My basic thoughts before playing
You'd have to go really, really late to make it matter, since it's very slot inefficient, you miss building on bigger items, can't farm fast enough, and won't be online in time. Even if the team is physical heavy, a blademail would go a lot further.
Oh cmon are you saying you didn't have fun getting Silenced then silenced again?????
Yeah, I went and crunched the numbers on it at work the other day and realized that it wasn't very efficient. Buying the secret shop armor is more eff armor to gold than eating the same amount of chainmail. You really only want to be doing it once you're 6 itemed + scepter + moonshard. Seen people try it in turbo, but games are really over too fast 15-20 mins and rarely do you get long turbo games. Best use would be to buy cheaper support items like scepter, blademail, shiva, force staff, pipe, dust and eat it, but even those are a lot of gold. If Valve wants to do something interesting with clockwerk, maybe give him 1 stack of a perma buff every 1 minute thats .3/.6/.9 armor (scaled off ult).
It's for pos4/5 Willow, it makes her very good at trading rightclicks with enemy supports in a sidelane because it makes healing salves restore like 700 HP if you use Shadow Realm during the Salve duration. Willow has some crazy starting attack speed too so she's good at doing this. You start with cheap stats, circlet, branches, quickly buy whatever early item components will make you a bit bulkier, and take aggressive trades. When you're low enough to get value out of a salve you pop it and shadow realm, heal all your HP, and go back in. You also get high value out of self-healing with Urn of Shadows charges later on.
Hot take
Underlord offlane really doesn't seem that bad still. The others are in a rough spot for sure though. I really wish volvo had addressed Axe/LC/Cent offlane domination or the fact that WK is once again weapons grade retarded strong in their most recent patch.
I get it, it can be frustrating to have your favorite hero be terrible for seemingly no reason. My favorite hero is Doom. Go check his winrate on dotabuff right now, I dare you.
i'd straight up fucking kill myself, he was S-tier in the Beta and the last time I played him I was just in shock at how much he fucking sucks. It's like they completely forgot about him, and I know why: his kit is from when the game was more slow and more complicated. Things like neutrals having passive abilities that meaningfully interacted with the game was what made Dota have the depth and character League of Legends never had. But those small quirky things are irrelevant now.
When I tried to play a few competitive matches it was legit trying to place me in herald so I gave up and just stopped playing and never completed calibration. I wasn't going to try to climb out of herald.
A lot of heroes are hit by this, Naga being permalocked as a support for example. Actually all illusion heroes.
Yeah I play a pretty decent amount of chaos knight and he is usually the only one allowed to be good for any real length of time. Sometimes Tblade or PL will be cancer for a patch but valve seems pretty quick to tap that shit down. I have a friend who loves Monkey King and you can probably guess how that works out for him, especially recently.
Underlord and Pand I've always felt like in the games they're in either they have massive impact or they have zero impact, there's no inbetween. It doesn't help that Pang is focused around abilities and he doesn't have short cooldowns.
Hood is great in turbo cause you can easily get money for the crit build and destroy the enemy team anytime they stick together.
Now she is very catchable and does no damage. She's ruined beyond belief.