6.85 Storm Spirit?

Of course Storm received some notable nerfs in 6.85 due to his huge popularity in the last patch, so I've been taking advantage of his low pick rate and spamming him for a bit in pubs. To me it seems like he still has carry potential if he gets a good early game snowball off. Yes there is no more insane death-time reduction from Bloodstone, but if you have all your necessary items and get 6-slotted in a decent amount of time (for me that's mostly BoT, Orchid, Bloodstone, Linkens/BKB, Shiva's/AC, sometimes a MKB too) then you are good to go since all Storm needs to do anything is mana, and to sustain his mana he needs farm and items.

Has anyone else played much Storm this patch?

Except that he can't solo kill a fly now. Forget about this hero, he's **** now and is a very situational pick against no lockdown.

Since I come from the trench, I guess I can admit that I love Storm mostly for his insane initiation range and solo kill potential...

I mean, how exactly are you supposed to run from a handle a Storm with an early 14-15 min Orchid? I've had decent success with just that, not that I'm saying its good right now or anything, but he is still playable I suppose.

That's probably just you hugely outplaying trench players. In an even game where midlaners are at least remotely decent and don't die to storm 3 times in lane there's no way you can have 14-15 min orchid without supports devoting all of their time to you i.e camping mid and stacking whole jungle, but then why would do that for Storm when there are a lot of mids who can kill stuff at 14-15 mins, be useful in teamfights and scale to the late game reliably and not till you give away a streak and lose your Bloodstone charges. Wr, SF, TA are just flat out better this patch and can kill more than one hero in a fight.

There are games where I simply snowball out of control with Bloodstone, and just as easily throw the game with just one untimely death, and of course blowing most of my mana on one hero then having to back out which makes it difficult to have significant teamfight impact without an Aegis.

Your post does make sense, I'll probably go back to spamming invo instead of storm.

Yes, basically this is what makes him a **** tier mid now. Laning problems and farm can be fixed by stacks for every hero with a sort of AOE but low impact and huge unreliability can't.