometimes find I get more money and kills by picking up the anklet, later on in the game it becomes a nice boost but not as needed.  Still its worth mentioning.

How bout some damage item love?